Introduction: Remaking Modern Classics

Introduction: Remaking Modem Classics CHRISTOPHER INNES The "classics" have always been reworked, updated, or made the basis of new plays - think of Shakespeare's variations on Seneca, Racine's versions of Phedre and Iphigenie en Au/ide (later reused again by Hoffmannsthal), Yeats's or Cocleau's treatments of Oedipus. Ionesco's or Stoppard's or Heiner Muller's rewriting of Shakespeare. As Brecht once famously remarked, the strength of a literary tradition rests on its plagiarism.' Modem playwrights have turned to the classics perhaps more frequently than any of their predecessors . When the director entered the scene, variants and new interpretations of the standard repertoire multiplied; and increasingly during the last century "new readings" have changed the original texts so extensively as to constitute new plays: the director as dramatist. Now even the modem classics of the last 100 years or so have been seized on as.suitable material. Again, this is nothing new - when Dryden rewrote Antony and Cleopatra it was scarcely seventy years after Shakespeare had first presented the originalbut over the last couple of decades the remaking of modem plays has become such a comm~:m practice that it almost counts as an identifying mark of contemporary theatre. In fact, one of the first "modernist" (even postmodemist) plays borrows a section from another modem play: Pirandello's restaging of a scene from one of his own earlier pieces in Six Characters in Search ·of all Author. At the same time, this recent phenomenon has as yet received relatively little critical attention. Thus the decision to devote part of an issue of Modern Drama (during the millennial year/at the opening of a new century) to highlighting the subject. The essays collected here are a sampJe to initiate discussion, covering a deliberately eclectic range that will, we hope, be suggestive, but is in no way intended to be exhaustive. For instance, the Wooster Group is omitted, since their work has already been studied fairly extensively,' although an overModern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 248 Introduction: Remaking Modem Classics 249 whelming number of their productions have adapted scenes from modem classics as components of highly original new performance pieces. Reworkings of modem classics - like the traditional rewritings of ancient Greek or Elizabethan plays - are undertaken with a variety of motives. These seem to fall into four main categories. The material, or a character, may strike a chord that is then interpreted in a very different way by another playwright - so that the new version is a selfstanding work. In such a case there is no critical attack on the source; indeed, the new play may be so different that no connection can be seen. One example is Wedekind's use of the Lulu material, borrowed from a contemporary French source. This, in part, is the subject of Albert Bermel's contribution, and it reminds us that even those who wrote the plays that are now being reworked used the same approach themselves. Another reason for radical revisionism may be to restore the original vision of a play when it has become obscured or distorted. This is often felt to be par· ticularly necessary for the work of the great figures in the early naturalist movement, such as Ibsen or Chekhov. Even where their characters' situations remain relevant, their themes no less timely today than when they first appeared at the close of the last century, the passage of time and social change make them seem period pieces. The realistic style in which they were written becomes a barrier for today's audience by foregrounding the very details of costuming or cultural reference that make them historical. Indeed, ever more recent plays are being perceived as dated and requiring reinterpretation to recover their original bite. So the Wooster Group reformatted Thornton Wilder's Our Town as television sitcom in Route I & 9; or, over the last two years, Ivo van Hove's New York productions of O'Neill's More Stately Mansions and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire combined cinematic realism (e.g., a steaming bathtub into which a naked Blanche plunges for psychological refuge)3 with a complete absence of conventional props and scenery to present an...