An interview with Robert Johnson about his coming play. Following his huge success with
‘Caligula’ I am looking forward to this play. I will be writing my REVIEW Friday 2nd December. Meanwhile, let’s hear from Robert about his new play
Q: Tell us about your first encounter with the play ‘Little Eyolf’. Do you remember your initial response?
A: I first encountered the play in late 2016. My family and I were driving back from Sydney after attending a funeral and I had brought along a collection of Ibsen’s late plays (somewhat fitting, I know…). I remember devouring Little Eyolf, The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman in relatively quick succession. Each were devastating but tender portraits of individuals filled with frustrated ambition but for a number of reasons were unable to fulfil their own understanding of themselves, and they were all laid low as a result.
Together, these three plays have struck a real chord in me, and Eyolf will be the first salvo in what I hope will be a trilogy. Director Robert Icke said watching Chekhov is like watching a spider knit its web together – it’s delicate and beautiful and fragile (it’s also full of love and passion and immense courage), but watching Ibsen is like watching someone strap themselves to a rocket and lighting the fuse themselves. And he’s right – and then sense of focused destruction – with barely a thing to obfuscate it dramaturgically – is what really grabbed me on my first read. This play crackles over a furnace – it’s a tight 85 minute tragedy in which we watch a family completely fall apart. In the very best of ways, it’s utterly horrible.
Q: What inspired you to direct this play?
A: It’s a play I’ve wanted to do since reading it. Little Eyolf revolves around the Allmers – husband and wife Alfred and Rita, their son, Eyolf and Alfred’s sister Asta. All the adults in the family have deep foundational frustrations in their life and when Eyolf dies halfway through the play they are given an opportunity to reassess and really take up the mantle of their own potential. Watching this family struggle with things that are so common to us all – courage, honesty, frustrated potential, the weight of responsibility – struck a deep chord. And it’s magnified horribly through the death of Eyolf – grief is the cold, hard anvil Ibsen uses to beat out his themes.
It’s also just a strange play, frankly. Ibsen is known as the father of naturalistic drama, but he started off writing in verse and ends with a series of stellar plays that grow more and more symbolic. Little Eyolf straddles this scintillating place between harshly realistic in style but it also has a character called the Rat Woman – a Pied Piper figure who walks into the play as if from a Grimm fairy tale to offer the characters a chance of redemption. They all deny her, of course, and poor little Eyolf follows after her and drowns in the ocean when she rows away. It’s such a dissonant character, and is played masterfully by Ioanna Gagani, who was in my last play, Caligula. She somehow manages to make this utterly surreal character work in a play that is on all sides rooted in the tragedy of everyday life. The chance to work on a play that allowed me to work in such a world was incredibly attractive – I’ve never done an Ibsen before, and he’s one of my favourite collaborators to date.
Q: The last time you sat down with TAGG you working on the chaotic spectacle that was Caligula. How is Little Eyolf different from your last project?
A: Stylistically, they are two very different plays, but ultimately it’s an exploration of the same theme: having the courage to live as an individual on your own terms. Whilst Caligula revelled in the chaos and size of it’s main character, and his/her Godhood was used as a clear judge for people to measure themselves against, Little Eyolf does the same thing by going inwards. We see people just like us (and the play will look and sound like any of the numerous sea-side villages that dot Victoria’s coastline) going through the most heart-breaking series of events. There’s no invocations to the moon or poetic regiments to help prepare a God to die, but there is a quiet, constant conscious struggle from all the characters to make sense of their own lives. Responsibility weighs upon them all – and the questions that reverberated through Caligula reverberate through Little Eyolf: Is it better to shoot for meaning or happiness? What is the real cost of not being true to oneself? How do I face up to the weight of overwhelming but necessary responsibility? Why can a lack of courage lay utter waste to ones life, without one noticing until it’s too late? Ibsen takes some of the biggest questions he could ask, and shrinks them down to a small family on the beach dealing with heartbreak. There’s a stillness in the production that one could find in a Hockney or a Hopper, and it’s been quite beautiful to explore the nature of tragedy on such a domestic scale.
Q: You seem to have a fascination with tragedy. What attracts you to the work that Burning House chooses to do?
A: There’s definitely a masochistic streak in me that is drawn to works of blood, grief and death that manifests in my work. Out of every Burning House play so far there has only been one without a death, and that featured a botched suicide in the fourth act. Part of me is drawn to that extreme – of living as intensely as possible on the line between life and death. I think its where we see the very best of humanity as well. If I’m going to explore things like courage and honour and faith why not do it in the most searing crucible I can imagine? And I want to go to the theatre and be moved. When the lights come back up I want to be profoundly shaken. I want to have sat in a room in the dark and wiped the tears from my cheeks in time with another hundred people. Catharsis is real and powerful, and working on shows that can invite an audience into these moments of extremis fascinates me deeply.
Q: If you could invite anyone to see Little Eyolf, who would it be?
A: More and more as I work with classic texts I feel the writer in the room with me. You’re always trying to play the game of guessing what was the original intent of something for its contemporary audience, and then translating that same intent in a way that feels like it resonates to our own contemporary audience. And if you work on the classics, you get an opportunity to work with truly great people. So I’d really like old mate Ibsen to come see it and have a chat. I feel a lot of myself in my understanding of him – there’s a fatalism and melancholy I recognise, but also a fierceness and a determination to not flinch under the cruel gaze of life and to at least try valiantly to live up to your own ideal of yourself. These are standards I fall short of constantly, but when I read Ibsen I feel we’re both shooting at the same target, and Eyolf has been a great way to explore that.
Dostoevsky would make for some pretty great post-show discussion as well. “Break what must be broken, once for all, that’s all, and take the suffering on oneself”, he says. He has such an honest and profound relationship with the nature of suffering – and how relentless honesty, and the shouldering of requisite suffering can lead to a deeply meaningful existence. I’ve drawn a lot of wisdom from him as I’ve approached this play and it’s helped a lot. It’s a wonderful play in that in order to honour it properly – and not shy away from the more difficult and tragic elements – one needs to confront those things in oneself. The actors have risen to this challenge magnificently – they’ve worked tirelessly over the last six weeks to make a work of theatre that might appear domestic, but is about nothing less than the revitalisation of a human soul. It’s a tragedy though, so no promises of success. But a promise of eighty to eighty-five minutes of heart-wrenching, difficult theatre that is going to leave you shaken and cleansed which is performed bravely and superbly is something I can do. If you really want to be moved, if you really want to feel and have a chance to look into the abyss and see what stares back, come and see it. It’s worth it.
Producers: Elisa Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Jessica Johnson
Director: Robert Johnson
Production Design: Bridie Turner
Lighting Design: Tim Bonser
Composition: Robert Johnson
Stage Management: Acacia Nettleton
Cast: Elisa Armstrong, Liliana Dalton, Ioana Gagani, Damien Harrison, Zac Steedman, Alexander Tomisich
Performed @ TW Explosives Factory – Rear Laneway 67 Inkerman Street, St Kilda
Adults: $42.50, Concession $34.50, Student $27.50
DATES & TIMES
Friday 2 December, 7:30pm Preview Night
Saturday 3 December, 2:00pm Preview Matinee
Saturday 3 December, 7:30pm Opening Night
Tuesday 6 December, 7:30pm
Wednesday 7 December, 7:30pm
Thursday 8 December, 7:30pm
Friday 9 December, 7:30pm
Saturday 10 December, 7:30pm
Tickets: https://www.theatreworks.org.au/program/little-eyolf
