{"id":251,"date":"2019-05-07T17:47:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T17:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/?p=251"},"modified":"2022-02-06T19:43:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T19:43:07","slug":"ivo-van-hove-from-shakespeare-to-david-bowie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/19\/ivo-van-hove-from-shakespeare-to-david-bowie\/","title":{"rendered":"Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai<\/strong>
237 pp. London: Methuen Drama<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nvolume of essays and case studies of 30 important productions staged by Belgian-born\ndirector Ivo van Hove is as alive, informed and exciting as the theatrical visionary\nit flies after. Filled with evocative colour and black and white illustrations,\ninterviews, reviews and assessments, it represents the work of a wide range of\nscholars and critics, and even offers a piece by the unfailingly provocative\nman himself. In sum, vivid reconstructions of productions we thought we knew. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van\nHove\u2019s own Foreword, \u201cMy Life\u201d appropriately sets the tone: \u201cPlays are my life.\nMy productions are autobiographies in disguise.\u201d As an interpretive artist, he\ndigs and probes: \u201cThe stage should not serve merely as a mirror but should give\nus access to what happens on the other side of the mirror.\u201d The book\u2019s first image\nis from his Roman Tragedies<\/em>\u2014done for\nthe Stadsschouburg in Amsterdam in 2012\u2014a night shot glaring with the lights of\nmodern urban disaster from which flees an agonized Enobarbus. Even if you have\nnever seen a van Hove production, you can know from this point you are in for\nan exciting ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edited\nthoughtfully and thoroughly by Canadian theatre scholar Susan Bennett and British\nscholar Sonia Massai, the volume\u2019s Introduction gives the necessary factual\nbackground. We learn that van Hove was born in Belgium in 1958, and that, while\na directing student at university in Antwerp, he met Jan Versweyveld, his life\npartner and theatre collaborator ever since. It is Versweyveld who has been most\nresponsible for creating the visual dramaturgy that works so well with the textual\ndramaturgy of van Hove\u2019s productions. The volume effectively reveals the\nastonishing scope of their joint work, from classics to new creations, from\noperas to multi-genre events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among\nthe many productions examined here is his Hedda\nGabler<\/em>, done for the National Theatre in London, in 2016. We listen to actors\ndiscuss character with van Hove who explores emotional situations through\nimagery, suggesting that Hedda \u201cshould die like a fish.\u201d For Ruth Wilson, who\nplayed Hedda, van Hove\u2019s deconstructions of text light up key moments. Because\nvan Hove does not believe in fixed character, \u201ceverybody is anybody or can be\nanybody, if circumstances change.\u201d This approach encouraged Wilson to play\nHedda as a child, a friend, a lover and a wife. Van Hove himself argues that unlike,\nsay, Sylvia Plath, Hedda is bereft of talent and fantasy. \u201cThere is nothing she\ncould develop in order to escape this boredom. She\u2019s addicted to material\nthings and if she doesn\u2019t get what she wants, she simply destroys.\u201d For van\nHove, Hedda\u2019s great failure is her lack of imagination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van\nHove ponders long and hard about his choice of text, which he regards as the\ntoughest decision in his process and a completely intuitive one. A text may\nbother him for years and even be temporarily forgotten before he moves on it. Once\nproduction has started, \u201ctwo parallel groups\u201d begin working\u2014one based in\ntraditional dramaturgy and one based in the visual. He himself is the only one\nwho moves between these two centres. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nhis early work, van Hove more or less ignored original productions but has\nbegun, as he puts it, to revisit these houses, looking with new eyes. For Hedda<\/em>, he talks of starting with the set\nfrom previous productions and then during rehearsals taking things away. \u201cIt\nfelt like cleaning up,\u201d he says. \u201cToday we don\u2019t need all the exposition that\nis typical in an Ibsen play. . . . We created a twenty-first-century play, not\na nineteenth-century one.\u201d The actual dramaturg\/writer in this case, Patrick\nMarber, recalls van Hove asking him to \u201cwrite a script that could work for a\nmodern-dress production in an almost empty space but that could, in theory, be\nperformed in period costume on a realistic set,\u201d without updating the text or\nusing slang. The production study contrasts Michael Meyer\u2019s 1960 translation to\nMarber\u2019s, at the point when Tesman compares his own academic performance\nunfavourably with the ideas in his rival Lovborg.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meyer:
Tesman:  <\/strong>Amazing! I\u2019d never think of writing about anything like that!
Hedda:<\/strong>  No. You wouldn\u2019t.
Marber:
Tesman:  <\/strong>I feel like a dinosaur.
Hedda:<\/strong> (bored<\/em>) Yes, well. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In\nthis production, Hedda is doused with tomato juice before her suicide. \u201cThat\nmoment,\u201d says Wilson, \u201cmust be read in the context of Ivo encouraging my Hedda\nto be . . . brutal, dangerous and cruel . . . so that when Hedda is on the\nreceiving end, the brutality has to be equal . . . in order to push her over\nthe edge.\u201d The actress agrees that the nature and timing of that 2016 production\nspoke to the Trump era in which misogyny was (and still is) alive and well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skeletal\nscripts, bare bones scenography and lighting are all van Hove hallmarks,\nearning him the epithet of theatre\u2019s most \u201cmaximal minimalist.\u201d British dramaturg,\nKate Bassett terms his Shakespeare productions \u201csubcultural\u201d raised to \u201cbleak\nchic.\u201d She describes his symbolic correlatives as the \u201cemotional states and . .\n. ethos in which the play\u2019s characters are caught.\u201d Van Hove is here clearly a\npoet of the theatre inventing images such as a glass cabin for his Taming of the Shrew<\/em> (done for the Stadsschouburg\nin Amsterdam, in 2008) through which prospective suitors can ogle Baptista\u2019s\ndaughter \u201clike an Amsterdam prostitute. . . .\u201d Cutting to essential meaning, van\nHove\u2019s instinct is to erase any period specificity of a classic, freeing it up\nfor more contemporary relevance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roman Tragedies<\/em> is his compilation of Shakespeare\u2019s political histories. In it, van Hove uses multiple screens mixing film of the characters performing live with images of JFK and Trump, and the scrolling of Roman Empire headlines. His information overload is clearly politics-as-performance, an idea also used by Quebec\u2019s Robert Lepage in his Coriolanus <\/em>production at Canada\u2019s Stratford Festival in 2018 (reviewed in Critical Stages<\/a><\/em> 18<\/em><\/a>). When the production played at New York\u2019s Brooklyn Academy of Music, critics spoke of analogies between Roman Tragedies<\/em> and two American TV series, The Sopranos<\/em> and House of Cards<\/em>. The character of Richard III was \u201cportrayed as an overgrown schoolboy, bursting out of his too-small blazer\u201d\u2014(\u201cat first as laughable as Trump\u201d but then morphing into a lethal monster of mendacity, his throne room becoming a war room, reminding us that past and present cannot escape one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his staging of Greek tragedies such as Sophocles\u2019 Antigone\u2014<\/em>done for the Grand Theatre de la Ville in Luxembourg, in 2015\u2014van Hove strives for drama on an epic scale, \u201ca ticking time bomb, a train that one knows will crash, yet . . . as slow as strangling by a boa constrictor.\u201d He smashes through the classical unities here \u201cto bring scenes onstage that would conventionally be played offstage or not exist at all,\u201d highlighting how \u201cscarred\u201d and \u201cdeeply hurt\u201d Antigone is. She appears in mourning\u2014van Hove\u2019s notion that \u201cshe is already mentally and emotionally dead before the play begins.\u201d He shows her suicide, \u201cthe desperate but also serene loneliness of this ultimate action where she takes control of her own life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His\nwork on American scripts provides some of the volume\u2019s most penetrating studies\nas we follow his visions to their painful cores. Arthur Miller\u2019s A View from the Bridge<\/em> done for London\u2019s\nYoung Vic in 2014 raises the question, \u201cCan a Belgian director . . . really\nfeel the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn longshoreman?\u201d The production answered\nwith a resounding yes in powerful images of familial strangulation that climaxes\n\u201cin their final moments together, desperately grasp[ing] each other in a primal\nand protective huddle as blood rained down upon them.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His\nproduction of Lillian Hellman\u2019s Little\nFoxes<\/em> is described alternately as Greek tragedy, a Shakespearean power play,\na chamber play. Divesting the realistic drama of its \u201cSouthern and period\nassociations\u201d to reveal \u201ca parable for . . . rapacious capitalism of the\ntwenty-first century and a digression on the continued subjection of women,\u201d\nvan Hove replaces stage realism with images, chunks of dialogue with \u201cvisual\ncues,\u201d excavating the feral nature of a dysfunctional family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\nTony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America<\/em>\u2014done\nat the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014\u2014van Hove established a Peter Brookian empty\nspace \u201cin which the omnipresent theme of transitions between life and death\nwould be possible\u201d and in which David Bowie\u2019s music evoked the feelings of  \u201ca country in crisis with itself.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\nvan Hove\u2019s Broadway production of Miller\u2019s The\nCrucible<\/em> in 2016, he moves beyond the horrors and links of the Salem witch\nhunts and 1950s communism creating an event at once supernatural and\ncontemporary that infects both the obvious victims of persecution and also\nthose who judge them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reinforcing the creative scope of his theatrical imagination, van Hove\u2019s opera work provides a fascinating study allowing for both hits and misses. In Verdi\u2019s Macbeth <\/em>for the Opera National of Lyon in 2012, he offers up \u201cimages of characters [who] meet . . . their deaths like ectoplasms,\u201d visualizing that immortal line of mortality: \u201cLife\u2019s but a walking shadow.\u201d In this Macbeth<\/em>, the murderous king is left a vagrant on a park bench, the social outcast of his own mind. Tchaikovsky’s Mazzepa<\/em> for the Komische Oper in Berlin, in 2013, created controversy because its videos of torture and brutality were thought by some to be a violation of the privacy of the victims. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van\nHove adapts his vision to the material at hand, no matter what the genre. His staging\nof Brokeback Mountain<\/em> (Teatro Real of\nMadrid, in 2014) based on the Ang Lee film of 2005, which was itself taken from\nan Annie Proulx short story is a case in point. Proulx is a writer whose\nrevelations of character with a single unexpected image are often as uncanny as\nvan Hove\u2019s. In this production though, as in conventional opera, it is distinctive\nvoice types that do the major work of differentiating characters. Atypically, van\nHove actually expands the story, physicalizing what had been mostly suggested\nin the earlier versions, to create domestic suffocation. The innate lyricism of\nthe core male relationship is accomplished through video images of the Wyoming\nmountains, \u201ca wild and dangerous place . . . of freedom for . . . these cowboys\nin love,\u201d where, nevertheless, their emotional paralysis\u2014strongly reinforced by\nan atonal score\u2014continues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nlast section of the book deals largely with van Hove\u2019s adaptations of film and\nfiction. P.A. Skantze speaks of the rich \u201csonic strata\u201d of van Hove\u2019s live staging\nof Bergman\u2019s film, Scenes from a Marriage<\/em>\n(done for the Staadsschouberg of Amsterdam in 2013). Here, all three couples\n\u201cswirl about\u201d simultaneously vocalizing and embodying moments from their individual\nmarriages. Immersive and operatic, it offered \u201cthree arias in the air,\u201d  \u201ca chorus . . . with solos,\u201d \u201ca translation\nof sound into sense . . . a kind of spoken song.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

British scholar Julie Sanders\u2019 discusses van Hove\u2019s production of Obsession<\/em> (done at London\u2019s Barbican in 2017) illuminating the range of his imaginative processes. Obsession<\/em>, she tells us, started its life as a 1934 crime novel called The Postman Always Rings Twice<\/em> (set in Depression-era rural California) and, then, in 1943, was made it into the film Ossessione<\/em> by Italian director Luchino Visconti, a precursor of Italian cinematic neo-realism. Three years later another film version appeared starring Lana Turner and, in 1981, yet another version was done with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. As Sanders points out, this teleology is an important indicator of van Hove\u2019s associative rather than linear engagement with previous versions of the story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nphysicality of van Hove\u2019s Obsession<\/em> locates\nus in painter Edward Hopper\u2019s territory: \u201ca broad . . . palette of desolate\nindividuals in landscapes of bars, diners and gas stations, the spatial co-ordinates\nof twentieth-century Modernism.\u201d In this production, a water tub becomes the\nfocal point for the physical body, whether connected to washing or sex. A naked\nhusband is toweled down by his wife in full view of an unnerving young drifter.\nThe tub is later used to wash off the evidence of the husband\u2019s murder. Physicality\nis writ large with close-up projections of the lovers, images which voyeuristically\nimplicate the audience itself in their crime of passion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it may be that van Hove leads\nthe pack of innovative directors trying to replicate television, video and film\nin live performance, Sanders makes the careful distinction that he moves beyond\nsimple imitation, into what she calls a \u201cbreaking\u201d and \u201ctranscendence\u201d of familiar\nforms. He challenges the medium in which he works, continuing to insist that\nthe possibilities of theatre are limitless. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\"\"\n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is an award-winning Canadian theatre and literary critic, as well as a widely-published poet and novelist. Her most recent books are the novel, One Man Dancing<\/em>, based on the history of Uganda\u2019s legendary Abafumi theatre company and a collection of poetry and contemporary dialogues called Orpheus in Our World<\/em>, based on the earliest of Greek hymns. Keeney is a longtime Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Toronto\u2019s York University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2019 Patricia Keeney
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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