Amelia McConville speaks with legendary performer Valda Setterfield and renowned director John Scott in advance of the three day run of ‘LEAR’ in the Samuel Beckett Theatre (22-24 October).
Can you tell us a little about the show’s history?
John Scott: It originally was commissioned for the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2014, and of course has been shown in New York, but has never been performed in Dublin, or in Cork! Valda – who has worked with the likes of John Cage and Merce Cunningham – loves James Joyce who is very important to her art, so it’s always wonderful for her to perform in Ireland.
What went into the process of creating the show?
JS: The most immediately interesting thing about the piece is that Lear is played by Valda and the three daughters are played by three male dancers. This shakes the play up a bit and it makes the audience look at it in a new context.
VALDA SETTERFIELD: It’s a lot to do with parents I think, rather than gender – the transference that occurs when the child becomes the person who has to take charge, as the parent ages and diminishes.
JS: Valda and I have both witnessed our fathers losing their powers – both of us had these very romantic fathers who were like superheroes in our eyes. My own father had a cataclysmic stroke and he was institutionalised in a nursing home and in a way, for me, this is a parallel to the way we see Lear after the storm, where we see Cordelia reunited with him and Lear says “every inch a king”… Valda also watched her father’s decline. The first thing we did when we met in New York was to talk about our own fathers! So this is a very personal piece to both of us, it’s a love letter to them.
How did you approach the text of the show?
JS: We deconstructed the text in a way – we went through it and decided what was essential and what wasn’t. We jettisoned all the characters apart from Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and the Fool. Everyone else is gone! But you find all these little parallels within the narratives – Shakespeare was very generous to us. There was a dramaturgical challenge as we went into the piece with The Fool who makes a wonderful cameo – almost a burlesque kind of counterpoint to the drama of Lear and the question of power and the kingdom.
VS: We were deeply respectful of his text nevertheless, we didn’t change the words at all. When we speak the text we remain absolutely true to the language.
With this approach then, do you think you get to the heart of the piece or reach the pure essence of Lear?
JS: Yes absolutely! You cannot get away from Lear in this piece – or from the other characters. When we performed in New York the writer Deborah Jowitt remarked how the men playing the women’s parts was very like in the Globe, it had a boisterousness and a playfulness but also a pathos – they’re not doing drag so much as representing women – channelling and interpreting them. Almost the way in Kabuki theatre where a lot of the women’s parts are played by men. Valda has actually played several male characters in her time!
VS: … Marcel Duchamp, Bertolt Brecht, and now Lear.
JS: And in fact Deborah Warner is working on a production in London with Glenda Jackson playing Lear… I think we’ve started a trend!
How have you found the reception of the show previously in Ireland and New York?
JS: I think there was a very personal response from everyone who saw the piece, because we’ve been able to find such a personal element to the show. It’s the parent and the child dynamic – for me, as someone who was a child who had to become almost like a parent, and for Valda – her experience of being both a parent and a child. And anyone who’s had that experience had a deeply personal response and is deeply moved. In the last part of the show, there usually isn’t a dry eye in the house.
There’s a wonderful trend in Irish theatre with dance pieces at the moment – do you think this is because dance can extend and express emotions?
JS: That’s it exactly! Growing up, my father was the lighting designer in the Abbey, so I saw a lot of pieces, all the greats – but it wasn’t until I saw dance that something really clicked and I thought “this is it, this is my medium.” It’s been wonderful working here in Ireland with Mufutau Yusuf, Ryan O’Neill and Kevin Coquelard, the dancers who play Lear’s children, and especially with Valda. I’ve admired her work for so long – everything from Merce Cunningham pieces to seeing her in Woody Allen films! She’s even worked with Robert Rauschenberg.
VS: My background has very much been in theatre more than anything else. And it’s what I saw as a child, many performances – great comedians, jugglers, ballet dancers, operas – I’ve enjoyed a whole spectrum of performing.
Do you think your previous performances feed into your current one?
VS: I think I approach each new piece as a fresh new thing and if it makes contact in my brain and body with something I know maybe it enriches my performance, but it doesn’t define the new role for me.
Has the performance changed at all over its run?
VS: Well it deepens – it literally deepens. More things come to light, and you don’t even have to talk about them. As all actors say – playing anything deepens it, the pleasure of actually playing it, and how the audience responds – it deepens, but it hasn’t changed per se.
How did you find your relationship to language and the script doing a show that is primarily dance?
JS: In my work I’m notorious for making the dancers talk all the time! I actually did a BA in English before I studied dance. The first text that hit me when I went into college and took a Tragedy course was King Lear. I had never approached a big classic work before – I’d always created work as kind of a reaction against the canon, but I felt that if there was a classic work that I would feel comfortable with, could do battle with – it would be Lear. The piece is so embedded in me. When I spoke to Eugene Downes from Kilkenny Arts Festival about Lear it was just when my father was dying. I was going out to the nursing home and talking with doctors and nurses and hearing that he wasn’t going to last long, and not wanting to say goodbye because I didn’t want to frighten him. And it was from that sort of experience that I began to visualise how I was going to approach Lear. These amazing parallels to his situation and to where he was began to emerge. Suddenly how it was for me – I was having to become an orphan, and maybe even grown up for the first time in my life. It was almost like a blueprint of what I was living through.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the idea of the parent-child relationship?
JS: We looked at the place where Goneril and Regan feel Lear was being a burden to them – and that had resonance with this idea of parents in nursing homes and all these things about wills and properties, and it’s extraordinary, despite the cliche, to realise yet again how contemporary and resonant Shakespeare’s text is today! The theme of human nature had come up, and when my father was ill my brother and I were dealing with breaking up the family home and estate and furniture and all that. Questions from inheriting personal effects to organising the burial – and then with the idea of a parent becoming a burden, it becomes the question of how do we drive Lear crazy enough so that he leaves all this and goes off into the heath and into the storm. And in a way the whole first half of the play is devoted to that question. Even though reading the play I was thinking “don’t do this,” when he actually does go out something rather beautiful happens, there’s a kind of redemption there. Lear goes into another place.
VS: Yes, he finds peace, which is something that is absolutely missing from his life earlier on in the play. The lack of trust in himself, in his country, in his daughters, was actually threatened – he becomes peaceful after the storm.
Is this a hopeful production then?
JS: I think it is, yes. When Lear leaves his castle, and is out wandering, and meets Fool and all these characters, something very beautiful happens that’s against all of our conceptions. We work hard so that we can have a warm place to live and have a nice life, and get to travel and do the things we want and maybe find love – but the idea of where Lear goes is the horror, it’s the dread, it’s almost worse than death to go out into the storm, at that age, with that vulnerability. When my father was very ill it was like watching someone battle that very storm. But he recovered, he was able to be peaceful before he died. It’s the idea of resignation, and finding peace. It was something I learned through that experience.
Valda and I were talking recently about the use of the profile position in the choreography – inspired by some of the work of my friend Andrea Goodman who has worked with Meredith Monk, a lot of it is very holistic – it’s the idea that things begin in the east and end in the west, the west being the place of death, the place of losing. But Lear ends actually in the North, facing upstage, facing away – he may or may not be dead, he may be in some other world. There’s a definite transition into another state or another place – it’s ambiguous so the audience can pick up what they want.
Is there aspect of the piece that reflects or was influenced by current affairs?
JS: The parent-child relationship – I think that’s scarily relevant today. We’re working with these three young male dancers and explaining what it’s like to visit a nursing home, what it’s like when someone you love is tied to a machine in a hospital – it’s like describing another country. I couldn’t help thinking that these young dancers we’re working with will know all about this experience in another twenty years! But this piece is a very contemporary dilemma of where you are and who you are – when the parent-child relationship changes it’s like your world has been turned upside down. Your sense of reality has been turned upside down – again, very relevant with current times!
VS: For me, if you’re talking about the immediacy of what’s going on – I live in New York, and the whole election problem is horrifying to so many of us. America is such a large country – and there are a lot of people in the middle who maybe think differently – but fear of the effect that might come our way will be paralysing for older people. Health, education, welfare – the threat that is going on in the world aligns itself with what’s going on in this play for me.
JS: One other thing that may be interesting about the piece in terms of current events – the gender change in the piece. It’s so huge in the States at the moment – when you’re going to meetings you have to get your pronouns right and accept how other people define themselves, and how they choose to be addressed. When we were performing in New York, two of our stage crew were going through gender transitions, and they’d been working in the theatre for a season or two – and our work related to their experience and brought out this extraordinary response in them. They were deeply moved and it stirred all kind of chords – that Valda was playing a king, that these three male dancers were playing princesses. But it was the fact that we didn’t waste any energy or time dealing with gender – it’s just a part of the piece. Those two members of the crew picked our piece out as the show that dealt the best with the questions they themselves were asking and how they were feeling.
VS: Exactly. [The male performers] are not addressing femininity or anything – they’re just children.
Performances will take place at the following times: Saturday 22 October 2016 at 7.30pm, Sunday 23 October at 2pm, Monday 24 October 2016 at Noon and 7.30pm. Tickets can be booked online here.
