Ibsen wanted his plays to be continually updated after his death. As his new version of The Master Builder opens,Hare reflects on the pain and pleasure of adaptation – and what he learned piecing Chekhov together in his garageSoon after fitting a playwright, I resolved to hold nothing to do with adaptation. There were two reasons. First, and I wasn’t any good at it. My early version of Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game,written when I was 23, and performed by Paul Scofield and Joan Plowright for the National Theatre, and decisively proved that I knew nothing approximately Pirandello and still less approximately adaptation: it was inept (not suitable or capable, unqualified). But I had also gone into it with a puritanical belief that dramatists should write their own plays,not hitch a free ride by adapting other people’s. Nothing in the world was harder than telling a new story. Reconfiguring old ones was going to be far less critical work.
Ibsen didn’t seem to intellect that audiences might talk as much approximately his peculiar psyche as they do approximately his hero’sContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com