John Malkovich directs Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, there are dramas by Dennis Kelly and Duncan Macmillan, Sarah Ruhl adapts Eurydice and The Play That Goes Wrong is packed to the brim. You may look at the theater offering in London, but this is the special program at the Dailes Theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia, where, in addition to some American heavyweights, British talents are also leading the way this season.
Among them are writer-director Jeff James and designer Rosanna Vize with a dazzling version of The Winter’s Tale, commissioned by Dailes’ artistic director, Viesturs Kairišs. It starts with Hermione pleasuring herself with VR porn, reimagines Bohemia as a deadly video game, and turns theater’s most famous director into the supporting character of a hot-headed panda.
Time’s “quick passage” speech, which fast-forwards the plot sixteen years, is just about all that remains of the original text, although Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Leave me not to the marriage of true minds”) is cleverly added and supplemented with a scene depicting Leonard Cohen’s Treaty (“I wish there was a treaty / Between your love and mine”). It ends with a full ensemble to Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ‘Em. Did I mention that the wedding is performed by a banana avatar?
“What I do would be illegal in Britain,” says James, laughing, just hours before the show’s premiere on a sweltering evening in May. Completely rewriting Shakespeare might be met with icy suspicion at home. It doesn’t matter that half the play is set in a video game, filmed with characters wearing “beautiful, crazy fake heads” and shown on a large screen that largely obscures the actors stomping around behind them, their oversized red boots underneath sticking out.
“These are clearly distancing effects,” he says with a dry look. “But I would say that even these effects in combination are not as distancing as performing The Winter’s Tale in the original Shakespearean verse. I think that’s the ultimate alienation effect. Taking the story and structure of the piece and finding a kind of contemporary language and world for it makes the piece – I hope – much more immediate for an audience today.” It’s an often silly yet clever and ultimately moving evening, knowingly playing with the ridiculous elements of the original piece yet honoring its delicate blend of hope and regret.
To match this piece about wounded innocence and a childish tyrant, Vize has designed an office playground in pink and yellow. Silicon Valley company AppZapp is ruled by billionaire boss Leo (played by Leontes) who has built a Bohemia metaverse where baby Rose will be spirited away. Everyone is in disguise in Shakespeare’s Bohemia, James points out. “I thought, where do people go today and appear to be someone they’re not? The Internet.”
The trial periods for Leo’s game have resulted in the deaths of several players, increasing his trepidation and explaining his suspicion that Hermione is having an affair – something that directors often have to work hard to determine. James, who happened to be expecting a second child with his partner while writing the script, was less interested in Leontes’ sexual jealousy than in the character’s fear of having another child. “I thought, is there a story here about birth trauma and postpartum depression, and a really complex shared experience that Hermione and Leontes had?” It is this fear that ultimately leads Leo to accuse Hermione of infidelity. “If you have someone who is shaping the entire world through his technologies, and who has staggering wealth, what could such a man do if he had this wrong idea?”
How did Kairišs respond to James’ suggestion to completely rewrite the play? “He said ‘you can do whatever you want’,” laughs James, who got the job after being recommended by Ivo van Hove, with whom he worked as associate director on several productions. Directors may have more power outside Britain, says James, “but that means you have more responsibility, as Spider-Man tells us! So they will agree with your idea, but it is up to you whether it lives or dies.”
Vize, who is preparing for collaborations in Sweden with director Maria Aberg next year, says we tend to simplify the contrast between the way theater is made in Britain and the rest of Europe. “It seems to me that every theater in every European city, even independently of the others in that city, has a different kind of style.”
Dailes employs an ensemble of forty actors and has the largest stage in Latvia (“wider than the Lyttelton, in fact the same as the Colosseum [in London]says James) and receives significant state funding. “They need big shows. They don’t want a three-hander. Viesturs basically said, the more of our actors you can use, the better, because we want them to be used and they want the work. In Britain, on the other hand, the conversation is more often about how few actors you can use.
James saw an opportunity to create something on a larger scale than had ever been offered to him in Britain, where he has worked at venues such as the Royal Exchange in Manchester and Nottingham Playhouse. He and Vize say it has been a stimulating experience. For Vize, ironically, this is partly due to the language barrier. ‘The actors speak English, and so do the heads of the workshops, but the actual people who build, paint and sew don’t really do that. And it forces you to know exactly what you want to make… I have to hand over something that doesn’t require language to express it. That pushed me to be more decisive. I think you are then conceptually stronger.”
When inviting Vize to design the sets and costumes, James said: “We have to go big or go home… we can use this opportunity to create something as exciting as we can imagine.” Brexit does not appear to have hampered the business. The creative team consists of British contemporaries – dramaturge James Yeatman, composer Kieran Lucas, lighting designer Adam Silverman – as well as video artist Jakub Lech from Poland and Latvian choreographer Elīna Gediņa. Kintija Rogers, who translated James’ script into Latvian, often accompanied him to rehearsals to further refine. Several performances will have English surtitles – Kairišs suggests they will one day be standard for every show.
At Dailes, a show is first programmed for a handful of performances and its reception determines how long it will remain in the repertoire. (The biggest current hit is Anka Herbut’s Rotkho, which reflects on authenticity in the art world and is directed by Lukasz Twarkowski.) There isn’t the immediate pressure to sell out a long run of performances, nor is there a preview system like that in Great Britain; the show opens after two dress rehearsals that are available to the public. Having a permanent acting ensemble and its own workshop allows the theater to take more risks, James suggests, because they don’t hire a freelance cast and creatives for every production.
What else is different here? A better range of desserts for the public, a longer break – the more time to eat them – and the procedure for taking a bow, they explain. Furthermore, to Vize’s delight, dirty fingerprints are rarely left on her set. A stage cleaner regularly intervenes during rehearsals. “It’s like an amazing kind of perfectionist dream.”
James and Vize say the pay is much higher than they are used to at home because Dailes is so well supported by the government; the subsidy it receives could virtually cover the salaries of the entire acting ensemble, Kairišs explains. Both Mārtiņš Meiers (who plays Leo) and Madara Viļčuka (who plays Rose as a teenager) are new to the ensemble. Viļčuka has balanced her heartbreaking Shakespearean role with British-style farce courtesy of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, one of two Mischief Theater comedies produced at Dailes this season. She also appeared in The Night of the Shining Princess by Latvian playwright Rainis (“he is our Shakespeare”) and in Leopoldstadt, directed by Malkovich, who himself has performed at the Dailes and has praised the ensemble as wonderfully talented.
Meiers says he finds his roles “extremely demanding,” both physically and emotionally. The pair agree it was a rollercoaster start, but the ensemble soon felt like family. Viļčuka says that as an actor “you can fool a lot of people, sometimes even lie to yourself, but when you work in a company that has been working with the same people for years, they know you – and they know when you are fooling yourself holds. They will tell you.” There is also a Latvian tradition of assigning newer actors “godparents,” Meiers explains: “Someone you can talk to and who has a different perspective – actors are questionable creatures.”
Large houses with ensembles still dominate the country’s theater culture, but nimble, smaller, independent companies are on the rise. Meiers says that in the past a placement in a repertory theater after training was essential for an actor, but that is no longer the case.
In the past, the sheer size of the Dailes Theater has deterred some. Meiers says it makes or breaks young directors: “It takes some kind of extraordinary talent to fill this space.” James “had a precise vision” of the story he wanted to tell, he adds.
“We have never experienced anything like this on the Latvian stage,” says Kairišs about the daring production. When he took over the venue in 2020, he decided to showcase emerging creative talent from across Europe rather than hosting established international megastars like Van Hove. He compares it to a football club recruiting players: they don’t have the deep pockets of Bayern Munich from the Bundesliga, but are more like Borussia Dortmund, with future legends. He is also developing work with another of Van Hove’s British associate directors, Daniel Raggett.
Dailes’ internationalism helps distinguish it from Riga’s other venues, including the Latvian National Theater and Mikhail Chekhov’s Russian Theater in Riga, where Kairišs recently directed Hamlet: Wartime Chronicle, drawing a parallel between the war in Ukraine and the relationship between ‘brother nations’ Denmark and Norway. “We have to be a real European theatre,” he says of Dailes. “We have to sell European ideas to society because of Russian propaganda… we still have to fight for Europe somehow.”
With opening night over, James boards a plane home the next day and – in another important cultural contrast – it turns out that the actors will soon be leaving the theater as well. “When the sun shines, tickets sell less well,” says Viļčuka. Winter’s Tale takes a break for the summer, along with most of the repertoire. But in cooler weather, the actors will re-enter with that panda in hot pursuit.
-
Winter’s Tale will be shown on October 12 at the Dailes theater in Riga, with English surtitles. Chris Wiegand’s trip was provided by the theater.