Features Q&A and Interviews Published 1 July 2011

Ben Power

An Associate Director of the National Theatre, Ben Power has adapted Ibsen’s epic play Emperor and Galilean, currently running at the Olivier Theatre. He is a long-time collaborator with Rupert Goold and Headlong and was dramaturg on Complicite’s A Disappearing Number.
Simon Thomas

An aspect of the play that Power draws out in his version is the relationship between the four friends, who begin closely bonded but drift apart as Julian begins his journey as Caesar and then Emperor.  Renouncing his former Christianity, he descends into tyranny and persecution and each of the friends returns at various points to challenge his new-found beliefs.  Power gives this fluctuating friendship greater cohesion and it serves as a solid core that runs through the play.  One of the most memorable scenes in Kent’s production, where the institutionalized Christian Gregory is blinded and tears his own flesh from his body, is missing in Meyer’s translation.  He clearly felt that it wasn’t dramatically strong enough to include but Power’s rendering of the scene proves otherwise.

Theatres rarely work with straight translations these days and each new production of foreign-language classics seems to commission a “new version,” usually based on a literal translation, from which writers take flight, often updating and sometimes radically changing the original.  While Power’s version of Emperor and Galilean doesn’t overdo the colloquialisms, Kent’s production uses modern references such as helicopters and contemporary battledress, highly topical images as Julian the Imperial tyrant storms his way through the Middle East.

Andrew Scott and Ben Power in rehearsal. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Power was keen to get a balance between respecting Ibsen’s intentions and creating something new and exciting: “If one were 100% faithful to Ibsen, it wouldn’t thrill.  That’s why the play hasn’t been done in 140 years. But I didn’t feel that it was really necessary to find a contemporary idiom.  A lot of the images, for instance Julian’s late speech about going up to another planet and looking down on the earth, that’s an extraordinary little sequence of images and ideas but it’s literal Ibsen.  I tidied it up a bit but it wasn’t necessary to change it.”


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Simon Thomas

Simon writes theatre and opera features/reviews for Exeunt and Whatsonstage. He took a degree in Theatre Arts at the Rose Bruford College and has worked in the theatre, in various capacities since the 1980s. He has a keen interest in new writing, the early (and late) works of Henrik Ibsen, and the works of Carlo Goldoni, amongst other things. His book The Theatre of Carlo Goldoni is available on Amazon.

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