“Living at the Speed of Life”

JONATHAN KALB Let’s start with the origin question. Jeffrey Horowitz and I discussed several possible plays with you for production this year and you settled on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Why?

SIMON GODWIN The Wild Duck’s been in the back of my mind for over two decades. I heard about David Eldridge’s version when it was produced at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2005, directed by Michael Grandage. Interestingly, I never saw that production, but I read about it. There was a huge amount of interest and debate around the play and David’s version. The memory haunted me in a very, dare I say, Ibsen-like way, so when Jeffrey asked me for ideas for a third collaboration with TFANA—after Measure for Measure (2017) and Timon of Athens (2020)—I ordered a copy of David’s version and actually sat down and read it. I was struck immediately by the power of the story, the intensity of the characters, and how the theme of parenting affected me. I’m a father of three children, and this is a very intense study of fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. The play is known for locating the political within the personal, but the prism of the family is what I found so fascinating.

KALB Have you directed Ibsen before?

GODWIN No, I haven’t. I’ve directed quite a bit of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, but Ibsen is, perhaps, the thirteenth man at the table, whom I’ve never dined with until now.

KALB What do you mean by that?

GODWIN The symbol of the thirteenth man at the table comes up three times in The Wild Duck. Ibsen asks us to think about what it invokes. Is this man Judas? Or Jesus? Is he a figure of disruption or redemption?

KALB You’re making it sound like you were avoiding Ibsen.

GODWIN I think I hadn’t found my way to Ibsen. I found him daunting, perhaps a little heavy, or schematic. I couldn’t find a personal way in. But, then, the story of children and parents offered me a way to the play’s heart. I finally found access to the emotionalism of Ibsen’s writing.

KALB The Wild Duck will run at your theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., after its Brooklyn run. Do you see a connection between Ibsen and Shakespeare?

GODWIN They’re both dramatists of big ideas—of outsize ambition and huge emotion. Shakespeare, however, is principally invested in the now; his characters make as many decisions in the present as they possibly can. Ibsen is fascinated by how the past catches up with us. This makes the machinations of an Ibsen text different from the teeming vitality of one by Shakespeare. In the rehearsal room with The Wild Duck I feel more like a detective looking for clues from the past, or a psychoanalyst.

KALB The Wild Duck is a deeply admired canonical work, but it isn’t produced very often. Why do you think that is?

GODWIN The play is twisty and provocative. Unlike A Doll’s House, it has no clear, single protagonist. There’s an ensemble of characters jostling for our attention and our sympathies. The play asks us to shift our loyalties a great deal. It has some light, even witty moments, and then some extremely dark moments. The play contains audacious contrasts which are exhilarating and daunting to direct.

KALB The play’s detractors have called it dark and depressing. What’s your response to that?

GODWIN With plays that have a reputation for heft, I try to discover, if I can, a kind of contrasting effervescence. Human beings, as someone wise once said to me, move away from pain. Very few people are ever consciously trying to make their life worse. We are all trying to make our lives better. Sadly, in doing that, we occasionally unwittingly invite catastrophe. My job, whether it’s Shakespeare or Ibsen, Macbeth or The Wild Duck, is to find the radiance, to find the light that’s motivating the characters, for good or ill.

KALB What do you think is the central conflict in this play? Is it whatever is going on between Gregers and Hjalmar? Or between Gregers and Relling? Something else?

GODWIN The question of how much truth we all can take is central to this play. I think of this every time I walk past an advertisement asking whether I want to have some medical scan to check whether I might have some inherent condition or illness. I fluctuate between “I want to know” and “I don’t want to know.” Right now, I’d rather live in blissful ignorance than in painful knowledge. But the same information might save my life. I would suggest that each of us every day is negotiating how much truth we can take, how much truth we want, how much truth we can bear. Ibsen coins the term “life-lie” in this play, and you might think that he’s talking about something corrosive or nefarious. Arguably, however, this is our salvation; the life-lie is a story, a fiction we tell to survive. In the play Gregers comes along and says, effectively, to live with integrity, to live with freedom, we need to know everything about ourselves. We need to embrace the truth at whatever price, because the truth has its own luminosity. And we watch this very debate play out throughout the show.

KALB Gregers is an extreme case, though, someone often seen as hateful. Ibsen’s previous play, Enemy of the People, also featured a committed truth-teller, Thomas Stockmann, but he was presented as a kind of hero, even though he too had complications. Gregers is like Stockmann on steroids, Stockmann intensified to the nth degree, to where he’s a kind of purist, or ideological monster. What’s Ibsen’s reason for introducing such a person into a home that is perfectly happy before he arrives?

GODWIN The play asks how much we can or should intervene in other people’s lives. It also asks, what is happiness? Gregers believes that his best friend has deeply compromised himself. He feels Hjalmar is suffering from a series of delusions that are inhibiting his potential. So, for the benefit of his friend, and indeed for his whole family, he gives him the chance to know the truth about his life. Yes, Gregers has been viewed as a fanatic. But any psychoanalyst would, in some sense, identify with his mission to facilitate the discovery of truth. The tragic outcome of that mission is accidental. Catastrophe was never his intention.

KALB The play contains another character who also thinks he knows better what’s good for the Ekdals: Dr. Relling. Relling looks at the same man, Hjalmar Ekdal, and says, “I know what he needs. Not more truth, but a reinforced life-lie—a life-lie I will keep
inflating as long as I can.” Gregers and Relling reach opposite conclusions about what Hjalmar needs, and vie with each other to have their way. What do you make of that confrontation?

GODWIN That’s the collision we’re left with in the end. And it reminds me of Shakespeare and of his love of antithesis and paradox. Here again we have two truths that are opposite yet coexistent. To be or not to be; to dream or not to dream; to live in painful truths or enabling lies? As the play concludes, we move into archetypal territory where we’re invited to see the action as a metaphor for two forces grappling inside each of our souls: the wish to know and the wish not to know.

KALB How do you see Hjalmar, the object of their grappling? Is he a fool?

GODWIN As a director, one’s job is to try to identify with as many of the characters on the stage as possible. I must bring empathy and sympathy, not judgement. Hjalmar, like many of us, has big dreams and is sustained by a belief that one day he’s going to do something extraordinary. The play is exploring whether that might be rather a good thing—to have a certain degree of delusion. I know I have them. The absence of this feeling can lead people to feel very unhappy. A healthy ego has a happy and effectively delusionary component. Hjalmar has undergone suffering but has constructed a mechanism he can live by. And it’s a delicate mechanism. The play is partly advocating for care around the structures we’ve carefully built to live by.

KALB Fair enough. But does Ibsen really allow us to buy into his self-importance? Can we believe in the reality of his invention, that he’s seriously working on it, or that it will ever see the light of day?

GODWIN The play has a satiric edge, which asks, “Oh, yeah, is this invention real?” Ibsen is consciously articulating a sense that just because the invention may not be real, that doesn’t mean it is not needed. The invention Hjalmar says he is working on is essentially a metaphor for the fictions we must and do tell ourselves.

KALB Maybe that can bring us back to parenting, and Shakespeare. In her well-known book on Ibsen, the critic Toril Moi compared The Wild Duck to King Lear. She said both plays were not only about how much truth people can bear but also about the tragic avoidance of love. Lear and Hjalmar both avoid the love of a loyal and adoring child, with tragic consequences. Hjalmar’s rebuff of his daughter Hedwig triggers The Wild Duck’s climax. Does this comparison ring true for you?

GODWIN I’m reluctant to embrace it insofar as Hjalmar absolutely loves his daughter. The scene you’re referring to is poignant and heartbreaking, and it evokes the heartbreak of parenting. As parents, we are in a space of emotion and reaction, and tragically, sometimes we take things out on our children. We don’t wish to, and we suffer enormous regret when we do—whether it’s shouting or lack of compassion or impatience—but parents all know what this feels like. Hjalmar undergoes a crisis in the play, and for a short time blames his child, and that has terrible consequences. But has he been a consistently bad parent, or somebody who has consistently not loved his child? You must decide.

KALB Do you entirely reject the comparison to Lear?

GODWIN Lear summons a storm, figuratively and literally, at the beginning of the play through his closed sightedness to love and must go on a journey of illumination. The Wild Duck asks if such illumination is even possible.

KALB I’d like to ask you about the play’s theatricality. Some critics have called The Wild Duck a tragicomedy, and pointed out that it has a different kind of theatricality from the prose plays written before it. A Doll’s House has a tarantella dance and there’s a riot in Enemy of the People, but none of those earlier plays have the comic dimension this one does. Do you have thoughts about this?

GODWIN Well, first of all, I would refute that it’s a tragicomedy. Comedy has connotations, in a Shakespearean sense, of a happy ending, which this does not have. This is a satiric study of the human condition that has dives between contrasting tones. I’m still learning what genre it belongs to!

KALB Well, let me push back just a little bit, because yesterday, watching you rehearse Act Three, I felt that the energy was indeed creeping toward the farcical. Everything was moving so fast, and you observed yourself that the action was asking us to look here, and then there, and then over there. The play was constantly redirecting our attention, throwing a lot of different things at us. To me, that’s what’s meant by the play’s explicit theatricality. Are you saying that this requires no special attention from you?

GODWIN I’m encouraging the actors to play at what I call the speed of life. And the speed of life is quick, “as swift as meditation”, as Hamlet says. No one has any time to think. And any life viewed close up is intrinsically strange and sometimes funny. But these characters do not for a second feel like they are in a comedy, they are not doing anything to consciously generate laughter from anybody. I’m encouraging the actors to stay in their character’s reality, even though those watching may react in all sorts of rich and complex ways. And this is where I agree with Ibsen—the more complex the responses are in the audience, the better.

KALB Can I ask you about the play’s ending? What do you think the audience should take away from it?

GODWIN Peter Brook once told me that when it comes to Q&As, he prefers the Qs to the As. That’s my feeling around the ending. Ibsen organizes it around a tragic event and then gives us two people debating what the meaning of that event is. That’s quite a radical gesture. The rest is not silence. The rest, in this case, is urgent, ongoing debate about what we are here for.

KALB The two people in question are Gregers and Relling. Can the audience accept characters like them as agents of debate they should listen to? Both are so compromised by then.

GODWIN Gregers, who is inadvertently responsible for a terrible event, maintains at the end that the tragedy will come to mean something. The trauma will, in some painful way, forge a new maturity in those suffering it. Relling rejects this—they won’t be changed by it, he claims. It was a terrible event and no new wisdom will ensue. This point certainly connects to Lear. We feel that Lear sees better after the horrors he has witnessed. He’s grown because of what he’s faced. But in The Wild Duck, this idea is challenged. It’s as if someone in the audience has risen at the end of Lear and called back to the stage, “No, he hasn’t grown. He was a damaged and broken man at the beginning, and the idea that these horrors have made him a better or nicer person is sentimental cant.” Look at our world. See all the suffering. How can we insist that it necessarily yields wisdom?

Simon Godwin is STC's Artistic Director and the director of The Wild Duck.

Jonathan Kalb is Theatre for a New Audience’s resident dramaturg and professor of theatre at Hunter College, CUNY. The author of five books on theatre, he has worked for more than three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist, and dramaturg. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theatre book from the Theatre Library Association. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at www.jonathankalb.com.