All dolled up with somewhere to go
Award-winning actress, Anthea Thompson, is playing very different roles in two productions – a one-woman play and an ensemble piece, at Woordfees, writes Theresa Smith
ANTHEAThompson is very busy this week. In addition to appearing on stage in Hennie van Greunen’s one-woman play My Briljante Egskeiding, she also has to rehearse and then start on another run of A Doll’s House.
Both plays are running at Woordfees, the literary and art festival of the Stellenbosch University which runs till Sunday, and then Christian Olwagen’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic moves on to the Baxter stage from March 15 to 24.
The two roles and plays are very different, but while rehearsing My Briljante Egskeiding, Thompson realised that the one-woman play’s role was giving her insight into the Ibsen drama.
Egskeiding, Van Greunen’s translation of Geraldine Aron’s My Brilliant Divorce, has Thompson playing Engela, a character going through a divorce, having to figure out who she is now that she is not living her life through her husband or child.
In A Doll’s House, Thompson plays Kristine Linde, friend to Nora Helmer (played by Jennifer Steyn) who is having a similar crises of identity – having to figure out who she is in and of herself, rather than through the lens of husband or children.
“There is an inciting incident that happens to Nora; she has to borrow money. Then she sees how her husband responds to the fact that there is debt, making them re-assess their entire relationship, and that’s what we often do; we get to a point where we think, ‘how the hell did I get myself into this position with this person? How did I get to this construct?’
“And that assessment leads you to go, ‘who was I before I came into this construct?’ It’s like when a long-term relationships ends, and you go, ‘who was I before this happened?’”
Thompson’s character is an old school friend of Nora’s, seeking employment. She tries to help Nora when the man she lent money from threatens to expose her secret.
Thompson herself doesn’t like secrets and would like to think she would be able to persuade a friend in a similar situation of the need to come clean, but at the same time, she can’t judge her character too harshly.
“I think, however, that Kristine isn’t necessarily undiluted generosity in her motivation. I suspect there’s something she gets out of it, and in a way… there is a degree of envy there, when she sees Nora she thinks, ‘what has she actually done? She hasn’t worked?’
“Kristine has been through the wringer, she has had to work all her life. So I wonder, I haven’t made up my mind… it comes down to what Kristine says: ‘There is nothing, life is grey’.
“The interesting part of life is that it sits in the grey. It is neither black nor white, it sits in the unpredictability, in that moment of changing your mind in an instant.
“I don’t judge Kristine in that respect, if her motivation is that she gets something else out of it, that’s fine, she’s justified it to herself.
“That’s the point about people, that’s what makes us human. It’s a beautifully human play in that respect.”
She respects the way Olwagen has emphasised the humanist angle of the play and remembers snatching up the chance to work with him, having taken in his work on the Afrikaans theatre festival circuit over the past few years.
“I think that he is a visionary. The way that he approaches text illuminates the themes in a way that I don’t think are obvious. Especially in something like A Doll’s House.”
A Doll’s House is considered a classic, but its setting dates it, so Olwagen adapted it to a more contemporary setting, while still holding on to the themes and context.
“It is based on a modern text, but he updated it even further. It takes a good craftsman to place it within a… I hate the word ‘contemporary’… but relatable context. So that an audience is not sitting there going, which some audience members will do actually because ‘it’s Ibsen you know, it comes from that classical period of theatre,’” she intones in a wonderfully faux serious tone.
“In fact, people are involved to the point of ‘no, she didn’t say that,’” she says, making her eyes go wide.
“The natural rhythms, that’s very much like his style of direction. He doesn’t like things to be declaimed, he doesn’t like signalling ‘here comes the grand emotion’.
“He likes it to evolve completely naturally, so that he catches the audience by surprise.”