WITHOUT FEAR, RUSSIAN STYLE

The Australian
06.05.2008
Rosemary Sorensen

One of the world's most sought-after theater directors stops abruptly in the middle of the back-yard lawn at his home in London's Hampstead and points an accusing finger.

"There," Declan Donnellan says with dramatic intensity, "a Russian butt."

Earlier that week, his Russian ensemble of actors had been celebrating in Donnellan's back yard the opening at the Barbican Theater of another season of Boris Godunov, the Pushkin play Donnellan had been warned was impossible to stage. The cigarette butt and a big pile of empty bottles by the side gate are the traces of that celebration. Donnellan shakes his head and tuts at the litter in his lovely garden, but more in sorrow than in anger. The 50-something Irish-born director finds he can no longer party with the gay abandon of his youth. He can't keep up with his Russians and their post-performance carousing.

Donnellan's Russians are some of the best actors to come out of Moscow, where they are highly paid superstars of the stage and screen. He has been working with them since 2000, when he was invited to form a company of actors in Moscow as a Russian parallel to his London company, Cheek by Jowl. What began as an opportunity for Donnellan to indulge his long-held passion for Russian theater has blossomed into an unprecedented experiment in cross-cultural performance. Audiences across the world now accept, with surprising ease, productions of Russian plays in the original language rather than in translation.

Donnellan counts Sydney Theater Company artistic director Cate Blanchett and her predecessor Robyn Nevin as "great friends" and he has already brought members of his Russian ensemble to Sydney for an all-male production of Twelfth Night, first performed at the Chekhov International Festival in 2003. Next month he is bringing his acclaimed Three Sisters to the Brisbane Festival, giving audiences an opportunity to hear Chekhov performed in Russian. According to the almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews of Three Sisters from the production's 2007 seasons, you haven't really seen a Chekhov play until you've seen it done by Russians. Something essential is lost even in the best translations.

Donnellan and his partner, designer Nick Ormerod, have become so enraptured by this collaboration with Russian theater because, he says, "I just like working with them". When he was a teenager, "falling in love with the theater", Donnellan had a romantic notion of Russia and read everything he could find by Chekhov and the influential director Konstantin Stanislavsky, as well as by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. "I was mystified and intrigued by the idea of Russia because, of course, one couldn't go there," he says. He and Ormerod began Cheek by Jowl in 1981 and when the Iron Curtain came down at the end of that decade, they immediately asked if they could take a production there.

"When we did go to Russia, it was strange because it was like coming home," Donnellan says. "I didn't need to explain things that were very important for me: for example, how a company is not formed by individual stars but by an ensemble. English, French and American actors love to work like that too, but for them it's not where they start. Russian actors start there and they completely understand that."

Donnellan says that despite his rudimentary Russian, he found he didn't have to explain, as he does with English-speaking actors, what for him is important in the rehearsal room. Where embarrassment is the English "national disease", which makes actors tentative, the Russians have what he calls "shamelessness". "It's a provocative word," he says, "but what I mean is they have a kind of going-for-it. It's not a matter of exposing big emotions or being daring or outrageous, it's just doing things without having to apologise for it." In his book The Actor and the Target, published first in Russian and then in English, Donnellan identifies this shamelessness as a lack of fear. "No theater work absorbs more energy than dealing with the effects of fear," he writes. "Fear is, without a single exception, destructive. A healthy working atmosphere, where we can risk and fail, is indispensable. Fear corrodes this trust, undermines our confidence and clots our work. And the rehearsal must feel safe so that the performance may seem dangerous."

For the audience, when the actors achieve the shamelessness that comes from a lack of fear, the performance looks, sounds and feels alive. For an audience watching the large cast of Boris Godunov whirl through two hours of that busy play, deceiving each other, seducing each other, challenging each other to confront and change history, the acting is uniformly convincing; the actors, whether in motion or still and silent, embody their characters convincingly. Audience anxiety dissolves into pleasure as we relax into the narrative. If this is Donnellan's "live and living theater", then it's no wonder so many festivals are eager to stage performances by his English and Russian troupes.

"Great acting," Donnellan says, "is something that takes place in the spaces between actors, and not in the acting itself." As the director, it's not his role to have a "vision of how to do the play", but to help all the actors come together, as an ensemble, so that every part creates a hum in unison with all the others. "A production does get a life of its own, and sometimes things must feel rough to be alive, other times things must feel polished. I don't actually know where that comes from, because it just comes out, without me thinking: "I want it to be like this"."

Finding a new way to do Chekhov, whose four main plays are regularly staged in Moscow's many large theaters, is not what motivates Donnellan. He says that, unlike Shakespeare, a Chekhov play can almost direct itself, requiring a very light hand from the director. What you can't do, he says, is fiddle with the setting and time. "I can't think of a way of doing him in modern dress, and you have to supply the circumstances." Where Chekhov is like Shakespeare is in his "obsession with love". "He cuts to the essence," Donnellan says, "writing exhaustively about love and self-deception in love, as well as about people trying to live in a time of change. Shakespeare and Chekhov write about us, which is why we perform them. And Chekhov goes to hidden places quite fearlessly. There's a deceptive simplicity, and he's not pretentious. A truly great writer makes you feel like you could write it yourself. But as you watch Chekhov, the writer disappears. He's showing people unadorned, experiencing life in front of your eyes, all very bare and direct."

Donnellan's production uses surtitles and he dismisses criticism they are intrusive. "At its best, you stop looking at the surtitles and watch what's happening," he says. "You don't actually need to know everything that's being said, but the titles are there if you need them. If the acting is good and alive, you don't need them."

Donnellan once hesitated between a career in the law and the theater, but his passion is the stage. He has managed to take on what he calls the warhorses – plays that have acquired reputations as cumbersome, boring or unperformable – and reinvigorated them. In Paris last month he premiered his English Cheek by Jowl company's production of Shakespeare's most unwieldy play, Troilus and Cressida, and then took it on to the Barbican Theater in London, where the company has been resident for the past three years. Working with Peter Brook and his Bouffes du Nord theater, he has developed a production of Andromache, turning Racine's poetic classic into a "story about parents and children".

His life has become crowded with travel and work as he juggles a growing repertoire of productions in venues across the world. And he insists on being present for each opening, in order to be sure the ensemble's health is good for each season. What he looks for in performance is the quality that comes not from lavish staging or thumping acting, but from the details that lend a production its gravitas. "Small things can be done in a way that is shallow or a way that has depth," Donnellan says. "People may jeer and say, "Oh, come on, that's just pretentious", but it's not. There are differences in quality. It's like appreciating wine, which I drink a lot of, but I have a terribly coarse palette. I have to be told what is quality, but just because I can't tell the difference, I wouldn't jeer at someone who can. I don't think in terms of an ideal performance. I just like people to like what I do and get something quite deep out of it. If you have a living experience, you feel what it's like to be a human being."