Highly Creative

Hugely enjoyed watching the Independent Stage's version of Ibsen's A Doll's House yesterday evening (or, I should say one of its versions as I'm told that the four performances they gave over the last three days involved quite a variety of casting resulting in the play taking on subtly different flavours for each show) and ended up thinking further about what makes a creative, in the new sense of the word.

My own involvement in drama over the decades has involved the creative part of me, I think, but, as I have previously pointed out I don't see myself as genuinely creative in any real sense. I just don't have original ideas, though I have some facility for recognising and making use of the original ideas of others. And it strikes me that that is essentially what actors do. You play the assigned role, scripted or otherwise, by entering into the world of someone outside yourself and, as far as possible, abandoning the self to adopt that world. It feels like you are doing something new, certainly, and when you work with others all contributing to the new world a sense of something authentically new and different and original is created. And that feels great - ask anyone involved in theatre.

It seems to me that the young people creating their Ibsonian (is there such a word? Ibsenite?) world yesterday evening achieved something quite remarkable in that they made that world credibly hold together. The set & costumes weren't what exactly Ibsen would have wanted, but they worked so well in conveying the ambiance of the Norwegian middle-class household, and the performers entered into that world quite fearlessly. I believed in each of them such that the emotions involved worked, despite the distances in age and background from the characters of Ibsen's imagination. I watched something new, though deeply familiar, and the newness was refreshing (as theatre so often proves.)

Just one example: playing Torvald as really drunk in opening of Act 3 was a risk, but it worked in proving a kind of absurd comedy. Norah's disgust became that bit more real than usual, and the final doom-filled sequence with Dr Rank even more embarrassing since it was also funny in its way.

I came away convinced, as I always am, that setting students loose on stage to make something new out of old cloth, or new cloth, or no real cloth at all, is a splendid idea and deeply educational in a way that's difficult to articulate but oh so obvious when you experience it.