Bennett Fisher:
Paul, I know that you’ve spent quite a bit of time with this play: you’ve directed The Pelican, you have the wonderful essay on performance strategies of The Pelican. As you come back to this play over the years, what do you continue to learn about it? What changes for you as a translator with each new version of your translation?

Paul Walsh:
Well, what was really surprising to me in coming back to The Pelican was to realize how much I cut from my production. I was looking at it and seeing all these little bits and pieces that I had cut out as being too melodramatic for the production I wanted to direct. To treat the text as a complete and necessary whole, and see all of those melodramatic moments as part of Strindberg’s dramaturgy was really interesting for me. Now we have a much more complete text. I had made my job as a young director much easier by getting rid of the things I didn’t know how to deal with — and now I’ve put those back in because Rob as an experienced director will know what to do.

[Laughter]

Paul Walsh:
Also I found, coming back to The Pelican after translating the three other Chamber Plays — the number of echoes and thematic links became very clear and very pertinent to me. It really excited me about the overall project, because there are these continuing themes that Strindberg is dealing with. My understanding of Pelican grew richer the more we work on those other plays.

Bennett Fisher:
Can you specify a particular link that you didn’t see before that was clear to you after a few other translations?

Paul Walsh:
I knew from the scholarship that the sleepwalking motif was very strong in the Chamber Plays, even when I did the first production, but I didn’t realize the extent to which that notion of sleepwalking was tied to a larger concern with justness, vengeance, nemesis, and reconciliation. And so to see those things being played out in The Pelican gave me a new view of the play.

Bennett Fisher:
You mentioned the world melodrama. Of the five Chamber Plays, The Pelican is arguably the most melodramatic. The other plays, by comparison, seem so much quieter.

Paul Walsh:
Pelican is the most melodramatic, but is also the most action-driven. The other plays are more contemplative and reflective — and this play really drives forward on the action, which is why I chose to direct it in the first place, and why it was my favorite of the Chamber Plays for a long time. But, though the actions in the play are extreme, the issues are trivial. Issues of food, and issues of heating. The challenge of the play is to make the trivial trials of daily life as important as the dramatic action that they’re driving. And that introduces a strange kind of metaphysics — this is what we’ve been discussing in rehearsal as the theme of “testing”; those trivialities of daily life are the “tests” that allow us to reconcile with life, ultimately. If reconciliation in The Pelican means burning down the house, that’s a strange kind of reconciliation!

[laughter]

Paul Walsh:
I was reading a Norwegian detective novel this morning —Nemesis by Jo Nesbø. The detective goes into a description of the Greek notion of “nemesis” where as justice plus vendetta, and that is absolutely at the core of this play. The brother and sister talk about that notion of “justice” and vengeance. The other thing that I’ve noticed this time going through The Pelican is how close it really is to the Elektra story of TheOresteia , and how those echoes really play through.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, how does the difference in style that Paul has mentioned – the fact that it’s a little more action-driven than the other plays – change your approach to this text as the director?

Rob Melrose:
We’re trying to let approach be different to all five plays. We’re just ending this week of putting The Pelican and The Black Glove up against each other, and we’re doing that because they’re the fourth and fifth plays. But, in some ways it’s the greatest demonstration of Strindberg’s diversity of style. The Pelican is the most action-driven, most like a play like Miss Julie, while Black Glove is more poetic, contemplative, and follows not one action, but many different stories.

Bennett Fisher:
Do you feel like this play is more in the Miss Julie vein?

Rob Melrose:
The Pelican is much more mysterious than Miss Julie: there are ghosts, haunting, and things that show an older Strindberg who’s been through the Inferno Crisis and had his moments of seeing the unseen. As I mentioned in another interview, I’m reading his novels, which are satirical, and they’re funny — I didn’t realize how funny he was. Pelican isn’t necessarily as funny as those novels, but it has some similar satirical moments. One of my favorite speeches is from the young girl, Gerda, who says that when she was a child, she would tell the truth, and people would say “oh you naughty child!” But once she learned that growing up is learning how to lie, people said, “Oh, what a well-behaved girl you are!” I just feel there’s something so dark about it, but also so true. Last night, David Sinaiko said that it made him think of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in that so much of that play is about mendacity and being surrounded by people who are lying. I think that David’s right. The Pelican kind of has that same quality. And the other thing, as Paul said, is that I’m just realizing how it’s almost like Electra and Hamlet dressed up as a modern Chamber Play. Feeling those deeper resonances of the play and those echoes of these other plays is really exciting. The other plays don’t have antecedents that you can so clearly point to as this play and that’s something that makes this play special as well.

Paul Walsh:
Many years ago I got a call from Carey Perloff when was still at CSC. She called to ask me about Strindberg’s play Creditors. “Is this play funny?,” she asked. And I said, “ do you mean funny-strange or funny-ha ha?” And she said, “yes”; and I said, “yes.” Strindberg always has that humor, that satire, and that quizzical look at life all the way through his career. In The Pelican, though, it takes on a mystical and metaphysical scope as well, but only if you treat the play seriously. You need to ensure that the humor is the characters’ humor and the play’s humor. It’s the humor of the unseen powers, and not the humor of the director satirizing a play that’s already satirical.

Rob Melrose:
Exactly. As much as I love Strindberg, I think I misread him sometimes. The most parodied form of Strindberg is “Strindberg and Helium” which is a series of animated videos in which they read verbatim quotes from Strindberg but then have this cheerful “Helium” character repeating some of his most dismal phrases. What’s funny about Strindberg in “Strindberg and Helium” – is how totally grumpy he is and how utterly, in some ways, humorless he is. What I realized in reading The Red Room is that he is grumpy, and he does feel like he’s surrounded by liars, but he does have a sense of humor about it.

Paul Walsh:
What makes “Strindberg and Helium” so brilliant is the realization that Strindberg is both “Strindberg” and “Helium.”

Rob Melrose:
That’s right!

Paul Walsh:
I love “Strindberg and Helium”! I think it’s some of the best Strindberg criticism ever written. The creators of “Strindberg and Helim” recognize how self-conscious Strindberg is about the persona he’s creating and so create this alter ego for him that’s also him.

Rob Melrose:
That’s a wonderful point. And I think that’s what I missed. In “Strindberg and Helium,” I saw the Strindberg character as the real Strindberg and Helium as kind of our modern “ha-ha” about Strindberg. But you’re right, he absolutely has an awareness of his grumpiness.

Bennett Fisher:
So he’s maybe a little more self-effacing than we might think.

Paul Walsh:
What makes his novels, even his autobiographical novels (which I’ve always said are fiction and not autobiography), so brilliant is his self-consciousness, and that’s what makes him a modernist. He is able to talk about Johan, his alter ego, and at the same time speak through the voice of Johan. And we have that constant conflict between our narrator and an acting agent that are in dialogue with one another. And that’s what’s absolutely stunning. He does that in his plays as well. I mean, Flaubert can say “Madame Bovary c’est moi,” but there is as much of Strindberg in the character of Miss Julie, as there is in the character of Jean and he puts those two in battle with each other. In a play like The Pelican, it’s so important that the Mother be taken seriously in her lapses, in her belief that she does good and that she is a good mother (even though we as an audience have all the evidence to the contrary) because it’s that dialogue between two goods, neither of which is very good, that makes the play both exciting and accessible to us.

Bennett Fisher:
You’ve been talking about Strindberg’s ultra-dry sense of humor, and that irony is present in the play’s title. The title The Pelican is derived from the myth of the pelican, popularized by Thomas Aquinas, that says the pelican gives its own lifeblood to feed the young. In this play, we have a vampiric mother at the center of the family who literally takes wood from the stove skims the cream off the milk, and waters down the soup with soy sauce. From what you’ve said, Paul it seems a little bit different than what we see in Hummel in The Ghost Sonata. Hummel also is vampiric, he’s even accused of some of the exact same actions that Frederik and Gerda accuse the Mother of in The Pelican. What is different about the Mother?

Paul Walsh:
Well I think if you get to the center of what drives Hummel to do what he does, there is a sense of having been wronged by life and wanting to set that right. There is a sense of both vengeance and justice. The Mother in The Pelican on the other hand is a kind of sleepwalker. She’s unaware of the things she does. She steals the firewood, absolutely, but she doesn’t steal the firewood to burn for herself. Remember, in the first scene of the play, the maid comes in and says, “It’s freezing in here! Why are you in here?” So she’s like a depression baby who can’t stand to spend money. And, at other times, she is a flamboyant spender of money, you know, “a hundred crowns on one meal — that’s four cords of firewood!” It’s all because she’s sleepwalking and doesn’t realize the consequences of her actions. She’s the opposite of Strindberg in that she’s not self-conscious. Hummel, I think, is much more self-conscious. Hummel is driven by some deep urge to set the world right. His tactics are all wrong, though he’s not a typical melodramatic villain; and the Mother is not a stereotypical melodramatic villain either. She cares for her children, she just does it really badly! And so if you work hard to present her as sympathetic, the play explodes. If you don’t do that and simply treat her as a vampire and a terrible mother and abusive, then the play becomes ludicrous.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, what sort of things did you discover from the reading about making her more sympathetic and what are the traps that you see as a director in this workshop?

Rob Melrose:
Well I’ve seen two productions of this play, both of them terrible – one Paul and I both saw before we even knew each other. And I think that made me misjudge the play because I was judging it through these productions where the mother was just horrible and it was obvious that she was awful. The actresses in both productions played her totally unsympathetically, and the children had no power. With our production, I think it really started with casting. There was a real question about whether or not Danielle O’Hare was too young to play the part. But ultimately I feel really good about casting Danielle because she’s an extremely likeable performer. She plays both the Mother in The Pelican and the young wife in The Black Glove, both characters that could be played very unsympathetically. But, because Danielle is who she is, it’s easy to see things from her perspective even when she’s doing terrible things, which is kind of a great virtue just in her and also in her performance. Then, when Caitlyn [Louchard] and Nick [Trengove], (who are very strong, talented actors) spoke last night, you really entered into their reality and you felt like one: they were speaking their truth, and two: they were actually capable of winning. In those other productions, they were just starving, sniveling children. Caitlyn has this great moment when she says “anyone who tries to take my husband away from me is dead!”

Bennett Fisher:
That’s one of the first things we hear her say.

Rob Melrose:
Right. She says that out loud and there’s the mother, right there, and she isn’t saying “you will be dead,” but it’s said very much for her benefit. It’s a really strong move. You see that the power shifts in the play are very, very important because the next thing you know, Axel and Gerda have formed an alliance and the mother’s sleeping on the couch and is eating porridge! I feel like in those other productions, that moment didn’t happen. The mother was still this terrible person, but you feel bad for the Mother with the way Danielle plays it.

Bennett Fisher:
Something you’ve mentioned throughout the process, Paul, is the theme of testing that recurs in these Chamber Plays. In one of the talkbacks, you talked about how Strindberg believed that life could be interpreted as a series of tests, that everything that happened to him was in some way a kind of cosmic test that he could either pass or fail. Is there a test in The Pelican? Is it a test for the characters or is it a test for us as an audience that we need to pass in order to unlock its meaning?

Rob Melrose:
It’s tricky. You watch this family moving through the play with their destinies knotted together, and it’s hard to untangle that knot into a neat lesson. I made a mistake in saying “oh yes, well that’s true because in dysfunctional families, people act this way.” And Paul was wonderful in correcting me and said, “Why do you have to say dysfunctional family? Why don’t you just say families?” And it made me realize that dysfunction is a label we put on a certain kind of being…

Bennett Fisher:
Or the parts of families that we don’t like to acknowledge.

Rob Melrose:
Exactly, but in every family, those power dynamics exist. Someone takes the back seat and someone moves forward to be more powerful. Someone is always getting the short end of the stick. It’s just that some families don’t talk about it and other families do. So, to answer your initial question, I feel like in The Pelican, it’s really the test of being in a family. It’s also a test of poverty, although it’s a certain kind of poverty because the father, who’s just passed away, made 20,000 crowns a year, which we know from The Ghost Sonata is a very nice salary because it’s the amount of money that the student dreams of earning! I think so much of the play is autobiographical. In Strindberg’s own life, he had this period of time where he couldn’t find a maid. He kept firing his maids because they were unsatisfactory and he had to do a lot of stuff for himself. And, in The Pelican, the first scene in the play is a fight between the Mother and the maid. It’s just as Paul says – in the same way that Strindberg is Miss Julie, you can almost see Strindberg as the Mother playing out his argument with the maid.

Paul Walsh:
Absolutely. You know, Aeschylus in The Libation Bearers identifies the core conflict of that play when he has Orestes ponder over the truth that “she who is my mother murdered my father.” That’s his dilemma, that’s the dilemma. That same dilemma is at the core of this play. That’s not the test they have to pass, that’s the test they have to begin to understand. That’s the place where justice and vengeance cross over.

Rob Melrose:
That’s a great point.

Paul Walsh:
And what they come to is an acceptance of their mother’s goodness, of their mother’s humanity, of their mother’s necessity at the moment that she dies.

Bennett Fisher:
I always thought the test of the play was trial by fire, but I guess I’m wrong!

[laughter]

Bennett Fisher:
Paul, in the workshop you’ve touched on the cloud that hangs over this play. In several of the Chamber Plays we have ghosts, both literal ghosts and also kind of metaphorical ghosts – the ghost of memory, the ghost of presence. Both you and Rob have mentioned the presence of the father, that power vacuum that exists with his passing. What do you think Strindberg’s doing with the memory and the presence of the father – represented physically in the rocking chair that still moves, but also more abstractly in the tone of the piece?

Paul Walsh:
Personally I think that a director has an option in this play, of making all strange things that happen – the rocking chair rocking, the wind blowing – the result of the ghost of the father or the result of the larger testing powers that are not simply the father, but that are all of the cosmic events that shape these people’s lives. As we look at the five Chamber Plays, I’m coming to the conclusion that, in The Pelican, those possibly supernatural events are not necessarily the hauntings of the father, per se, but that they’re the hauntings of all of the cosmic powers. Rob and I were talking last night about how to make those things visible on stage. One solution would be to have Jim [James Carpenter], whose portrait is being used as the father, do those things – and that would be one interpretation of the play, that this is simply a dead father taking his revenge…

Bennett Fisher:
His ghost.

Paul Walsh:
Yes. Or it could be an ensemble of specters. I think that the ensemble of specters is a very smart reading of this play because it doesn’t become a play about the father’s revenge, it becomes a play about the cosmic attempt to try to reestablish order for itself.