Strange Interlude

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama yet satirised by Groucho Marx, Strange Interlude is a rarely performed American classic. Actress Emily Barclay and theatre director Simon Stone, talked to Elissa Blake, about how they are transforming what was originally a five-hour drama into a play that will click with contemporary audiences.

Simon Stone

Writer, resident director at Belvoir

Born: Basel, Switzerland, 1984 Based: Sydney

Stage highlights: The Wild Duck, Neighbourhood Watch (Belvoir) Thyestes (The Hayloft Project/Belvoir), Baal (Sydney Theatre Company)

Three words to describe Emily: Playful. Inspired. Unaffected

Emily Barclay

Actor

Born Plymouth, England, 1984 (raised in Auckland) Based: London

Stage highlights: Gethsemane, That Face, The Seagull (Belvoir), This is Our Youth (Sydney Opera House), The Importance of Being Earnest (Melbourne Theatre Company)

Three words to describe Simon: Brilliantly-smart. Instinctive. Inspiring.

By Elissa Blake

Simon Stone and Emily Barclay, both 27, are in a playful mood. At one point, over a post-rehearsal dinner of pizza and broccolini pasta (Barclay is vegan), Stone splashes a drop of mineral water on his shirt. Barclay immediately adds the remains of her glass of water.

“Did you see that?” he says. “Our relationship is either like a 12-year-old with his kid sister or brother, or we’re like an old married couple.”

Simon, did you consider doing the original five-hour play?

STONE: Absolutely. I thought about letting it be a totally messy, complicated theatre experience where you let the audience get bored for half an hour and then you can suck them back in again. There’s virtue in that. But then I just started writing.

So this Strange Interlude is a Simon Stone play, after Eugene O’Neill. In the same way The Wild Duck was a Simon Stone play, after Henrik Ibsen?

STONE: Yes. I’ve been criticized in the past for somehow reducing the value of the original play. That weighs on my mind. But actually what I am grappling with is the idea of being faithful to an audience rather than to a dead playwright. I’m trying to write a play about the time we live in.

BARCLAY: I don’t think it’s reductive at all. You’re distilling all these huge ideas.

STONE: There’s this idea that I’m creating ‘consumable classics’. It frustrates me because the theatre is there to be consumed and because I spend a massive amount of time writing these plays. It would be much easier to just do a faithful staging. But I want to go to sleep at night knowing I was true to all the principals that I think theatre should be. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Do you feel pressure to deliver a certain kind of play or that you have to reinvent the wheel each time?

STONE: No, I just question myself all the time. Is this actually what I want to be doing? Am I being truthful? Do you feel like that as an actress?

BARCLAY: Yes, of course I do. But that’s healthy.

Why did you choose Strange Interlude?

STONE: Because I’m also doing Death of a Salesman this year, I wanted to do a show that is opposite to a ‘male pride’ play. Interlude is a play about a woman kicking against the pricks - literally.

Also I believe we need to get to a point where 51% of the lead characters in contemporary Australian theatre are female and O’Neill wrote a lot of plays about women. He was punching above his weight in terms of exploring femininity in his day and age.

But Strange Interlude originally sides way too much with the men. In this version they are proven wrong more often. I’ve altered the tone. It’s as close to a post-feminist version of the play as it could be, while still being faithful to the chain of events. And I’ve rewritten the ending completely, which is something I love to do.

Why did you cast Emily in the lead role?

STONE: I saw Emily in [Benedict Andrews’s production of] The Seagull and I was astounded by her ability to make it seem like you’re hearing those lines for the first time. When Emily acts, you feel like a door in you has opened to a truth that has existed in you for a long time, but you still feel surprised.

Emily, what were your thoughts?

BARCLAY: I’ve never seen any of Simon’s plays, which I kind of love. I just haven’t been in the country when Simon had a play on. But I was really excited about doing another play at Belvoir. It feels like I’m part of something that’s happening now and is important. The people around me are incredibly inspiring.

Toby Schmitz and Emily Barclay in rehearsal for Strange Interlude (photo Heidrun Lohr)

You’re both 27. Do you feel like you are part of a generational change in Sydney theatre?

STONE: It’s not like, ‘hey, finally we got the keys let’s trash this place, let’s turn the music up and get drunk.’

BARCLAY: Yeah, ‘the grown-ups have gone, let’s get fucked up!’

STONE: It doesn’t really feel like that. It might if we didn’t have so much support from every generation before us. That’s the thing about working in the Australian theatre industry. Everyone paves the way for interesting work to be done by the next generation. It would feel more radical if we had to storm the palace. But we didn’t.

BARCLAY: I think it’s a really interesting time to be making theatre in Sydney.

Tell me about that.

BARCLAY: It’s even more happening here than in New York because there’s more freedom. There are pressures there that we don’t have - commercial pressures, a sense of tradition. We don’t have that here. We have freedom to try things and to fail.

What did you think about what Colin Friels said recently? Is our theatre scene “up itself”?

STONE: I think it’s great he’s been so blunt. We’re so used to people preparing a statement to the media but Colin talks as though he’s at the pub and I think he expects journalists to represent it that way. What you don’t get in the articles is his cheeky grin, him thinking ‘I know this will get published because it’s outrageous’. It’s the way we are in Australia. Let there be no sacred cows. That’s what Colin is saying and I agree with that completely. Slaughter those cows.

BARLCAY: Just think of how many conversations people are having because of what Colin said. That is fantastic. Sometimes it takes someone to really put themselves out there in order for that too happen.

STONE: I like that there’s a robustness to the conversation, too. Theatre has to justify itself now. People are asking, why are you doing this, why are you doing that? Why is there no set? Where are the props? That never used to happen. They just paid for their subscription and came to see a show. No one paid attention to the director. But they do now and that’s great.

Do you think some of those subscribers feel disenfranchised?

STONE: I would buy into that if we hadn’t increased our subs by 2000 in two years. We’ve had so many sold-out shows at Belvoir and we’ve been able to attract a whole heap of non-regular theatre-goers. I am much more interested in attracting a non-theatre so that we can have a sustainable theatre culture over the next 20 years.

BARCLAY: What sort of theatre do you want to see, Simon?

STONE: I love it all. I want to see everything that’s out there.

BARCLAY: Really?

STONE: At the age of 18, I decided that in order to become an artist, I had to obliterate the notion of taste in myself. If I could do that then everything I wanted to make would be an honest response.

BARCLAY: How the fuck did you have that realisation at 18? When I was 18 I was narrowing everything down.

STONE: Well, at the age of 17 I was like, ‘there is no theatre except for Sarah Kane, Howard Barker and Edward Bond’. I was such a fucking snob. I was a real elitist for about a year. Only a fairly well off, middle class white boy can be such a radical. [laughs]

Emily, tell me about your role in Strange Interlude.

BARCLAY: The play begins with my character, Nina, when she’s 19. Her fiancé has died a year earlier in a war, and then the next 25 years unfold. For me, it’s about the choices she makes and the choices she doesn’t make and how that creates her life. She has a constant battle between contentment and not knowing whether she’s settled. That is what made me fall in love with this play and what makes it feel so contemporary.

STONE: We’ve emphasised that feeling of unsettledness, but we’re not portraying it as mental illness, like O’Neill intended. In our version, it’s about finding that point at which you decide to compromise. How do you make that decision, Emily?

BARCLAY: I have no idea! I think it’s about trying to be as honest and brave as you can and accepting the fact that your life is going to be messy.

STONE: It’s a really contemporary problem. How do you figure out the order of your life as a young woman? How do you do it? Every order has been questioned and thrown out. There is too much choice. What the fuck do I do?

BARCLAY: And how the fuck do I know it’s real?

Interlude is famous for its soliloquies. Groucho Marx even sent them up in Animal Crackers - ‘Pardon me while I have a strange interlude …’. How are you handling that?

STONE: The soliloquies are incredibly unusual. I’ve never done anything like it before.

Barclay groans …

STONE: Emily’s great at them, but she’s just never done this sort of thing either and so she wants to kill herself.

BARCLAY: It’s just that the only way I can get on stage is to convince myself that the audience does not exist. So to actually talk to them is terrifying.

STONE: There is some great stuff where she gets to discuss her sex life with the audience. That socialisation of her mental process is going to wonderful, like a gossip column in a magazine. We wonder if there will be people in the audience who responds, so that when Emily turns to someone and asks, should I sleep with him again, someone might say NO!!

BARCLAY: Oh, god, really? [laughs]

Toby Truslove, Emily Barclay, Toby Schmitz, Eloise Mignon and Mitchell Butell in Strange Interlude.

Emily Barclay and Mitchell Butell in Strange Interlude (photos Heidrun Lohr)

Simon, this is the beginning of what seems like an incredibly busy year for you.

STONE: Yeah, Interlude, Salesman, Face to Face for STC and we’re going to Norway with The Wild Duck [for the 2012 International Ibsen Festival in Oslo] And while I’m in Norway, I’m writing the screen version of The Wild Duck which will be vastly different to the play. We’re hoping to shoot at end of 2013. And I have at least three shows I know I’m doing next year but I can’t talk about yet. I’m just exploring all the different avenues that have started to open up to me.

What about you, Emily?

BARCLAY: He makes me feel like such an underachiever! I’m doing The Three Sisters with Benedict [Andrews] in London in September. I’m so excited about it. I play Masha. I have one month off after this and then I start rehearsals. I’m really taking on whatever comes along.

Simon, are you planning to apply for the STC artistic directorship vacancy that’s coming up?

STONE: I knew you’d ask that! But look, I have reached a point in my career where I’ve been able to contribute a certain amount to the culture of this city and this country through the discrete pieces of work I’ve put on. But something else happens when you are in a position of cultural leadership. You can actually take part in the larger conversation about the country’s artistic future and after the experience I’ve gained at Belvoir I think I’m ready to do that. As a city and as a country we can become a major player on the world stage and I have a lot of ideas about how that can be achievable. It would be remiss of me not to put my hat in the ring.

But regardless of what the next step is for Sydney Theatre Company I really look forward to this next passage of Australian theatre history. It’s going to be a really satisfying time for audiences and I think we’re going to start being known as one of the great theatre cultures of the world. I think Neil Armfield with his production of Cloudstreet opened the doors and it’s taken too long for us to capitalise on it.

ENDS

STRANGE INTERLUDE 

Thanks to earlier plays such as Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill was already a celebrated playwright by the time Strange Interlude opened on Broadway in 1928. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year, the third for O’Neill in just 10 years.

British actress Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds, a woman of academic stock devastated by the death of her fiancé in World War I. Distraught, Nina embarks on a series of affairs before determining to marry the amiable, uninteresting Sam Evans. But when she falls pregnant with Sam's child, Nina discovers that insanity runs in Sam’s family and could be inherited by any of his children. She decides on an abortion.

For this and other reasons, Strange Interlude was regarded as highly controversial in its time. It was censored or banned in many cities outside New York. A considerably softened version of the story was made into a film in 1932, with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable.

Strange Interlude opens at Belvoir on May 9, 2012.

This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 28, 2012

Watch the ABC news report here.