Through a Glass Darkly - Almeida Theatre

Three Spheres of ConflictINTERNALCONFLICTThere are three different types of conflict, and different mediums will do them differently. All dramais based on conflict. If you want to write about someone's internal traumas then the best thing todo is prose or poetry, because you can get that direct link: there's no interpretation, no arbitratorbetween you and the writer. If you're doing social then you do theatre, because what you get, that'salways based on dialogue and interaction between two people and that's what theatre does reallybeautifully, like a microcosm. If you want to do something with external factors, then you do film,because then you can have the gods and hurricanes and you can do all that massive stuff.This is interesting, but if you look at Shakespeare, he does all of those things. If you look at theGreeks too, they do all of these things. So when you think of adapting a movie, if somebody gaveme something and said do it from scratch, I certainly wouldn't look at it and assume that it won’tadapt well. Because I actually think theatre can do all of these things, because we can have directaddress, it could happen in this play - we don't, because we don't feel the need to use it - I don'tthink it's tacky, I quite like the relationship with the audience and the challenge of the external stuff,putting stage directions, which are like 'a mountain collapses' and then thinking, 'it's theatre -they'll find a way to do that'. But social conflict is your banker, if you like: that's the thing you knowyou can do well in theatre.AP: What was your involvement in the rehearsal process?SOCIALCONFLICTEXTERNALCONFLICTJW: My role in rehearsal was about clarification. The first thing that we did was spend five days justgoing through the text, so we read it once, and then we moved on to reading a scene, and then westopped and would discuss that scene in great detail; literally, 'what does he mean with that line,what is he trying to do, what's underneath that?' You wouldn't do that for every play, because itwouldn't be necessary; but in Through A Glass Darkly, because so much is packed into every line,even though I've opened it up quite a lot, there's still so much subtext. So I was there to explaineither what I meant when I wrote a line or my interpretation of what Bergman is intending tomean.Interestingly, there are certain things you realise are just totally up to interpretation, and actuallythat my idea behind how it should be played is not necessarily the choice the actor or director take.And for any writer in that situation you have to give them the liberty to do that; you're there reallyto answer questions. You also find out what doesn't make sense. With the notes that I took out ofthe rehearsal room after the first five days, I then spent two days working through; I had about tenindividual lines which weren't quite clear, and then there were three larger sections that neededclarification. One of the things that I had to clarify was that the cast felt that it wasn't clear enoughthat the mother had killed herself. And so the difference between the draft that they walked into theInterview with Jenny WortonResource Pack: Through A Glass Darkly by Ingmar Bergman 26