by John Malkovich directs Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, there are plays by Dennis Kelly and Duncan Macmillan, Sarah Ruhl adapts Eurydice, and The Play That Goes Wrong is packed to the rafters. You may be surveying theater listings across London but this is the singular program at the Dailes theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia where British talent is leading the way this season, alongside some American heavyweights.
Among them are writer-director Jeff James and designer Rosanna Vize with an eye-catching version of The Winter’s Tale, commissioned by Dailes art director Viesturs Kairišs. It opens with Hermione pleasuring herself with VR porn, reimagines Bohemia as a killer video game and turns the theater’s most famous stage direction into a supporting character of a giant panda.
Time’s “quick descent” speech, which fast-forwards 16 years in the plot, is almost all that is left of the original text, although Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not wed true minds”) is added and sharply complemented. . a scene featuring Leonard Cohen’s Contract (“I wish there was a contract / between your love and my love”). It ends with a full ensemble tune to Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ‘Em. Did I mention the weddings are officiated by a banana avatar?
“What I’m doing would be illegal in the UK,” James says with a laugh, a few hours before the show’s premiere on a sweltering May evening. A complete rewrite of Shakespeare could be met with frost skepticism at home. Never mind setting half the play inside a video game that was filmed with characters wearing “beautiful, crazy, fake heads” and shown on a giant screen that mostly hides the stage actors slouching backwards, their oversized red boots sticking out from underneath.
“These are obviously far-reaching consequences,” he said. “But I would say that even these effects are not combined as far as the interpretation of The Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare’s constitution. I think that is the ultimate alienation effect. To take the story and structure of the play and find a kind of contemporary language and world for it, it – I hope – makes the play much more relatable to today’s audience.” An often blinding but clever and ultimately moving evening, which knowingly contradicts the accessible elements of the original play that pays homage to its delicate blend of hope and regret.
Vize has designed an office playground in pink and yellow to accommodate this play about injured innocence and a child’s tyranny. The Silicon Valley company AppZapp is controlled by the billionaire boss Leo (Leontes’ role) who has built a Bohemian metaverse, where the baby Rose will be sent away. Everyone is undercover in Shakespeare’s Bohemia, says James. “I thought: where do people go today and pretend to be someone they’re not? The internet.”
The test run for Leo’s game resulted in the killing of several players, which caused the horror and helped explain his suspicions that Hermione is having an affair – which leads to directors work hard to find out often. James, who happened to be expecting a second child with his partner while writing the script, was less interested in Leontes’ sexual jealousy than in the character’s anxiety about having another child. “I thought, is there a story here about birth trauma and postnatal depression, and a really complicated shared experience that Hermione and Leontes had?” It is this fear that ultimately causes Leo to accuse Hermione of infidelity. “If you have a person who is shaping the whole world through their technologies, and who has enormous wealth, what could such a man do if he had this wrong idea?”
How did Kairišs respond to James’ suggestion that he completely rewrite the play? “He said ‘you can do whatever you like’,” says James, who got the gig after being recommended by Ivo van Hove, with whom he had worked as an associate director on several productions. Directors outside the UK may be given more power, says James, “but then you have more responsibility, as Spider-Man tells us! So they’ll go with your idea, but it’s up to you to live or die.”
Vize, who is preparing for a collaboration in Sweden next year with director Maria Aberg, says that we tend to simplify contrasts between the way theater is made in the UK and the rest of Europe. “It seems to me that every theater in every European city has a different style, even separate from the others in that city.”
Dailes has an ensemble of 40 actors on staff, and has the biggest stage in Latvia (“wider than the Lyttelton, basically the same as the Coliseum [in London]” says James) and receives significant state funding. “They need big shows. They don’t want a three-hander. Viesturs basically said the more of our actors you can use because we want them to be used and they want the work.” In the UK, by contrast, the conversation is more about how few actors you can get away with using.
James recognized an opportunity to create something on a larger scale than he had ever been offered in the UK, where he worked in venues including the Royal Exchange in Manchester and Nottingham Playhouse. Both he and Vize say it was a rewarding experience. In Vize’s case, that’s ironically because of the language barrier. “The actors speak English, and so do the heads of the workshops, but the people who build and paint and sew, don’t. And it forces you to know exactly what you’re trying to do … I have to hand over something that doesn’t need language to express it. That pushed me to be more decisive. I think you’re in a stronger place conceptually.”
When he invited Vize to design the set and costumes, James said: “We have to go big or go home … we can use this opportunity to make something as exciting as we can imagine.” Brexit does not seem to have hindered the venture. The creative team includes their British counterparts – playwright James Yeatman, composer Kieran Lucas, lighting designer Adam Silverman – as well as visual artist Jakub Lech from Poland and Latvian choreographer Elīna Gediņa. Kintija Rogers, who translated James’s script into Latvian, often went to rehearsals to continue fine-tuning. Some performances will have English subtitles – Kairišs suggests they will be standard for all shows one day.
At Dailes, a show will first be programmed for a handful of performances and its reception decides how long it will remain in the repertoire. (His biggest current hit is Rotkho Anka Herbut, an art-world authenticity directed by Lukasz Twarkowski.) There is no immediate pressure to sell out a long series of performances and no preview system like the UK too; The show opens after two dress rehearsals that are open to the public. With a permanent acting ensemble and their own workshop, the theater can take more risks, according to James, because they are not hiring freelancers and creative people for every production.
What else is different here? A better range of desserts available to the audience, a longer interval – more time to eat them – and the procedure to take a bow, they explain. Also, much to Vize’s delight, their set rarely leaves dirty fingerprints. A stage cleaner goes in regularly during rehearsals. “It’s like a kind of dream of perfection.”
James and Vize say that the wages are much higher than what is used at home because Dailes is so well supported by the government; the subsidy he receives could cover the entire salary of the acting ensemble, Kairišs explains. Both Mārtiņš Meiers (who plays Leo) and Madara Viļčuka (who plays Rose as a teenager) are new to the ensemble. Viļčuka has balanced his heartbreaking Shakespearean role with some British-style farce courtesy of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, one of two Mischief Theater comedies presented at Dailes this season. She also appeared in The Night of the Shining Princess with the Latvian playwright Rainis (“he’s our Shakespeare”) and Leopoldstadt under the direction of Malkovich, who himself performed at the Dailes and said the ensemble was extremely talented. .
Meiers says his roles are “very demanding”, both physically and emotionally. Both agree that it was a hectic start but that the ensemble quickly felt like family. Viļčuka says, as an actor, “you can fool a lot of people, even sometimes lie to yourself, but when you are in a company working with the same people for years they know you – and know them when you are fooling yourself. They’ll tell you.” There’s also a Latvian tradition where newer actors are called “godparents”, explains Meiers: “Someone you can talk to who will have a different point of view – actors are suspicious creatures.”
Large houses with ensembles still dominate the country’s theater culture but nimble, smaller independent companies are emerging. Meiers says that it used to be essential for a stage actor to get a placement in a theater after training, but that is no longer the case.
In the past, some people were intimidated by the sheer size of the Dales theatre. Meiers says it makes or breaks young directors: “It takes extraordinary talent to fill this space.” James had a “precise vision” of the story he wanted to tell, he says.
“We’ve never had anything like this on the Latvian stage,” Kairišs says of the daring performance. When he took over the venue in 2020, he decided to showcase rising creative talent from all over Europe rather than host established international megastars such as Van Hove. He compares it to a football club signing players: they don’t have the deep pockets of Bundesliga Bayern Munich but are more like Borussia Dortmund, bringing in future legends. He is also developing work with another of Van Hove’s associate directors in Britain, Daniel Raggett.
Dailes’ internationalism helps distinguish it from other Riga venues including the Latvian National theater and the Russian Mikhail Chekhov theater Riga, where Kairišs recently directed Hamlet: Wartime Chronicle, drawing parallels between the war in Ukraine and the relationship between the “sister nations” of Denmark and Norway. “We have to be a real European theatre,” he tells Dailes. “We have to sell European ideas to society because of Russian propaganda … we still have to fight for Europe, somehow.”
With opening night over, James will fly home the next day and – in another important cultural contrast – the actors will soon be leaving the theater too. “When the sun is shining, the tickets don’t sell as well,” says Viļčuka. Scéal an Geimhridh will be on hiatus for the summer along with most of the rehearsals. But in colder weather, the actors will rejoin that panda in search of warmth.
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Winter’s Tale is at the Dailes theatre, Riga, with English subtitles on 12 October. The theater presented a Chris Wiegand tour.
