In 2016, the cult Belgian director Ivo van Hove directed Ruth Wilson in his production of Hedda Gabler. It caused a storm.
Hedda exemplified van Hove’s ability to draw both clarity and cruelty out of the most shop-worn drama classics. Since the 1891 premiere of Ibsen’s play, critics have squabbled over the underlying cause of its heroine’s suicide. In van Hove’s production, everything became terribly clear. The traditional text shows us Hedda’s insecurity at having to depend on her husband’s friend, Judge Brack, to keep her secrets; in this version, Brack’s leverage became sexual blackmail at its most explicit. The shift was due not to Patrick Marber’s translation so much as van Hove’s directorial fantasy of violence, enacted by actor Rafe Spall on Wilson’s trembling body as she lay on the floor of the National’s Lyttleton stage.
It caused a storm amongst feminist critics. The Stage’s Natasha Tripney noted the irony of van Hove’s take on a proto-feminist classic: “a play about women’s position in society and the pressures placed upon them… ended with someone spitting on Ruth Wilson before her face was rubbed into the floor.” That moment sparked a brief campaign to see less violence against women on stage, with Tripney writing: “I simply don’t believe there wasn’t another way of depicting Hedda’s predicament without the audience having to watch yet another woman twitch and writhe and cry.”
Yet twitching, writhing and crying or not, the experience didn’t seem to deter Wilson from working with van Hove again or from putting herself through the wringer on stage. Last year, she teamed up with him again to star in The Human Voice, a one-woman show based on Jean Cocteau’s script of a woman’s telephonic pleas to her departed lover. It was another exercise in female humiliation. Van Hove left us with a final image of Wilson dressed up for suicide as if for the bedroom. The Guardian’s critic, Arifa Akbar, wrote about the voyeurism of the direction and the set: “Wilson only ever looks like an exhibit encased in glass, dramatising female pain rather than inhabiting it.” Prospect readers who missed it are better advised to dig out Pedro Almodóvar’s superb short film adaptation of Cocteau’s original, starring Tilda Swinton.
The sadomasochistic streak doesn’t only apply to Wilson and van Hove when they work together. This May, Wilson pushed her stamina to extreme limits in the one-off event The Second Woman, a 24-hour performance in which she appeared, again, as a desperate woman breaking up with her lover. This time, the break-up took place in person over a meal of takeaway Chinese noodles, a short scene repeated on loop as different actors swapped to play her ex. Meanwhile, Ivo van Hove was just across the river, directing James Norton in an orgy of theatrical torture-porn, his adaption of the Hanya Yanagihara misery novel, A Little Life.
The Second Woman was an impressive feat in the technical sense. Wilson isn’t the first actress to undergo this 24-hour marathon: creators Nat Randall and Anna Breckon have staged their show in New York, Toronto, Taiwan and Australia, with different leads. But it’s hard to imagine any other performance being as mesmeric as Wilson’s, as she retraced her steps around a small, glass-cased apartment again and again, each time with different interlocutors, none of whom had rehearsed with her.
It’s less clear that The Second Woman did anything much to flip the script on “the precarious nature of gender and power relationships,” as promised in the advance publicity. Wilson’s script was fixed, but her co-stars were permitted to improvise provided they hit basic cues. Most were amateurs. Most, although not all, were men. And given their chance to improvise an intimate scene with Ruth Wilson, how these men improvised! Strangers licked their lips as they made lurid references to “last night”; one early performer decided to interpolate a backstory in which she was a foolish and sex-driven female prime minister. This may have held up a mirror to gendered expectations, but it did little to challenge them.
When theatre directors torture men on stage, is anything substantially different? If they’re playing gay men, perhaps not. A Little Life featured Norton as abuse-survivor Jude St Francis. Historically, female screen stars have been pressured to get naked as if to prove the seriousness of their commitment to theatre; here, it was Happy Valley heartthrob Norton who stripped off. Onstage nudity carries added vulnerability in the smartphone age. Within the first week of performances, the Daily Mail had published covert photographs of Norton, sparking an industry-wide conversation about whether venues could reasonably ban mobile phones from the auditorium in future.
The production also generated widespread reports of audiences walking out. They had good reason for doing so. Depending on exactly when you gave up and left, you could have seen Jude confront a lifetime of memories including but not limited to: childhood abuse in an orphanage run by monks; kidnapping by one such monk who pimped him out to “clients” when aged eight; rescue years later by a social services unit, only for this haven also to be riddled with child rapists; betrayal by friends; rape and domestic violence in his first attempt at an adult relationship; multiple attempts at self-harm; multiple car-crashes; multiple attempts at suicide; self-inflicted amputation of the legs and, finally, successful suicide.
There’s little moral or aesthetic justification for this litany of pain. The narrative of A Little Life defies basic emotional logic. Jude is cared for after each self-mutilation by a friendly doctor, who shows no sign of reporting him to more formal medical authorities. (The critic Alice Saville, to my delight, termed him a “walking insult to the Hippocratic Oath” in her own review.) Jude’s law professor—actor Zubin Varla, who deserves better—bonds with Jude so deeply that he offers to adopt him as an adult, despite Jude never telling him about his personal life. Somehow, Jude holds down a career in a white-shoe law firm while flinging himself out of windows.
Who is the audience for this? The narrative is preposterous: to give it credence, one must believe in a conspiracy of child rapists around every corner. Perhaps conspiracy theorists are indeed the primary audience, but encouraging their paranoia is not an act of civic service. There might also have been a progressive audience for a play that seeks to examine a world of affluent gay men in New York. (The only woman on stage is Nathalie Armin as the saintly, maternal ghost of Jude’s dead social worker.) But while A Little Life touches, crudely, on the ways in which self-loathing abuse victims may seek out abusive relationships later in life, it flinches from tackling the explosive question underlying this theme: do Jude’s trauma-based sexual patterns tell us anything specific about risky sexual behaviour among gay men? The question is begged, circled and ultimately dodged.
What is clear is that, as a popular male sex symbol, Norton has reached a theatrical status previously reserved for women like Ruth Wilson: he has earned the privilege of getting sexually humiliated in an Ivo van Hove production. Perhaps this is what gender-based equal opportunity looks like in theatre. Yet it leaves a sour taste. Our screen stars deserve better than to be treated as fodder for sadism every time they venture back to the stage.
