Hungarian László Marton directs plays only when he feels an emotional connection. He tells Belinda McKeon about making an Irish 'Wild Duck'
When, after a year's toil, Henrik Ibsen finished his play The Wild Duck in 1884, he was fiercely possessive of his troupe of troubled characters. The doomed child Hedwig Edkal and her reality-shy parents, the ruthless merchant Werle and his meddling son Gregers; for all of them, Ibsen wrote, he hoped for "good friends" in the theatre world. And, as his instructions to the manager of the Oslo theatre, which first staged the play, make clear, by "good friends" the playwright meant good directors and performers, skilled enough to intuit what lies beneath the simplistic surface of his characters.
László Marton is one director who makes good friends easily. It's in his nature; open and affable in conversation, he laughs constantly, and when he talks about the process of making theatre, he practically glows. Although something of a celebrity in his native Budapest, where he has been artistic director of the Vígszínház Theatre since 1979, and a director of serious international renown, captivating audiences and dizzying critics from Toronto to Tel Aviv, he remains refreshingly unaffected. What counts for him, it's clear, is not so much what he has done in the past as what he must do anew each time he approaches a play. Currently, as he engages with Frank McGuinness's translation of The Wild Duck for the Peacock, he is talking in a way that would come as a relief to poor old Henrik. "To direct Ibsen, you need, inside you, a great understanding and a great tenderness for his people," says Marton. "Ibsen did not give cheap criticism, and so you are not allowed to be the moralist, or someone who thinks he knows everything." Even the callous Werle feels sadness when his son abandons him; even the helpless Hedwig is capable of taking the most decisive action in the play. To see all the sides, a sort of friendship with the play is indeed what is called for, and to Marton, such intimacy is the only starting-point.
"It has been the luck, the luxury, of my last 15 years," he says, "to not have touched a single play which was not close to me. I will only direct a play if I feel really emotionally connected to it." No matter how long it takes; even though he had been teaching another favourite, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya since the mid-1980s, Marton restrained from directing the play until three years ago, feeling that he was too young "to deeply understand this man, who is on the second part of the road of life".
Acutely aware of the responsibilities of his craft, Marton is an actor's director. Not one to impose a fixed vision on performers, he sees the process of bringing a play to the stage as a collaboration. "The director must understand that he has a certain power," he says, "and it is very important that he does not exploit this power. In directing his play, he has these incredible partners, the actors, and they give him inspiration, and that's wonderful, and you can give back your inspiration to them. It must be about mutual trust." The movement play Dance in Time, an acclaimed exploration of 20th-century Hungarian history, with which the refurbished, post-communist Vígszínház was opened in 1994, and which is still playing, was actually composed by the performers on the basis of family anecdotes told to them by Marton.
The cast of The Wild Duck, he says, smiling enigmatically, are also closely involved with the realisation of the play. This, as much as McGuinness's translation, is what will make the production a very Irish one, he feels. "I try to inspire my actors to be as genuine as possible. They have their own life experience, their own emotional memory, and they bring this to rehearsal. Their love-life is Irish, their disappointment is Irish, the way they blush is Irish. I am not going to ask them to be generally disappointed or generally humiliated." Again, that degree of intimacy. And Marton knows it's not always easy. "I feel very lucky about this, because for them, it's a little bit like confessing your most personal things. And that is what I mean when I talk about this need for mutual trust."
Working with an Irish cast, Marton's only worry is time; he is used to much longer rehearsal periods than the four weeks which is typical here. He is too much the gentleman to take shots at the Irish system, but certain deficiencies are too glaring to ignore. He wonders, for example, at the scarcity of ensemble companies here. At the Vígszínház, he says, 45 performers work together, again and again, on different productions. He thinks this is the only way.
"To make good art, I think you must always return to the connections you make together. They learn together, they fail together, they learn again together."
Another thing which perturbs him is the absence of training for directors. Himself a graduate of the prestigious, and hugely competitive, Academy of Dramatic Art in Budapest, where he now teaches acting, he believes that formal instruction in the craft is vital for young directors. "If a country wants to have a serious theatre art, and if they are thinking about theatre as an art form, I think it is very important to have a directorial programme. There are many things a director has to learn." During his own training - the five-year course required him to attend from eight in the morning until 10 at night, five days a week - he was coached in everything, from analysis to acting to criticism, as well as in opera and film direction. All of this, he says, fed into the process of developing his own style.
Upon graduating in 1967, Marton was immediately recruited into the Vígszínház company. In communist Hungary, his freedom as a director was officially curtailed, but Marton had little time for officialdom. The musical An Imaginary Report on an American Pop Festival, which he directed in 1973, acquired a massive cult following, its coded songs becoming the anthems of disaffected young people in every communist country. In 1987, Marton defied the authorities and took a significant personal risk by sneaking out of Hungary to stage, at Tel Aviv's celebrated Habima Theatre, a production of Molière's The School for Wives with clearly political undertones - the rapacious old man as Russia, the imprisoned young virgin as Hungary. Post-communist Hungary is "fantastic" to live in, he says, but something of that period survives in his style, and in a way, he thinks, that is no bad thing. "What you did then as a director was to invent a kind of strange metaphoric language between audience and performers," he explains. "We had a secret language, and the censor couldn't say anything. And I think that is still part of what I do, still part of the eastern European culture. The knowledge that you have to suggest something more, because it's theatre, it's an art form. Just a recreation of certain things is not enough. So you need a kind of metaphoric language to communicate with your audience."
But in Ibsen, he finds, the metaphor must be approached with extreme care. Too often, interpretations of The Wild Duck over-emphasise the central symbol - the wounded wild duck, diving to its death, and rescued by the claws of a hound, to be kept in the Ekdal's back room - at the expense of the play's own hidden depths. "In a play like this," says Marton, "you have to create all the details genuinely and connect them, otherwise you won't get a chance to understand the life of these people. When everything is connected, when you understand the lives, the problems, the defeats, the disappointments of these people, then you understand the meaning of The Wild Duck."
And the metaphor of The Wild Duck - of the diversion in the back room, or the tendency, literally, to duck when wounded instead of facing harsh facts - has meaning for us all. "The family as a nest, is very fragile. And, as is taking place in modern society, if the nest is shaken or getting broken, the child suffers," says Marton.
"It is such an incredibly contemporary play. And the genius of Ibsen was to see that, of course, we all have our own wild ducks." He recalls the evening of his very first visit to Dublin, arriving to a deserted O'Connell St and thinking how peaceful it was. Only later did he realise that the whole country was glued to a soccer match on the television screens. "So the people, actually, were watching the wild duck, and they didn't have to work, or think, or do anything, they could do it tomorrow. In Hungary, we used to have such a good soccer team, we forgot we were living under Stalinism. In modern society, there is always something. People, they lose. But that is how they carry on living."
• The Wild Duck previews tonight, opens tomorrow, at 7.30 p.m., and runs until August 16th at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin
