You have a longstanding relationship with the work of Henrik Ibsen. Why did you choose to stage The Wild Duck?
I’ve had a very personal relationship with Ibsen’s work for a long time. A Doll’s House was the first play through which I truly felt I was able to grasp his writing. It was with that play that I was able to explore a modern way of staging his stories while avoiding the potential pitfalls of a slow pacing and psychological interpretation. His characters feel contemporary, driven by the desire to get rich, by the urgency of living, unafraid of confrontation. It was essential for Ibsen’s words to resonate in our present day. Ibsen wrote The Wild Duck two years after An Enemy of the People, which I staged at the Opéra d’Avignon in 2012. The two plays have diametrically opposed relationships to the truth. In An Enemy of the People, truth must be absolute, whereas in The Wild Duck, it’s evoked as a concept struggling to find its place in the world against the efforts of those who try to hide it. The Wild Duck can be read as a response to An Enemy of the People: is every truth worth telling, or do we sometimes need to lie to survive? There seems to be a sort of dialogue happening between these two plays.
Was your decision to adapt the play driven by this need to have it resonate with today’s world?
We wrote an adaptation of the play to modernise it and its language. Some of the secondary characters have been removed, and we’ve moved the story to our time. The passion for truth of the idealistic Gregers Werle is what attracted me the most to this play: here is a man who returns to his hometown after a long absence, seemingly possessed by a missionary zeal to enlighten people. It reminded me of American psychotherapist Brad Blanton’s analysis, in his book Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth. His approach to truth, and to lies, has become a real trend in the United States, and is now spreading to Europe. There are workshops and groups dedicated to this ideology of radical honesty, which claims that you can transform your life by being entirely truthful about everything, without holding anything back. The theory goes like this: although life can sometimes be cruel, it is far better when lived truthfully. Lying to your loved ones, your friends, or your colleagues is interpreted as destroying your own life. The only way to be free is to tell the truth. This is exactly the kind of approach Gregers Werle takes in Ibsen’s play. It gives the character a strangely contemporary feel that resonates with current concerns in Western society. But the play presents another theory as a counterpoint to radical idealism. It is put forth by Dr. Relling, who argues that we need certain lies to survive. We also reimagined the female roles to give them a more modern voice and a more equal standing than they were afforded in the 19th-century play. It was particularly important with the character of teenager Hedvig. In the original play, she is 13 years old. We aged her up a few years to allow her to speak with more independence, to express her own ideas and theories.
The Wild Duck is a play centred on family, intimacy, and unspoken truths. By transposing it to our time, in what kind of world did you choose to set it?
The story unfolds within a private house with several rooms. We designed a revolving stage to move easily from one space to another, staying as close to the characters’ intimacy as possible. The play opens in the bourgeois character Werle’s living room. This scene serves to give us hints about traumatic past events and to prepare us for the revelations to come. The rest of the play takes place in an entirely different world, within the modest household of the Ekdal family. The Ekdal grandfather lost everything in a failed business venture and ended up in prison for embezzlement. The setting is contemporary, but the furniture is old and mismatched, a mix of pieces from the 1970s and ‘80s. In this domestic space, everything feels dated. The attic from Ibsen’s original play has been transformed into a room with trees, a shelter for the wounded wild duck and other animals in need of care. It becomes a symbol for this humble family struggling to survive after their lives have been damaged. The play offers no answers. Instead, it leaves the audience wondering about the central question of the play, whether it is better to always tell the truth or if some lies make life easier.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant in February 2025