Joanna Murray-Smith is torn. On the one hand, the acclaimed playwright is an in-demand adaptor of classic works not written in English. On the other hand, she’s suspicious of the need for such adaptations (as opposed to existing translations) in the first place.
“Around the Western world, theatre companies have not yet recovered from the pandemic”: Joanna Murray-Smith Credit: Simon Schluter It’s a demand stemming from the burning need for “relevance”, the current buzzword in theatrical circles, as companies, still recovering from the pandemic, frantically try to attract new and hopefully younger audiences. Almost any play penned longer ago than 2010 is seemingly a contender for the “relevance” treatment, although, as Murray-Smith points out, classics become classics quite specifically because “they transcend time”. Nonetheless, she sprinkles her modernist magic dust over plays by the likes of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov.
The latter’s Uncle Vanya is about to open at the Ensemble, with Yalin Ozucelik as Vanya and Chantelle Jamieson as Yelena. Director Mark Kilmurry approached Murray-Smith because he wanted it to be as contemporary for his audiences as it was for Chekhov’s audiences 125 years ago. Studiously avoiding anything “revolutionary”, she strives to preserve the original, while gently disguising aspects that mark the play as “historical”, and therefore in the minds of some theatre-goers, “not about my world”.
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