EMILIA GALOTTI
Interview - Dr Mark Ewbank, Director
Why Lessing's Emilia Galotti?
The play itself is an enigma, as Edward Dvoretzky entitled his study of the play's countless interpretations in 1963. The beauty of the work is that the patterns followed are classical in style; but the result on stage is anything but traditional. Lessing's story has political and social commentaries about the hierarchical society at the time, but those features alone are not the defining attributes of the play and the text itself has confounded commentators since its debut 1772.
The great pull in this play is an absolute vagueness around the thoughts, feelings and desires of the characters. It seems that this play has a psychological depth unheard of at the time it was written. What does Emilia want? What is she hiding from her parents? What did Emilia really desire in her life? There is so much under the surface of this play that it represents a true challenge to interpret and stage. With my cast, we have together plunged the depths of the characters and attempted an interpretation which reflects the text as written and pulls out that which Lessing left tantalisingly unstitched.
What have Ottisdotter done?
From the outset and the opening music from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s accompaniment to Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Emilia Galotti is very firmly about the middle-class and its relationship with the nobility. As one of the first bourgeois tragedies, the play is a scathing attack on unfettered autocracy in any form and even a barb on the aspirational middle class itself (see Claudia Galotti); showing that a moral framework isn’t the reserve of any social strata. However the play’s political and social commentary aside, the psychological depth provided by Lessing is remarkable for its time. His assessment of the treatment of women at this time is very acute, if completely atypical amongst his contemporaries. In interpretations as far apart as those from the Enlightenment, the sentimentalists, sturm und drang, Goethe and the later romanticists, no-one really knows what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing intended to communicate about his characters. With such depth in his concise text, the character motivations and drive are open for such wide-ranging interpretations. Audiences are wholly free to believe what they want to believe about such characters as Emilia, Claudia and The Countess Orsina. Each of the three women face battles in their lives which are imposed upon them. Their decisions are locked down to them, dictated by men, and their actions are constrained by these choices. Given this setup, no one can predict what they should do to escape their torment and the women lack the ownership of action that they so require in this play. The adaptation and new breath that we have put into the play is Ibsenesque; granting these women elements of self-ownership and control.
One of the two travails of this play has been the character of Emilia; so often framed as just an object of lust. Whilst lust is clearly a large part of the play, in previous productions it has almost squarely focused on the lust of the Prince, rather than on the sexuality of Emilia. As a young woman on the brink of adulthood, the play has long skirted around the issue of Emilia’s own sexuality, her desires and wants. Some interpretations have usefully taken away that Emilia is equally, if not moreso, lustful towards the Prince, but religiosity represses these instincts and she punishes herself for this. This is critical. Emilia is an object to the Prince of Guastalla, but similarly plausible is that the Prince could be considered to be an object of her lust; expressed in a far more nuanced religious self-flagellation.
The second difficulty has been The Countess Orsina. The character, I have to confess, was first read as a rather comedic role given the abominable things said about the character before she evens sets foot on the stage. However, as readings progressed, there was a realisation that Countess Orsina was not an ‘unhappy whore’ but actually a mirror of Emilia, years down the line; equally as bitter about her impending fate as her subjugation as a woman. Again, we have tried to give Orsina an ending that she deserves in life without changing Orsina’s, always beautiful, expressions.
Unfortunately the men of Lessing’s play are not to be redeemed, bar the controlling but consequently reformed Eduardo Galotti, whose role in our interpretation of Emilia Galotti has been given a more powerful reprieve from his own unhappy fate. However the designs and fate of the Prince of Guastalla and Marinelli in this work will never change. Whilst I will not give an account here, we believe that Lessing would be so very unoffended with the slight adaptation of his ‘positively revolting’ end of his play. Some may argue that the end remains indefensible, but harrowing pain, when framed in the way we have intended, isn’t always in bad taste.