A Farewell to Arms, imitating the dog, The Lowry, Manchester, 13th-15th November 2014
Imitating the dog posit themselves as a theatre company that ‘tests theatrical conventions and brings high-end design and technical and thematic ambition to audiences at small and medium-scales.’ This was all on display during their adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. They used video projections of the actors on stage, putting their faces against the backdrop of the set at most key moments in the play. They had Hemingway’s words on the walls. The pages of his novel turned as the actors worked their way through it, giving the audience the chance to connect the book to the scene in front of them. They even used subtitles for the Italian sections of the text. And they had a movable set, where a crumbled riverbank could be turned around to resemble the walls of a hospital. At times, and particularly in the war scenes, it did look spectacular.
It’s no surprise that such a daring company would want to take on a text like Hemingway’s classic war novel. It is, in many ways, the exact opposite of them. It isn’t flashy, it’s extremely pared back and minimalist, and, in typical Hemingway fashion, it leaves much to the reader’s interpretation. Imitating the dog must have seen this as a huge challenge, and it seems as though that would appeal to them. They deserve credit for their bravery and ambition.
But huge questions still remain when the curtains close on the play. Rereading the novel earlier this week, I found myself repeatedly wondering how they would adapt it to the small stage of the Quays Theatre. By Hemingway’s standards, it isn’t a long novel. But in scope, it’s humongous.
Protagonist Frederic Henry (played by Jude Monk McGowan in the play) joins the Italian army as an ambulance driver. He’s injured, and while convalescing in hospital he falls in love with Catherine, his nurse (played by Laura Atherton.) She ends up pregnant, and the couple both look forward to and dread the new arrival. Once recovered, he is back on the front, attempting to get three ambulances from one town to another. When one gets stuck in the mud, he has to lead his squadron through the battle ravaged country and eventually, he is forced to flee the Italian army when they accuse him of illegally retreating. His escape takes him swimming down a river, hiding in a train compartment, then travelling by road to find Catherine.
The difficulties don’t end, though, once they are reunited, and the two of them have to flee to Switzerland in a rowing boat. Here, a devastating final few chapters presents the worldview that Hemingway often showed in his work, putting love and beauty next to loss and pain. In the book these final few pages are shocking, surprising, and typical to the work of this evocative author.
That’s an awful lot to fit into a two hour play, so it was understandable that cuts were made. Unfortunately, the two most exciting sections of the book, when Henry escapes Italy and, later, when he rows Catherine to safety in Switzerland, were reduced to mere footnotes. To be fair to the company they did their best to make these scenes exciting. These particular set-pieces made the most of their multimedia approach, but I couldn’t help feeling that a crucial part of the story was brushed aside and replaced by impressive technology that actually took something away from the original text. They had to choose whether to spend most of their time on the love story or the war story, but neither can be as successful without the other.
The difficult and multifaceted plot is not actually the biggest obstacle faced when bringing A Farewell to Arms to the stage, though. In fact, when adapting any work by Hemingway there will be a challenge in translating his sparse prose style to the audience. When reading the novel, I was again trying to imagine how imitating the dog would bring this style to the stage. Or would they ignore it completely, simply telling the story through dialogue and actions? And would that really represent the philosophy that was so integral to everything Hemingway wrote?
They got around this issue in a very simple way. They had the characters read the prose directly from the book. Whenever the scene needed setting, McGowan would simply read the words that Hemingway wrote back in the 1920s. When we moved from the war to the hospital, one of the narrators that was constantly circling the stage would paint the scene with the author’s prose. When one of the characters was thinking something that couldn’t be shown through their facial expressions or movements, a member of the chorus would step forward and tell us just what was on their mind.
Did this work? Sometimes. In the early scenes when Henry was professing his love for Catherine while secretly thinking that she was crazy and he would never love her, this was an effective and humorous device. But later, during the tragic hospital scenes that close the narrative, the interjections from the side of the stage worked only as a distraction to the high emotion of the plot.
If this all sounds overly negative, I should offer a caveat. For me, it is the unadaptable nature of the novel that prevents this production from being entirely successful, and not the failings of the theatre company. Yes, they had a few issues of their own; such as the out of sync video and the sometimes too fast subtitles, but overall they produced an exciting play with moments of real drama. The set looked spectacular and, although they were too short, the scenes of war and escape were brought to life brilliantly by the innovative video production. Overall, though, this felt too fast-paced and frantic to do justice to Hemingway. There was a little too much happening on stage to make the connection that was needed. And ultimately, it suggested that Hemingway might always be best left as nothing more than words on the page.
Fran Slater