Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 28, 1992 TAG: 9203280352
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But when she called to talk about it, Stevenson, in Los Angeles to assess possible roles on this side of the Atlantic, hadn't yet seen her own work.
"I'm always apprehensive about watching myself," she said, "and I was quite apprehensive about this one, because it's a difficult thing to do a theater play on television. The idea - it started last year - was to take very great theater plays and to do them on television, trying to get as good a cast together as possible."
This one co-stars Welsh-born Trevor Eve, playing the patronizing Torvald Helmer, who treats Nora like a child and would prefer that she remain docile. Geraldine James is her friend, the widow Kristine Linde.
Unlike most "Masterpiece Theatre" presentations, most of which have already aired in Britain, "A Doll's House" this Sunday on PBS (at 9 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15) and will run later this spring in Europe.
This is one of Ibsen's "problem plays," focusing on women in conflict with the roles society imposed on them. Since 1879, when the Norwegian-born playwright wrote it while living in Germany, "A Doll's House" has been both shocking (it ignited much controversy when it was performed in London in 1889) and more recently, a challenging favorite.
Ibsen, generally considered the father of modern theater, dared to write about an intelligent woman who left her husband for a better life.
"A Doll's House" appealed to Stevenson, who said, "The thing that's always been my guiding factor has been the material. If that interests me, then I want to work."
Stevenson, 34, who starred in the film "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (called "Cello" in Britain, and written for her by Anthony Minghella), has also spent years doing Shakespeare in England and appearing in other classics, including another Ibsen play, "Hedda Gabler."
Like Trevor Eve, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She then began eight years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and is so talented she has been compared to the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
"The amazing thing about Ibsen is that he's using quite an old form, like a melodrama, to explore very profound and rich psychological themes," Stevenson said. "He and Chekov were the first to write psychological studies."
She was concerned that viewers would be dismayed by what she called a "cumbersome old plot - blackmailers coming in the middle of the night, manuscripts getting lost - and you get caught between what the people are going through and what the message is."
In "A Doll's House," the message is that women have equal rights with men, and it is a theme that Stevenson treasures.
Juliet Stevenson once was part of a campaign to eradicate the sexism she saw in the RSC. A member of the company while 20 to 28, she appeared in four two-year cycles of presentations, occasionally taking a break to "do television stuff." She is now an RSC associate.
"They were challenging, rich years there," she said. "They gave me wonderful opportunities. I got very involved with the company, and I began to feel that it was strange that the 12 associate directors were all men. I could not help seeing this and thinking it was strange.
"It's not a qualitative thing about men or women being better or worse, but I began to think it would be fairer and more interesting if a female perspective were brought to bear on the plays. Shakespeare wrote both male and female roles, but he also wrote about being a woman dressed as a boy (Rosalind in `As You Like It') and discovering the freedoms that are available in one gender and another.
"I thought it was paradoxical that there was this total lack of balance. So I sort of rumbled about it, and there were other actresses who took it on as well, and I suppose it sort of came to a head in my last two years."
by CNB