Entering the almost silent rehearsal room, I fear I’ve blundered into a private moment. The Lady from the Sea cast are seated in a tight circle and at least two of them have tears in their eyes. The quiet murmur of conversation suggests something heavy has just gone down. So I’m relieved when I realise they’re reading a scene – and stunned to discover the scene was written only yesterday.
Simon Stone’s modern take on Ibsen’s play is still under construction, and he has had his actors together for less than a fortnight. “Most people really take six weeks to connect to scenes,” the Australian writer-director says during the lunch break. “Often an entire rehearsal process can be the slow marking out of stuff, and it takes until your first run-through to feel anything at all. We are connecting faster, because we’ve been talking about it so much.”
After workshopping the characters with his actors, Stone writes dialogue based at least partly on their conversations, sometimes only the night before they rehearse it. It’s an approach that has inspired some memorably intense performances. A blistering Yerma was a career-defining moment for Billie Piper in 2016. Two years ago, Janet McTeer sent tremors around the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage in an updated version of the Phaedra myth.
In today’s hot seat – or, to be accurate, leather sofa – Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander are playing a couple whose married life is derailed by the return of the wife’s long-lost lover. “The way Simon works is sort of the opposite of my training,” says Lincoln, who had a long hiatus from the stage while starring in nine seasons of The Walking Dead. “It’s like you start at the end. But there’s no bullshit, he blows all of that away, and it’s been one of the most remarkable and enlightening things I’ve done in years.”
That’s lucky, because Lincoln wasn’t completely sold on Ibsen’s play. He laughs that he was “ambushed” into the role of Edward – it was only halfway through their initial meeting that he even realised he was being offered a gig. “There’s a thriller aspect to the original that I loved. But I honestly think it’s oppressive. When someone mentions Ibsen to me, I don’t think of gut-belly laughs. But Simon’s got a track record.”
Stone’s modern tragedies are shot through with humour and today’s rehearsal is a case in point: Gracie Oddie-James and Isobel Akuwudike, in particular, fizz with comic chemistry as Edward’s daughters. The writer throws himself back in his chair with a huge cackle and wheezes with laughter even at what sound like serious parts. He watches intently as the scenes unfold in front of him and only occasionally interrupts with advice – say it slower, be more casual, come in faster – teasing out the musicality of the lines like a conductor.
At lunch, Vikander is none the worse for a morning spent being shouted at by her fictional spouse: if anything, it seems to have delighted her. This is the first time the 36-year-old Oscar-winner has been in a theatre production since she was a teenager. “On a film the clock is ticking, because you know that you have three scenes in two days. Here it is such a joy because I have these wonderful nerves every day, from still not really understanding what we’re going to do in front of people.”
Her mother, Maria, was a theatre actor, and Vikander herself trained as a ballet dancer: she never even imagined a screen career. “There’s no one saying ‘cut!’, so I really can lose myself in it all. I’m doing the thing I dreamed of as a kid. It’s a real high.” The one thing she was most apprehensive about was whether her voice would reach across the Bridge theatre’s auditorium. Stone reassures her: “You could do a 2,000-seater if you wanted to, Alicia.”
Vikander knew the play already – she had seen a production in her home country of Sweden, and loved its radical feminism. Her first encounter with Stone – over Zoom while she was shooting a forthcoming film in Korea with her husband, Michael Fassbender – was an intense and revelatory conversation that only ended when they realised it was 1.30am where the actor was (Stone says he left the chat feeling “wonderfully embarrassed”).
His works often contain autobiographical elements, albeit heavily disguised; he calls it “photocopies of photocopies of photocopies”. Lady from the Sea is no different. He first read Ibsen’s original in 2009, two months after encountering a similar situation in his own life. “I had been one half of a relationship that went through that,” says Stone. “I started reading this five-act play in the bath and I just couldn’t stop. By the end, the water was completely cold.”
“I love that you were in the bath,” Vikander comments. “Very appropriate.”
Stone’s stage productions – Yerma, Medea, Phaedra – are testament to the fact that he is more interested in female heroes than male ones. “When I started out I thought I would do just one or two plays focused on women. But it’s become pretty much everything [I do].” It’s why he is so drawn to Ibsen: “When you think that his female characters were written 150 years back, it’s extraordinary. And this from a man in his 50s and 60s. You just go – what?”
The dramatic tension in The Lady from the Sea arises from the fact that the female protagonist is emotionally split in two – something Vikander can relate to. She has two sons, aged four and one, with Fassbender, and still feels guilty when she has to leave them for long days on set. Her grandmother worked – which was considered unusual at the time – and her mother’s earnings were often spent on the childcare she needed when she performed: “I don’t even know how she was able to pay rent,” says Vikander.
She looks back with huge gratitude for an upbringing that modelled how a woman could be a fully committed artist and a loving, present mother. “She would get up at 4am to bake bread, because her mum never cooked for her,” she remembers. “And I’ve realised that to be the best mum, I also need to make sure I have this other thing that makes me the person I am.”
Lincoln, who is 51, has developed his own important work-life rules. One is to do his research on the directors he works with: “The question you always ask is, ‘Are they a shouter?’ Life is too short to work with people that are going to be oppressive or unkind.”
He talked to his friend Piper, whose work in Yerma he had admired, before committing to working with Stone. “She said, ‘It’ll be probably one of the most intense and frightening experiences, but you have to do it.’ It changed the way she worked for ever, and it gave her legitimacy that she felt she didn’t have before.”
Lincoln is thrilled with the role that Stone has written for him; he has also, he says, noticed that he has entered the time of life where he is asked to play cuckolds. “But even when you were young, you were the other man,” says Stone. “Look at Love Actually!” Lincoln nods: when he made a film about Apollo 11 he played Michael Collins, the only astronaut on that mission who didn’t get to land on the moon. “Maybe I’m just the guy that doesn’t get the golden ticket.”
Stone observes that that was the reason audiences adored James Stewart – the characters he played somehow accepted being second best. “But in this play it’s like we cast Jimmy Stewart to go, ‘I don’t want to be Jimmy Stewart any more’,” says Stone. “That’s what I love about it.”
With lunch over, the director must hustle away and leave his cast to a group-led rehearsal: delays on his latest Netflix film mean he will spend this afternoon in a Soho editing suite. The Woman in Cabin 10, released next month, is his third movie (his first, The Daughter, was based on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, and his most recent, The Dig, starred Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes). In a complete coincidence, it’s set in the North Sea, and even climaxes in Norway. “I didn’t know we were making a sequel,” jokes Vikander.
It all adds to the impression that a Stone production can be a seat-of-the-pants ride for those involved. Vikander, making what is to all intents her professional stage debut, admits to knowing no different. “I think I came in extremely open,” she says, “and I’m discovering more each day. I feel as bare and real as I would in a film.”
