Director Eline Arbo about The Hours

Michael Cunningham presents three women from different decades of the 20th century. This makes the reader compare. Not just about who they are exactly (who has a difficult relationship with her daughter, who has never wanted children, for whom having children is an impossibility). But also: in what context do these women live? How 'free' do they feel in their life choices? The book is about expectations of your role as a person and as a woman (artist, housewife or manager of a household, nurse, party planner for a sick friend). Expectations of others and expectations of yourself, the judgmental gaze of others and of yourself.

Virginia considers whether the main character of her book will die. The impromptu burial of a dead bird changes her mind. Much later she will kill herself. Laura checks into a hotel and considers committing suicide there, but she decides not to. Clarissa embraces life with great intensity because she knows death is near: her best friend is critically ill and could die at any moment.

Death is a possibility, so: Life! What a party, what a dive!

Heaven knows why we love life so much…

Achter een bed van bloemen met een gehaakte deken en een geel kussen staat in De uren een vrouw met lang blond haar en een pony in een zwart gewatteerd jack, de handen op de rug, en kijkt opzij; achter haar staan een geel toilet met een rol papier en microfoonstandaards.

When I read The Hours again, I had just finished Mrs Dalloway. The Hours is a wonderful book, yet I noticed how different the Clarissa characters are in the novels by Cunningham and Woolf. That made me think about a male and a female view of literature and art. I saw a conflict between Cunningham's masculine gaze and his feminine characters. I started developing a concept where we could hear the writer's voice. He would examine the three women before our very eyes. Thus, the male gaze would literally be present on the stage.

Een vrouw in een beige trenchcoat, met een bril aan haar blouse gehaakt, houdt in De uren glimlachend de hand vast van een vrouw in een lichtblauwe stippeljurk, voor een gele wand; links leunt een vrouw met een omslagdoek tegen een paneel, de ogen dicht en een rood boek tegen zich aan geklemd.

I now realize that I can do it differently. First I may have to confess something.

I often think in conflict. Maybe it's because I experience injustice in my environment very personally. I always have. I like and often criticize the system I live in. It is sometimes a problem, sometimes a good quality. When I was ten and broke my arm, I had to be put in a cast twice, because the first time my arm hadn't fully healed. My mother then had to pay a second time. I became furious and wrote an angry letter to the hospital, how outrageous that was when clearly a medical error had been made. That was the prelude to many letters of protest, demonstrations, the organization of debates and protest groups, 'looking power in the eye and demanding justice', and more that followed. There are many themes that keep me awake. For example, I am furious about the institutional differences between men and women in today's society, I do not understand how long we have to wait for equality. When you start to focus on that pattern, you suddenly see it everywhere. My conflict thinking doesn't come out of nowhere.

But still.

I struggled with my concept for a while, thinking that maybe my propensity for conflict would only create a greater distance between women and men on stage. While of course I actually want to achieve the opposite. I want to thematize, not create distance. The writer as a human being, trying to understand other people who, like himself, struggle with life.

(I call this 'a Stoltenberg'. Jens Stoltenberg was prime minister in Norway in 2011 when a Norwegian terrorist shot and killed more than 50 young people on an island. When the whole country was in shock and vindictive, he said in a speech that we had to answer hate with love. A cliche. Not that men hate women, but it's about how we can be part of the solution, and no longer part of the problem. Another cliche.)

Another reason I wanted the writer in it is because I like a theater form where epic and situational scenes alternate. Addressing the spectator directly with distance, humor, putting things into perspective - while we also create old-fashioned theater magic: illusion, the real belief in the fate of people on stage.

The Hours is a beautiful book, very rich in form, in the characters, situations, mixed storylines, reflections and thoughts. I think these forms can coexist on stage too: dramatic dialogues, the inner thoughts of the women and finally the writer's gaze as an important key to an exercise in empathy. In this way we can also show what the book does to its reader, namely that we must continue to try to empathize with the other, to reach out to the others, even if the other is not like us.

In De uren zit een vrouw met krullend haar in een bed vol bloemen en aarde, terwijl links een vrouw met lang donker haar aan een keukenkastje iets klaarmaakt en rechts een man in een wit overhemd toekijkt, op een rond podium in groen licht en mist.