The Scarlet Letter

The 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, which forms the basis for the theatre production of the same name by Angélica Liddell, is one of the best-known and most-read works of American literature.

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne sets the story in the Puritanical Boston of the 17th century, where young Hester Prynne is on trial for adultery. After not having seen her husband in years, she has a baby from a secret affair. That’s a sin according to the Bible, and is considered a disgrace to society. Hester is sentenced to wear the letter ‘A’ for adultery on her clothes and is banished from the community. After years of remaining silent, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, tortured by guilt and love, confesses to being the father and dies moments later. It turns out that an ‘A’ is carved into his skin, over his heart. 

In Liddell’s version, the A stands for Angélica, for ‘artist’, for Artaud in a bold act of reclaiming – in much the same way that Hester, later on, refuses to remove the letter from her clothes, because she has begun to doubt the conventional views on good, evil and sin. As in much of her other work, Liddell uses the story to explore sensitive issues and expose the hypocrisy of society. Liddell’s take on The Scarlet Letter is a scathing indictment of the recent surge of neo-Puritanism. She considers this lethal to the wild, primeval power that she believes art should have. Where in the 17th century, religion and law were one and the same, in the 21st century, it is ideology that has come to replace religion as the unwritten law in a society that seeks to eradicate instinct, lust and passion and only allows reason to reign. 

Angélica Liddell’s previous production at the Holland Festival, You are my destiny (Lo stupro di Lucrezia), was a similarly bold, provocative take. In her version of the classical story of the rape of Lucrezia, rather than a victim-perpetrator relationship there is unbridled passion between the rapist and the woman he sets his sights on. After her suicide, Lucrezia continues the relationship in hell in a conscious act of rebellion against the way virtue and political correctness are enforced on Earth, stifling the expression of desire. In The Scarlet Letter, Liddell raises the question of whether oriiginal sin in Paradise was actually a deliberate transgression, born of the desire to burn with passion. One of the first scenes shows Adam and Eve at Hawthorne’s tombstone. Their interaction is beautiful and pure, yet not without sexual tension. It’s the start of a series of visually-lush, astonishing, sometimes difficult scenes, completely devoid of taboo – a passionate testimony to Liddell’s love of man and his body. It’s an honest, uncompromising plea for the rehabilitation of sin, guilt and so-called ‘impurity’. Liddell is horrified by the notion that art should conform to a politically-correct ideology – for her, the stage is the one place of sanctuary where no topic should be off-limits.