Modern theatre

As many of you will know by now, I am taking a class in modern theatre. This means I've been studying Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, Beckett, Miller, and Williams, and Albee, Churchill, and Kushner. I've enjoyed most of their plays, and seeing how they influenced each other, and were influenced by society and other literary movements. I know most of the plays I studied were "classic" modernist plays, plays on which most of our contemporary and experimental theatre is built. So when the program for the new theatre season came out, I was curious to see whether I could maybe see one or two adaptations of plays that I'd read.
It turned out that I could.
Even more, it turned out that every single play that I've read for the past semester, with the exception of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, will be performed next year. Most of these performances will be in Dutch, and very few will be "modernised" (per the description, I am unsure how you "modernise" a "modernist" play, but there you go), but on the whole, I can just see the entire course pass me by on stage.

Now that made me think. I mean, I know most of Shakespeare's plays are still being performed (I can go see Othello and Macbeth), but these are generally modernised and show some interpretation of the play (such as the Hamlet production I saw last year, where they changed the whole thing so that Hamlet is in a psychiatric asylum and experiences the whole play inside his head, very creative). But why would we keep repeating all the "old masters" of modern theatre, without changing them? (This obviously does not concern plays in which the copyright holders forbid any productions that do not follow the original texts to the letter, such as in the case of Waiting for Godot, but those are extreme cases.)
Are they still relevant? I'm not sure if watching Death of a Salesman in Groningen in 2013 will give you the same insights about 1950s America as it did 60 years ago. Do we not have any inspiration? Not true, the adaptation of Shakespeare's plays clearly shows that things can be done with these plays, and that other interpretations are possible. Do we have too much reference for these great theatre masters that we do not dare to adapt their plays? Well, Shakespeare is even more the "grand maister" of theatre, so this can't be true either.
What is it then?
I think that people are just playing safe. If you translate a play from Norwegian or Russian or even English, you've already done 'something' to it. Even more, most of these plays take place in some Russian or Irish country house or French landscape or whatever, so maybe for us Dutchies, that is already so strange and unfamiliar that changing even more would become dangerous. Or even worse, maybe most people don't know these plays (I have to admit I didn't know them before I took this course, although I had heard about most of them, but then I didn't go to the theatre to watch plays before this course, and people who go to the theatre to watch plays generally know something about theatre). If you don't know the classic version, then the contemporary interpretation won't make any sense either.
Now I could say "this worries me" and pretend to be some cultural conservativist person, but that's not how I feel about this. It's not that I'm worried, I'm just surprised. I am very happy I get to see all these plays performed, even if it is in Dutch (generally, Dutch translations of plays tend to be not so great), and I'm happy to see them in their original forms because I haven't seen them that way yet. But I do think that 130 years after something was first performed, we could have done more with it, really. And I would just as happily go see a 'modern' interpretation of Hedda Gabler where Hedda is trying to do her research and her husband is being bored and tried to seduce the female judge hanging around their house. Either way is fine with me, I'm just happy I get to see them at all. But still, it makes you wonder...