Roman Tragedies: Toneelgroep, Festival Theatre, 28 Feb-2 March 2014. Directed by Ivo Van Hove. Based on the plays of William Shakespeare; BigMouth: SKaGeN, Queen's Theatre, 27 Feb-3 March 2014. Directed and performed by Valentijn Dhaenens; Blackout: Stone/Castro, AC Arts Main Theatre, 3-9 March 2014. Conceptualised, written and directed by Paulo Castro; Girl Asleep: Windmill Theatre, Space Theatre, 28 Feb-15 March 2014. Written by Matthew Whittet. Directed by Rosemary Myers.
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| Photo: the author |
In 2013 David Sefton’s theatre program for his first
of four Adelaide Festivals was noted for its emphasis on the interactive and
interdisciplinary. Belgium company Ontroerend’s immersive trilogy – The Smile
Off Your Face, Internal and A Game Of You – came to define the program in the
eyes of many, its intimacy challenging long-established expectations of the
size and spectacle of the Festival’s offerings.
Although this year’s theatre program continued to lean
heavily towards the Western canon, a marked return to scale was felt by this
writer in Toneelgroep’s titanic Shakespearian anthology Roman Tragedies, the
expansive arc of Windmill’s coming of age trilogy, and the vast historical-political
sweeps of SKaGeN’s BigMouth and Stone/Castro’s Blackout.
Roman Tragedies
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are
run consecutively, chronologically and without interval in Toneelgroep’s
six-hour reimagining of Shakespeare’s unofficial trilogy of Roman histories.
Director Ivo Van Hove has stripped away the poetry of the original plays and,
with translator Tom Kleijn and dramaturges Bart van den Eynde, Jan Peter
Gerrits and Alexander Schreuder, pared the dialogue back to a crisp,
utilitarian plain English (via surtitles translated from the original Dutch).
Part television studio, part airport departure lounge,
Jan Versweyveld’s set, which reaches deeply into the wings of the Festival
Theatre, transforms Shakespeare’s mouldering halls of imperial power into a
sort of drab, corporatised purgatory. The stage, around which the audience are
invited to more or less freely move after the first set change, is equipped
with television screens running 24-hour news channels, computers on which
audience members can tweet (‘Coriolanus just got banished from Rome. Damn. His
Mum’s angry’) and two functioning snack bars.
The contrast between the production’s sweep and
duration and its emphasis on an individualistic, social media-informed
experience is intriguing, simultaneously bloating and anatomising the drama.
Witnessed from the auditorium, much of Coriolanus plays out like an unusually
compelling press conference, but the view from the stage, despite the proximity
of the performers, is fractured and unstable. The action is always partially
obscured, either by elements of the set or other audience members, and the
search for optimally readable surtitles amongst the dozen or so strategically
arranged screens is sometimes frustrating.
The audience is positioned as the denizens of this
new, information-overloaded Rome, snatching at supposedly sense-making updates
and relief-giving gossip as hungrily as the ‘rabble of plebeians’ that sets the
events of Coriolanus in motion does for corn. The plays’ numerous wars and
annexations are familiarly distant, signified not by the movement of swords and
armies but by sound and vision: pounding music and a news ticker. We could be
watching Fox News on the eve of the Iraq war. Our contemporary impotence is
given a freshly chilling dimension by the audience’s powerless proximity to Shakespeare’s
ruling classes who, in Van Hove’s production, die as the politicians of our own
times die – publicly and bloodlessly, arraigned, photographed, and finally vanished
for our grim pleasure.
All three plays are distinguished by remarkable
performances but, for me, Coriolanus most
rewardingly benefitted from Van Hove’s consummate ensemble, giving us Gijs
Scholten van Aschat’s viciously anti-civil title character and Frieda Pittoors’
calculating but earthy Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Their relationship is
fascinating, a dynamic power play between intellectual equals that contains none
of the camp or soft misogyny of earlier interpretations. If the other two
plays, with the exception of Hans Kesting’s Mark Antony whose tear-drenched eulogy
for Caesar is a mid-show highpoint, are not as resoundingly successful, it may
be that the unbroken, saturating tides of these histories begin to conflate,
challenging the audience’s ability to fully engage with so much information.
Roman Tragedies is, nevertheless, an
almost wholly successful marriage of innovative design and gutsy, exacting
performances which refreshes Shakespeare’s plays for an era marked by the
escalating tension between our technology-powered connectedness and our anxiety
about our political emasculation in the face of increasingly hermetic state and
corporate arrangements.
BigMouth
Also offering a broad historical vista this Festival,
albeit on a radically reduced scale, was Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens in
the one-man BigMouth. Dressed in nondescript business attire, Dhaenens uses
whole or partial speeches to fashion a performative mashup in the guise of a
lecture. The names of the original speakers are scrawled on a digitised blackboard
and disappear each time Dhaenens progresses. The conceit is simple and
consistent, disrupted only by tenuously linked period songs that are performed
live and, notwithstanding the assistance of loops, a cappella.
Taking in Ancient Greece and Rome (Pericles, Socrates,
Cicero), Nazi-occupied Europe (Goebbels, Patton), colonial Africa (Lumumba) and
post-9/11 America (George W. Bush) the speeches cover vast geographical, historical
and thematic terrain. What is less than clear is what ties these disparities
together. Though skillfully performed by Dhaenens, who is bilingual and an
impressive mimic in multiple languages, the lack of a binding schema reduces
BigMouth’s impact. Moreover, not all of the speeches are great or even good;
Coulter’s is especially conspicuous, not only because it is the sole
contribution by a woman but also because it is entirely unremarkable, an
asinine anti-Muslim diatribe by a mediocre politician.
There are discernible subtexts – the ebb and flow of
democracy over time, racism and colonialism, what Samuel P. Huntington and
others have termed ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ – but perhaps it is the
omissions that do the most to prevent an intelligible through line. I wasn’t
sure what to make of the absence of women, or why none of the speeches touched
on the Cold War despite the predominance of 20th century material.
At times, as when Dhaenens wickedly interweaves warmongering speeches by a
blustering Patton and a frighteningly serene Goebbels, BigMouth seems close to
forming a useful critique of oratorical power, but the production remained for
this writer an unsatisfying and opaque experience.
Blackout
Having interviewed Portuguese theatre maker Paulo
Castro, one half of Adelaide-based duo Stone/Castro, for RT 119, I was prepared
to be confronted by Blackout, an interdisciplinary work for dancers and actors
inspired by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead, I found the
production to be a defiantly playful one, ironical and full of textual and
choreographic eccentricity.
A young couple, played by dancers Alisdair Macindoe
and Larissa McGowan, is to be married on a sailboat amidst a disparate group of
guests which includes the groom’s father (Stephen Sheehan), a kurta–wearing
bohemian, the mysterious Portuguese best man (John Romao), and a wannabe rock
‘n’ roller (Nathan O’Keefe). A series of unexplained power cuts throw the
wedding into a state of chaos as each of the guests attempts to make a speech
in praise of the increasingly estranged bride and groom.
Castro’s text, translated from Portuguese into English
by Joao Vaz, is sharp and funny, full of bitterly satirical takedowns of middle
class pretensions. Conversely, some of the jokes – such as O’Keefe’s
character’s inability to stop talking long enough to perform his song ‘Shandy’
– are stretched well beyond tolerability, and the surrealness of speeches by
the bride (on aliens) and Charlotte Rose’s waitress (on the killing of her
ex-lover’s dog) are vexing.
In Blackout’s final moments the best man, having
stripped to his waist and partially cross-dressed, assumes a Christ-like
posture as water laps at his outstretched arms and legs, the rest of the guests
having presumably made it to safety. Daniel Worm’s precise lighting ensures the
image, like many others in the play, is striking, but its significance is
obscure, as its relationship to the rest of a production which up until that
point has been predicated on skewering rather than indulging in high-flown
posturing.
Girl Asleep
With its
late 70s aesthetic, disco- and hair rock-mining soundtrack, and nods to Jim
Henson’s Labyrinth, Girl Asleep digs deeply into Generation X nostalgia to
produce a brash, filmic and spikily postmodern take on the transition from
female adolescence to womanhood. It is one of three stylistically consistent
plays penned by Matthew Whittet for South Australian children’s theatre company
Windmill which, together with Fugitive and School Dance, form an unofficial
coming of age trilogy, performed together for the first time during the
Festival at the invitation of artistic director David Sefton.
Girl
Asleep’s fourteen-year-old heroine, Greta (Ellen Steele), is, like most of the
trilogy’s protagonists, an unfashionable teenager on the undesired cusp of
adulthood. In a subtle recasting of the trope of the older, wiser sibling who
assists the younger in navigating the transition, Greta’s sister (Jude
Henshall) cautions her not to fall asleep during the birthday party her parents
(Matthew Whittet and Amber McMahon) have organised for her. Greta, of course,
falls asleep, and her burgeoning sexuality becomes the subtext of a series of
bizarre, sometimes scary and often funny encounters with fantastical humans and
subhumans including a witch, a goblin, and a younger version of herself.
Girl
Asleep’s cross-generational appeal is built on various fronts: its unguarded
appropriation of familiar fairy-tale tropes, its knowingly silly pop culture
grabs and its conventions – faux slow motion action sequences, exaggerated
light and sound effects – which both mock and pay homage to contemporary
children’s cinema. If Girl Asleep’s mawkish ending errs a little too much on
the side of homage in its kid gloves treatment of Greta’s sexual awakening, the
young adults sitting either side of me did not appear to notice.
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