Beckett Triptych: State Theatre Company of SA, State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop and Rehearsal Room, 20 Feb-15 March. Directed by Corey McMahon (Eh Joe), Geordie Brookman (Footfalls), and Nescha Jelk (Krapp’s Last Tape); SmallWaR: SKaGeN, Space Theatre, 2-4 March. Written and performed by Valentijn Dhaenens; La Merda: Marta Ceresoli, Richard Jordan Productions, and Produzioni Fuorivia, Space Theatre, 5-8 March. Written by Cristina Ceresoli, performed by Silvia Gallerano; riverrun: TheEmergencyRoom, Dunstan Playhouse, 26 Feb-2 March. Adapted, directed, and performed by Olwen Fouéré.
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| Photo: Shane Reid |
Whether through the vagaries of curatorial
taste, the spectre of economic austerity, or some untraceable shift in the
theatrical ether, the actor in brutal isolation – tethered almost solely by
text to stages dimly lit and emptied of relieving or easily symbolic dressing –
dominated this year’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts.
Beckett
Triptych
The State Theatre Company of SA’s offering,
Beckett Triptych, locates its three onstage soloists – Pamela Rabe (Footfalls),
Paul Blackwell (Eh Joe) and Peter Carroll (Krapp’s Last Tape) – within the
crepuscular atmospherics of the Company’s subterranean Scenic Workshop and
Rehearsal Room spaces. The audience, ushered between venues like visitors to
the underworld, is divided in half for the first two ‘dramaticules’, which run
twice in succession, then reunited post-interval for the climactic Krapp.
In Eh Joe, we watch through a scrim as
Blackwell, in his ‘stinking old wrapper’ of worn dressing gown and slippers, shuffles
paranoiacally around Ailsa Paterson’s monochromatic, vaguely fabulist set
that telescopes weirdly towards an upstage door. He checks under the bed – no
monsters there – then slumps onto its end, submitting to some expected but
unspoken consequence of bringing his body to rest. There he remains in silence
for the remainder of the play as a woman’s disembodied voice (Rabe) torments
him about his lascivious past and barren present, her clipped, accusatory voice
an aural waterboarding. Joe’s face, crumpled and impassive, is projected via a
video camera onto the scrim in a series of increasingly extreme close-ups.
Finally, just his eyes – unnervingly massive and miraculously unblinking – fill
the screen, windows onto a soul in ineffable anguish.
Director Corey McMahon’s montaging of live action and projected image,
though not innovative (Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan employed both scrim and
video feed in his 2006 production for Beckett’s centenary celebrations), is
nevertheless an effective solution to staging a play originally written for
television, its disturbing intimatisation of a mind under remorseless psychic
assault undiminished by the shift in medium.
Like Joe, Footfalls’ May is persecuted by ghosts from a neurotically
reproduced past; the present, as a result, is rendered a sleepless purgatory.
‘Will you never have done…’ the voice of May’s mother (Sandy Gore) asks in the
low, drawn-out timbre the characters familially share, ‘revolving it all? In
your poor mind’.
Rabe looks like the ‘tangle of tatters’ to which May elliptically refers,
face drawn and pallid, hair overlong and disheveled (the only mistake is the Victorian-style
dress, a too elaborate and loaded an interpretation of Beckett’s call for a
‘worn grey wrap’). But for the audible, mathematical tread of her feet on the
worn strip of floor beneath her, Rabe is spectral in Ben Flett’s narrow,
starkly contrastive lighting. She looks, occasionally, monstrous as she leans
disfiguringly out of the light, or like the tortured figure in Munch’s The
Scream as her mouth yawns soundlessly open. Here, perhaps more than in any of
Beckett’s other short plays, the role of the director is akin to that of a
conductor – the rhythmical progression implied by the play’s title and inherent
in its text demands to be both physically and verbally realised – and in this
Geordie Brookman keeps time admirably.
It’s somewhat mystifying that Footfalls is followed in the triptych not
by That Time, written specifically to accompany it, but Krapp’s Last Tape, the longest
and most familiar of Beckett’s shorter plays for the stage. It stands apart
from the other two pieces presented here in other ways too, namely that Krapp’s
private perdition (for what are each of these plays but inversions of Sartre’s
dictum that hell is other people?) is ultimately, if incompletely,
reconcilable: ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t want
them back. Not with the fire in me now’.
This impression is strengthened by Carroll’s performance as Krapp, in
which, under the direction of Nescha Jelk, the clowning Beckett minimized in his
later revisions of the play is fully reinstated. The result is a slightly fussy,
childlike Krapp, less visibly haunted than in many previous incarnations that,
however unreliably remembered, cannot be easily forgotten – Patrick Magee, John
Hurt.
While at times I yearned for more of the gravitas those actors brought to
the part, at least neither Carroll nor Jelk mistake ponderousness for insight,
a trap both lesser and greater interpreters of Beckett have succumbed to. The
production’s one true shortcoming is Paterson’s overdesigned set, a crudely
symbolic and needlessly focus-pulling array of middens on trolleys that
threatens to overwhelm the only detritus of moment, that of the ultimate unreconstructed
hoarder, the human mind.
SmallWaR
It is the body, at least at first, that is the
site of trauma in SmallWaR, a companion piece to Belgian writer/performer
Valentijn Dhaenens’ BigMouth that substitutes the earlier play’s cast of powerful,
militant orators – Patton, Goebbels, George W. Bush – for one of doomed youth,
ordinary soldiers destined to die, in Wilfred Owen’s words, ‘as cattle’.
A truncated gurney is wheeled onto the
stage in front of a giant scrim by Dhaenens, dressed in the starchy, army green
uniform of a World War I nurse. Fixed to the bed is a flat screen TV on which
pre-recorded vision plays: Dhaenens again, this time a limbless, prostrate soldier,
only his head and shoulders visible atop crisp white sheets. He is silent and
motionless. The nurse sings softly: ‘There was a boy, a very special boy’.
Multiple, ghostlike duplicates of the soldier peel away and cross the stage to
answer a phone, the almost seamless transition between video and projection
stunning. On the other end of the line are fathers, mothers, lovers – each
voiced with skilful differentiation by Dhaenens – who, as with the letters and
memoirs which form the basis of much of the script, wrestle with war’s
teleology as well as its lived reality. ‘When you look death in the face,’ one of the
soldiers muses, ‘do you think of democracy, freedom and honour?’
There is,
refreshingly, little here in the way of simplistic anti-warism, but a late,
awkward turn into a seemingly unironical jingoism – evidenced by, for example,
the appearance of the words ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country’ –
propels the work too far in the opposite direction. It was Owen, after all, who
called Horace’s phrase, originally set down in Latin in Odes, ‘the old
lie’.
La
Merda
A woman (Silvia Gallerano) perches naked on
the edge of a tall, pedestal-like chair, clutching a microphone into which she
is mumbling the words of what sounds like the Italian national
anthem. Her lips, quivering and almost cartoonish, are bright red, her body
pale and unforgivingly exposed in the cold glare of multiple spotlights. ‘Yes
I’m a small one,’ she says, pianissimo,
in the first of the three movements (and one counter-movement, ‘Italy’) that
make up Cristian Ceresoli’s monologue, ‘and I’ve got these thighs of mine but
still I never quit and never give up’. An actor in desperate pursuit of fame
whose fascist father killed himself when she was thirteen, she has the
rusted-on look of someone on the verge of a breakdown or, perhaps, a
breakthrough that never quite arrives. The howling, narcissistic crescendos
(‘me, me, me, meeeeeee’) that end each movement, plunging the theatre into
darkness and silence, presage a negation of the self that can only be brief and
temporary – the ego, insatiably hungry, must always return to cannibalise its
host.
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| Photo: Valeria Tomasulo |
La Merda (in English, The Shit) is not,
however, merely an atomistic study of neurotic obsession with body image and celebrity.
It reveals, through the actor’s grotesque evocations of various men – an odious
TV director, her father, sexual predators in school and on the subway – a
culture of nationalistic masculinity that connects the Italy of Garibaldi to
those of Mussolini and Berlusconi, a lineage that traces the country’s journey
from, in Pasolinean terms, a fascist to a consumerist totalitarianism. ‘The
male sex our flag, the male sex our flag,’ Gallerano spits at the conclusion of
the monologue before clothing her body in a green, white and red flag – an
ambivalent gesture freighted with both embracement and resistance. A charged
silence hardens, after what seems like a minute or more, into a standing
ovation that justly rewards a performance of startling intensity and import.
riverrun
Olwen Fouéré, adapter, director and performer of
this one-woman interpretation of the voice of the river in Finnegans Wake, has
described James Joyce’s modernist apogee – ‘admired more often than read, when
read rarely through to the end, when read through to the end not often fully,
or even partially, understood’, according to Anthony Burgess – as ‘a seam of
dark matter somewhere between energy and form, music and language: the trace of
a boat on an endlessly changing surface’. Fouéré, in a virtually uninterrupted monologue that freely
splices together passages from all over Joyce’s infamously sprawling text, is
at once vessel and waterway, embodying both the river’s sinuous, dreamlike
course that ultimately circles back on itself (the novel’s final sentence,
which has no period, leads back to its first word, riverrun, which has no
initial capital) and the shadowy characters who drift and drown in its currents.
Coiled, shifting like a prizefighter on the balls of
her feet, Fouéré begins with a dawn
prayer, three words in Sanskrit that are found in Finnegans Wake at the opening
of Book IV, the beginning of the novel’s final section: ‘Sandhyas! Sandhyas!
Sandhyas!’ The jagged stand of Fouéré’s microphone and its lead’s tracing of the edges of a vast patch of
chalk evoke the uncertain, meandering quality of the flow of bodies of water, but
it is the topographies of the body and of language that are foregrounded here.
Joyce’s multilingual, polysyllabic wordplay is given endlessly fluid shape by Fouéré’s sinewy, gestural physicality and almost
schizophrenic vocalisations. She hisses, growls, murmurs, sings, and, quite
literally, breathes the river – Dublin’s Liffey, personified in Finnegans Wake
in the character of Anna Livia Plurabelle – into life.
The elusiveness of
Joyce’s text is unquestionably amplified in its transition to the stage. The audience
member, unlike the reader, never has the luxury of pausing its inexorable flow
to dig deeper into its strata of meaning, or to fully unpack its complex puns
or allusions to Irish history. But, as Beckett, a close friend and aide of
Joyce’s, noted, ‘[Joyce's]
writing is not about something; it is that something itself”.
That something is, in essence, a
dream conveyed through language rendered as music, and it is in the splendid,
endless noise of Fouéré’s furious unintelligibility that the pleasures of riverrun arise.
An edited version of this review appeared in RealTime issue #126.
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