Review: 2014 Adelaide Festival

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. 

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 20^th 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.            

 An edited version of this review appeared in RealTime issue #120.

         

Review: 'Macbeth'

Foul Play, Plant 1, Bowden, 23 January-9 February 2014. Written by William Shakespeare, dramaturgy by Craig Behenna, Holly Brindley, Yasmin Gurreeboo, Graham Self, Delia Taylor and Dan Thorpe. Directed by Yasmin Gurreeboo.

Photo: Ian Routledge

Macbeth is the briefest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and is in all likelihood the most familiar to the greatest number of people. It is still studied within an inch of its life in schools, and is by a long way the most searched for of all Shakespeare’s works on the World Wide Web.

Perhaps it is for these reasons that director Yasmin Gurreeboo, along with a five person-strong dramaturgy team, has felt empowered to shuffle the play’s deck so completely in this bold staging which features two single-gendered casts playing on alternate evenings. Like a greatest hits CD on shuffle, nothing comes when you are expecting it to, the weyard sisters, for example, nowhere to be seen when the lights come up, replaced by that most golden of Shakespearian greats beginning ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ The murders, when they arrive, are all out of sequence. In short, there is an awful lot of assumed knowledge, and even if you do happen to have it, you’re liable to o’erleap in trying to keep up.

The task is made harder by the enigmatic staging. The castle is reimagined as a prison in which Macbeth and various thanes are incarcerated, presumably for prior crimes. There is good sense in this – Macbeth, after all, being a play mainly concerned with the corrosive effects of guilt – but it is never clear whether a particular scene is taking place in the present, in Macbeth’s disturbed memory, or a combination of both. It is already a play brimming with supernatural appearances from ghosts, witches and dead children, and the lack of clarity in terms of the play’s chronology adds an unnecessarily obfuscating layer of mystery.

This is a production with too much topsoil and not enough solid rock. Excessive effort is expended making the concept work instead of making the play as comprehensible as it should be. When the characters that have been repurposed as prison guards, for example, cross the stage with military-like precision, the direction feels imposed, an inelegant answer to a staging problem rather than a solution which emerges organically out of the whole. There is no shortage of lovely directorial touches, from having the witches’ cauldron metamorphose into a toilet bowl, to the chilling finale which quietly defies our expectations of Macbeth’s ultimate fate, but the lucidity of Shakespeare’s play – not to mention its poetry – is too often lost in the disorder.

This is also, it should be said, a strangely bloodless rendering of a play which is amongst Shakespeare’s most ghoulishly violent. The design, by Manda Webber and Olivia Zanchetta, mirrors the space’s grim industrialism in its muted palette of greys, whites and blacks; not so much as a damned spot of red anywhere. Though the effect is undeniably handsome, this decision lends the play a sterility which is at odds with the text, sapping much of the theatrical power of Macbeth’s bloodlust as well as Lady Macbeth’s extraordinary journey from merciless savagery to crushing remorse.

Macbeth is also bloodless in a figurative sense. Bar fine performances by the cast’s more experienced members Patrick Frost, Jacqy Philips and Chrissie Page, both ensembles are peculiarly lacking in dynamism. The men fare better overall, thanks to superior diction and more nuanced characterisation, but few of the performances contain the required amount of oomph. Frost – by turns airily regal and dementedly rudderless – and Philips – earthy and eccentric – are terrific as Macbeth, and strong support is given by David Hirst who provides some much-needed comic relief, and Laura Brenko who is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the more successful Lady Macbeth. Also of note is Dan Thorpe’s suitably ethereal sound design which uses blended human voices and hair-raisingly unfamiliar notes to excellent effect.

All of this discussion, however, begs the question: why the two ensembles at all? Gurreeboo asks in her program notes for us to reflect as we are watching on how people in positions of power are ‘evaluated’ in respect of their gender. In light of the noxious recent national debate centred on Australia’s first female prime minister, Gurreeboo’s challenge sounds like a noble one, and even if it is not noble it is certainly ambitious. For this alone she deserves commendation in a city often accused of cultural conservatism. Where the challenge falls down is in its execution. While each ensemble has a distinctive energy, they don’t individually illuminate either Shakespeare’s text or issues of gender and power. The ensembles apparently rehearsed together, and there is a unity of presentation across the two versions which arguably says less about how powerful women are appraised than a mixed gender production might have done. And maybe, in this respect, Gurreeboo underestimates Shakespeare; isn’t the power play between the Macbeths a rich and complex one as it is, and doesn’t it contain within it more than enough nuance for ten conversations about the real or imagined consequences of the intersections between gender and power?