Geese written and directed by Joe Woodward. Shadow House PITS
at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre, April 26, 8pm and April
28-29, 1pm, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 26
While I drove home from Geese
in the middle lane equidistant from either verge on a dark section of
three-lane freeway, a stationary white car appeared to my left. As the
image grew I could see its bonnet was up like a wing suspended. Then I
made out a dark formally dressed figure peering into the black hole
seeming to be attempting to manipulate something impossible to see. All
four emergency lights were flashing. As the image faded into my left
rear vision mirror I found myself contemplating this person’s belief in
do-it-yourself action without even tools, light or working clothes. Why
not just wait patiently for Road Service to arrive? I thought.
Before
my thought was finished, in my right peripheral vision movement caught
my eye. An athletic figure in white was running, as if in training for
some long-distance event, against the flow of traffic on the very edge
of the right lane, on a right-hand bend. I was thankful to be in the
middle lane as he disappeared in my right rear vision mirror, and could
only hope that drivers in the right lane would miss him as he would
appear suddenly to them out of the darkness, just in front of them,
unexpectedly to their right.
Then it struck me that Joe
Woodward had at last succeeded in making me understand Antonin Artaud.
The images held briefly in my headlights were not part of my life as
far as those other figures are concerned, but because I saw them they
are now in my memory and I have pejorative thoughts and fears about
them. I impose my conventions and expectations upon them.
Artaud’s
conceit that we are only free when we escape from the hell of
convention is not a philosophy to which I can subscribe. In Woodward’s
previous works that I have seen, it seems to me that he wanted to
embrace Artaud’s position, but the result was that what appeared on
stage remained hidden in an impenetrable cloud of mystery, becoming
sound and fury apparently signifying not very much.
Though in Geese
many long speeches are soporific as characters expound their particular
philosophical positions, in the end there is a structured storyline.
There is a young girl who saw and briefly spoke to a disturbed man at a
railway station in the beginning. When she reappears at the end, she
switches on a radio news broadcast which neither she nor the others she
meets listen to, but we hear as background noise words like Libya, Yemen
and Syria. Suddenly the ‘Artaud’ characters’ views in the possible
memories of the disturbed man, and his possible experiences, become
relevant today. How much conflict, death, destruction and madness is
the result of people’s obsessive insistence on carrying out the dictates
of conventions like religious beliefs, unbending political positions –
even perhaps being totally enamoured, speaking only in French, of the
theatre of Antonin Artaud.
Geese is for the most
part too heavy (rather than weighty) theatrically for my liking, but
now it is openly about Artaud, the cloud of mystery comes but also goes,
and the ending makes a valuable observation about the real world. “No
one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented
except literally to get out of hell” according to Antonin Artaud, but
perhaps Geese is a step in the right direction for Woodward.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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