Panic by Archibald MacLeish, directed by Andrew Holmes, School
of Cultural Inquiry, College of the Arts and Social Sciences, at ANU
Arts Centre. August 18-20, 25-27, 2011. Free entry.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 25
The
purpose of a doctoral study is to research an original topic in the
hope of establishing a new understanding to add to a body of knowledge,
and perhaps confirm or change the direction of academic thinking. Since
this production is presented as part of Holmes’ PhD studies, my first
question is “Is there anything new about it?”
For me
there was. I had long been aware of MacLeish as a poet, but I hadn’t
thought of him as a significant playwright – or even as a playwright at
all, to be honest. Yet he won a Pultizer prize for J.B. in 1958
(my first year at Sydney Uni) which ran for 364 performances on
Broadway, directed by the key to American theatre of that time, Elia
Kazan. While Martin Esslin calls Panic, with the lead played by
Orson Welles in 1935, “a sophisticated agitprop drama of the Wall Street
crash” – of 1929, of course; not 2008. What had I missed? And why?
The
why is easily explained. My 1950s Anglo-Australian background only
took a few American playwrights seriously: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller
and Tennessee Williams. If I looked for social criticism I saw Bernard
Shaw. For agitprop I thought of Bertolt Brecht. Should I now include
Archibald MacLeish?
Perhaps the 1992 advertisement for Archibald MacLeish: An American Life by Scott Donaldson. (Houghton Mifflin; 622 pages; $35) suggests not:
“THIS
year marks the centenary of the birth of Archibald MacLeish, one of the
most unusual figures in 20th-century American letters and a man who
prospered at both poetry and public service. As this massive biography
documents, nothing seemed impossible to him: he played football like a
demon while at Yale; he was brilliant in debate; he practised law with
panache after graduating from Harvard Law School; he wrote some of the
finest lyric poetry of the century and he transformed the Library of
Congress from a dull but worthy repository….”
(www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-12428195.html)
So what was it that made Andrew Holmes want to focus on MacLeish, rather than plays such as O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) or The Great God Brown (1926), or indeed Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (1929) or Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui written in 1941 in Helsinki while waiting for a visa to enter America?
The answer has to be, the poetry.
Verse drama in its modern form goes back to the Romantics: The Cenci
by Shelley was written in 1819, but was first presented publicly on
stage in London in 1922 (after a private production in 1886 attended by,
among others, Bernard Shaw). Shelley’s play was historical, about
Beatrice Cenci of the late 1500s. MacLeish’s play is set in his own
time, in the Great Depression when, by 1933, 21 US States had closed all
their banks and Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a four day Bank Holiday
throughout America and began his “fireside chats” to keep the populace
calm while the banking system was restored. The new aspect of
MacLeish’s work was to take such a prosaic situation and write in the
mode of Romanticism. Not exactly the style of a Brecht, nor even a Shaw
or O’Neill, though one might see it as a forerunner of Tennessee
William’s work.
So my second (and final) question is “Does Andrew Holmes’ production take us in a new direction?”
The
poetry begins with words spoken by the common people in chorus with
soloists, highlighting words like “closed”, “foreclosed”, “moratorium”,
“McGafferty” – the “hero” who claims he will keep his bank open – and
finally “death” as McGafferty “tragically” shoots himself. The
reference in rhythmic form which goes back to the Ancient Greek – I was
particularly reminded of Sophocles’ Antigone – is effectively
done. There are references to the future as well. Keeping the American
idiom, accent and phrasing must have been a considerable challenge for
largely untrained actors, but the effect was almost like some parts of
Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
But MacLeish keeps the
chorus in its place, concentrating the action on McGafferty and his
woman Ione (the relationship is undefined). Tony Turner and Christa
Dejager stand out in these roles not just because they are the wealthy
elite but because each of them used the verse to create individual
characters and timed their interactions with the kind of staccato effect
their side of the story required.
The Blind Radical,
who I take as a Tiresius sooth-sayer figure, was played very effectively
by Simon Thomson, reminding me especially of Lucky in Waiting for Godot.
In
the end, as Holmes explained in the follow-up discussion, the story can
be interpreted (and was when first staged) by Communists as a
vindication of the failure of Capitalism, or by industrialists and
bankers as a tragedy of a hero with a fatal flaw. I could not see the
play as “sophisticated” nor as true “agitprop” since the story is
simplistic, the economic and social issues are not made clear, and the
characterisation is minimal, except – interestingly – of Ione, who
clearly understands her role as support for the go-getting banker until
she recognises the reality that he is done for. She leaves to look for
other opportunities, while McGafferty suicides.
But the
poetry works. Sound, rhythm and images swirl around, creating their
own sense of chaos to suit the theme. There is something here worth
attention for modern playwrights: perhaps we have lost the habit of
using the sounds and structure of language as integrated elements in
theatre, especially in “naturalistic” drama. So, I conclude, writing
today does not mean going back to the Romanticism still wafting around
MacLeish’s Panic, but we have a model in today’s hip-hop or rap
rhyme, rhythm and strength of word choice. Steven Berkoff, do I hear?
In the Australian context, Louis Nowra, Dorothy Hewitt and perhaps
Stephen Sewell, as well as Richard Frankland as directed by Wesley Enoch
in Conversations with the Dead?
And, noting
that it is some time since university theatre was a regular feature of
the Canberra scene, it is good to see the new ANU structure for Drama
teaching providing support for the practical production on stage of work
under study, and I trust the performance program will expand once
again.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
2011: Destination Home by Camilla Blunden, Liliana Bogatko, Raoul Craemer and Noonee Doronila
Destination Home written and performed by Camilla Blunden,
Liliana Bogatko, Raoul Craemer and Noonee Doronila. The Threads
Collective directed by barb barnett at The Street 2, Canberra, August
23-38, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 23
Four actors come together. Each began life somewhere else. Their stories gradually coalesce as each migrates to Australia. Their words and images are like short sequences from a documentary film which form a coherent picture only at the point where they perform their stories together on stage, in Australia, in Canberra, before this audience. The end.
The idea is interesting – certainly for a migrant like me with my own parallel story – but the writing is for the most part prosaic and the theatrical structure unexciting. Perhaps this is the result of the writers' becoming incorporated bodily and emotionally into Australia’s flat topography and culture.
The four stories represent multicultural reality in today’s Canberra. Camilla from Cornwall via London and Melbourne; Liliana from Poland via Austria and Adelaide; Raoul mixing India and Germany via London; Noonee from Manila via Melbourne. Each arrived in Australia at different ages on different dates in different decades, yet find they have similar experiences, dreams, confusions about their identity, while coming ‘home’ together in this work.
This is the positive value of Destination Home, especially in the face of those who decry multiculturalism as creating racial enclaves. None of these four have lost the ties to their original homelands, but all have stayed here. As Liliana puts it, “In Poland I am Australian; in Australia I am Polish” but there are freedoms here, despite the peculiar contradictions of Australian life, for which she stays. Each of them visit their England, Poland, Germany, India or the Philippines, but each has been changed by Australia and they cannot maintain the old relationships.
Despite sadness at the loss of the past, the final bow is a celebration, which the audience joins in, of simply being here to stay.
So the intention is valid, the motivation is genuine, while the theatrical expression is lacking. Raoul’s story is the most energetically played, while Camilla’s shows the greatest variety, but I see the work as still in progress, needing a good writer to work it up and for it to be performed by other actors. The work needs to be put at some distance from the original storytellers to create a drama with a clear sense of direction from scene to scene. As it stands, for most of the play the scenes seem too random, too amorphous, too evenly paced. I would take the script by the scruff of the neck, shake it about until it cries a bit, hisses back at me and tries to scratch with its claws out. Then I could drop it from a great height and watch it land on all fours and purr to everyone’s satisfaction.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 23
Four actors come together. Each began life somewhere else. Their stories gradually coalesce as each migrates to Australia. Their words and images are like short sequences from a documentary film which form a coherent picture only at the point where they perform their stories together on stage, in Australia, in Canberra, before this audience. The end.
The idea is interesting – certainly for a migrant like me with my own parallel story – but the writing is for the most part prosaic and the theatrical structure unexciting. Perhaps this is the result of the writers' becoming incorporated bodily and emotionally into Australia’s flat topography and culture.
The four stories represent multicultural reality in today’s Canberra. Camilla from Cornwall via London and Melbourne; Liliana from Poland via Austria and Adelaide; Raoul mixing India and Germany via London; Noonee from Manila via Melbourne. Each arrived in Australia at different ages on different dates in different decades, yet find they have similar experiences, dreams, confusions about their identity, while coming ‘home’ together in this work.
This is the positive value of Destination Home, especially in the face of those who decry multiculturalism as creating racial enclaves. None of these four have lost the ties to their original homelands, but all have stayed here. As Liliana puts it, “In Poland I am Australian; in Australia I am Polish” but there are freedoms here, despite the peculiar contradictions of Australian life, for which she stays. Each of them visit their England, Poland, Germany, India or the Philippines, but each has been changed by Australia and they cannot maintain the old relationships.
Despite sadness at the loss of the past, the final bow is a celebration, which the audience joins in, of simply being here to stay.
So the intention is valid, the motivation is genuine, while the theatrical expression is lacking. Raoul’s story is the most energetically played, while Camilla’s shows the greatest variety, but I see the work as still in progress, needing a good writer to work it up and for it to be performed by other actors. The work needs to be put at some distance from the original storytellers to create a drama with a clear sense of direction from scene to scene. As it stands, for most of the play the scenes seem too random, too amorphous, too evenly paced. I would take the script by the scruff of the neck, shake it about until it cries a bit, hisses back at me and tries to scratch with its claws out. Then I could drop it from a great height and watch it land on all fours and purr to everyone’s satisfaction.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 8 August 2011
2011: Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca
Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated and
directed by Iain Sinclair. Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, August 5 –
September 11, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 8
Perhaps you expect me to write about Lorca, but this is more than adequately done in the program. No, it is Iain Sinclair I must write about.
Thanks, Iain, for the poetry, the myth-making, for revivifying my memories of Lorca. Thanks especially for Leah Purcell in the central role of The Mother. “I believe very strongly in the Aboriginal spirituality. I believe in my ancestors and I believe that they have given me my ability to be a storyteller, a song woman, a performer.” (ABC TV Australian Story 2002)
The first Act is the story leading to The Mother’s only surviving son, The Groom (Kenneth Spiteri), marrying The Bride (Sophie Ross) who rides off on The Horse with her first love, now married Leonardo (Yalin Ozucelik) before the wedding reception has ended.
Act 2 is the search for the eloping couple in the forest. The Groom and Leonardo stab each other to death, while The Bride, still a virgin, returns, expecting retribution and death. But it is men who kill, not women, and the play ends leaving The Wife of Leonardo (Zindzi Okenyo), The Bride and The Mother all tragically bereft with no future beyond the “thick walls” of their peasant farmhouses.
The story has the epic proportions of Greek tragedy, and has a parallel in the Aboriginal story of the Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters (A creation story from the WONG-GU-THA, people of the desert near Ooldea, South Australia, as told by Josie Boyle http://www.kitezh.com/sevensisters/7sisters.htm#A12 ).
It has the metaphorical and sexual implications of blood, reminiscent of D H Lawrence. It has the eerie faerie presence of death like the Irish playwright J M Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Lorca was clearly conscious of being one among the artists of his time, writing in 1933 of “Duende … This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”
So, true to Lorca’s art, Iain Sinclair’s production of Blood Wedding is not a dramatic retelling of the plot but an original creation of the mystery in the translation from the Spanish into Australian English, in the imagery of the Andalucian peasant farmers, in their music, rhythm and dance, and in the mysterious spirit figures of the forest. The play takes on the mantle of all the ancient rituals of death and transfiguration, written only a few short years before Lorca’s own execution in 1936 by fascists as Franco’s regime re-established dictatorship after a brief period of a democratic Spanish republic.
Go to this production not as a spectator but to absorb all the feelings – of terror, of joy, of tragedy – that Sinclair makes available to you. You may come away from Leah Purcell’s final scene shaken, out of complacency and into new understanding of the human condition. Thanks, Iain Sinclair, for making my kind of theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 8
Perhaps you expect me to write about Lorca, but this is more than adequately done in the program. No, it is Iain Sinclair I must write about.
Thanks, Iain, for the poetry, the myth-making, for revivifying my memories of Lorca. Thanks especially for Leah Purcell in the central role of The Mother. “I believe very strongly in the Aboriginal spirituality. I believe in my ancestors and I believe that they have given me my ability to be a storyteller, a song woman, a performer.” (ABC TV Australian Story 2002)
The first Act is the story leading to The Mother’s only surviving son, The Groom (Kenneth Spiteri), marrying The Bride (Sophie Ross) who rides off on The Horse with her first love, now married Leonardo (Yalin Ozucelik) before the wedding reception has ended.
Act 2 is the search for the eloping couple in the forest. The Groom and Leonardo stab each other to death, while The Bride, still a virgin, returns, expecting retribution and death. But it is men who kill, not women, and the play ends leaving The Wife of Leonardo (Zindzi Okenyo), The Bride and The Mother all tragically bereft with no future beyond the “thick walls” of their peasant farmhouses.
The story has the epic proportions of Greek tragedy, and has a parallel in the Aboriginal story of the Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters (A creation story from the WONG-GU-THA, people of the desert near Ooldea, South Australia, as told by Josie Boyle http://www.kitezh.com/sevensisters/7sisters.htm#A12 ).
It has the metaphorical and sexual implications of blood, reminiscent of D H Lawrence. It has the eerie faerie presence of death like the Irish playwright J M Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Lorca was clearly conscious of being one among the artists of his time, writing in 1933 of “Duende … This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”
So, true to Lorca’s art, Iain Sinclair’s production of Blood Wedding is not a dramatic retelling of the plot but an original creation of the mystery in the translation from the Spanish into Australian English, in the imagery of the Andalucian peasant farmers, in their music, rhythm and dance, and in the mysterious spirit figures of the forest. The play takes on the mantle of all the ancient rituals of death and transfiguration, written only a few short years before Lorca’s own execution in 1936 by fascists as Franco’s regime re-established dictatorship after a brief period of a democratic Spanish republic.
Go to this production not as a spectator but to absorb all the feelings – of terror, of joy, of tragedy – that Sinclair makes available to you. You may come away from Leah Purcell’s final scene shaken, out of complacency and into new understanding of the human condition. Thanks, Iain Sinclair, for making my kind of theatre.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Saturday, 6 August 2011
2011: Life x 3 by Yasmina Reza
Life x 3 by Yasmina Reza. Canberra Repertory directed by Garry Fry. Theatre 3, August 5-20.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6
It was interesting to find, even in a translation by noted British writer Christopher Hampton, how very French this play is. Though at first blush it seems naturalistic, before long it becomes reminiscent of French-style absurdism in the manner of Eugene Ionesco. It’s a comedy of the human condition, epitomised by drunk Ines in Act 2 insisting to her astronomer husband, “We are not insignificant!”
Reza’s writing is demanding. The same scene is played three times: a couple arrive for dinner with another couple, a day early. Their hosts are completely unprepared. Each replay is not an exact replica, because each of the four characters start from and end up at different points in trajectories which their personalities could have followed.
Scene 1 and Scene 2 end in emotional disaster. In Scene 3 the characters make valiant attempts to be more civilised and reach what, at least superficially, seems an OK compromise. After Scene 1, a psychologist friend was ready to be called in for marriage counselling. By the end of the play, she thought she wouldn’t be needed.
For the actors, Peter Holland (Henri, whose academic career makes demands he is afraid he cannot meet), Megs Skillicorn (Henri’s wife Sonia, who has a law degree but works for a finance company), Sam Hanna-Morrow (Hubert, a successful academic who delights in putting Henri down while flirting with Sonia) and Debbie Newboult (Hubert’s wife Ines, faced with a husband she depends on for his social status) and for the director there is a great deal of fine detail to be worked through as each character is interpreted surprisingly differently in each appearance.
In the program notes, we are reminded that Garry Fry developed Replay Theatre in educational settings, in which “Actors explore themes with short semi-improvised plays derived from interaction with a target group; eg, homeless young people. During replay of scenes, audiences are invited to change the action according to how they think these life situations could be improved.”
It seems to me that Fry’s highly successful community work over many years has provided him with the skill in Reza’s version of Replay to direct his cast to seek the nuances of characterisation needed here, and each actor has succeeded well.
I was particularly impressed by Debbie Newboult’s work: she added an extra dimension in her strong stage presence.
Life x 3 is very appropriate for a Canberra audience. Academics audibly cringed at times when they were not laughing in recognition of their experiences, while couples who have tried to bring up children were equally amused in a squirmy sort of way, as Henri and Sonia’s 6 year old (Michael Spong’s voice off-stage) made demand after demand when he should have been asleep.
The play, and this production of it, is both enjoyable and worthwhile.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 6
It was interesting to find, even in a translation by noted British writer Christopher Hampton, how very French this play is. Though at first blush it seems naturalistic, before long it becomes reminiscent of French-style absurdism in the manner of Eugene Ionesco. It’s a comedy of the human condition, epitomised by drunk Ines in Act 2 insisting to her astronomer husband, “We are not insignificant!”
Reza’s writing is demanding. The same scene is played three times: a couple arrive for dinner with another couple, a day early. Their hosts are completely unprepared. Each replay is not an exact replica, because each of the four characters start from and end up at different points in trajectories which their personalities could have followed.
Scene 1 and Scene 2 end in emotional disaster. In Scene 3 the characters make valiant attempts to be more civilised and reach what, at least superficially, seems an OK compromise. After Scene 1, a psychologist friend was ready to be called in for marriage counselling. By the end of the play, she thought she wouldn’t be needed.
For the actors, Peter Holland (Henri, whose academic career makes demands he is afraid he cannot meet), Megs Skillicorn (Henri’s wife Sonia, who has a law degree but works for a finance company), Sam Hanna-Morrow (Hubert, a successful academic who delights in putting Henri down while flirting with Sonia) and Debbie Newboult (Hubert’s wife Ines, faced with a husband she depends on for his social status) and for the director there is a great deal of fine detail to be worked through as each character is interpreted surprisingly differently in each appearance.
In the program notes, we are reminded that Garry Fry developed Replay Theatre in educational settings, in which “Actors explore themes with short semi-improvised plays derived from interaction with a target group; eg, homeless young people. During replay of scenes, audiences are invited to change the action according to how they think these life situations could be improved.”
It seems to me that Fry’s highly successful community work over many years has provided him with the skill in Reza’s version of Replay to direct his cast to seek the nuances of characterisation needed here, and each actor has succeeded well.
I was particularly impressed by Debbie Newboult’s work: she added an extra dimension in her strong stage presence.
Life x 3 is very appropriate for a Canberra audience. Academics audibly cringed at times when they were not laughing in recognition of their experiences, while couples who have tried to bring up children were equally amused in a squirmy sort of way, as Henri and Sonia’s 6 year old (Michael Spong’s voice off-stage) made demand after demand when he should have been asleep.
The play, and this production of it, is both enjoyable and worthwhile.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
2011: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, adapted by Peter Evans
and Kate Mulvaney for touring by Bell Shakespeare. Canberra Theatre
Centre, The Playhouse, August 2-13, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
2 August
Shakespeare is as constant as the Northern Star, and this production proves it.
Working in generic modern dress, Peter Evans directs this neatly trimmed adaptation so that we see, by implication, the effects not so much of the non-violent Julia Gillard removal of Kevin Rudd (despite the usual claims of political stabbing-in-the-back) but more closely what the effects of Tony Abbott and the Barnaby Joyce Tea Party are likely to be.
The question for me about Julius Caesar has always been what to do with the second half. Up to the murder and Antony’s ears speech there’s no problem with dramatic tension – in fact, up to Cinna’s mistaken slaughter by the maddened crowd. But armies wandering around Philippi – all a bit ho-hum.
But not in this production. The touring company has grown from Bell Shakespeare’s education component. With only ten actors to do all the parts and everything else from set manoeuvering to an amazing scaffold construction, the old theatrical dictum that constraints lead to discipline is played out before our very eyes. I trust they had the correct rigger’s tickets!
They certainly had the right stylistic ticket. Combining acting the text with fully developed Stanislavski intentions with a choreographed design in movement, set within a Brechtian conception to alienate us from sentimental emotion was exactly right for this play.
Actors came on stage, then signalled the moment that they walked into the acting space, and out again. So simple – but so effective. Actors could switch roles when they spoke through a standing microphone; or could make part of a private conversation suddenly public.
The result was a close-knit ensemble of performers each equally playing their parts in a complex jigsaw puzzle. Placing the interval at precisely the halfway point, freezing the action as the first murderous blows were happening, gave us the motivation to return after champagne and coffee to find out how everything would fit together after this.
And what an ending. “Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, While I do run upon it …. Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.” Fade to black. None of Shakespeare’s “Who is this man” etc etc. We don’t need to see Brutus fall. We know what he will do and our imaginations fill in the blank, in silence. This is real theatre, leaving the audience to applaud in a peculiarly muted kind of way, even through two curtain calls. There is a humility here, on the part of the performers and flowing over the audience, in recognising what Shakespeare has done.
He has shown us the inevitable unintended consequences of extreme destructive political action. In Shakespeare’s day, Anthony Burgess suggests, the 1599 banning – indeed the burning “in good Nazi style” – of books about English history gave Will good reason to turn to more ancient times for a cautionary tale. Then ironically, only 23 years after his death, republicans murdered a king in England. They did things in reverse, having the civil war first, then executing the king, with Oliver Cromwell the “Lord Protector” in Parliament until he died in 1658. The monarchy was restored (and Cromwell’s body was dug up, hung in chains and beheaded) – and it must be said in the following century a compromise was reached to begin the establishment of today’s limited monarchy.
As I write, I am reading Jack Waterford in today’s Canberra Times (The Tony Abbott Tea Party, August 3, 2011 p.11). Of the US Tea Party, he writes “For this anti-party, the mission is not seeking the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but resistance and purity….For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott must seem much the same. As she complains, he simply won’t accept the verdict of the umpire – the electorate – last year. He acts as if he was cheated from his rightful place at the head of government…. Like the Tea Party his campaigning style has been focused on the extremes and on massive oversimplification.”
Waterford concludes, though, that if Gillard can get the carbon tax up and running, as she has the power to do with a majority in both houses, “There’s a very good chance that this would expose Abbott’s hollowness, his opportunism, and even some of the extremism of his remarks. Tea Parties, as with their American predecessor Know-Nothing Parties, never win." http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/waterford-the-tony-abbott-tea-party/2246566.aspx
Just as Cassius and even the honest patriot Brutus could never win. And just consider the parlous state the Roman polity ended up in, as Antony worked to make Octavius become the emperor Augustus. What damage will the Tea Parties inflict on us all?
So, in my view, Shakespeare’s star still shines, lighting up our understanding, and I thank Bell Shakespeare for it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Reviewed by Frank McKone
2 August
Shakespeare is as constant as the Northern Star, and this production proves it.
Working in generic modern dress, Peter Evans directs this neatly trimmed adaptation so that we see, by implication, the effects not so much of the non-violent Julia Gillard removal of Kevin Rudd (despite the usual claims of political stabbing-in-the-back) but more closely what the effects of Tony Abbott and the Barnaby Joyce Tea Party are likely to be.
The question for me about Julius Caesar has always been what to do with the second half. Up to the murder and Antony’s ears speech there’s no problem with dramatic tension – in fact, up to Cinna’s mistaken slaughter by the maddened crowd. But armies wandering around Philippi – all a bit ho-hum.
But not in this production. The touring company has grown from Bell Shakespeare’s education component. With only ten actors to do all the parts and everything else from set manoeuvering to an amazing scaffold construction, the old theatrical dictum that constraints lead to discipline is played out before our very eyes. I trust they had the correct rigger’s tickets!
They certainly had the right stylistic ticket. Combining acting the text with fully developed Stanislavski intentions with a choreographed design in movement, set within a Brechtian conception to alienate us from sentimental emotion was exactly right for this play.
Actors came on stage, then signalled the moment that they walked into the acting space, and out again. So simple – but so effective. Actors could switch roles when they spoke through a standing microphone; or could make part of a private conversation suddenly public.
The result was a close-knit ensemble of performers each equally playing their parts in a complex jigsaw puzzle. Placing the interval at precisely the halfway point, freezing the action as the first murderous blows were happening, gave us the motivation to return after champagne and coffee to find out how everything would fit together after this.
And what an ending. “Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, While I do run upon it …. Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.” Fade to black. None of Shakespeare’s “Who is this man” etc etc. We don’t need to see Brutus fall. We know what he will do and our imaginations fill in the blank, in silence. This is real theatre, leaving the audience to applaud in a peculiarly muted kind of way, even through two curtain calls. There is a humility here, on the part of the performers and flowing over the audience, in recognising what Shakespeare has done.
He has shown us the inevitable unintended consequences of extreme destructive political action. In Shakespeare’s day, Anthony Burgess suggests, the 1599 banning – indeed the burning “in good Nazi style” – of books about English history gave Will good reason to turn to more ancient times for a cautionary tale. Then ironically, only 23 years after his death, republicans murdered a king in England. They did things in reverse, having the civil war first, then executing the king, with Oliver Cromwell the “Lord Protector” in Parliament until he died in 1658. The monarchy was restored (and Cromwell’s body was dug up, hung in chains and beheaded) – and it must be said in the following century a compromise was reached to begin the establishment of today’s limited monarchy.
As I write, I am reading Jack Waterford in today’s Canberra Times (The Tony Abbott Tea Party, August 3, 2011 p.11). Of the US Tea Party, he writes “For this anti-party, the mission is not seeking the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but resistance and purity….For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott must seem much the same. As she complains, he simply won’t accept the verdict of the umpire – the electorate – last year. He acts as if he was cheated from his rightful place at the head of government…. Like the Tea Party his campaigning style has been focused on the extremes and on massive oversimplification.”
Waterford concludes, though, that if Gillard can get the carbon tax up and running, as she has the power to do with a majority in both houses, “There’s a very good chance that this would expose Abbott’s hollowness, his opportunism, and even some of the extremism of his remarks. Tea Parties, as with their American predecessor Know-Nothing Parties, never win." http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/waterford-the-tony-abbott-tea-party/2246566.aspx
Just as Cassius and even the honest patriot Brutus could never win. And just consider the parlous state the Roman polity ended up in, as Antony worked to make Octavius become the emperor Augustus. What damage will the Tea Parties inflict on us all?
So, in my view, Shakespeare’s star still shines, lighting up our understanding, and I thank Bell Shakespeare for it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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