BOW
DOWN
Old
Municipal Market, 17th May
What
have we here? A new production of a piece of 'music theatre' by
Harrison Birtwistle and Tony Harrison, based around our old friend
the murder ballad 'Cruel Sister', last seen in
these parts via Julia
Wolfe's musical reworking. ('Bow Down' would seem to be an
alternate title from one of its many
variants.)
The
staging strikes you as audacious. It's put on in the disused
municipal market, with minimal props, without amplification, where
the only electricity is used for the quite bare lighting. The music
comes from flute and oboe, more often played trillingly and
screechingly than to make melodies. Percussion is more often supplied
by props within the scene than by instruments, such as spades
striking the concrete floor.
This
could be called audacious, but it's actually quite smart.The
cavernous, echoey space is functionally useful for an unamplified
work. But more than that, it was fitting. I would rather have seen it
here than in the Suffolk forest, which was another option on the
itinerary. The simplicity of the staging isn't just about minimising
distractions from the content, it's part of the piece. Despite the
folk roots it's not interested in whisking us off to some pastoral
otherplace where the drama takes place, with forests and rivers. It's
diegetic. They the performers and we their audience remain in that
stark room, they addressing us as often as each other. Quite often
they talk as though addressing each other while looking out at us.
There's a recurrent gag about characters prompting each other.
...then
again, perhaps that line above should be ”because”
of the folk roots.” For a drama it's remarkably rooted in that
original folk song, not elaborating or fleshing out characters. And
folk music is often diegetic, the frame becomes
part of the picture. Think of the number of folk songs which start
with the explanation that we're about to be sung a song.
For
example, the performance kicks off with a recitation of the ballad's
opening. Despite the term 'Opera Group', this is thankfully done in
northern dialect, not opera's strangulated tones. And yet a
recitation, even an entirely faithful one, works differently to a
ballad. In
the ballad's most well-known version, by Pentangle, you are
aware that the line “lay the bent to the bonnie broom” is
continually repeated. But you don't hear each
iteration, they blend into the repetition of the music, they become
punctuation, your brain starts to substitute the mental equivalent of
little ditto marks.
Not so
with a verbal recitation. Each instance of “there were two sisters”
slaps you anew. Which is surely the point. What would seem familiar,
even naturalised, in a song is reformulated and restaged to feel new,
strange and arresting. It's like the folk song stretched and
flattened, it's inner workings exposed. If a folk song was a picture
of a scene, this was like an overlaid series of rough, diagrammatic
sketches.
Visually
the piece played with making and breaking symmetry, just as it did
with the ballad's rhyming couplets. It's point may well have been to
compare the paired lines to the two sisters, apparently harmoniously
matched (“dark/fair”, “water/earth” etc.). Yet the breaking
is inherent to the pairing, the lines are not equal, one must always
close the other.
There
is something simultaneously childlike and sinister in the ritualised
performance that reminded me of the adults-playing-children scenario
of Dennis Potter's 'Blue Remembered Hills.' It's a
dark, almost drippingly Freudian vision of a reality predisposed to
conflict and violence - “there were two sisters who will die.”
(Though Freud would doubtless have insisted they missed a trick by
not making the wooing knight and the “baron of power” father one
and the same.) When the drowned sister is washed up, in a scene black
with humour two fishermen lasciviously set about dismembering her,
which certainly didn't happen in the more family-friendly Pentangle
version.
It's
interesting to see how much variety can be wrung from this most
simple of set-ups, either visually or in terms of mood. And it's an
interesting attempt to adapt from one medium to
another rather than simply lift, to take creative advantage by
playing up the differences between them.
Yet I
felt not a little skeptical...
The
aim would seem to be to confront us with the corpse beneath the
surface of the bucolic-looking stream, the dark content behind the
pretty folk tune. But wasn't that dark content already visible for
anyone who cared to go looking for it? Moreover, isn't that contrast
between the dark and the fair the point of the
song, the very thing which gives it bite? Doesn't the very term
'murder ballad' suggest all that is an intentional juxtaposition? The
Pentangle song essentially goes “fum-diddley-i, diddley-din, then
she smashed her bloody head in.”
Folk
fans are often caricatured as hopeless nostalgists, cupping hands to
their ears to block out the intrusive present. But it's got no more
truth to it than any other caricature. Folk fans, in my experience,
love nothing more than a good murder ballad. They joined the dark
side some good while ago...
It
seems to me that high art normally does to low art what the rich do
to the poor, turn up offering to bring something then taking whatever
they can get their hands on. Arguably, the performance does to the
original ballad what the fisherman do to the dead sister's corpse.
Admittedly, there's a limit to how far you could pin this piece to
the term 'high art.' Yet there's enough truth to it to have raised my
skepticism.
Moreover,
composed in 1977, this piece has something of the world of Seventies
experimentalism about it. You can sense that Godardian perverse glee
in stripping away anything pleasurable, as if all that was inherently
“bourgeois” and truth and needle-in-the-eye repetition were
somehow synonymous. Here it's the folk melody that's stripped away,
anything with strings to pluck tossed out for something austere to
the point of confrontational. All of which is now so out of fashion
that it now seems almost new again. Yet we shouldn't forget where it
led last time. And last time it led nowhere very much.
Perhaps
this was also why one of my favourite elements of the ballad was
removed, the dead sister's corpse being made into a harp which then
'sings' an accusation of her murderer. Perhaps that was dismissed as
romanticism. Instead this was replaced by a more hackneyed ghostly
revenge, like something out of EC comics.
In
addition, the stripped-down setting threw a great emphasis on the
performers, yet they varied greatly in quality. Some were excellent
but the sisters in particular were surprisingly weak. That may have
marred my gruntlement as much as anything conceptual or thematic.
(Interestingly, it may have worked better had they all
been weak. It would have worked within the intonatory, ritualised
nature of the performance. True, it would have been best
if they'd all been good performers. But the problem was the
mismatch.)
The
result was interesting and (at least by today's standards) unusual
but only fitfully successful. Like the ballad I couldn't really
decide whether it was dark or fair, whether it was killing something
off or giving it new life. Which was perhaps the point...
WATERLITZ
Black
Rock, Brighton Seafront, 26th May
Generik
Vapeur are a crazy French performance troupe who seem to specialise
in the grand outdoor performances you like to imagine crazy French
performance troupes get up to, but imagine you're only imagining
that. They are, in brief, crazy. Crazy in a good way. But mostly
crazy in a crazy way...
At
last year's Festival they performed 'Droles d'Ouiseaux,'
aka 'Funny Bird', which involved hanging
multicoloured cars up from a washing line on the Level. (In case you
don't believe me I have photographic evidence.) This year's show was if
anything bigger, bolder and... well, crazier.
A
bunch of upturned shipping containers had been made into a modernist
wicker man. Films and graphics were projected onto him, as performers
act around, upon, dangling from, and even inside him, as hatches open
in the sides to reveal scenes, like a kind of surrealist advent
calendar. Or they circumambulate it while hoisted by a crane. Or...
look, sometimes you've just got to be there!
Through
charmingly thick French accents, they claim this as their potted
history of the world. The Festival blurb mentions “the pressing
concerns of our age” and “the ghosts of globalisation.” Indeed,
at one stage they pause to pay tribute to the popular risings round
the world.
But
mostly, it's not a piece of theatre which employs penetrating
symbolism to invite analysis. Trying to join up those disconnected
scenes would be a fool's errand. It's a show!
You're better off wallowing in the spectacle of it all, drinking in
the derangement. A favourite moment of mine, presumably tailored for
English audiences, was when a projected clock struck four and they
promptly broke for tea, waiters scurrying around the audience with
cups.
This
seems to have been the Festival where austerity really hit. Rumour
claims that many Fringe shows were flat-out cancelled. I attended
less events myself, though for me time poverty was as much a factor.
The free, public stuff didn't disappear but seemed diminished. The
exhibitions, with the exception of the Patrick Hamilton tribute
'Hangover Square', were a total waste of time.
(Disclaimer, I didn't do on the “interactive seafront walk”, so
please exclude that from my dissing.)
So
this was probably just what we needed. A fantastic show, held for
free on a glorious summer's evening, with an amassed crowd (some
contend ten thousand strong) clapping heartily then walking home with
great big grins on our collective faces.s The Festival spirit finally
appears for it's final weekend.
“Zee
yuu next yee-arr!” they promised at the curtain call.
You
never know your luck...
The
same show, but not from Brighton...
Both
events, as you may have surmised, part of the Brighton Festival.
Coming
soon! The play's the thing...
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