By Flabbergast Theatre The Old Market, Hove, Thurs 15th Sept
I’d found my seat and sat in it before I realised the performers were already on stage. Acting out, it would seem, a scene from Bedlam. Everyone having some psychotic episode of their own, oblivious to those around them, switching arbitrarily from one extreme mental state to another. This was doubtless intended to establish the dark mood, and did.
They performed in identical non-costumes with minimal props, and no staging save for the drums and gongs the company played themselves. ‘Performers’ works better than ‘actors’ here. They’d cavort, leap and gesture wildly, like something from an Expressionist painting. And strike tableau poses, for which I’m not sure if there’s a name. They’d not just make up a pattern but combine together to form a single shape, like a gestalt creature. The poster image came from one of these (the witches at work, as you may have guessed), and was what first piqued my interest.
We’re now used to naturalistic versions of Shakespeare. Which probably started as a righteous reaction to the stiff-backed, tights-clad RP recitals of luvvieland, but has long since become as ritualised in its own way. So reacting against this, with a very physical, very ritualised approach may well be wise. Rather than be desperate to ‘contemporise’ a Jamesian play it almost looked back. While part of the company went through with their lines, the rest acted as a kind of Greek chorus.
At times it seemed to be riffing on popular notions of “the Scottish play’”, that the whole thing is an extension of the witches scene, some sort of dark, malevolent spell. And if the whole play is the witches while we’re the fearful yet forever curious Macbeth, drawn in by that poster. (And remember, while ’Hamlet’ opens with characters talking about the ghost, ’Macbeth’ goes straight to the witches. Even though plot demands means it then has to go elsewhere, then come straight back to them.) And it was often nothing less than striking to watch.
But what Shakespeare is is psychological. Whether he was the first dramatist to get us interested in the interior life of his characters, or whether he was the one who got known for it, is probably moot at this point. We accept devices such as the heightened language because it aids his mission, gives us more of an insight into those character’s minds. Which means…
When Macbeth first encounters the three witches, in all their otherworldliness, the grand gestures of physical theatre work well. But when he hesitates to commit the crime, and has to be talked into it by his Missis, that’s quite a different kind of scene. The witches are, in some way or other, a personification of his ambition. While Lady Macbeth is a character in the play. We need to believe two people are standing on stage, debating, each with their own thought processes. Inevitably, the staging for this scene differs.
The programme states that Flabbergast “takes a rigorous and respectful approach to text, combining it with exhilarating aspects of live music and event performance.” Which seems a little like wanting it both ways, to be both an Expressionist painting and a faithfully realist sketch.
For one thing, the acrobatics of physical theatre often made it hard to hear the words, which were sometimes gabbled or delivered sing-song. I overheard one guy, who was reliant on lip-reading, saying he’d picked up not one line.
Is this circle unsquareable? I don’t think it is. But you need to go round it one way or the other.
For one way, we might argue that Shakespeare is now part of our folk culture. In the old Radio Four phrase, his works are already on the island. Not many of us now go to see ’Macbeth’ to see how ’Macbeth’ ends, after all. So he can be taken the way you would a folk tale. It’s not enough to say he’s open to re-interpretation, he’s become embedded, source material, so we can create works which only refer obliquely to him.
In a week when we’re all remembering Jean-Luc Godard, one of his maxims was “texts are death”. Meaning, I think, they constrain and stifle. DreamThinkSpeak’s version of ‘Hamlet’,’The Rest Is Silence’ would be an example of this approach. (Note how it’s not named after the original play, but a quote from it.)
Or you can play up a problem until it becomes its own solution. In a ‘schizo style’ performance, where the two styles are deliberately set against one another, perhaps conveyed by something like lighting changes. The banquet scene, when Macbeth spies daggers and then not, is the closest to this. This is more or less how Cheek By Jowl managed ‘Ubu Roi’.
As it was, Flabbergast gave a bold effort which didn’t entirely come off, something you wanted to like more than you actually did.
”There are many groups like this one, all over the country, all over the world, just waiting for the moment of transformation”
TRIPLE LOCK PLOT SPOILERS! Normally I stick up a plot spoiler notice just in case anyone might care. This time, spoil means spoil! If you’re going to see this show, which is on till 12th June, you really don’t want to read this review first!
Anyone else old enough to remember the old ’End of Part One’ sketch where the cinema patrons end up getting seats within the film itself? The performances of DreamThinkSpeak, which in their own words “interweave life performance with film and instillations to create extraordinary journeys” are something similar.
Rather than setting up fixed areas for stage and audience you wander round an environment, coming across actors and interacting with them, as if you’ve been dipped in their world. After ’Before I Sleep’ and ‘The Rest Is Silence’, this the third of their Festival performances I’ve seen.
The Pavilion estate (for non-locals, a large area in central Brighton) is presented as a town in itself, under the dominion of the Governess. But steps are afoot to remove her, with a group of revolutionary cells led by her own brother Lucas. Buying a ticket is enough to get you mixed up in all this.
The politics, it has to be be said, were typical of this type of thing. The system is a semi-feudal affair, focused on the Aunt Sally figure of the Governess, not a social and economic relation which requires changing. (Though the olde-worlde look of the Pavilion estate may have been a factor here.) Revolutionaries are well-meaning middle-class types, cops hard-working proles. And those revolutionaries are divided into big-hearted idealists and violent fanatics. They first denounce the Governess’ dinner debate as a farce, but then participate in it. In fact, there’s too much formal debating in general. Their plan seems to be to tell her she’s not wanted, at which point she’ll be obliged to leave. Good luck with that…
However, I’m not sure how much that matters. Because it wasn’t really what the thing was about. Playing up the immersive nature of the drama, the actors don’t broadly soliloquise but directly address us, look us in the eye. At various points, we’re appealed to by both cops and revolutionaries. And we’ve no notion who we can trust, or whose plans are even credible. So, bewildered, we follow the guides around like human baggage hoping some resolution is reached.
Which, pretty much, is the state we live our lives in. But, by standing so near the spotlight, we start to feel singed by it. And I’d have to say I know this feeling! You turn to radical political groups because you want to get unchained, but before you know it you’re tied in knots.
I kept thinking how much this miasma of mistrust felt like descriptions of pre-revolutionary Russia. Forgetting that the Festival programme had already confirmed this was based on Dostoyevsky’s ’The Possessed’, which is about… as you may have guessed… pre-revolutionary Russia. In its own words, “plunging [us] into the feverish and hallucinatory world of Dostoyevsky’s vision.” This isn’t agitprop, but absurdist tragi-comedy for us to get ourselves mired in.
And then there’s technology. I’ve not read Dostoyevsky’s book, but assume characters in it don’t lug tablets around, which dispense clues and instructions of doubtful provenance. And of course modern activist culture does organise on-line, for both better and worse, the smartphone replacing the Little Red Book.
The show starts several days early, when you’re sent an email containing a weblink to Lucas speechifying. Then ends with a room of screens, each devoted to a character (both activist and cop), all talking at once. Which becomes a kind of summation of the experience. Remember the William Burroughs phrase, “Ain’t nothing left here now but the recordings”? (And modern life as an indecipherable babble seems a theme of the company.)
Everyone has to have a kind of origin story which led to them getting involved in the underground. Its pretty much the first thing we’re told. This is something commonly done when activist culture gets represented in the media, as a kind of instant motive, despite it not being at all accurate of that world. But then something smarter is done with this…
One of the things you run past is a Jam exhibition currently on at the Pavilion. And it’s hard not to think of those famous lines: “What a catalyst you turned out to be, Loaded the guns then ran off home for your tea”. They prove apt, when Lucas takes the opportunity to bump off his dominating big sister. All those grand, fine-sounding political speeches, and it had been a simple case of sibling rivalry all along.
Crucially his motives are not despotic, to seize control from her, but narrow and entirely personalised. You could call them petty, insofar as that term could be applied to murder. On accomplishing this he immediately disappears from the narrative, his real work done.
Though, as you’re arbitrarily assigned different guides on arrival, your perspective might change accordingly. Ours was Stela Maris, presented as the idealistic heart of the group, who begs troubled head Lucas not to shoot. (When you hear them clashing, off-stage but audible, it’s not unlike being a child and hearing your parents argue.) But Lucas was guide to his own group, who might well have seen in him a more tragic figure, playing out a kind of Greek tragedy in which the rest of us were more incidental.
Similarly, while my group did some very English squirming and eye-averting when asked by both sides to join up, I wondered if others might become more engaged. Arifa Akbar’s Guardian review suggests her group did.While a review in GScene commented more sourly: “We listen to radicalised young people talk of lost childhoods and a system which crushes them, we look around and admire the baroque and rococo back rooms we find ourselves in. We stay silent.”
All of which is to the good. However…
The show is not short of incident, sometimes quite dramatically so. But incident is not necessarily the same thing as narrative. And the hectic rushing from one supposedly ‘safe’ place to another, then again, did feel at times like incident was trying to take the place of narrative.
And the use of technology did seem a little half-hearted. It mostly seemed additional, the tablets we were asked to carry just underlining things we were already seeing or being told by our guide. Had someone switched theirs off at the start, there’s little they’d have missed. Dramatically, there should have been more times when the tablets were guiding us, demanding our trust.
I wondered if this was out of concern that some more technofeared attendees might fail to follow along. But a suggestion at the initial briefing that we’d need to work together, moving as a group, might have allayed that. Perhaps a more extended period at the start, where the tablets try to guide you to your guide, with plans getting stymied at the last minute.
Overall… well, it’s a hard thing to get a grip on. If it often feels like a frustrating experience, that we pass through spaces without really engaging with anything – well, that’s kind of the point. It is, by a strict definition of the term, Absurdist. Things make no sense, then they’re over, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to deal with that. And that conflicts by definition with the standard dramatic needs, for closure and all of that. If you come away feeling dissatisfied and uninvolved, that’s kind of the point. What might feel like basic audience needs can just be at odds with the event.
But then again, other things have been Absurdist without this seeming so much of a problem. While it has much to commend it, you feel like it’s not *quite* there yet, it needs a little more road testing and fine-tuning. It couldn’t be claimed it equals their previous two festival offerings.
And finally (as they say on the news)… if this was more absurdist tragicomedy than political drama, there was still one clue which side the company might fall on. In the room of screens, both activists and cops supply a personal anecdote of how they came to be involved. And each activist has their own story while, like a troll farm, the cop tales are all identical…
Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…
This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.
The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.
The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.
But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.
But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.
It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.
GNOD Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May
Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.
The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.
There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.
Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.
Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.
They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.
Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…
Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...
THE NECKS St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May
If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.
The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.
Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.
Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.
And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’ There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.
A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…
… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…
If you wanted a soundbite description
for Complicite's new show – a one-man performance with binaural sound and minimal
staging – try 'Brechtian radio done as theatre'. Simon McBurney
smartly starts this long and often intense performance with an
on-stage announcement to turn off our mobile phones, which segues
into some apparently spontaneous chat which precis many of the
themes. Yet he's up to something else too...
Michael Billington's Guardian review comments “shut your eyes at
any point and you feel... that you are in the Amazonian jungle”.
And McBurney does ask us to do precisely that - but briefly and before
the show's headed off for the Amazon. Precisely, I think, to get it
out of the way and have us open our eyes again.
He demonstrates many of the devices
he'll use, including two microphones – one for his and one for his
protagonists's voice – even though it turns out he doesn't need
them in order to switch. Many of his sound sources are
old-fashionedly direct, from the grand old days of radio, such as
crumpling a bottle of water to convey a water sound or – quite
gloriously reductively - crunching recording tape beneath his feet to
evoke tramping.
All this is foregrounded for two
reasons. First, the soundbite description above does mean “as
theatre”. The bare stage and the demonstrated sound sources keep us
reminded that this is a story we're being told. But at the same time,
if paradoxically, it gives them an element of magic. Electroacoustic
music sometimes verges on the animist, the assumption that not only
do objects possess spirits but have a 'voice' which can be unlocked.
And as we follow his protagonist, the photographer Loren McIntyre as
he gets lost among an Amazonian tribe, we get reacquainted with such
animist ways of thinking.
And like McIntyre get lost is what we
do. A dense work two hours long, with lines sometimes literally laid
over one another, it's quite hard to parse in a single viewing. This
is the best route map I could manage...
It's clear enough that as McIntyre
loses his old Western possessions he goes through a symbolic death
and rebirth, he goes through a shamanic journey. In fact, as he both
joins in a tribal rite and is given his own to embark on (acting
something like the play-within-a-play in 'Hamlet'),
this is fairly literally what happens.
The tribe could be read as externalised
aspects of his psyche, those antagonistic to his presence
representing his own sublimated wish to get back home, and so on.
This is most clearly suggested by the way the Chief, nicknamed
Barnacle, can communicate with him psychically, a voice inside his
head. Just as the binaural headsets are ensuring most of he play
happens inside our heads. Notably, McBurney has described McIntyre's journey as “an inner one”.
It might be telling that Barnacle dies,
yet we're told he is always “with” McIntyre. You can probably see
the problem coming. It suggests he's not really a character in his
own right, and that once he's fulfilled his role of passing on his
validation he can be extinguished. An Amazonian tribe aren't there to
represent another culture but map out the inside of a white
Westerner's head. Barnacle is the South American cousin of the magic negro.
But when McIntyre undergoes that solo
shamanic journey he sees himself as “the crack” in the fabric of
the universe. Barnacle leads the tribe as they enact a ritual,
burning all their belongings to get back to the beginning. The
implication is that we're all lost, we've gone
down the wrong path and need to retrace our steps. Yet McIntyre, who
after getting lost in the forest is there for literally that reason,
cannot commit to the ritual. Steeped in linear time he can only
interpret “the beginning” as death, the extinguishing of
everything as the end. McBurney acts out the destruction in an
onstage rampage, but fails to see it through.
Rather than McIntyre taking back home
some of that good-home-cooking simple tribal wisdom, gleaning new
feelgood phrases to stick beneath his e-mail signature, he disrupts
their lives. The storm that besets them represents his failure to
commit to them, the flood relating to his earlier vision of the crack
“from which our time might flood”. And this then segues into a
Fall story. This is an Eden story in which our narrator discovers too
late the snake is himself.
For all his protestations to not be
like the other whites, the profiteers who come to burn down the
forest, ultimately he's irredeemably from the same world as them. And
if he, a clued-up guy and seasoned traveller to such far-flung
places, is irredeemable then what chance do we have? Complicte make
us complicit.
Perhaps the idea was to set up a more
standard Western-guy-burns-his-sneakers-to-become-tribal-shaman
story, and pull a bait and switch. He just ends up a Western guy
without his sneakers, duh. Yet that feels like a post-hoc
rationalisation. The noble savage stuff is too indulged to just
jettison like that. What actually happened on stage was something
more volatile, vying between the two notions.
And in a way this is played up. Early
on, McBurney played a gag of claiming an old video cassette contained
all the images of his dead Father, only for it to fall and smash on
the floor. And the spool of cassette tape which messily pours out is
an image which recurs later, when McIntyre finds the film from his
camera wrapped danglingly round a tree. This is the messy reality,
the truth against which the cassette box was the tidy mechanism we
use to 'storify' our lives.
Yet neither am I sure the point was for
us to not get the point. Certainly part of the piece was the
necessity of our telling ourselves stories, despite their
fallibility. But much like McIntyre, I was led entranced through two
hours but found myself lost amid the spool of cassette tape on the
floor.
PIKACYU MAKOTO + ADRENA ADRENA
Sticky Mike's Frog Bar,
Brighton, Tues 24th May
Adrena Adrena are a duo of drummer E-Da
from Boredoms and Drum Eyes (both Lucid Frenzy favourites) and “performance
artist” Daisy Dickinson, who plays a laptop live. And if the live
drums/laptop combination sounds unlikely, she frequently provides not
just washes and tones but her own rhythms for the drums to play off
against. The contrast is virtuous, throwing each instrument back on
itself – on what it does best.
The centre of the stage was taken up by
projections which, always simple and often semi-abstract, never stole
the limelight from the music. It was more like watching a trio, just
one at work on different senses to the others. Pretty soon you
weren't taking in the sights and sounds as separate elements at all,
but hand been induced into a kind of synaesthesia.
And if that seems like we're reverting
to Sixties terminology like 'trip' we might as well go with it.... it
felt like a trip (man), like being taken through some other reality
then dumped back in ours at the end.
Not from Brighton but the International
Festival of Projections (and I'm going to pretend I know what that
is)...
Pikacyu Makoto are another of the
near-infinite array of side-projects undertaken by guitarist Kawabata
Makoto, alongside his mothership Acid Mothers Temple. (Lucid Frenzy was lucky enough to catch Mainliner some while ago.) This one's with drummer Pikacyu from another Japanese underground
band, Afrirampo. The two bands previously made a joint album, which
alas I've not heard.
As things kicked off I feared we were
in for the whole 'too many notes' business, common when noise music
overlaps with jazz. But after starting with a burst of 11, they then
turned it down just a notch...
Styles and genres were still rattled
through at breakneck speed, as if music history was sighted from the
window of an express train – including Sixties beat music,
Beefheart, Hendrix and some I probably missed as they hurtled by.
After perhaps the least successful part, where Makoto turned to
squelchy keyboards, they even provided a quite serene mid-section –
Pikacyu providing holding patterns beneath Makoto's sustained tones.
They then ramped back up for a thumping finale, chanted vocals over a
power riff.
After seeing Lightning Bolt last year, I commented they “seem
to stem from the child's love of making noise. Rather than the
nihilism so associated with the genre there's something joyous and
uplifting about the whole thing, even as its rough and abrasive.
Certainly, you can rely on a Lightning Bolt set to put a great grin
on your face.” And that seems even more true of this
duo. And Pikacyu I suspect has a lot to do with that.
She seemed intent to hit every drum and
cymbal in turn, a style common in noise music, but with tumbling
rhythms that created spaces in the sonic onslaught. Overall, its
perhaps her cheerful, childlike and almost poppy vocals which gave
the set it's identity and raised things from the too-common
angstiness of noise music.
It sounds like hippyshit to talk of
some balance between male and female energy, and of course any kind
of gender essentialism is pretty dodgy stuff. But there was something
about Pikacyu's performance that took things beyond the
babblebashbash noise music can sometimes degrade into, like a toddler
endlessly smashing a Tonka toy against a wall.
Forty minutes from London... (Three
days later and it seems an almost entirely different set!)
CAVERN OF ANTI-MATTER
Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 26th May
Truth to tell, I was always a little agnostic over Stereolab. There was something slightly knowing
to their retro-futurist schtick. But Tim Gane's new band Cavern of
Anti-Matter mix Neu!-style Krautrock beats, trancy dance and swooshy
Sixties organ. Plus they referred to 'Doctor Who'
in their track 'Tardis Cymbals' and named
themselves after a Situationist painting. (One large enough to cover a whole gallery
which then got sold by the metre.) I mean, theoretically
they could bring in some reference to Jack Kirby comics and the taste
of pistachio to tick all my boxes, but that's
pretty good going.
There no bassist to their three-man
line up and they specialise in stretched-out instrumentals, two
things I think which go together. It's spacey
music which doesn't want to be grounded in any way. Drummer Joe
Dilworth, also ex-Stereolab, spends as much time on cymbals as drums.
(In fact I'm fairly sure half his kit went untouched.) Listen to them
a little while and I swear you'll start to feel like your feet are
lifting from the ground...
Some bands, such as Moon Duo, achieve
mesmerism by simple repetition until trance states take hold.
(Leading to my review stating “more, please, of this less business”. I
was quite pleased with that one...) While others, like this lot, are
able to achieve a virtuous combination. They harness the power of
repetition while morphing as they move, packing in changes you're not
really aware of happening until after they've happened. They move
and stand still. You can listen or trance out. In
fact, you can listen and trance out.
Reviews tend to focus on the futurism
of the band, but I'm not sure they're picking that up so much as
getting a residue from Stereolab. Unlike the 'Jetsons'-style
soon -everything-will-be-silver futurism of Stereolab, COAM lean more
to the end-of-'2001' cosmic side of SF. The long
numbers, the repetition, the psychedelic visuals – of course it's
all about sending you. You'll be part-way through
a track you were previously just enjoying, and suddenly you'll find
yourself through the looking glass. Sometimes you can spot the
trigger, the point where the music stepped up a notch. But other
times it comes almost arbitrarily, presumably because they were
accumulative – the point where your doors of perception got
cleansed enough for the light to break through.
If their German-sounding name suggests
a Krautrock influence then, much like Cavern of Anti-Matter, there's
a definite Neu! Element to the sound. There's the same extended
rhythmic pieces, stretching to trance-out dimensions. (The CD I
bought fits only four tracks on it.) But they also reminded me of the
point post-punk crossed over with dance music, bands like 23 Skidoo
or A Certain Ratio. If there's not the same uptight agitation, the
David Byrne jerky dancing, there is the straight-faced euphoria.
Vocals, when they appear, are de-emotionalised and intonatory, while
album artwork exudes that post-punk starkness.
If Cavern of Anti-Matter's dominant
movement is up, Follakzoid's is forwards. If Andrena Andrena are like
a trip, Follakzoid are a road trip. Their tracks are driven by
propulsive riffs, other shapes forming alongside them like trees and
hills, some passing by quickly, others remaining a while. Certainly
their tracks are journeys rather than destinations, often ending
rather than finishing – like they're run out of road.
Reviewing one of their releases, the Quietus' Joe Kennedy commented how the motorik beat “can
express both the experience of automated late-industrial modernity
and atavistic impulses towards the cosmic and transcendental.” And
certainly they have not just the tranciness but the sheen
of Neu! In fact one of the surprises of seeing them live is how much
of their sound is made by 'real' instruments.
Yet particularly with those vocals,
which could be either trance-like or robotic, Follakzoid feel like
both experiences at once. But then isn't something like the act of
dancing like that? You repeat ritual gestures until you achieve an
ecstatic state. Kraftwerk unveiled the Man Machine like their
creation, like something they'd devised in their secret laboratory.
But in our era, when Google glass and driverless cars seem imminent,
he's something we just take for granted. Perhaps that's partly why
it's Neu! rather than Kraftwerk that bands today are taking up.
After the theatrical shows 'Lulu' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', this was the first time I'd
seen the accordian-driven Brechtian street opera trio the Tiger
Lillies do their actual dark cabaret set in an actual cabaret
setting. And it made for a pretty good setting, laughter drifting
through from the weekend revellers as they regaled us with their
tales of debauchery and woe.
There's supposed to be an art exercise
where you paint a painting from as many different shades of black as
you can, the point being we so rarely come across 'pure' black. And
they make music somewhat like that. They don't stray to the dark side
of the spectrum so much as set up shop there. (Like their lyric of
the woman who “always sees the black and not the gold”.) But they
elbow out a range for themselves regardless. There's black humour. (A
song about inserting hamsters which I won't repeat here gains fulsome
belly laughs.) But there's also stuff that's pretty close to pure
black, and all stations between. (I was reminded of the old Soft Boys
line “And when there's no more tears to cry/There's nothing left to
do but laugh.”)
Musically, they do a similar thing.
Their default line-up may be accordian, double bass and drums. (Is
there such a style as dark klezmer? I guess there is now.) But the
drummer finds the strangest things to drum, while other instruments
include piano, theramin, a “home-made ukelile” (which looks
suspiciously like a chopped-off guitar neck) and a circular saw. And
that last one, though sparingly used, may even be their signature
sound – absurd, strangely melodic, mockingly sentimental and
sinister all at once.
They smartly start the gig with the
semi-diegetic song 'Roll Up' presenting a
freakshow for an eagerly thrill-seeking suburban audience (“our
lives a sideshow attraction, we do our best to please”), which
inevitably frames everything which follows. By not being the subject
of the song, we are somewhat implicated. And then comes another twist
on that...
Though the Brecht and Weill influence
is clear enough, there's none of Bertie's political themes. Their
subject is human folly, people who became addicted to something or to
someone until it finishes them. (Their universe is really a Snakes
and Ladders board without the ladders.) And a song about the folly of
drinking delivered to a roomfull of drinkers gains an edge. We're
voyeurs, yet at any point we could find ourselves projected from out
seats into one of those songs. If the musical saw signifies their
sound, the default response is the uncertain belly laugh.
Not from Brighton... (But then they
rarely are.)
Not sure if a theatre performance and three gigs really go together, but that's how the cookie crumbled...
This week, for no particular reason, a film and a play...
'ANOMALISA'
Charlie Kaufman's new film is set in
Connecticut. Well, nominally. It's actually not set somewhere so much
as anywhere – an anonymous, interchangeable
world of bland hotel lobbies leading to nicely made-up suites.
Service encounters are simultaneously object-oriented and
substanceless, ritual exchanges, a means of masking empty space.
Those encountered talk like Hal from '2001', their
modulated smoothness the sonic equivalent of the lobbies they
inhabit. The casting of David Thewlis as Michael, a Brit adrift in
America, neatly underlines this. (I kept having to remind myself
creator Charlie Kaufman isn't English himself.) Remember the old Bob
Dylan line, “There'd be no point talking to me, It'd be just like
talking to you”? The conceit is that to him everywhere is like this
and everyone, men and women, both look and sound the same.
Which makes it bizarre to consider this
was made with puppets. Generally, we file puppetry animation
alongside cartoons, and expect the same zippy pace. (Think of how we
picture 'Wallace and Gromit' as so quirkily
English, yet how frenetic it would seem if filmed as a live action.)
And we expect characters to look iconic rather than identikit, coming
complete with some distinguishing tell like Mickey Mouse's ears. Here
things proceed at a trudging pace, including a checking-in to a hotel
and elevator ride to the room in all its excruciating endlessness,
with the room card that only seems to work the fifth or sixth time
you swipe it.
And yet its actually so perfectly
suited to the form. Everything, from sets to characters, looks
produced. People are just assemblages of parts
given motion. Most animations avoid the uncanny valley, the disquieting midpoint between iconic and
realistic. This film finds its uncanniest depths and pitches its tent
there.
It would be tempting to see in this a
critique of alienation and corporate conformity, seen through the
prism of service culture. But when Michael turns his blundering
convention speech into an off-script rant against The Man, he merely
looks ludicrous. And in his dream the depersonalised mass cry not
“you must conform”, the catchphrase of Pod people everywhere, but
“we love you”. We learn early that this is the (non)relationship
he has with his own family, an indication we'll be spending time with
not with a heroic rebel but one of life's losers.
The customer service guide he's written
seems to have not only read but been absorbed by everyone he
encounters. He's not only implicated in this world – he's not far
off having created it, having made his world this anonymising
purgatory he now has to lie in it's king size bed. Kaufman has a
penchant for allegorical names and not only is Michael's surname
Stone, not the most porous or flexible or substances, but the hotel
he stays in is named after the Fregoli delusion. And the image of him checking into his own myopia
is strong. Though what he's really suffering from is a case of
solipsism less acute than all-embracing.
Michael's constructed a world for
himself where others have become instrumentalised by him, there to
help him with his problems. To the point where all human encounters
become service encounters, the need for love and understanding
equivalent to the need for room service. And of course he ruminates
ceaselessly over his problems, unable to see it's this which has
become his problem. (The tag line for this film should really be
‘Instrumentalising Others – A How Not-to Guide’.)
He seems so inured in this world that not only does he no longer
notice other people as other people, he's even stopped noticing he
doesn't notice. There's one scene in the whole film not seen through
his eyes, a brief coda, mostly there to show the world with his
filter removed.
Then he encounters Lisa, the one person
he's able to see and hear for who she is. And immediately, and quite
literally, he pursues her. Which cues in a virulent debate over
whether that makes her a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (See for example this Guardian discussion.) Certainly he obsessively assumes
she can provide him with life validation. He fixates upon her
identifying facial scar, while she does her best to conceal it behind
her hair.
At one point he buys a Japanese sex
toy. And some have suggested she is this toy,
animated into personhood only in his warped mind. (See here for an example.) Certainly, we're given multiple
points of comparison between the two, a clear sign she is being
objectified by him. But to turn a comparison into an equivalence is
too literal a reading. In the morning-after scene, perhaps the film's
key moment, he sees her turn back into another faceless face, as she
starts to recite the set platitudes he's heard earlier. Were she the
toy, surely it's that she would turn into. In fact, I'm going to
argue almost the opposite about her.
It's not precisely spelt out why he's
able to perceive her uniquely, but it must be to do with her lack of
'face' - of presentation. Unlike the smoothly smiling mass she's
almost childishly guileless, spilling out her lack of her sexual
experience. Yet when he hits on calling her Anomalisa she asks to be
called that “all the time”, then corrects herself – there won't
be any “all the time”. And for all his compulsively gushing that
this is a life-changing event, that they should straight away move
cities to be together, its her assessment which holds. While he
compulsively grasps at straws she – if crippled by low self-esteem
- is grounded. (To a degree they resemble to the identical twins in
Kaufman's earlier 'Adaptation', one self-important
and self-absorbed, the other louche but at home in the world.)
And we recognise the same truth as her.
We're expected to not just recognise the Dream Girl trope but
simultaneously see the folly in it. A self-pitying middle-aged man
will manage to turn his life around by screwing an impressionable
younger woman? Yeah, right. “I thought she was special and unique,
so special that being with her could change everything. But she was
just like the rest!” How many times have you heard some sad sap
burble that one in a bar, as he cries into his beer? We don't expect
it to work for him, and then it doesn't.
But the film's great paradox, which
makes the Dream Girl debate so potent yet so irresolvable, is this -
Lisa's easily the most likeable character in the film. (There's such
a false opposition between her low self-esteem and his insistence
she's extraordinary, I felt like yelling at the screen “no, you're
just okay. And it's okay to be okay!” I am at
heart a simple soul like that.) But then most-liked out of this
company may be a prize for which there's little competition. More to
the point, she's also the most realised. She may well be a bundle of
quirks and insecurities, but Michael's no more than a set of symptoms
with a name attached. Lisa's not just the most real character to
Michael but to us too. And yet the film remains his.
And this paradox is accentuated by Lisa
ostensibly coming out of it the best. She writes to Michael in a
bookended counterpoint to the “fuck you” letter he still keeps
from his ex, suggesting the encounter's instilled in her a new-found
confidence. Is Kaufman simply trying to reverse the Dream Girl trope,
where the validation rubs off him and sticks to her? If so it doesn't
really work. For all its fumbling attempts at intimacy, there's a
creepiness – even a wrongness – about their one night stand which
goes against any notion there's validation to be claimed.
It doesn't seem too unreasonable to
suggest that Michael is a dark reflection of Kaufman himself, his own
worst tendencies taken out and stuffed inside a latex fetish. But
perhaps the film succeeds too well in this, in getting inside
Michael's head, and can't extricate itself when it needs to. One
small line stood out, when Lisa's friend encourages her to go with
him because “he's gorgeous”. Which must surely qualify as one of
the most unearned lines in cinema history. Perhaps she's supposed to
have her own perception filter, which can't tell fame from
attraction. But it's one of several points which come too close to
wish-fulfilment for comfort.
Some films you review because you feel
you have something to say about them. For others its almost the
opposite, you need some way of working out how you felt about them
and it might as well be pen and paper. And there's nothing wrong with
the second kind, films don't have to be neat and tidy. But sometimes
when you have a conflicted reaction to a film its because the film
itself is conflicted.
THE DEVIL SPEAKS TRUE
Dome Studio Theatre, Sat 19th March
A version of 'Macbeth'
played out in actual or semi darkness? It did cause me to joke about
'The Scottish Murder in the Dark' and all the rest
of it. Yet as a way to see one of Shakespeare's most claustrophobic
plays, it also appealed. As it turned out, Goat and Monkey had a
different fish to fry. They describe their performance's means and ends like so:
”'The Devil Speaks True'
uses wireless headphones, projection, scent, a physical performer and
binaural sound design to plunge audiences into an intimate, 360
degree experience... a chilling exploration of the psychological
effects of war.”
Scenes from the play were alternated
with testimonies from those who warfare had inflicted with post
traumatic stress disorder. When not in pitch black, the onstage
action was confined to a few semi-static tableaus, in a manner
similar to illustrations in a novel.
The headphone-based sound design by
Dominic Kennedy was indeed evocative. The disturbing nature of the
performance, warned of in both pre-publicity and by the ushers before
you went in, seemed to concern itself with the interview accounts.
But it was the sound design which unsettled. The headphones trap you
in with the sounds and voices, they're directed at you rather than
disseminated, like you're inside someone else's psychoscape. And
sound devoid of context often takes on an eerie effect.
'The Rest is Silence' by DreamThinkSpeak, also took a
Shakespeare play as a jumping-off point. But where they condensed
'Hamlet' down to a skeleton, this was more
reductive still - like chopping some limbs off 'Macbeth'
and shaking them at you.
It might seem charmingly traditional to
assume an audience will know Shakespeare from their eddyercation,
along with how to do up a bow tie and which direction to pass port
in. But in actuality it's something much
more modern. The performance is something like a hypertext, patching
itself together out of chunks of iambic verse and testimony tapes.
But so little of the play survives it becomes a hypertext with no
underlying text. Sections were rendered inaudible, as if just a sound
source.
The focus on Macbeth's erstwhile buddy
Banquo as the PTSD survivor becomes problematic. One reason given is
that he sees the witches. But while (as we're told) survivors can
continue to 'see' memories of incidents they can't shake, there's no
suggestion they also get beset by apparitions – so the connection
seems unclear. And besides, Macbeth sees the witches too. Plus, in
what's normally regarded as Banquo's best-known appearance, he
returns as a ghost to silently accuse his old mucker of his murder.
Which fits the model more closely, though it makes Macbeth himself
seem more like the afflicted. So why not make Macbeth the subject of
their 'Macbeth'?
But that would start to associate the
affliction with feelings of guilt. Which would undermine the narrow
focus where sufferers are treated as witnesses of horror, never
involved in what they saw. A kidnapped IT consultant is treated as on
a par with soldiers. Let's not get on to how or why a soldier might
experience guilt, or whether or not the feeling is rational or
justified. (This isn't, and doesn't have to be, a work about the
British occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan.) The point is that this
narrowness seems symptomatic of treating the play as a set of
pullable quotes. You cut up the cloth to make your patches, and the
big picture cannot help but be lost.
There's also more prosaic problems. I
find I need time to tune in to the heightened nature of Shakespeare's
language, and the everyday English of the testimonies kept throwing
me back out of it. And the lack of narrative leaves the performance
with no real momentum. We don't just not get the play's ending, we
really don't get much of an ending at all.
Lin Gardner's Guardian review summed the problem up as not
enough 'Macbeth'. But perhaps it was the other way
round. For what I found to stay speaking to me afterwards was not the
Bard’s timeless verse but the survivor testimonies. Perhaps they,
set among the soundscapes, would have been enough. Or perhaps they
could have been interspersed with multiple quotes from literature and
poetry which seemed to suggest at post-trauma, rather than trying to
pin the whole of it onto poor Banquo.
Some intriguing ideas made for an
interesting failure. But still, a failure.
Should
you not be familiar with this infamous play,
an absurdist assault on the senses, know first that it's first
Parisian staging in 1896 led to instant audience uproar. (Author
Alfred Jarry later claimed he'd hired goons to stir by countering the
rest of the audience, cheering when they booed and vice versa.) At
the inaugural Dadaist club, the Cabaret Voltaire, extracts from the
play were read. It's plot and, more important, tone were actually
best described by another audience member I overheard - “imagine
'Macbeth' if it had been written by Cartman from
'South Park'.” (And I really
wish I'd said that.)
Initially,
I'll admit, I was suspicious of the notion of a version with live
actors. I've always contended the play works best either with
puppets, as was a Jarry's original intention, or as an animation.
(The first public performance used actors, but masked and described
by Jarry as “man-sized marionettes”.)
Both
mediums lend themselves to render the title character as monstrous
and diminutive, and are least likely to try and humanise the sick
beast. (He was described by the Independent's Paul Taylor as “an
ovoid oaf... a Humpty Dumpty monarch with a loo-brush for a sceptre
and a set of a lavatorial id-like appetites ungoverned by the least
suggestion of a superego.”) Crucially, his motives must be
as petty-minded as his means depraved. In particular, the faintest
whiff of 'proper' acting, of digging Stanislavaskian depths into his
green candle, are to be avoided at all costs.
As
it transpires, Cheek By Jowl have found an ingenious way around this.
They give a performance that's (in the colloquial sense of the word)
schizophrenic. They start out with a naturalistically played scene, a
dinner party held in the gleaming white of a designer home. This then
flips arbitrary into the id-world of Ubu, the gestures suddenly
spasmodic and grotesque, the voices strangulated and guttural.
Lighting switches and projections then change the environment almost
entirely, even as we're aware we're looking at the same scene.
That
last part is crucial. Throughout the props remain the same as the
standard domestic paraphernalia – a lampshade becomes a crown, a
food blender a weapon, silver foil booty, like children's play
transforming the meaning of objects while their parents are out.
In
one memorable scene the dinner guests arrive, then promptly reverse
out again – as if in a backwards film. Their seemingly spontaneous
gestures, their waving and hugging are reproduced exactly, suggesting
they were never so naturalistic in the first place.
...all
of which is of course as Freudian as my green candle. One is id to
the other's ego, the sublimated struggle of each against all, buried
only slightly beneath those bourgeois pleasantries. Proceedings swap
jolting back and forth between the two, chalk cut with cheese, never
giving you the chance to get used to either.
The
resetting is perpetuated through the performance, and needs to be.
Back then, you could stun an audience with the word “merde”,
which is precisely how Jarry started this play. Yet literal versions
of Ubu staged now, “merdes” all present, would no longer have any
shock value left to trade. It would be like the Sex Pistols reforming
and... oh, hang on, that actually happened. Anyway, you take the
point. The closer the imitation, the more the point will be lost.
It's a straight choice between preserving the form and keeping the
spirit. Which is, I suspect, why director Declan Donellan reacted with umbrage when an interviewer
described the play as a classic - “I don’t do [these plays]
because they’re classics; I do them because they’re good.”
Which is of course precisely the right attitude.
And
Ubu without the accoutrements, the hood, the spiral on the pot belly,
works like the vampire without the cape or the superhero without the
cowl. Which is to say, it works. It short-circuits
expectations, discards what once might have been emblems but are now
merely heirlooms, to get closer to the heart of things. The result is
a richly grotesque seam of black humour, where you're often not sure
whether to respond with shock or mirth, and mostly can't help but do
both.
The
play is performed entirely in French, with surtitles for us
linguistically challenged Brits. Much like the live actors, I
wondered how this would work. Keeping to the original language is not
necessary. Jarry's text could hardly be more basely anti-poetic so is
hardly likely to lose in translation. But, much like the live actors,
it works surprisingly well. Our received images of French may be as
the language of romance, diplomacy and expensive consumption, but in
actuality it lends itself to the guttural with ease.
While
the performance was almost ceaselessly inventive, it should be said
it was also overlong. In that sense it was
actorly, as if those performances were too priceless to be shoehorned
into mere purpose. Yet 'Ubu' should, above all
things, be a short, sharp, shock. This was particularly noticeable in
the opening. As said, the 'classic' opening cannot be kept, and
swapping it for a naturalistic scene may be smart. But it risked
going beyond lulling us into a false sense of security, and instead
sending us to sleep. And what foreshadows and undercurrents there
were seemed a rather banal literalisation of the theme, reaching
their nadir with the camcorder close-ups of the stains in the toilet
rug.
The
film projections could also feel superfluous. The semi-abstract ones,
used for scene-setting worked well. Much of the play is set in what
Jarry described as “Poland, that is to say Nowhere.” He suggested
getting someone to walk on and “put
up signs indicating the locations of the various scenes”.
By comparison,'Hamlet'
is a historical documentary about Denmark of scrupulous accuracy.
Suggesting at the setting, rather than indelibly taking us there, is
the perfect thing to do. But the repeated live projections of the
scene we were actually watching seemed gimmicky, done simply because
they could.
But
more problematic is the character of the teenage son, brooding under
his sullen fringe. At times he seemed able to switch things between
the 'ego' and 'id' settings, as if he was magically in charge of the
play's remote control. Perhaps we were in similar territory to
Haneke's film 'Hidden', with the teenager as the
inside outsider, neither guest nor host at the dinner party - and so
able to see it for what it is.
If
so, it feels too close for comfort to the self-image of the teenager.
'Ubu' is of course not a politically sophisticated
play, nor is it intended to be. Jarry wrote it as a young man, early
versions while still at school in order to satirise a teacher.
Running on pith and bile, it in many ways was a punk record before
its time. Yet to simply flatter the teenager as a natural rebel seems
too much. The child is of course living off the silver foil of the
parents, even as he emanates disdain from their sofa.
There's
also an odd connection between the family teenager and the avenging
Prince Boggerlas, who is of course not an outsider but very much a
character within the play. It's like he casts himself in the play and
so gets to make himself the hero. The climactic scene, as he stalks
and dispatches his adult antagonists, seemed to push things beyond
'Hidden' into Lynne Ramsey's post-Columbine 'We
Need to Talk About Kevin'.(The Independent review even suggested the alternate title
'We Need to Talk About Boggerlas.')
This
scene is notably not in Jarry's original play, where the monster
survived to belch and grab again. And we seem encouraged to fit it
with another added scene – the beginning. In one he prowls the
house with a camcorder, in the other a gun, as if we should find an
equivalence between them. But a post-Columbine Boggerlas is frankly
boggling. Any suggestion his counter-Ubu is merely another Ubu, a
monster begat by such monstrousness, does not seem to have been
reflected anywhere else up to this point.
And
how could it be? The teenager was more than half a century distant
when 'Ubu' was first performed. His roots are more
in the grasping nature of the child, of infantile fixations being
grotesquely indulged by the power inherent in an adult body.
Jarry
himself came to be nicknamed Ubu, and as time passed took on more and
more of his gait and manners. Which suggests to me Jarry's intent was
different to all that, both more potent and more incisive. Who is
Ubu, chest stuffed with medals he was awarded himself for valour in
furthering his own self-interest? Of course he's us.
He's every self-centred thought you ever had and suppressed
shame-faced, turned into a totem to assail you. He only does what we
would do, given his half-a-chance.
Jarry
himself said “I wanted the stage to stand before the public like
one of those mirrors in fairy tales... where the vicious villain sees
himself with bulls' horns and a dragons' body, like the exaggerations
of his own vicious nature.”
Or,
to translate into pithier and more modern parlance - “that's you,
that is.” We become represented by a puppet so he can work like a
fetish, drawing out the evil that it may be shut away somewhere else.
Modernism
is always ridiculed for assuming it has a radical audience, while
actually relying on a bourgeois one. Yet 'Ubu' is
aimed straight between the eyes of that bourgeois audience. Teenagers
may have not originally been in Jarry' sights. But they should not
escape his distorting mirror. None should escape.
(This,
incidentally, is why I've always considered it misplaced to tie Ubu
too closely to Franco, Botha or any actual tinpot dictator. Ubu may
in many ways resemble Brecht's Arturo Ui from the play of the same
name. But while Ui was tagged as a diminutive copy of Hitler, Ubu's
pot belly is broader than that.)
But
perhaps the true test of an adaptation isn't whether it re-works the
text into a new configuration, but whether it portrays the text in a
new light. At one point Ubu, looking for fresh financiers to bag and
dispatch, the better to line his pockets, stalks the audience.
Breaking into English for the only time, he reminded us that where we
sat bordered the City of London – one of the world's great
financial institutions, whose recent Ubu-like greed and folly has
brought misery to millions.
But
mostly it brought to light that, if the teenager is in many ways a
problem of the production, the production is still able to find a
problem in the play. While the play became a darling of modernist
shock, it is in many ways quite reactionary. First performed during
the dawning days of Modernism, it looks back as much as it does
forward. Ubu's crimes are entirely bourgeois; his insatiable greed,
his lack of decorum or respect for tradition. His self-coronation
scene compares him to Napoleon.
While
the Tzar is referred to as “builder of mountains”, a proper toff
who rules by divine right. Lacking these reserves and refinements,
Ubu goes all-out to sate his senses. The tomb-robbing scene sums this
up the best. Gold is buried with the ancestors out of respect for
tradition. In seeking to rob it, Ubu is seduced by its cash value and
fails to see its true worth.
Perhaps
this is a side-effect of the play's purpose, of holding that
distorting mirror up to the bourgeoisie. For they do not through
choice distinguish themselves from the proletariat so much as the
landowning class, grandiloquent and indulgent, too comfortable where
they sit to be driven by avarice.
The
downside of Jarry's anti-naturalism emerges here, for one of the
things unnecessary to show on stage becomes the armies pressed into
fighting one another. The final line of Jarry's original was
“there'll always be a Poland. Otherwise there wouldn't be any
Poles.” Yet this Poland is Nowhere. And no Poland means no Poles. A
play that makes the bourgeoisie monsters, but monsters according to
their own compass, may be congenitally unable to come out any other
colour than Ubu green. Perhaps a play devised in a boarding school,
however irreverent, was always going to be circumscribed by it's
walls. In this way the anti-bourgeois is like the teenager. He is
still defined by being bourgeois, unless or until he finds some other
centre of gravity.
So,
in inventing a fresh perspective from which to see this play, the
production exposed a political weakness endemic to it. It may seem
strange to feel grateful for having been shown one of your favourite
plays in a lesser light. But yet I am!
Coming
soon! 2014 would seem most likely. For we seem to be at the
end of the year again. However did that happen? So the next few weeks
(or, more likely, couple of months) will be dedicated to some quite
unseemly catching up. Be it gigs, exhibitions or (as here) plays. If
Ubu's sin is avarice, mine is surely tardiness...
