Postcard from Adelaide
Adelaide Festival 2017: Schaubühne Berlin Richard III, Barrie Kosky's Saul
As a friend and colleague remarked to me when we met up to see a show at the Adelaide Festival Centre on Saturday night, there’s something about the Festival here that feels more like a national (and even international) convergence of audiences and artists than any other festival in Australia. Perhaps Perth is just a little too far away for people from the eastern seaboard to make the journey; Melbourne feels a little too much like a festival-city all year-round; Sydney doesn’t need a festival in order to be a destination-city for work or pleasure; and Brisbane and the other smaller or more regionally-focused festivals are…well, just a little too small.
There’s also something about Adelaide itself – the size, the
layout, the weather in March, the proximity of public space (especially the river
and parklands) to the main venues, the bon
vivant culture – that makes it an ideal setting for an arts festival. Whatever
the reason, there’s a sense of the city coming together to celebrate itself and
the arts – a sense, in short, of festivity – that makes it hard to resist joining
in, if one has the means to do so.
I add the last qualification advisedly, as whenever I make
it over here (which is almost invariably at Festival-time) I can’t help
noticing the ‘other side’ of Adelaide – and perhaps of all cities with which
one isn’t overly familiar: the sense of a massive social divide between the
haves and have-nots. In Adelaide this is accompanied by an indefinable but sinister
undertow, which is partly fed by urban mythology and partly by the city’s
peculiar status as somewhere midway between miniature metropolis and large
country town, with little in the way of a surviving industrial base to employ
its (increasingly) non-working class. As such, it has something in common with
Perth, now that the mining boom has come to an end and the ensuing recession is
having a visible impact on the streets. As I walked the ravaged CBD en route from my comfortable digs in east Adelaide to the Festival venues
and their mostly well-heeled patrons, I couldn’t help feeling a little haunted
by some uncomfortable questions about who is invited to the feast, and who is
left outside the door.
Nevertheless, arriving at my first destination, Her
Majesty’s Theatre, to see the Schaubühne Berlin production of Richard III on the Friday night of the Festival’s
opening weekend, I picked up on an extra air of excitement and expectation around
this, the first under Neil Armfield and Rachel Healey’s tenure as joint artistic
directors. There’s a sense of guiding artistic vision that recalls Barrie Kosky’s
legendary Festival in 1996 (back in the days when it was still a biennial
event, and all the more attractive as a pilgrimage because of that); along with
perhaps a slightly broader mainstream appeal; and (most importantly for me)
some irresistible theatre.
Thomas Ostermeier joined the artistic directorate of the
Schaubühne Berlin in 1999, and since then the company has acquired a reputation
as perhaps the most trend-setting theatre company in that most theatrically
trend-setting of cities. As another theatre colleague of mine pointed out in
the foyer, Richard III is the latest
in a series of re-definitive re-stagings of the classic masterpieces of ‘bourgeois
drama’ (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov) by Ostermeier and others at the Schaubühne
over the past fifteen years. Several of these have toured to Australia, including
Ostermeier’s versions of A Doll’s House,
Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People
and Hamlet. The latter, like Richard, was translated and adapted by
playwright and regular Ostermeier collaborator Marius von Mayenburg and
featured Lars Eidinger in the title role.
I didn’t see Eidinger’s Hamlet,
but from what I’ve heard his performance as the ‘mad’ Prince foreshadowed many aspects
that characterise his version of Shakespeare’s crippled psychopathic King.
Perhaps most notable is his use of extemporization – or perhaps a musical term
like ‘decoration’ or ‘embellishment’ would be more exact. The Shakespeare text
(in von Mayenburg’s German translation) is delivered as written (and translated
back into English surtitles projected upstage) but is frequently interrupted by
Eidinger, who repeats lines in English, or stops to read the surtitles in
mock-astonishment, or breaks into an Eminem lyric, or delivers improvised one-liners,
or even (at one point) leads the audience in a mocking chant of abuse directed
at one of the other characters. He also moves freely (and at times seemingly on
impulse) between the stage and the auditorium, exiting and entering not only
through the wings but also the side-doors that lead to the foyer, or lurks in
the semi-darkness around the outskirts of the seating, like a spider
permanently lurking in the corners of the mind.
Eidinger has an animalistic physicality which, together with
his powerful physique and anarchic stage persona, makes him resemble a
rock-star as much as an actor. This is supported by the
central feature of Jan Pappelbaum’s set design: a retractable microphone
dangling from the ceiling, which Richard uses like an announcer in a boxing
match whenever delivering a soliloquy or aside. Florence von Gerkan’s costume
design for him similarly includes a boxer’s protective leather head-brace and boxer’s
tape strapped across his knuckles, together with a padded hunch visibly strapped
to his back and one outsized padded shoe to give him an exaggerated club-foot.
All this contributed to a thrilling sense of Richard’s
theatricality, his punk-like disregard for propriety (stripping down to nudity
in the Lady Anne wooing scene, and again in the later battle scenes), his
confronting rapport with the audience, and his increasingly unpredictable and
unhinged relationship with the other characters – and ultimately with himself.
For Ostermeier’s (and von Mayenberg’s) version of the play is not so much a
political study in tyranny, or even a psychological study in anti-social
personality disorder, as it is a philosophical study in solipsism – the belief
that the mind is the only reality, and the logical consequences that follow.
It’s as if the production took its cue from Richard’s line in the precursor
play to this one, Henry VI Part 3: ‘I
am myself alone.’
German tradition has indeed long understood Shakespeare’s
characters through the lense of Romantic irony as embodying the existential predicament
of ‘absolute freedom’. As such, Eidinger’s Richard is more of a Dostoyevskian nihilist
for whom ‘everything is permitted’ like Stavrogin or Ivan Karamazov than the familiar
paranoid twentieth-century dictators to whom he is usually likened. This
becomes more apparent in the second (and for me more revelatory) half of the
show (which runs for two-and-a-half hours with no interval), when Richard
assumes power only to find himself entering a kind of nightmare from which he
can no longer awake, gradually becoming his own double and ultimately suicidal
enemy. As such, he comes more and more to resemble Hamlet, who would count
himself ‘a king of infinite space’ were it not that he has ‘bad dreams’.
As for his deformity (clearly a theatrical artifice rather
than a realistic impediment), once he becomes king it is artificially
constrained and corrected by a corset and neck-brace, as if the fulfilment of
his wishes in the form of absolute power became the ultimate form of imprisonment
within his own consciousness. Indeed there’s something both terrifying and
pitiful about his transformation in Act IV when he dips his face in a bowl of
whitewash and becomes his own death-mask before wooing Queen Elizabeth for her
daughter’s hand; or lies on the table and moans like a child for ‘a horse…a
horse…’ before hitching himself by the leg to the microphone cable and being
hoisted up like a joint of meat on a butcher’s hook in the final image of the
play.
Perhaps inevitably the rest of the cast and production seemed
somewhat eclipsed by this central performance. Strong and complex secondary
characters – particularly the women of the play – were given short shrift,
almost as if they were more like emanations of Richard’s mind rather than
fully-fledged characters in their own right. Jan Pappelbaum’s split-level set
design – basically a rough façade with balcony, steep stairs and a fireman’s
pole – kept the action circulating; Sebastian Dupouey’s video projections of
silhouettes of birds in flight onto the façade between scenes reinforced the
ambience of swirling dread; Erich Schneider’s lighting design was almost clinically
cold (the most conspicuous light being the one installed in Richard’s
microphone which sculpted his face with an eerie glow whenever he spoke); and Nils
Ostendorf’s live downstage drumming (supplemented by an aggressive techno
soundtrack) added to the sense of a perverse circus or nightclub act gone
wrong. Special mention should be made of the grimly humorous use of Bunraku-style
puppet-schoolboys as the two hapless Princes in the Tower – their puppet-corpses
later delivered to a trussed-up King Richard in his neck-brace and corset looking
more and more like a puppet himself.
In short: the whole production was an object-lesson in theatrical
craft servicing a single-minded and rigorous artistic conception, and a central
performance which felt like one of the handful I’ve seen in my life that in
some sense re-defined for me not only the role in question but acting itself.
We don’t see (or make) work like this often enough in
Australia. We should.
*
From one mad King to another: Barrie Kosky’s fully staged
production of Handel’s oratorio Saul is
probably the defining coup of Armfield and Healey’s program (all performances
sold out within days of its announcement last year). Originally conceived and
presented as a Glyndebourne Festival production in 2015, it’s here remounted in
collaboration with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the State Opera Chorus, and
conducted by Melbourne Conservatorium-based early music specialist, keyboard
performer and scholar Erin Helyard (who makes a spectacular stage appearance at
one point on a miniature revolve while playing the organ like Handel himself –
or indeed Barrie in one of his earlier theatre productions). The remount still
features the British baritone Christopher Purves in the title role, along with (of
course) the original costume and set design by Katrin Lea Tag, lighting design
by Joachim Klein, and choreography by Otto Pichler, all regular collaborators
with Barrie in his capacity as intendant
at the Komische Oper in Berlin and elsewhere.
The rest of the cast includes a hauntingly voiced counter-tenor
Christopher Lowrey as the future King David; stalwart tenor Adrian Strooper (a
member of the Komische Oper ensemble) as Saul’s son (and David’s devoted
friend) Jonathan; gilt-edged soprano Mary Bevan as Saul’s daughter Marab;
thrilling Australian soprano Taryn Fiebig as her sister Michal (for me giving
the standout musical-dramatic-comedic performance of the night); Australian
tenor and cabaret artist Kanen Breen (in full artificial bare-breasted drag) as
the Witch of Endor; and versatile tenor Stuart Jackson in the composite role of
the High Priest, Saul’s herdsman Doeg, his cousin and commander-in-chief Abner,
and the Amakelite messenger who brings David the news of Saul and Jonathan’s
death in battle – all of which he encompassed in the guise of an impishly camp,
Bacchic master-of-ceremonies.
Barrie is a master at staging deliciously and deliriously surreal
extravaganzas which celebrate Eros in all its polymorphous possibilities; but
his vision also provides apocalyptic glimpses of the chasm of catastrophe into
which we fall when Dionysus is denied – or given full sway. If his Urtext is The Bacchae, then his horizon is the Holocaust. However he is also
(as he calls himself in the program note) ‘an extravagant minimalist’, at least
when it comes to the layout of the stage itself, which is generally open and
uncluttered in terms of set or furniture, so as to allow for maximum focus on
the bodies (and voices) of the performers. His special talent is for striking
physical images and collective movement; in opera, this lends itself especially
to the staging of the choruses. As such, he remains true to the German operatic
tradition of Bewegungsregie
(movement-direction) as practised by his precursor Walter Felsenstein (the
founder of the Komische Oper).
Saul provides
ample opportunity for his vision and stagecraft to exercise themselves because
as an oratorio it lacks inherent physical or dramatic impetus. Instead it’s
more like a series of magnificent musical numbers (and corresponding emotional
states) without sufficient narrative or thematic connective tissue between them
to constitute a satisfyingly continuous or internally coherent experience
without some form of radical directorial intervention. In fact Handel’s operas
suffer from a similar lack of dramaturgical flow, in comparison say with
Mozart’s – though this arguably has as much to do with the librettos as it does
with the music (Charles Jennens, the librettist of Saul, was no Da Ponte). Barrie’s theatrical and thematic
preoccupations – which focus on the body as means of expression and subject-matter
– therefore have plenty of space to inhabit and animate what would otherwise
remain dramatically inert.
In fact the most striking feature of Barrie’s staging in Saul is the use of crowded tableaux vivants or ‘still lives’ –
whether composed of brightly lit and costumed human bodies or the more
traditional arrangements of food, flowers and domestic possessions which we
associate with the period (and especially the art and architecture) of the Baroque
from which the oratorio is drawn. These tableaux are arranged on and around two
huge (literal) tables which, themselves inventively rearranged from one scene
to the next, are the only stage-furniture in the show. They evoke an age of
economic and material bounty (at least for the ruling classes), but also of religious
and political reaction and absolutism, against which renewed social, artistic and intellectual impulses towards
freedom were already striving (and can be heard in the music itself).
Barrie’s interest in the work however is less political or
historical than psychological and archetypal. Saul’s ‘madness’ – much debated
by Biblical scholars, theologians and psychologists even today – here becomes
the divine punishment visited on one who resists or attempts to over-regulate
his own (fundamentally sexual) impulses. This is not the madness of
Nebuchadnezzar, which is a punishment for blasphemy and pride, or even of Lear,
which has more to do with the abuses of power and injustice. It’s more closely
related to the madness of Pentheus in The
Bacchae – and in Barrie’s surreal imagination leads to a similar
de-naturing (and eventual dismemberment). Saul’s aggressive envy toward David
as a rival talent, warrior and future king is thus a twisted form of narcissistic sexual jealousy – in contrast with his son Jonathan, who loves David
but is willing to share him with his sister Michal (unlike their sister Merab,
who rejects David because of his inferior social class even more emphatically
than her father does). As such, Saul becomes
a perverse family saga which resembles Pasolini’s Teorema, with David as the angelic object of lust whose beauty
destroys a dynasty.
The most striking image of all in this production occurs
when Saul visits the Witch of Endor (here represented as a kind of Tiresias complete
with ‘wrinkled dugs’ as Eliot describes him in The Waste Land) on an empty plain of black rubble, and suckles on
his/her teat in order to summon up the ghost of the prophet Samuel within himself
(the role is here sung by Saul himself as if in a form of demonic possession).
The same empty black plain is then filled with the corpses of the Chorus of
Israelites who have been slain in battle by the Philistines – among them the
decapitated bodies of Saul and Jonathan, their heads sitting in the rubble
beside them, in a direct echo of the severed head of Goliath which sat there in
the rubble, illuminated by Joachim Klein’s Carravaggio-like lighting, as the
opening image of the opera.
Purves is marvellous in the title role, vigorous and
expressive in voice and action, and fully embraces Barrie’s highly physical
interpretation of the role’s demands. In an interesting parallel with Eidinger’s
Richard III, this ‘mad king’ also breaks out into extemporized speech during the
opera while the other characters continue singing – underscoring the sense that
madness also involves a kind of aesthetic ‘break in form’. Personally I didn’t
feel this device worked as well as it did in Richard, possibly because it felt more like a gear-change into
naturalism which seemed a little weak in comparison with the ritualised nature of the
rest of the production, and the work itself. At times (particularly towards the end of the show) I also felt that perhaps there was a little too much Bewegung for Bewegungs sake, in comparison with the shattering moments of stillness when the mis-en-scene was at its most eloquent.
Musically and (for the most part) dramatically, though, this
Saul was a triumph, and the audience
responded accordingly when the curtain came down, even more than they did with Richard. Mad kings, psychopaths,
narcissists…perhaps there was some recognition of the times we live in.
