Monday 23 March 2020



Postcard 2 from Adelaide Festival 2020 


Dramas of Ideas in a Time of Crisis


The Doctor/Mouthpiece




It’s been a fortnight since I saw The Doctor and Mouthpiece at the Adelaide Festival. How time flies. 

Back then the coronavirus was a secondary local topic of conversation and cause for concern, some way behind the Democrat primaries in the United States. Since then, the Covid-19 pandemic has engulfed the world. It’s changed everything – including the global conversation, and my perspective on both plays.

In retrospect, it now seems ironic that The Doctor – which I experienced at the time as a play about identity politics – is essentially a medical drama; and even more so that it’s an adaptation of a play by Schnitzler that deals with the ‘virus’ of anti-Semitism.

Similarly, Mouthpiece – which ostensibly deals with exploitation, appropriation and the question of ‘who has the right to tell whose stories’ – when viewed through the lens of the current crisis becomes fundamentally about economic and social precarity, physical and psychological health, the need for boundaries and ‘distancing’, and even the ethics of whether or not a public gathering (in this case a theatrical performance) should take place. 

The meaning of work lies its future reception rather than its intentions, as Walter Benjamin once said.

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British auteur-director Robert Icke has been repeatedly described in the London press as ‘the great hope of British theatre’. His sensational (indeed sensationalised) version of 1984 was co-adapted and co-directed with Duncan McMillan for Headlong Theatre, and transferred to the West End and Broadway before touring Australia last year. More recently his play and production The Doctor  – ‘very freely adapted’ from Arhtur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi and starring stage and screen luminary Juliet Stevenson – was produced by the Almeida in London in 2019, and was duly presented as the big-ticket work of text-based theatre at this year’s Adelaide Festival in the Dunstan Theatre. 

Schnitzler was fin de siècle Viennese-Jewish doctor, playwright and author of fiction. He’s most famous for his literary and dramatic treatment of sexual and class hypocrisy: his most widely translated and performed play Reigen (known in French as La Ronde) was adapted by David Hare as The Blue Room; and his novella Traumnovelle is the basis for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

However he also wrote about anti-Semitism – most directly in Professor Bernhardi. The play is set in Vienna in 1900, when widespread anti-Jewish sentiment was on the rise and being exploited by populist politicians, with consequences Schnitzler could not have predicted but we now know all too well. In fact the dialogue is peppered with subtle and not-so-subtle hints about the characters’ religious or racial identities, ideological allegiances and personal attitudes towards each other. However the inciting incident of the play soon breaks down the protocols of speech and conduct among medical colleagues – from formal hierarchy to informal collegiality – so that cracks apparent at the outset soon become unbridgeable chasms.

The plot deals with a Jewish doctor and director of a charity-funded hospital who prevents a Catholic priest from giving the last rites to a female patient dying of septicemia following a botched abortion. He does so in order to spare her distress because she’s delirious from the infection and unaware that she’s dying; the summoning of the priest is a routine procedure that the doctor decides to overrule.

Nevertheless he’s falsely accused of striking the priest and hounded by the press; the hospital is threatened with bankruptcy; and a law proposed in parliament banning Jews from certain positions. The doctor is betrayed or abandoned by most of his (non-Jewish) colleagues, who agree to him being charged with ‘obstructing religious observance’ (a law in Vienna at the time which has something in common with the proposed ‘freedom of religion’ legislation currently being discussed in Australia). He resigns from his position in protest, is put on trial and ultimately sent to prison.

Professor Bernhardi is as finely wrought and multi-faceted as it is open to interpretation. Alongside the issue of anti-Semitism – Bernardi is the victim of racially motivated lies, hate speech, persecution and even bribery (a colleague offers to help him if he appoints a Christian instead of a Jewish specialist to the hospital staff) – the play untangles a tightly knotted complex of related personal, professional, political, psychological and philosophical conundrums. These include the difference between professional and personal competence; righteousness and arrogance; workplace ethics and workplace politics; legal, medical and administrative ethics; moral consequentialism and deontology; ethics and politics; science and religion. In particular, one might point to the currency of debates over abortion (and the health risks associated with its illegality); the question of what constitutes a ‘good’ death; and the issue of ‘religious freedom’ already mentioned.

This level of complexity, ambiguity and sophistication is matched by Schnitzler’s typically Viennese irony, lightness of touch and sense of perspective. As a social drama of ideas, it shares at least some of these qualities with Shaw. Nevertheless the writing also probes at Ibsen’s deeper vein of individual tragedy, as well as Chekhov’s all-embracing sense of collective absurdity.

Schnitzler himself was no stranger to controversy in the court of public opinion. His earlier play Reigen was banned from publication in 1904, and attacked as ‘Jewish pornography’ when it was finally performed in Vienna in 1921, with riots taking place outside the theatre. Professor Bernhardi was banned from performance in Vienna in 1912 for its realistic depiction of anti-Semitism. His works were described by Hitler as ‘Jewish filth’ and banned by the Nazis when they took power in 1933, and his books were publicly burnt (along with those of Marx, Freud, Einstein and Kafka). 

The doctor-writer described his works with typically Viennese understatement and evasiveness: ‘I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?’ In fact Professor Bernhardi was originally billed as ‘a comedy’ – perhaps in the spirit of his fellow doctor-playwright Chekhov, who described his own plays in similar terms. A more obvious precursor  is Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The opinionated, contrarian anti-hero Doctor Stockmann is a prototype for Professor Bernhardi; and Ibsen likewise admitted that he was unsure if his play was a comedy or a drama. 

An updated English adaptation of Professor Bernhardi by Samuel Adamson that underlined the satirical aspects of the play was produced in London by the Oxford Stage Company and Dumbfounded Theatre in 2005. More recently an uncharacteristically low-key and textually faithful production directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Berlin Schaubühne in 2016 also toured to the UK.

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The Doctor is set in a private medical institute presumably somewhere in the UK that specialises in Alzheimer’s disease. The protagonist is Doctor Ruth Wolff (Stevenson), the institute’s founder and star physician who also serves on the board of directors. She also happens to be Jewish, and a self-righteous prig. 

Somewhat implausibly, she intervenes in another doctor’s case similar to that of the young woman in Schnitzler’s original play; even more implausibly, the family priest (Jamie Parker) barges into the ward without being restrained by anyone else on the staff or hospital security. Wolff refuses to admit him to the patient’s room, on the grounds that the young woman is unconscious, and has given no authorisation for him to do so. They both immediately start yelling at each other; the priest attempts to force his way in; and Wolff appears to lay a hand on his arm (though the production obfuscates what actually happens with a dramatic movement freeze, sound cue and lighting change). Meanwhile a nurse goes in to check on the young woman, and returns with the news that she’s died, presumably in fear and stress because of the commotion.

The next day the priest accuses Wolff of assault (though it’s not exactly clear why); and predicably there’s a social media pile-on. The hospital board turn on Wolff and vote for her to be dismissed from the board and the hospital staff; but not before (in another implausible scene) the young woman’s father (again played by Parker) bursts into the room (again without any intervention by security staff) and strikes Wolff in the face (another dramatic freeze-frame). Again for reasons that are unclear, especially given her ‘by the book’ character, she doesn’t subsequently charge him with assault; nor does she sue the hospital board for unfair dismissal.

The implausibilities continue to pile up after interval. For some reason Wolff agrees to appear on a Fox News-style (but unanimously ‘progressive’) chat show where she’s grilled by a panel of experts who are all caricatures of political correctness. Despite losing her job, however, the charges against her are (without explanation) dismissed. In a final scene of prolonged implausibility, the priest comes to visit her at her home; she lets him in; and they have a civilised chat about it all.

So much for the plot; the writing is even more ham-fisted. The language and tone is unvaryingly monotonous and monological. Icke seems incapable of writing in character; mostly we hear the voice of the author, or straw men and women whose arguments are easily refuted. Real dialogue or nuance are sadly lacking, and sorely needed. Perhaps that’s the point; but in reinforcing it so rigidly, the play seems part of the problem.

The exception is in the scenes between Wolff and Sami (Liv Hill), a young neighbour in the same block of flats. Despite their plot-redundancy, and the unexplained reason for this unlikely relationship, these scenes are surprisingly well written, and demonstrate genuine complexity. A monologue about having sex in the school toilets was the best piece of writing in the show, and certainly the funniest. It almost seemed to be written by someone else – indeed it seemed to come from another play. In a similar though slightly more sentimental vein, the final scene between doctor and priest was at least a relief in that they finally emerged from behind their masks as three-dimensional human beings: dialogue and nuance at last.

These scenes remind us that drama of ideas does not necessarily involve an endless hurling of brickbats. Among contemporary Australian playwrights working in a similar genre, I found myself thinking almost fondly of David Williamson’s cheerful sense of satire, or the caustic wit of Joanna Murray-Smith. In comparison, The Doctor is closer to the sledgehammer approach of Stephen Sewell. However the latter offers a more penetrating analysis of political psychology, while Icke remains on the more superficial level of cultural politics, which sees everything in terms of ideas rather than material reality. At best one has the sensation of watching an ‘issue-based’ ABC TV drama series onstage, or at worst, reading an opinion piece in The Australian

In terms of ‘issues’, the complexity of Professor Bernardi is reduced to the overriding theme of ‘identity politics’ – a catch-all that extends from race, culture and religion to gender, sexuality and even gender-identity – with the predictable if somewhat gratuitous inclusion of transgender rights thrown into the mix. This results in a false equivalence (especially dear to cultural conservatives) between all forms of identity politics (other than their own) that assimilates ‘political correctness’ with totalitarianism, ‘radical’ left-wing protest with far-right violence, and (even more preposterously and offensively) uses the ‘slippery slope’ argument to compare accusations of discrimination or hate-speech with ‘witch-hunts’ or the Holocaust. In the climactic scene of Act One, for example, The Crucible is openly cited, along with the extermination of the Jews; in one rhetorical howler Wolff is even described as being ‘crucified’. 

At the risk of stating the obvious: privileged white middle-class doctors, academics or journalists (even Jewish ones) are not actually being crucified, burnt at the stake or exterminated; whereas racial and other minorities are still being oppressed by physical persecution and material injustice based on racism and other forms of prejudice. Underlying this false equivalence is a confusion between the symbolic and the real that is arguably symptomatic of contemporary cultural politics in general (on the left as well as on the right). Perhaps it’s even a part of what Icke is railing against. The problem is that in railing against it, he becomes its mirror-image.

This is amplified by the production, albeit in an interesting way (here a spoiler alert is in order, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re ever likely to see the show). I’m referring to the use of reverse-colour and reverse-gender casting, such that virtually every actor except Stevenson is progressively revealed to be playing a character whose racial or gender identity is other than it appears at first sight.

Personally I’ve no argument with inverting racial or gender-based casting. Caryl Churchill does it brilliantly in Cloud Nine, as Genet did before her in The Blacks and (at least potentially and perhaps even implicitly) The Maids. Shakespeare did the same thing, albeit in a more theatrically traditional but all the more subversive way. The same is arguably true of the Greeks, especially Euripides. In all these cases the inversion or subversion of norms is the point of the play. 

In the case of The Doctor however I found the device confusing and distracting. Perhaps it was meant to be an ironic reflection on the politics of identity; or perhaps it was intended as an act of (symbolic) colour or gender ‘blindness’ (a metaphor which is indeed ‘blind’ to social and material reality). Whatever the intention, it seemed to commit precisely the sin of political correctness that the play itself condemns. 

On a more visceral level, it also gave Stevenson and her character an unfair advantage over everyone else in terms of theatrical and moral integrity, almost as if she were being presented as the only ‘real’ person onstage. Once again, Schnitzler is far more nuanced in his portrayal of the humanly flawed but genuinely persecuted Bernhardi (as was Miller in his characterisation of John Proctor). In contrast, Icke makes Wolff an emotional cripple, and then tacks on a back-story about a lover who killed themselves after developing Alzheimer’s that supposedly explains her surface coldness and underlying rage, as well as her over-identification with a patient’s right to a peaceful death.

This lack of subtlety extends to the acting, which (like the writing) is mostly one-note and hysterical. There’s a lot of shouting, banging of fists and over-emotionalising. Once again, the exceptions are the scenes mentioned above between Wolffe and Sami, and the final scene between doctor and priest.

Stevenson herself is a riveting actor in terms of razor-sharp intelligence, emotional force, technical precision and sheer stage presence. She also possesses great comic timing, even in otherwise humourless scenes. However even she resorted to shouting from the first scene of the play onwards.

The rest of the performances – with the exception of Hill and Parker (at least in his final scene) – were woefully under-par, wooden and two-dimensional. Admittedly this was partly due to the writing and the cross-casting, which many in the cast appeared to be struggling with.

Things weren’t helped by the design. Hildegard Bechtier’s streamlined IKEA-style set featured a concave blond wood-panelled back wall, a long functional table surrounded by benches in matching tones, and a white floor that revolved slowly during various dramatic ‘turning points’. These were accompanied by heavy-handed underscoring (sound design and composition by Tom Gibbons) from a live drummer (Hannah Ledwidge) seated on a platform above the back wall.

All these elements – the curved back wall, the furniture and blocking (with the actors seated around the table in crucial scenes), the use of the revolve, and the live percussion – made it difficult to hear the dialogue, despite the use of radio-mics (it was hard to tell from where I was sitting if the actors were wearing these or if they were hidden on the set – possibly both). The curved back wall in particular seemed to create echo-points within the set that were compounded by the mics, so that the acoustic surrounding the actor’s voices constantly changed as they moved around.

As a result even Stevenson’s remarkable anchoring performance never quite landed for me because I couldn’t always understand what she was saying, even (and perhaps especially) when she was shouting; and the situation was even worse for some of the other actors.

In a sense, this flaw in the design goes to the heart of the problem. In a Guardian interview in 2015 Icke described his philosophy of adaptation as being ‘like using a foreign plug…you have to find the adaptor that will let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function’. This analogy betrays the crudity of his approach to adaptation, theatre, and the drama of ideas. 

In comparison with Schnitzler’s original play, The Doctor is simplistic, one-sided, heavy-handed and hysterical. Ultimately it fails – not just as an adaptation of Professor Bernhardi, but on its own terms – because for all its sound and fury it never leaves the echo chamber of ideas to become a convincing or compelling drama. 

*



Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley’s new play Mouthpiece – produced by Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre Company and directed by the company’s previous Artistic Director Orla O’Loughlin – is a much more tightly woven play than The Doctor. It also deals with a more focused clash of ideas on the battlefield of cultural and identity politics – this time over class rather than race or religion. However once again it ultimately came across as overwrought in conception and overcooked in performance.

Like Educating Rita, it’s essentially a two-hander about a man and a woman of different ages and class backgrounds who establish a mentor-relationship that becomes a love story – and which founders because of the contradictions between all of these factors, especially class. The obvious precursor to both plays in terms of the drama of ideas is Shaw’s Pygmalion.

The play is set in Edinburgh (as opposed to London or Liverpool in those two plays), and the city is almost a third character, with its own landscape, personality and contradictions. Scenes take place in inner-city cafes, art galleries and theatres, as well as a suburban housing-estate flat and – most memorably – the edge of a crag on a hilltop overlooking the city. All these settings feel convincing, and have the quality of lived experience – like the hospital setting in Professor Bernhardi (as opposed to that of The Doctor).

Libby (Shauna Macdonald) is a playwright in her forties who has hit a period of artistic and personal crisis and come back to Edinburgh from London after a promising early start to her career hit the doldrums. At the start of the play she appears to be contemplating suicide on the hilltop, but is rescued by Declan (Angus Taylor), an angry young unemployed teenager fresh out of juvenile detention who is also a gifted amateur artist and hangs out on the crag to sketch the view.

Libby cultivates a relationship with Declan and encourages his art. She reveals that she has a vested interest in doing so, as she hopes to reinvigorate her career by writing a play based on him called – you guessed it – Mouthpiece. The title is stolen from a drawing of his, depicting his little sister standing on the edge of the cliff with her arms outstretched and her mouth wide open – a drawing which is in turn inspired by seeing one of Bacon’s ‘Screaming Popes’ at the Scottish National Gallery when Libby takes him there on an excursion.

Things get out of hand when Declan’s own life spirals into crisis; Libby attempts to comfort him and an awkward sexual encounter ensues. When she attempts to continue their ‘professional’ relationship while enforcing some kind of emotional distance, and then shows him the ending of the play (which we don’t at this stage get to hear) for approval, he flies into a rage, and abuses her for exploiting him and appropriating his material to write a piece of poverty-porn.

In the final (and most theatrically intriguing) act of the play, Declan shows up at the opening night of Mouthpiece at the Traverse Theatre, and confronts Libby (from a seat in the actual audience) during the post-show Q&A. (For me this was where a more interesting version of play began, and could have unfolded in its entirety.) Eventually he storms the stage and threatens her at knife-point in an outburst of toxic aggression. (This was a bit of a stretch for me, and reminded me of similar moments in The Doctor when the playwright’s own hysterical desire for drama seemed to outstrip psychological plausibility on the part of the characters – notwithstanding slightly generic back-stories about anger management or unresolved grief.) A police chase ensues (the play having well and truly jumped the shark for me by this point), culminating in a cliff-hanging final scene. One more draft, please. 

Mouthpiece is a more intimate play than The Doctor, and was performed in the relatively small black box of the Odeon Theatre (although a larger venue or more open stage – perhaps more like the Traverse itself – would have been exciting, especially for the final act). Kai Fischer’s basic black two-level set and occasional furniture provided for upstage and downstage scene changes between hill-top, café, flat, art gallery and theatre, although a bare stage would arguably have been even more effective. Lighting (also by Fischer) and sound (designed and composed by Kim Moore) were appropriately minimal. 

Unfortunately (as with The Doctor) the performances were unnecessarily ‘big’ (especially for the venue) and involved a lot of shouting, which was understandable on a windswept hilltop but seemed redundant elsewhere (even in the final act). Macdonald frequently got stuck in a register of fragile self-pity, especially in her long monologue in the café about being a hard-done-by and misunderstood playwright. Personally I felt that the play worked best as a satire on well-intentioned but self-absorbed middle-class writers who are unable to relinquish their power and privilege; and there was a lot of comedy in the writing that wasn’t realized onstage. 

Taylor’s performance was much more robust and self-mocking, assisted by Declan’s sometimes hilariously incomprehensible ‘Embra’ dialect. Nevertheless the character’s sense of social isolation was deeply moving; and his outrage totally understandable (even if his final outburst of rage was unconvincing). 

In the end – again like The Doctor - despite a fine central performance, Mouthpiece remained trapped by its own ideas, rather than taking flight as a living, breathing organism. 

As the coronavirus is teaching us: all our ideas are ultimately as insubstantial as gossamer when torn asunder by the impact of material reality. 

*

The Doctor was at the Dunstan Playhouse from 27 February to 1 March.

Mouthpiece was at the Odeon Theatre from 6 to 14 March.

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Postscript: on the drama of ideas, naturalism and the current crisis


Both The Doctor and Mouthpiece arguably belong to a tradition known as ‘the drama of ideas’: a phrase that resonates strongly in an era of political, economic, social, cultural, ecological and now epidemiological crisis such as the one we’re currently living through. This sense of crisis is heightened by the current pandemic, which has in turn been amplified by the economic reality of globalisation – as well as an ideology of neo-liberalism that has left the world so unprepared to handle realities like the coronavirus (or climate change) because it prioritises individual prosperity over collective needs. 

This atmosphere of global ‘crisis’ (the word itself refers in a medical context to the ‘decisive point’ in an illness) also prevailed during the era in which the drama of ideas emerged – along with the literary and dramatic movement called Naturalism with which it’s more or less co-extensive.

We might define the former as plays in which a conflict of ideas, opinions and values (rather than interests, needs or desires) becomes the substance of the dramatic action, usually in the form of prolonged debate (although arguably these interests, needs or desires underlie the ideas, opinions or values in question). As such it’s a tradition that goes back to Greek Tragedy.

Naturalism on the other hand refers to a certain historically determined and circumscribed idea of ‘nature’ – and more specifically ‘human nature’ – which in turn owes something to the ideas of Darwin, heredity and evolution, as well as their various social, political, psychological and philosophical offshoots. It too has ancient origins (going back at least to Lucretius).

Nevertheless Naturalism and the drama of ideas in their modern form took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As is well known, the period in question led to two world wars, as well as genocides and other crimes against humanity. It’s also worth noting in the current context that this sense of crisis was intensified by viral epidemics; the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu, for example, infected more than 500 million people between 1918 and 1920, and killed somewhere between 30 and 100 million (far more than the combined military and civilian casualties resulting from the First World War). 

Needless to say I’m not suggesting that the drama of ideas or Naturalism caused or contributed to those deaths. Nevertheless these historical movements – and the works that sprang from them – reflect something about their times, and perhaps we can learn something from them.

Perhaps we can also learn something from the way that the drama of ideas and Naturalism have been misunderstood, in a way that illuminates our current situation.

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As historical repertoire, both the drama of ideas and Naturalism are now looked on somewhat askance, notwithstanding their persistence as contemporary genres and styles on the stage and screen (large and small). The plays of Bernard Shaw for example are now rarely performed; and the work of his precursor Ibsen has been left like road-kill not far behind, at least on English-speaking stages – with the signal exception of adaptations by contemporary ‘auteur-directors’.

In part this is due to a characteristically tendentious interpretation and appropriation of Ibsen on the part of Shaw himself (in terms of Shaw’s social realism as opposed to Ibsen’s fundamentally romantic individualism). This strong misreading in turn influenced the reception of both playwrights, as well as the entire subsequent history of English-language theatre, especially in terms of acting that favoured the intellect and the voice over the emotions and the rest of the body (Shaw’s philosophy of ‘vitalism’ – which to some extent he shared with Ibsen – notwithstanding).

A similar misreading is also true of Naturalism. Admittedly the plays of Strindberg (or at least an early work like Miss Julie) and especially Chekhov have fared somewhat better on the English-language stage than those of Ibsen (or even Shaw). This prevalence is however due to two fundamental misconceptions. The first is a simplistic reduction of Naturalism considered as a historical movement – which had philosophical implications in terms of content as well as form – to ‘naturalism’ considered as a genre of writing or style of acting that is purely formal and equated with verisimilitude. This reduction leads to a notion of being convincing or life-like which is fundamentally different from – and even opposed to – being truthful or real.

The second and more technical but no less reductive misconception of naturalism – which relates to acting in particular – is an English-language interpretation of Stanislavsky that is just as tendentious as the Shavian reading of Ibsen. This interpretation focuses primarily on textual ‘units’, ‘bits’ or ‘beats’, verbal ‘actions’ and psychological ‘objectives’ rather than more primal and fundamentally non-verbal forms of behaviour and motivation. For example ‘task’ is a more accurate translation than ‘objective’ of the Russian word zadacha; and Stanislavsky himself soon abandoned the term kusok (‘bit’ – as in a slice of bread or a piece of meat) in favour of the more clearly material ‘facts’, ‘events’ or ‘episodes’. Needless to say this misreading of Stanislavsky has had a huge impact on the subsequent understanding of Ibsen and Chekhov – the two playwrights (along with Shakespeare) whose works Stanislavsky most frequently wrote about, acted in, taught and directed (though Chekhov famously disagreed with Stanislavsky about the latter’s productions of the former’s plays). 

In fact Ibsen, Chekhov, Stanislavsky and perhaps even Shaw himself are long overdue for a re-evaluation (at least in the Anglosphere) that focuses more on the body (and especially sexuality) rather than being typically performed by actors who appear to be dead from the neck down. This tendency is especially prevalent on the English-speaking stage, as well as in British, Anglophile and more generally White culture –including Australia and to a much lesser extent the United States (partly because of the pervasive influence of African-American culture there).

However the tendency ultimately springs from an elevation of ideas over reality, the mind over the body, the abstract over the concrete, language over other forms of action, and the symbolic over the real, which goes back at least as far as Plato. As a way of thinking and being, this habit is not merely theoretical or aesthetic, but has practical and political implications: for example when it comes to prioritising ‘the economy’ over society (or nature), profits over people, debt-reduction over risk-reduction, or financial over physical and environmental health. This has become glaringly obvious in the current period of crisis, especially with regard to the cornovirus and climate change.

To return to the drama of ideas: in the case of contemporary English-speaking playwrights (not to mention screenwriters), what might be called the ‘idealist’ version of this tradition is still very much alive (or at least on life-support). Think of the regular and popular programming of plays by Tom Stoppard or David Hare in the UK, or David Williamson and Joanna Murray-Smith in Australia. In the United States, the genre took a more heightened and visceral turn – in part due to the influence of Arthur Miller, and more recently Angels in America – for underlying reasons which have to do with a very different relationship to language, class, ideology, and the heritage of European as well as African-American culture.

In film and TV (in both English and non-English speaking countries) the drama of ideas and naturalism have taken root and thrived, with feedback effects on theatre itself. In part this has to do with the displacement of theatre by the large and small screen for the purposes of mass entertainment in the course of the 20th century. More specifically, dramatic writers interested in communicating with a mass audience have increasingly migrated to a mass medium (TV) for reasons of ongoing employment and artisic influence in a much more writer-driven industry than theatre or film. In terms of scale, format and attention-span the small screen is also better suited than the stage (or the big screen) to genres like the drama of ideas or naturalism that typically favour dialogue (or more precisely talk) over action; workplace or domestic situations over large-scale settings like cities or landscapes (which are more easily rendered in novels or films); and long-term character development (or the lack thereof) over the exigencies of a well-crafted classical three-act plot. 

More recently – and partly in response to the flocking of audiences and writers to film and TV in particular – within theatre itself one might point to the dethronement of the playwright by the ‘auteur-director’ (in this case aping the medium of film, where the director has always been the leading creative artist and principal ‘author’ of the work). This has its own set of problems, as the writing and acting tend to suffer as a result, unless the director has a background in acting and writing as well directing, a preternatural gift for all three, or a generous capacity for collaboration.

There’s also been a tendency for theatre acting to become more and more ‘naturalistic’ or ‘filmic’ – a tendency reinforced by the ubiquitous use of radio-mics. The latter is partly necessitated by the similarly ‘filmic’ use of ‘sound’, which means that the actors’ voices have to become part of the ‘mix’ in order to be heard. One of the consequences of this (especially the use of head and body mics) is that the acting becomes less fully embodied and more ‘head’ related. The increasing use of live-feed video (typically involved big-screen close-ups and ‘head shots’) compounds this tendency even further.   

On European as opposed to English-language stages, the drama of ideas and Naturalism have always been interpreted in more physical and heightened terms. Productions of Ibsen or Chekhov in Europe are typically staged and performed in ways that reflect the content and form of the plays themselves, not only by setting them in a contemporary and local context but also by using a more physical and heightened acting-style. Both these strategies are truer to the radical spirit of the original texts than the museum-like staging, acting and diction still predominant in the Anglosphere.

Recent attempts to adopt this more ‘European’ approach on the part of English-speaking auteur-directors have typically imposed ‘anti-naturalistic’ staging (in terms of concept and design) onto writing (often their own) and performances that remain resolutely and even banally ‘naturalistic’ or ‘filmic’ in style. Once again, a lopsided approach to the drama of ideas and naturalism is apparent here.

Perhaps this distortion in theory and practice is not confined to the sphere of theatre, but also applies to the political, economic, social, cultural, ecological and epidemiological crisis we’re currently living through.


Monday 16 March 2020

Postcard # 1 from Adelaide Festival 2020


Turning up the Heat: Dance into Images, Music into Dance


Cold Blood/Lyon Opera Ballet


*


The phrase ‘cold blood’ has associations with physical death, emotional detachment, and animals like reptiles, fish, amphibians and insects that can survive for long periods without food because (unlike warm-blooded creatures) they don’t maintain a constant body temperature, and thus require less energy.

Belgian company Kiss & Cry Collective’s Cold Blood is certainly a show about death, detachment and resourcefulness, but it also deals with love, chance and ephemerality. There’s even a certain ‘cold-bloodedness’ in its form of expression and means of production; as well as in its content – including some of the characters, events, and even the settings in which they take place. However I found the cumulative effect of the show surprisingly ‘warm’ – lyrical, funny, moving, beautiful, awe-inspiring and even profound.

The genre of the show is a unique hybrid of micro-dance theatre, bricolage-object theatre and live-feed video. Co-directed by dancer-choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey and film-maker Jaco Van Dormael, it features three dancers (De Mey, Grégory Grosjean and Grabriella Iacono) and six set/object/lighting manipulators (Van Dormael, Ivan Fox, Bruno Olivier, Stefano Serra, Julien Lambert and Aurélie Leporcq) – two of whom (Lambert and Leporcq) also double as Steadicam operators.

The set (designed by Sylvie Olivé) consists of a collection of domestic objects, tables, chairs and light-sources (lighting designed by Nicolas Olivier), surmounted by a huge projection screen (featuring live-feed and live-edited cinematography by Dormael and Lambert) that hovers just above the performers’ heads. The entire apparatus is a kind of split-level, parallel-reality dance-theatre stage/cinema, the moving parts of which can be observed either one at a time or as a simultaneous but contradictory totality in which any formal hierarchy is effectively abolished. As Van Dormael remarks in a program note: ‘We were looking for something where the dance was not serving the cinema, and the cinema was not serving the dance.’

The choreography (by De Mey and Grosjean) mostly involves the dancers’ hands, and sometimes extends to their entire bodies. The performers are clad in basic black (costumes by Béa Pendesini and Sarah Duvert), but occasionally more flesh is revealed; and their movement repertoire is drawn from a wide range of styles and sources (De Mey is a contemporary and colleague of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and hails from the generation of Belgian contemporary dance makers who came to prominence in the 80s and 90s).

However everything seems to emanate from or culminate in the hands, which are the principle focus of the images, both as these appear onstage and (in very different form) on-screen. As De Mey remarks in a program note: ‘The camera sees what the audience’s eyes can’t see, and the audience’s eyes see what the camera doesn’t see. It’s very much the idea of a story within a story within a story.’

In fact the work’s ambiguous visual and narrative framing recalls the recursive art of Escher or the nested stories of the 1001 Nights. The deliberately unresolved conflict for ontological primacy between flesh and technology also gives Cold Blood a special place in the contemporary field of multi-platform performance, as well situating it in a literary and cinematic sci-fi tradition that goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and the most significant 20thcentury avatar of which is arguably 2001 (indeed Kubrick’s film is directly referenced in the show).

The effect is one of deliberate disorientation or even de-differentiation, in which sophisticated theatre and cinema techniques ‘regress’ to a more basic stem-cell-like level of functioning, and are then recombined to induce a kind of oneiric delirium. In fact the work also belongs to a very French and even more specifically Belgian tradition of surrealism in literature, painting, photography and cinema, from Buñuel and Dalì’s, Un Chien Andalou to Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad to the paintings of Magritte and Delvaux – especially former’s visual paradoxes, and the latter’s dream-like images of women, architecture and nocturnal landscapes.

Dreaming, hypnosis and the inducement of a hypnagogic or ‘twilight’ state of consciousness are all explicitly invoked by the text, which is written by Belgian author Thomas Gunzig, and delivered in voiceover by actor Toby Regbo. Text and delivery are disarmingly yet deceptively droll; in fact this artful narrative framework – the hallucinatory style and content of which resembles a short story by Murakami – is crucial to the dramaturgy of the work, which might otherwise dissolve into a series of superficially textural and gimmicky technical effects.

The text takes the form of second-person monologue, and begins with a classic hypnotist’s incantation before counting backwards and telling us: ‘You are asleep.’ What follows are seven stories of death by misadventure – each leading to a last memory-image before the final extinction of consciousness – which we are invited to experience as a kind of transmigratory journey (‘You are becoming someone else’).

These bizarre, unforseeable and/or otherwise ‘stupid’ deaths recall the pre-title sequences that used to begin each episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under, and are similarly detached and even ‘cold-blooded’ in tone. The sole survivor of a plane crash (a toy plane suspended in a jar of cloudy liquid) wanders through a snowbound forest and freezes to death; the driver of a car forgets to roll up the windows while going through an automated carwash (feather dusters attached to cordless drills) and is bludgeoned to death (the image is suffused by red lighting-gels); a restaurant patron dies of an allergy to mashed potatoes; the patron of a gentlemen’s club chokes on a bra-clasp (the pole-dancer is an index and middle finger sliding up and down a metal stick); a man-eating serial cannibal commits suicide by taking an overdose (a dancer’s body writhing supine is filmed from above through a window-frame while the image tilts and rotates onscreen); and an astronaut asphyxiates in space. 

An equally surreal succession of landscapes, settings and images includes clouds, forests, a frozen lake (on which one hand dances with another in the guise of its own impossibly independent shadow), six pairs of hands plucking invisible strings and fluttering like butterflies, forlorn highways, a drive-in movie screen, a bombed-out city on fire in wartime, an aerial view of nocturnal apartment blocks, and a rocket blasting off into space (a vibrating hair-dryer, two forks and three lamps against a background constellation of fairy lights).

Choreographic tributes include a Fred and Ginger routine (two hands with thimbles tap-dancing on a crystal tray); an Esther Williams synchronised swimming extravaganza (a kaleidoscopic fractal image of multiple hands); and an astonishing recreation of Maurice Béjart’s choreography to Ravel’s Bolero danced by six hands on a miniature model stage and covered by a 180-degree tracking shot until finally the actual house lights go up and the audience is revealed to itself onscreen. There are also playful cinema-history references to Lost HighwayBlack Swan, 1930s Hollywood musicals, and of course 2001.

All this is accompanied by an alternately ironic and sublime continuous playlist-soundtrack (sound design by Boris Cekevda) that mixes classical tracks by the likes of Ravel, Ligeti, Arvo Pärt and the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet with popular classics like Doris Day, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed’s It’s Such A Perfect Day and David Bowie’s Space Oddity

The overall production aesthetic is both domestic and exotic, miniature and spectacular at the same time. As Van Dormael says in the program, he and De Mey began by asking themselves: ‘Is it possible to make a feature film here on the table on our kitchen? And is it possible to dance only with the hands?’

The answer, resoundingly, is yes. And perhaps this has something to do with the nature of hands themselves – as opposed to the objects or artefacts that are the substance of so much visual theatre (as well as Kubrick’s anti-humanism in 2001). 

As organs, hands (as opposed to paws) are unique to human beings and other primates (as even tools are not). They are also uniquely articulated (having more bones than any other organ in the body), mobile and tactile, as well as cognitive and communicative (think of counting and sign-language). As choreographed by De Mey and filmed by Van Dermael, they also possess an incredible degree of expressiveness. As the latter commented in an interview in The Guardian earlier this year: ‘When you film the hands, it’s the face and body at the same time.’ 

The success of Cold Blood ultimately attests to the relationship between its co-creators: a choreographer and filmmaker who are also life-partners. Their mutual embrace of dance and cinema – and beyond this, their collaborative transcendence of the opposition between the body and technology – also points to a ‘trans-humanism’ beyond ‘anti-humanism’. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, the image of two hands touching each other – and the exchange between them as they alternate between touching and being touched – testifies to a reversibility of ‘the flesh’ that situates us as living beings within the living, breathing context of something greater than ourselves.


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In comparison with Cold Blood, the Lyon Opera Ballet’s Trios Grandes Fugues was at least on the face of it a more rigorous exercise in ‘pure’ contemporary dance. However if what we mean by ‘pure’ dance is that it’s ‘uncontaminated’ by reference to anything else, then the evening was ‘impure’ in the sense that each of the three pieces it comprised was created in reference to a single work of music (Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge), and that therefore in that context they also referred to each other. 

It should also be noted that arguably not all three works might best be described as ‘contemporary dance’, since the opening piece by Lucinda Childs could also be characterised as a kind of postmodern ballet, while the closing piece by Maguy Marin is perhaps more a work of dance theatre. Nevertheless because of their common point of reference, and even more so by programming them as a set of ‘variations’ in response to it, Trois Grandes Fugues became a satisfyingly integrated work in its own right, much like the great sets of musical variations by that composer (in particular the ‘Diabelli’ Variations and the last movement of his final Piano Sonata, which were composed during the same period as the Grosse Fuge towards the end of his life).

The evening also followed an interesting musical and dramaturgical journey in terms of instrumental and choreographic forces. Three different recordings of the Grosse Fuge were used – the first an orchestral version, the other two played by two very different string quartets; and the ensemble of dancers used by each choreographer was progressively reduced in number, while the style and intensity of the choreography and dancing became progressively heightened.

Most importantly (and in common with the Grosse Fuge itself, as well as the other works by Beethoven just mentioned), Trois Grandes Fugues is no mere academic or intellectual exercise. In terms of physical and emotional intensity as well as aesthetic form, there’s a progression from coolness and even coldness to warmth and finally searing heat. As such it has some similarities with Cold Blood (though it goes much further). Thus both works considered together provide an opportunity to reflect on the nature of that journey and these qualities in relation to any work of performance.

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Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is an eccentric outcrop even amidst the craggy mountain range of the composer’s oeuvre. Originally conceived as the final movement of the late String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 in B flat major, it’s longer than all five other movements put together (and usually takes about 16 minutes to perform). Widely reviled by his contemporary critics, and met with incomprehension by colleagues and friends (as well as dismay by his publisher), he eventually consented to replace it with a ‘tamer’ finale. 

The work is now regarded as one of his towering masterpieces. Interestingly in the context of dance, no less than Stravinsky (one of the greatest ballet composers in the history of music) described it as ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’. It’s thus no surprise that contemporary choreographers have been drawn to it and attempted to meet it at least halfway  – as any interpretative artist must with any work (the greater the work, the greater the challenge). 

As its title indicates, the work is a ‘grand fugue’, which like many of Beethoven’s late works engages in a characteristically titanic struggle to integrate baroque forms (such as the fugue itself) and even earlier Renaissance and medieval elements (such as polyphony and modal tonalities) with the classical style – as well as Romanticism (and even arguably prefiguring Expressionism and atonality). Once again, in Beethoven’s case this struggle was no mere academic or intellectual exercise, but an immense emotional and spiritual undertaking. It can even be understood as political, for example if we regard Beethoven’s ‘religion’ as what Furtwangler called a ‘religion of humanity’, or in less overtly theological or humanist terms recognise with Adorno that music and art always have social content.

Formally this struggle takes the form of a perpetual oscillation between order and chaos – or what Nietzsche termed Apollo and Dionysus in relation to Greek Tragedy and the work of Wagner (who again interestingly in this context referred to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony as ‘the apotheosis of dance’). Musically this takes the form of a conflict between dissonance and harmony, and reflects the inherently fugal characteristic of counterpoint, as well as Beethoven’s own increasing preoccupation with cross-rhythms (all of which contribute to the work’s fiendish technical difficulties in performance, both for the musicians and in this case the choreographer and dancers). 

In terms of its reception by the listener (or in the case of dance, the spectator), this is experienced as a struggle between mind and body, intellect and emotions – registered physically by violent shifts in intensity between noise to silence (or movement and stillness); and emotionally by violent changes of mood from anguish, rage, grief, despair and resignation, to playfulness, humour, joy, thanksgiving and reconciliation (musical as well as emotional).

In sum: the music makes substantial demands, to which the three choreographers in question made varying responses, and in turn placed different demands on the dancers – and on us.

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First cab off the rank was also the most recent work on the program, created for Lyon Opera Ballet itself in 2016 by American postmodern conceptual minimalist Lucinda Childs. This involved 12 dancers – 6 men and 6 women – dancing in opposite-sex couples. The choreography was characteristically cool and detached, even airy, involving a postmodern-ironic use of classical steps, along with the choreographer’s trademark gestural and spatial patterns and repetitions.

Set lighting and costumes designed by Dominique Drillot were restricted to shades of silver and grey. The dancers were clad in soft, loose tops and pants, and the choreography was arranged against a freestanding background structure made of some kind of filigree lace material that cast shadows against the backdrop and was reminiscent of an Arabic ornamental window screen or Indonesian shadow puppetry.

The music was recorded by the Lyon Opera Orchestra in 2016 – presumably for the work’s premiere. It was a luscious, rich, romantic reading, somewhat like a movie soundtrack, although undeniably in ironic counterpoint with the choreography. However, the combined effect was one of formalism, and even traditionalism.

In sum: the work felt to me like something of a museum piece, and seemed to engage with the Beethoven on a somewhat superficial level. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help admiring the technical ingenuity of the work, and the grace of the dancers. Their faces, however, seemed frozen in forward-looking fake smiles, and their bodies and emotions seemed disconnected from the work and each other – one dancer in particular (as my companion at the performance pointed out) even switching off completely every time they stopped moving.

In the context of the evening, however, this opener turned out to be a palate-cleanser. The best was yet to come.

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After a short interval came a much more substantial, delightful and fascinating work: Belgian contemporary dance maker Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s setting of the Grosse Fuge, created for her own Rosas Company in 1992. 

For this performance, the recording of the Beethoven was by the Debussy Quartet in 2006. This was an ardent, earthy and joyous rendition of the score, in total contrast with the preceding orchestral version. (I’d be curious to know which recording the work was originally made in response to, but I’d wager it was something similar in terms of energy and mood, as the choreography seemed to respond to it with such sensitivity and precision.)

De Keersmaeker makes dance in response to music (and text) that’s not necessarily written to be danced to. As someone who studied music prior to dance, she does this in a uniquely rigorous and original way. For example her choreography inspired by Bach’s Cello Suites (which I saw a couple of years ago) involves taking the musical language of the dance-movements that comprise the suites (which themselves were not written to be danced to, but rather to translate dance into music) and ‘re-translating’ that language back into her own choreography. This process of translation even includes the text of the score, for example by rendering the dance-term ‘Allemande’ in the form of actual walking.

Here the choreography involved 8 dancers (6 men and 2 women), identically dressed non-gender-specifically in black suits, open white shirts over t-shirts or singlets, and ‘sensible’ shoes black (costumes designed by the Rosas Company); the women had their hair tied back, and were gender-identifiable only by their body shapes. However their neat outfits became increasingly and randomly dishevelled, shirts becoming untucked or being casually tucked back in, unbuttoned or discarded as some of the dancers stripped down to t-shirts or singlets. Set and lighting by Jan Joris Lamers were similarly ‘neutral’ and informal, with the exception of a horizontal strip of light across the forestage, which the dancers moved in and out of in various ways.

Like the costumes, the choreography was similarly androgynous but individualised, with dancers frequently taking turns to dance in various groupings, or standing, sitting or reclining on the floor to observe each other. The movement had the appearance of being spontaneous, but (as one would expect from De Keeersmaeker) was meticulously responsive to the score and even the mood of the recording, being full of unfeigned exuberance and enjoyment. The dancers were physically grounded, and used multiple levels (including floor-rolls) and a variety of dance and movement languages (including folk dance and martial arts moves)

I loved this work, and found it a revelation in terms of the Beethoven, which is frequently interpreted as heavy and full of struggle, but here shone with all the composer’s capacity for lightness and joy – surely essential components for any revolution worthy of the name.

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This was immediately followed by the final version of the Grosse Fuge for the evening by French dance theatre maker Maguy Marin, whose work is characterised by heightened emotion and grotesque theatricality, inspired by Samuel Beckett and fairy tales – as well as by her political philosophy, which might be summed up by her statement on receiving the Scripps Award for modern dance in 2003: ‘I don’t accept this world as it is.’ As such of all three choreographers under consideration she has perhaps the most in common with Beethoven himself. 

The work in question was created for the Maguy Marin Company in 2001. It was danced to an intense, incisive, even abrasive recording by the Quartetto Italiano from 1968 (the date itself is indicative of the recording’s revolutionary spirit, as well as the crushing reaction that followed). The choreography involved 4 female dancers, variously dressed in red skirts and tops (designed by Chantal Cloupet), on a bare stage starkly lit by Francois Renard.

In a program note Marin herself invokes ‘the rising life-force of the female being’ in response to music that simultaneously produces a ‘state of enthusiasm and despair’. This ‘bipolar’ quality in Beethoven’s music (and perhaps temperament) was here met by something wild, ferocious and even furious, involving huge leaps, ecstatic faces and outstretched arms, but also bent heads, hunched torsos, crooked legs and shuffling, almost crippled feet (fiercely embodied by the four extraordinary dancers, Julia Carnicer, Coralie Levieux, Merel van Heeswijk, and Elsa Monguillot de Mirman, on the matinee performance I saw).

In Nietzschean and Wagnerian terms, this was certainly the Dionysian apotheosis of the evening. Musically and choreographically it possessed an almost Stravinskian primitivism, and affirmed that composer’s remark about the ‘absolutely contemporary’ nature of Beethoven’s work. I was reminded simultaneously of the Bacchae, and of the current political moment we’re living through, especially in terms of gender. At the curtain call, the dancers looked as if they were awakening from a trance, and surprised to find themselves still alive.

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Cold Blood was at the Ridley Centre, Adelaide Showgrounds, 5–8 March; I saw the performance on 6 March.

Lyon Opera Ballet was at the Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 6–7 March; I saw the matinee on 7 March.