Postcard from Perth Festival 5

Women and Power

Bryony Kimmings, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch/Beethoven, Fidelio

In counterpoint with the theme of Indigenous and First Nations identity that’s been such a pervasive leitmotif in this year’s Perth Festival have been the subjects of gender and sexuality. Both were prominent at Kabarett Haus in the concerts by Meow Meow and Rufus Wainwright (and Amanda Palmer as well).

Among the First Nations theatre works in the program, Hecate invoked the role of matriarchy in traditional Noongar culture; two powerful contemporary matriarchs did battle in Black Ties (while a Takapui trans woman was a crucial force of chaos and liberation in the unfolding of events); and a maternal deus ex machina also played a decisive role in the resolution of Bran Nue Dae. Even in Anthem, key female figures included the Indigenous busker and the rage-filled working-class mother who both disrupted the fragile order of things on the commuter train.

In this Postcard I want to look at two other works of theatre and opera in the Festival that tackled head-on the issue of women’s experiences and struggles in what is still predominantly a man’s world.

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British feminist theatre artist Bryony Kimmings has carved out a unique path in contemporary performance which is every bit as distinctive and dangerous as that of Meow Meow in the field of contemporary cabaret. I saw two previous shows of hers – Sex Idiot and Fake It Till You Make It – at Perth Fringe World in 2015. One involved contacting former lovers after being diagnosed with an STD; the other was about her partner’s clinical depression, and featured him in the show. I reviewed both somewhat unkindly at the time, because I felt that - while highly entertaining and even moving -their intentions (and perhaps even their ethics) were slightly unclear. To be honest, I felt that the undeniably hugely talented artist’s ego sometimes got in the way of her concern for social justice, even in the case of her research subjects. 

In saying this I’m mindful of sounding like the archetypical middle-aged white middle-class male critic who features in I’m A Phoenix, Bitch as a persecutory voice in Kimmings’s head and accuses her of self-indulgence – an archetype hilariously embodied by Kimmings herself in the show by speaking into a head-mike and using voice-changer software to alter the pitch. However for the purposes of this review, and as a sometime ‘confessional’ theatre maker myself, I’m more than happy to check my privilege and wear the accusation.

Moreover, none of the aforementioned reservations apply to I’m A Phoenix, Bitch, which for me is a game-changer in terms of her work and confessional theatre generally. Like its precursors, it’s a multi-platform performance work; but in comparison with the previous shows of hers I’ve seen, it’s conceived and realised on a vastly expanded scale, using monologue and songs (written and performed by Kimmings), music (composed by Tom Parkinson), atmospheric sound and lighting (by Lewis Gibson and Johanne Jensen), live-stream and pre-prepared video projection (designed by Will Duke and associate Hayley Egan), and an extensive array of props, costumes and set design components (some of which are made by Kimmings herself, but all of which are integrated into an over-arching aesthetic by art director David Curtis-Ring). 

All these elements are progressively employed and (in the case of the set design) dramatically revealed during the show, which is co-directed by Kimmings and Kirsty Housley, with additional input from dramaturg Nina Steiger, creative associate Michal Keamo and choreographer Sarah Blanc. This sense of expanded dramaturgy also applies to the emotional content, which takes us (and her) on a rollercoaster from comedy and satire to heartbreak and illness, mental and physical – and finally a kind of recovery that’s in no way sentimental, but intelligently thought-through and brutally hard-won.

All of Kimmings’s work is designed to provoke social change. This provocation typically takes the form of a meta-theatrical and autobiographical ‘social experiment’ conducted (with a greater or lesser degree of control) on herself (and to a greater or lesser extent on others as well). In fact, for better or worse, the notion of ‘control’ in every sense of the word – artistic, scientific, social and personal – is crucial to understanding her work. Other shows for example have involved being observed by scientists while drunk for seven days to explore the relationship between alcohol and creativity, or becoming a pop star invented by a nine-year-old.

However while Sex Idiot and Fake It Till You Make It sometimes felt over-controlled (or perhaps over-controlling, for example in the case of her creative and stage relationship with her partner in the latter show), it might be more accurate to describe I’m A Phoenix, Bitch as a highly controlled work about being out of control – primarily in relation to herself, but in a way that speaks to all women – especially when it comes to relationships, including motherhood; and more generally, when it comes to women’s relationships with their bodies, their psyches, and their careers. As the title of the show indicates, it’s also a show about personal and artistic as well as social change. 

In brief: this is a show about making a show, in response to events that (in this case) happen largely outside of her control. Falling in and out of love, falling pregnant, falling ill, and the fallout from all of these, are all paradigmatic examples of this loss of control, much as we like to deceive ourselves otherwise – a lesson that all of us learn sooner or later, depending on how addicted we’ve become to control in the course of our lives. (Beyond the sphere of the personal, it’s arguably also a lesson that entire societies and civilisations have to learn as well.)

In the case of artists, this addiction often takes the form of obsession, in relation to their work, and even their lives, conceived as material. I’m A Phoenix, Bitch thus speaks beyond its putative subject matter (Kimmings herself, female experience, relationships, motherhood, illness, and the making of art) to everyone in the audience, and to the world in which we live.

In a sense the show is a kind of sequel to Fake It Till You Make It, in that it deals with ‘what happened next’ in the story of Kimmings’s relationship with her partner. However it digs much deeper into the foundations of that relationship – including a hilariously staged account (using song and live-feed video) of how she ‘captured’ him – and exposes much more about her own psychological weaknesses and flaws. 

These come home to roost when the couple rent a charming but isolated and (it turns out) perilously situated cottage in the countryside on the edge of a stream. The cottage itself becomes a major character in the show, represented by a fantastically detailed model created by Kimmings herself, which manages to evoke not only a sense of rural quaintness but also something more sinister that increasingly takes on the features of a Victorian Gothic fairy tale illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a twisted version of Howard’s End, or a Tobe Hooper horror film. 

Suffice to say that things do indeed go horribly wrong – as they sometimes do. There was a first-time pregnant woman and her partner in the front row of the audience on the night I saw the show, and Kimmings generously took the time to embrace and reassure them before the going really got tough. In this case however, ‘going wrong’ meant not only of the physical travails of childbirth (‘I miss my old vagina!’), but severe post-natal illness on the part of their child; total relationship breakdown; and perhaps most crucially psychological breakdown on the part of Kimmings (rather than her emotionally unstable partner as might have been expected), in the form not simply of post-natal depression, but psychosis – including an episode of full-blown paranoia, hallucinations and near-drowning.

This was spectacularly and terrifyingly realised using all the previously mentioned design elements but taking them literally to another level. As a result the physical and psychological landscape of the work took on the dimensions of a surreal nightmare – or perhaps a multi-platform staging of the storm scene from King Lear. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so close to the experience of madness in the theatre as I did watching this sequence – and was totally (and appropriately) unprepared for it, despite all the warning signs that had come before. 

The latter part of the show shifts again in terms of genre – if one can speak of genre without sounding callous in the case of an autobiographical work– and becomes more of a medical drama, as Kimmings contends not only with the process of her own recovery, but also with the progress of her son’s worsening condition, which is diagnosed as rare form of epilepsy that leads to encroaching brain damage. Personally I found this part of the show slightly less well-integrated, but nonetheless harrowing. The final part of the show however involves one more dramatic reveal in terms of the staging and narrative, when Kimmings is encouraged by her therapist to go back to the cottage and face her demons.

I’m A Phoenix, Bitch is a monumental achievement that transcends all of the theatrical, narrative and thematic categories that it invokes, sheds and finally – triumphantly – leaves behind. It’s still unmistakeably a Bryony Kimmings show, with all the playful humour and feminist satire that’s part of her unique performance-style and personality. Nonetheless it also has the primordial quality of myths like Orpheus or Persephone, or fables and fairy tales like Psyche or The Snow Queen – all of which tell similar tales of physical and spiritual loss and recovery, death and rebirth, descent and return. As such, it has surprisingly much in common with a work like Beethoven’s Fidelio, to which I now turn.

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Beethoven notoriously struggled with the composition, production and reception of his only opera. He began work on it in 1804 (after the onset of his deafness), and it was first produced in Vienna in 1805, a few days after the city had been invaded and occupied by Napoleon’s troops. Most of the audience were French officers, who were possibly not very receptive to a work about the struggle for freedom from tyranny.

In fact the work was based on a French play written in 1798 called Leonora, or Conjugal Love that was based on actual events that occurred in France during the Terror. For obvious reasons the setting for Beethoven’s opera had to be relocated to Spain, but the work’s underlying intentions must have been clear enough. 

The score and original libretto were extensively revised in subsequent years in collaboration with different librettists: Beethoven wrote no less than four versions of the overture, and the opera was remounted as a two-act version in 1806, and again with further revisions in 1814, each time with more success. The final version was conducted (with the aid of an ‘assistant’) by the almost totally deaf composer himself.

Beethoven himself described the work as his ‘problem child’, and acknowledged in a letter to its third and final librettist: ‘This opera will win me a martyr’s crown. You have by your co-operation salvaged what is best from the shipwreck.’

Even in its final form, it’s an opera more honoured in the breach than the observance by the world’s major opera houses. Nevertheless it has a performance history that has continued to be intertwined with politics. The 1814 performances celebrated the defeat of Napoleon; Toscanini conducted annual performances in Salzburg between 1935 and 1937 as a protest against Nazism; it was the first opera staged in Berlin after the end of Nazi rule; and a performance in Dresden in 1989 that coincided with demonstrations against the communist regime featured the Chorus of Prisoners in contemporary street clothes and was interrupted by prolonged applause after their Hymn to Freedom in Act One.

As well as its complex relationship with history and politics, Fidelio bears the traces of Beethoven’s lifelong personal struggles. The central figure of the political prisoner Florestan – incarcerated in solitude and rescued by his wife Leonore – is arguably a representative of Beethoven himself, increasingly isolated by his deafness and yearning for his ‘immortal beloved’ (most likely the aristocratic widow Josephine Brunswick), whom he was unable to marry because of his social inferiority. 

The development of the score also reflects the composer’s evolving musical style. The first version was composed at the height of his so-called ‘heroic’ middle period, while the final version was completed during his ‘late’ period of increasingly radical formal experimentation (a period also marked by the encroachment of almost total deafness and increasing social isolation).

Technically the so-called opera is actually a Singspiel with spoken dialogue between the musical numbers. In form and content the obvious precursor is Mozart’s Magic Flute (which Beethoven greatly admired, and whose librettist Schikaneder actually commissioned Beethoven to write what eventually became the first version of Fidelio). 

Like the Flute (and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice before it) Fidelio belongs to the genre of ‘rescue opera’ – with the twist that in Fidelio it’s a woman who does the rescuing, venturing into the ‘underworld’ (in this case a dungeon) in order to liberate her husband. In a further twist, she does this by disguising herself as a man (‘Fidelio’) – a device more typically associated with the typically comic mode of opera buffa. 

The most prominent example of this device (which would have loomed as large in Beethoven’s mind as The Magic Flute) is the role of Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The latter is a ‘trouser’ role played by a female singer, who in truly reverse-Shakespearian fashion also performs the recursive feat of ‘disguising’ themselves as a woman in the final Act of that opera. However, Beethoven further complicates the degree of sexual as well as gender inversion by having the gaoler’s daughter Marzelline fall in love with Leonore while the latter is disguised as a man – her father’s new apprentice Fidelio. 

Fidelio is thus an intentionally transgressive work in terms of its structure, genre, mood and even sexual politics. Musically like all of Beethoven’s output it also shatters the boundaries of conventional form. Unsurprisingly given the native inclinations of the composer’s genius, the work is scored ‘symphonically’ in terms of form and orchestrationl. Moreover, the notoriously difficult vocal lines are primarily expressive of verbal sense and meaning rather than melodic beauty (as such it breaks decisively with Mozart, and in some respects anticipates Wagner, who admired the work and its composer greatly). Finally, in terms of dramatic and musical structure, the work arguably resembles an oratorio more than an opera; Furtwangler described it as a ‘Mass’ preaching ‘the religion of humanity’.

Despite its noble history, Fidelio remains a problematic and often misunderstood work. In particular, what might now be termed its trans/queer romantic sub-plot is often treated as inferior, unrelated or even superfluous to the ‘main’ political plot, although the former arguably reflects the latter in an inverted form, as a complex elaboration (albeit in ironic mode) of the opera’s principal theme of liberty and its inherently paradoxical nature. The ‘impossibility’ of a mutual erotic attraction between the two women is rarely taken seriously in productions, but is irresistibly communicated by the ravishing beauty of Beethoven’s music (especially the sublime ‘Canon’ Quartet in Act 1, ‘A wondrous feeling fills me’) and immediately audible to anyone with the ears to listen. Dramatically it resembles the love triangle between Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Heinz Bennent as her Jewish husband (who is hiding in the cellar from the Nazis) in Truffaut’s The Last Metro; while thematically it refracts the political contradiction between the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ definitions of freedom (freedom ‘from’ restrictions versus freedom ‘to’ pursue one’s interests and pleasures) in the form of a romantic conflict between marital fidelity, sexual preference and gender identity in the sphere of ‘conjugal love’. As such it constitutes an ironic (and typically Beethovenian) musical variation on the original title of the opera (Leonore, or the Triumph of Marital Love).

In fact the libretto as a whole is all-too-frequently dismissed in comparison with Beethoven’s score. However perhaps we should not be too hasty to reduce the work’s problematic nature. After all, similar judgements are often levelled at The Magic Flute, but that doesn’t necessarily mean either opera should be performed without the libretto, or that the latter needs to be replaced. As with Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, one is inclined to suspect that Beethoven knew what he was doing or at least give him the benefit of the doubt; and attempts to second-guess him or ‘improve’ the work from a contemporary perspective risk exposing their own limitations by falling into the trap of historicism. 

Unfortunately the ‘concert-version’ adaptation of Fidelio co-presented by the WA Symphony Orchestra, the WA Opera and Perth Festival fell into precisely this trap, notwithstanding its many musical felicities. 

Among the latter were the thrilling energy and structural grasp brought to the work by the orchestra’s chief conductor Asher Fisch; the sumptuous and committed playing of the orchestra; some heroic singing from the WASO chorus; and some magnificent soloists. Chief among these was Berlin-born soprano Christiane Libor as Leonore/Fidelio, whose colossal voice and heartfelt acting gave the role tremendous warmth and pathos. Fellow German soprano Felcitas Fuchas also lent the role of Marzelline a delightful delicacy and grace. There were also fine performances from Samoan-New Zealand bass Jonathan Lemalu as Marzelline’s father the kindly but corrupt gaoler Rocco; and Australian tenor Andrew Goodwin as Rocco’s assistant (and Marzelline’s hapless would-be fiancé) Jaquino. All four voices blended together in divine harmony for the ‘Canon’ Quartet to musically reconcile their otherwise irreducibly conflicting perspectives on Marzelline’s love for Fidelio.

In other key roles, Australian baritone Warwick Fyfe gave a swaggering and sneering interpretation of the prison governor Don Pizarro, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the current President of the United States in personality, deportment and physique. Finally Australian bass baritone Adrian Tamburini gave a solid rendition of the king’s minister (and deus ex machina) Don Fernando, who arrives at the last minute to wave the liberal magic wand pardoning the prisoners, incarcerating Don Pizarro in their stead, and reuniting the principle couple, while the hapless Marzelline and Jaquino are left to pick up the pieces in the final and deliberately forced musical and dramatic resolution (which resembles similarly forced endings in Shakespeare and Mozart): ‘He who has gained a wife like this, join in our rejoicing!’

Croatian tenor Tomslav Mužek in the crucial role of Leonore’s husband the political prisoner Florestan was vocally and dramatically a little constrained. Nevertheless he made a deeply moving entrance at the start of Act Two with his heartrending aria in solitary confinement (so redolent of Beethoven’s deafness): ‘Oh God, how dark it is! How terrible this silence!’ At other times one couldn’t help thinking of the plight of a contemporary victim of political persecution like Julian Assange (‘I dared to speak the truth and these chains are my reward’). The comparison was also evoked earlier in the opera when Leonore (at this stage still unaware of that the mysterious prisoner is her husband) speculates: ‘He must be a great criminal’; to which Rocco wryly rejoins: ‘Or he must have great enemies.’

Sadly all this musical and dramatic richness and complexity was ill-matched by the ‘adaptation’, which entirely replaced the dialogue between the musical numbers with narration, in the form of a monologue written by poet and critic Alison Croggon, performed by Erin Jean Norville and directed by Clair Watson.

To present the opera in the form of a concert performance is by no means inherently unsatisfying (as WASO and Asher Fisch demonstrated in 2018 with their magnificent concert performance of Tristan Und Isolde). In fact there are considerable musical gains to be made by liberating the orchestra from the confines of the pit (especially in the glorious acoustic of the Perth Concert Hall); the vocal lines become even more like audible threads in the sonic tapestry; and the admittedly somewhat static action is freed from the demands of having to be staged, and is given free rein to take shape in the listener’s mind. 

However there’s no intrinsic reason why the singers couldn’t have spoken the original dialogue (in either German or English); indeed they gave a convincing demonstration of this in Act Two, when some of the dialogue is underscored. Instead we were treated to a valiant attempt by Norville to ‘tell the story’ between the musical numbers, while the orchestra, singers and conductor waited patiently. Musically and dramatically this necessitated a constant shifting of gears; even aurally one had to continually readjust from the sound of the orchestra and singers to that of an actor’s voice speaking into a head-mike and echoing around the hall.

Dramaturgically Croggon’s text also shuttled awkwardly between modes. These included a kind of pedantic lecture-commentary; arch passages of exposition (which continually signalled that the plot was not to be taken seriously); pointed references to contemporary gender politics (which often missed the point or reduced the complexity of the original); flowery descriptions of stage action (which sometimes sounded as if written for a vision-impaired audience); and nostalgic passages of trans-historical reflection evoking a mythical ‘garden’ of freedom. The latter was the most effective, at least in terms of actual writing; but its sentimentality seemed at entirely odds with Beethoven’s hard-headed sense of political, practical and psychological struggle, as well as his earthy sensuality – all which are palpable in his music.

In short: I would venture to say that Fidelio in its original form (including the libretto) is a much more radically ‘contemporary’ artistic, political and even feminist work than it was here given credit for, notwithstanding the adaptation’s occasional coy references to current global politics or the Me Too movement. Interested readers should look at Deborah Warner’s gripping contemporary staging at La Scala in 2014, conducted by Daniel Barenboim (and freely available in a televised version on YouTube). Failing a similar level of theatrical conception (and resources) – or the dramaturgical vision to meet Beethoven halfway – I would have preferred a straight concert version to this half-baked adaptation. 

Nevertheless, in this 250^th anniversary year of his birth, Beethoven still looms large, speaking to us of the enduring revolutionary ideals of freedom, justice and solidarity – along with their bosom companion and soul-mate, joy – like no other composer across the centuries. In Fidelio especially these ideals are yoked to a vision of Woman – admittedly as seen through male eyes, and in the idealised form of an ‘immortal beloved’ – which the work shares with an entire epoch, if not an entire form of civilisation (one which we have perhaps yet to entirely leave behind). Yet even this reading of femininity can perhaps be redeemed as an allegory of love, in the form of a physical, psychological, spiritual and even political force. As the gender-fluid figure of Leonore/Fidelio sings in the final chorus: ‘Love it was that gave me strength to free you from your chains.’ 

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I’m a Phoenix Bitch was in the Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre of WA from February 26 to March 3. 

Fidelio was at Perth Concert Hall on February 28 and March 1.