Postcard from Minneapolis and NYC

Theatre and Race

Blackout Improv; Mixed Blood Theatre, Prescient Harbingers; Aleshea Harris, What to Send Up When It Goes Down; Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play

Since I started visiting the US regularly one of my biggest lessons has come from encountering racial politics (and identity politics generally) in a much more up-front way than back home in Australia, where even the word ‘race’ is generally avoided (and the concept evaded) in favour of the less loaded term ‘culture’. This is even more the case with ‘colour’ (and even more specifically ‘Black’); skin colour just isn’t referred to comfortably in Australia at all, either literally or as a cultural category or designator of social class. 

Blackout Improv is a local Minneapolis comedy improvisation troupe of Black theatre actors, stand-up comedians, writers and musicians who mix comedy, social justice and arts access work in their performances, workshops and training. Since I’ve been here this winter I’ve seen three of their shows: a late-night spot at Pillsbury House Theatre, and two of their regular third-Monday-of-the-month shows at Mixed Blood Theatre.

Blackout is not like any other improv I’ve seen. The methodology is familiar enough: the audience volunteers topics – in the form of a word or phrase – either solicited verbally (as they were for the more abbreviated performance at Pillsbury House) or written down on scraps of paper and dropped into a hat before the show (as for the more structured evenings at Mixed Blood); these become the basis for group sketch-comedy improvisations, with individual members of the company dropping in and out or watching from the sidelines. However each sketch is preceded by a serious sit-down all-in discussion of the topic by the ensemble; and because of the identity of the performers (and at least some in the audience – who were diverse but mostly White at all three shows I attended) the content of the discussion and sketch (regardless of topic) tends to be informed by race. 

The performers are all dazzlingly skilled and in tune with each other, but what’s really exciting is the honesty with which hilarious and sometimes painful contradictions are exposed. For example, at Pillsbury House, someone yelled out ‘MeToo!’, which led to a fearless discussion (mostly by the female performers) about their feelings of rage and disempowerment at the way they felt white middle-class women had hijacked a conversation (and a phrase) that was originally started by (and been about) working-class women of colour. This led to an excruciatingly funny sketch involving a White middle-class woman trying to get her driver’s licence renewed in an increasingly awkward exchange with a Black male service-counter worker. An escalating competition ensued over which of them was more discriminated against on the basis of gender or race, while one of the other performers fluttered around her chanting softly ‘White fragility’, before they all finally started singing: ‘Shut the fuck up, Melissa!’ (or some other typically White middle-class name)  – which had me feeling simultaneously exhilarated and uncomfortable, as all good comedy should. 

Other memorable highlights included a hilarious take on the topic of religion, which had two performers admitting that they’d been raised by minister-parents, after which they embarked on a manic game-show-style improvised sermon-competition, complete with fake biblical quotations; an extended dive into the topic of sex education, which led to a series of fearlessly revealing anecdotes followed by an improvised high-school 'advanced' sex-education class; and a entire evening devoted to the theme of getting partnered (or ‘boo’d up’), which included a lot of self-mockery (also extended to some brave members of the audience) about Black dating rituals.

All in all, I found Blackout an exhilarating and addictive experience: funny, risky, unafraid to strike jarring notes and expose rough edges, and genuinely empowering for everyone onstage and in the audience, Black and White. 

*

Later that week I was back at Mixed Blood for Prescient Harbingers, a trilogy of recent plays by three Black male playwrights from outside Minneapolis that all in one way or another touched on racism and gun violence (or in one play, gun-violence in a predominantly White workplace). The trilogy was produced by Mixed Blood Artistic Director Jack Reuler with a shared design team (and some cast members) but three different directors, and all three plays were remounts: Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was originally produced (and set) in New York; Hooded: or Being Black for Dummies by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm was first staged in Washington DC (and set in Baltimore); and Hype Man: A Break Beat Play by Idris Goodwin was a guest production by Company One Theatre, Boston (and ‘set recently in a large American city’). 

I saw the plays on three separate nights; they were also performed as a marathon on weekends; but despite their shared themes and personnel the plays and productions were vastly different experiences. I found Hype Man (which I saw first) the weakest on all fronts. A somewhat schematically written and statically staged one-act work about a rap outfit divided by racial-political tensions in the wake of a police shooting, it was well-enough acted but suffered from the fact that the actors weren’t convincing as rap artists (apart from Rachel Cognata as the beat-maker, Peep One). This wasn’t such a problem during the long and somewhat dramatically inert recording-studio scenes, but became a glaring liability in the ‘live-gig’ sequences. (IMHO it’s almost always a mistake to make theatre about another art-form, except with crossover artists who are adept at both; Amadeus is an exception because it’s primarily about a mediocre artist, Salieri.)

Gloria was a much more sophisticated and fully realised play in three Acts with an interval between Acts One and Two. The action spanned two years and three locations, and revolved around a mass shooting at a New Yorker-style literary and cultural magazine workplace in New York City. The genius of the writing lay in the element of dramatic surprise and ‘post-suspense’ about who had survived the entirely unexpected (and shocking) onstage shooting that ended Act One. This level of uncertainty was heightened by the theatrical device of having the same actors reappear in Acts Two and Three playing different characters from the ones they had played in Act One who had been killed (or killed themselves). 

The staging was a little unimaginative and some performances suffered from a degree of caricature that possibly reflected some of the same actors’ work in the more appropriately cartoon-like Hooded (which I saw the following night). Personally I felt the subtlety and stealth of the writing in Gloria would have benefited from a more nuanced and underplayed overall acting style; this was notably achieved by William Thomas Hodgson, the sole Black actor in the show, who by doing the least made the most of his three relatively minor (and conspicuously lower-status) roles. 

I found the play a deceptively layered take on micro-aggression and exploitation – with some delicious reverse-ironies perpetrated at the audience’s expense about how the survivors of the shooting each sought to appropriate and profit from the experience in a ‘post-truth’ media age. As such it had a great deal to say about how everyone experiences and perpetrates violence and trauma (physical and emotional) in their own way – and sometimes even for their own benefit – in a kind of dis-informational ‘cycle of abuse’. It also showed how this takes place against a background of isolation and anomie, especially in a big, fast, individualistic and ruthlessly competitive city like New York.

Hooded was by far the most exciting and provocative of the three Harbinger plays and productions. Staged with considerable flair by Thomas W. Jones II and taking a more dynamic and abstract approach to the set and lighting (including the judicious use of silhouettes and projections), the writing and performance styles were also considerably more heightened than Hype Man or Gloria.

In a one-act series of jagged short scenes, the central relationship unfolded between a more socially ‘integrated’ and preppy young Black male high-school student Marquis (who has been adopted by a wealthy White family) – brilliantly played by William Thomas Hodgson in more neurotic and extraverted mode than his work in Gloria – and his more politically ‘woke’ and streetwise counterpart Tru (played in more relaxed form by Nathan Barlow). The two meet while being held in a police station following an incident in a park; Tru proceeds to ‘adopt’ Marquis and ‘re-train’ him in the art of ‘being Black’, particularly when it comes to picking up privileged White girls at his school. The relationship is paralleled in a hilarious sub-plot involving one of Marquis’s White male student ‘friends’ Hunter (a fabulous piece of clowning by Tom Reed, who played a nerdy and vindictive shooting-survivor in Gloria) who gets hold of Tru’s hand-written bible Being Black for Dummies and attempts to transform himself in order to achieve sexual success with his White girlfriend.

The show swung wildly between over-the-top comedy, grotesque satire (especially in the protracted scene when Hunter assumes his ‘Black’ persona and attempts to seduce his girlfriend) and the occasional (and for me slightly less successful) venture into mythic surrealism or tragic realism. Marquis’s elaborately staged dreams about Apollo and Dionysus (inspired by his precocious reading of Nietzsche) seemed like an unnecessary extension of his clearly archetypical relationship with Tru (which already resembled a Black version of Fight Club); and Hunter’s off-stage suicide seemed to come out of nowhere and felt neither convincing nor satisfying. Nevertheless, the final image of a terrified Marquis being cornered by an inept white cop with a gun was truly the stuff of nightmares – a nightmare that young Black men in America have to live with every day. 

Mostly I found Hooded an exhilarating work of ‘Black-comic’ (in both senses of the phrase) theatre probing the same vein as some of the best sketches in Blackout. One of the most disturbing moments came in the first scene, when Marquis takes Instagram selfies while in the police station, and shifts from planking poses to lying prone on the floor. When Tru asks what he’s doing, Marquis blithely replies that he’s ‘Trayvoning’ – a reference to the infamous 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin that inspired Black Lives Matter (the movement and the slogan itself). Whether or not this practice is real or fabricated, I found it a chilling indictment of the effect of social media on truth, ethics and politics, both within and beyond the Black community.

*

The following week I saw two even more incisive and formally adventurous works of Black theatre in New York City. What to Send Up When It Goes Down is a new off-Broadway play by Aleshea Harris directed by Whitney White for The Movement Theatre Company at the A.R.T. Theatre. More precisely, it’s not exactly a play, but what Harris in her program note describes as ‘a ritual’ created in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin and other shootings of Black people – as well as the racist response to those shootings, which has largely exonerated the killers and blamed the victims. 

Initially the title made me think I was going to see another work of political satire, until I learned that in America the phrase ‘send up’ refers to the act of sending up a prayer (rather than an act of mockery as the phrase generally implies in Australia). Indeed there’s a sacred quality to the ritualised action, language and staging of What to Send Up which reminds me of the role of religious discourse and practice in African-American (and indeed American) culture and politics. 

In more psychological terms, the work is an act of catharsis and even therapy for the playwright and the audience that transforms theatre into a forum for testimony, rage, grief, meditation and commemoration. It creates what Harris describes as ‘a space in the theatre that is unrepentantly for and about Black people’; as such, White people are not the show’s somewhat ironically designated ‘target audience', though they are invited to enter, witness and even participate – at least until the final section, when White audience members are asked to leave and gather in the foyer for a separate debrief while they wait for their Black companions. 

Before the performance began we all gathered in the foyer to contemplate an exhibition of hundreds of photos of Black victims of racialised violence covering every available wall surface. Among them I recognised the names of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and (something of a flashback) Rodney King; but it was a shock to see their faces, and countless others, including young children, teens and elders, in family snapshots and selfies. 

When we entered the theatre we were asked to form a circle and introduce ourselves by name; identify ourselves in response to a sequence of questions that mapped our relationship to racism and racialised violence; and articulate how we felt or hoped to feel by the end of the show. We listened to one of the performers read out a brief biography of one of the victims and then collectively repeated her name once for each year of her life; the sequence terminated at seven. Finally we emitted a collective shout or scream in response to what we had heard so far. 

We then dispersed to the three-sided seating banks and the performance proper began. Four female and three male performers (a fourth was unable to perform that night because of an undisclosed family tragedy) embarked on a sequence of songs, dances, chants, monologues and vignettes about enduring racism in multiple forms. The singing (led by one of the female performers, Denise Manning) was highly emotive, and the dancing and chanting tightly choreographed and accompanied by rhythmic body slapping. There was a recurring heightened second-person poetic monologue by one of the male performers (Beau Thom – for me the most striking performer of the night) that manically-obsessively listed ‘your’ feelings of anguish, despair and rage in response to ‘it’; and a recurring scenario involving a white liberal Southern woman called ‘Miss’ (played with sarcastic bravura by another male performer, Ugo Chukwu), her obsequious black driver (Thom again, in an excruciating caricature of a Jim Crow-era minstrel) and an increasingly furious maid called ‘Made’ (Rachel Christopher). Other memorable scenes included one involving two male friends, one of whom criticises the other for walking the way he does in White neighbourhoods and then demonstrates by mimicking him with a walk that appeared to be completely ‘neutral’; and a diatribe about a white female co-worker who claims not to ‘see colour’. The show escalated in energy and intensity, culminating in a literally scarifying revenge-monologue by ‘Made’ in which she fantasises about torturing a White oppressor by flaying them alive. By the end of the show (or in my case the point at which the White audience were asked to leave before the final stage in the ritual) several cast and many audience members were visibly struggling or in tears.

I was deeply shaken by the content and form of this work – especially its tactic of overtly and forcefully ‘seeing colour’. The atmosphere felt appropriately dangerous but at the same time ‘safe’, for the audience and the performers. I say this as a White audience-member; I have no knowledge of what occurred at the end of the ritual, but I imagine it involved some form of healing. I should add that ‘White critics’ were among those targeted at one point in the show – possibly a reference to one review I read which ironically warned readers not to go if they were afraid of being confronted (IMHO it’s never the job of a critic to anticipate how anyone else will react or to tell anyone not to see a show). 

Once again, however, I couldn't help noting the targeting of White women (as opposed to White men) in the show – and more specifically White liberal women; my two White female companions both said they had noticed the same thing. One suggested that it was a reaction to the much-touted fact (though the claim is somewhat questionable) that a majority of White women voted for Trump (at least in comparison with those who voted for Hillary Clinton); but I wondered how much misogyny might also play a role, in both the targeting and the election results – alongside a backlash across race, gender and class lines against liberalism generally. 

*

The most radical and provocative show I saw in New York was Slave Play by queer Black playwright Jeremy O. Harris, directed by Robert O. Hara at the New York Theatre Workshop. This time the title had me expecting a heavy night of period drama; in fact it’s a pun on the concept of domination and submission in the context of sexual ‘play’. Specifically, Harris explores the slippery (in every sense of the word) intertwining of racism and desire. As such, he penetrates (if you’ll forgive me extending the pun) more deeply than any of the works previously discussed (or indeed any play I can think of since Shakespeare’s Othello, with a brief nod to Genet) into the psychosocial mechanics of racism and sexual/gender-roles. 

Harris admits in an interview that he was partially inspired as a playwright by watching multi-screen online porn as a teenager; and the first Act of Slave Play plunges us into a montage of three couple-scenarios involving various permutations of race, gender, sexuality and sexual dominance/submission between slaves and masters (or mistresses). The scenarios all appear to take place on a pre-Civil War plantation, but are (at first puzzlingly) clumsy in terms of their performance and staging; they are also interrupted by incongruous bursts of the Rihanna/Drake song ‘Work’ which the characters seem to be aware of and respond to.

As with Gloria, it’s hard to write about what follows without spoiling the show, so skip to the end of this paragraph in the unlikely event that you’re in New York and are planning to see it. For those still reading: twenty minutes into the first Act, and with things hotting up in all three scenarios, one of the participants calls out a safe-word (‘Starbucks!’), and two white-coated female therapists enter from the auditorium. It soon becomes clear that the six characters we’ve been watching onstage are in fact three contemporary mixed-raced couples (two straight, one gay) participating in a five-day ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ workshop in which they dress up as pre-Civil War Southern slave-owners and slaves, and act out sexual fantasies to address the Black partners’ sexual dysfunction (they have been diagnosed with 'anhedonia'), which is supposedly related to inter-generational trauma. A hilarious second Act ensues, in which the two well-meaning therapists clumsily guide the couples to unpack and share their feelings, with calamitous results for all of them (including the therapists, who are also an inter-racial gay female couple with relationship problems of their own). The White characters are exposed as loving but unwitting oppressors, and every bit as neurotic as their Black partners, who gradually come to realise how they’ve been oppressed. The mood accordingly shifts from comedy to pathos; and things becomes darker in the final Act, when one of the couples returns home, apparently on the brink of a break-up, and re-inhabit their antebellum fantasy-roles in a much more disturbing and ambiguous way; before the play pulls the rug out from under our feet once more in a devastating (and possibly liberating) final twist.

The deft, multi-layered writing is ably supported by superb performances from all eight actors that manage to be funny, touching, sexy and occasionally scary; astute direction; and a simple but spectacular set featuring a backdrop of modular mobile mirrors that (depending on positioning and lighting) reflect the audience, the characters (especially when positioned above them in the final Act) and (most hauntingly) a horizontal panel suspended above and behind the audience which depicts an avenue of trees leading to a classic Georgian plantation home. As such it evokes our own voyeuristic complicity in the onstage action as well as the history that precedes it and envelops us too. Above all, it intensifies the focus of the play on the mechanisms of desire. 

This focus makes Slave Play less about moral culpability or consciousness-raising than about the unconscious and structural determinants of racism, gender, sexuality and desire itself. Paradoxically, I found the brutal honesty of the play emotionally, artistically and politically liberating – as well as being surprisingly compassionate and even forgiving in its treatment of all the characters, however flawed: black and white, male and female, straight and gay, dominant and submissive alike. This breadth of vision is possible because of the play’s multiplicity of perspectives and inclusive cast, which in turn enables it to speak in a more inclusive and complex way to its audience. 

In fact I found myself wondering if the playwright’s queer perspective in some ways offered a more progressive – as well as theatrical – take on things than works driven by ‘straight’ anti-racist, feminist or even class-based identity politics, which can often get stuck in the (necessary) emotional stage of anger or even despair. Specifically, the use of masks, costumes, props and disguises, and more generally pretence and role-playing, has historically been both a possible and necessary strategy for survival in response to oppression on the basis of their sexuality (as well as a source of pleasure) among the queer community. Perhaps this has led to an understanding of performance – and the performative aspect of identity itself – which can help us all to negotiate our political, artistic and even domestic conflicts; trans, non-binary and gender-fluid thought and practice might also provide us with even more tools for thinking and doing things differently. If so, Slave Play might be the most Utopian work of theatre I’ve seen in a long time.

Postcard from Minneapolis

The Maddening Music of War

Minnesota State Opera, Silent Night; Lewis Milesone/Great River Film Orchestra, All Quiet on the Western Front; G.W. Pabst, Westfront 1918, Kameradschaft; Rose Ensemble, Empire, Religion, War, Peace: Music from the 30 Years’ War

I arrived here in the Midwest just in time for the mid-term elections, closely followed by Remembrance Day weekend and the centenary of Armistice Day. The atmosphere was one of polarisation: international, national, regional, political, economic, social, cultural and along the usual battle-lines of race and gender. If anything this sense of division was even more marked after the elections, leaving the country starkly divided between White House and Congress, Senate and House, urban/suburban and rural electorates, progressive internationalism and reactionary nationalism  – divisions mirrored in rainy Paris by the respective speeches of the French and American presidents (not to mention the squaring off between America and China back in my home region at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Papua New Guinea).

The works I saw in my first two weeks here – and my response to them – were somewhat overshadowed by this sense of national and global confrontation.  

Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s Silent Night was originally commissioned and produced by Minnesota State Opera in 2011; the score subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, and the work has since had dozens of productions in North America and Europe – including nine this season, perhaps not unsurprisingly in the centennial year of the Armistice. The original production was recently revived by the MSO at its home venue the Ordway Centre in Minneapolis; and it’s here that I saw it the week after Remembrance Day. 

Based on the screenplay for the 2005 French film Joyeuse Noël, the opera commemorates what is possibly the one incident in the First World War that almost everybody has heard of: namely, the brief spontaneous truce that broke out on Christmas Eve in 1914, when German, French and British troops laid down their weapons and celebrated Christmas together – only to resume obediently killing each other the next day on the outraged orders of their respective High Commands. I instinctively avoided seeing the film when it came out, but was prepared to give the opera a shot, if for no other reason than to hear composer Kevin Puts’s award-winning score. 

Sadly neither score nor libretto of Silent Night is remotely in the same league as other significant twentieth-century anti-war or anti-fascist musical offerings like Britten’s War Requiem, Tippet’s A Child of Our Time or even (more debatably) Gorecki's 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' – all of which notably use 'found' musical or textual material (the poetry of Wilfred Owen in the case of Britten, African-American spirituals in the case of Tippet, and Polish folk songs as well as an inscription on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in the case of Gorecki) in order to anchor the works in an authenticity and immediacy of reference which also (especially in the case of Tippet) paradoxically enables them to transcend their contexts and speak to themes of atrocity and injustice across time and space with deeply felt horror and anger as well as sorrow and compassion. Of course because they were composed for churches or concert halls such works also have the advantage of eschewing any direct dramatic representation of their respective narrative content; as such they obey a kind of secular taboo on images by keeping the obscenity of that content properly off-stage while using music and words alone to stare relentlessly into the abyss.

In comparison with these precursors the failings of Silent Night are all the more conspicuous. Most perplexing is the almost perverse absence of any direct rendition of the actual Christmas carols sung by the German and Allied troops – not even including ‘Silent Night’ itself – which would have provided the obvious musical and dramaturgical germ for the entire opera. Possibly this decision was made in the interests of compositional integrity; however I could detect no other authentic original voice amidst the clamour. Instead the musical style of the work is a kind of melange of various national genres or references to ‘typical’ composers: Wagner, Debussy, Mahler, Elgar and a rather laboured pastiche of Mozart (or possibly Gluck) in the opening scene – which rather implausibly takes place in a German opera house in 1914 where a performance is interrupted and the leading tenor conscripted onstage (in front of his wife who is also the lead soprano) when perhaps the more merciful act would have been simply to shoot him on the spot and dispense with an increasingly superfluous romantic subplot. 

This ‘everything-but-the-kitchen sink’ stylistic approach pays obvious homage to the nationalities of the characters, whose musical and dramatic personalities in turn are little more than emblematic of their respective homelands. However it does so only at the cost of reducing both music and drama to one or at most two dimensions: national origin in the case of the music, with the schematic addition of military rank, social class and romantic or familial relationships in the case of the characters. As such the score suffers from a kind of academism and even historicism which borders on the musical equivalent of l’art pompier; indeed when the Scottish soldiers began singing in bad Highland accents I was seized with an urge to call the fire brigade immediately. At times I wondered if I was watching a Broadway musical with a title like Western Front Story– or perhaps a Hollywood remake of Joyeuse Noel.

As for the structure of Mark Campbell’s libretto, I couldn’t help suspecting that it had been all-too constrained by the screenplay on which it was based. The alarum bells went off in the opening scene, which introduced our two opera-singer romantic leads Nikolaus Sprink (tenor Myles Mykkanen) and Anna Sorensen (soprano Karin Wolverton), who both sang well enough (though I found Wolverton’s voice a little grating) but were scarcely needed as a musical or plot device, and about whose relationship or fate I could not have cared less, in comparison with the soldiers and officers who were surely the opera’s real subjects. 

Among the latter, the most convincingly written (and performed) both musically and dramatically in terms of subtlety and complexity were the German-Jewish Lieutenant Horstmayer (baritone Joshua Jeremiah) and the French Lieutenant Audebert (baritone Edward Parks), along with the Scottish Lieutenant Gordon (Christian Thurston – struggling manfully with his accent). All three in different ways convincingly navigated and expressed their ambivalence towards the war and their assigned task in it, and in the case of Horstmayer and Audebert were also given simple but touching backstories. 

Indeed for me the most effective and moving scenes in the opera occurred after interval in the Second Act: firstly when the three officers agreed to extend the truce on Christmas Day to bury their dead and exchanged amicable if halting (and comic) trilingual small-talk on the battlefield (the English surtitles lending additional irony to the exchange); and later when individual soldiers from the ensemble sang haunting extracts from letters home in their respective languages on Christmas Night. These scenes justified and made use of the material and its form as a multilingual opera, and both score and libretto (as well as the players of the Minnesota Opera Orchestra under Courtney Lewis’s sensitive conducting) rose splendidly to the occasion. They also provided moments of much-needed stillness and contemplation in the otherwise somewhat hectic direction and staging of Eric Simonson – as well as Francis O’Connor’s picturesque revolving set, which looked like an illustration from a children’s book or museum diorama, complete with dead trees and the ruined façade of a church that wobbled slightly whenever the revolve came to a standstill, and huge projected flags on scrims (in case we were in any doubt about the nations involved).

In sum: I couldn’t help feeling that the popularity of Silent Night had more to do with its mostly pre-modernist and user-friendly score, its Broadway-style libretto and staging, and its sentimental, slightly pious and falsely consoling message, than any actual achievements as a work of contemporary opera. Perhaps there’s something about the so-called ‘Great War’ itself – and more specifically the story of the Christmas Truce – that inspires a kind of Edwardian nostalgia for a mythical time at the close of the Age of Empire when everyone still knew their place and a certain chivalry still prevailed. Such nostalgia is especially evident in Anglophone countries (not least Australia, with its Anzac obsession); but it also informs the more resentful and reactionary forms of nationalism that led to the ensuing catastrophe of the Second World War – and which in various forms still plague us globally today.

*

Down the street from where I’m staying in the cosy inner suburb of Longfellow, the tiny local non-profit art-house Trylon Cinema commemorated Armistice Day weekend with two benefit screenings of the lesser-know silent version of Lewis Milestone’s 1930 epic All Quiet on the Western Front to raise money for Minnesota veterans, alongside two even more powerful and newly restored anti-war classics from 1930 and 1931 by the great Austrian theatre and film director G.W. Pabst: Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft (Comradeship). All three packed far more punch than Silent Night – and in the case of All Quiet also included a far more effective use of live music. 

The film was originally released in two versions: the better-known talkie and a (somewhat re-edited and slightly shorter) so-called International Sound Version which included music and sound effects but removed the American-English spoken dialogue and replaced it with inter-titles for an international audience. The silent version is arguably superior both because of its tighter, more fluid and expressive editing (silent cinema being at the time a much more advanced art-form than talkies) and because it dispenses with the dialogue, much of which was lamely delivered by the actors and in any case sounded somewhat incongruous coming from the mouths of German soldiers and French civilians. 

The Trylon screenings however went one better by dispensing with the music and sound effects as well, and replacing these with a semi-improvised live accompaniment by The Great River Film Orchestra, comprising local Twin Cities musicians Keith Lee on baritone guitar, piano and autoharp (a kind of zither), Nathan Grumdahl on drums and synthesizer, and Matt Sowell on electric lap steel guitar and industrial equipment. 

The original soundtrack’s essentially pre-war, classical-romantic and alternately militaristic or elegiac orchestral style has an unfortunate tendency either to sentimentalise or even glorify war, much like the soundtracks of so many war and even anti-war movies since (a tendency that arguably extends to the score of Silent Night). Indeed this is arguably one reason for Truffaut’s paradoxical remark that he had never seen an anti-war film that didn’t end up being pro-war. The Great River Film Orchestra however treated us to a much more hand-held, expressionist and even contemporary industrial sound, which suited both the material and the medium. 

The result was like watching a horror film, the visceral impact of which was considerably increased by the music being performed live in semi-darkness in front of the screen, and largely improvised in response to the images projected there. This was especially the case during the remarkably staged and filmed battle and bombardment scenes, when the moaning chords of the autoharp and plangent howls of slide guitar mingled with the crash of cymbals and drums, and the machine–gun rattling of industrial junk percussion; but it was no less telling in the earlier scenes of jingoistic street parades and enthusiastic recruitment-sessions in school classrooms, which were more starkly underscored by ominously sustained piano-chords; as well as during the interludes of ceasefire, on furlough and in the hospital barracks, which were hauntingly accompanied by the slide guitar.

Despite some of the more predictable elements in the essentially generic content of All Quiet (which after all virtually invented the genres of both Hollywood war and protest-movies) I left the cinema much more shaken than I had been by Silent Night. The early recruiting scenes in particular (and their eerie musical accompaniment) had me immediately thinking about the bellicose nationalism and militarism currently being preached in the US, Russia, China and elsewhere around the world, and fearing lest history repeat itself with even more catastrophic consequences.

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Although probably most famous for his silent Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks (based on Wedekind’s Luluplays), G.W. Pabst came into his own in 1930–31 with a trio of great social-realist sound films: Westfront 1918, Kameradschaft and a controversial version of Brecht and Weil’s Threepenny Opera which was the subject of a lawsuit by the playwright and composer but made a movie star of Lotte Lenya. Certainly Pabst is a much more significant film-maker than Milestone, and German cinema was far more advanced than Hollywood in the early 1930s – and indeed arguably led the world in that art-form until the catastrophe of Nazism, from which (like Pabst himself) it never recovered, until the brief blazing flare of Fassbinder and rise of the New German Cinema in the 70s. 

Westfront tells a similar story to All Quiet – about the physical and mental impact of the war on a group of friends in the German army who are progressively disillusioned, wounded, maimed, killed or driven insane by the conflict – but it does so in a much bleaker and more horrifying way, and uses much more advanced techniques such as long complex overhead tracking shots through the trenches and the deliberate absence of visual perspective during the chaotic battle scenes. Certain images leave an indelible imprint: the death of one of the main characters in a shell-crater leaving only his hand sticking out of the mud; another driven mad and dragged from battle shouting ‘Hurrah!’ while saluting piles of corpses; and a final scene in a field hospital that seems to come straight out of a medieval vision of hell as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch – or perhaps an etching by Otto Dix, Pabst’s contemporary and fellow practitioner of the so-called ‘new objectivity’ in art that succeeded expressionism in the latter years of the Weimar Republic. The closing image of a blinded French soldier reaching out unwittingly to hold the hand of a German – who has just died and been covered by a sheet on the stretcher beside him – and murmuring ‘Comrades, not enemies!’ is both hopeful and hopeless at the same time (recalling Kafka’s saying that ‘there is hope, but not for us’) even as it evokes the title of Pabst’s next film, which is effectively a sequel to this one; yet even this image is followed by the closing title with its chilling question mark: ‘The End?’ (In this regard it’s worth remembering that Armistice Day is just that: the commemoration of a cessation of hostilities – albeit with onerous terms for the German side – rather than a formal surrender; an anomaly which contributed to the fact that ‘the War to End All Wars’ in a sense never ended – much like the American Civil War which is arguably still being waged by white supremacists to this day.)

The French-German co-production Kameradschaft more or less picks up where the previous film leaves off, but is even more technically sophisticated and perhaps ultimately more humanist in its narrative and vision. Set in a town on the French-German border in the immediate aftermath of the war, it tells the story of a group of German coal miners who risk their lives coming to the rescue of their French counterparts who are trapped in a neighbouring mine after a gas explosion. The film combines realism and expressionism even more effectively than Westfront 1918, and deliberately evokes imagery from the latter in scenes such as the terrifying domino-like collapse of the mine-supports (recalling a claustrophobic scene from the earlier film in which the German soldiers struggle to keep their trench-supports from collapsing during a bombardment) or –hauntingly – when an oxygen-starved French miner sees his German rescuers approaching him wearing gas-masks and has a flashback to the trenches, leading him to attack them in his delirium. Yet if the penultimate scene of Kameradschaft – in which a mass-meeting of survivors leads to expressions of solidarity from both sides – ‘We are not enemies, we are all workers!’ – is more optimistic and politically charged than anything in Westfront, it is nevertheless followed by the bleak image of French and German border guards re-installing the metal grille that separates the two nations even underground (and which the German miners had kicked asunder earlier in the film to reach their French counterparts). 

Unlike either the sound or silent versions of All Quiet, both Pabst films tellingly have no music at all in the soundtrack, other than the diegetic use of cabaret music with which the French villagers entertain the German troops in an early scene of Westfront – a scene paralleled in Kameradshaftwhen the German miners enter a local music-hall in the French part of town, and a misunderstanding leads to a fight when one of them is snubbed by a French woman. Pabst had a much more nuanced understanding of the role of music in theatre, cinema and politics – as well as the psychology of nationalism, war and conflict, and the socio-economic conditions that fuel them – than Milestone (let alone the composer and librettist of Silent Night). Artistically he had lived and worked as a theatre director and actor in New York before the War, and was interned in a French prisoner-of-war camp on his return to Europe, where he formed a theatre group inside the camp; politically he made no secret of his Marxist affiliations (at least until the Nazis took power), and later faced at first-hand the compromises imposed on him by both the Nazi and Hollywood regimes; so he had skin in the game when it came to the subject-matter he was drawn to as a film-maker throughout his career. 

As such, his films have a great deal to tell us about our contemporary situation, which in many ways alarmingly resembles the era of economic precarity and intensified nationalism that preceded and led to both World Wars.

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From opera to silent film with live musical accompaniment to sound film with minimal music, I finished my ‘week of war’ with an experience of pure music (vocal and instrumental) by local Twin Cities early music group The Rose Ensemble, in collaboration with the Augsburg University Choir and early music ensemble Dark Horse Consort, performing a program of music entitled Empire, Religion, War, Peace: Music from Europe’s 30-Year Conflict, 1618–48. 

The concert was performed at three different churches; I saw it at the magnificent and recently restored neo-Romanesque Church of the Assumption in downtown Saint Paul – a Catholic church founded by German immigrants fleeing persecution poverty and persecution in search of a better life in the mid-19^thCentury. So the performance had a visual component as well: one which, like the music itself, had a soaring beauty while also indirectly reminding us of its enduring religious (and sectarian) context and history.

The program included works by Bach’s great German precursor Schütz (who travelled to Italy where he was influenced by Gabrielli and Monteverdi) as well as other contemporary German composers who wrote work in response to the conflict – all of it in the service of their respectively Catholic or Protestant Princes and thus heavily partisan, but much of it of surpassing spiritual beauty or deeply rousing in a way that transcends the circumstances of its composition. 

The works were given glorious and passionate voice by the ensemble and choir, with outstanding work from tenor Bradley King, mezzo-soprano Alyssa Anderson, and the clear soprano of Kristina Boerger, who also conducted the Augsberg Choir. They were given delicately rich support by the Dark Horse Consort’s variously sized sackbuts (early trombones, more or less) and sweetly tuned cornettos (which are like curved wooden trumpets with finger-holes) – all resounding in the majestic acoustics of the church.

The performance was a timely reminder that 2018 is also the 400^thanniversary of what was arguably the first ‘modern’ war in that it involved virtually all of Europe’s major powers; was at least ostensibly waged in the name of ideology (in this case religious) even if in fact largely driven by power-politics and fought by indistinguishable armies of mercenaries; and saw the death of over 8 million people – or about a sixth of the population of Europe, including over a third of the population of the German and Czech lands – either in battle or from violence, plague and starvation. 

Unlike the both World Wars however – or even the American Civil War – there are only written (and artistic) records of the conflict. This makes it a fascinating object for imaginative contemplation – as Brecht did with Mother Courage, which was based on the 17^thCentury German writer Grimmelshausen, whose picaresque novel Simplicissimus fictionalised his own experiences in the war, but which Brecht used to hold a mirror up to the role of capitalism in the Second World War.

In this case the Rose Ensemble allowed us to close our eyes and imagine the war and its impact for ourselves, with the aid of a spoken narrative thread interspersed between the musical items, delivered at a lectern by individual members of the ensemble and drawn from contemporary personal accounts by Schütz himself as well as a Swabian cobbler-farmer Hans Heberle (who kept a diary during the war after seeing a comet and interpreting it as a sign of his mission to record what he saw) and the Polish-German poet Andreas Gryphius, who witnessed horrific atrocities against civilians and wrote about them with unsurpassed lyricism. As he wrote in his poem ‘Tears of the Fatherland’, which was read during the concert (in English translation): 

So, now we are destroyed; utterly; more than utterly!
The gang of shameless peoples, the maddening music of war,
The sword fat with blood, the thundering of the guns
Have consumed our sweat and toil, exhausted our reserves.
Towers are on fire, churches turned upside down;
The town hall is in ruins, the strong cut down, destroyed.
Young girls are raped; wherever we turn our gaze,
Fire, plague, and death pierce heart and spirit through.
Here, town and ramparts run with ever-fresh streams of blood.
It's three times six years now, since our mighty river's flow
Was blocked almost by corpses, just barely trickling through.

I found the cumulative experience of this concert – music, narration, architecture, the context of Armistice Day and our contemporary times of trouble – a deeply moving cause for reflection and culmination of the week's performance-going. As the German-Bohemian composer Andreas Hammerschmidt’s motet ‘Verleih uns Friede’ (‘grant us peace’) implored in the words of Martin Luther at the concert’s conclusion:

In your mercy grant us peace, 

Lord, in these our times.

Postcard from Perth #57

Lost and Found Opera, Actéon/Anything Is Valid Dance Theatre, Dust on the Shortbread

Site-specific theatre and performance has become all the rage in recent years. At their best, such productions allow for a mutually illuminating dialogue between venue and work; often they also use the space to refresh our experience of performance itself by immersing the audience visually and spatially in the work with the performers.

Last week I saw two shows that used non-theatre venues to very different but equally telling effect: Lost and Found Opera’s staging of Charpentier’s Actéon at the UWA Aquatic Centre, and Anything Is Valid Dance Theatre’s devised work Dust on the Shortbread, which was performed at private house in North Perth.

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Lost and Found Opera has been presenting neglected or ‘lost’ works from the repertoire in alternative or ‘found’ spaces in Perth for the past six years. Past productions include Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine in a hotel room; Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in a suburban house in City Beach; Milhaud’s Medée in a former cell for female asylum inmates at Fremantle Arts Centre; and Viktor Ullman’s Atlantis (which was written in Theresienstadt concentration camp) at Perth Hebrew Congregation Synagogue. 

Charpentier’s baroque chamber opera (or ‘pastorale’) Actéon is based on a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses about a man out hunting in the forest who stumbles across the goddess Diana bathing naked in a pool, and is punished for his transgression by being transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. The circumstances surrounding its composition and first performance are unknown, but it would have been in a non-theatre space, owing to the royal monopoly held by Lully over the public performance of stage music in Paris at the time. Possibly it was commissioned by Charpentier’s patron the Duchesse de Guise as an entertainment at her palatial home; or perhaps by Louis XIV’s son the Dauphin, who also commissioned works from the composer for performance in his private chapel – and who like Actéon was apparently a keen hunter. The composer himself sang the lead role when it was first performed during the spring hunting season of 1684; when it was remounted in autumn later that same year, the role was changed from a counter-tenor to a soprano, and the work was renamed, Actéon changé en biche (‘Actéon changed into a doe’). 

Charpentier had studied composition in Rome, and his incorporation of the latest Italian developments in harmony and counterpoint were in defiance of Lully’s nationalistic efforts to ‘purify’ French music. The younger composer’s sacred vocal music was especially acclaimed, and he also wrote stage music for Molière (after the playwright quarrelled with Lully). Musically, dramatically and perhaps even in terms of its staging and performance, Actéon can thus be seen as an ‘alternative’ and even transgressive work. 

Lost and Found’s latest production of Actéon was staged in and around a covered 25-metre swimming pool at the UWA Aquatic Centre. Conducted and re-orchestrated by Artistic Director Chris van Tuinen, it featured a tight ensemble of seven wind, keyboard and percussion players, and periodically bent the genre of the work from baroque to contemporary jazz. The cast ranged from professional opera singers in the principal roles to younger singer-performers as the respectively female and male choruses of Nymphs and Hunters, as well as a team of female synchronized swimmers (drawn from local volunteer sporting organisation SynchroWA) who augmented the action in the water, much as ballet dancers would have graced the stage in traditional baroque opera productions. 

In an impressive feat of creative vision and artistic coordination, the production was directed by multi-talented Perth actor-singer-dancer-performer-writer-director Brendan Hanson, with simple but effective choreography by Laura Boynes, which successfully integrated the various styles of movement utilised by all the performers in relation to each other as well as the architecture of the venue. The similarly minimal but brilliantly unified set and costume design by Tyler Hill and lighting design by Karen Cook featured a collection of on-water floating orbs containing LED lights which periodically changed colour, with extra illumination provided by a small but perfectly judged lighting rig, and an array of delightfully tongue-in-cheek costumes and the odd prop (crucially including a stuffed and de-mounted stag’s head). The audience were seated at one end and along one side of the pool on standard terraced benches with waterproof ponchos provided for those in the more expensive (and exposed) ‘poolside’ front-row seats.  

The production began in playful mode with Actéon (countertenor Russell Harcourt) and his chorus of hunters dressed as uni students on the rampage after a college ball entering the space through the roof down a ladder and sporting the stolen stag’s head as a trophy. Things become more surreal with the arrival of the synchronised swimmers in flesh-toned bodysuits, followed by the goddess Diana (mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Tymms) and her chorus of nymphs and attendants Arthebuze (Corinne Cowling), Daphne (Bonnie de la Hunty) and Hyale (Caitlin Cassidy, who later doubled as the goddess Juno).

The singing was thrilling throughout – especially from Harcourt in the title role, his shrill countertenor lancing and piercing through the space, with Tymms lending her warm powerful mezzo voice to the role of Diana, and Caitlin Cassidy providing strong support as Hyale, and later as a fiery Juno – all naturally amplified by the echoing acoustic of the venue. Watching these fine actor-singers plunge into the pool, swim around and generally disport themselves while continuing to sing was truly astonishing; and seeing the synchronised swimming team display their skills at close quarters (and beautifully lit) was an unexpectedly enchanting visual analogue of nymphs at play.  

In terms of mood, the production took me on a surprisingly nuanced journey from playful comedy to surreal beauty, and then entered deeper waters with the punishment and death of Actéon, the staging becoming more abstract and ritualised as the music became more dramatic and tragic, especially for Actéon’s plaintive recitative following his transformation, Juno’s vengeful account of his death, and the sorrowful final chorus, in this version movingly sung by the hunters and nymphs as a combined male-female choral lament.

In this regard, the director’s program note invoking the #MeToo movement gave the production a contemporary frame of reference that opened up a level of complexity both to the work itself and to the current debate about sexual misconduct, especially by men in positions of power. I saw the production with my daughter, and afterwards we had a discussion about Actéon’s level of guilt and the appropriateness (or otherwise) of his punishment. Perhaps it’s drawing a long bow to compare Actéon’s accidental transgression (and the cruel punishment inflicted on him by Diana and Juno) with the accusations (from inappropriate behaviour to harassment, assault or abuse) currently being exposed in the media and judged in the court of public opinion as well as in the legal system, in the workplace and in personal relationships. Nevertheless, beneath the current wave of righteous denunciations and calls for change, perhaps there are deeper historical, social and psychological layers to the seemingly endless cycle of accusation and denial, judgement and retribution, that need to be acknowledged if we are to move forward collectively – as men and women – with all our imperfections.

If this is the case, perhaps mythology and art can provide not exactly a mirror but more precisely a lense through which to view our contemporary troubles. Opera in particular – with its historical and cultural origins in Greek tragedy – is well-suited to excavating the roots of some of the ills that afflict us, and perhaps has a cathartic power to heal some of our wounds. The earliest works in the genre – the Italian Renaissance composer Jacopo Peri’s Dafne and Eurydice, followed by Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (arguably the earliest opera still regularly performed) – were explicitly conceived as a revival of Classical Greek drama that combined music, theatre, song and dance in order to re-enact the stories of ancient myth. In terms of their social function, opera and Greek tragedy arguably share a common historical origin in communal rituals of human and animal sacrifice (the word ‘tragedy’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘goat-song’) - re-enacted to be sure in a purely symbolic form. Even the plots of most operas (like most myths) are stories of suffering and sacrifice, from the death of Eurydice (and Orpheus himself at the hands of the Bacchae) to the grand gestures and tragic dénouements of the lead characters (male and female) in the Romantic and contemporary repertoire, from Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini to Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking. 

In a sense, we still go to the opera for the same reason the Romans once attended the Colosseum or aficionados watch a bull-fight: to see how well the lead characters die. The aesthetic pleasure in seeing death ‘well-done’ – or at least well-told – answers to deep psychological and social needs, and perhaps points to an ethical imperative: to acknowledge the complexity of things, as well as our faults and imperfections, and that even when wrongs have been done and suffered, our judgement can be tempered with understanding and compassion.

As the Chorus sings at the end of the opera: Quel cœur, à ce malheur, ne seroit pas sensible - ‘What heart would not be touched by this unhappy tale?’

*

Anything is Valid Dance Theatre is another Perth company specialising in what they refer to as ‘site-alternative’ performance, breaking down barriers between audiences and performers and exploring what lies at the margins of mainstream performance practice, repertoire and subject-matter, with previous work performed in caravans and laneways as well as making mobile, immersive, one-on-one and audio-guided work.

Dust on the Shortbread is currently being presented by AusDance WA as part of Move Me Festival 2018. The work explores ageing and dementia – and more generally memory and forgetting – and their impact on personal relationships and identity in the context of a suburban home. Choreographers and co-artistic directors Serena Chalker and Quindell Orton have been developing the work for three years in collaboration with performers Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and George Shevtsov, two greatly respected elders in their respective fields of contemporary dance and theatre/film. 

The performance takes place in a small single-storey cottage in North Perth, with the two performers moving in and around the living room and adjacent kitchen, front hallway, bathroom/laundry and backyard. Last Thursday I was part of an audience of 15 people, and we waited outside on the front porch before being admitted and finding a place for ourselves in the living room with the two performers already in situ; we were then free to move around during the performance, sitting or perching on chairs or a sofa, or standing wherever we chose, while the performers moved around us – sometimes talking or doing domestic activities, sometimes dancing or performing more stylised movements, and sometimes interacting with each other or (more rarely) with us, but mostly ‘in their own worlds’. Domestic ceiling lights and lamps were switched on and off by the performers during the show, and they also occasionally played records on a turntable or listened to an old radio; and these sounds were augmented by a more abstract, intermittent sound design by Tristen Parr, which seeped in and out of the space as if welling up and then sinking back again into the inner landscapes of the characters and their memories – all which remained ultimately elusive, both to us and them, despite their attempts to recall and reconnect with them, and with each other.

A week after seeing this show, images still haunt me: of two people talking past each other, fixated on their separate memories and endlessly repeating themselves; of a woman telling the story of how she met the love of her life, while he dances in front her, each oblivious to the other; of hands resting on a table-cloth, more expressive than words or faces; of a man piling furniture up in the middle of the room, becoming more agitated, and forgetting a key word in his story; of a woman wandering outside, occasionally visible as she passes a window; of two people dancing together wordlessly in a hallway, briefly united in the present moment and in their bodies.

I found the delicacy and tenderness of this work very beautiful, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking, and ultimately deeply moving. As well as being an exploration of dementia and forgetting, it made me think about our attachment to the past, and conversely, about the slender thread of the present, which is really all we have to go on to lead us through the labyrinth – as performers, as audience-members, and in our daily lives and relationships, as time goes by and we advance further and further into the unknowable.

Postcard from Perth #56

Tristan und Isolde, Stuart Skelton, Gun-Brit Barkmin, Ekaterina Gubanova, Boaz Daniel, Ain Anger, WA Symphony Orchestra, Asher Fisch, Perth Concert Hall, August 16 and 19

Since becoming Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of WASO in 2014, Asher Fisch has been assiduously cultivating the orchestra’s sound and profile and ambitiously extending its repertoire and programming. A specialist in German Romantic and post-Romantic opera and symphonic music, he began his career as Barenboim’s assistant at the Berlin Staatsoper, and has since held positions or been a guest conductor with most of the major European and North American opera houses and orchestras. Under his baton (and the sensitive leadership of concertmaster Laurence Jackson) the WASO strings in particular have developed a more sumptuously blended European sound, while the wind and percussion sections (led by many fine individual players) have continued to go from strength to strength. 

In terms of programming, Fisch has embarked on a notable series of composer-specific projects with the orchestra, including their Beethoven and Brahms cycles in 2014 and 2015, and ‘Wagner and Beyond’ concerts in 2016 and 2017. Meanwhile, he has invited outstanding international colleagues and friends like Pinchas Zukerman and Garrick Ohlsson to appear with WASO as soloists. The 90^thAnniversary Gala concert performances of Tristan und Isolde last Thursday and Sunday were in some ways a culmination of all these strands in Fisch’s work with the orchestra so far, featuring one of the world’s leading heldentenors, Australian Stuart Skelton, as Tristan; German rising-star soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin as Isolde (a last-minute replacement for Eva-Maria Westbroek); and a supporting cast of international specialists in their respective roles, including Russian mezzo Ekaternina Gubanova as Brangäne, Israeli baritone Boaz Daniel as Kurwenal, and Estonian bass-baritone Ain Anger (who has sung Fafner and Hunding in various Ring cycles) as King Marke.

Tristan und Isolde is a watershed both in Wagner’s development and the entire history of Western music. The famously ambiguous ‘Tristan-chord’ that opens the prelude and the chromaticism that pervades the rest of the opera open the door to Debussy, Strauss and finally the abandonment of tonality by Schoenberg and his followers. In terms of musical structure the work dispenses with traditional forms of harmonic progression or thematic development (for which Wagner substitutes the building-blocks of more or less fixed leitmotifs) as well as any discernible arias; and the continually shifting tempi, rhythmic patterns and time-signatures destroy any sense of temporal stability and evoke the ever-changing sea that is such a central element in the narrative and emotional landscape. 

In terms of dramaturgical content and form,  the ethereal setting, minimal plot, static action, emotionally paralysed characters and their increasingly prolonged and tormented monologues anticipate the subsequent theatrical development of Symbolism and Expressionism. The work’s underlying philosophical and psychological themes also break new ground: both as a direct expression of Wagner’s recent reading of Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic twist on German Idealism was in turn influenced by his peculiar reading of Buddhism; and as a harbinger of Freud’s imminent theory of sexuality and the death instinct as the driving forces of the unconscious (unbewusst being in fact one of the last words of the Liebestod sung by Isolde at the end of the opera). In terms of what might be called the work’s negative theology, Tristan is a meditation on the gulf between knowing and not-knowing, seeing and not-seeing, language and wordlessness. 

A concert performance thus has much to recommend it as an appropriate form of representation for a work that challenges the limits of representation itself. As Tristan sings to King Marke, when the latter asks how the pain and shame of his betrayal and jealousy can be explained: ‘O King, that I cannot tell you; and what you ask, that can you never learn’; before going on to invoke an obscure primordial realm of darkness, unconsciousness and non-existence, which he explicitly compares to his mother’s womb, and which he longs to return to by ‘extinguishing’ the light of day, consciousness and ultimately life itself. Hearing Tristan performed without seeing it staged thus allows us to ‘see’ its images with the mind’s eye, much as Tristan ‘sees’ Isolde’s ship (and Isolde herself) arriving in Act Three (even when she arrives in the flesh, he ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ without seeing or hearing her, until finally the two lovers ‘join’ each other in the ecstasy of death). A concert performance thus remains true to the opera’s invocation of a via negativa, in which the sensory world of appearance is seen and known to be an illusion in comparison with the real, while the latter cannot be represented or directly experienced, except in death. It grants us access to the negative vision of ecstasy in the vast Love-Duet in Act Two that lies at the heart of the opera, when the torches in Isolde’s garden are extinguished and the two lovers entwine and merge in a kind of soul-union – not physically (despite the pulsing, thrusting, accelerating and surging moans of the orchestra) but vocally and sonically.

Indeed it’s above all on a sonic level (as well imaginatively and conceptually) that I found this concert performance so overwhelming from the moment the cellos began the sighing, soaring, yearning ‘Tristan’ leitmotif that opens the Prelude. Quite simply, no conventional staging in an opera house – with the orchestra buried in a covered pit beneath the stage (a technical innovation ironically instigated by Wagner himself) and singers typically framed by a proscenium arch with a fly-tower and wings extending above and to either side of them (and thus all-too-frequently swallowing their voices) – can match the sound of an orchestra (and the singers in front of it) on an open stage in a concert hall (especially one with the acoustics of Perth, widely regarded as the finest in the country) in terms of sheer impact as well as detail. Last Sunday I was fortunate enough to be sitting in the front row of the audience and right in front of Isolde, who sings the lion’s share of Act One; she was later joined on that side of the stage by Tristan for the Love-Duet in Act Two; he returned there for the immense monologue that forms the bulk of Act Three; and Isolde rejoined him there again for his death, and to sing the final Liebestod. 

As for the performances: Gun-Brit Barkmin was a thrilling Isolde, her hard bright silver-edged soprano as sharp as a sword but with plenty of depth to support it. A specialist in roles like Salome and Marie in Wozzek, she evoked a youthful but strong-willed Isolde, and this together with the controlled intensity of her acting made the role almost seem like an Expressionist prototype (an impression enhanced by her Louise Brooks-style bob haircut and expressive face and hands). Her voice and characterization also made for a satisfying contrast with Ekaterina Gubanova’s warm, rich mezzo and compassionate performance as Brangäne in Acts One and Two, especially when the two vocal lines are interrupting or calling and responding to each other. One of the most beautiful passages in the entire opera is Brangäne’s Watch (Habet acht! –‘Take care!’), which she sings during a lull in the Love Duet between Tristan and Isolde in Act Two; and this was memorably staged by having Gubanova appear and sing above and behind most of the audience in the Dress Circle, thus immersing us sonically in the scene.

Stuart Skelton is currently at his peak as Tristan, and clearly knows the role like the back of his hand, but still seemed open to a sense of discovery, especially in his evident rapport with Barkmin. The voice is effortlessly powerful (except when effort is required as part of the performance, as it is in Act Three), but perhaps at its most impressive when it softens and caresses like brushed velvet, as it did during the ineffably tender Love Duet. Despite his power, maturity and assurance, he seemed almost to defer to Barkmin’s more impulsive and at times more fragile Isolde, and his emotional desolation and psychological disintegration in Act Three was unbearably heartbreaking. He was ably supported by Boaz Daniel’s rich-voiced Kurwenal, who gave a slightly hammy performance in Act One, but inhabited the role more genuinely and touchingly in Act Three; while Ain Anger in his two crucial appearances as King Marke endowed this difficult role as the wounded but forgiving husband and friend with dignity and pathos, giving a subtle and understated performance – assisted by a magnificent voice – that conveyed the complexity of this character’s feelings.

For me though the hero of the night was Maestro Fisch, whose rendition of the score combined the drive and energy of Kleiber with the control and attention to sensuous beauty of Karajan (to cite just two of the many great conductors of this work), while always remaining in a state of creative rapport (and evident pleasure) with the singers and the orchestra. The sound he coaxed from the WASO strings was ravishing, led by delicate and heartfelt playing from Laurence Jackson, with outstanding contributions from Alexander Millier on bass clarinet and Leanne Glover on cor anglais. 

In many ways this was the most thrilling experience I’ve had from Fisch and WASO so far – as well as one of the most revelatory Wagner experiences I’ve had in my life. I’m consumed with curiosity about what Fisch has in store for us next year. A concert performance of Parsifal perhaps? Bring it on.