St Petersbrug
Romeo and Juliet and Fedra
Watching a play performed entirely in a language one does not understand, can – like any experience in the theatre – provoke one of two reactions: fascination or intense boredom. If one knows the story, and the director’s visual conception, the production’s values, and the performers’ conviction are all first class, it can be a riveting experience despite not knowing a word.
Fedra by Ukrainian director Andrei Zholdak produced both reactions. Using text from Phaedra by Seneca the Younger and Phèdre by Jean Racine, Zholdak sets the work in a mental asylum and today’s violent, underground world of the Russian mafia. Zholdak was meant to bring his production of Romeo and Juliet to the Baltic Festival, but then it was banned in the Ukraine. This year he also delivered a lecture on “How to kill a bad actor”. For a glimpse of his Romeo and Juliet for which Zholdak was either in effect fired from his position or resigned (reports contradict) see http://www.desillusionist.com/data/3/09.html . We watched a grainy video of the production performed before a specially invited audience. What it had to do with Romeo and Juliet was anybody’s guess. I inferred it was the balcony scene when Romeo and Juliet – both as rigid as dolls – were inserted on either side of a giant tube that stretched across the proscenium. Most of the performance involved an ensemble cast chanting, apparently in the Ukranian language, though a Ukranian speaker told me much of the text was unintelligible to her. Video productions are never fair. I imagine the piece had a powerful impact. The choreographed group movements appeared to be lampooning the communist style mass gymnastic displays, converting these into a kind of synchronised anarchy. The cast were dehumanised, turned into idiotic robots. After all, the English word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech ‘robota’ meaning forced labour. Zholdak created an unmistakeable and haunting impression of the Soviet gulag. The cast of male and female actors stripped naked, smeared themselves what looked like faeces (but wasn’t in reality) and ended the piece by forming a giant wall of bodies against the backdrop.
Zholdak certainly knows how to illicit powerful performances from his actors. In his Fedra the intensity of the performers transcended the language barrier. Unfortunately, in his quest for a post-modernist look, Zholdak employed video projection, which – as is so often the case in theatre – simply doesn’t work. Video tends to deaden the live quality, to desensitise us to the immediacy which theatre uniquely delivers. When Fedra, smoking, delivers her riveting speech in the final act, she has to compete with an overshadowing video projection of her face. It distracted, almost destroyed the performance for me. Zholdak also used video clips to inform us about off stage action, most of which were gratuitous and these could easily be inferred. The film direction was of a far lower standard than the theatrical direction, and should serve as a lesson for theatre directors who employ mediums in which they are less capable. To introduce an element as radical as video, it needs to be aesthetically integrated into the work as a whole. Having a technician dressed in black wandering around the stage with a handheld camera and struggling with a feed lead, is a cheap and tacky and a failure to find an artistic solution. Some of the inserts were overlong. Don’t invite me to the theatre and then show me a badly made movie.
Another element in the production to dislike – and it’s worth harping on about here, because this device too is insidiously inserting itself increasingly in our theatre – was the use of a soundtrack. Almost throughout the performance, there was background music – a filmic score, with ambient sounds and themes accompanying the action. It is an artificial way of inducing emotions and cueing the audience on what to feel. It’s unnecessary and often irritating even in films. It’s as if the actors are not trusted to make us feel. Besides, the essence of theatre is that we do not try to predetermine and control the live reaction, in the same way that the audience is presented with a complete stage and action, not with selected expressions and close-ups linked together by a film editor. The theatre audience is active, not passive as in television. We do the editing. Our responses are part of the danger.
Uncle Vanya
More successful as a whole was the striking Belgian production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya by innovative director Luc Perceval. Originally translated into Dutch, Perceval and dramaturge Jan van Dyck rewrote the “artificial” (Perceval’s word) Nederlands into Flemish, specifically emphasising the Antwerp dialect. As part of his directorial process, each actor reworked their part in terms of their own family. Perceval says Chekhov is “universal” – the emotional truths in Uncle Vanya could be about any family anywhere in the world. After running for four years on tour around the world, this was the final performance.
The performance opens with the cast of eight sitting on chairs staring at the audience. A kind of showdown ensues, in which the audience is at first perplexed, then begin to wonder if this is one of those avant-garde productions in which the actors watch the audience until one of the parties becomes bored. Sporadic isolated clapping followed. After six minutes one of the characters (we don’t who is who yet) burps. Two arias play, two couples dance. “God Verdomme!” is the first audible word and we’re fifteen minutes in. But once the action starts it is unstoppable: tightly choreographed, the language brutal and cutting, the emotion visceral. At one point Doctor Astrov retches on stage until bile comes up, though he doesn’t actually vomit (thank God).
The annual Baltic Festival in St Petersburg is a well-attended event with a high standard of production. Festival Director, Sergei Shub, says “1990 was the year the USSR collapse and many human, humanitarian and political relations were broken…The festival had to fulfil not only cultural, but also social mission, the task of preserving the common spiritual area of the Baltic region…a search for a common language.” Speaking neither Russian, not Latvian nor Lithuanian, I could understand clearly what he is in the process of achieiving.
