Ranking top of my festival experience here has to be The Battle of Stalingrad (Tbilisi Marionette Theatre). Rezo Gabdriadze, writer and director, using small puppets, recreates the tragedy of the apocalyptic battle that saw the death of a million human beings. His two protagonists, imaginatively take the form of horses (around a 100 000 horses died in Stalingrad).
I have always felt it interesting that there is no adjectival form for the English noun ‘pathos’ (from the Greek pathos meaning ‘suffering’). ‘Pathetic’ it isn’t. And the ability to arouse pathos, beyond empathy, is the essence of theatre. Without pathos, it is entertainment. Pathos has to be created – always made anew. It cannot be described. It is firmly a noun. And by concentrating on individual stories in this vast canvass, Gabdriadze’s delicately made puppets bring the full horror of a detestable history home. This is powerful, refined theatre, visualised with a freshness and ingenuity that allows us to respond to the horrific slaughter with feeling, rather than a dulled sense of the futility of man.
I highly recommend that anyone who comes within the vicinity of this theatre master makes every effort to see his work.
Visit their website www.gabriadzetheatre.ge or www.georgianseason.ge
Drawing crowds and splashing endless photographs of Alan Cumming’s cute naked butt across the magazines and newspapers is a new production of Euripides’ The Bacchae by the National Theatre of Scotland. It’s a pleasing enough entertainment, but it really boils down to a wonderful vehicle for impish Cumming, who is superb.
The experimental Wooster Group’s production of La Didone combines Francesco Cavalli’s 17th century opera with Mario Bava’s 1965 Sci-Fi B-movie horror film Planet of the Vampires in a hi-tec staging. It is visually exciting; the singers are not only technically brilliant, but blessed with pleasing voices; though once we have the concept it becomes a one-trick pony and soon begins to wear thin. The effects are clever, but alienating. You never get into either story – the opera and its parallel movie. Much of the action is awkward, the cast negotiating their way around screens and the hi-tec equipment.
Though not well received by some starchy critics and some bemused, rather literal-minded balletomanes, the Royal Ballet of Flanders production of William Forsythe’s satirical ballet Impressing the Czar is a coup de théâtre. Originally performed in Frankfurt in 1988 it shared notoriety among the outraged city fathers who eventually had enough and closed the Ballet Frankfurt.
The Brazilian dance company of Lia Rodriguez are here with Incarnat. It’s an hour long disembowelment with naked male and female dancers making gut-wrenching screams and smearing themselves with blood, gore and gruesome bits of viscera. With all due respect for these brave artists and acknowledging their sincere creative aspirations, it simply doesn’t work. I kept asking, what are they so angry about? This is protest art as mindless and the senseless violence against which presumably they are trying to draw our attention.
Also experimental and not much more successful is the Israeli-Russian physical theatre piece Orpheus. Referencing the great clowns of the stage and the silver screen, the artists employ a range of imaginative props. Unfortunately, it overplays the tricks and the result is somewhat gimmicky and sits uncomfortably.
The American one-man monologue Nijinsky’s Last Dance has played to sold out audiences. The nudity of the incredibly well-shaped and handsome soloist may have more to do with this. A professional dancer foremost, his acting can be a little hammed at times, but the script is good and it’s an easy hour on the eye.
Critically acclaimed and also sold out, but disappointing is Damascus, a new play by Scotland’s David Greig. This success of this work is that it deals in a lucid way with the issues surrounding the present crisis in the Middle East. The public is desperate for an intelligent and dramatic exposition. In other words, people need theatre to deal in a personable and accessible way with the political and abstract issues arising out of different cultures chafing against one another in a world suffering the imbalance of power and resources. But this is not Gorky, who manages that kind of dramatic dance effortlessly. Damascus becomes debate theatre. It also employs monologue, with al the awkwardness that comes form directly addressing the audience and asking rhetorical questions.
