Puppetry of the Penis

Ethologists will tell you that genital display is a common form of communication in the animal kingdom; not only for reproduction, but also to assert social status. Male squirrel monkeys wield their erections in so called “penis duels”; macaque monkeys and guinea pigs withdraw their testicles into their bodies in submission displays; and as a hangover of our evolutionary origin, some men’s genital area, especially the scrotum, has a markedly darker hue.

The theory goes that our unique upright posture and front facing genitals require that we have taboos around the naked penis to prevent sending incorrect messages to the more primitive regions of our brains that signal sexual enticement, aggression or intimidation.

So what happens when two adult male Homo sapiens take to the stage and overtly display their genitals for seventy minutes? Comedy, is the short answer. The response is automatic. We can’t it seems help ourselves laughing; or if the show is in Amsterdam, where penises are par for the course, at least cracking a broad smile.

The two dicks (as it were) behind Puppetry of the Penis or “the ancient art of genital origami” are Australian jocks Simon Morley and David (Friendy) Friend.

Introducing the performance Morley tells the audience, “There are no strings and no puppets.” What follows is a carefully scripted and well thought through exhibition of male genital manipulation involving pulling and folding the penis, pinching and twisting the testicles and flapping and stretching the scrotum to create a variety of shapes. Women roar with laughter; the guys cross their legs from sympathetic pains. The performers keep reassuring the audience that it doesn’t hurt, but my own cobblers were not convinced.

A television camera projects close-ups of their genital “installations” on to a giant screen. “Does wonders for the confidence,” quips Morley. The flattening effect of the lens improves the mimicry. My favourites were the “turtle”, the “mollusc slowly emerging”, and the “hungry chick in its nest”. By the time one gets to the “sea anemone”, you’ve almost forgotten you’re looking at a cock. As “purists”, they try not to use props. They have about 60 tricks in their repertoire and perform roughly 45 of these on a night. Some are clearly in the eye of the beholder. The “hairy tongue” and the “chicken nugget” nearly triggered my lesbian friend’s gag reflex. My other companion, a yoga teacher, smiled and nodded approvingly at the “wind surfer” which is quite a stretching exercise.

Originally conceived as an art calendar in 1997, the show debuted as a live performance at the 1998 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, then went on tour and really took off at the 2000 Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. A West End version in 2001 ratcheted it up into a fully multimedia entertainment with sound effects and lighting cues. They’ve now franchised and it has been performed in seven languages in twenty countries. “We also have guys who have regular day jobs but do hen parties. We’re global pimps,” laughs Morley. South Africa is a new market opening according to Friend.

But, after the first few airings, Morley comments, “The women are reacting a lot different from everywhere else. . . our installations usually get a riotous laugh. . . here it’s a shy giggle”. Not quite on the night I saw the show.

Says Morley: “Dick tricking is not so uncommon in Australia. This is secret men’s business that comes from male sporting change rooms. We expected South Africa to have a very similar sort of environment – good climate, lots of sport, you enjoy a drink too, but we haven’t found anyone who does them. I’m sure they do, it’s just a little more underground here.”

Friend agrees: “I did it as a kid in the bath…we all did.”

For the comedy to work, the show is of necessity premised on taboo. According to Morley when a Christian congregation in England moved for the show to be banned, the local bishop came to their rescue, saying there is nothing wicked about the human body.

Friend says he hones in on patrons who seem particularly uncomfortable until they crack.

“It’s is a ridiculous piece of human anatomy…a couple of kiwi fruits hanging off, nothing pretty about it in its flaccid form,” says Morley. “It’s a piece of skin. Get over it!”

“The penis is a symbol of power, but we are actually ridiculing it,” adds Friend.

True, no matter how powerful a man may be socially, in private you can crush him by laughing at his penis.

There is nothing lewd about what is essentially a vaudeville entertainment. It has even a sibling quality to it. Morley’s facial expressions especially resemble a naughty boy showing off.

Which is why I don’t understand the “no under 18” age restriction that is slapped on the show. It suggests something that isn’t there. As does having the United Kingdom’s Ninia Benjamin, whose humour is in your face sex talk, open the show.

Personally, I think the penis puppeteers should consider doing school tours. Poking fun and demystifying the penis can only do good in such a sexually violent country as our own.

September 3, 2008 | Comments Closed

House of Holy Afro

House of Holy Afro

Although it has still not been seen in South Africa, Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro has had successful runs in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Zimbabwe, Belgium and even Reunion Island. I finally catch it at the Edinburgh Festival. Quite unlike his other work, though carrying his signature stylistically, Afro is a quality ensemble funky camp club entertainment with house DJ Dino Moran (Ibiza, Ministry of Sound).

Bailey tells me how people have attempted to discuss the deeper symbolic meaning of the piece, such as the holy cross backdrop. “There isn’t any,” he insists. “I’m just having a bit of fun.”

The show balances cheap township tat, designer chic and pricey Vegas kitsch. As a theatre man, the acts that work best are those lead by the disguise of a charismatic character. Bailey sources a range of star iconography, from Adam Ant to Brenda Fassie. The entertainment runs the gamut of clubby reworkings of jive, gumboot dancing, Gospel and Afro-pop. Easily accessible, it’s uniquely popular in theatreland with young, late night audiences. And in Edinburgh, I saw a seventy-year-old dowager and her mousey husband tapping away with their feet to the Ugandan Yalimunyenye (“Ancestors, come down from the stars”).

At a seminar hosted by the Africa Consortium UK and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA), Bailey is pointedly asked whether he isn’t pandering to European prejudice and exploiting African exoticism.

Bailey replies that he no longer carries his youthful arrogance. “I was naïve,” he says bluntly. This is not to deny the integrity and power of his early works. Artists must be allowed to experiment and find their way, and not be dictated to by academicians and ideologues. But he has learned lessons. Never, he says, will he bring works like iMumbo Jumbo to Europe again. Or Safari, his play about CG Jung’s central African travels. “I made the unforgivable mistake of dressing the Ugandan cast in red clay and raffia skirts. The standing ovations every night were patronising. They were not appreciating the quality of the performance.”

Yet even our official tourism marketers still promote our country with a luxuriously maned male lion and a Zulu with shield and an assegai. Looking at some of the brochures, you wouldn’t think we’d built a standing structure. “But,” counters Bailey, “when black cultural makers bring the same work it comes from the pride of a nation.”

I recall the opening night of Umoja at Artscape. There were German coach tourists with binoculars unabashedly ogling the topless African singers, while several of Cape Town’s recognisable black politicians were beaming and cheering that ‘our people’ had taken the hallowed main stage.

Bailey says he now makes works with either Europe or local audiences in mind. He does not translate works into another culture. Without the cultural literacy, Europeans cannot be blamed for seeing a work about witchcraft as whacky and absurd. “You can’t in theatre give the audience a cultural primer beforehand or some ethnographic display.” This was once seriously considered by his producing hosts.

Bailey has moved away from his initial trilogy – the plays of miracle and wonder. Recently, he has been accessing Greek mythological figures, such as Medea and Orpheus and making site-specific works.

He describes sitting in a tiny shack in Gugulethu where a goat was killed and as the red blood gushed on to the blue linoleum from China, on the television facing him Ridge and Brooke kissed in The Bold and the Beautiful.

“There is an extraordinary flavour of life in South Africa. So much that was previously dominated and destroyed is now bursting through.” The European structures and formats of theatre are no longer the be all and end all. Bailey achieves the apex of theatre – he transports his audience so thoroughly that we once again believe in the experience and ritual of theatre at the very core of what makes us to be human.

The world is taking note. Next year Bailey’s remade opera of Macbeth will tour to Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Germany and The House of the Holy Afro will tour Sydney, London and Zurich. Norrlands Opera, Sweden, have commissioned him to direct a new work. His production of Orfeus has been bought by Linz, Switzerland, which will be the European Cultural capital in 2009. Brett Bailey is co-curator with Jay Pather of the next Spier Arts Festival.

September 2, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

South Africans at Edinburgh 2007

Comparisons are invidious, but instructive. An ex-South African (to use that colloquialism peculiar to white South Africa meaning a highly qualified fellow with two passports who now lives in London) tells me our National Arts Festival is no different from the Edinburgh festival. Make that festivals – half a dozen separate simultaneously held events. The Scottish capital – their host –– is architecturally splendid and multitudinous, beautiful but unsurprising, built as it is on the discreet greed of the financial instrument – banks and insurance companies forming the bedrock. Started in 1947, to affirm the creative achievements of the human spirit after the near annihilation of meaning during World War II, this year marks the 60th annual celebration of the arts.

The festival first-timer notices similarities to the Grahamstown event: the desperate fringe artists swatting patrons with flyers; the stone university buildings; makeshift venues that recall a Gothic student digs’ life; and a High Street with a dirty great cathedral (theirs is dirtier); the seething crowds – though in SA we don’t usually get teams of drunk, middle-aged women stumbling home. It’s also wet. The height of Scotland’s summer is equivalent to the depths of our winter. Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh’s climate as “meteorological purgatory”. Global warming seems to have slowed the Gulf Stream denying the country any future summers, instead scorching tinder-dry Europe. And like Grahamstown, the city is teeming with an outbreak of comedians.

There is no comparison in scale. There are more stand-ups at Edinburgh than there are fringe shows at Grahamstown. Over 300 comics and over 600 comedies. Bring back King James VI for he licensed comedians (and beggars) in the 16th century. With 2000 fringe acts and over 17 000 performers, Edinburgh is seven times the size of our National Arts Festival (NAF). The only absence this year appears to be that of American patrons, so complain some impresarios.

The problem is partly that the ever-growing number of shows has outstripped the audience. Like our National Arts Festival, the open fringe has no curatorship. However, and this is a concept the Grahamstown event should seriously consider, two reliable brands of quality have been established on the open fringe – the Assembly and the Pleasance. The Assembly banner, consisting of eight separate venues scattered throughout the city, hosts over 300 shows, itself producing 25 shows, two of which so favoured are South African: Michael Lessac’s Truth in Translation and Brett Bailey’s House of the Holy Afro.

This year, Assembly founder and CEO, William Burdett-Coutts, anticipates his first financial loss in seven years, but he’s taking it in his considerable stride. It happens in this business; no need to panic.

Without a financial guarantee, it seems insane for a South African artist to even attempt Edinburgh. The economics are as foreboding as those of our NAF, except in British Pounds ten times the stake at risk. Even if sold out, the show is lucky to break even. Innumerable shows find themselves playing to audiences of fewer than twenty. Most British artists really come hoping to be discovered for television and radio. After a workshopped Jerry Springer the Opera was picked up by the National Theatre and went on to a spectacular West End run Edinburgh is awash this year with new musicals – over one hundred! There’s Orgasm the Musical, Zombie Prom, two musicals about Tony Blair, as well as several other facile agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Jihad the Musical and Failed States.

On the Royal Mile, I bump into Stef Junker (of Stef’s Sidesplitting Hypnosis) parading in the cold drizzle wearing nothing but an exiguous speedo. “We’ve decided to bring you some sunshine from sunny Souf Efrica,” he shouts, exaggerating his accent and pressing a flyer on me.

There seems to be a rite of passage, peculiar to South African performers, perhaps a hangover from cultural cringe, who feel that to stage at Edinburgh is to graduate after they have ‘passed’ Grahamstown. And there were many gold stars awarded this year. All the proudly South African productions – Lucy Heavens and Sarah Jane Scott’s Eurafrica, the Cape Dance Company, the Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir’s African Spirit, as well as Translation and Afro received much coveted and judiciously awarded four-star reviews. While an exhibition of William Kentridge’s prints has introduced this master artist to a new audience.

The print critics, because of the bewildering number of shows, are powerful here, though more by way of their recommendations that bring an audience, than by their ability to put people off. However, one pities those shows listed in the daily review paper under ‘Not Recommended’– surely their titles should have sufficed – Beckett in a Bucket, Songs About Vaginas, and Find Me a Primitive Man?

The LA production of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances is being favourably received too, though marred by the appalling apery of Fugard’s accent by the young man playing the autobiographical character. I preferred our Jason Ralph, but overall this production is superior because director Stephen Sachs understands that it is a struggle of styles. Morlan Higgins as André Huguenet, flamboyant not flaming, manages the crucial transition, to be stripped of disguise and affectation, not “an actor puffed up on stage”, but “an ageing fat old gay ham”, the real man bursting through his artifice.

Truth in Translation kicked off in the headlines with Hugh Masekela declaring to The Times that the ANC had sold out the struggle and he felt he was no longer welcome to trumpet transformation. He is quoted as saying, “People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people.” As if to prove his point the following week The Scotsman ran a 36-point headline: “A bully, thief and drunk who jumped the transplant queue to ‘steal’ liver – meet Dr Beetroot, health minister”, accompanied by a suitably frightful picture of Tshabalala-Msimang.

Critics seem to agree with this newspaper’s assessment that Translation is aesthetically and structurally flawed, but the subject matter transcends its formal detractions. Extracts from Lessac’s Translation will be performed at the Fringe Awards ceremony.

South African artists have certainly made good at Edinburgh this year following in the footsteps of a history of quality productions at the festival by stalwart theatre practitioners such as Andrew Buckland, Mbongeni Ngema, David Kramer, Greg Coetzee, Paul Slabolepszy, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Nicholas Ellenbogen.

August 30, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

The Passion of Winnie

Passion of Winnie

We all regret things we’ve said. Politicians tend to deny ever saying them. Until, that is, someone plays the video or the tape. The usual defence follows – it was out of context. Some eventually own up. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was unapologetic about her infamous speech at Munsieville outside Johannesburg in 1986: “Together hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” The incident has been rehashed numerous times, and as a reflection on the personage today is hardly controversial. After all, we have Members of Parliament widely believed to have personally executed people. The question that divides us, is whether we believe they killed for us or some other’s cause.

Take this treatment – Winnie sings:

For what I’m about to do
Oh Africa, my Africa
I know I will be demonized
And hated in my day
But what now I proposed we do
Believe me, I have thought this through
Rise up and take a stand
All our husbands sons and daughters
Are now rotting in their jails
By the rubber tire necklace
By the burning petrol necklace
With a box of common matches
We will liberate this land
We’ll find freedom
We’ll find freedom, ah!
Viva Mandela!

Chorus:
You said it mama,
And now you are done
It’s far too late to say “why oh why?”
It’s late at night
And the dark fight has begun now
All your secrets
Your hidden silent schemes
And your wildest dreams
Your dark desire
Feeds the comrade’s fire
Your wildest dreams they are one now

This then the climactic last song in The Passion of Winnie (Part 1), a new opera by South African composer, Bongani Ndodana-Breen, with libretto by South African-Canadian Warren Wilensky. June 8 sees its world premiere in Toronto.

Any writer who has attempted a biopic will know life doesn’t always provide a well-structured drama, and such endeavours are made particularly complex when the subject is still alive. David Kramer, having seen several treatments over the years for proposed musicals on Nelson Mandela, says they tend to struggle with the Robben Island period. What does one do – have a 27-year interval?

The Passion of Winnie ducks the problem by painting the past with the broadest of brushes. True to opera, it is preoccupied with narrative action and not the psychology of the characters.

We start in the village where Winnie Madikizela was born. Her father, Columbus, warns her about the outside world. She boards a steam train for iGoli to the refrain“You strike a woman, you strike a rock”, and a backdrop of South African landscapes. She stumbles into a first-class carriage and is ejected.

In Johannesburg, she beds down in a dormitory at the Helping Hand Hostel, where she chances upon Nelson. Wisely, Madiba isn’t a character part. Only Winnie, played by Chantelle Grant, who has a remarkable resemblance to the young Winnie Mandela, and her father, Columbus (Mxolisi Welcome Ngoli) are solo parts; the other rolls are covered by chorus members.

Sharpeville and the passbook protests are shown in archival still. Winnie’s own chilling arrest is played out in darkness with sounds only.

This is Ndodana-Breen’s second ‘digital opera’ (the first was Orange Clouds with filmmaker John Greyson) fusing film, digital media and opera. Five projectors create a montage of archival footage and images captured by Wilensky in rural South Africa on three screens custom made for the production. At times film sequences interact with the live performers. A chamber orchestra of 16 musicians and 8 vocalists, hidden behind a scrim backdrop, are at times lit to make ethereal appearances during the show.

Ndodana-Breen’s modern classical style incorporates traditional Xhosa rhythms, Cape Town jazz, township jive and anti-apartheid street chants. This young, debonair composer has rocketed to success. His work is performed around the world; last year, the Miller Theatre, New York, put on a programme entirely of Ndodana-Breen’s compositions.

It remains to be seen how overseas audiences will respond, especially the rightwing expats of Toronto. Canadians are less familiar than ourselves with damaged individuals. However, Madikizela-Mandela is well on her way to rehabilitation. Awards and glowing tributes, recently by Carl Niehaus on Mother’s Day (following hard on the heels of his obsequious apologist plea for Mugabe) have been rolling in. In many ways, this is a natural response to tragedy. Countless persons suffered and suffering is not a competition; scores of people paid the ultimate price, but Ma Mandela is undoubtedly an elite member of the few subjected to sustained periods of sadistic brutality. Yet, through her own flawed actions, she has not reaped the rewards others have, in many cases quite disproportionate to their efforts in the struggle.

As dissatisfaction with the success of the national democratic revolution spreads, perhaps there is finally a broader appreciation, even from unlikely quarters, of what she embodies.

Part 2 though is going to be far trickier for Ndodana-Breen and Wilensky as they enter muddier waters and the grim activities of the Mandela Football Club. Brett Bailey once had plans for a musical about Winnie called Ipi Stompie? Carl Niehaus won’t approve. But hopefully, we all regret things we’ve written.

June 7, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Sizwe Banzi est mort (Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord) Paris

Currently on in Peter Brook’s atmospheric old theatre on boulevard de la Chapelle is the adaptation of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead into French by Marie-Hélène Estienne with direction by Peter Brook. Unfortunately this erroneous title, ‘Banzi’ not ‘Bansi’, has survived in to the translation. ‘Sizwe’ means ‘people’ and ‘bansi’ means ‘great’. Fugard intended the title as a political statement, but when the play first went to the UK a typo on a poster resulted in ‘banzi’, something only corrected in later English editions.

It’s inevitable that comparisons are drawn when one sees a foreign version, but it is not that comparisons are unfair, but rather that they are unhelpful. However, curiosity demands. The setting remains South Africa, and the script is relatively faithful to the original with some additional explication. The stage is bare using only the paint-flaked walls of the Bouffes as backdrop. Back, metal clothing-rails on wheels serve as doorways; props include a couple of chairs and two rubbish bags. Whereas the South African productions have tended to be more literal, Brook decorates the photographer Styles’s studio with ink wash impressions on cardboard to represent photographs.

The greatest difference from the recent revival with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, is in the physical presence of the actors and their interpretation of the rôles. Habib Dembélé is a slight man with a ponytail and an almost camp joie de vivre, an effeminate streak noticeable but greatly downplayed by Kani. In contrast to Ntshona, Pitcho Womba Konga (Sizwe) is a giant of a man with the silhouette of a door. Both actors handle their characters with sensitivity and humour. As a South African, it’s affirming to see Fugard’s remarkable script succeed as well in Paris as Cape Town.

January 7, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Berlin January 2007

Die Zauberflöte (Komische Oper Berlin) Berlin

Provocative director Hans Neuenfels has in the current production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute extended it as a modern spielsang, with a cast of actors, and set it in a clinic for sexual neurosis. It’s a Freudian claptrap distillation of an imagined subtext in the original, which when it doesn’t make sense is elaborately worked in to the opera by inserting passages of clumsy text penned by Neuenfels himself. The magic flute is a four foot lacquered penis and the glockenspiel a set of silver testicles. Although trying hard to be camp and tongue in cheek, the humour is resolutely mirthless, lacking all Mozart’s sense of fun. The second half is particularly belaboured with Mozart’s beautiful score tediously interrupted by Neunfels’s self-important treatise. Though as a director he clearly has an excellent aesthetic eye, this production was truly an example over-subsidised self-indulgence.

January 5, 2007 | Comments Closed

БАЛТИЙСКИЙ ДОМ 16th International Baltic House Festival

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.

October 29, 2006 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed