The King Lear story is brought to a contemporary aboriginal community in Australia, with mixed results. I liked the live band, although I think the production as a whole relied on music to cover up a host of issues with script and acting. The decision to cut between Shakespearean text and aboriginal language worked effectively; the new English text, however, flirted aggressively with banality.
"World theatre" is somewhat vaguer a category even than "world literature," and poses many problems--several of which were on display here. Moreso than the novel or poetry, theater needs teams of experts; those experts gravitate towards the major centers, either of population or of training or of funding. I think it's harder for theater from the periphery to really manifest itself at full force in a center--in a place like the Barbican, with its role to cherry-pick theater from around the world--given the need of peripheral companies to compete for resources with large, nationally-subsidized companies like the RSC or (say) Peter Brooks or Ivo van Hove or whoever. This isn't just to flatly say that things are better in London, always--one certainly watches enough dull professional exercises in the West End.
Simply put, this didn't scale well to the Barbican stage and to the level of training evinced by most of hte productions that appear there. Firstly, this had clearly originated in a smaller auditorium than the Barbican's; the solution was to amplify the actors heavily, which tended to flatten the possibility for subtlety among the performers. Indeed the cast seemed, frankly, of varying levels of ability--or maybe just wasn't used to performing in a vast, somewhat clinical space like this theater. This is the kind of theater that puts heavy technical demands on actors and productions; it killed the intimacy between performers and audience that the actors seemed at moments to invite. The staging reminded me of teaching those Richard Schechner-y productions, with their onstage musicians and actors moving in and out of character; a stage like the Barbican's kills this sort of thing dead. This kept reminding me of those West End transfers from smaller theaters, in which a set is kind of awkwardly installed in a huge new space.
But there were other problems, too. The script was full of the sort of vaguely-stated notions that, I fear, a right-on audience would have expected from an aboriginal setting in a theatre. There were many references to "nature" and "this land" and so forth, but without any new, vigorous language to support or unpack these vagaries: to give them local or revivified meaning. A smaller venue would have played better to this script and actors; indeed I could imagine several moments involving these big--but also, mounted correctly, primal--abstractions working well in another space. But a better script would also have given these actors more to work with in the non-Shakespearean parts: would, in other words, have given them a better bulwark against the Shakespeare. The play as a result seemed textually uncertain to stand on its own, soaring in terms of language only when Shakespeare's language was brought in. I sometimes felt the production inviting a condescending pat on the head from the RSC.
If there's a lesson here, it's that (I think) to be moved around the world, theater-makers need to be more attentive to reproducing all of the details of a staging in an analogous or similar setting; and need to make allowances for the ways that different tekne play differently in different spaces.
No comments:
Post a Comment