Saturday 26 April 1997

The Secret Death of Salvador Dali, April 26, 1997


By Stephen Sewell
Court of Miracles and Rooftop Productions At Budinski's April until May, 1997
Reviewed by Kate Herbert around April 25, 1997

There's no getting away from it. Salvador Dali was a real weirdo. This applies not only to his surrealist paintings, films and other design but also to his personal life and his family background: weird, weirder, weirdest.

His relationship with his mother was textbook Oedipus Complex and with his sister was sexually questionable to say the least. His father was a tyrant who put three year old Salvador's name on his brother's tombstone because he wished him dead instead.

He was renowned for his incessant masturbation and sexual disturbing imagery and conversation, his neurotic and hysterical behaviour and dependence on his wife Gala in later life. This was one weird bunny - but he was undoubtedly a genius.
Stephen Sewell's The Secret Death of Salvador Dali is an episodic, almost vaudevillian portrayal of Dali. Rory Walker and Kate Kendall play all characters, swapping roles, genders, costumes and a complete wardrobe of moustaches.

The piece is most successful when Walker exclusively plays Dali in the second half. Dali becomes a parody of himself, a grotesque, warped mirror image of his own narcissistic creation. Walker hits his stride and reveals himself as a fine comic actor. His timing is excellent and his Dali tirades do justice to Sewell's wild, esoteric and hilarious images and text.

Kendall is less effective in her multiple roles which demand a very broad range of character acting skills. Her portrayal of Ferdinand Lorca and the younger Dali are not credible.  She is better equipped for the ingenue, Dali's sister Anna-Maria and for his harridan wife. Director, Peter Dunn also seemed determined to keep Kendall nearly naked off-stage for an inordinate amount of time as she changed costumes.

Dunn cuts from scene to scene with actors dressing and undressing at side-stage. Scenes bleed into each other, dialogue runs off-stage or as voice-over. Generally the play moves swiftly but the innumerable costume changes seemed unnecessary in the first half.

Dali's was a long life. He outlived all his cronies: Louis Bunuel, Max Ernst, Breton and all his idols, namely the Marx Brothers (not Zeppo). He was an artistic slut painting anyone, even Hitler and Stalin, for money or for interest. In the final scene his long-dead hero, Renaissance painter Raphael, decries him from a celestial height for the prostitution of his art. He has served no purpose. He has become one of those he condemned in his youth, one of the "Putrefactos".

KATE HERBERT

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