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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