Writer: Kate Herbert
Jan 30, 2002
It was a wild old weekend visiting the Sydney
Festival to see the French Theatre du Soleil and Barcelona's La Fura Dels Baus.
Neither are coming to Melbourne.
Nobody asked them.
La Fura Dels Baus is
dubbed experimental but is one of many companies internationally making theatre
of this kind. They visited Adelaide Festival in 1998 with a show called MTM.
Their latest, OBS
Macbeth, is based on the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth but, strangely, uses
none of his poetic language.
Their highly developed
form of visual and visceral spectacle incorporates video technology, live
electronic music, huge machines, pyrotechnics, non-theatre spaces and an
audience that is never allowed to sit or stand still.
Nor are they safe from
marauding machines, roving video cameras, showers of water, tubs of blood or
getting trampled by panicking crowd members attempting to escape damage.
OBS does just as it
intends. It recreates in an innovative form, the violence of the murderous
would-be king and his manipulative wife.
So, allow me to be
controversial about a controversial company.
Audience members who love
the work say they like the edge of fear in the space, that theatre is not
usually physically dangerous. The company might say it presents a complacent
middle-class with an image of social violence to shock them out of their fuzzy,
self-satisfied fog.
What I see, is a theatre
company appropriating social violence for the entertainment of the young,
middle class, theatre-going audience.
They are marketing the
fear. It is used as titillation for an audience that has no first hand experience
of it.
Lady Macbeth is a strip artist, a tabletop dancer, a lewd, provocative
tart whose only power is her gorgeous body. It also, just like MTM, violates
women. She is almost penetrated with a sword by her soldierly husband on return
from battle.
In profound contrast is
Flood Drummers, created with her company by the heroic and much mythologised
theatre director from Paris, Ariane Mnouchkine.
Mnouchkine's company,
formed in the 60's, has sufficient funding to allow her to take five to twelve
months to develop a show. This Sydney season, she tells me, is the last of
Flood Drummers in the world.
This show is kinder to
audiences. We are seated, albeit in a non-theatre space. The story is an
political parable written by Helene Cixous. What makes this piece so extraordinary is the form and mode
of presentation.
It derives from Asian
styles, particularly the Japanese Bun Raku puppets and Noh Theatre. But the actors are the puppets. Each has
manipulators to lift, propel and animate him.
Prior to the show, we watch the actors
dress and put on delicate masks and costumes in their public and very
decorative dressing rooms.
On stage, an exceptional
musician, who has worked with Mnouchkine since the 70s, accompanies the action.
There is less passion and
assault in the Flood Drummers than OBS. There is more dialogue, less flesh,
blood and fear in the audience. And there is no nudity.
Nothing shocks. It merely transforms the actors and transports us.
The only other show in
Sydney that involves a naked man is the Elocution of Benjamin Franklin featuring a new, more svelte John Wood .
That show, we will see in September in Melbourne, according to Mr. Wood.
Will he be writhing naked
like a strip artiste? Or bathing in a tub of blood or chucking bladders of
blood at us?
Sydney Festival closed
officially on Australia Day weekend. Some visual arts and cinema events
continue.
By Kate Herbert
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