The whiteness is
total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its
depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of
reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for
Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s
corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking
A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the
Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty
space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and
panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather
of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples,
reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been
described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too,
was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much
of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream,
was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched
in since the 19th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm
of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making
process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.
Simon Stone,
aware of these thoughts and the history of theatre-making, writes illuminatingly
in his Writer and Director’s notes in the programme. “The theatre’s ability to
represent other eras and other worlds in realistic or expansive detail is not
its strong suit,” Stone writes. “Its ability to provoke an audience’s
imagination is. The imagination exists outside time. It is best provoked by
placing ideas, language and images in a void, leaving the rest to be filled in
by the audience.” (p5) I get the feeling that, watching Stone’s recent work at
Belvoir – a rewriting of The Wild Duck
(after Ibsen) and his direction of Lally Katz’s Neighbourhood Watch, both in
2011 – this almost complicit relationship with the audience, to engage them and
invite them into the worlds of the play is at the forefront of his aesthetic
and style, as is the process of “[raising] to the level of classical drama the
everyday lives of people like us.” (p5)
Strange Interlude’s production’s aesthetic was almost too
simple to be true. Items of set were brought onto the white sheet of void as
the scene required them – a lounge for the professor’s study, a singular
cylindrical rubbish bin, a functioning shower cubicle, a jetty made from
interlocking sections, a strip of synthetic grass and three director’s chairs,
a child’s train set, a rope swing, like Brook’s, that descended from the
ceiling. Additional lighting was introduced, sparingly, to create different
times of day or create a mood that was unable to be achieved otherwise. Yes, it
might’ve been the principle of Brook’s ‘empty space,’ but it created such a
rich and evocative mood, a kind of searing whimsy whereby entire locations were
conjured from a mere symbolic representation, an abstraction. It was a bit like
a colouring-in book, I suppose: Stone and Cousins created the outline, and as
you engaged with their ideas and the space, you coloured it with your own
emotions, reactions and experiences.
Stone’s
rapid-fire dialogue, tightly-written and extremely well-rehearsed at times
became too quick, too slickly rehearsed, to be real; yet instead of becoming
laughable what you got was an immediate sense of exuberance, urgency, vitality,
thisishowitis, (a bit like the frenetic energy in Kerouac’s On The Road). Toby Schmitz’s scene towards
the beginning with Mitchell Butel was one such example, as was Schmitz’s
continuation of the same scene with Toby Truslove. Much has been made of
O’Neill’s writing style in Strange
Interlude – “[in] his desire to represent the mental life of the
over-educated, under-stimulated, upper-middle-class of his time, he struck upon
a formal conceit that is extraordinary in both how radical and simple it is[:]
the soliloquy.” (p5) Initially jarring as the fourth wall was blatantly shattered,
as characters moved from a dialogue scene to a soliloquy of their intense
thoughts and emotions and back again, a performance quirk or device became
apparent: if it was a soliloquy, there would be little or no movement in the
background of the scene, and the characters’ focus would remain as it was
before the soliloquy began. As the use of soliloquy became increasingly bold and
creative (the ‘shower scene’ between Emily Barclay and Toby Schmitz is one
example, as is the following jetty scene with Barclay, Schmitz and Truslove),
the line between soliloquy and scene became blurred until you weren’t quite
sure which was which. Out of the shower, came Barclay’s Nina dressed in a
swimming costume. Actors-cum-stagehands moved the shower cubicle out of the
way, as the resultant steam softened the edges of the jetty being set up in the
foreground; an abbreviation of a ladder was placed on the edge and Nina climbed
onto it in one movement, effectively walking out of the water, and the scene
moved on, from one time to another, two or three months later, effortlessly,
brilliantly, simply. Instances like this made the production sing with a
vitality that was sorely lacking in Belvoir’s previous show (Benedict Andrews’ Every Breath. (The less said about that,
the better.)).
O’Neill’s
characters (via Stone’s sharp finely-wrought script) were like cosmic asteroids
on a collision course: their lives colliding, their orbits crisscrossing and
bisecting, intersecting in space and time. Sooner or later you just knew they
were going to crash and burn and splinter and break apart, heartbreak and
turmoil and possibly carnage spread in their wake, no one safe or exempt from
their path.
I particularly liked the
story’s chronological framing (in terms of the ordering of scenes as they occurred
in the play’s world, not as they were presented to us on stage) of Nina
farewelling her Gordon’s – first her fiancée who will soon die in the war,
later her son. In a moment of almost heavenly irony, Nina loses both of them
one after the other in Stone’s sequencing of scenes. As she stands in the
departure lounge of an airport we never see, her late fiancée leaves, followed a
beat later by the entrance of her son’s girlfriend, Madeline. As Nina taunts
Madeline, we get a sense that even though she might be bitter, Nina is still a
strong woman who has come through the tumultuous twenty-five years of the play’s
narrative. The play’s final image – of Nina standing alone in the white blank
page of void – is potentially nihilistic, but I read it as that in the end,
Nina is the only person who’s ever going to be with herself for her whole life,
regardless of who weaves in or out of her life’s journey. It’s like Nina says
in the second scene, ‘sometimes you’ve got to stop doing things for everyone
else, and live for yourself.’ I read the play and its physical visual
representation as kind of comment on the here-and-now of contemporary ‘over-educated
under-stimulated upper-middle-class’ life: if you have everything, if you can get
everything and anything you want whenever you want, what do you live for? How
do you create meaning in your life if everything is transitory, insubstantial,
acquired and discarded at will?
Ultimately, and
to Stone’s credit, this new envisioning of Strange
Interlude “offers a touching insight into the minutiae of our daily
worries, joys, and hopes, set against the vast backdrop of life’s irreversible
decisions.” It does so with a searing warmth and humanity, a creative flair and
a spark of genius that lingers with you long after the play has concluded. It is
perhaps not a strange interlude in our life at all, but rather a hauntingly
poetic one, and a rather brilliant one at that.
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