I
thought perhaps this time Benedict Andrews’ mise
en scène would make sense, that his staging techniques and or Effects would
be justified by the production’s context and or the text’s demands. Being the
fourth production of Andrews’ that I have seen – Measure for Measure (Company B Belvoir, 2010), The Seagull (Belvoir, 2011), Every
Breath (Belvoir, 2012) – I thought that perhaps I had seen it all (in many
respects, I suppose I have), but The Maids
only confirmed the fact that Andrews is perhaps on a different planet to most
people, especially myself.
In
some ways, I think I understand what he is trying to do, it’s just that his
execution and implementation – his deployment and reliance upon– of Effects end
up distracting from any kind of message or examination he could be trying to
make or conduct. For instance: I understand the notion of constant surveillance
that pervaded Measure for Measure
(and now The Maids), but the
live-video-feeding cameras on large screens on either side of the stage meant
you were watching them not the actors on stage. I understand the idea of the
storm in The Seagull,
but to have ‘ash’ falling from the heavens and not be referenced at all in the
dialogue seems clumsy, immature. To depict (frequent) sex acts on stage seemed
to negate any point he may have been making, and turned Every Breath
into a farce. So now in The Maids,
when we have glass walls on either side of the stage, mirrors, a live
video-feed from seen and unseen cameras dotted around the stage perimeter and
dressing; when the set is destroyed (to an extent) and sex acts hinted at
though never fully realised; when characters seem to actually use an on-stage
toilet, it really does feel like we have seen it all before. And I guess we
have.
In
the program, Andrews discusses how, at age fifteen, “Genet was very important
to me” and along with Beckett and Pinter, “formed the foundation of what my
theatre practice and my enquiry into what theatre is.” With this is in mind
then, we begin to see what Andrews’ theatrical style consists of: mise en scènes and effects which are
designed to shock and jolt audiences, and to invite – nay, provoke – them to
walk the line between absurdity and seriousness via a deliberate exacerbation
of their inherent dramaticness. Genet, in an article titled ‘How to play The
Maids’ (also published in the program), talks about how “the performance will
be furtive so that the heavily overblown language feels lighter and gets across
more easily to the audience.” He could well be talking about Andrews’ own
stage-craft, his very practice of making theatre; his language is both the
written language of the script, and the visual languages of his mise-en-scènes which are definitely more
memorable than the plays themselves. In years to come, we will no doubt be
recalling ‘the production when [insert effect here] happened.’ (It is even starting
to happen now.)
On
paper, the drawcard for me was (unsurprisingly) Cate Blanchett. When she and
Andrew Upton took up the reigns of Co-Artistic Directors of Sydney Theatre
Company back in 2008, I made a deal with myself that come hell or high water, I
would see her on stage before their final season concluded. A Streetcar Named Desire, The War
of the Roses, Uncle Vanya all
sold out, and Gross und Klein held no
interest for me, so it was left to The
Maids to fulfil that promise. While she can most definitely act, I felt
that she was sleepwalking her way through the role of Claire, one of the
titular maids. Yes, she was good, but there was no heart in it, no depth and or
passion, seemingly no soul or investment in it. It was sterile, clinical,
passionless. Maybe this was Andrews’ direction as opposed to a conscious choice
by Blanchett. Isabelle Huppert as her sister Solange, bordered on
indecipherable for much of the performance. Her physicality was at times like
that of a young girl, highly energetic and excitable, while at others it was
resigned and world-weary, yet the balance between the two never seemed to be
found. Her twenty-minute monologue towards the end of the play was dreary and
lacking in any dramatic tension, partly due to her accent and also her
near-static delivery of it at the very front of the stage, almost falling into
the front rows of the audience, too much of a caricature to be taken seriously.
Perhaps
the standout was Elizabeth Debicki as the Mistress. Debicki, recently seen in Baz
Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby as Jordan
Baker, towered above Huppert and Blanchett and was more than a match for
Blanchett’s grace, physicality and skill. The only quibble I have with her
performance is that the role itself is barely on stage when compared to her two
maids – her presence is felt for maybe twenty or thirty minutes at most, and
not until after the better part of the first hour. She had the necessary air of
superiority and nonchalance that the character required, and her lack of care
for her maids – indeed, her not being able to tell the difference between them,
however in jest it may have been, was rather telling – frighteningly
believable.
While
Andrews’ effects were in many ways justified in this production, they were
overshadowed and rendered near-obsolete when viewed in relation to the giant
video screen on the back wall of the stage. There is something worrying at play
when you spend more time watching the endless static close-ups of flowers and
not the actors, when you try to work out where the hidden camera is and not
focus on the maids’ conniving and planning of how they will murder their
mistress. The pacing too, tended to veer towards soporific at times – great
swathes of silence between the two maids could be removed and the pacing
tightened, resulting in a more taught, more dynamic and thrilling production.
Advertised as ninety minutes’ duration, it is more like one-hundred-and-twenty
minutes’ duration, though it feels much longer.
There
is a point, near the beginning of Solange’s end monologue, when she asks ‘And
who will stop me now? Who will tell me to shut up and stop?’ If I wasn’t so
completely uninvested in the production or possessed of a more anarchic Monty
Python-esque spirit, I might well have called out ‘I will,’ a lone heckler in
the dress circle. While “earlier versions [of the play may] have used good
old-fashioned English,” Andrews and Upton’s new version has, in Andrews’ words,
“the poetry of Genet. The language is very shocking because it would have been
when he wrote it. We [wanted] the play to be a very visceral and emotional
experience.” Visceral, perhaps; emotional, no. What results is a tedious
melodrama that, like his other productions, is a showcase for Andrews’
unwavering theatre-practice. Like Genet, he seems to be “obsessed with notions
of destabilisation and disruption… [exploring] his characters’ relationships
[complex or otherwise] with power, sex, and identity.” Perhaps, like Genet,
Benedict Andrews has never really been bothered with whether audiences “like”
his work or not, instead delighting in a kind of Grand Guignol circus of
theatrical effects, manipulations, and overblown mise-en-scènes.
You
can call it whatever you’d like, and that’s perfectly alright. I’d just like it
to all make sense as a whole, and not in the fragments I’ve witnessed thus far.
Theatre playlist: 16.
The Rehearsal, Alexandre Desplat
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