After going from
strength to strength in their first two years, Sydney-based collective Montague
Basement have decided to speak of ‘forms changed into new entities.’ In their
adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, they have taken the fifteen
books of epic Roman poetry and condensed them into seventy minutes of smart
deconstructions and reversals; a smorgasbord of transformations and
transgressions, a riot of godly shenanigans. “With sincere apologies to Ovid,” the
disclaimer reads; you can almost see the “Not really” written in small letters underneath
it. And while it
works (and when it really does fly, it is marvelous), a lot of the references
and parallels – the cleverness and intertextuality – comes from a familiarity
with Ovid’s stories, something
I don’t think we quite have as much of today as we’d like to think we do.
Ovid’s stories feature
gods and mortals getting into mischief in almost every way you can imagine. And
then some. There are people turning into animals (and gods to animals) and vice
versa; plants and stones becoming human; and all manner of sexual partnering,
switching, coupling, rape (again
and again; you don’t realise how much rape there is in Greek mythology
until it is pointed out), lust, and general dicking around; the gods can’t seem
to keep it in their pants for all that long. Add to this “a mishmash of
historical references and assumed knowledge, in-jokes and political satire,
poignant poetry and crude quips,” as well as an examination of the monster and
the monstrous, the hunter and the hunted, and two-thousand (plus) years of violence,
sex, and lust, and you start to get an idea of just what a formidable task
these young collaborators had taken on.
Devised by Imogen
Gardam, Saro
Lusty-Cavallari, and Lulu
Howes, Metamorphoses is performed by Lusty-Cavallari and
Howes as they switch in an out of gods, genders, costumes, and stories,
sometimes right in front of us, and draw attention to their rambunctious and
honest intentions, and are aware of their limitations and perhaps our own in
understanding these two-millennia old stories. They might be young, but these
theatre-makers are consistently punching above their weight, and are creating
intelligent, insightful, and assured pieces of theatre which make you think
about the world we live in for days afterwards.
With theatre-maker,
actor, and librettist Pierce Wilcox engaged as dramaturg, this Metamorphoses resembles something of a
Classical-literature-nerd’s version of The Chaser rather than Monty Python, or
perhaps like “a
2 a.m. binge across the
darkest corners of Wikipedia.” (And it is dark. And funny. But also
dark. Very dark.) Wilcox certainly lends the production are more focused energy, a more
political and social commentary aspect, but I wonder if something of Ovid’s protean
and fertile imagination is lost in translation; like their Hamlet
last year, I wonder if these metamorphoses could have been bolder, more wild,
more free and frivolous; a little bit more, well, insane.
However. If you
look at what Ovid himself was doing – that is, taking existing stories and
selecting the bits he liked while getting rid of the rest; running riot with
them, reorganising them into new forms, refocusing their narratives around
different characters; leaving off (and picking up again) the narrative thread
on a whim – then the structure and end result of this experimentation with
these two-thousand-year-old stories is remarkably similar to what Ovid himself
was doing. So this Metamorphoses
become less about the what of the stories, and more about the how
of their retelling – the process of metamorphosing or adapting these stories
into a modern context for twenty-first century Sydney
What happens
during the process of adaptation? What happens to the source material, to the
end result? How slavish or free should you be in your process? What was the
original trying to say; what are you trying to say; where is the common ground;
what can you make more potent and relevant? These are all questions these
collaborators have asked themselves in the process of creating this production,
and although the result is perhaps too specific in its audience, the brio and
gutso with which this show has been mounted is more than admirable. Like Sisters
Grimm’s La
Traviata last year, there is an undercurrent – as there is in Ovid’s
original epic poems – of railing against censure and censorship, new empires, the
very real threats to cultural diversity and plurality, and the celebration of
efficiency and order.
For all the
quick-changes, cleverness, and godly shenanigans, I think Aeneid to brush up on
my Greek mythology. For all the prior knowledge Ovid (and perhaps Montague
Basement) assume of you in their retellings, this Metamorphoses is
for people who know and can appreciate their Ovid from their Kafka, yet it is
still a hoot, still an entertaining and stimulating seventy minutes of
well-made theatre, even if it does (and quite rightly) give you pause for
thought at numerous points along the way.
I really want to see that Olympian
franchise now.
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