The story of L.
Frank Baum’s The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz has found a place as one of the most famous and enduring stories
in (children’s) literature; just as the celebrated MGM
film with Judy Garland has become a staple of millions of people’s lives
since 1939, the story has become synonymous with a journey of discovery and a
quest for self-identity and -worth. At its heart are four displaced people who
are in some way incomplete; the book (and film), then, becomes a chronicle of
their quest for completeness, for self-change. It is also a space for dreaming
and yearning, a place for the glorious flights of fancy of your imagination, a
space for a certain amount of theatricality, illusion, and artifice. Based on
the myth created by Baum’s book and perpetuated in all its Technicolor glory, Belvoir’s latest offering is Adena
Jacobs’ reimagining of The Wizard of Oz.
However: if you do happen to go down to Belvoir this May, it’s best to leave
your expectations and love of the book and/or film at the door.
In her Director’s
Note, Jacobs states that this production “is a response to the myth, created by
myself and all of the artists involved in this project.” She goes on to say
that “Dorothy’s gender is no accident. Through the prism of the feminine, the
metaphors of Oz open up in fascinating ways. Oz is a landscape of castrated
bodies, of witches dead and alive, of an invisible patriarchal force, and a
young female hero who is imbued with great power and authority. Dorothy’s rite
of passage can also be read as a complex process of feminine conditioning, one
which is laced with beauty and violence.” Bearing all this in mind, you would
expect a dark and perhaps confronting production. In many respects, Jacobs’ Oz is. But it’s also weirdly alienating,
distancing, and disaffecting.
I quite admire the
rigour and ideas behind Jacobs’ productions – she often seeks to reinvigorate
‘classic’ or canonical texts, try to come to terms with their implications in a
twenty-first century context, for a twenty-first century audience. However, I
feel that this rigour and boldness in challenging boundaries and preconceptions
of ideas is lost in its journey to the stage; watching her work, I don’t
understand why she has made these choices, what they add to a production or
text, what effect they’re designed to have. I am all for non-linear,
non-traditional modes of theatrical storytelling and radical reinterpretations
of foundational stories in the canon, so long as the story is strong, so long
as the logic or narrative progression within the story makes sense in its own
world.
Jacobs’ Wizard of Oz follows the spirit of
Baum’s book in that it is almost folkloric, more Grimm than MGM-Technicolor; it
is also more primal, and there is a strong sense of power and sexuality at work
in the production. In an interview
with Elissa Blake, Jacobs remarked upon the fact the land of Oz is “a world
of witches… In our piece everyone is a witch. We are exploring the notion of
what powerful or sexual women are and how they are regarded… especially that
terrifying journey young girls have to go on in order to become an adult woman.”
Eschewing a script for a more impressionistic approach, Jacobs uses music,
movement, imagery, and soundscapes to evoke a darker, more surreal Oz than we’re accustomed to seeing.
While Jacobs says “it’s not text or storytelling driven,” surely any piece of
theatre, no matter how linear, movement-based, or immersive it is, should be
driven by the need to tell a story. This Wizard,
however, doesn’t really tell a story; at least, not one that is easily
discernable from Jacobs’ series of often-striking vignettes.
Ralph
Myers’ set – a concrete box, with a glass cabinet in the corner, and a hole
cut in the wall, while wires criss-cross overheard – is as blank and malleable
as any dreamspace can be, but it lacks the imagination and ingenuity that any
vision of Oz requires. Emma
Valente’s lighting goes some way to disguising this, blasting the bleak space
full of a rich saturated coloured light, the closest Jacobs’ Oz comes to glorious Technicolor.
Valente also manages to create a clever approximation of sepia, de-saturating
the normally-vibrant colours in a nod to the sequences which bookend MGM’s
film. Max Lyandvert’s composition and sound design is subtle and brief; the
opening dust-bowl cyclone is too quiet to be discombobulating, and the two or
three bursts of song sound like outtakes from an MGM musical, but they fail to
compel or invigorate the already-flimsy story. Kate
Davis’ costumes are more gestural, abstractions of ideas rather than full
illustrations; while Dorothy is still dressed in her gingham dress and ruby
slippers, the rest of the characters wear everything from power-suits and
orange face-paint, to abstracted masks, metal gloves, balaclavas, and sometimes
barely anything at all. Rather than combining to create a coherent vision of a
darker and more surreal Oz, the costumes only fragment the vision and
storytelling further, burying meaning beneath layers of extraneous connotations
and symbols.
Jacobs’ cast
manage to create some memorable moments amongst this melange of influences, but
even they are upstaged by a round of applause for Lucky Jim, the Jack Russell
terrier who plays the role of Toto, in his first appearance in the opening
moments. Emily Milledge’s Dorothy is full of an effective wide-eyed naïveté,
and even though there are moments where the unbridled joy of performing and
being on stage shine through (as in the first dance sequence with the
Scarecrow), her Dorothy is ultimately passive and bewildered, the water-balloon
scene notwithstanding. Melita
Jurisic’s Scarecrow first appears behind a curtain, hanging from a rope in
a twisted bondage act; her high-pitched maniacal cackle is unsettling, and her
floppy head-strong straw-filled walk is effective, but there is no real sense
of character or kindred-spiritedness between her and her companions. Jane
Montgomery-Griffiths’ Tin Man (or should it be Woman?) is dressed like a
Frida Kahlo painting, hinting at the darker, more Baum-esque incarnation of
the character, rather than its MGM incarnation. Paul
Capsis’ Lion is really a diva with stage-fright who only needs a microphone
and a red-curtain to shine (which he does, briefly), but he otherwise feels
underused. The Witch, played by Luisa Hastings Edge, appears in many different
forms, characterised by her platinum-blonde wig, emerald-green dress (or suit),
and orange face; while vaguely threatening at times in a benign kind of way,
any threat or conflict she might bring or represent is undone when she starts
playing the accordion.
There are little
moments in this production which nod to the source material but pass briefly, are
there if you get the reference but are otherwise un-signposted. Perhaps the
most significant, blatant, and underused is the rainbow which appears from a
column of lights, while Dorothy’s disembodied head gazes longingly at it
through a hole in the rear (false) wall. When she meets the Lion, she tries to
coax him out of his phobia by singing the first two notes of the film’s iconic
song. As we get further and further into Oz, the dream mutates, becomes less an
homage and more a fantasia upon an idea, even to the point of drawing on intertexts
such as Alan Moore’s controversial Lost Girls graphic
novel. There is sex and nudity in this production, but it doesn’t read as
serving any particular purpose. By the end of our hour-long audience with the Wizard, it seems that a lot of the
instances of partial or near-total undress were simply because they could; the
act, besides the necessity of costume changes which often happen in full-view
of the audience, loses any power it could have had because it is used so
frequently and seemingly haphazardly.
Even though Jacobs
makes us sure we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, at little more than an
hour her journey to Oz seems
excruciatingly long; without any strong narrative arc, however, it also feels
rather inconsequential, and not really worth anywhere near the full ticket
price. To be pithy about it, this Oz
has no heart, and as this Tin Man says, you "cannot love something with no
heart." While Jacobs’
intention is no doubt to confront, challenge, and provoke a strong sense of the
surreal in the audience, as well as breaking down boundaries of performance and
gender (as in Hedda
Gabler), I don’t think it works anywhere nearly as well or effectively
as it could; even Valente’s richly coloured lighting loses its impact after a
while. It all feels rather
complacent and tame, a little bit too ‘safe’ considering what we were promised;
even ironically self-aware university students with a library’s worth of
performance and gender theory behind them would produce something more
engaging.
Like the Wizard
himself, it all feels like a bit of a sham.
Fn. I’d also really like to see a show at Belvoir this year which is more
than eighty minutes long.
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