In October 2011, following two enormously strong
productions for Bell Shakespeare – John Bell’s exuberant Much Ado About Nothing, and Michael Gow’s theatrically-encyclopaedic
Faustus – Peter Evans’ production of Julius Caesar arrived in Sydney at the
end of a four-month national tour. Intelligent, concise, and subtly condensed
for a cast of ten, Evans’ Caesar was a
rare example of a production which eloquently captured the contemporary mood
(and political climate) in a raw, poetic and theatrical way. Robust, haunting,
and profoundly gripping, it made me sit up and take notice of Evans’ work, and remains one of the
cornerstone productions in my theatrical fascination with Shakespeare.
Peter
Evans is Bell Shakespeare’s co-artistic director,
and is about to take the reins of the company once John Bell concludes work on The Tempest. I sat down with Evans at
the end of July for a discussion about playing the classics, his career as a
director, the challenges facing a specialist company like Bell Shakespeare in Australia’s
theatrical climate, his fascination with Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics,
and what might lie ahead from 2016.
Untranslatable is
a word often used to describe Racine’s
plays, we are told in the program to Bell Shakespeare’s latest production, Phèdre. And
watching the play, part of me cannot help but wish it had stayed thus, however
much it hurts me to admit it. Based on the Greek myth of Phèdre, Racine’s play is a
downward spiralling tragedy, much like Shakespeare’s own Macbeth and Hamlet, until
at the end, tragedy befalls everyone, and Theseus and Théramène are left to
pick up the pieces.
If Anna
Cordingely’s set was anything to go by, the production should’ve been
sumptuous. A decaying room, perhaps in a French palace, it consisted of an
elongated octagonal room with the front walls removed – stairs tiled in black
and white, six large windows at the rear, a ceiling with a hole smashed through
it (due to a god’s intervention, perhaps?), a chaise divan and two
similarly-upholstered chairs… a picture of faded elegance. The space was lit
effectively by Paul
Jackson in bolts of harsh fluorescence, gentle gold, and electric blue, and
added to the former grandeur of the play’s location. Kelly Ryall’s sound design
and ‘score’ were both effective in unsettling the audience from the opening
salvo of scratching susurrations to the final blackout, almost as if the gods somewhere were spinning
disks of thunder and lightning. It was used in scene breaks too, and in tiny
unobtrusive blurts when a character entered via the stairs, and though my
description of it sounds somewhat disparaging, it was one of the production’s
strongest points, and complemented the set in its depiction of a once-faded
decadence, something familiar now in disarray, beyond repair. However, when you
added the cast – headed by Catherine McClements as Phèdre – something inherently 'magical' disappeared.
