A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is my favourite of all Shakespeare’s plays. You can
read me bang on about it on numerous
occasions on this blog. This will not be another one of them. This is the
fourth Dream I’ve seen this year, and
it was also the most eagerly awaited, and certainly one of the most anticipated
shows of this year. But as is often the case, the greater the expectations, the
harder the fall, and the more painful it is when it doesn’t work. And so it is
with Kip
Williams’ production for Sydney
Theatre Company.
This production
seems to owe a passing debt to Peter
Brook’s seminal 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production which toured the
world (you know the one I mean). But where Brook was rebelling – and quite
rightly – against the accumulated gossamer and Romantic notion of the Dream that had built up in theatrical
tradition since the 1800s, this production almost seems to want to shock us. In
seeking to draw out the darkness within Shakespeare’s play and to serve, in
some respects, as a corrective to the accumulated detritus around The Dream
both locally and abroad, Williams and his team create a psycho-sexual space for
the play to sit in and in doing so, impose a stark and austere world of lumpy
fairies, hooded figures, and semi-Lynchian images upon the text without too
much consideration for the textual engine at work beneath it. In doing so,
Williams removes the ability of the audience to dream, and thereby denies the
production its power; by being all intellectual and deliberate and calculated
about it, it can only come of as quite superficial.
Alongside Hamlet, King Lear is one of the megaliths of the Western dramatic canon,
regarded by Percy Bysshe Shelley as “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic
art existing in the world.” Often cited as being sublime and universal, it is
also extremely nihilistic, a bleak portrait of despair, a Bacon-like scream
into the abyss. Known
for his acute observations of humanity and generosity in directing, Neil
Armfield’s work embraces the epic and intimate all at once, and so it was
with great expectations and an almost-equal dose of trepidation that I entered
his production of King
Lear for Sydney Theatre
Company. The only trouble is, it
isn’t really that compelling at all.
We’ve seen it
before – actors playing children and/or characters much younger than themselves –
in plays like David Holman’s The Small Poppies, and
more recently in Matthew
Whittet’s School
Dance and Girl, Asleep. In
fact, a lot of Whittet’s work draws on this conceit, something he readily
acknowledges in his writer’s note in this show’s program. But in Seventeen, it feels
like it has gone one step too far, that the joke has been over-extended and
stretched out to fill ninety-minutes’ worth of theatre.
Two particular
things happened at the beginning of this year: I sat
down with director Eamon Flack for a discussion about his work, process,
and intentions as incoming artistic director of Belvoir; and I saw a Korean pansori production of Brecht’s Mother Courage – Ukchuk-ga
– at the Sydney Festival.
Without wanting to jinx Flack’s production so early on in the year, I believed Ukchuk-ga to be one of those transcendent
productions where you leave the theatre exhilarated, an emotional wreck because
of its story, stagecraft, and the simplicity of its craft. And I still firmly
believe that. Enter, then, Flack’s production of Mother
Courage and Her Children for Belvoir. In January, as in his notes in
the program, he talked about his desire to bring a taste of the global sense of
chaos to Sydney
in 2015, and trying to figure out how to do that in a theatrical way. And while
he does this to an extent, this Mother
Courage feels strangely empty, as though something is missing from it, and
I still don’t know what it is, several weeks and two viewings later.
