Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

It's been a dramatic sort of a week. Not in the sense of anything dramatic actually happening, just in the sense of seeing drama. On Thurdsday the new Neil LaBute, The Distance from There, which reminded me oddly, or not so oddly, of Dennis Cooper - except there was a severe lack of the kind of stuttering, messed-up tenderness that makes the characters in Cooper, for all their wacky ephebophilic necrophiliac ways, so often lovable. As my partner for the evening observed, the main mystery was why the supporting characters, the sweet-natured boy and the paradigmatic girl with huge trousers and a Nirvana longsleeve that makes me and all right-thinking people go "bless!", didn't just abandon the protagonist round about minute five and just have a cuddle.

Still, although not ground-breaking (it reminded me in some ways of an American rustbelt Saved), it has some very good set-pieces, makes good use of the revolving stage, and the endless complexities of the post-nuclear family are nicely explored. Worth seeing.

Also worth seeing was the Bacchai on Saturday, although it has some fairly serious problems. The mixed male-female chorus is just completely fucking pointless (and done few favours by overly thematised pieces of Birtwhistle), and illustrates probably my biggest problem with the Peter Hall approach to Greek tragedy. Keep the masks, cool, have the three actors playing every part, cool, make all the main actors male, even when playing female parts, cool. So why go co-ed with the chorus, then make the costumes very obviously gender-revealing? Not to mention in one case Calvin Klein thong-revealing, which was a real "look! the fourth wall!" moment, as were Teevan's insertion of things like "suspend your disbelief", "beauty is truth, and truth beauty", the intermittent moments of "look, I translated this properly! From the Greek" - I kid you not, people actually say things like "Pentheus - that sounds a lot like Penthos, which means 'grief'. I bet there is grief, which is 'penthos', in store for Pentheus, whose name it so resembles" - and the impressive stage effects (splitting the stage and having a river of fire works. Elevating Dionysus on a pole as he talks about postmodernism does not). Plus, if you're going to have topless Bacchai, try to choreograph a bit less jiggling would be my advice.

And yet, for all its faults, it was very exciting and a lot of it was very well done. Worth it for the relatively limited opportunities to see tragedy with masks. And the nob jokes. Of which there are an insane number.

0 Comments: