“Woods” by Robert Alan Evans, directed by Lucy Morrison @ Royal Court

“The Woods” by Robert Alan Evans, directed by Lucy Morrison (stage design by Naomi Dowson)

@ Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, seen on 20 October 2018

The first thing I saw when entering the small auditorium in the attic of the Royal Court was the trees, thin bare trunks rising from the floor to the roof all across the floor-level stage flanked by chairs on two sides. There is a makeshift shed in this “wood” but I could not help thinking that the stage design was reusing the sets of Natalia Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads” I saw there last year. But where in the latter the trees were denoting a certain wild, unexplored landscape in the depths of Eastern Europe, in “The Woods” the trees form part of the play’s imaginary world, monstrous branches growing into and through the heroine’s psyche, making her do the most horrible things imaginable but also offering a temporary refuge. Part of me felt that maybe there was little need for these second-hand sets (which I personally found quite tacky the first time round) and a verbal invocation would have sufficed (the same way as a storm is rendered here by sounds and mercifully no water is spilled).

This play is clearly part of a by now established tradition of theatrical storytelling (most recently I saw Alistair McDowal’s “X” and the film version of “Ghost Stories” by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman) where scenarios and plots familiar from popular cinema (sci-fi, horror, thriller) that occupy the largest portion of the narrative are at the end revealed to be images generated by the brain of the main character suffering from mental illness. But where the narrative of “The Woods” is the strongest is also where it may invite the most criticism: by refusing (to my knowledge and understanding) to follow this tradition faithfully and blurring the lines between “reality” and “delusion” the play creates a denser, more tangible and disturbing fabric but also loses in coherence and, possibly, fails to deliver a clear moral message (an absence I, for one, welcome).

The play presents a series of encounters between a woman and a man who claims to be her son; he

claims to love her her and he takes pleasure in making her suffer. Quite early on, thanks to a clever set design device (I’d never seen it used in the upstairs theatre before) where a section of the wall, usually darkened, is revealed to contain a family kitchen, complete with white goods, a family-sized pack of washing powder and a baby-monitor, we realise that something terrible must have happened to the heroine’s baby and that she is now somehow atoning for its death. The play goes through a number of scenes of terror and humiliation, and the fake exaggerated American accents the actors adopt in the earlier sections (and then gradually lose) seem to make a reference to the atmosphere of some 1980s American shocker. At a later point in the play, we clearly find ourselves in an NHS hospital and the “son” becomes first an over-worked and then a slightly sadistic doctor, taking his patient through even more torture than her condition is already imposing on her.

Even though ostensibly (and maybe not altogether successfully or tactfully) dealing with the painful topics of mental illness, post-partum depression and, possibly, society’s responsibility for the safety of its most vulnerable citizens, the play avoids fixing meaning, we never fully discover what is really happening, whether the heroine is suffering for a real crime or fears created by her condition, whether atonement and forgiveness in life are possible and whether the woman’s final departure from her mostly silent companion, a lost boy (or wolf?), signify her own death or give hope of redemption. Although leaving the theatre confused and slightly irritated, I felt grateful for the generosity of the play’s open structure and its power to deliver unsettling images without tying them up with a clear and unequivocal meaning.

"Exit the King" by Eugène Ionesco @ National Theatre, seen 15 August 2018

“The throne is hard for royal haemorrhoids” complains Rhys Ifans’s roi Bérenger in Patrick Marber’s production of Simon Scardiefield’s new translation of “Le roi se meurt”/”Exit the king” provoking one of many chuckles in the audience: a clever rendition of Ionesco’s more matter of fact “Ouf! Il est devenu bien dur ce trône.” For me, this outburst summed up the translation and the staging; however ingenious, it sits rather uncomfortably on its throne, constantly anticipating pain and discomfort resulting from tackling this text, still so strange and yet so central to European theatre; the play is cringing and moving cautiously, trying to distract and appease the viewer with jokes that sound so natural in English, Queen Marie’s seductive fake French accent and fake fur bolero that keeps sliding off, with a giant syringe and a phallic telescope, working really hard not to take itself too seriously yet bursting in the King’s increasingly heart-breaking monologues.

At the end, you can’t help thinking it rather funny when the remains of Berenger’s castle disappear and the throne, this instrument of Bérenger’s torture, slides into an empty space and is consumed by a red light, like a coffin in a crematorium.

Letting go of Youth: Earth and Blood

 

Vincent Macaigne's Voilà ce que jamais je ne te dirai, Théâtre de la Colline, Paris, 6 June 2018 

Vincent Macaigne's Je suis un pays, Théâtre de la Colline, Paris, 7 June 2018

Akhram Khan's Xenos, Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, 9 June 2018

Akram Khan in Xenos, Sadler's Well's, London

9 June 2018 

Because my life is so glamorous, I managed to see two shows by two of my favourite artists last week. On Wednesday and Thursday, I saw (again) Vincent Macaigne’s “Je suis un pays” in Paris [now finished, apparently, for good; this time I also saw the “performance” act of “Voilà ce que je jamais je ne te dirai” where you to see the play from, quite literally, a different vantage point]; and, on Saturday, Akhram Khan’s solo dance piece “Xenos” in London [still touring the world].

Je suis un pays, Théâtre de la Colline, Paris

7 June 2018 

There was, of course, the accident of my own rather sporadic space-time continuum; but I also felt that the two pieces, ostensibly so dissimilar, spoke to me in ways surprisingly related, across almost every possible difference - of subject matter, medium, culture, geography, or even timeframe. Most strikingly, both shows play with the symbolism of the soil, dissolved into mud, and its associated connotations of contamination, defilement, death – and rebirth. On a larger scale, both address the questions of utmost solitude in the middle of a crowd, a desperate need for connection – and ageing.

In the UK, World War I has become a go-to metaphor for a devastating conflict, both distant enough not to be perceived as threatening a status quo and eternally pertinent, a traumatic experience that defined the life of every family in 20^th-century Europe. The ultimate alienation of every fighter is exemplified by Akram Khan’s colonial soldier, the “xenos” (foreigner, alien of the title), brought in to fight for the Empire in a war he cannot make sense of. This adds poignancy to the presentation of the war as an apocalyptic event, as the dance piece opens with a voiceover: “Don’t think it is a war, it is the ending of the world”.  When thinking of trenches, however, you may imagine crowds of soldiers cramped together in mud, an impossible stampede, but here the single dancer is performing on his own, on a slanted stage illuminated by a stream of red light; the stage appears covered in blood.

Vincent Macaigne’s play which I saw for the second time, yet on a different, smaller stage of La Colline theatre, is, on the other hand, ostensibly removed from any such historical context, talking as it does about the threat of other apocalyptic disasters – terrorism, nuclear attack, consumer frensy, loss of purpose. Yet, as actors yell at you at different points in the play, “You do not save a country, you do not save the world – you entertain it!” This kind of unrestrained entertainment, needless to say, that lays bare humans’ lust for blood, that is the worst disaster of all.

Paul Nash, We are making a new world, 1918 

I was not surprised, somehow, to find that the stage set in a scene towards the end of the first half of the play reminded me of the English painter’s Paul Nash’s haunting World War I landscapes with their bare tree trunks. In Vincent Macaigne’s play, of course, this was one of those trademark bizarre inflatable structures, which, in time (and to general merriment), started collapsing like a forest of flaccid penises.

The succinct character of Akram Khan’s dance solo, lasting just over an hour, may have nothing to do with sprawling excesses of Vincent Macaigne’s nearly four-hour long play that are testing the limits of the audiences’ (not to speak of the actors’) endurance. Akhram Khan’s piece is all about maintaining focus, building tension, sustaining attention, assisted by the rhythm of music, while leading the viewer to a resolution that had been determined in advance. Adopting a different yet equally effective strategy, Macaigne, of course, relies on sudden shifts of rhythm, of pace, of pathos and register, taking the audience from an intimate monologue to a scene of debauchery in a matter of seconds. In both cases, the action is taking place in the mud.

Earth, made famous by Pina Bausch as stage covering, is used in both shows I saw to what seems to be similar effect. It is both a place of origin, as Akram Khan’s soldier clings to the handful of earth brought to Europe from his home country, and the destination of the long journey, the substance of death. Mud brings shapes into relief (with a monstrous baby climbing on the survivors’ white suits in the French play) and at the same time dissolves the boundaries of objects and bodies, making them collapse onto themselves, fuse with each other and blend with the environment, erasing all distinction between organic and inorganic matter (life and lifelessness). Akram Khan rolls in mud as his character is divested of his humanity on the battlefield. In one of my favourite episodes in “Je suis un pays”, in a characteristic move of ironic deconstruction of a scene, when a character is killed, several bottles of blood are spilled over her body before shovelfuls of earth are thrown – and, in an instant, the mood goes from playfully gory to uncannily serious.

Both shows are tales of extreme loneliness in the crowd and a desire to reach out, to dig into inner resources and to connect to other human beings (and music and yelling – in Macaigne – are of course figures of this desire). In “Xenos”, ropes are used to denote both the connection (they can stand for cables that are still transmitting dead people’s voice) and restriction; ropes can help one climb to safety but they can, equally, bind - and kill; even Akram Khan’s strings of ankle bells at one point become fetters). More uncompromisingly still, in “Je suis un pays” there is a scene of hanging, possibly the only “irreversible” death in the story.

 Ilya Kabakov, How to meet an Angel, 2000

Fear of and desire for contamination, dissolution, diffraction, elimination and rebirth – all these themes, for me, lead into the overarching topic of ageing, coming to terms with the loss of youth, illusion - or an Empire that promises but fails to take care of each and every of its subjects. Like in Ilya Kabakov’s whimsical angel projects, a careful preparation for a meeting with one’s angel will almost certainly result in a disappointing fall, a spectacle. And at the end of “Xenos”, Akram Khan’s struggling hero is naked, destroyed, covered in mud, bare; Vincent Macaigne’s angel is altogether sinister.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Fallen Angel, 2002

Throughout the rehearsals of “Xenos” Akram Khan was saying that this would be his last full-length solo show as, at 43, he is planning to retire from performing soon. Personally, I am not too worried, I have seen his “Giselle” (twice) and I know what he can do with other – ever younger – people’s bodies. Akram Khan has said that age was the “element” he has to fight daily while creating and performing “Xenos”; in a way, ageing is his personal war, the struggle against an inconceivable retreat of the powers once taken for granted. And yet the tragic end of the hero is also his rebirth in the history of mankind, in the same way as acceptance of ageing, letting go of promises is a way into a more serene and fulfilled life. “You do not regret your youth, you regret the promise” is one of the catchphrases of the latter part of “Je suis un pays”, performed with characteristic vigour, yelled out several times. Somehow, a refusal of a rite of passage, of ritual slaughter, of prophecy appears to be the truest initiation; the war will continue, new generations will come, but this is not the end. Maturity is, hopefully, something else; art.