Malthouse Theatre and Bell Shakespeare: Venus & Adonis

Look, how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.

When I go to a restaurant, I want the chef to be better at cooking than me. (Or I'll order stuff I'm not real good at, or can't be stuffed making!)

When I go to the theatre, I want the production team to know the text better than I do. I want them to dazzle me with their understanding of it, to give me insights into it, to give the thing a spin that's distilled from the text, not imposed on it...

I've always been in awe of directors who tackle Shakespeare. (And when I say 'Shakespeare', I mean the body of work we attribute to a bloke who apparently owned no books and had illiterate daughters. Yeah, right... he must be the one!) Even the worst of them know what every word -- every phrase -- means.

So, directing a 1200 line poem -- one of the earliest and simplest works of the Shakespearean canon -- should be a gimme.

But, man, I left this show thinking the director and dramaturg had no bloody idea what the words meant. (And I only have a passing familiarity with the poem myself!)

The first clue was the programme which uses Cornelis van Haarlem's painting of Venus and Adonis (left) on the cover. Now, van Haarlem's painting might be the closest to Shakespeare's poem chronologically, but it could hardly be less matched to it dramatically or psychologically. Shakespeare takes Titian's line on the story: Adonis resists Venus's advances. (Some academics have argued that it's entirely possible that Shakespeare saw Titian's painting.)

Van Haarlem's Venus holds Adonis lightly, her arm around the boy's shoulder. He's looking wetly at her. She's looking off into the distance. Titian's Venus is clutching her man for dear life.


Titian's Venus and Adonis

Shakespeare's Venus, likewise, locks her arms around Adonis -- "her arms infold him like a band" -- and she "locks her lily fingers one in one" to hem him "Within the circuit of this ivory pale." That's pale as in fence, incidentally, not just pale ivory.

"I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer..."

Again, the pun.

"Within this limit is relief enough." [My emphasis.]

This key section is botched in production. It's such a missed opportunity. It would take only the slightest mime to 'clinch' the point.

Inexcusably, the use of the words hollows/tombs/caves are all taken as euphemisms for what Hamlet would call country matters. They're not. They're references to Adonis's dimples. Yes, Venus wants to -- er -- fuck them (seriously) but Marion Potts (and presumably Maryanne Lynch) go for the d'ohbvious and far-less-interesting Freudian "let's go caving" gloss.

Another puzzling missed opportunity is the stallion section of the poem. It's a classic subplot. Venus hits on Adonis, literally stealing him from his mount, and he resists. He's not in the least bit interested in the goddess of love. He eventually breaks her grip -- breaks her spirit really -- and "hasteth to his horse."

Right on cue, Adonis's mount -- a hot blooded stallion -- spies a cute little filly (a Spanish mare, "lusty, young and proud") and, in the steamiest part of the poem, the beast breaks away to do what hot-blooded stallions do. Colts will be colts, an' all that.

But, importantly, the stallion now controls "what he was controlled with" -- i.e. the iron bit. This curves back neatly to the line: "Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn." Venus, goddess of love, is unloved. The very thing she's supposed to control... she is deprived of, forlorn.

The encounter between the horses is a sizable chunk of the poem. First the girly resists, is disdainful. The stallion gets angry, then dejected. The mare gives the stallion an inch and, well, he takes it... and quite a few more.

In Marion Potts' production, this entire section is reduced to a digital projection of one white horse humping another. A knight's tale reduced to mere porn. Poetry reduced to mere plot. And not a great deal of that.

If only this had been directed by Catherine Breillat... But then perhaps that's the point Potts and Lynch are trying to make. 'Romance', in the Anglophone world, is a French film they tried to ban.


Breillat's Venus... and her unwilling Adonis


My (rather feisty) review should be in tomorrow's Herald Sun.


P.S. I did like the snatch of 10CC ('I'm not in love') which aired in the seconds before the lights went down... very apt! ('Babe please don't go' wouldn't have been out of place either!)