For the record, a couple more Melbourne Festival reviews
Le Salon by Peeping Tom. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.
It’s a shame to bring this Belgian company all the way to Melbourne and then present just the centre section of its celebrated Garden/Lounge/Basement trilogy.
The first piece (Le Jardin) is about hitting forty. This one, Le Salon, is about incontinence and death. The final section (Le Sous Sol) is posthumous. It’s set underground, where all the players are now buried. The trilogy is also about different body sizes and weights and capabilities. Sounds like a barrel of laughs, no?
Le Salon is a meaty eighty minutes, dazzlingly physical and sometimes riotously funny. But without the equally eccentric outer acts it floats unanchored and dimensionless. This brilliant centrepiece is reduced to an apparently over-resourced and overproduced curio.
Like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Le Salon has an ageing and failing patriarch (played by actor Simon Versnel) whose wealth and influence has gone the way of his bladder control. The family’s attention is firmly on smaller nappies. Which belong to the new grandchild.
Good as the staging is -- the set, the singing and the sleight of hand -- stripped of context, all that audiences have to hold onto is the physical work. Luckily these are amazing. Unforgettable even.
A body is ridden like a skateboard. The same body rocks as if made of curved steel then twists, kicks and rolls, again and again, in a brilliant impersonation of a hip-hopping, freshly-landed fish.
This vivid, joyful and exhilarating performance leaves us baffled, but strangely content.
This review was published in Monday's Herald Sun.
Pornography. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.
The seven separate sections of Simon Stephens’ play hang in space like a constellation. It’s up to us to join the dots.
The action takes place in and around London in the first week of July 2005, a week which had the Live 8 concert (Madonna, Pink Floyd, Coldplay), the G8 conference on third world debt, the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics and, the following morning, the 7/7 suicide bomber attack.
In the spooky central scene -- entitled The Soldier -- a man rises before dawn, kisses his wife and children goodbye and boards a bus. For a minute or two we imagine he’s fighting the good fight: the clean-cut white guy with wife and kids. But he’s the home-grown terrorist. One of the four self-proclaimed soldiers on their way to the City.
Though it’s framed by specific historical events, Pornography is a composite portrait of a people; of a culture; maybe, even, of Western culture. It’s not a flattering likeness! It’s riddled with corruption of the flesh and of the soul; it’s shot through with acts of violence, sabotage and incest. The pornography of the title, incidentally, is downloaded by an 82 year-old woman who has become addicted to it.
It’s an elegant and haunting script (written in English, performed in German) given a chaotic and highly physical production. It’s a provocative and thought-provoking piece of theatre which seizes our attention and doesn’t release its grip for 130 minutes.
It’s a shame to bring this Belgian company all the way to Melbourne and then present just the centre section of its celebrated Garden/Lounge/Basement trilogy.
The first piece (Le Jardin) is about hitting forty. This one, Le Salon, is about incontinence and death. The final section (Le Sous Sol) is posthumous. It’s set underground, where all the players are now buried. The trilogy is also about different body sizes and weights and capabilities. Sounds like a barrel of laughs, no?
Le Salon is a meaty eighty minutes, dazzlingly physical and sometimes riotously funny. But without the equally eccentric outer acts it floats unanchored and dimensionless. This brilliant centrepiece is reduced to an apparently over-resourced and overproduced curio.
Like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Le Salon has an ageing and failing patriarch (played by actor Simon Versnel) whose wealth and influence has gone the way of his bladder control. The family’s attention is firmly on smaller nappies. Which belong to the new grandchild.
Good as the staging is -- the set, the singing and the sleight of hand -- stripped of context, all that audiences have to hold onto is the physical work. Luckily these are amazing. Unforgettable even.
A body is ridden like a skateboard. The same body rocks as if made of curved steel then twists, kicks and rolls, again and again, in a brilliant impersonation of a hip-hopping, freshly-landed fish.
This vivid, joyful and exhilarating performance leaves us baffled, but strangely content.
This review was published in Monday's Herald Sun.
Pornography. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Playhouse, the Arts Centre.
The seven separate sections of Simon Stephens’ play hang in space like a constellation. It’s up to us to join the dots.
The action takes place in and around London in the first week of July 2005, a week which had the Live 8 concert (Madonna, Pink Floyd, Coldplay), the G8 conference on third world debt, the announcement that London would host the 2012 Olympics and, the following morning, the 7/7 suicide bomber attack.
In the spooky central scene -- entitled The Soldier -- a man rises before dawn, kisses his wife and children goodbye and boards a bus. For a minute or two we imagine he’s fighting the good fight: the clean-cut white guy with wife and kids. But he’s the home-grown terrorist. One of the four self-proclaimed soldiers on their way to the City.
Though it’s framed by specific historical events, Pornography is a composite portrait of a people; of a culture; maybe, even, of Western culture. It’s not a flattering likeness! It’s riddled with corruption of the flesh and of the soul; it’s shot through with acts of violence, sabotage and incest. The pornography of the title, incidentally, is downloaded by an 82 year-old woman who has become addicted to it.
It’s an elegant and haunting script (written in English, performed in German) given a chaotic and highly physical production. It’s a provocative and thought-provoking piece of theatre which seizes our attention and doesn’t release its grip for 130 minutes.
Labels: Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Melbourne Festival, Peeping Tom
posted by Chris Boyd at 12:35 PM
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