The Belvoir has introduced a second string to B Sharp but Geoffrey Rush in his absentee dedication didn’t tell us what note it was going to be, maybe F#, it’s ‘B Sharp Downstairs’.
Actually
‘Downstairs’ has been there for a long while in the ordinary guise of
‘Downstairs’ but this year it’s launched into a season in its own right.It is being presented under the inaugural directorship of Annette Madden.
It is themed, in Madden’s words, to ‘deal
with the here and now - in very different ways these works grapple with
a version of reality, meeting the present face on with illumination.’
It promises to be something every bit as provocative as upstairs but maybe even more in your face.
The forthcoming upstairs’ production of the black comedy, ‘The Pillowman’ byMartin McDonagh poses a rather pertinent question in terms of its downstairs counterpart, ‘What purpose, Drama?’It
harks back to the original Aristotelian view of tragedy and comedy
being two faces of instruction, a subject that has provoked argument
unabated by time.
Madden
would seem to have embraced its concept while allowing the respective
voices to find their own way of illuminating the particular issues.
The season opened with Brendan Cowell’s‘Ruben Guthrie’ a story about hitting the pavement after a try-out as Icarus.It doesn’t get much more contemporary than this as a walk through the Establishment on a Friday night will confirm.Its language is engaging but the message predictable.It’s a rather heavier slap than Durang’s ‘Titanic’ but the same rabbit is in the spotlight.
Now we have ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’ which opened this week, directed by Shannon Murphy.
This work has gained a great deal of political hype which, by all accounts, it doesn’t deserve.It is the dramatisation of a selection from the diaries of Rachel Corrie, the
young American woman who lost her life while trying to prevent the
systematic demolition of Palestinians homes by the Israelis.Apparently
the New York Jewry found it too close to the bone and threatened to
withdraw sponsorship for the theatre if it staged it.Guilt will always damn the innocent.
It’s easy to see why it has been given a political bias but it’s not what the play is about.That, in Murphy’s opinion is about the coming of age of a young girl.Corrie might have been the subject of W B Yeats’ poem, ‘But I … have only my dreams, I spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’While the politicised aspect to the play may seem relevant and timely the real story being brought to light under Murphy’s direction is even more immediate and more tragic.Corrie’s death may have been a terrible accident - her life was not.
‘Miss Julie’ is the first in the programme that could be termed a ‘classic’. Strindberg’s ‘Miss Julie’ is described as a psycho-sexual drama about class weapons of exploitation.It’s certainly a tormented piece with a heavy concentration on the sexuality of the antagonists however Strindberg was far more concerned with the class contagion than its sexual exploitation.He foresaw that for future audiences ‘it
will make an exclusively pleasant and cheerful impression to see the
royal parks cleared of rotting, superannuated trees which have too long
stood in the way of others with equal right to vegetate their full
lifetime; it will make a good impression in the same sense as does the
sight of the death of a recidivist.’
While one might argue that Australian society is more egalitarian than that experienced by Strindberg it is possible that only the definitions of class has changed.It only requires a modest revision to see that the issues of ‘Ruben Guthrie’ in almost every aspect parallel those explored by Strindberg.Australia’s exploitative ‘class’ may wear corporate suits but their destructiveness is no less palpable.
It promises to be something every bit as provocative as upstairs but maybe even more in your face.
‘Spring Awakening’ follows, by Frank Wedekind who gave the world ‘Lulu’ both the play and the opera.It
scandalised the world when it premiered in 1906 and last year a revised
translation which opened in Delaware rated this comment from reviewer Daisy Yuhas, ‘The
story of teenagers lost in their own confusion about sex and schoolwork
… [is] sensitive both to Wedekind's interests in an extreme,
caricatured circus-performance and the intensity of the subject
matter.’(The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore College PA)There’s no getting away from the relevance presented here.
‘The Oak Tree’ by Tim Crouch tests the very foundation of drama itself.Emile Coué who invented the mantra, ‘Every day in every way I’m getting better and better’ inspired it.He also gave us ‘Every one of our thoughts, good or bad, becomes concrete, materialises, and becomes in short a reality.’Crouch devised a scenario between two people who share a common outcome from an event, one knows what it is and the other doesn’t.Neither does the actor who is new to the role every night and comes on board unrehearsed.It’s theatre based on ‘Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion.’ Now you can’t get anything more immediately relevant than that unless you’re on the street doing it yourself.
The American poet Charles Bukowski died in 1994, one of his works, ‘Alone with Everybody’ reads:
‘the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
…nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.’
At first sight it might seem a little depressing but then remember how your day has been.‘Bumming with Jane’, inspired by Bukowski’s poetry is about as contemporary as you want to get.
Then comes Tony Kushner’s‘Homebody/Kabul’.This is the author who gave us ‘Angels in America’ currently playing at the New Theatre in Newtown.Believe it or not this play was conceived before the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan, before 9/11.Kushner is
very much about the power of theatre and its responsibility in the here
and now, the why and wherefore - ‘We need to think about ourselves, our
society - even about our enemies.’
He’s certainly not out of touch.‘More horror is to come’ was his prediction and it’s probably still coming.
They could only coin it in the States.Well maybe not, it could have come from the pen of Geoffrey Rush himself, ‘‘Killer Joe’, a black comedy of deplorable manners.’(TheatreZone).It was Tracy Lett’s
first play and caused something of a sensation when it eventually
showed in London in 1996 having incubated in the US from 1993.
The New York Times classes it ‘white-trash Gothic with a comic-book spin’, which is hardly better than TheatreZone’s effort.It
relates a story of a family so numbed by their vicarious life on the
tube they fail to distinguish between reality and whatever else it is
that has caught their attention for the moment.If the Brits could buy it we should have absolutely no difficulty at all.
The same theme of a vicarious overload is brought back on shore in Gareth Ellis’s hallucinatory world of ‘A View of Concrete’.The
characters progressively slide into ever darker fantasies until they
are incapable of distinguishing where it is they are actually living
them.
The final offering of this apparently bleak but by all accounts extremely perceptive and at times uproariously funny season is to be ‘Queen C’ by Laura Ruohonen.It is brought to Belvoir Downstairs under the direction of Kate Gaul.Gaul describes the piece in terms of one ‘who questioned the very nature of her existence: her gender, her role, her legacy, beliefs/values. To continually question the status quo as she did is aberrant, wayward, challenging and delightful!’
‘It must benefit women in some way to throw a ball badly and all wrong otherwise why would they do it.’(Ruohonen,)
‘Ruohonen’s gender does not make her a feminist. But
the fact that she writes with unflinching amiability about women,
whether they are queens, lonely old people, generals’ widows, writers
or scientists, makes her characters new and challenging.’(Teija
Hyvarinen, ‘Does the Soul have a Gender’)
This is why Madden has billed her inaugural season as the ‘here and now’. These plays have been chosen to speak to us.
‘Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over the abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting, What is great in man is that he is a bridge not a goal; what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. (Frederick Neitzche, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’)
Maybe it is not a coincidence that upstairs the ‘Pillowman’
delivers a parabolic discourse on the historical argument of what
constitutes drama and what its place is in the social fabric. Perhaps this is the level of complexity that underpins the excitement that is the theatrical manifestation of drama at Belvoir, upstairs, downstairs.
This drama is our dreaming, tread softly therefore lest the clamour of life chase them from your mind.
It’s a mighty ambitious premiere season from a mighty ambitious company, B Sharp on a high note.
The season opened with Brendan Cowell’s ‘Ruben Guthrie’ a story about hitting the pavement after a try-out as Icarus.
The same theme of a vicarious overload is brought back on shore in Gareth Ellis’s hallucinatory world of ‘A View of Concrete’.
