On The Bodily Education of Young Girls

On The Bodily Education Of Young Girls (Fraught Outfit) runs at Melbourne Theatre Company from May 30 – June 9 2013. Adapted from the novella by Frank Wedekind, directed by Adena Jacobs.

I guess it’s fitting that the next piece I saw after I wrote that long piece on adaptation was itself an adaptation. I was in Melbourne for academic purposes, and took the chance to catch up with the preview of the latest offering from the exciting MTC Neon program, On The Bodily Education Of Young Girls. This piece by Fraught Outfit has its roots in Frank Wedekind’s 1903 novella Mine-haha, a strange, surreal account of a very bizarre boarding school.

I have a little familiarity with the original novella, having encountered it tangentially in the course of my doctoral research. So I guess this review comes with a disclaimer of sorts, because my perception of this text comes not only via the novella but the specific academic lens through which I was looking at it. My interest in it comes because of its relationship to a sub-genre of pornography: the boarding school porno. These are often set in all girls’ boarding schools, where girls either sexually initiate each other or are initiated by a teacher or authority figure. (Seventeenth century French pornographic text L’École Des Filles – The School for Girls – is one such text. It was among the first pornographic works to be translated into English, and there’s a fascinating passage in Samuel Pepys’ diary where he talks about buying it, masturbating to it, and burning it.) The single sex boarding school, which is supposed to be this repository of chastity, in fact becomes this site of incredible sexual activity.

Mine-haha is not porn, but it draws on this literary lineage. Younger girls are taken under the wings of older girls. They’re only taught a select range of subjects – music and dance among them, as demonstrated in this production – and are taught to “think from the hips”, an obvious riff on this tradition of the pornographic boarding school. Eventually, they are conscripted into performances that fund the school, very young women innocently acting in sexually charged performances for a voyeuristic audience. This audience is presumably male – suffice it to say that the dominant gaze in porn is always male – and there is a fascinating section where a caged woman rails about her plight, which has led to very interesting feminist readings of the text. It’s a short text but a fascinating one, and one which could be and should be very rich in performance.

Unfortunately, I just really didn’t feel On The Bodily Education Of Young Girls. Sure, the basic ingredients were there – the bizarre boarding school where they only teach a couple of subjects, the strange performances – but it felt empty. The sinister overtones of the original were largely missing. There was a moment right at the beginning of the show where the lights came up brightly on the audience, perhaps reminding us that we were part of the play, spectators of the girls’ show, but this was really the only suggestion of overt voyeurism we get. Likewise, the show the girls put on is definitely weird, but there’s none of the sense of exploitation that exists in the novella, which I think is key to the text (especially when reading it against a pornographic tradition). It’s certainly not especially erotic. I am sure it’s meant to be allegorical, but if you asked me to identify what its meant to be allegorical for...? Female power play, I guess? Maybe? It’s really hard to tell. There are also none of the proto-feminist bits, and I found the elision of these a bit sad. I had high hopes for that particular element of the text in performance.

This is a wordless piece of theatre: the story is told entirely through movement, music, and costume. I’ll be the first to admit that non-verbal theatre isn’t exactly my favourite form ever, but I don’t think that’s what my problem with On The Bodily Education Of Young Girls was. To me, it didn’t seem like it knew what it was trying to achieve. If you asked me to identify what the point of this show was, I don’t think I could do it – whereas if you asked me to identify what the point of the novella was, I could talk from a while about the different readings that could be applied. Perhaps I’m just too used to reading this text against the pornographic tradition, but to me, it felt like it missed a lot. I’m not averse to someone doing a Simon Stone on Mine-haha –that is, taking the text, “corrupting” it, and finding new meanings – but I really couldn’t find a lot of meaning in this one at all.

Other Desert Cities

Other Desert Cities runs at Melbourne Theatre Company from 2 March – 17 April. By Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Sam Strong.

As readers of my blog will probably be aware, I do the majority of my theatre reviewing in Sydney. However, I recently found myself in Melbourne for academic purposes, and so I thought I’d check out some of what’s going on down there. And so I went along to Other Desert Cities, Sam Strong’s (late of Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company) directorial debut in his new position as artistic associate at Melbourne Theatre Company.

This is a very fine script. This is not exactly a secret –it was nominated for a Pulitzer, so this is hardly a groundbreaking observation. Other Desert Cities is the story of a family in crisis. Brooke (Sacha Horler) and Trip (Ian Meadows), the children of Republican senator Lyman Wyeth (John Gaden) and his hardass wife Polly Wyeth (Robyn Nevin) have come home to Palm Springs for the holidays. Brooke has shocking news to tell her family: she has written a tell-all memoir about the life and death of her older brother Henry, who rebelled against his parents and who Lyman and Polly turned away when he needed help the most. This memoir, if published, will rock the Wyeth family to the core. But, as we learn over the course of the play, there is far more to the story of Henry than Brooke knows. The truth – if there is one – is more complicated than her perspective.

One of the most common things that writers get told is to show, not tell. I completely understand why this is useful advice for writers starting out; however, this play is a testament to the power of storytelling (emphasis on the telling) and the fact that sometimes action is more powerful in retrospect. Truth becomes splintered and multiplied in Other Desert Cities, refracted through all the perspectives of the characters. Everyone has their own version of the action, different pieces of the puzzle, different narratives that they have lived by, stories they have told.

The reason writers get told to show, not tell, is so they don’t fall into the trap of having characters talking about the interesting stuff that has happened rather than allowing the audience to see what actually happened. Other Desert Cities has almost a story within a story: it is the story of the disparate reactions of the Wyeth family to the disparate versions of the Henry story. The script is strong enough to break the show-don’t-tell rule – we are definitely more invested in the how-people-react story rather than the what-actually-happened story. However, the danger with this kind of narrative is that it can become sedentary – a bunch of people talking without anything actually seeming to happen. I measured the places where the narrative flagged by the woman sitting next to me: when things weren’t happening, psychologically speaking, for the Wyeth family, she would promptly fall asleep. This is not to say that the show was in any way boring, because it wasn’t. However, she did provide a remarkably accurate barometer as to when interesting tensions were being exploited as opposed to when characters were simply sparring or bantering. Sam Strong’s direction was taut enough that she didn’t fall asleep often. The scenes she drifted off in were largely those involving Trip, and I was sad for her, because I really enjoyed Ian Meadows’ work in this production. His character is caught in the middle of the battle between the Wyeth parents and Brooke, and so he becomes somewhat extraneous to it, but he had some great moments. (I would totally watch that trashy reality courtroom show he works on. So hard. I love the way that, in a play which deals so much with ideas of truth, his daily work was on reality TV, the fakest truth there is. It was so perfect.)

One of the cleverest things about this show was the set. As soon as I walked in and saw that glass box on the stage, my mind went straight to the Simon Stone place, but I feel like the glass was symbolic in a different way here. The glass reflects the truth as we see it, but we can also see through it to something else. Transparency and truth were one of the major preoccupations of the play. In the first act, characters can pass through the transparent space of the house, skirting it but not addressing it. In the second act, when truths are revealed, they are contained within it, transparency becoming a prison, truth doing the opposite of setting them free. This was cleverly mirrored by the swimming pool at the front of the stage: it too reflected back an image, but if you tried to penetrate too deep, you could drown (just like Henry).

I feel like Other Desert Cities could easily have become static and dull, but in the deft hands of Sam Strong, it is a deeply engaging and moving piece of theatre. The cast is magnificent – I have already mentioned the work of Ian Meadows, but I would be remiss not to note the wonderful work of Sacha Horler and Robyn Nevin also. John Gaden tended a little towards the melodramatic in certain moments on occasion with his portrayal of Lyman, but his performance was nonetheless wonderful and nuanced, as was Sue Jones’ performance as Polly’s recovering alcoholic sister. Don’t let the woman who fell asleep next to me put you off: this is a great show. It engages cleverly with ideas of story, truth, and performativity. It is funny without letting the humour overtake the story at its heart: humour, in this show, is just another way the truth is deflected.