Scenes From An Execution

Scenes From An Execution (Tooth and Sinew) runs at the Old Fitzroy Hotel from May 13 – 31 2014. By Howard Barker, directed by Richard Hilliar.

Scenes From An Execution is an incredibly rich, textured piece of theatre. There is so much here to chew on, intellectually and emotionally. At its heart is an enthralling female character, prickly, complex and utterly engaging. The show raises fascinating questions about art and authority which I’ll continue to mull over for some time.

The play is set in Venice in 1571. Controversial artist Galactia (Lucy Miller) is commissioned by the Doge (Mark Lee) to paint a picture commemorating the Battle of Lepanto, one of Venice’s most comprehensive victories over the Ottoman Empire. He expects her to conform to certain artistic boundaries – to celebrate the victory and the glory of Venice. But Galactia has a different story in mind. After an encounter with Prodo (Peter Maple), a war veteran made ridiculous by the arrow shaft stuck in his head, she decides to paint a portrait of the battle as it really was: a bloody, merciless slaughter.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away and spoil it – particularly as this is a show well worth seeing for yourselves – but the ongoing story of the painting and its contentious ownership raises questions about art and intention that I’m very interested in. This play might be about sixteenth century Venice, but these are questions with ongoing resonance. I’m not sure whether there was a similar moment in art history, but I am familiar with some of the literary theory around these questions. Schleiermachian hermeneutics, one of the early forms of literary criticism, placed the author at the centre of the work. In this model, the reader became a sort of detective, puzzling over the text in an effort to reach the author’s true intentions. But in the twentieth century, the New Criticism emerged, which centred the text, rather than the author. In 1968, Roland Barthes famously declared that the author was dead. Michel Foucault made a similar claim when he called the author a function.

While this is congruent with literary development at the time, it is also not coincidental that this is a period when marginalised writers’ voices started to be heard: voices from writers disenfranchised by their race, class, orientation and/or gender. The dead author trope became another way of marginalising them.  We see something similar in Scenes From An Execution, particularly in the second act. Galactia is so certain her work belongs to her, but a new mode of criticism is emerging, represented here by the critic Rivera (Katherine Shearer).

Let’s talk a bit about Galactia, this fascinating female artist, and her relationship with her work. Her character arc in this play is remarkable, centring as it does around art and her pursuit of truth rather than her relationships, as so many female arcs do. (I have absolutely zero problems with female arcs centring on relationships, but this should not be the only option open to women.) Indeed, the most important relationship she has in this play is not with her lover Carpeta (Jeremy Waters), but with her art – and, by extension, with truth. Galactia believes she is doing a brave and noble thing with her art: an important thing, an incontrovertible thing, an intrinsically political thing. But she does not take into account the fact that ownership of her work might be challenged. I found the way this idea of truth and art is treated and mobilised in Scenes From An Execution so, so interesting. I want to say a lot more about it, but a) a lot of it involves Foucault and that’s a bit boring, and b) I don’t want to spoil the show.

This is a really good production of a very difficult script. It is very intense the whole way through and perhaps could have benefited from a little more light and shade, but when I think about where that stillness could go, I’m at a loss. Like Galactia, this play is relentless – and that is part of its appeal. Director Richard Hilliar has put together a great ensemble – Lucy Miller as Galactia and Jeremy Waters as Carpeta are particular standouts. There is so much going on in this piece, and it would have been easy for it to get bogged down in its own verbiage. But happily, this does not happen. I found Scenes From An Execution utterly fascinating. Make time to go and see it.

The Ham Funeral

The Ham Funeral runs at the New Theatre from April 23-May 25 2013. By Patrick White, directed by Phillip Rouse.

The Ham Funeral is an expressionist play written in 1948 and first performed in the 1960s, but it reminded me of nothing so much as William Wordsworth’s 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In this preface, Wordsworth talks at length about how he wants to be a poet of the people. He talks about how poetry should be something the common man should enjoy, thus getting closer to the essential passions of humanity. He eschews intellectualism and champions the triumph of nature over art, choosing not to rely on “poetic diction” but to use common language that everyone can understand.

I should probably add here that I hate Wordsworth’s poetry, and I think that he fails in his project. I devoted a considerable amount of time in my undergraduate career arguing that his poems were banal and smug (and I defy anyone who has read Expostulation and Reply and The Tables Turned to disagree with me). Unfortunately, The Ham Funeral reminded me of him in the wrong ways. One of the things I dislike most about Wordsworth is the way he claims that he wants to make poetry for everyone and yet he still elevates the figure of “the poet”: he wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that the poet possesses a “more comprehensive soul” than other people. The main figure in The Ham Funeral, a poet (Rob Baird) reminded me a great deal of Wordsworth, desperately trying to get close to real life but still holding himself apart, imagining himself to exist in an artistic, intellectual world, where he both thinks and feels more deeply than everyone else. I think it would have been possible for me to dislike the main character, a poet, and still be engaged in the play, but unfortunately it did not turn out that way.

(I also think it’s interesting that The Ham Funeral reminds me so much of Wordsworth, that champion of simplicity, when it was controversially rejected from the Adelaide Festival in the 1960s for being too difficult. I'm not sure what the implications of that are, but it's interesting.)

The Ham Funeral is inspired by William Dobell’s painting The Dead Landlord. It is set in a boarding house run by the Lustys (Zach McKay and Lucy Miller), where that oh-so-reminiscent-of-Wordsworth poet lodges. He is apparently trying to experience real life so he can immortalise it in his poetry, but finds himself in somewhat over his head when the landlord dies and he finds himself mired in a tangled web of relatives, muse, and landlady. His artistic, intellectual world clashes with the fleshier, more visceral world of the aptly-named Mrs Lusty as she tries to seduce him. The web of genre is likewise tangled: there are elements of the Gothic, poetry, bildungsroman, something vaguely Dickensian, with a soupçon of something a little like The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The script is, if nothing else, unusual, and as someone who is interested in narratology and genre theory and that kind of thing, I found its strange mix of genres very intriguing. However, overall, I found this show, like its protagonist, dull and kind of self-important. White’s script is a tragicomedy, and while there were some laughs from the audience, for me, this production felt so desperately earnest that the comedy was mostly lost. There’s a poem by Wordsworth called To Joanna, where he takes a girl (not coincidentally called Joanna) up to the top of a mountain, has one of his I’m-communing-with-nature-look-at-me-I’m-a-poet-I’m-so-awesome moments, and she laughs her arse off at him. I’d like to say the protagonist was Wordsworth, because then it would okay to laugh at him. That would make the landlady Joanna, and the exploration of the class and intellectual tensions between them could be much more engaging. (Neither the poet nor the landlady’s worldview is endorsed in this play: they achieve, at best, an uneasy truce.)  Unfortunately, however, the show is Wordsworth, dull and self-important, taking itself way too seriously, making me feel like Joanna. I felt like the comic elements – some of the vaudevillian stuff, for example – were glossed over. The overall aesthetic was much more realistic, and it ultimately resulted in a kind of dramatic imbalance, the tragic part of tragicomedy outweighing the comedy. Put simply, this show needed to laugh at itself more.

Overall, The Ham Funeral just did not work for me. While there are interesting issues of class and intellectualism explored, the show did not grab my attention. There are definitely intriguing elements, but the show is imbued with a kind of pomposity I did not find especially appealing. I wanted to tell it to loosen up and have some fun. Other people (perhaps those who don’t feel like I do about Wordsworth) might get more out of it than I did, but sadly, this show was not my cup of tea.