Phantom Phèdre

Dominic Cooper and Helen Mirren in the National Theatre production of Jean Racine's Phèdre

Richard and I, together with our friend Joanna, did something slightly unusual this past Thursday: we went to the movies to watch theatre. And not just any theatre. We went to see Dame Helen Mirren starring as Racine’s tragic heroine, Phèdre, in the acclaimed National Theatre production of Ted Hughes’ English prose translation, directed by Nicolas Hytner, and currently receiving raves in London. Rather than us flying to London to see Mirren, she deigned to come to us. It was all courtesy of satellite technology, the National’s first experiment in using the live simulcast model pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The Met’s idea was as simple as it was brilliant: hire an experienced camera crew to film successive Saturday afternoon matinees of its current seasonal repertoire, and beam the images live to audiences across North America, who will have gathered in their local multiplexes (here on the west coast before breakfast, which only adds to the novelty) to experience, for example, the thrill of Marcello Giordani and Susan Graham in Robert Lepage’s visually stunning production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust for a fraction of the cost (tickets for Phèdre were a mere $20.95 CDN), and in stereo surround sound and high definition video.

The Met broadcasts happen at the Scotiabank Movie Theatre in downtown Vancouver, the newest and most luxurious of the raked ampitheatre-style cinemas in the city. While I have yet to attend one of those events (I’m not, I admit, the biggest opera fan), when I heard that the same venue would be participating in the Phèdre broadcast, I immediately jumped at the chance to buy tickets. I had seen advertisements for the production when we were in London this past May, and regretted that the show was scheduled to open only after we left. I regretted this even more when I began hearing, via various other blogs and RSS feeds I follow, that the production was receiving uniformly excellent reviews. Having now seen the play, I concur with these assessments, albeit with one minor qualification. On the whole, I likewise enjoyed immensely the experience of watching Mirren and company battle futilely against their own desires and the even more inexorable will of the gods in glorious technicolour on a giant movie screen, although here I have some more significant quibbles.

The overall excellence of the production owes much, I think, to the success of Hughes’ translation, which adapts Racine’s notoriously difficult Alexandrine verse into a contemporary English idiom that is especially visceral in its animal imagery, particularly when describing human sexual appetite and the thrall into which those appetites often place us. Hytner and his production team have matched the contemporariness of Hughes’ prose with a simple, spare set carved out of the white limestone of the play’s Troezen setting, and modern-dress costuming in mostly Armani-like monochromes (with the notable exception of Queen Pèhdre) and modern tailoring that nevertheless succinctly alludes to more ancient themes of martial masculinity and quiescent femininity. Against this “blank” backdrop, Hytner allows his cast to give full vent to their deeply hued and intricately embroidered passions. Most of the cast is up to this task, especially Mirren, who gives a master class in tragic acting (which, even in Racine’s “updated” 17th-century neo-classical baroque style, can look impossibly antiquated and alienating to a contemporary audience raised—via movies, no less—on the North American “method”).

It is particularly transfixing to watch how Mirren’s body physically recoils from the unspeakability of the words that she is yet powerless to prevent herself from uttering to her nurse Oenone early on in the play, and that consequently set the tragic plot in motion—namely, that she is in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. Again, those who primarily know Mirren from her buttoned-down Oscar-winning movie role as Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’ The Queen will have forgotten what a sensuous, embodied, and physically present actress she has always been (from the increasingly frazzled and blousy Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series to her sexually magnetic turns in movies ranging from Michael Powell’s The Age of Consent to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers). Here, as an older woman abandoned by her self-important and womanizing husband, Theseus (those who remember their Greek mythology will know he had similarly abandoned her sister, Ariadne), and all too aware, moreover, of the curse that hangs over her family when it comes to love (her other sister is Medea, after all), Mirren registers her character’s forbidden, incestuous desire as a series of wounds sustained upon her body. She enters the stage crippled over by the weight of her secret, and on or near the floor of the stage is where she lingers for most of the play, literally bent double by the quicksilver rush of uncontrollable emotions engulfing her. Watch, for example, how she supplicates herself abjectly at the feet of Hippolytus after confessing to him her love, and then in a flash grabs his sword and places it upon her breast when it is clear he has only contempt and disgust for her. And, near the end of the play, when she discovers that Hippolytus is secretly in love with Aricia, the princess imprisoned by his father Theseus because of her rival claim to the throne of Athens, the new emotion that suddenly overtakes her—jealously—first registers as a pain beneath her ribs, with Mirren using her fingers to crawl down the left side of her body to indicate the exact spot where she has been ensnared by the poisonous flipside of Cupid’s arrow. Mirren conveys with such gestures how vainly and futilely characters like Phèdre strain against the inevitability of the narrative as it has been written for them (by the gods, as by a Sophocles or a Racine), and it is a marvel to watch such a fine actress slowly succumb, limb by limb, vertebra by vertebra, to the destiny that will literally consume her.

As Hippolytus, Dominic Cooper (whom the three of us had all seen, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic, in the National’s excellent production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys of a few years ago) matches Mirren’s outsized passion with his controlled performance of a man who has spent a lifetime keeping his own emotions in check: his contempt for his father, who sired him through rape (ironically, the very charge that will be brought against him by Phèdre when she realizes, belatedly, that her husband is still alive); his disdain for his stepmother; and his own secret and forbidden passion for Aricia. Cooper is an intensely charismatic performer and, here, clad in army fatigues and a black wifebeater, with bulging biceps and a sexy growth of beard, it is easy to understand how both Phèdre and Aricia fall under his spell. When, falsely accused by his father, he finally lets loose with the full fury of his emotion, the effect is electrifying. And the love scenes with Aricia (a very fine Ruth Negga) are equally affecting in their tenderness. John Shrapnel and Margaret Tyzack offer strong support in the key roles of Théramène, confidante to Hippolytus, and Oenone, nurse to Phèdre. Both are properly solicitous of the confidence of their respective charges, though the counsel Oenone gives in return (she is the one who, upon false news that Theseus is dead, convinces Phèdre, to confess her love to Hippolytus, and then, when it turns out Theseus is in fact still alive, to accuse her stepson of rape) is perhaps not so wise as that of Théramène. These supporting roles also indicate something of Racine’s innovation regarding the classic Greek chorus, with Oenone and Théramène separately taking on aspects of this dramatic function, but in so doing also turning the chorus into a fallible individual conscience/unconscious (a check on Hippolytus’ ego in the case of Théramène, not enough of a check on Phèdre’s id in the case of Oenone) rather than an abstract collective consciousness with which the audience is meant to identify.

Only Stanley Townsend as Theseus truly disappoints. He is a commanding physical presence, and has a booming voice, but his performance is noticeably wooden alongside the others, and he does not seem able to invest Hughes’ prose with the same emotional depth or poetic rhythm as the other actors. The return of Theseus (absent for the first half of the play, but a powerful looming presence nonetheless) is the key moment of the play, what sends everyone hurtling towards their denouement, and unfortunately Townsend just doesn’t convince as a man equal to Hercules in heroic labours but tragically blind to his own domestic dysfunction.

It was pleasing to see such a strong turnout on a warm summer night for all of this high tragedy, though one wonders why audiences don’t seem to exist in the same numbers for live local theatre? As it turns out, the event was somewhat misadvertised. It was not actually a live simulcast (which, as it started at 7 pm local time, would have meant the London performance was taking place at 3 or 4 am), but rather involved filming a live performance to tape for subsequent rebroadcast around the world. Which makes it all the harder to explain why the people in charge at the Scotiabank felt compelled to start rolling the tape before all of us forced to queue outside the cinema entrance had found some seats. Richard and I came in just as Hippolytus and Théramène were engaged in their opening expository conversation at the top of the play. Joanna arrived just a few minutes later, and had to take a neck cramp-inducing seat near the front.

Then, too, as much as I enjoyed seeing Mirren and Cooper et al emote in extreme close-up, and as much as I admired the skill with which the director of the film crew cut between actors, I did chafe against the cinematic apparatus’ imperative of where to look. One of the pleasures of going to the theatre is, by and large, having an unobstructed view of the entire stage and the full range of action played out upon it. In the theatre, we can choose where to look; in the cinema, the camera makes that decision for us, and in this context I deeply regretted on more than one occasion not being able to see and assess various reactions of the non-speaking actors on stage.

There was also something missing in terms of atmosphere, and not just because of the strange disjunction of seeing people carrying big bags of popcorn and jumbo softdrinks to their seats. Notwithstanding the ongoing debates in performance studies regarding liveness and mediation, I admit to being a sucker for the “eventness” and sense of intimacy created by live theatre. I do think the audience feels differently (which is to say, in a way that is potentially more collective) in the theatre than in the cinema. And I think this has something to do with the difference between seeing live bodies on stage versus virtual bodies on screen. A case in point: while there were the odd scattered laughs and gasps throughout the course of the broadcast of Phèdre on Thursday night, it was telling that the one time the audience came together in a noticeable way to express a felt reaction was one that was expressly mediated by technology, that is, when the broadcast signal appeared to wobble and the screen images momentarily started to break up.

A final note to readers: the blog is going on hiatus for a few weeks, as I will be traveling (to Australia, where, before running a marathon on the Gold Coast and traveling with my sister and brother and his family to the Great Barrier Reef, I plan to catch some theatre in Sydney). I’ll be back in mid-July to report on the Dancing on the Edge Festival and much else.

P.

Choreographing Norman

In Montreal last night I attended lemieux.pilon 4d art’s presentation of Norman, their homage to legendary National Film Board of Canada auteur Norman McLaren, at Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle. A collaboration with dancer/choreographer Peter Trosztmer, the piece takes as its point of departure McLaren’s lifelong love of dance, and his likening of his filmmaking process—and legendary animation techniques, in particular—to the movement associated with dance.

McLaren himself studied dance in his native Scotland, met his lifelong partner, Guy Clover, at the ballet, and in one form or another would always consider himself a choreographer for the cinema. From his earliest scratches on celluloid to his two great dance films, Pas de deux (1967) and Narcissus (1983; which I remember seeing in high school, and which if I didn’t already know it by then, surely proved to me once and for all that I was gay), McLaren was all about achieving through stop-motion and the scratching of film what Eisenstein accomplished through sped-up montage and his cutting of film. While, to be sure, there is an important acoustic element to McLaren’s films, with his scratches precisely positioned to create various rhythmic beats, and with music always integral to the reception of his images, there is perhaps no better metaphor for his oeuvre than that of a great filmic ballet, and I can think of no better tribute to his work than this stunning multi-disciplinary, multi-media, and multi-sensory work.

Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon are known for their own brilliant visual effects, their incorporation of the latest new media technologies into their mise-en-scène, and especially their use of scrimless holographic projections. In Norman the latter take two forms. First, Trosztmer, who, according to the organizing conceit of the piece, is researching McLaren’s life and work at the NFB archives, beams up for us from his cell phone various images of his interview subjects: former co-workers and collaborators of McLaren; other filmmakers and critics familiar with his work (including my friend Tom Waugh, who teaches films studies at Concordia); and so on. Impressive as this Star Trek technology is, it is Lemieux and Pilon’s magical holographic conjuring of classic imagery from McLaren’s most iconic films—both animated and live action—and Trosztmer’s equally magical interactive dancing with this imagery that really takes one’s breath away, and provides the piece with its heart and soul (see the above video excerpt for examples of both sorts of projection).

For, as much as the show relies on state-of-the-art technology to achieve its theatricality, it also provides as the ground for that theatrical expression the body of a live solo performer on stage. It is, after all, Trosztmer’s charisma as a performer, and his graceful fluidity in the languages of dance and theatre (not to mention French and English), that quite literally brings McLaren’s filmic language “alive” on stage. This is a reminder, as well, that McLaren, who could sometimes veer off into pure abstraction and get caught up in his own self-reflexive immersion in the medium, was often at his best and most affecting when he placed himself at the centre of his work. Indeed, some of my favourite moments in Norman come from Trosztmer interacting with McLaren’s own holographic image on stage, as in the brilliant choreography created to the footage from A Chairy Tale (1957), or in the very moving images taken from McLaren’s last film, a home movie of him dancing in his garden.

Thanks, Sylvain, for alerting me to the return Montreal engagement of this wonderful mixed-media show. I’ll do my best to see that it eventually finds its way to Vancouver.

P.

Theatre and Film, or, E-Motion

It’s the end of a long week, during which I’ve been rather consumed by various other writing projects. But I did want to post something here—in haste, alas—to urge local readers of this blog (are there any?) to attend Electric Company Theatre’s special presentation of Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge, at the Vancouver Playhouse until the 18th of this month. The play was a hit in 2006, as part of a co-production between ECT, the PuSh Festival, and Theatre at UBC. It’s since been completely retooled, featuring a revised script by Kevin Kerr, direction by Kim Collier, choreography by Crystal Pite, and scenography by Robert Gardiner. Andrew Wheeler stars as Muybridge, and the always wonderful and eminently watchable Jonathon Young, a co-founder, along with Kerr and Collier, of ECT, appears in a variety of key roles, including Muybridge’s colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, the painter Thomas Eakins, and the man who cuckolds and is eventually killed by Muybridge, Henry Larkyns.

This last detail gives you a sense of the structure of the play, which weaves the story of Muybridge’s pioneering photographic investigations into animal locomotion—which began, at the behest of industrialist and California Governor Leland Stanford, as a way of settling a bet about whether all four hooves of a racehorse ever come off the ground at the same time (they do), and which eventually resulted in him completing an exhaustive catalogue of animal (including human) movement at U Penn—with the scandal of his earlier personal life in San Francisco that he is trying to leave behind. There he met and married the much younger, and previously divorced, Flora, whose subsequent affair with Larkyns (and, it’s suggested, Muybridge’s discovery that the son he thought his—the magnificently named Florado Helios—is actually his rival’s), prompted Muybridge to shoot and kill him. At the ensuing trial, Muybridge entered a plea of insanity, though in the end the jury acquitted him, labeling his crime justifiable homicide. However, Muybridge remained haunted by Flora (who died shortly thereafter) for the rest of his life, as well as by his decision to place Florado in an orphanage. The biography certainly contains a wealth of dramatic material, but at points in this production (which could be streamlined and faster-paced in sections) it felt that, as both psychological motivation and dramaturgical counterpoint, it overwhelmed the scenes of Muybridge’s photographic experiments that comprise the other half of the play.

This is where all of the collaborators in the piece are really allowed to take imaginative flight, with the process by which Muybridge used multiple cameras to “stop time” and “instantly” capture a range of movements—as well as how he “stage managed” the subjects who made those movements—wonderfully evoked in Pite’s movement sequences and especially Gardiner’s stunning projections and lighting decisions (I’m assuming Gardiner was in charge of these decisions, as no separate lighting designer is listed in the program). Here we have not just photography, but early cinema, come to life on the stage. (There’s a magnificent scene, for example, in which Muybridge demonstrates his invention of the zoopraxiscope, an early device for projecting “motion” pictures that predates the invention of celluloid film, to his young assistant, Blanche. It lasts but a flash, but it takes your breath away.) And we have it come to life in a way that reveals the beauty of all human and animal forms, the nudity that was an essential component of Muybridge’s published plates of male and female locomotion here rendered in a way that is the exact opposite of gratuitous. It is, rather, completely warranted.





Still, a part of me wished that Muybridge’s influence on the development of the new medium of film had been emphasized a bit more in the play. Not to detract in any way from the amazing theatricality and visuality of the piece as it currently exists. Rather, I say this for purely selfish reasons. I will be teaching a course in the fall that will deal partly with the relationship between film and theatre (including the use of film and video in contemporary theatre), and have programmed Studies in Motion as part of the syllabus. Not having seen the play, I had perhaps “projected” a bit too much of my own thinking in connection with the course’s various topics onto the play. That said, I still intend to teach the play, and hope that I can coax some of its creators into the classroom to discuss its development. Here, for those who might be interested, is the course description as I’ve currently conceived it:

Filmed Theatre, Theatre and Film, Film in Theatre

Since its invention, film has had a special relationship to theatre. The historical, theoretical, performative, and technological dimensions of that relationship are the subjects of this course. First, we will look at early international cinema, noting the extent to which it borrowed from theatre not only in terms of narrative content, but also in terms of aesthetic form, incorporating proscenium framing, pictorialist staging, and vaudeville attractions into its mise-en-scène. We will also discuss how advances in film technology (including the mobile camera, rear-screen projection, montage editing, and the introduction of sound) gradually altered the aesthetic and ideological relationship between film and theatre. We will then apply these preliminary findings, as well as readings by critics and artists like André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, D.W. Griffith, Tom Gunning, Stanley Kauffmann, and Susan Sontag, to two cross-media case studies: a discussion of Samuel Beckett’s sole contribution to the cinema, Film (1966), starring Buster Keaton, alongside his contemporaneous theatrical short, Play, in a filmed version directed by Anthony Minghella; and a review of the historical trade between Broadway and Hollywood via the genre of the musical. Sticking momentarily with this narrower national focus, we will next examine the stage-to-screen collaborations and stage-versus-screen excoriations and exculpations of three giants of theatre and film in 1950s America: Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller. Closely analyzing A Streetcar Named Desire, The Crucible, and On the Waterfront, we will raise questions of authorship/auteurship, liveness and mediation, spectatorship and audience formation; we will also discuss style’s connection to politics via the new Muscovite acting “method” exported from New York to LA by Marlon Brando, and the taint of communism that inevitably followed. Finally, we will conclude by investigating how different avant-garde and experimental theatre companies such as The Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, and Vancouver’s own Electric Company Theatre have increasingly sought to incorporate film, video, and new media technologies into their dramaturgy. This will coincide with the local staging of a new work by one of the masters of this kind of intermediality, Robert Lepage.

And here is a promotional clip for Studies in Motion. Walk, run, or ride to the Playhouse to see it.

P.