Francoise Berlanger – Penthesilea - Barbican

Hmmm.

This was a dreadful piece of experimental theatre; self indulgent and showing contempt for the audience.

As we enter the theatre, the stage is swathed in dry ice, and ominous processed electronic drones fill the air. With the audience still taking their seats and the houselights up, a naked woman with a bow (but no arrow) roams the stage, occasionally confronting the audience. The naked woman is Francoise Berlanger and this is essentially a one woman show, backed by the two laptop musicians, and some paintings above the stage by Berlanger’s brother Marcel.

At some point the lights dim, the naked woman dons a black tuxedo jacket and rather nice long frilly black dress, and does her best to make the text completely incomprehensible. Randomly, words are screeched, squealed or shouted, in an array of weird accents. She particularly enjoys saying the word “horse” over and over again. A large section is in the German of the Von Kleist text that the performance is based on. All the while the electronic drones try their hardest to drown out the words.

All of this was quite deliberate, as became clear in the after-show talk. Berlanger said she was more interested in exploring how the words sounded than what the text meant. The talk was chaired by Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for the Guardian. Yes said Lyn it was almost as if it didn’t matter if you couldn’t follow the text. Well it did matter, because there was noting else going on on stage to tell the story. Lyn purred how the production seemed to be an all out assault on the audience, which it was – all around me people were suffering from the dry ice, menacing drones, and Berlanger’s incomprehensible howling. Lyn seemed to think this was a good thing. But it wasn’t. It was neither interesting nor original, nor did it in any way relate to the content of the play, which from what I can make out revolved around love and loss and killing what you most hold dear (by eating them apparently, from what Berlanger said, not that there was any evidence of this on stage).

Penthesilea is part of the Spill festival of experimental theatre, live art and performance. It is organised by director Robert Pacitti, frustrated at the lack of opportunities to stage experimental theatre in the capital. Yes well that is a moot point. Look at some of the things I have been to of late – Faust, Platonov, Yabbok, Doo Cot – all experimental, all good.

Lets compare with some of the other events at Spill (quotes being from the Spill brochure): Eve Bonneau “uses the body as live matter in constant transformation…with its flux/reflux of interior rhythms” – meaning she crawls about naked on the floor illuminating her body with a single lightbulb; Hancock and Kelly’s Tattoo during which Traci Kelly continues “to have the length of her back tattooed in a pattern drawn from the wallpaper of [collaborator] Richard Hancock’s childhood home”; Untitled (Syncope) where Kira O’Reilly “employs…biomedical and biotechnical practices to consider the body as material, site and metaphor in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations” meaning she cuts herself on stage with a scalpel.

One word sums this up for me. Why. Why do it? Why go and watch it? And look at what is really going on. In these types of shows it is always women, never men, who find themselves parading naked and self harming – this is little more than cerebral lapdancing for students of Gender or Queer Studies.

That’s why you can’t get bookings Mr Pacitti, because these types of performance are not only terribly clichéd almost to the point of self-parody (and there is nothing contemporary or new about them even if the surface trappings of electronica or digital media are new) but because, when boiled down to it, they are not very good, and because to mask their not being very good, the performers go out of their way to alienate the audience. Contrast the wonder that was Faust (and every bit as experimental, by the way) which was all about the audience, bringing the audience into the show, with what Berlanger said about wanting to work in a very open space, so that it was very easy for the audience to leave if they wanted to.

Remind me again what the emperor's new clothes looked like.


The Spill website is at http://www.spillfestival.com/ and their blog is http://www.spilloverspill.blogspot.com/