What a glorious day Saturday turned out to be. Watching United thumping Arsenal 4-0 in a pub near Waterloo was the glorious meat in a sumptuous cultural sandwich. Van Morrison said there'd be days like this but frankly I’d stopped believing him.
The day began with “A Guest For Dinner” up at the Arts Depot, for what was, to all intents, a mini-Punchdrunk performance in Finchley. Regular readers of this blog (oh if only!) will know just how extraordinary and exciting that concept is to me. So exciting that I have to say it again, as if aurally pinching myself to believe it. Yes. Punchdrunk in Finchley.
To be precise, A Guest for Dinner is a collaboration between final year degree students at The Central School of Speech and Drama and Maxine Doyle (director/choreographer) and Livi Vaughan (design / details / atmosphere) of Punchdrunk. But this was no student drama production, this was the real McCoy. Continuing Punchdrunk’s obsessive investigation of Edgar Allan Poe, A Guest For Dinner takes as its starting point Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” about the lunatics taking over the asylum. The story is also used as the basis for one of the most powerful set pieces in Masque of the Red Death.
We weren’t given masks, but otherwise the entrance into the theatre was classic Punchdrunk. We were led into a goods lift lined in red fabric, with a silent actor with moody beard rocking on a child’s wooden horse; the doors were slammed shut and we descended, emerging from the lift into a pitch black space, following a path inside a desiccated bonsai forest which had magically sprung up inside the Arts Depot. We were led into a tiny anti –chamber where a stunning ethereal ghost told us the story of the little boy who went to the moon (first encountered by me in Faust, but which I now know to come from Woyzeck) whilst dabbing a silent man’s shaved head with TCP. In the flickering light one could just make out various specimen jars with unidentifiable organic matter inside.
We were then led into the main space, where the lunatics / doctors) were assembled around the dinner table. It was a full on sensual assault – the actors passed over to us bits of papers dipped in essential oils with strange sayings – “who put the din into dinner”. The normal spectral equation was reversed – as if we the audience were the ghosts - occasionally one of the actors would just glimpse us out of the corner of the eye, and strain to see or hear us.
Just as everything was starting to feel familiar and comfortable, at least for a Punchdrunk obsessive, we were moved on again – a curtain opened to reveal what ordinarily is the auditorium, and we were ushered off the stage and into the seats, whilst the lunatics/doctors gave us a show, an interlude one might call it, perhaps recalling the vaudevillian Palais Royale inside the Masque of the Red Death. After a crazy song, some mesmerism and some quackery, the show took a further turn as the cast, now all in white, turned what had been the dining table into hospital beds, and a long and quite brilliantly choreographed scene emerged, the actors exploring the duality of the patient - doctor theme in the Poe Story. The choreography reminded me of the Woyzeck I saw earlier in the year and last year’s Icelandic Peer Gynt (set in a lunatic hospital), especially the way the beds were hurled from side to side of the stage to create an extraordinary energy and visceral visuality.
It was a tremendous production – light and sound and smells were of course magnificent, and I cannot praise the cast highly enough given their relative inexperience. As with all Punchdrunk stuff, they are really challenged hard, acting, dancing/physical theatre-ing, singing, some playing instruments, interacting with the audience and performing in tight narrow spaces. It was difficult to believe they were still learning their trade. Not everyone was equally brilliant at everything, but everyone excelled at something.
After heading down to the South Bank and watching the footie, it was into the QEH for Darren Johnston / Array and a piece of visual theatre / dance called Outre. If my Martian cousin were to come down from the skies and say to me “Robin, I’ve been reading your blog, in fact I am that regular reader you have been dreaming about, and I really like the sound of this thing you humans call culture - oh and before I forget, yes they do have Jews on Mars, anyway I really like all this stuff you go to see - can you take me to see something, maybe - cos it’s short visit, you know what with the costs of accommodation on Earth and all that – something that has a bit of all the stuff you keep going on about, please, will you, please?” then I would take him/her/it to see this.
Outre seemed to be a summation of everything wonderful I have seen in the past three years. In no particular order it was: uncanny, gothic Victorian, ghostly/hauntological, fragmentary, macabre, sinister, and extraordinarily, intensely, mentally stimulating. It had touches of the freak show/circus. It suggested automata and living puppets. It had elements of David Lynch and Angela Carter. It was sound-tracked with specially commissioned abstract electronica and contemporary classical. I connected with it on a deep unconscious level, yet it remained elusive, forever just beyond the tip of my tongue. It had touches of those classic Doctor Who episodes, The Talons of Weng Chiang and Spearhead from Space, and brought out memories of Bagpuss. It made me think (and dream) of Von Kleist’s famous essay “On The Marionette Theatre”, with its discussion of grace and the unconsciousness of inanimate objects in movement. It had intimations of Noh and Kabuki theatre and tapped into that uniquely Japanese strain of supernatural/ghost story, in particular reminding me of Kaneto Shindo’s two wonderful supernatural movies of the 1960s, “Kuroneko” and “Onibaba”.
But more, more than this, it was absolutely exquisite, with some of the most beautiful moments I have ever seen conjured in the theatre. To manage to be tough and physical yet at the same time delicate and fragile is the sign of a truly masterful piece of work.
What it was is of course hard to describe. The first section seemed to be set in the freakiest of freakshows; we saw a living automaton, conjoined twins, a headless man, and a lithe erotic dancer who was revealed to have a gruesome witch’s face. Each act was preceded by a projected introduction from a sinister distorted MC. Then there was some kind of breakdown, a rift in the ether, and we were watching a crazed and tortured Japanese ghost figure. Finally all the pieces of the nightmare seemed to coalesce before the figures collapsed in a heap in the centre of the stage, like de-animated children’s dolls.
The production took place behind a gauze screen and the air was heavy with dry ice. Minimally, but very carefully, lit, the haunting figures seemed barely there, drifting in and out of the blackness and the mist and the beams of light.
Like I say, exquisite.
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