| Lovefuries by David Rabey |
| First presented in 2004 by Lurking Truth |
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cast size:2
synopsis: A double bill of performance pieces which explodes national and personal pressures to keep silent. |
There is 1 review of Lurking Truth's Lovefuries in our database:
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Lovefuries
by David Rabey
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[print] |
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venue Aberystwyth |
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May 1, 2004 |
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| Can we have an intellectual response to erotic activity? Is there a language of eroticism? If so, is it too private a language to communicate the experience? When we make love, when we come, is the experience not a release from intellectualism? Aren’t we swept away by a sea of overwhelming sensation? Is there an aesthetic to be structured from this moment that is at the same instant the abandonment of life and yet the most acute expression of it? The language of the act is private because the vocabulary belongs to the moment of orgasm. But we have a desire to deprivatise it; to find in the mystery of copulation a way of making something of those unqualifiable truths expressed in the moment of ecstasy. We have a desire for the language of infinities. Lovefuries is an expression of that language; an expression of the theatrical aesthetic that seeks to make intelligible to all and to communicate to all, those raging emotions and their meaning which we as humans refuse to lock away though they are private. There is often something erotic about the true experiencing of a work of art – it may even be that a work of art isn’t successful without this erotic response. Whatever, I loved watching the actress Antoinette Walsh. As the first part of Lovefuries – The Contracting Sea – opened, I was transported to the Ireland of John Synge: to the West Coast and Connamara and the keening women of Riders To The Sea and when she cried out in a heartbreaking moment of grief for her lost-at-sea man I wanted to take her in my arms. And as she pleaded with the sea against the temporality of being human, she became Neruda’s mermaid abused by the drunks she’s fallen amongst and I wanted to possess her to save her sexuality. Antoinette Walsh is breathtaking! This woman with these words given her by the poet/professor David Rabey – the deprivatiser of eroticism’s language – has the power of the sea. I know what’s happening here – Rabey has directed her to seduce me and as she begins to de-robe I complete the process or her undressing in my mind so that I may appreciate the beauty implied in her dance-like movements, like I would appreciate Manet’s L’odelisque. In this way, Walsh transcended herself to give me Elisheba and I am as one with the absent sea, the forlorn fictive mermaid and Walsh’s other character Morgana possessing the storm torn Elisheba. I don’t much like music in theatre – it’s likely to produce the tactics of melodrama (melo = music). But Paula Gardiner’s electrifying (non-electric) double bass is different. This music is not there to explain the text and encourage appropriate responses from us; it’s in conflict with it. It’s an elemental music for a play about sea and fire – a music that explores the roots of music itself. In the second play The Hanging Judge, the landscape is still Celtic but now we’re in South Wales and the eroticism is harsher. Gareth Potter as Fury – an exceptionally powerful performance – explodes, his anger coming at us like grenades and machine gun fire. It’s the eroticism of one abused wanting to rectify the betrayal asking: how can the beauty of that be made so ugly? Is this what it is to be human? Can art save us?! I grew up in the valleys of South Wales and its environs and I could recognise that deep undercurrent of something like cultural betrayal and more personal hurt that rose through the piece like the threatening hand of corrupt authority. And what I was left with as I became Fury was this terrible loneliness in the prison of my desire but that out there was another world – maybe on some Western shore of Ireland, where Elisheba is calling me in from the sea to wash me with her juices and kiss me with her sex. |
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| reviewer: Dic Edwards |
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