| Chilling, demonic and absurd |
At Volcano Theatre |
| Volcano Theatre company- Destination , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 20, 2001 |
| “Destination” is the title of Volcano Theatre’s latest play, written by the Austrian playwright and novellist Thomas Bernhard, and directed by Theatre de Complicite co-founder Kathryn Hunter—but the characters are really unable to go anywhere. Trapped in a steel-grey disused foundry and its dead owner’s equally bleak disintegrating seaside cottage, the foundry owner’s narcissistic, fascist widow (Fern Smith) condemns herself to spitting repetitive monologues, cruel insults, too-clever aphorisms, and orders at her enslaved daughter, played by Matilda Leyser. The daughter repeatedly to escape from her surroundings, undertaking frenzied scrabbling climbs up the walls beautifully choreographed by Complicite co-founder Marcello Magni. Suspended upside down with only a span of the drapery looped in a complicated design under one knee, supported by the tension, the daughter reaches up toward freedom with her feet. It’s beautiful and frustrating and difficult to understand how she got there or how she can support herself on rope and void. What is she trying to escape from? Her mother—Austria’s ugly Nazi era history, the futility (as her mother puts it) of trying to change anything by making “drama,” or of trying to change anything at all? In this challenging and wonderfully kinetic production, which Volcano presented as part of the Aberystwyth Arts Centre’s annual Theatreshop Cymru performance festival, raises all these questions. The script seems to have borrowed a great deal from Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”: the mother and daughter often appear to be the identical twin sisters of Beckett’s master and slave Hamm and Clov. That this staging begins with the mother seated upstage in a tall, unwieldy chair, facing the audience and apparently unable to move, whilst the daughter plods about the space performing monotonous household routines makes the similarities between the two plays inescapable. However, the first act of this play is given suspense by the mention of a third character—a young “writer of drama” (Burn Gorman) who might accompany the mother and daughter to the dilapidated seaside house the foundry owner left them. This young playwright, the author of a play titled “Save Yourself,” might be the daughter’s saviour, but the mother’s (and apparently Bernhard’s) cynical attitude that theatre never has and never will change society leaves that possibility dangling in doubt. The mother’s sharply spoken monologues are illustrated by sets and costumes that often say more than she does about the details of her unspeakable past. The production plays with one’s sense of time as the daughter unpacks and wears clothes that range in style from the 1930s to the 70s. We are told she is twenty years old, so something is very wrong here. Either time has broken, or in her limited experience she is being forced to relive forty years of the past. And some symbols sewn to the sleeves of the foundry owner’s old trenchcoat and the uniforms of the workers whose labour he has exploited say far more about the foundry’s ugly past than the mother is willing to. Some cutting in the beginning of the second act—when the mother and the writer of drama discuss the role of the theatre in society in dialogue that often seems too self-conscious and clever—would have made this a better production but as it was it was amazing, chilling, demonic, sincere, and absurd. All three actors gave fine performances. Smith’s character is revolting and frightening: her disgusted repetition of the detested terms “the foundry” and “your father” sound like stabs at language, and one moment when she drags her adult daughter into her lap and clutches her like a baby—then drags her across the floor like a baby doll—is perversely convincing. Gorman is perfectly understated as the writer, the outside observer who gets sucked into the tragedy, who wants to save the daughter but increasingly finds himself misled, trapped, and threatened by her mother. His unease is visible but never overplayed. Leyser’s acting is impeccable and believable and she holds her own despite not speaking many words, but her gymnastic performance is completely arresting and mesmerising. She does not make tearing through the air and up the masonry look easy: she makes it look excruciatingly, impossibly hard and yet she does it anyway. "Destination" begins with a wordless scene in which a chained, manacled man in a bowler hat and smart clothes, a professional performing escape artist, tries to escape from a trunk. Accompanied by jerky, clattering, slighly schmaltzy fast music plays, he tries to get out of the box, but something unseen is pulling him back in. His chains shake and the untied long sleeves of his straightjacket flap about before he disappears under the floor, leaving the spectators wondering what it was they just saw, who he is, and what he was struggling against. When I left the Arts Centre after the performance, that sense of disorientation which the play plumbs hadn’t gone away. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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