| Sunday in the Park with Diego |
At NYTW |
| National Youth Theatre of Wales- Frida and Diego: A Love Story , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , September 5, 2003 |
| Greg Cullen, the author and director of the English-Welsh bilingual musical Frida and Diego: A Love Story, appears to have found a kindred spirit in the early twentieth-century Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Given towering, wide walls to cover with crowds of figures in constant busy action, Rivera created scenes that enchant and galvanise viewers. In Frida and Diego, written in 1989, Cullen does the same, arranging the forty-strong company of the National Youth Theatre of Wales in striking tableaux, recreating Rivera’s murals and society and bringing them to life. The play is a vast improvement upon Cullen’s Tarzanne, Queen of the Valleys, and scale seems to have something to do with the success. Whereas Tarzanne featured a cast of four as a nuclear family, Frida and Diego draws its great energy from the buzzing carnival of the ensemble and the need to make that ensemble represent a civic community. While Frida and Diego is alive and often inspiring, it would benefit appreciably from an honest admission that Cullen’s most urgent theme is Rivera (played by Thomas Evans), his art, and his society, not ‘Frida and Diego.’ Kahlo (Catrin Elizabeth Morgan) is tragic, but does not demand that the audience identify with her. Cullen’s handling of her tragedies is sometimes is a bit uneventful. She soldiers facilely through illness, horrific injury, and disability. Her affairs with many men and women provoke sensationalist comment, but don’t trouble her mind much. Diego’s own escapades, over which she has less control, frustrate her more. Their attempts to sort out rules for Bohemian marriage aren’t much different from the marital quarrels in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, and her death scene seems to echo Shadowlands and Evita. Her insistence that she will return to her estranged Diego if they abstain from sex is suddenly brought up and then just as suddenly dropped. Her reasons for imposing that condition and the way it works out for them require further exploration. Kahlo’s representation may lack immediacy partially because the piece begins and ends with the grieving Rivera’s soliloquies. The main objective is his: to make peace with her memory and to resolve his own sense of personal and political failure. The reconstruction of one of Kahlo’s paintings looks like waxwork compared to the kinetic human murals. The company, the cream of Wales’s emerging acting crop, must be congratulated for yet another strong performance. The ensemble nature of the play would make it nonsensical as well as unfair to single out any one outstanding performance. Some of the choreography looked especially challenging. The moment when a human crucifix-figure fell from his cross, face-down into the arms of the congregation, demonstrated that the actors have built up an impressive reserve of both skill and trust. Siân Jenkins and Rhiannon Matthews’ costumes, inspired by the Mexican figure of the Calavera, or “papier-mache skeleton, symbol of fun” and of the binary relationship between the living and dead, are beautiful, quirky, and eerie. Projections of Rivera and Kahlo’s paintings were used effectively and with a clear purpose, as multimedia should be. The musical score, composed by Steve Byrne and Jak Poore, is more edgy and far more memorable than that of last month’s new opera Gwyneth and the Green Knight, or any other musical I’ve seen in a very long time. Byrne and Poore’s influences range from Mexican folk music and liturgical song to the structured pounding fury of a car factory floor. Each song perfectly illustrates its scene and contrasts with the others. In spite of Rivera’s contempt for his early Cubist endeavours, Frida and Diego looks like a Cubist work, and an ultimately illuminating one. Cullen’s vacillating, often self-contradictory Rivera reveals what he sees through multiple sets of eyes. Always looking at once left and right, past and future, his vision encompasses American-style unregulated capitalism, his own socialist ideals, his past with Frida, and his society’s possible futures. * * * This article first appeared in THE WESTERN MAIL on 12/9/2003. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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