At Volcano Theatre |
| Volcano Theatre- Torsk , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , November 1, 2000 |
| Two months ago in San Francisco I saw a car with a sticker stuck to it which read: "My aim is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." On the afternoon of Saturday, 14th October, in the Gallery 2 space in the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Volcano Theatre Company presented "Torsk"- a performance piece which seemed to agree in spirit with the motto printed on that sticker. The play's protagonist identifies himself as "an owl frightened by darkness and a fish frightened by water," and asserts, "every man is such an owl and such a fish." In this play, the actors approach and confront realities which are both terrifying and as all-encompassing and inescapable as darkness is to the owl and water is to the fish. "Torsk" concerns the at once vivid and petrified imaginative life of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, and explores that life through a myriad of media. The death, from tuberculosis, of the young Munch's fifteen-year-old sister, Sophie, tore through the canvas of his life and his art and explodes at ground zero of the topography of this play. The story that unfolds is reminiscent of Ibsen's work (I am thinking in particular of 'Ghosts' and 'Hedda Gabler') in its brutally honest wrestling with issues of disease and death, family, guilt, and the burden of survival. Naturalism is not necessarily pleasant, as the company demonstrates in one scene recounting the story of an artist's model who was so nervous and self-conscious about posing nude that she blushed, shivered, laughed, cried, and urinated on the pedestal- and was praised by the artists for appearing so real and alive. When we first see Sophie, she is played by a tall, adult actress who wears an absurdly ill-fitting white satin nightdress, knee socks, and candy-apple-red Mary Janes. Crowding her body against her brother's in a coffin-like rectangular niche in the Gallery wall, she is a ghoulish representation of Munch's kid sister. Later, Sophie re-appears: this time, played by a stiff-limbed china doll, opposite another china doll standing in for her brother. One gets the feeling that in this play we can't see Sophie- only different articulate but artificial phantoms of her. One wonders if the same is not true of her haunted brother. Volcano Theatre Company describes itself as "backward-looking forward marching… physical theatre." The company's past directors and performers include Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni, founders of Theatre de Complicité, and the company has toured the U.K., South America, Canada, Europe, and Russia. While I think it would be misleading to describe the play as physical theatre, because it is so much more, the company pulls off with a freaky finesse the trick of making the invisible clearly and concretely visible. The actors move around the found space of the Gallery, but they often refer to a maquette of a set for the play which has been assembled in what appears to be a recycled cardboard file box. In the centre of the upstage wall of this maquette is a reproduction of Munch's "The Sick Child"- "the painting that launched his career." The two human actors who play Sophie and her brother turn the maquette into a dollhouse and manipulate the two perfectly groomed but hard and passive dolls inside it, acting out Sophie's death. Volcano Theatre Company's Munch used his art both to evade and to confront the fear of dying and the guilt of surviving when those one loves have died. In "Torsk" Munch confesses: "I live my life in the company of the dead," but he also declares: "Painters do not succumb. Painters paint." His paintings constitute his challenge issued against death, but his life beyond the edges of the canvas is a daily commute to Hades. He survives to paint and he paints to survive- but what kind of survival has he won? The conflicting images Munch creates when he smears white paint over his face- paint is his mask to shield him from the world, but from the point of view of the outside observer it looks like a pale death-mask- may be both comforting (to him) and disturbing (to us) and makes drama out of the seismic contradictions that erupt out of Munch's paintings and the legend of his life. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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