Melbourne Festival review: The Manganiyar Seduction, Rhinoceros in Love ~ theatre notes

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Melbourne Festival review: The Manganiyar Seduction, Rhinoceros in Love

Much has been said about The Manganiyar Seduction, a stunning theatrical presentation of Rajasthani music, and no doubt I will simply add another bunch of superlatives. Indian director Roysten Abel has created a work that had the Melbourne Festival audience standing up, cheering and stamping its feet. Like everyone else, I was seduced: by the musicianship, by the passion of the music, by the production itself.


The Manganiyars are a caste of musicians, an unknown concept in western culture. The performers in The Manganiyar Seduction are mostly Muslim, although there is one Hindu, and mostly, intriguingly, have the surname "Khan". Their work combines both classical and folk traditions, creating a music of winding complexities: driving rhythms that get under your skin and make you want to dance contrast with solo voices that seem to express all human longing, edged with raw feeling and yet astonishingly skilled in their flexibility.

At first we're presented with four tiers of booths curtained in red velvet, each surrounded by light globes. The progression of the show is through revelation: one by one, two by two, three by three, the curtains open and reveal singers and musicians, until there are 37 musicians all playing together. It was like an Advent calendar, and I found myself pleasurably looking forward to finding out what I would see next. The other simple conceit is that the globes around the booths light up when individual musicians are playing, and darken when they stop. This creates a constantly changing geometry, and permits the conductor/percussionist/dancer (Deu Khan) who performs before the set to act as a conductor of the visuals as well as the music.

The performance itself consists of three songs, which fluidly connect in a text-book example of theatrical orchestration. The primary song is a Sufi work by the poet Bulleshah, Alfat Un Bin In Bin, which explores the love of God and the Sufi journey of gnostic self revelation. Two other songs are woven into the first: Halariya, a traditional welcome for newborn children that describes the birth of Lord Krishna, and Neendarli, a comic song about a wife attempting to seduce her husband.

I wished I could understand the words: not that the music wasn't enough in itself, because it was, but because the directness of its emotional effect made me want to know what they were singing. However, I didn't need to read the program afterwards to know that all these songs were about love. That was absolutely palpable. This show made me want to cry with happiness.

*



I walked out of Rhinoceros in Love shaking my head. One of the Melbourne Festival's headline acts, it's a production from the National Theatre of China, billed as China's "most popular contemporary drama". It was first produced in 1999, and was the National Theatre's resident playwright Liao Yimei's first play. We're seeing the fourth production, directed by Meng Jinghui, who has, among other things, specialised in bringing productions of the European modernists - Dario Fo, Samuel Beckett - to the Chinese stage.

This production is a bizarre collision of Chinese and European traditions. And yet... for all its faults - and these are legion - it generates a seductive energy that I found impossible to resist. Within this work is a feeling that I think western theatre has largely lost: it manifests an expressive liberty which reminded me strongly of the modernists of the early 20th century, a sense of almost defiant arbitrariness. All the dramaturgical care, all the polish and experience that can be brought to the best western theatre, can have a constipating effect, creating a feeling of aesthetic politeness and, in the worst cases, a "by the rules" stolidity. There's something refreshing in the total lack of attention to our unwritten laws of aesthetic production here, and in its best moments it creates an electric sense of the unexpected.

The play itself is the tale of Ma Lu's (Zhang Nianhua) hopeless passion for Mingming (Qi Xi), who is herself in love with an abusive man who won't love her back. Ma Lu is a zookeeper, and his only confidant is a lone rhinoceros, to whom he addresses his confessional monologues. This dodgy love story is punctuated by satirical clowning scenes, in which the reckless individualism represented by Ma Lu and Mingming is counterpointed by the conventions of the state or market. There is, for example, a series of "Love Tutorials", in which young people are taught the proper expressions for love through Hollywood cliches and pop songs.

Ma Lu's obsession reaches stalker territory - he declares that he will keep loving Mingming until she loves him back, no matter what she says, and that she will never be allowed to escape. There's no irony in this: he is presented as the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds. Perhaps it's not surprising that there should be a rape joke in there. Again, and this time not in a good way, it made me think of the early 20th century.

It's quite clear where the expertise lies in this production: in the performances, which are highly skilled, especially in the impeccable chorus work, and, for all its problems, in the text. I don't know enough about Chinese culture to be able to read this clearly against tradition, but even through the uncertain surtitles it seemed to me that Liao Yimei's text spirals out of a long tradition of Chinese poetry. The play's lyricism and obsession with the natural world recalls Li Po and Du Fu, who famously celebrated the romantic figure of the poet as an exile from society, and also contemporary poets such as Yang Lian, one of the figures who unites Chinese traditions with European modernist influences.

The design is probably its worst aspect. The set features suspended metal rectangles and reflective panelling at the back, and is very approximately lit: the lighting design has some good ideas, but is indifferently executed. The whole looks like a bricolage of modern effects, but doesn't appear to mean anything. Likewise, the show opens with a flourish of percussion which is never seen again, and which seems to bear absolutely no relationship to anything else. This, and a lot of the clowning, made me think of the acrobatics which were interpolated into Shakespeare's productions: these elements seem designed to catch the attention of the groundlings in the pit.

To one side of the stage is something like a billiard table that turns out to be a treadmill. This is the locus of one the production's hilariously kitsch moments: a Chinese pop song rises and the two lovers are running together, in an analogue of making love. It made me feel as if I had strayed into a bad anime. Towards the end of the play, the stage is flooded with water, forcing the cast, rather charmingly, to don green gumboots. In the climax, Zhang Nianhua ends up standing on a table being drenched with a private rainstorm, passionately declaiming his stalker ambitions. I still don't know why he had to be so wet.

Pictures: Top: The Manganiyar Seduction; bottom, Zhang Nianhua in Rhinoceros in Love.


The Manganiyar Seduction, conceived, arranged and directed by Roysten Abel, conducted by Deu Khan. Sound engineer, S Manoharan, set and lighting design by Roysten Abel. Melbourne Festival. Closed.

Rhinoceros in Love, by Liao Yimei, directed by Meng Jinghui. Design by Zhang Wu, lighting by Zhang Jian, sound design by Yan Guihe. With Zhang Nianhua, Qi Xi, Zhao Hongwei, Zhang Ziqi, Kou Zhiguo, Lui Chang, Wang Xiaoshen and Feng Qilong. National Theatre of China and the Melbourne Festival. Closed.

16 comments:

Geoffrey said...

Probably a reference to the Great Flood which is of immense significance in Chinese mythology. Not surprising it was lost in translation though.

Alison Croggon said...

What would be the symbolic connection to the story? (It was a very little flood...) Certainly, Biblical connotations make no sense to me...

Geoffrey said...

No idea ... just an observation. I didn't/can't see it. If it was a little flood, maybe it was just splashy (pun intended) effects. Maybe they saw Meryl Tankard's "Two Feet" and liked the effect? Who knows.

Alison Croggon said...

I lean towards the splashy effects theory - Ma Lu being drenched in his elemental passion...

Daniel Coghlan said...

I left Rhinoceros in Love thinking I had missed the point, not knowing whether it was lost in translation or just me. (I actually spent more time on way home wondering what the significance of all that water was. I love when the stage floods - but why?) Surely there was some greater philosophical meaning that had simply gone over my head. The text seemed beautiful, and I wish I could understand it without the use of surtitles. As for the all important youthful rebellious energy (so perfectly pitched for a 20 year old) - I must have missed that too. Then again, I sat there rugged up under a coat while unwrapping my cough drops.

I think what irked me is just as your say: we are meant to view Ma Lu as "the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds" even after attempted rape and a successful kidnapping. I don't know about everyone else, but that message doesn't really encourage me to reach for the stars.

Alison Croggon said...

The gender politics certainly left a few people open-mouthed, especially the jolly rape joke. I guess the "saving grace" is that Mingming is the feminine version of Ma Lu, and so equally free to be a stalker; the problem being that she ends up bound to a chair and gagged. Not saying that an exploration of destructive obsession can't be interesting - look at Wuthering Heights; but when that collides with a politics that heroicises individualism verses the collective, the result is pretty dire. Still, can't say I disliked it. It was kind of bonkers.

Alison Croggon said...

That would be (ahem) "versus", not "verses".

Daniel Coghlan said...

I can't say I disliked it either. There was some sort of contagious energy to the piece that reeled me in - and I really enjoyed the chorus, especially the 'Love Tutorial' scenes.

At least it has left me pondering for the past few days and, to be superficial, the stage sure did look nice.

Naive Theatre Goer said...

Maybe I missed the point but I didn't come away thinking that I was "meant to view Ma Lu as 'the heroic individual who persists in his beliefs against all odds'". I came away thinking that even Ma Lu's single-minded obsession was in the end meant to be seen as pathological and poisonous, that the lampooning and caricature throughout the piece was also finally involved debunking the romantic ideal of the "love" driven individual, such an individual being exposed as really being self-obsessed and dangerous rather than truly loving.

Alison Croggon said...

Did you? I got the idea that Ma Lu's references to the solitary poet figure were somewhat more romantic than that...

Daniel Coghlan said...

I like that idea and now that you've said it, I can definitely see that as a more logical, or at more least politically correct, explanation of the themes. However, even the play's program mentions that the play is "about the power of belief, and the need to persevere in the pursuit of one's ideals and dreams". The writer Liao Yimei is quoted "If you look at human history it was the people who were ridiculed, yet still persevered along their own path, who gaves us all the riches we have today. They were the so-called fools."

If this was a tragic tale of obsessive love and the destructive results like Sondheim's Passion (which was based on a film in turn based on Iginio Ugo Tarchetti's novel Fosca) or even Tis Pity She's a Whore then I could accept it at face value. Alas no, for me it definitely romanticised Ma Lu's intentions and it really threw me.

Is the production's hype really just the 10-year overflow of the shocking and avant-garde original showing that garnered a cult following?

Naive Theatre Goer said...

For what it is worth, I'm not the only person I know who took it that way, I at least have some company if I'm in error. The portrayal of the obsessive love became so over the top and bizarrely extreme that it just seemed like another instance of the ridicule of various ideas that permeated the play.

Daniel Coghlan said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Alison Croggon said...

Hi NTG - I don't think there's a "correct" answer! It's not an exam...

Australian Catalogues said...

As what I've read in all of the comments here, seems like there's a contradiction. I'm just wondering if this play was good enough to watch?

Alison Croggon said...

Whether it is "good" wasn't really the point, at least for me. It made me think of the German playwright Botho Strauss, when asked what German theatre needed: after some thought, he said: "What German theatre needs is more bad plays.