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.