Melbourne International Arts Festival #1

The Temptation of St Anthony, from the novel by Gustave Flaubert. Direction, set design and lighting concept by Robert Wilson, music and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Costumes by Geoffrey Holder, lighting design by AJ Weisbard, sound design by Peter Cerone, music direction by Toshi Reagon. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne. October 11. Until October 14.

The Tell-Tale Heart (after Edgar Allan Poe), adapted and directed by Barrie Kosky, performed by Martin Niedermair and Barrie Kosky. Design adapted by Anna Tregloan (set) and Paul Jackson (lighting) from original designs by Michael Zerz (set and lighting) and Alfred Mayerhofer (costume). Malthouse Theatre @ the Malthouse Workshop until October 20.

The band struck up, the lights blinked on, and the weather, which had hitherto smiled benignly on the fair city of Melbourne, invited Mr Rain and Ms Hail in for a party. Yes, it’s festival time, when it is traditional for Melbourne’s skies to snarl, and woolly longjohns under the petticoat are now de rigeur.

Fortunately for those of us shivering on the mean streets, the heart is warm, even if the flesh is goose-pimpled. MIAF artistic director Kristy Edmunds has struck the requisite wow factor.

Last year’s headline openers were, it must be said, a little patchy: the astounding theatrical mysteries of Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endoginidia on the one hand were counterbalanced by a damply earnest version of 1984 from Tim Robbins’s Actors Gang on the other. As a frisson between events, it failed on every measure of joissance (a mixture of the erotic, the mystical and the political, if you’re wondering).

This year, the joissance was bouncing. Edmunds has set up a conversation between two visionary auteur directors, Robert Wilson and Barrie Kosky. Although both draw from major writers in the Western literary canon, they are a complete contrast in style and approach, and, ultimately, in their conceptions of theatre.

Robert Wilson’s middle name is “spectacle”. For years, this leading practitioner of avant garde theatre has been providing luscious sensual feasts for the eye.

Last year, Wilson’s elegant theatricalisation of traditional Indonesian epic, I La Galigo, was a major festival hit. This year he’s brought an operatic adaptation by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Gustave Flaubert’s magnificent obsession, The Temptation of St Anthony, a novel in play form that Flaubert rewrote three times and claimed was his “life’s work”.

Flaubert’s story of St Anthony’s dark night of the soul, as he is assailed in his search for truth by temptations of the flesh, mind and spirit, is definitely an oddity. Ezra Pound’s view of the novel was rather less sanguine than Flaubert's, and has a certain justness. “[Flaubert] was interested in certain questions now dead as mutton, because he lived in a certain period,” said Pound. “Fortunately he managed to bundle these matters into one or two books and keep them out of his work on contemporary subjects. I set it aside … as something which matters now only as archaeology.”

Johnson Reagon is the founder of the acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and is a historian and venerable Civil Rights activist who works in the musical tradition of African-American gospel choirs. While you can see the thematic connection to Flaubert’s story, her soul-stirring rhythms don’t seem an immediate fit with Wilson’s cool, chic aesthetic; but in fact their warm immediacy, yin to Wilson's yang, do much to mitigate the distancing eye.

Drawing from spirituals and gospel can, however, induce a certain semantic confusion: when St Anthony is being tempted by the gifts of the Lord’s table, for instance, it suggests communal joy rather than any sense of gluttony. It’s hard to see what the Lord could possibly object to in anything so celebratory of Him.

As I followed the argument of Reagon Johnson’s libretto, I felt a certain wonder that the idea that religion is not the answer to every truth, or that there are contradictions in scripture that compromise its value as historical document, needed to be said quite so baldly. But then I remembered that the US has a president who claims that he invaded Iraq because God told him to.

Which is to say that, while I am not so convinced of the intellectual provenance of this show, I can see its contemporary aptness. But intellectual provenance is hardly the point here.

From the moment the performers enter the theatre in a slow hieratic procession to the show’s final ecstatic climax, Wilson’s stagecraft brings the State Theatre to radiant life. Johnson Reagon’s thrilling score embraces everything from gospel to African music to funk, and there’s the electrifying pleasure of hearing so many huge voices on stage at once, backed by Toshi Reagon’s admirably tight band.

This pleasure is heightened by the visual banquet of Wilson’s production. The costumes are gorgeous, and the simple neo-classical set, reminiscent of a church, is drenched in swathes of intense colour – azure, emerald, scarlet, gold.

And Wilson’s gift for breath-taking mise en scene is well in evidence. His masterly stage choreography is poised on what TS Eliot called “the still point of the turning world”: its potency emerges from stillness, just as its songs emerge from silence.

This maxim is, however, much more powerfully illustrated by Barrie Kosky’s brilliant adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, as a monologue performed by Martin Niedermair. Here silence and darkness are invitations into Poe’s uniquely psychological horror.

Where Wilson asks us to admire – and we do – Kosky demands something more intimate, more difficult and, dare I say, more profoundly theatrical. This is theatre that plays in the minds of the audience as much as it does on stage, that invites us to come on a voyage into our own subconscious. In a way that strikes me as particularly Jewish, it is theatre that appeals to the ear rather than the eye, to the intimacy of hearing rather than to the dissociation of sight.

But this isn’t to say that the show doesn’t also have its visual pleasures. Anna Tregloan’s minimal set, adapted from Michael Zerz's design for the original production at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, is remarkably beautiful. The single stage element, aside from the sumptuous red curtain that greets us as we enter, is a vertiginous wooden staircase that reaches up into the dizzy heights of the workshop.

The performance takes place entirely on the staircase, and here the lighting – an elegantly effective design adapted by Paul Jackson from Zerz's lighting – is crucial. For most of the show, the majority of the stage is in shadow. At times, the only illumination is on Niedermair’s face.

Poe’s story, the confession of a murderer betrayed by his guilty conscience, is performed almost in its entirety, but Kosky’s fidelity to Poe goes deeper than mere attention to his words. He creates an entire psychological environment that enacts the true horror of Poe’s tormented imagination.

The show begins and ends with a long interval of total darkness (a rare thing in a theatre) which acts as a liminal state, a crossing of a threshold into a different imaginative world. The text is interleaved with songs by Henry Purcell and Hugo Wolf, the accompaniment played live by Kosky himself, and the contrast between the yearning expressed in this sheerly beautiful music and the bleak story creates an unsettling poignancy.


Martin Niedermair gives an exemplary display of an actor’s physical and emotional expressiveness: here utterance is a struggle articulated by his entire body. He gives each word – and each silence between each word – a darkly gleaming emphasis that is completely compelling. And there is a totally unforgettable moment - the emotional climax of the show - when I swear he becomes the physical embodiment of a painting by Francis Bacon.

As Poe’s nameless hero, he achieves a poise between vanity and self-disgust that is sometimes genuinely comic. But what he communicates with disturbing accuracy is the dismaying self-delusion of madness.

The whole production features a restraint, even a sense of discretion, that intensifies its stark psychological realism. This is Poe naked, stripped of the rags of Gothic melodrama, and it is a terrifying vision.

Pictures: Top, Robert Wilson's The Temptation of St Anthony; bottom, Martin Niedermair in The Tell-Tale Heart.

A shorter version of this review appears in today's Australian.

Festival Diary #5

As we enter the third week of the Melbourne Festival, TN finds herself a little alarmed by how easily she fades these days. I had to pass on Lucy Guerin's Structure and Sadness and Kota Yamazaki's dance company Fluid hug-hug's Rise:Rose out of sheer exhaustion. Dammit. Mind you, I have never been much good at wholesale cultural consumption: there's always the danger of the experience becoming undifferentiated artistic sludge, like mixing too many colours on a palette. So, with the idea of stringing individual jewels along the MIAF narrative, I will stop regretting what I haven't seen, and get on with what I have...

I La Galigo, from the Sureq Galigo, adapted by Rhoda Grauer, directed by Robert Wilson. Music by Rahaya Supanggah, co-set designer Christophe Martin, lighting by AJ Weissbard, dance master Andi Ummu Tunru. State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre

It's impossible to underestimate the influence of Asia on modern Western theatre. Ever since Antonin Artaud reviewed a Balinese theatre troupe at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, its theatre has been a major stimulus for the avant garde. Artaud was inspired by the Balinese dancers, who for him articulated the possibility of a theatrical language free of the chains of literature, and his rewritten review later became one of the key essays in his hugely influential book, Theatre and Its Double. A little later, in 1935, Bertolt Brecht saw the Peking Opera in Moscow, and his experience of "strangeness" profoundly underlaid his Epic Theatre and its theory of verfremdungseffekt, most often translated as the "alienation effect".

In 1978, Edward Said published his ground breaking (and much misrepresented) work about the political implications of Western portrayals of the East, Orientalism. By the time Peter Brook undertook his extraordinary nine-hour adaptation of the Indian epic poem, The Mahabharata, in 1985, the issue of cultural appropriation had entered the intellectual mix. Intercultural artists like Brook (and Ariane Mnouchkine, for her epic production of Les Atrides) were accused of a kind of neo-colonial banditry, "raiders across a frontier", according to one critic, who brought back "strange clothes as their loot".



In assuming that cultural influence only runs one way, this rather ignores Said's argument about the mutuality of cultural influence in colonised societies. Even more problematically, it can encourage a museum-mindset around minority cultures, preserving them in a kind of motionless prehistory that is hermetically sealed from the present. Some of the complexities around this question can be seen from the arguments sparked by Wesley Enoch's appropriation of Medea in his production of Black Medea: as Enoch himself said, "I've been amazed how many 'purists' have come out of the closet saying that this kind of appropriation is 'not allowed'."

Given this history, it's easy to see why Robert Wilson - one of the major innovative directors of our time - was so attracted by the Sureq Galigo, an epic poem from the Bugis people in South Sulwesi in Indonesia, and also why he has been so careful in his approach, consulting extensively with the culture to whom it belongs. The original epic runs to something like 6000 pages and exists in innumerable versions, making it one of the longest literary works in the world. In realising this text on stage, Wilson has pulled off a considerable aesthetic coup: he has created a work of breathtakingly sensual splendour that neither compromises his practice nor traduces the Asian traditions on which he is drawing.

Anyone who saw the National Theatre of Cambodia's production of the traditional Cambodian epic Weyreap's Battle at MIAF last year will be familiar with the theatrical traditions at work here: the narrative is chanted or sung, while dancers, masked and unmasked, enact the story with stylised, even heiratic movement. It's theatre that combines elements of the sacred and profane, beginning with a blessing and including elements of vulgar comedy.

Librettist Rhoda Grauer has adapted what are generally understood to be the most significant characters and events of this creation myth. The Middle World - the realm in which we live - is created and populated when the gods of the Upper and Under Worlds, in an irresistably Blakean observation, realise that they are not gods if there is no one to worship them. Patotoqe, boss god of the Upper World, sends down his son Batara Guru, and Guru ri Selleq, god of the Under World, sends up his daughter We Nyiliq. The two marry and, in a festival of fertility, everyone gives birth except the Queen. That's because her twin son and daughter have decided they like the womb and don't want to be born.

Bissu priests are brought in to help the Queen, and after a blood sacrifice in which the people battle, she gives birth to Golden Twins. Sawerigading, the warrior king, is born like Athene in full armour, while We Tenriebeng, his sister, destined to the priesthood, is born in Bissu regalia. After this difficult birth, an oracle tells the parents that their children must never meet, as they are destined to fall in love, and incest would destroy the kingdom. The princess is hidden in the palace, while Sawerigading is sent out to explore the world with his clownish cousins.

Of course, the twins meet and fall in love: but despite Sawerigading's bloody tantrums, which involve killing most of the population, they are not allowed to marry. Trying to forget We Tenriebeng, he marries We Cudaiq, a proud and stubborn princess in Cina, and begets I La Galigo. Eventually Sawerigading returns to his home kingdom and meets his sister again, at which point the gods announce the purging of the Middle World. The gods return to their worlds, Sawerigading's son and We Tenriebeng's daughter are sent down to the Middle World to be its new rulers, and the gates between the realms are closed forever, leaving the young royal couple alone on the godless earth.

When we enter the theatre, we see the blank stage, obscured with a scrim that is decorated with the original script of the epic. The show begins with the entrance of the orchestra, who settle themselves stage right, and a figure dressed gorgeously in yellow silk, Puang Matoa Saidi, who sits cross legged on a small hanamichi at the front. Puang Matoa Saidi is the main chanter and also a Bissu priest: he sits motionless through the entire show, slowly turning the pages of a book that lies in front of him on a wooden rest. Then the scrim rises and we witness the emptying of the Middle World: a procession of people carrying a miscellany of objects - pots, musical instruments, spears, baskets - cross the stage from right to left, silhouetted against the blank screen that is the major feature of the stage, and which now is a deep blue brightening to sunrise. The slow, heiratic movement introduces the pace of this production, which induces a deep, contemplative attention.

The show itself lasts for three hours, but it seems somehow appropriate that I lost all sense of time while I was watching it. Wilson orchestrates the rhythm beautifully: long ritualised scenes, such as the first meeting of the royal couple, when We Nyiliq Timoq rises in royal splendour from the sea, are contrasted with the burping-and-scratching vulgarity of Sawerigading's disreputable cousins or the comically beautiful entrance of the animals - masked monkeys and frogs, deer with antler and an unlikely-looking giraffe, each with its own musical signature. Wilson's cast of more than 50 Indonesian performers enacts the stylised dances and mimes with a precise and compelling expressiveness. This is the kind of performance that flowers from a core of stillness and contemplation, making each gesture and each change of rhythm charged and meaningful.

The costumes are, like the set design, elegant contemporary adaptations of traditional Asian designs. Perhaps what is most striking in the production is the colour: it is at once lush and spare, employing a palette of clear, luminous colours, like those used in dyeing silk. It didn't surprise me afterwards when I read that the costume designer Joachim Herzog adhered strictly to traditional Indonesian notions of colour use and heraldic symbology in his designs (yellow for royal, for example), as the colours in both the lighting and costumes have a deep coherency, which works even for those who do not understand the codes.

Likewise, Rahayu Sapanggah's original music, which draws on traditions from all over Indonesia and beyond, sounds at once deeply ancient and modern, and features some thrilling drumming as well as songs of heart-stopping poignancy. One of the instruments sounds exactly like a cello, but in fact no Western instruments were used.

Wilson escapes the trap of making a patronisingly anthropological treatment of a fascinating but obscure text: this is utterly contemporary theatre that dynamically reworks this ancient epic, bringing it freshly alive. All the various elements are seamlessly woven together to create a work of profound elegance that, like the myth it enacts, is at once lucid and mysterious. It epitomises the kind of intercultural exchange that Said himself would have welcomed; if all meetings of East and West were this fruitful, the world would be a different place.