John Linklater is wooed by the brutal intimacy of Kenny Ireland's
Oedipus Tyrannos in which a disorientated audience acts out a crucial
part
NOT even a first full season completed and artistic director Kenny
Ireland has a Royal Lyceum audience up on its feet. He has made a grand
promenade of Oedipus Tyrannos by flooring over the stalls area and
creating a skateboard of a playing space, flattening over the main
auditorium and rising with the natural rake of the stage up to the
portico of the Theban Palace. It is surely a brave gambit for a
repertoire theatre to go for bums on seats by taking away the seats.
To describe it as a promenade is actually inaccurate if this implies
mobility. The audience presses in, seeks individual vantage points,
huddles and then stays put. In the darkness before the action begins
there is a mildly panicked claustrophobia mingling with expectancy, and
a loss of balance as though we have lost our bearings. The sense of
impending event is pungent with the strong waft of burning incense, and
with it comes a mixture of apprehension, physical involvement, and
tension.
This experience of anticipation and disorientation is important to
stress, because it represents not only one of the major theatrical
achievements of Ireland's production but it signifies a profound change
in his relationship with a repertoire theatre audience. Until now
Ireland has offered a kind of security in a programme of summer farces
followed by classics, curriculum-friendly adaptations, Neil Simon and
Gaslight, and the excitement he has generated has been through the
introduction of stage stars as actors, directors and associate artists.
Stars make their own very special relationship with an audience, but
suddenly in this production Ireland has his actors jostling through the
crowd to make entrances. It creates a brutal intimacy.
Ireland has always stated that his approach with the Lyceum would be
about seduction. Big men like himself can display an unsuspected
gentleness in the wooing game, whispering sweet nothings, but we always
knew that Ireland was schooled as a wrestler, and there had to be that
moment when he would throw his weight. This is that moment.
The forced manoeuvre in Oedipus Tyrannos is to make the audience act
out a crucial part of the drama. ''Children of Thebes, why are you
standing here?'' is Tom Mannion's first line as Oedipus. Thebes is
currently twinning with both Edinburgh and Glasgow, but this is the
municipal version, the highly public version. It is probably safe to
speculate that a Lyceum audience does not have wide experience of being
part of the mob, and if Oedipus was around today he would give a
television broadcast to the nation before de-briefing Creon in private,
so the promenade also changes our relationship with the tragedy that
unfolds. We are part of it. We are pressing our noses up against it.
There is a steep ramp upon which several of the scenes are played, and
at the opposite end there is a pedestal just below the level of the
circle. Between them are little islands of rostra which actors scale to
make themselves heard above the crowd. The rest is a great sea of
audience through which parts of the action break, and there is some
scurrying to part waves for the self-mutilated Oedipus as the tragedy
reaches its climax.
In such a swell a cast of five might drown, or might seem to multiply,
and on Friday night's opening there were moments of both. But, whether
it likes it or not, the audience is physically involved in the
spectacle, and in a continuous 90-minute piece this inevitably makes
demands. Three Thebans near me were overcome by faintness. There is
reserved seating in the circle, but even from here the audience
perspective is radically altered, no longer a lofty gaze but a side view
on to an arena of disaster.
Jane Bertish is a frenetic Jocasta and even she doubles to join
Janette Foggo (Priestess), Michael Mackenzie (Creon) and Benny Young
(Teiresias) in the chorus. This has less of the ritualistic ensemble
available within the resources of the Royal Shakespeare Company when
Timberlake Wertenbaker's translation was first used, and the pitch of
Ireland's production is much more histrionic than the natural tone of
that text might suggest as appropriate, though itself not as colloquial
and interrogational as the very latest adaptation by Clare Venables for
the Citz studio production. Other than that, comparisons are of no
value. The objectives pursued by Ireland and Venables are so completely
different that we might as well be watching entirely different plays.
This is a useful reminder. Theatre is about what is experienced, and
little to do with literary interpretation. The most positive aspect of
Ireland's promenade is that he forcibly dispossesses those (and there
are many) who approach Greek tragedy with a checklist of required
emotional engagements. The sheer physicality of this Oedipus forces us
to leave all our baggage of preconceptions at the door. In a sense it
offers an interesting paradox. We think we are entering the Royal Lyceum
theatre, but we are not. Francis Gallop's design implies an outside
location, with rocks and traces of red soil. It could be argued that the
intentions of the production would be better served by an open air
performance, but this would be to miss the point about what Ireland is
trying to do in literally changing the very plastic reality of a theatre
building, and our physical relationship with it.
In good theatre this should happen every time, but repertoires build
up their layers of comfort blankets, habituality, complacency, and
emotional cushioning. Sometimes it is necessary to strip the place to
begin again. That is something for which I am prepared to stand up.
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