[seen 16/04/16 at MITEM III, Nemzeti Színház, Budapest]
[The structure of this review is as follows:
i programme notes
ii my half of a messenger conversation last night
iii conclusions, if any.]
i) The drama The Raven is based on a “fiaba” – a theater tale with a tragic-comic story – of the same name [Il Corvo], written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi, the famous Italian dramatist, a contemporary and rival of Goldoni. The director, Nickolay Roshchin, has produced dramas by Gozzi before. In 2001, he directed The Stag King. The production was praised as one of the most striking interpretations of a work by Gozzi ever to have been performed in Russia. It won the Smoktunovsky Prize and the Award of the Moscow Critics Association.
This production of The Raven is free of superficial “Italian” clichés and the playful, carnival, improvisatory style of the commedia dell’arte. Instead, it reveals the deeper interpretive layers of the play, bringing its dramatic quality to the surface. Like Gozzi’s other dramas, The Raven ushers the audience into a world that is rich with complex and fantastic events and unusual passions. The story presents a cavalcade of love, devotion, friendship and magic that is sometimes mirthful and amusing and sometimes oppressive, a procession that is seasoned with scenes involving characters hidden behind masks, strange spectacles, and expressive movements and gestures.
ii) So, plot:
There’s this bloke...
(Oh, this might make it quicker, Wikipedia has the plot...)
Ok, that is *incredibly coherent* compared to what happened on stage... Especially if you don't speak Russian.
So, there's a bloke on a boat. which has a skeleton crucified on the mast, and skulls on spikes all over it...
All the set is made of metal frames like the photo at the top...
And all the cast (male and female) are wearing suits and papier mache half-masks.
They're on this ship...
And then the bloke gives an animated comic-book power-point lecture which possibly ties in to the fairy tale above...
Except that it’s all wildly unclear (to non-Russian-speakers, with Hungarian simultaneous translation)...
Then he goes and visits what appears to be a man he’s got tied up in his cellar or something...
(Maybe that’s his brother?)
((Oh, before all this there's a long introductory business with a translator speaking Italian with a voiceover in Russian...))
So then he meets this guy, who is with a woman in a burqa?
Maybe...
And the bloke invites him to kill some animals in metal boxes!
But as an assassination attempt...
*Large* metal boxes. Not real animals...
He emerges from the first box with a comically giant chicken's foot, and then the second box opens to reveal a horse carcass...
A ridiculous one.
It’s all basically comic...
If a bit on the morbid side.
Oh, way before this he’s executed some woman.
And it seems like this woman is maybe haunting him and trying to get him killed?
Maybe?
So, he’s killed the animals...
and then that bit stops...
And then the woman in the burqa turns out to be the man who was the band leader who was in the pre-show intro bit...
(Oh, yes, sorry, there’s a live brass band and drum kit, and they had a conductor who was also in the intro...)
IT DOESN'T EVEN SLIGHTLY HANG TOGETHER AS A STORY.
WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER TELL THIS STORY?
AND, I’m only about a quarter of the way in...
But... the rest of it can be summed up with: “More of the same.”
More of the bloke killing women...
And more of everyone else killing the bloke.
The bloke gets killed approximately eight times...
(Bizarrely, *EVERYTHING* that happens in Cleansed, happens to him...
Needles, limbs chopped off, tongue pulled out...
PLUS SOME MORE THINGS THAT SARAH KANE CLEARLY THOUGHT WOULD HAVE BEEN *TAKING IT A BIT FAR...*
Like, when he's gassed...
And when he’s immersed in concrete...
Or when a giant mechanical bird appears to vomit acid on him...
FOR EXAMPLE
Oddly, it did actually drag a bit in places...
And I have literally no idea what it says about the world.
When I was watching, I did think this is probably the result of what the world feels like when Putin’s in charge.
All the times he died did seem kind of fair enough, since he’d kept on killing all these women...
And then it keeps turning out he’s not even the worst bloke in the world of the play.
It does feel like we’re apparently meant to feel for his situation.
This was maybe stretching things a bit.
I mean, he is, at root, just a psychotic misogynist, maybe?
Ophelias zimmer eat your heart out...
The way he kept on being revealed to be a really minor offender, though, compared to these ever worsening figures he encounters did mean I spent a lot of time thinking about Assad and then ISIS, and how there’s this media cycle of always discovering that there’s “something worse”
But, yes.
Technically, it’s incredibly accomplished.
Brilliant actors.
The design is really beautifully realised.
And the lighting design was noticeably spot-on...
I mean, it had a lot of moving lights, and they were all bang on target throughout, which always feels impressive given that they’d only had a day to plot it in this theatre/auditorium...
(and something else had to get out first...)
I reckon I might just cut and paste that and call it my review...
iii) So, yes. A breathless account of quite the maddest thing I’ve seen a long while. I imagine it’s a good deal less mad when you know what’s going on, but then, I think seeing just the action without the justifications for it does make it easier to condemn the treatment that women receive in the play.
It’s the sort of show that I think will do blindingly well wherever it’s played. It reminded me of a cross between AKHE and Derevo, but *as actual theatre*. It feels, somehow, more like “a theatre ensemble” than “a company”. Dunno if that’s right or not. Maybe like a(n even more) off-the-wall version of Krymov’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It). But no little dog in this one, sadly...
I’d love to say this was “just knockabout fun”, and be able to leave it there, but it did feel like there more than that there, but *more* that I wasn’t unable to unlock. Still, very glad I saw. Names worth remembering.
(It’s really worth going to the MITEM site and looking at the rest of the production photos, it really is a lovely-looking show...)
[The structure of this review is as follows:
i programme notes
ii my half of a messenger conversation last night
iii conclusions, if any.]
i) The drama The Raven is based on a “fiaba” – a theater tale with a tragic-comic story – of the same name [Il Corvo], written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi, the famous Italian dramatist, a contemporary and rival of Goldoni. The director, Nickolay Roshchin, has produced dramas by Gozzi before. In 2001, he directed The Stag King. The production was praised as one of the most striking interpretations of a work by Gozzi ever to have been performed in Russia. It won the Smoktunovsky Prize and the Award of the Moscow Critics Association.
This production of The Raven is free of superficial “Italian” clichés and the playful, carnival, improvisatory style of the commedia dell’arte. Instead, it reveals the deeper interpretive layers of the play, bringing its dramatic quality to the surface. Like Gozzi’s other dramas, The Raven ushers the audience into a world that is rich with complex and fantastic events and unusual passions. The story presents a cavalcade of love, devotion, friendship and magic that is sometimes mirthful and amusing and sometimes oppressive, a procession that is seasoned with scenes involving characters hidden behind masks, strange spectacles, and expressive movements and gestures.
ii) So, plot:
There’s this bloke...
(Oh, this might make it quicker, Wikipedia has the plot...)
Ok, that is *incredibly coherent* compared to what happened on stage... Especially if you don't speak Russian.
All the set is made of metal frames like the photo at the top...
And all the cast (male and female) are wearing suits and papier mache half-masks.
They're on this ship...
And then the bloke gives an animated comic-book power-point lecture which possibly ties in to the fairy tale above...
Except that it’s all wildly unclear (to non-Russian-speakers, with Hungarian simultaneous translation)...
Then he goes and visits what appears to be a man he’s got tied up in his cellar or something...
(Maybe that’s his brother?)
((Oh, before all this there's a long introductory business with a translator speaking Italian with a voiceover in Russian...))
So then he meets this guy, who is with a woman in a burqa?
Maybe...
And the bloke invites him to kill some animals in metal boxes!
But as an assassination attempt...
*Large* metal boxes. Not real animals...
He emerges from the first box with a comically giant chicken's foot, and then the second box opens to reveal a horse carcass...
A ridiculous one.
It’s all basically comic...
If a bit on the morbid side.
And it seems like this woman is maybe haunting him and trying to get him killed?
So, he’s killed the animals...
and then that bit stops...
And then the woman in the burqa turns out to be the man who was the band leader who was in the pre-show intro bit...
(Oh, yes, sorry, there’s a live brass band and drum kit, and they had a conductor who was also in the intro...)
IT DOESN'T EVEN SLIGHTLY HANG TOGETHER AS A STORY.
WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER TELL THIS STORY?
AND, I’m only about a quarter of the way in...
More of the bloke killing women...
And more of everyone else killing the bloke.
The bloke gets killed approximately eight times...
(Bizarrely, *EVERYTHING* that happens in Cleansed, happens to him...
Needles, limbs chopped off, tongue pulled out...
PLUS SOME MORE THINGS THAT SARAH KANE CLEARLY THOUGHT WOULD HAVE BEEN *TAKING IT A BIT FAR...*
FOR EXAMPLE
Oddly, it did actually drag a bit in places...
When I was watching, I did think this is probably the result of what the world feels like when Putin’s in charge.
All the times he died did seem kind of fair enough, since he’d kept on killing all these women...
And then it keeps turning out he’s not even the worst bloke in the world of the play.
It does feel like we’re apparently meant to feel for his situation.
This was maybe stretching things a bit.
I mean, he is, at root, just a psychotic misogynist, maybe?
Ophelias zimmer eat your heart out...
The way he kept on being revealed to be a really minor offender, though, compared to these ever worsening figures he encounters did mean I spent a lot of time thinking about Assad and then ISIS, and how there’s this media cycle of always discovering that there’s “something worse”
But, yes.
Technically, it’s incredibly accomplished.
Brilliant actors.
The design is really beautifully realised.
And the lighting design was noticeably spot-on...
I mean, it had a lot of moving lights, and they were all bang on target throughout, which always feels impressive given that they’d only had a day to plot it in this theatre/auditorium...
(and something else had to get out first...)
I reckon I might just cut and paste that and call it my review...
iii) So, yes. A breathless account of quite the maddest thing I’ve seen a long while. I imagine it’s a good deal less mad when you know what’s going on, but then, I think seeing just the action without the justifications for it does make it easier to condemn the treatment that women receive in the play.
It’s the sort of show that I think will do blindingly well wherever it’s played. It reminded me of a cross between AKHE and Derevo, but *as actual theatre*. It feels, somehow, more like “a theatre ensemble” than “a company”. Dunno if that’s right or not. Maybe like a(n even more) off-the-wall version of Krymov’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It). But no little dog in this one, sadly...
I’d love to say this was “just knockabout fun”, and be able to leave it there, but it did feel like there more than that there, but *more* that I wasn’t unable to unlock. Still, very glad I saw. Names worth remembering.
(It’s really worth going to the MITEM site and looking at the rest of the production photos, it really is a lovely-looking show...)
No comments:
Post a Comment