"The world premiere of a specially commissioned new poem, read by the poet herself. In Greek mythology, the Dawn fell in love with Tithonus and asked Zeus to make him immortal, but she forgot to ask that he should not grow old. Unable to die, he grew older and older, until at last Dawn locked him in a room where, several thousand years later, he still sits babbling to himself. This is an account of his babbling, written in real time, through a series of dawns from spring to midsummer 2014. It is a poem about survival. The performance begins in darkness and lasts 46 minutes (the length of dawn in midsummer)."
So - some promise, perhaps. What we got was one of the more curious moments of theatre I have seen for a while. The first 5 minutes were conducted in total darkness. A lone voice in the darkness. The poem owes a lot to the beat poets, and was clearly partly improvised, with lots of repetition about a theme.
The idea of coming out of darkness was potentially effective, except I nodded off after a few minutes - it had been a long day. So did a number of audience neighbours. I missed the transition to half light - the start of dawn - but am reliably informed that it was clunky and not particularly effective. Under the gradually brightening lights, the poet persisted on her chosen course, interrupted at times by improvised music from a bowed dulcimer-like instrument, fitted with various electronic delays and loops. It was as soporific as the verse.
After 46 minutes of this, it just stopped. No sense of climax, or arrival. No sense of "performance" either. A production desperately in need of some theatrical direction. The most telling thing, for me, was that, despite a few startling images captured in the moment from the incessant word stream at the time, a few minutes late, I couldn't recall a thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment