Neandellus: Theatre: Melbourne

Someone Who’ll Watch over Me by Frank McGuinness
West East Theatre @ Fortyfivedownstairs
Wed. 29 Apr. to Sun. 17 May

It had been something of a difficult week for our young hero of the spigot, Neandellus. What with one care and another lashed upon my conscience, I could fairly claim to have sailed rather low to the water last week. I wanted relief, buoyancy, fancy. And so, dreamward take us, Fortyfivedownstairs. Therein discover Someone Who’ll Watch over Me, directed by David Myles, starring Trent Baker and Richard Stables, the co-founders of West East Theatre. The play also stars Ezra Bix, with lights by Lucas Silva-Myles and some low-key original music by Gemma Turvey.

After the show, talking with Cauta, who, like me, was attending singularis, I supplied, on demand, a description of the kind of a show I had been anticipating. “I came here wanting,” I said, “a thing of light beauty, where imagination and vigour find agreement in steepling flight and robust directorial intention meets, in delightful and disturbing harmony, a wild design and exhilarated performances.” [...]

“Poor thing! You must be disappointed!” she exclaimed.

“Ah, well. Not quite disappointed.” We both laughed. My hopes, described in this extravagant fashion—I could, I suppose, have simply said lively theatre—and placed in immediate contrast with the performance we had just witnessed produced an effect of amusing anticlimax.

The nature of what we had just witnessed I will shortly come to, but first, Cauta asked, “What on earth made you think that a play based on the real-life kidnapping of foreigners in Beirut during the late 1980s could provide a launching pad for that kind of theatre? You must have got your dates confused, perhaps come to the wrong play?”

“It was,” I said, “the promise of transcendence that brought me here. Despite what we saw tonight, I see nothing in the basic rig of this script that would disqualify it from launching such flights. It has in it the promise of extravagance. Here,” I brandished a pretty little postcard, the show’s promotional swatch, “just listen to this: the characters resort to elaborate flights of fancy and games of the imagination. Well, it is all very well to say as much, and I do not believe that it would be impossible with this script, but flight here, in tonight’s performance, was shortly tethered.”

“And you would have preferred it run free.”

“There is an old metaphor about creative fancy—I believe the work Thomas Hobbes or such like—wherein the imagination is said to be a faculty wild and lawless, an high-ranging spaniel, which must have clogs tied to it (clogs in this case being a kind of thick-walled work boot), lest it outrun sober judgement, its proper master. But clogs are such a cruel weight for small dogs to haul—they are utilitarian, roughly worked: in a word, crude. Better to affix a buskin boot or twilly sock.”

“So, in your estimation,” said Cauta, concerned I not allow my own young spaniel roam too far, “the production was ponderous; the vigour, suppressed; and the handling, clumsy; the thing as a whole, roughly worked.”

“Yes, that is about it. The directorial energy was lethargic. As I see it, the real potential in this script is the inner world, or worlds, opened by confinement. Imagination as a survival instinct. The fantasy needs to be ripped open. Forget limping about the cell. Forget the chains. Forget the nationalistic niggling.

“Here, though, the imaginative flights were rarely sustained. The characters, by their manner and attitude, appeared too self-conscious. Conscious, that is, of being observed by the other characters. They were therefore too ready to drop from the fantasy world, too ready to stumble clumsily back into their nagging and lamenting, an attitude which is at the heart of this performance:

Michael: ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run run. Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run run.’ It’s actually quite fun if one of us pretends to be the rabbit. Shall I be the rabbit and you sing?
Edward: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, ru—what are you doing?
Michael: I’m pretending to be a rabbit.
Edward: That looks nothing remotely like a rabbit.
Michael: You could do better?

The most emphatic scene, where a character really steps out of this awkward diffidence, was in the first act:

Adam: I want a pair of jockey shorts. I want to kill an Arab. Just one. Throw his body down before his mother and his father and his wife and kids and say, I did it. Me. The American. Now you can blame me. Now you justify what you do to me: ‘You have deserved this. Ooo.’ I want to see their faces filled with hate. True hate. I want that within my power.

Then he quotes from the Koran. It was quite good.

“But this, and what follows it immediately, emphatic as it was, is not any kind of fanciful escape. And that is the general tenor of the piece: there is no escape; you must face up. On stage they are backed into a corner. The ceiling is high and the room is wide; they are not enclosed; there is room to fly. But they don’t. Every now and then, in their limping fashion, they threaten to explore the empty space; but they do not; they are always backed back into the corner of their cell. There is, I think, an issue about the organisation of space in this piece. I notice there is no designer in the credits. What happened? Also, and bear with me here, from the little I know of Beirut’s domestic architecture, the floor in a basement would be stone-pavings, dirt, or, most likely, a concrete slab. It probably wouldn’t be floorboards. There is not much wood used in Lebanese architecture. This might seem counter-intuitive, what with a cedar tree being the country’s national emblem, but, I think, the terrain that now supports most of the cedar forest is mountainous and inaccessible, the more easily harvested forests being long ago depleted—”

“You’re saying they can’t get the wood.”

“You may think that this is all pedantry, but, in this play the three characters have to drag around those damn chains which tether them to the wall the whole time. So every single move—and they move around a lot, sometimes quite athletically—brings forth the hollow sound of chains on wooden floorboards. Sometimes so loud that it’s a struggle to hear the lines. We are therefore every instant reminded that all this goes on upon a stage.”

“My objection is otherwise to yours,” admitted the patient Cauta. “I did not come here tonight expecting your myriad worlds. I came wanting rigour, not vigour. I don’t object to West East Theatre making the imaginative elements—the flying car and the dream pub and the rabbits and Wimbledon and all the other colourful incidents—secondary to the superficial interactions between the three captives, the quibbling and bickering, if these latter are made a device by which the characters’ deeper transformations are analysed. I think the fantasy, if viewed as what you call a flight, in fact gets in the way of such an analysis. If the characters were allowed to slip too easily and completely from captivity into fantasy, then they could also slip too easily from the prison of their insecurities and fears. That would leave them no context for development. Wherein this story is one of incident rather than event—that is, wherein the fable or plot is not developed beyond the original scenario, an English man, an Irish man and an American are locked in a basement—and wherein each successive scene is essentially an aspect of the original, undeveloped scenario, the impetus of the play must rely on character development. Without this character development you reduce the production to an unsatisfactory chain of incident.”

I let the poor clench pass.

“At least, that’s what I think it would be like,” continued Cauta,“if this production had been as fanciful as you seem to have wished it. What I say is, there must be more. There must be rigour. It is a tricky thing to show the development of a wretched human into an angelic guardian, into someone who’ll watch over his or her companions, take responsibility for their sanity while dealing with the stress of confinement and the stress of enforced companionship.”

“And yet, your expectations also were not met.” We had at least this one note of disappointment in common, though the scales we played were different.

“The clogs that drag this show down,” she explained, “are not the direction and production values of the company (led by Baker and Stables). I think the ambitions of this team are admirable. I think they aim at more intense and more realised characters. And I think their methods are subtle. But I wonder at the choice of script.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was unconvinced as to the relevance of a piece such as this just now, politically, that is. It has that seeming relevance—exotically conjured Middle Eastern location, lots of talk of Arabs, lots of hints at executing hostages. But there is an unwieldy politico-historical tone to it which is not quite contemporary and struck me as redundant. Take that scene where the American, Adam, articulates his identity qua a hostage:

Adam: What is an American?
Edward: Somebody born in America.
Adam: An American is, I repeat, a valuable asset, a prized possession. Prized, yes. Valuable. But not loved. There is a price permanently placed on the Americans’ head and in his head the American believes in the value of the price that is placed upon him because his is a market economy and in that economy everything has a price. But, ah, that same market decrees the price may differ in day-to-day dealings. So the valuable asset, the prized possession, this American, has no control over his price. You know, whoever has no control is fucked. I am American. I am Arab. I am fucked. We have that much in common.

This attitude toward global perceptions and this market-value rhetoric sound, now, to me, like once-popular ideas struggling to find fresh relevance. It sounds last century.”

“I think the problem is more basic than that.” Cauta wasn’t thinking politically. “The characters are left somewhat half-made by McGuinness. They rely heavily upon the stereotypes they knowingly call to mind. There isn’t much in them that rises above that. So, while it is admirable for a company to try and flesh them out, perhaps there talents could have been better deployed elsewhere.”

’Twas then that Fortyfivedownstairs’ own Lophotes, appearing from behind a curtain, interupted our conversation to teach us due humility: “Well, you know my suggestion, if you didn’t love it? Coz, like, I never see the show on Fridays, especially not in the first week. My suggestion is you come back Sunday. See it again. Like, it’ll probably be completely different, you know? Bring your friends. Take a postcard. Here’s what I do: I see the show on Thursday or Sunday, usually in the second week. Tuesday and Wednesday the cast experiment. Or, you know, they’re unsettled. On Thursday, they’re in the zone. On Friday and Saturday, the cast are tired or, you know, tense. But on Sunday they’re relaxed, I’m relaxed and the rest of the audience is relaxed. So, Thursday and Sunday. But, you know, that’s only me. That’s my rough system.”