Theater: The Cove [weeks one and two]

The Cove [weeks one and two], four short works by Daniel Keene
If Theatre @ The Dog Theatre
Wed. 22 Jul. to Sun. 16 Aug.

As I mentioned in the previous post, last Friday I was pleased to attend the second week of If Theatre’s production of The Cove, comprising eight short works by Daniel Keene, directed by Matt Scholten, featuring Majid Shokor, Harli Ammes, Bruce Myles, Jan Friedl, Matthew Molony and Danielle Carter, with design by Lisa Mibus (lighting), Kat Chan (set) and Katherine Branch (costume), Lok Tan and Geoff Chan providing a comprehensive soundtrack.

See! I (Neandellus) and my chance companion for the night (Semiota) in doughty post-show conversation; Matt Scholten, helpful Lar of Dog Theatre, also present (see previous post), figured in this transcript as a disembodied presence, answering in the abstract, or not, our critique.

The last play of the second week was To Whom It May Concern, the most affective of all the performances in weeks one and two, which, being foremost in our memory, shone a particularly demissive light upon our conversation:

Daniel: [..] It’s hard for me, too … in a different way.

Ach! And hard for us, too, Daniel. [...] As we filed out of the theatre into the Dancing Dog Café proper, Semiota put it thus:

“Ugh. He [Keene] gets inside my head. I thought I was going to have a panic attack. All that poverty. All that helplessness.”

I made some vague gesture of agreement, looking about for somewhere to sit. I needed to sit. Semiota continued:

“The poverty, the loneliness, the desperation. The brutal social realism: it’s just one great nexus of all my fears. I think such theatre is meant for people who lead carefree lives. For contrast.”

“To Whom is definitely confronting,” I said, “but the Arguments put forth in all four plays so far are sharp: exile, incapacitating loneliness, separation, infanticide, dementia, terminal cancer, abandonment, &c.”

“And they seem to me to be linked by some nightmarish logic,” said Semiota from the chair opposite, leaning forward in a semi-foetal curl. “It’s the poverty and the fear. The fear is mine. My fear of the helplessness and misery that poverty brings.”

Ammes: I want them to know that I’ve arrived safely, that I’m okay.
Shokor: Are you okay?
Ammes: No. I’m miserable.
Shokor: That’s to be expected.
Ammes: I know.

—Café Table

Sylvie: Have something. A sandwich.
Agnes: It’s too expensive here.
Sylvie: It isn’t really.
Agnes: It’s too expensive for people as poor as us. [Pause] We’re poor aren’t we?

—Somewhere in the Middle of the Night

“I think perhaps this poverty is the Device by which the Action in all four plays is Disposed,” I said, following my usual script.

“It is poverty which rationalises the motives of the characters,” agreed Semiota, “if that’s what you mean. And that explains the action … which, as I say, makes me utterly miserable.”

Matt Scholten: Why did you come, then? You have to think about that.

“But the characters are not unworthy of these dire plots,” I said. “They are made of a very thorough substance indeed. They carry theatrical conceits like ‘motive’ very lightly. As from Two Shanks:

So I was rather needy in one way or another. I have always tried to be independent and not sponge off people.

At this recollection, I noticed that the feeling of nausea, for me, had passed. I was fine. I was refreshed, even. All week I’d been a rotten sook. But no more; I’d been cured. Not so for Semiota, however; she fairly groaned, “Oh, the courage of the actors—having to live with these characters!”

Matt Scholten: Basically, the six actors that I wanted for these roles, I got. And it was great to have some really experienced actors on hand. And they were really excited by the project, too. I think for older actors, these roles are a gift. In the case of Cafe Table, that role was written for Majid Shokor. So to have him …

“I think I’d rather not pursue any kind of governing device that may or may not be common across all four plays,” I said, warming now to the analysis. “It’s true that the whole time I was watching I was looking for one. It is because of the obvious consistency of the design elements: the set, costumes, the wonderfully textured lighting, the space itself, the sound and the music, especially the music—”

Matt Scholten: It’s actually inspired by Satie. Each play has a separate theme.

“—which to me sounded like a kind of dinner music with polite dissonance. I thought, instinctively, that there must be a formal thread. After the first week I thought I’d found it in the project’s name, the idea of these characters finding a sheltered haven in which to sing their terribly pure songs or loss and hope. But this week—the dementia, the cancer—I have given this line of analysis up.”

Matt Scholten: For the revivals, I had the beauty of a choice from any of about thirty of Daniel’s plays. It was really lovely to have that freedom. The four works we decided on were chosen because they are distinct—separate—worlds that I thought were right for this project. That’s how they’ve been treated. The same as the new works.

“Yes, they are unique creations, but there’s definitely a connection between them,” insisted Semiota. “There is perhaps a shared quality to the themes, something magnetic that draws them together. They make a very compact arrangement.”

Matt Scholten: In deciding what order we were going to stage the eight we tried to resist any kind of thematic pairing. There are commonalities. Both of tonight’s plays [Somewhere in the Middle of the Night and To Whom It May Concern] are about, in different ways, saying goodbye, and about older parents and their children.

“They’re about care, responsibility and courage,” continued Semiota. “I just wish I could get past the bleakness, because I see that there is life and hope there, too. I only can’t get past the fear. I can see the importance of courage; like in Somewhere in the Middle of the Night, Carter’s character, Sylvie, the daughter, has only the one moment where she loses it, but the rest of the time she is trying to be right there, right beside her disappearing mother. The character called Daniel, the father, is the same in To Whom It May Concern, just trying to stay by Leo’s side. Or take the courage of Ammes’ character in Café Table, when he announces with conviction, I won’t fail like you. Or even Simone and Paul (played by Friedl and Myles), also in Café Table, the courage of each to reach out, after all that time, to the other, even if they sustain the contact. If only the grim circumstances these characters all find themselves in did not call for such courage.”

Matt Scholten: I think afterward it can feel bleak, but I think the watching of it, the experience of it, is full of life. Full of hope.

“I don’t know. Themes? They’re so twentieth century,” I said, evidently bearing up well. “I don’t think the themes will persist as strongly in my memory. What I think is enduring with me, at least after the first two weeks, is the Manner of Contrivance: a similarity in the manner by which each of Keene’s worlds is constructed; a manner which impacts strangely upon my sensibilities. Here we come back, I think, to the production values, the design elements already mentioned and the direction—”

Matt Scholten: I love designers that are like dramaturges. And that’s what these three [Lisa Mibus, Kat Chan and Katherine Branch] are. They each interrogated the script to work out what their individual roles were.

“But what specifically do you mean by strangely impacted?” asked Semiota.

“The use of the long, narrow strip of stage, significantly longer than the width of the audience, for instance, where the players make effective use of the off-stage wings to abruptly thrust focus upon other actors and where all lateral movement across the stage takes on the significance of a quest.”

Matt Scholten: I love the idea of a long, thin space just with light across the space. As in Somewhere: spatially, there’s a journey across the stage. Sylvie has to get her mother to that bed; she starts at that door and ends up on the bed.

“For me it has the effect of elongating the everything,” I continued, “distorting the naturalism of the performance.”

Matt Scholten: It’s good in a space that size because it allows you leave elements from other scenes—either before after—in the space. I’m happy for the remnants of stuff that’s occurred to remain there, like Leo’s bed in To Whom, which remains on stage, empty, for the rest of the performance.

“Which is why I disagree,” I continued, still, “that the manner is exactly social realism, although I agree that it is brutal.”

“But Keene’s scripts have always, in some quarters, at least, been described as ‘gritty’ social realism,” said Semiota.

“I guess. But I didn’t think that this production, this way of contriving it, could be described as realism. Like the way Jan Freidl gave us the mother with dementia, Agnes. I didn’t feel as though the intended effect was verisimilitude. The mannerisms are there, but the movement of the disease—its progress—is not naturalism. I’m thinking of the movement of time—which, while apparently linear, does not appear strictly uniform. It is as though, and I mean this across all four plays, time is an abstract quality.”

Matt Scholten: I work in a very abstract kind of way—working on ideas, letting them [the actors] play for a couple of weeks—abstracting things. Finding stuff in different gestures … like putting Bruce [Myles, as Daniel in To Whom It May Concern] off stage when he makes that telephone call. There’s just Bruce’s voice and it’s the first time you really get to watch Leo.

“I would still prefer to describe it as a thematic experience,” insisted Semiota. “The lines that I followed through these plays were thematic lines. This is, I guess, the same as saying that it’s not naturalism, but social realism was never pure naturalism anyway, it is always driven by themes.”

“But it still needs to be real. And this is not real in that way. Like the interactions in Café Table—they all seemed somehow dreamlike … the light … the timing … it was as though each character had an eternity to distil the necessary reply. Or the use of monologue in Two Shanks, giving it that abstracted air, like one of those early twentieth-century elegies for the doomed culture of cosmopolitan Europe. Or in To Whom It May Concern, where the whole time I was screaming to myself—‘Just ring DHS!’”

Matt Scholten: People think Keene writes naturalism but he doesn’t. It’s only that he writes domestic settings.

“Okay, yes,” she said, “but that last example is exactly why I prefer to call it a thematic experience. DHS is inimic to the theme. Such a move is not a part of Daniel’s reality. He doesn’t understand anything except that for forty years he’s the one who’s provided the care. He’s desperate to have someone care for Leo with that same kind of love. The idea of a bureaucracy can’t come into it.”

“Hmm. To be honest, in the last play, To Whom, I rather thought that the theme was pushed too far. Sentiment overwhelmed the carefully articulated Manner of the other three productions. The nail, perhaps, was driven too far home. The wood was bruised. I wonder, for instance, if there isn’t one scene too many toward the end. Maybe that scene by the sea? Did you hear the woman in front of us sighing sharply—emotionally—in the scene immediately before that one? Like, ach! more horrors! Well, I confess, when I realised that he’d taken Leo to the beach, I too felt my spirit shrink.”

“I don’t know, Neandellus,” said Semiota, “As much as my own spirit recoiled in that scene, I think we do see something new.”

Matt Scholten: Matt’s [Matt Molony’s] whole body transforms in that scene. It’s the idea of fear. Which is what he hears in Bruce’s voice.

“Maybe then it could have gone the other way,” I mused. “Maybe the play—or even all the plays in The Cove—could have been unpacked a little more: deeper silences, more space. The experience, especially in the final play, reaches a level of intensity somewhat above the rest of the production. Perhaps it would stand better if set apart from the others, given more room.”

Matt Scholten: Of course we could have done just one play. I could have done To Whom and that’s it. But that’s not the project. We’ve got the eight plays; and they are all fully realised.