Neandellus: Theatre: Melbourne

So Calm, So Blue
by Mutation Theatre, written and directed by Patrick McCarthy, devised with and performed by James Tresise and Matthew Epps
Some Place in Collingwood
26 Sept – 9 Oct

This is a study in distance. The play’s program indicates that the title is taken from Beckett’s Godot, from the fractured end of Lucky’s wild thinkspate. I’m not sure of the particular significance this speech holds for Mutation Theatre – perhaps it’s because the calm and the blue, the patch of sky, is the last thing glimpsed in Lucky’s speech before the grey scudding of the skull, the skull, the skull, which is, apparently, shrinking and wasting concurrently, obliterates even the foolish semblance of meaning which the so-called speech pretends to. That is to say, the sky is the last thing seen before the skull closes overhead (overmind).

The skull is a singularly distant place to be, and these two, the characters played by Tresise and Epps, are characters disappearing, albeit gradually, into the dim skull-zone. On the one hand there is a sense that they are trapped together. The setting is a mock backyard beautifully designed by Ashlee Hughes and McCarthy, with astroturf and fake sky painted on a broad canvas that curves around and encompasses the stage. The fakeness of the setting, with its sky-painted canvas boxing them in, comes to resemble the painted interior of a sconce-case. It’s a little like the dome wall in The Truman Show, only in miniature. But on the other hand, they are both on the verge of separation, of being consumed by their respective introspective obsessions and meditations.

Or perhaps it’s not a question of separating, but rather a question of never meeting to begin with. They are fixed, each in their own skull, and despite their numerous attempts, affable attempts, to sally forth and join the other in conversation, they are drawn back, again and again, into the comforting and excruciating vagueness of the skull.

While the scenario bears a circumstantial similarity with Godot, the two of them waiting, all action constrained by existential vagrancy, I think perhaps a more comparable scenario, one which better accommodates the hesitations that mark this performance, is Beckett’s Molloy, where there is the repetition of that same movement, of the approach that is broken off. I think especially of the repeated image of two men approaching one other, tentatively, or purposefully, but then mutually deciding to turn around and head back, each to their own ruminations, to their own skulls, to their own distance.

So a study in distance … but of what? The times. So Calm, So Blue is very much a piece of its time. These are characters who are expressions of their time, expressions narrowed by nationality, race, class and gender, but still rich in their cultural contemporaneity. It is in the music they play, the moral and ethical positions they assume, the cultural associations which have currency for them, their diction and vocabulary, obviously, but also in their silences. I don’t mean this to be a commonplace. Of course, new theatre, theatre that is scripted or improvised, is always an expression of its times. I mean that this is an attempt, stricter than most, perhaps more self-conscious, to provide an index of the moment, to be present, somehow, now. That is to say, with it’s overt references to Beckett, Grotowski and Ranters inter alia, this piece attempts to connect the tradition, or a tradition, with its own moment, to make the tradition present for the present.

A study of presence conducted at a distance. It is the great Eastern problem of philosophy, is it not? And there is a pseudo-zen quality to the work. These are skulls aspiring to be stones, the stone which, according to Leibniz is like a man who has lived for exactly one moment.

But these are not stones. The zen is pseudo. It is Kahlil Gibran pseudo. It is theatrical. The moment is fleeting. The distance, which apes contemplation, becomes melancholy. Treses especially appears resigned to alienation – so often quarter turned from the audience, flat delivery, a fixed, mask-like grin. It is an optimistic piece, because that is part of the “time” they express, but they are less generous with that optimism.

Less generous, I mean than in Habitat. Habitat was the piece that these three, McCarthy, Epps and Tresise staged early last year and which this current piece has evolved out of. McCarthy writes in the program that At the time Habitat was created, I was living above a shop on Smith Street. Not long after that, there was a period of ten months in which I moved house five times, only to end up three doors down from where I started.

For the earlier work, Habitat, which was set in a Fitzroy sharehouse, the audience was in the room, they were an acknowledged presence in the room where Tresise and Epps were chatting. But here it feels as though we’ve been studiously removed. It’s not only that we’re no longer figured in the dialogue; it’s also because of those distant stares which dominate the performance – they look through us. Grotowski, an acknowledged presence behind the work, asks, somewhere or other, Why worry about what the audience’s part ought to be? In extending the project they began with Habitat, they have come to dismiss, more or less, the role of the audience. This makes their immediate debt to Ranters’ Holiday somehow more stark. In the earlier work the direct influence of Ranters was clear, but so too was the departure. The departure was in their relationship with the audience.

Between the expectations of the audience and the intentions of the performer there is an inevitable tension, one which springs from the natural inscrutability of each to each. This tension is an energy, and the energy is a source of so much that is wonderful in theatre, so much that is transformative – the hot breath of an expectant audience; the impertinent gaze of a performer. In Habitat, in a coup de theatre moment, the tension was suddenly defused, completely evacuated from the small theatre, by the simple act of opening a window, literally, onto the street outside. That place, the theatre, was in that instant no different from this place, to use Grotowski’s way of putting it, the world outside. It was an instant of reconciliation between the audience and the performers, a moment of wonderful though completely unstable harmony.

Here the audience’s presence is not acknowledged, and consequently the acknowledgement of the performance by the audience is muted. There is a scene where some kind of transformation is aimed at, a decorative transformation, lights and music. It is certainly spectacular, expanding and elevating the closed set; it is also a revelatory moment in as much as it discloses the wonder, otherwise only faintly acknowledged, that lies behind James and Matthew’s distant staring and silent contemplation. But it is inconclusive, which is perhaps the dominant mood of the piece.

This is work then feels more like a station on the way to somewhere else – a point of recollection and recapitulation – a grounding point before ——