Tom Holloway’s Don’t Say the Words and Debbie Tucker Green’s Stoning Mary belong to that increasingly popular genre of dystopic, post-Western civilization ‘what-if?’s. What if Africa’s AIDS epidemic reached Britain and our children were drafted as rebel soldiers? What if stoning women to death was a perfectly acceptable form of punishment? What if a solider returned from Iraq to a fallen Western city only to be murdered by his wife? It’s a category with a long tradition and one which is currently enjoying some time in the sun. While Hollywood has given us V for Vendetta (which graphic novels gave us first) and Children of Men, and literature has given us Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, the theatre has given us works such as Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur and, now, Don’t Say the Words and Stoning Mary.
That all three of these pieces have enjoyed runs at the Griffin Theatre in the last twelve months is surely no coincidence. Aside from any curatorial agenda, the space seems somehow conducive to such work. The theatre’s nigh-on-claustrophobic size only intensifies the uncomfortable familiarity of these pieces, their too-close-for-comfort-ness.
Based as it is on Agamemnon, the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Tom Holloway’s Don’t Say the Words has a certain timeless quality to it. The motivations of its characters spring eternal: the soldier, his wife and her lover are driven by jealousy, betrayal and, that old chestnut, revenge. At the same time, the piece is very much of the present, trying to wrap its head around now. Agamemnon tells the story of a warrior king who returns home after a decade at the front, whereupon he is promptly murdered by his scheming wife, Clytemnestra, drama’s first femme fatale. Holloway has relocated the story to Australia, setting it sometime in the not-too-distant future, inevitably leading one to ask which war the solider has returned from.
Where the piece really shines is in the quality of its dialogue. Though the performance of it here occasionally seems a little forced, Holloway perfectly captures the rhythmic musicality human utterance, weaving speech, stutter, song and even burping into a rich aural tapestry. I would go as far as to argue that no one has so thoroughly explored the rhythmic intricacies of male (non-)communication since David Caesar’s 2001 film Mullet. A logic of difference and repetition, which sees much of the dialogue appear multiple times from one scene to the next, gives the script—if not the production—an almost symphonic quality.
Director Matthew Lutton’s production is for the most part suitably cold-blooded and clinical, though the whole lacks a certain cohesion of tone which one suspects has little to do with the text. Certain scenes are played for comedy when comedy seems dramatically inappropriate, or, even worse, for horror when there is no horror inherent to them. I had similar criticisms of Lutton’s Malthouse production of Molière’s Tartuffe earlier this year, leading me to suspect now that the problems with that earlier production were more a result of Lutton’s style than his sudden drafting to the directorial chair after Michael Kantor fell ill. Nevertheless, Don’t Say the Words has been masterfully designed by Adam Gardnir, who has given us what one might describe as the bathroom at the end of the world, and the performances are strong across the board. Brett Stiller, as the wife’s nervy, likeably pathetic lover and accomplice, is particularly impressive, while Anna Lise Phillips plays Clytemnestra with just the right level of charm and madness.
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Tucker Green’s text shares a number of structural characteristics with Holloway’s: the slow-burn development of its narrative, which sees events and meaning come into focus only gradually, like the image in a Polaroid; the mirroring of its first scene with its last, highlighting the cyclical nature of suffering; and, indeed, the brilliance of the dialogue and the logic of difference and repetition used to structure it. Tucker Green’s strategy with her dialogue is subtly different to Holloway’s with his. Where Holloway transplants long stretches of dialogue from one scene to the next, varying the meaning of the words by altering the context in which they appear, Tucker Green has a tendency to hone in on a single word and pivot around it manically, throwing it into every line, exhausting the various meanings it may have until it takes on new ones or else devolves into a mere sound. The result is brilliantly effective. Listening to Tucker Green’s dialogue, one feels a little like a ping-pong ball on the end of a piece of elastic, hit hard by the content of each line but pulled back to the paddle by the repetition, whereupon one is hit again. As it must be for the ping-pong ball, the experience is somewhat bruising.
Lee Lewis’s production is magnificently pared back and makes great use of the intimate space. Where Lutton never quite seems to understand what the rules of his space even are (the last scene of Don’t Say the Words is a visual mess, primarily because it is spatially awkward), Lewis’s operates according to a very precise logic of superimposition. This might well be a side-effect of the spareness of her set: it is easier to collapse two spaces into one when there is little on stage to denote time and place, and the set here is furnished with little more than two chairs and a couple of piles of bricks. Lewis also manages to coax great performances from all thirteen of her cast members, most notably from Yael Stone, the titular character who is to be stoned.
More so than Don’t Say the Words, the aforementioned timelessness of which might be said to relieve some of the stress of its familiarity, Stoning Mary, like Children of Men or Mercury Fur, is uncompromising in its uncomfortable closeness. In transposing the various social ills of Africa to the social sphere of the West, Tucker Green demands that we recognise those ills whilst simultaneously expressing her disgust at the fact that it has taken a play cast exclusively with white people for us to do so. Lee Lewis, one can only assume, likely feels a similar disgust. Not for nothing would the author of that much-debated treatise on cross-racial casting deliberately mount a play in which it is specified by the playwright that all the characters are to be played by white actors.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 7 July 2008
