There are better places to see bullfights than Pamplona. In fact, during the city’s annual fiesta, Pamplona is one of the worst places in Spain to see corridas de toros: the crowds up here in the Basque country demand the biggest bulls on offer, despite the fact that such bulls are almost impossible to dispatch with any great art, and the constant distraction to the animals provided by the peñas, social clubs that take up residence on the sunny side of the arena, drenching themselves in sangria while their in-house brass bands compete with one another, make it almost impossible for the matadors to maintain the bulls’ focus, impossible to dominate them. For someone who wishes to learn about bullfighting, Pamplona teaches only one thing: what a bad corrida looks like.
Yet I write these words having recently returned from the city where, for the second year in a row, I attended all eight corridas, as well as the rejoneo, or horseback fight, and the novillada, in which slightly younger bulls are fought by novice toreros who have not yet graduated to the level of professional matadors. There was a lot to dislike about this year’s corridas: far and away the worst performance of the week, on an evening that had been billed as the must-see fight of the feria, was that of Morante de la Puebla, about whom I had heard great things and whom I was very much looking forward to seeing in action. I had been promised a masterclass with the cape, but instead bore witness to incompetent butchery. I can’t usually countenance those who say they want the bull to win—let them see Juan José Padilla, who lost an eye to a bull, fight without depth perception and see if they wish him to slip beneath the horns—but this really was one night when one wished to see the bulls pardoned, simply by virtue of the unmitigated, ugly punishment they were being subjected to.
If there was one night that redeemed the feria—and thus the corrida in a more abstract sense—it came three nights later on the thirteenth. It had been a bloody morning: a massive pile-up of bodies at the mouth of the arena during the morning encierro, what we know in English as the running of the bulls, had stopped the Fuente Ymbro bulls in their tracks and resulted in twenty-three injuries, including the near-death of one young man, trampled to the colour of eggplant by runners, who was in a coma. The cartel for the evening included Padilla, Miguel Ángel Perera and Iván Fandiño.
One couldn’t help but look forward to Padilla, appearing in his second corrida of the feria. I had been in the arena on July 14, 2012, for his first appearance in the city since he was gored through the face in Zaragoza the previous October. It was an afternoon that those who were there will find difficult to forget: Padilla placed his own banderillas, the colourfully decorated barbed sticks that are inserted in the corrida’s second act (“He’s mad,” the old man next to me muttered), and killed near-perfectly, lingering over the horns in the way that Hemingway described (“that flash when man and bull form one figure as the sword goes all the way in, the man leaning after it, death uniting the two figures in the emotional, aesthetic and artistic climax of the fight”). Until then, I had only read about such things. As the woman next to me cried tears of happiness—I maintain that I had something in my eye—Padilla was carried out of the ring on the shoulders of his supporters, waving what in this city has now become his trademark: a big, black skull-and-crossbones, a pirate flag to match his eyepatch.
But this year his performance seemed trickier somehow, less marked by valour, in my mind, than by a certain vulgar populism. The dangerous-seeming histrionics he engaged in—opening his mouth over the point of the bull’s horn and leaning on the animal’s forehead with his elbow—came off as crass and disappointing. Don’t get me wrong: he still put on a show, and the peñas in particular loved it. But for my money the evening belonged to the more classical stylings of Fandiño—the president of the ring apparently agreed, awarding the matador the two ears of his first bull as trophies for his performance—and the feria to the insane death-drive toreo of the young Jiménez Fortes, who fought on the twelfth and fourteenth and who in both cases passed his bulls so close that he seemed to me to be actively inviting death. As the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of El Litri facing a Murube bull: “When you have seen that, you know a little about dying.”
You may be wondering why I am using my theatre column to discuss bullfighting. The answer is very simple: I consider the corrida and the theatre to be cousins. Like many budding aficianados, I came to the corrida through the work of Ernest Hemingway. Not Death in the Afternoon, which I read only later and which, in spite of its undeniable expertise, also marks the beginning of the author’s tendency towards hard-boiled peer-baiting and literary penis measurement, but rather short stories like ‘The Capital of the World’, with its hotel full of toreros and its tragic, wannabe matador kitchenhands, and ‘The Undefeated’. But when I saw my first corrida, in Mexico City in 2010, it wasn’t Hemingway’s “feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” that caught my attention, overwhelmed me, and planted the seed of my afición. It was the corrida’s resemblance to the other arts I love, particularly theatre, dance and sculpture. It is for this reason that I give pride of place on my bookshelf, not to Hemingway’s treatise on the bulls, but to Tynan’s wonderful Bull Fever. (I did read Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer this year, mind you, and loved it despite its lesser reputation. It’s a weird, bloated, strangely homoerotic book, densely packed with details about the corrida while also serving as an unintentionally revealing portrait of the writer as an old man. The preface by James A. Michener is indispensable, too.) For the sake of conciseness, I will not touch upon extra-aesthetic justifications for the corrida in this column, though those interested in arguments from the standpoints of conservationism, animal biology and economics would do well to consult Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight by my friend Alexander Fiske-Harrison. For obvious reasons, my concern here will be solely aesthetic. Not that it particularly matters: the ethical question mark that hovers above bullfighting is as deeply related to the aesthetics of the corrida as it is with other concerns. As Wittgenstein wrote: “Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins.”
Tynan was not convinced, as others have been, that the corrida is art in and of itself. He described it, rather, as “the cause that art is in other men—poets, for example, painters, sculptors, and musicians”. Personally, I don’t see why it can’t be both, though of the roughly one hundred and thirty bulls I’ve seen killed in the ring, I’d say I’ve seen maybe three killed in a manner that truly ascended to the level of artistic creation. But the fact that it is the cause of art in others is undeniable, the evidence convincing: the Hemingway short stories; Picasso’s series of twenty-six remarkable aquatints, La Tauromàquia, and his cubist Le matador; and Goya’s own series of prints, also named La Tauromaquia, which Robert Hughes described as “one of the benchmarks of popular Spanish identity”. I have never seen José Tomás fight, but one would have to include Anya Bartels-Suermondt’s remarkable photographs of the greatest living torero, too.
In his essay on Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, collected in Working the Room, Geoff Dyer outlines the connections between the two art forms, “between the images emerging gradually in the tray of chemicals and the figures’ emergence into form. ‘Stone is so still,’ sighs the statue in Rilke’s song. Still photography is the logical medium for conveying stillness…” This speaks to the relationship between toreo and sculpture—“the figures’ emergence into form” recalls not only Hemingway’s “flash when man and bull form one figure” but Orson Welles’ description of the matador’s art as the “[reduction of] a raging bull to his dimensions”—as well as to the relationship between toreo and still photography. This may seem an odd thing to say about a medium that involves the near-constant movement of a terrifying, dynamic force—the bull—but to the extent that the modern corrida has been marked by a ceaseless, paradoxical movement towards stillness, it does make some degree of sense. Perhaps this is why Tomás does not allow his corridas to be broadcast on television: the essence of his art is stillness, and thus he is better served by the still photographer than by the man with the movie camera. In this respect (and not only in this respect, given the obvious relationship between the corrida and flamenco), I am reminded of dance. Unless a dance piece has been choreographed specifically for the screen—and from Maya Deren’s A study in choreography for camera to the New York City Ballet’s 2010 film of Jerome Robbins’ NY Export: Opus Jazz this tradition has been fruitful indeed—there is something not quite right about seeing film or video of a dance performance. Such documentary evidence serves an important archival purpose, of course—in this day and age, it is nice to be able to keep up with what’s happening a world away, even in unsatisfactory facsimile—but something essential doesn’t translate. The same is true of the corrida: I will occasionally catch up with the progress of El Juli or Padilla online—the former’s January 30, 2011, performance at Mexico City’s Plaza México, available on YouTube, is the closest that a filmed bullfight has come to eliciting the emotions that the real thing might have done—but the effect is usually not the same. Because of his moratorium on broadcast cameras at his corridas, this is even truer of Tomás: the available videos of his fights are all iPhone bootlegs, shot from the nosebleeds, usually of his masterful solo performance in Nîmes last year.
I suspect that this is one of the reasons—alongside the desire to have his film seen in countries where viewers are more broadly opposed to the corrida—that Pablo Berger does not show too much actual bullfighting in his excellent silent version of Snow White, Blancanieves, which screened at the Sydney Film Festival the month before Pamplona’s fiesta. Berger prefers to shoot toreo de salon, in which matadors practice and perfect the various classical passes alone, sin toro, than trying to capture the essence of the corrida itself. Along with Miguel Gomes’ formally similar but more elusive Tabu, Blancanieves follows hot on the heels of Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, which it greatly improves upon in terms of both originality and technique. Where The Artist was merely a rehashing of Singin’ in the Rain, Blancanieves is a thorough reimagining of the fairy tale, which it sets in the unlikely world of torero in 1920s Seville.
More than this, it is a rewriting of the original, too, to an almost Wellesian degree. In the wake of the Holocaust, Welles found himself unable to countenance the idea of Kafka’s Joseph K. being led like a lamb to the slaughter at the conclusion of The Trial, and so had Anthony Perkins take his own life in defiance of his captors in a startling but somehow appropriate deviation from the dénouement of the novel. Berger does nothing so remarkable here. What he does do, though, is find a way to capture something vital about the corrida that the motion picture camera cannot: unable to give us the essential form of the bullfight in the way that a still photographer might, he gives us instead its essential narrative characteristics, which is to say those of tragedy. “A bullfight,” said Welles, who trained for a time as a torero himself, “is a tragedy in three acts. These noble creatures, who are waiting for their death this afternoon, are the heroes of that tragedy. The tragedy of the bullfight is based on the innocence of this creature.” To achieve the trajectory and sense of tragedy in the film, of course, requires a departure from the source material: when the innocent young matadora Carmen (Macarena García) eats her evil stepmother’s poisoned apple, there’s no coming back from it. Having signed a contract with a ruthless promoter before her demise—and here Berger appears to be mixing his Disneys, granting Pinocchio’s Stromboli a role in the proceedings—Carmen’s body is trotted about as part of a Ripley’s-like believe-it-or-not show. Her prince charming, one of the seven bullfighting dwarves she befriended and, through her art, made famous, can kiss her all he wants: Blancanieves, as she has come to be known, is not coming back.
This is not the plot of Snow White, perhaps, but it is that of the bullfight. Whatever one thinks of the often untenable cruelty of the spectacle, when an aficiando speaks of the tragedy of the corrida they are referring, not to the suspension of animal rights, but to the inevitability of the bull’s demise at the hands of the man. The bull has often been compared to Hamlet, but Tynan thought him more akin to Othello: great in size, strength and nobility, he is reduced, unwittingly, by the superior cunning of an adversary who should by rights be his sport. (I am less inclined than Tynan to carry this comparison to its logical conclusion by comparing the matador to Iago. A matador may need some degree of madness to get into the ring, let alone to fight as Fortes did in Pamplona, but he is no sociopath. Iago might be a master with the muleta, convincing the bull to charge at the cloth as opposed to his body, but he is entirely lacking in honour.)
This is why the English word “bullfight” is such a misnomer: there is no fight here, no contest, no competition. Even when the man gets gored, the bull will die. (According to Fiske-Harrison, at least 533 matadors have been killed in the ring in the past 300 years, a figure that doesn’t include amateurs killed in unofficial town square fights and on ranches. Thankfully, advances in modern medicine have ensured that fewer die today than used to: no less a figure than El Juli might have done so himself had his April 19 cornada been sustained as little as 50 years ago.) It is true that concerns about the ferocity of the stock means that more bulls are being judged brave enough to be pardoned at present than at any time in a number of years, but they still represent a tiny percentage of the number of bulls entering through the toril doors onto the sand each year. “La corrida de toros” translates literally as “the running of bulls”: the art is to incite the bull to run by you using a series of classical, agreed-upon passes. What we know as the running of the bulls, the encierro, actually translates literally as “enclosure”, which is what those countless thousands on the streets of Pamplona are supposed to be doing every morning for eight days: leading, herding, shepherding the bulls from their pens on the edge of the old city to their enclosures in the bull ring. When people speak of the corrida not being a fair fight, they’re absolutely right: it’s neither fair nor a fight. When they call it a sport, they don’t know how wrong they are, but when they say it’s unsporting they’re right on the money. There’s a reason the bulls appear in the cultural pages of Spanish newspapers alongside the theatre and dance notices. It’s the extent to which the inevitable, unavoidable cruelty of the corrida is transcended by the man’s grace and dignity that determines the spectacle’s status as art. It is the extent to which the bull hurtles inevitably, constantly, unwaveringly towards his fate that determines—think of Oedipus, Medea, Antigone and the rest—its status as tragedy.
I could ask you to think of Phèdre as well, I suppose, but part of me feels like her fate doesn’t quite count. Bell Shakespeare’s production of Racine’s seventeenth-century tilt at classical tragedy is technically very well appointed—Anna Cordingley’s set makes the whole stage feel like the darkest cobwebby corner of itself and Kelly Ryall’s soundscape is anxiety inducing—and contains at least two great performances. Catherine McClements’ Phèdre is less a storming taurine force than a skittering arachnid one: as Chris Boyd put it, in an observation that can’t be bettered so why try, the actress is like “a bottled spider […] a venomous tangle of limbs and libidinous urges.” She’s so good than one rather wishes she was playing the male roles, too, all of which feel comparably stitled, unemotional and weird. This holds true of the direction, too, especially during the first act.
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It’s not so much that what constitutes tragedy has gradually mutated over time, though that is as obviously true as it is of other genres. As Jeffrey Eugenides observed, talking about the marriage plot as it was manifested in Austen, Flaubert and James, “those novels are no longer able to be written because the social conditions for women are so radically altered from what they were in the Victorian age. Your freedom is completely different than a woman from that time.” In the same way that some of Seinfeld’s greatest episodes could not be made today thanks to the current ubiquity of mobile phones—‘The Parking Garage’ would be over in a minute—so even Anna Karenina might have avoided her fate today thanks to changed standards of propriety. Which is not to say that her fate no longer weighs heavily upon us when we read Tolstoy today. It certainly weighs more heavily upon us than Phèdre’s does, but that’s because Anna’s movement towards it, like the bull towards his, seems so innate to her and it an inevitable by-product of her character. Tragedy is the meeting of incompatible forces—usually hubris on the one hand and fate on the other—that will inevitably destroy one of them. (In the first act of the bullfight, the bull’s quality is judged by how willing he is to continue charging the horse even though to do so is to drive the picador’s lance further into his heaving neck muscle.) Anna’s tragedy is that of the scorpion in the fable: “It’s my nature,” he apologises to the paralysed frog, whom he’s stung halfway across the stream, sinking and killing them both. Phèdre’s tragedy, by contrast, has little to do with the inherent qualities of her character than with mere circumstance, timing and misunderstanding. It is for this reason that, as hinted at earlier, the piece actually hews closer to the comic than to the tragic, and does so regardless of whether we approach her tale with seventeenth- or twenty-first century mores in mind. (It also the reason that any overly earnest production of the piece is likely to feel somehow off, in the way a sitcom is liable to feel like a soap opera the moment its actors start taking their roles too seriously.) Phèdre is Othello’s comic equivalent while her handmaiden Oenone (Julie Forsyth, fully getting the joke and at the top of her game) is the ridiculous inverse of Iago: a font of kind-hearted but terrible advice, a puppet master who’s never so much as see a puppet show, let alone touched a marionette. Phèdre is thus not a force in and of herself, but a cork bobbing about on the high seas of something closely resembling farce, like Basil Fawlty whenever he listens to the well-intentioned but always misleading ramblings of Manuel. If one cries during Phèdre, it is as likely to be from laughter as anything else.
Quite the inverse is true of the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Maids, which opens with slapstick and ends with suicide. Jean Genet’s play is not a classical tragedy, of course, but in this respect, at least, it is more genuinely tragic than Phèdre: there is not a moment’s doubt that the maids of the title, however madcap their antics, are going to wind up killing either their madam or one another. To return to Fawlty, it’s kind of like how, even as you laugh at him, you fully expect that he’s one day going to top himself. Or as Tynan quotes Chaplin in the course of a passage on the similarity between matadors (I would say the banderilleros) and the little tramp: “I am always aware that Charlie is playing with death. He plays with it, mocks it, thumbs his nose at it, but it is always there. He is aware of death at every moment of his existence; and he is terribly aware of being alive.” This is clear from the opening, in which Claire (Cate Blanchett) and Solange (Isabelle Huppert) recreate the degradations meted out upon them by their absent mistress (Elizabeth Debicki, always two steps further down the staircase than Toby Maguire in The Great Gatsby, here allowed to unravel vertically to her full, terrifying height), leading up to a scene of their own invention in which one of them is meant to strangle the other to death. Their blood ritual never quite gets as far as the blood: an alarm goes off, alerting them to their mistress’s imminent return. Here, then, is Chekov’s gun on the wall.
One of the piece’s most fascinating elements is its use of live video. This is a much more complex experiment with streaming video than Andrews’ The Season at Sarsaparilla a couple of years ago. There, it was a means of allowing us inside Robert Cousins’ “classic Howard Arkley brick veneer”, as Alison Croggon described the set at the time, as well as a transparent, not especially nuanced commentary on privacy and surveillance written in the visual language of reality television. (Given recent revelations, it was arguably ahead of its time.) Here it becomes an extra-narrative examination of the differences between theatre and cinema, making the case for each against the other simultaneously. Depending on where your attention is directed at any given moment, you are able to witness two quite distinct stories, or rather two distinct takes on the same one. The version unfolding on stage is primarily comic: from Blanchett and Huppert’s playacting, hilarious as it is hysterical, to the height difference between Debicki and the leads, like something from the caricaturist’s pen, the majority of the piece is intended as a laugh riot, at least until Huppert’s remarkable monologue near the end. The story on screen is very different: a Hitchcockian murder film—there is a close-up of a tea cup that is a direct quotation from Suspicion, with Blanchett in the Cary Grant role—with Cassavetean tics and obsessions. Andrews at times appears to be writing a treatise on the mediums and their strengths: the stage is a place of bodies, he seems to be saying, and the screen that of (the title of a Cassavetes film) faces. The stage is the place for large movements and the screen the place for Manny Farber’s termitic details. (Speaking of details, it’s worth pointing out that the use of video also helps Andrews to get around problems with the space. This is not the first time a rather intimate piece, better-suited emotionally to the confines of Wharf 1 than to the cavernous space of the Sydney Theatre, has wounds up in the latter, larger space primarily because of the star power—which is to say the selling power—involved. A Streetcar Named Desire could have used a camera or two: I’m not sure I saw Blanchett’s face once that night and I wasn’t even in the nosebleeds.) Interestingly, without quite meaning to, one finds oneself transforming this formal semi-argument into an emotional logic that determines how one follows the otherwise overwhelming proceedings: in the early comic scenes, as with Debicki’s first entrance, one finds oneself following the action on stage, where the remarkable scene in which the mistress applies make-up to Claire’s face, for example, has one transfixed to the screen. No filmmaker has shot Blanchett quite so well in recent years as the unknown cameramen shoot her here: her face will tear your heart out.
It’s the middle of the year and the companies are beginning to trot out their prestige shows, the ones that are likely to win them their awards. For the STC, The Maids is the first of three or four such shows, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Waiting for Godot to follow later in the year. For Belvoir, Angels in America is the season’s pièce de résistance. Frankly, I don’t know what to say about it other than that it is the show of the year thus far, and indeed perhaps ultimately. Viewed in a single day, over the course of roughly ten hours with a number of intermissions and a dinner break, its effect is immense. For one thing, it puts the whole ridiculous directors-versus-playwrights argument, intimately tied up as it is with the statistically inaccurate claim that reworked classics are outnumbering new Australian works, into much-needed perspective. If critics of so-called auteur theatre want more contemporary Australian stories by Australian playwrights on our stages, perhaps they could lobby our theatre companies to commission plays like this one: ambitious works, Quixotic works, not more of the same old this-could-be-an-episode-of-Without-a-Trace-type stuff that certain writing-focused companies are seemingly obsessed with these days. Angels in America, as anyone who has seen the 2003 HBO miniseries based upon it will know, has ambition to burn, a sprawling epic deeply, often messily engaged with history, religion, ideology, philosophy, society, politics, and all the rest of it. It’s as though Tony Kushner heard what Godard said about the cinema and decided it was true of the theatre, too: “One should put everything into a film.”
Eamon Flack is not an auteur in the manner of some of his rather more infamous contemporaries, but that’s only to say that his visual style is comparatively invisible. That is the thing with masterful assurance when it isn’t teamed with ostentatiousness these days: it can be difficult to pick up and to credit. But Flack has proven himself, time and again and across multiple genres (his children-of-the-80s Midsummer Night’s Dream was a minor masterpiece), of putting together remarkable teams of collaborators and, especially when it comes to his direction of actors, delivering the goods. Marcus Graham is a fine example here: an actor who, in my experience, can be very hit and miss, even a bit of a joke, delivers a performance that, remarkably, made me forget that Al Pacino had ever played the role. The other performances are equally as good: Robin Nevin takes on Meryl Streep’s handful of roles (and one of James Cromwell’s, for what it’s worth), DeObia Oparei is excellent as Belize and Mr Lies, and Amber McMahon, one of my favourite young actors, not only brings the requisite crazy to Harper, but imbues that crazy with a slight touch of menace, which I wasn’t expecting and which I enjoyed. But the show ultimately belongs to Luke Mullins as Prior Walter, the HIV-afflicted prophet at the centre of the proceedings.
Along with Ewen Leslie, Mullins is arguably our best young stage actor. From Prior’s chance meeting with Harper in a dream (one of McMahon’s best scenes, too) to the night-time collapse that leads his boyfriend Louis (Mitchell Butel) to leave him—America’s denial of death and sickness made manifest—he excels. When, in a fit of pique upon his arrival in Heaven, Prior rejects the prophecy delivered unto him—a demand from the angels, abandoned by God, that mankind stop moving, stop progressing—Mullins pretty much secures himself a Helpmann nomination.
It is a remarkable scene, involving every actor in the ensemble, and it is remarkable precisely for its refusal to give in to a tragic vision. There has been a spate of documentaries about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s as of late—How to Survive a Plague and We Were Here, for example—and watching them one is constantly aware of how tragic the whole thing actually was. In another epic play about the era, Hélène Cixous’ The Perjured City, Or the Awakening of the Furies, the Ancient Greek connection, if we might call it that, is made explicit. (Cixous’ play is not concerned with the AIDS epidemic per se, but rather with a mid-1980s scandal in which the French National Centre for Blood Tranfusions distributed blood supplies that it knew were contaminated with HIV to more than four thousand patients.) In this view, the victims were the bull and their inherent, animating force the desire to live, while the virus was the ruthless counter-force that, no matter how they struggled, mercilessly dominated and destroyed them. Kushner perversely—and very Americanly—inverts this dichotomy. For him, the virus is the bull and living—the desire to live—is the force that might be enlisted to defeat it. (Yes, there are some very heavy-duty drugs floating around in the play’s second part, but what is modern medical research if not the practical manifestation of our desire to live?)
With this rejection of the tragic, my tired bullfighting metaphors become irrelevant. Stillness is the essence of toreo and movement is the essence of life, particularly American life, at least as it is popularly conceived. Go west, young man, go west. More importantly, America’s relationship with death, as Kushner demonstrates with Prior’s arrival in Heaven, is nothing like Hispanic culture’s. (The American death drive as it is explored in, say, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point or Peckinpah’s Westerns is a very different, darker, more countercultural thing altogether.) Octavio Paz spoke on behalf of Mexico: “The Mexican … is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it,” he wrote. “[I]t is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.” Federico García Lorca stepped up to the plate for Spain: “In every other country death is an ending,” he wrote in his famous essay on duende. “It appears and they close the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors till the day they die and are carried into the sun. A dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else on earth: his profile cuts like the edge of a barber’s razor.” Prior Walter speaks on behalf of America. “I want more life,” he tells the angels. “I can’t help myself. I do.”
Angels, written twenty years ago and focused on a circle of Jews, Mormons, gays and pill-poppers at the tail end of the Cold War, has more to say about Australia today than great swathes of what is being written by our establishment playwrights. This is because it has more to say, not about Australian politics or what it’s like to have dinner parties in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but about our common humanity. Whatever David Williamson and Andrew Bovell might tell you, in self-serving interviews and op-ed pieces lambasting Simon Stone and his latest reworking of Greek tragedy or American drama, the annual effusion from such playwrights of ripped-from-the-headlines, position-paper dialogue, delivered by mouthpieces masquerading as characters, does nothing—nothing whatsoever—to teach us about ourselves. This is what Jane Howard, overreaching only a little, was getting at when she argued in The Guardian that Angels could almost be considered “a new Australian work, comfortably part of an Australian canon of contemporary theatre.”
“By embedding the work with a very contemporary Australian sense of humour,” Howard wrote, “Flack brings it closer to the world of his audience,” a world in which peripheral nobodies like Prior and Harper still struggle to gain a foothold and which we might do well to look at little more clearly, a little more humanely, for a while.
Ironically, it was in the very area of the production that Howard highlighted as being particularly Australian—its sense of humour—that I felt the production lost its way a little. One of the play’s most moving, haunting passages—Louis’s recital of the Kaddish at Roy Cohn’s death bed, guided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—was here played quickly, in a way that I felt was a significant tonal misstep, selling short the emotional concession that was taking place while simultaneously screwing with the scene’s internal rhythms. Nevertheless, Howard gets the main point right: “[E]ven when being faithful to the script at the heart of text-based theatre, the resulting productions are simultaneously a product of the time they were written, and the time they are presented.” Those who argue that we should have more Australian plays on Australian stages telling Australian stories in Australian accents limit the possibilities of the theatre by circumscribing the nature of its role to the most parochial of parameters. They are the equivalent of those who, in our screen bureaucracies, assume that Australian cinema has a responsibility—a dangerous word—to reflect—an annoying one—the national character, thus precluding many of the genre films that some us believe might save the industry. Or those who, until very recently, interpreted the Miles Franklin Award’s much-discussed stipulation that entries present “Australian Life in any of its phases” in the strictest and thus most stifling of ways. Kushner’s play is in the end no more about America than The Maids is about France or the corrida is about Spain. They are, like all art, first and foremost about being human—if not, in the latter case, about being humane. If we go to the bullfight to learn “a little about dying”, we go to the theatre to learn how to live.
The Lifted Brow, No. 19, August/September 2013
