Back in October, I wrote a review in which I more or less lavished praise on The Navigator, a contemporary opera by Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky. I have thought a lot about my response since then, not entirely agreeing with a lot of what I wrote (or rather wishing I had written more), and am convinced now that I was more enamoured with what was trying to be done than with what was actually achieved. The music and singing were brilliant, the stage direction laboured, and the libretto without merit. But I admired its ambition, the fact that it was trying to do something difficult. It may have missed its mark by some stretch, but at least it aimed high.
I bring this up because Marion Potts’ Venus & Adonis reminded me very much of The Navigator—or rather, what The Navigator would have been like had it been based on an infinitely better text and been directed with some modicum of modesty. (Sometimes Kosky’s maximalism works and sometimes it achieves only vacuous density—or dense vacuity, like a black hole.) The comparison between the two shows is obviously not perfect. Venus & Adonis, after all, is not exactly an opera. (The fact that it co-stars Melissa Madden Gray, of Meow Meow fame, suggests the extent to which its musical tendrils are rooted at least partly elsewhere.) But it does show what you can do with halfway decent writing (Shakespeare’s poem, of course, being somewhat better than that) and a vision that is not only rich with aesthetic invention but with textual interest. (One of the problems with The Navigator is that no one had any idea what the libretto was even about.) It also goes to show the appeal of cohesion in art, the merits of everything working, and working in tandem. Where the elements which comprised The Navigator never quite seemed to gel (to the extent, in fact, that I initially thought incohesion was the piece’s central aesthetic principle, which it may well have been), those which comprise Venus & Adonis come together in such a way that one is reminded of the Honda commercial: “Isn’t it nice when things just work?”
For some, admittedly, not everything does. I remember one of Mr Boyd’s criticisms at the time of the piece’s Melbourne season, a suggestion that the theatremakers’ understanding of the text was, well, non-existent. While I don’t for a second profess to have a closer acquaintance with Shakespeare’s poem than Chris, who himself admitted to having only a passing familiarity with it, I would suggest that the extra ten months have given everyone time to get to know it somewhat better. (Though he’s right to criticise the footage of two horses fucking. It’s a cheap gag.)
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I didn’t catch Venus & Adonis when it opened at the Malthouse Theatre last April, mostly because my world was in a tizz at the time, and time wasn’t something I had very much of. When Mr Boyd didn’t think much of it, I decided not to waste any more of the little I did have. (Not that Chris is my go-to guy on matters of taste, of course. Ms Croggon, for her part, loved the show. But then I rather suspected—forgive me, Alison—that the poet in her might have been predisposed to do so.) I’m not sure what it was that compelled me to go along when the show came to Sydney, though it likely had something to do with the fact that it was part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s Next Stage line-up. Next Stage is Wharf2Loud with a new name, and the three Wharf2Loud shows I saw last year were routinely excellent. (Two of them, Frankenstein and Highway Rock ‘n’ Roll Disaster, were my favourite two shows of the year.) I can see why Blanchett and Upton decided to bring Venus & Adonis north of the border: on opening night, Upton spoke about how this stream of programming was set up to encourage exploration, of text and theatrical form. This show certainly meets that criterion. Like The Navigator, Venus & Adonis, too, aims high. And in this case, it hits its mark.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 5 March 2009