Nehad Selaiha experiences varieties of the postdramatic at the Vienna Theatre and Music Festival As I mentioned in my article last week, the majority of performances presented at the Wiener Festwochen this year belonged to what German theatre scholar and critic, Hans-Thies Lehmann, has called 'Postdramatic theatre', meaning a theatre that parts company with the basics of drama, traditional or otherwise, to assert its identity as live performance rather than 're-produced' text. I also noted that despite the new label, this brand of theatre, which comes in a great variety of forms, including Happening, site-specific, multimedia and actors- audience inter-active performances, has been with us since the 1960s, alternatively called 'avantgarde' or 'experimental'. In 3 of the productions I saw, however, some characteristics and features of this experimental trend were carried to new extremes. By far, the most staggeringly radical of those 3 productions was the Japanese Castle of Dreams by the Potudo-ru company. Conceived and directed by Daisuke Miura, a highly productive young author and director, hyped as the 'new star of the Tokyo theatre scene' and already quite famous in Europe, seemed to me like a drab and depressing parody of a silent porn movie, with a savagely ironic title, intended to put you off sex for life. On a stage dressed to look like a tiny, cluttered, one-room flat in Tokyo, almost completely papered over with pin-ups, posters and photos, with a toilet at the back, a door and kitchenette on one side, and no furnishings save a television set, a small piano and some cushions on the floor, we are shown, in crude, semi-documentary style, 24 hours in the life of 8 ordinary Japanese youths crammed into it either by choice or necessity. The hours are clearly marked by video projections on a screen that punctually descends to separate the scenes. At first, the stage is fenced off with a railing and a sheet of glass to suggest a window that occupies the whole side of this tiny flat, placing us, the audience, firmly outside it as voyeurs. As the day progresses, the window framing is lifted, admitting us into the flat, as it were, and making the auditorium an extension of it. In this 'castle of dreams', the predominantly naked youngsters seem to do nothing but have indiscriminate sex all the time with the body that happens to be nearest to them. They have it at all hours, upon waking, coming back from outside, or going to sleep, only briefly stopping to have a can of beer, eat crisps out of a bag, heat and consume instant noodles, watch television, play video games, dry their hair, go to the toilet (we see their shadows clearly through the opaque glass door), not forgetting to flush it noisily, or do some personal cleaning of their private parts. Radical as Miura's depiction of sex on stage was (with the naked actors sometimes performing fellatio and cunnilingus right before our eyes), it wouldn't have been as shocking and disgusting as many found it, or made some of the audience leave the theatre in protest halfway through as it did the night I was there, had it been tempered with any show of tenderness or respect for the human body. Even animals indulge in some sort of ritual love play before indulging in the act. But in Miura's Castle of Dreams, sex is coldly debased and humans are reduced to less than animals. Though they mostly crawl and creep on the floor and move on all fours to get from one place to another, only standing up momentarily to go to the sink, door, or toilet, they look quite artificial -- as artificial as no animal can ever look, with their weird hairdos, heavy make-up, or hair dyed blonde -- and their mating has a hard, mechanical quality to it. They seem driven to it not by any instinct to multiply, as animals are, or a healthy desire to satisfy basic needs, but, rather, by sheer boredom and the emptiness and futility of their lives. Rather than an animalistic community, living in harmony with nature, what we are shown in the Castle of Dreams is a distorted, artificial, inhuman community, spiritually, morally and emotionally bankrupt, held together by cement walls rather than by any shared memories, feelings or experiences, or any natural bonds of human sympathy, solidarity, or common purpose. Moreover, the absence of language, which Daisuke Miura is reported to call the "mother of fantasy and lies" and, therefore, bans from his stage works, was not here compensated for by any kind of body language that indicates human communication in any form or degree, or recognition of the 'other', other than as a sex object. A bleaker picture of young people in decaying, post-industrial affluent societies I do not think has ever been put on stage. And the bleakness was not lightened by the non-appearance of the actors at the end to take their bows. This was perfectly in line with Miura's style of documentary realism, I thought, which had made his actors fight in earnest, slap each other hard and have sex for real during the show. I left the theatre wondering about the artistic legitimacy of subjecting actors to such extremes of sadistic treatment at the hands of budding experimental directors. In contrast, Ruedi Höusermann's Walk to the Patent Office, though equally taxing to the performers, requiring musical skill and versatility and involving for each a series of intricate tasks to be performed in unison with the others' at split- second timing, must have been great fun to rehearse and play. Based on an entry in the diary of the poet-inventor and visionary Paul Scheerbart on 12 July 1910, in which he triumphantly announced that he had finally succeeded in "resolving the problem of perpetual motion flawlessly," but that, "unfortunately, ... [he] must remain silent about ... [it] since this would jeopardise its registration at the patent offices of several countries," A Walk to the Patent Office imaginatively recreates, in the form of a sophisticated musical children's game, the process by which this German designing engineer went about realizing his utopian dream of building a resource- saving machine that, once set going, would remain in motion forever, handling various tasks, and thus freeing humanity from the need to work and allowing it to devote its time to higher pursuits and nobler objectives. In preparation for the work, composer and director Ruedi Höusermann wrote a series of 25 quartets for four specially prepared one-hand pianos. Through mechanical manipulation, the pianos were converted into independent sound-boxes able to perpetually change their character. Then using his compositions and Scheerbart's texts and drawings, Höusermann and stage designer Barbara Ehnes developed a complex dramatic- musical work, set in an engineer's cluttered workshop, with sheets of metal, planks of wood, wheels, frames, diagrams and bits of machinery scattered everywhere. In perpetual motion, the performers sang, played the pianos, sawed real wood, put together contraptions and dismantled them and were always everywhere and completely engrossed in what they were doing like children seriously at play. Their various activities were dramatic, not in the traditional sense of represenation, but in that they were directed towards a particular end in view, thus keeping the viewer in suspense. The exertions end humorously with the construction of a self-propelled, one-seat carriage-like machine, which one of the performers mounts triumphantly and wheels off waving his hand at the audience. Described by one critic as "lightweight, madcap entertainment" and by another as a "complex tapestry of music, sound, noise, text and scenic images," A Walk to the Patent Office was for me an example of postdramatic theatre at its most delightful and exhilarating. Kristian Smeds's Cherry Orchard, performed by Lithuanian actors in a mixture of Russian, French and English, with a Finnish/Lithuanian technical crew, wa s an altogether different kettle of fish. It was nothing like Chekhov's Cherry Orchard as I know it from various English translations or previous performances, nor was it presented in a conventional venue. To see it, we had to travel by a special bus to an immigrant community on the outskirts of Vienna. Arriving at twilight at a park that forms part of the compound, we were invited to watch a football match in which some of the actors played alongside teenagers from the community, while others stood alongside and cheered and beat drums. This was intended to frame the performance at the start as a communal experience and collective feast, which is what Finnish director Smeds believes theatre should be. The game over, we were led into another part of the park where seats where arranged in several rows facing a large screen, as in an open-air cinema theatre. On one side of the screen, a small make- shift tent housed 3 musicians and a singer who played some Ravel songs, and next to it, a little further to the side, stood a large, wooden garden shed, with a curtain for a door. Thoughtfully provided with blankets against the night chill and fortified with cups of hot tea from real samovars, specially provided for the occasion, we were informed through a loudspeaker that the first and second acts of the play would take place inside the shed, where only a few of the audience could be admitted to watch it live, but would be simultaneously projected on the screen outside, with German subtitles, for the rest of the audience. In the interval between the two acts, those who watched the first act inside would give up their places for another party. The third act, which ends this performance, would take place outside, in front of the audience, and also be shown on the screen. I lined up for the first group to go inside; but once inside, I found the place too cramped, hot and stuffy and the proceedings so disconcerting that I was glad to escape at the interval. Except for one character coming in or going out, standing up or lying on the floor, for the most part, the actors, in modern dress and accompanied by an incessantly barking dog, sat squeezed together on two sides of the room, with copies of the play in their hands, alternately reading Chekhov's dialogue and freely improvising to connect the play with the present, as I gathered from the few sentences in English and French, while the audience, who were offered copies of the play in German at the outset to be able to follow the action if they did not know the play, or to see where the actors diverged from it if they did, occupied the two other sides on graded platforms. On the walls, behind the actors' backs, there were shelves and nooks carrying dusty books and an assortment of discarded objects and tools; among them, set-designer Jérat� Paul�kait� had set up a gallery of photographs of deceased Lithuanian and international artists, as if to link the present with the past. After a while, the closeness of the actors felt positively oppressive and the small room and all it contained felt like a fierce, relentless assault on the nerves and senses. But more disconcerting than anything else were the constant antics of the camera man, Lennart Laberenz, as he hopped around, often kneeling and crouching to take a particular shot for the benefit of the lucky people outside. I watched Act 2 on the screen, or, rather, caught a few glimpses of it in between dozing off and wandering around. With Act 3, however, the performance finally came into its own as a communal, festive event. It opened with Charlotta (played by Benas öarka) performing tricks with fire while dancing and ended with the sale of the cherry orchard and with Jonas Vaitkus, as Lopakhin, claiming the garden where we sat as his cherry orchard and ordering and physically pushing us, along with the actors, out. I thought the performance had ended, but was not sure since the actors stood amongst us and did not withdraw. Then I heard, rising from inside the garden over the noise, what sounded like a loud, fervent oration, which I later discovered was a poem by Salom�ja N�ris called "Our days are like feasts", read by one of the actors. At the end of it, we were welcomed back into the garden, actors and all, by members of the immigrant community who had welcomed and assisted Smeds and his actors with the production and on whose actual land we then stood. As the audience mingled with their hosts and the actors walked around filling our glasses with champagne, the air tingled with merriment and the silent night rang with laughter. By ending the play in this way, Smeds not only turned the performance into the kind of communal theatre he cherishes, he also communicated to us most vividly his political protest against the destruction of nature and beauty by greedy, capitalist investors, making us partners in the protest. I felt this protest all the more keenly as I conversed with a Persian/Austrian member of this community, who could speak both English and Arabic, and who told me how the company, who had sold them the houses in this semi-rural compound over 17 years ago, now wanted to buy them off the land to reinvest it in more lucrative projects and how they were determined to fight and hold their ground. Unlike to the Japanese Castle of Dreams, the Austrian/ German Walk to the Patent Office, or the Finnish/Lithuanian Cherry Orchard, I Am the Wind and Autumn Dream, both by Jon Fosse, Norway's leading playwright now and one of the most produced contemporary playwrights in the world, and both directed by the French Patrice Chereau, the former in English for the Young Vic Theatre in London, and the latter in French, for the Théâtre de la Ville company in Paris, were solidly text-oriented and seemed, therefore, more comfortably traditional, even though the texts that gave the performances shape and direction were anything but traditional in their language and dramaturgy. Written in a poetic language full of pauses, repetitions, contradictions and silences, with minimal, nearly non-existent action, nebulous, implicit conflicts and vague, ambiguous characters, and always dealing with such existential questions as loneliness, alienation, the sense of being lost and belonging nowhere and the inability to communicate with, or relate to other people, or to know, or express what one really feels or longs for, Fosse's plays have been described as 'balancing between theatre and poetry,' 'between the darkness of depression and light of mysticism,' and existing 'somewhere between realism and the absurd.' They have also been damned as 'undramatic', "wretchedly pretentious" and "interminably boring." In I Am the Wind, which vividly brought to my mind some of Samuel Beckett's later plays, particularly the ones for radio, such as Embers, a young man holds a conversation with his dead mate who threw himself overboard during a voyage on a boat at sea. The conversation, which recreates that voyage in all its details, is propelled by the desire of the living man to know why the dead one jumped off the boat. During the re-enacted voyage, which shows them setting out to the open sea, casting anchor and mooring at a little island, eating and drinking, they talk all the time without arriving at any definite meaning or idea. While the living man keeps asking questions to fathom the depths of the dead man's mind and help him define his feelings, the dead one repeatedly fails to articulate what he feels, fumbling for words, breaking in mid sentences, falling silent or speaking in metaphors. He speaks over and over of feeling heavy as a rock, of lying motionless at the bottom of the sea, of not liking himself or anybody, but not liking being alone either, for when he is alone, 'there is nothing.' He sees the fog as a concrete wall and himself also as a wall, but one that is cracking up and falling into rubble. Finally, when they unmoor the boat to return, the dead man decides against his companion's objections to get out on the open ocean where suddenly he hurls himself overboard as the wind rises, the waves heave and the sky turns black. Why did he do it? The only answer we and his companion get (in Simon Stephens's English translation, published by Oberon Modern Plays, 2011, p. 93) is: "I did it because I was so heavy." Death was the only way to get rid of the heavy burden of existence. Only when dead does the dead man feel light. The play ends with him saying: "I've gone / I left with the wind / I am the wind." Here, as in Autumn Dream, a play where the funeral of an old woman becomes the funeral of a whole family and, indeed, the whole world, and where the original graveyard setting was replaced in the performance with a red painted gallery in an art museum, director Patrice Chereau lent heavily on his set-designer, Richard Peduzzi, to pep up the poetic text with visual effects, letting him completely cover the performance area in water, except for a thin edge, and placing his two actors, Tom Brooke and Jack Laskey on a big square plank on top of some contraption that kept it rocking and popping up and down, just like a real boat on water. It is a credit to the actors that their drenched clothes and effort to keep their balance on the swaying plank did not stand in the way of their giving excellent performances. The same goes for the actors in Autumn Dream who kept me riveted to my seat even though I could barely make out the meaning of what was said in the French translation. Chapeau to Patrice Chereau and to the Vienna festival for hosting such a wild variety of theatre.
