Surely there must be something in a performance that is beyond words. The presence of the ineffable is what demands something be performed rather than written on a piece of paper and handed out before the audience take their seats (though many directors fall foul of that temptation). Thus is mused over a sweet pint of larger in a Tottenham Court Road pub, some hour or so after Rashomon at RADA, part of their director showcase. If only the practice lived up to the theory.
As a director showcase, one must place responsibility for a show's success (or otherwise) on the shoulders of the director. While they may be working with a limited cast, budget and equipment, it is they alone who made the choices they made given the circumstances they were under. If you have 20 minutes to make a performance, you do what you can with that time, and if you do it well it will be recognised. There are no excuses, only reasons.
Anyhow, with that in mind....The play examines an event - involving rape and murder in a Japanese forest - told from four different characters' view points. It is a re-working of a Kurosawa film, generally considered a masterpiece. There are inevitably questions about the validity of each telling, reflections on the nature of truth and what can be believed about things that happen and of those who make them happen. By being involved in an event, one is cleaved to a certain subjectivity that will render any re-telling an inherent lie. There is no absolute truth. Thus ends the philosophising. No further questions are probed and it would appear that no more detailed questions were probed in the process by which it got to this performance.
One element that left a particular sour taste was the portrayal of the female character. She appeared in the first three tellings as a hysterical creature, shifting wildly from intense sexual desire (despite having been raped only moments previously) to screaming and flailing about without any anchor in an honest character development. She is a function of a male re-telling. I can accept that this is perhaps a comment on that re-telling and I applaud any performance that provokes a reflection in the audience of how a particular person is portrayed. But I suspect that, in fact, this is a reiteration of a very old fashioned way of viewing female sexuality and a woman's place within a male society. The performance pushed all of the emotion outward, and contained none of it within. If the shrillness could have been turned to steeliness one feels that that same character, with the same words emerging from her mouth, could have been a strongly and honestly rendered woman.
In the final telling, in which we are led to believe that perhaps the characters are behaving how they actually did, the woman is still a caricature of herself - a sort of Eastenders-style "angry female lover" that one can imagine seeing outside that same pub earlier mentioned later on in the night shouting at a brutish boyfriend. It is not good enough to make this your definitive version of a strong woman.
There was little or no sense of variation in the pacing or tone throughout. The clearly noted jokes within the play are not drawn out or utilised. The lack of reaction may have had something to do with a small (less than half full) audience - a shame as in a different atmosphere this performance might have sparkled a lot more. The (male) director, Minjae Kang, does show some initiative in using the space interestingly, making use of a sense of height and making the most of a theatre-in-the-round formation of the GBS Theatre downstairs at RADA. What he has failed to do is to develop a real sense of who these characters are or to develop more seeking questions raised by this play. One does sense the lack of a dramaturg in the process, someone to ask the most difficult but important question: why?
Still, there is no doubt that these showcases are useful vehicles for exploring what it is like for these directors to enter full professional practice. However, it has demonstrated a failing that many in professional practice also fall victim to: it never sought to explore ideas that cannot be put into words. Perhaps we all could have saved the effort and read a synopsis instead.
- James Grogan
As a director showcase, one must place responsibility for a show's success (or otherwise) on the shoulders of the director. While they may be working with a limited cast, budget and equipment, it is they alone who made the choices they made given the circumstances they were under. If you have 20 minutes to make a performance, you do what you can with that time, and if you do it well it will be recognised. There are no excuses, only reasons.
Anyhow, with that in mind....The play examines an event - involving rape and murder in a Japanese forest - told from four different characters' view points. It is a re-working of a Kurosawa film, generally considered a masterpiece. There are inevitably questions about the validity of each telling, reflections on the nature of truth and what can be believed about things that happen and of those who make them happen. By being involved in an event, one is cleaved to a certain subjectivity that will render any re-telling an inherent lie. There is no absolute truth. Thus ends the philosophising. No further questions are probed and it would appear that no more detailed questions were probed in the process by which it got to this performance.
One element that left a particular sour taste was the portrayal of the female character. She appeared in the first three tellings as a hysterical creature, shifting wildly from intense sexual desire (despite having been raped only moments previously) to screaming and flailing about without any anchor in an honest character development. She is a function of a male re-telling. I can accept that this is perhaps a comment on that re-telling and I applaud any performance that provokes a reflection in the audience of how a particular person is portrayed. But I suspect that, in fact, this is a reiteration of a very old fashioned way of viewing female sexuality and a woman's place within a male society. The performance pushed all of the emotion outward, and contained none of it within. If the shrillness could have been turned to steeliness one feels that that same character, with the same words emerging from her mouth, could have been a strongly and honestly rendered woman.
In the final telling, in which we are led to believe that perhaps the characters are behaving how they actually did, the woman is still a caricature of herself - a sort of Eastenders-style "angry female lover" that one can imagine seeing outside that same pub earlier mentioned later on in the night shouting at a brutish boyfriend. It is not good enough to make this your definitive version of a strong woman.
There was little or no sense of variation in the pacing or tone throughout. The clearly noted jokes within the play are not drawn out or utilised. The lack of reaction may have had something to do with a small (less than half full) audience - a shame as in a different atmosphere this performance might have sparkled a lot more. The (male) director, Minjae Kang, does show some initiative in using the space interestingly, making use of a sense of height and making the most of a theatre-in-the-round formation of the GBS Theatre downstairs at RADA. What he has failed to do is to develop a real sense of who these characters are or to develop more seeking questions raised by this play. One does sense the lack of a dramaturg in the process, someone to ask the most difficult but important question: why?
Still, there is no doubt that these showcases are useful vehicles for exploring what it is like for these directors to enter full professional practice. However, it has demonstrated a failing that many in professional practice also fall victim to: it never sought to explore ideas that cannot be put into words. Perhaps we all could have saved the effort and read a synopsis instead.
- James Grogan
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