I caught up with a couple of new productions on Saturday and Monday that both imposed something completely unexpected on the text, respectively creating environments and perspectives on the action that were not specified by either of the playwrights concerned.
In the case of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water, now at the Young Vic to November 8, designer Miriam Buether and director Walter Meierjohann have created a massive onstage lake that the actors perform the entire play on, wading through it ankle-deep and creating a splash in every sense as they move around it. (Even the piano is in the water - though I hope it is somehow protected from possible water damage). Not since Cirque du Soleil’s watery Las Vegas spectacle ‘O’ (and its rip-off successor, La Reve) has the use of water been so integral to a performance. The idea may takes its cue from a literal interpretation of the play’s title, and early on a character says, “It’s always about the water, my dreams. Near it or around it.”
But the intriguing thing is that nowhere is this translation of those themes specified in the playwright’s own stage directions.
I gather from sources close to the production, even the director had a loss of nerve close to the opening and thought about abandoning the water altogether. But actually that water enhanced for me the play’s mythical poetry, and sense of its characters’ otherness; though not all critics agree. According to Michael Billington review in The Guardian, “The mythic simplicity of McCraney’s story was overlaid by a conceptual production set in a shimmering pool. Even if the design doesn’t exactly drown the action, it also doesn’t help it…. Miriam Buether’s design set the action in a standing pool. It takes the light beautifully, and there is a surreal pleasure in seeing the show’s talented composer-performer, Abram Wilson, seated at a piano creating water music. But, acoustically, water is an unfriendly element, and I found much of McCraney’s language obscured by splashing feet. A play that might have had a strong emotional content here becomes an aquatic spectacle.” He concludes, “Although the production yields a host of strange images, it dominates the text rather than serving it. I’d love to see McCraney’s magically simple play on dry land.”
By coincidence, or perhaps not, I also saw another play last Saturday that made me wonder about what different ways of seeing it might look like, too: for the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs production of Leo Butler’s Faces in the Crowd, the audience is turned into those faces, peering down from above as we’re seated on a platform arranged around the perimeter of Dave’s studio flat in east London as he and the wife he abandoned ten years earlier are reunited for another bruising encounter. The intention, no doubt, is to turn us uncomfortably into voyeurs - a role we’re invariably cast in as theatregoers, but accentuated by a play here that is full-frontal, in every sense.
In an interesting blog on The Guardian website, Lyn Gardner wondered aloud, “For a play about debts (monetary and emotional) I did wonder how much the whole shebang cost.” And she went on, “Is the design of the play more interesting than the play itself? Is it genuinely in service of the play or there to disguise the play’s deficiencies - or make it seem more than it is? Could the play be done in any circumstances, or only in this particular, eye-catching way? How would the script stand up if it was simply played end on and on a bare stage? Of course in any production the design, lighting and sound and the directorial choices made are as crucial a part of the overall experience as the acting. But just as we’ve all come across actors who can make the telephone directory seem meaningful, it seems to me that I’m increasingly coming across stagings and design, site-specific or otherwise, that seem intended to dazzle so that you don’t actually question the content too closely. What you are often getting is lamb dressed as steak.”
That tension between form and content - between serving the play first and foremost or serving the creative team’s own attention-seeking wishes - is one that happens even in more conventional stagings, but we seem to be embarking on a new era of director and designer’s theatre where the play is now only becoming a starting point for other interpretative explorations and impositions. Directors like Peter Hall, Howard Davies and Michael Grandage famously respect the text and see it as their job to guide the actors in its interpretation, but then get out of the way; a new generation of directors, from the Young Vic’s Walter Meierjohann (a German with no previous track record over here, but who has suddenly ascended to the heights of being appointed an associate director of the theatre) to the Royal Court’s Clare Lizzimore, seem to be following in the footsteps of Rupert Goold in insisting on putting their footprints on the play. But are they stamping their mark on it - or stamping all over it?
