The rest is silence...

Last night I sat down to watch an interview that Kerry O'Brien had recorded with Marcel Marceau during his recent trip to Australia in 2003.

Reflecting on the post I penned yesterday, I have thought a little more on what I said at the end of the post:

His death reminds us not only of the beauty of his performance but of the way that theatre can take us to places that no other art form in the world can. With so many trying to out-do each other with technical and multimedia effects, it is timely to remember that the journeys that Marceau carried audiences on can be reached with the mere flick of a hand, or the look of an eye.

I have seen a fair amount of interesting theatre in the last few years. A fair amount of bad theatre too. But essentially, most of the theatre I see is adequate.

Adequate in that actors can say their lines. The script is pretty good and that the production values of the play have covered all the bases and supported the actors appropriately.

But so often I walk out of the theatre perplexed at how so many directors cram their productions with bells and whistles, flashing lights, sponsored sets, overwhelming soundscapes and dreaded filmic elements.

Something has been forgotten. A missing key.

Thinking about the art of mime and watching some footage of Marceau over the weekend, it has affirmed my belief that so much of the theatre I see has forgotten the art of silence. The art of simplicity.

If you want any guide into what I am talking about, you need not go any further than Peter Brook:
... there are two ends of the pole of silence. There is a dead silence, the silence of the dead, which doesn't help any of us and... there is the other silence, which is the supreme moment of communication - the moment when people normally divided from one another by every sort of natural human barrier suddenly find themselves truly together... In between two silences.. are the... areas where all the questions arise.

I think that when Brook talks of the silence between people, it is not only that which exists between actors, but that which exists between actors and the audience.

I knows it's a cliche to pull a quote from Brook to support a statement, but I think it's relevant to consider the lost of art of silence that theatre in Sydney is plagued by.

The digital age has brought about a need by so many companies and directors to fill silences and not leave anything to the imagination. The amount of times I have seen a lighting or sound cue destroy what could have spoken in greater volumes through silence makes me sometimes despair.

From much of the theatre I have seen of late, it seems that many directors have (through what I believe is an imagined fear) tried to compete on the technology stakes so that they can produce the latest, bestest, amazingest theatre experience that throws the gauntlet down to any of your facebook'd, second life'd virtual fantasy.

I know that the reason for this in some instances is that a handful of directors are wasting our time by using the theatre medium as a stepping stone into their real dreams of entering a career as music video director or film producer, but on the whole this journeying into technologically-induced-theatre (TIT) is a blind assumption on where theatre is heading.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to try out new elements of theatre technology as they make themselves available, but too many directors are using the technology as cornerstones of their rehearsal journey, not as the support instruments to a more organic process.

Robert Lepage is one great director who has deliberately installed the bells and whistles of TIT to tell his stories. Where he departs from a lot of what I see in Sydney is an astonishing ability to use the technology as a beginning to an end result of simple story-telling.

He said in an interview that "in my own work, the difference is that my starting point is a strictly formal one: just trying to get a form on stage and to have actors and collaborators visit that space, that form, and to try and find what stories it contains."

You can see evidence of the misuse of technology in Sydney theatre on a weekly basis when basic director skills in the movement of actors and in the discovery of simple theatrical processes is non-existent. So often I sit and am amazed at not only the lost opportunities, but the convoluted nature of production values.

More often that not, the embarrassing affect of this vamped up TIT is when you see an actor struggling under the weight of the 'amazing mood' of the music or the 'amazing mood' of the lighting. It becomes clear that the actor has found something else in rehearsal but is fighting against it because of the dictates in direction of design.

It all gets very tiring for audiences who aren't as stupid as many think. But somehow directors feel it necessary to clobber a hundred or so punters over the head with not only a clear text, but in the re-enforcement of the music, re-enforcement of the lighting and the indulgence of direction. It all adds up to getting the message three times all at once... "oh, I see!! This is a dramatic moment!" The end result is a theatre that is beginning to look a little uniform, corporate and mercantile*.

Enough already.

I am not alone in sharing the opinion of many that dislike the new multimedia affects now regularly used in so many shows. The central problem of the multimedia is that as soon as you throw a two-dimensional blanket over a three dimensional image, you deflate it quicker than a helium balloon with a flame. Whoof!

I apologise if I am preaching to the converted, but it seems so many have forgotten the art of story-telling. Theatre has with it an element that no technology can ever compete with and that is the raw nerve of human interaction.

"If the world of sameness refuses to absorb the element of otherness that every group and human being unconsciously carries within themselves, just as Pentheus refuses that mysterious, feminine Dionysiac element that attracts and fascinates him, despite the horror he claims to feel for it, then all that is stable, regular and the same tips over and collapses... The victorious eruption of Dionysusis a sign that otherness is being given its place with full honours at the centre of the social system."**

Theatre can learn a lot from the great Marceau and it's not just his passion for theatre, but in his ability to capture silence and overwhelm an audience by sliding it in next to the imagination of many. That is theatre and that is what takes an audience anywhere you want them to go.


* Michael Kustow, Theatre @ Risk, Metheun 2000
** Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Zone Books 1999