Reviews in full
http://www.theatre-wales.co.uk/
Bill Hopkinson
October 2002
That which comes after
If you want to see the full range of work by Wales’ cutting-edge
playwrights, you’re probably used to going a bit further
afield. This time you would have to go a little further than usual:
Graz in Austria, to be precise. Here, Kaite O’Reilly has
been collaborating with American Director Phillip Zarrilli and
the Austrian company Theatre Asou to create Speaking Stones. It
is a montage of images, voices and fragments which describes its
subject as “that which comes after…” It requires
the full journey of the evening to understand what this means.
The show opens with a sung lament, and a stage divided by laboriously
built dry stone walls. We could be in rural Wales or the mountains
of Greece. One of the walls comes crashing down covering the
stage with stones, and a farmer’s son remembers the harshness
of the land. Gradually we meet characters whose lives are rooted
in this landscape and in the fruit of the land: stones, which
are transformed by the love and tenderness the performers lavish
on them. As they move across the rubble, creating images that
remind us of the wars of the twentieth century, we seem to be
in many places at once, but the sense of dispossession, of being
uprooted is the most immediate and powerful impression. Marching
songs, poems, lullabies and the terse communications of soldiers
provide the score for a dance of transformations as the performers
leave their human characters behind becoming abstract shapes,
‘zeros’ and finally stones, like those they hold.
The power of these transformations is their ability to resonate
with a multiplicity of interpretations, which never stray into
the gratuitously beautiful, are always rooted in a place and
a sense of belonging. At one and the same time these people
are earth and human, living on their land and being evicted,
surviving and being ethnically cleansed, possessing and being
dispossessed.
Credited as both writer and dramaturg, Kaite O’Reilly
and her collaborators offer powerful political theatre, which
defies aesthetic categories and reminds us of our humanity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the work has not been well received in
Austria where right-wing nationalism is on the rise, and the
issue of asylum seekers is even more fraught than it is here.
It is an understatement to say that this is a great shame, as
it might mean that the work does not get seen elsewhere in Europe,
another stone in the wall of insular, parochial nationalism
which the work so elegantly demolishes.
“that which comes after…” may be survival,
or it may mean joining the stones in the field. The choice is
left to us. It seems unlikely that you will get to see this
work… I hope this has offered you a fragmentary sense
of its power and immediacy.
Bernadette Cronin
October 2002
Speaking Stones
Scripted by Kaite O'Reilly, directed by Phillip B. Zarrilli
and performed by Theater ASOU (Graz, Austria), 'Speaking Stones'
premiered in the Theater im Palais in Graz on September 12th,
the day after the anniversary of the mass destruction witnessed
by the world in America last year. This piece represents an
attempt to engage with devastation in the aftermath of war and
to explore the possibilities of dissolving barriers and bringing
about reconciliation.
Stillness, gestures and text are all of equal importance in
this complex, finely woven montage of images, gestures and music.
The six performers are stones, ancient witnesses to the history
of humanity. The performance is an answer to the question, what
would stones tell us if they could speak?
The entire piece is rock-like in its formation: interwoven
into Kaite O'Reilly's text are fragments from Brian Rotman's
Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Kazuo Ohno's The
Dead Sea and Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones. It was crafted
together with Phillip Zarrilli for an ensemble whose commitment
to their art has led them to engage intensively with and internalize
an extensive range of theatre practices from several different
cultures: Japanese, South American, Chinese and Indian. Add
to this synergy the influence of Artaud's writings and visionary
ideas, a set with lovingly built stone walls, superb lighting
and the end product is a virtuoso piece of theatre which could
not have more relevance to our times, where devastation and
human suffering are regular occurrences.
The opening tableau - one performer moves at a glacial pace
behind cleverly positioned picture frames carrying a large ticking
clock - arrests the spectator with its visual beauty and takes
them gently by the hand into the world of the stone, into a
different zone where seeing and not distraction or quick-fix
gratification is priority. The same figure moving in the opposite
direction relinquishes the spectator back to the 'real world'
at the end of the piece, after affording them a range of insights,
which might be described in the words of Walter Benjamin as
'images blasted out of the continuum of history'.
More than the subtlety and grace of the performers' movements,
the technically irreproachable quality of their voices and song,
were the honesty, vulnerability and generosity of their performance,
which clearly also reflects on a relationship of deep trust
with their director. These are performers whose years of ensemble
work and finely so well attuned to one another that they can
be present to themselves before their audience , giving the
spectator a sense of privilege to be there. They are indeed
what Artaud calls 'athletes of the heart'.
The local journalists reacted badly to the piece - an unfortunate
circumstance, which will probably prevent Theater ASOU from
touring with 'Speaking Stones'. At a time when Austrian politics
seem to have forgotten the mass destruction caused by fascism,
it is regrettable that this highly sophisticated and beautifully
crafted.
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