 |
Photo by Guido Mencari | www.gmencari.com |
Today I experienced Romeo Castellucci’s
theatre for the first time: Oresteia
at the Odéon Théâtre. Wow. I know he is considered one of Europe’s most
exciting experimental dramaturgs, and though his work has played on Paris
stages a number of times, tickets are nearly impossible to get. And now I know
why. This is among the most inspiring theatre I have seen. It’s mindblowing. I
don’t really have a language with which to write about this, it is so far from
anything I have seen and know. However, I must blog it because everyone needs
to know about Romeo Castellucci.
Where to begin? The man behind me
told his companion on a couple of occasions that “these characters are all out
of Alice in Wonderland.” Which they
are not. I know why he said this though, and will give him the benefit of the
doubt that he was not just referring to the centrality of a rabbit who leads the chorus. There is something so ominous, grey, apocalyptic about the visual and
sonic density of Castellucci’s Oresteia
that it could be taking place down the rabbit hole, behind the looking glass. The
whole of the first part of the Aeschylus
trilogy unfolds behind a black scrim, giving the
stage a blurred lens, making the hellish world of war even more intrepid. The
cold, ruinous world behind the scrim is the stage for the power,
violence, and the horror of subjection that plague a mythical world at war with
itself. Of course, there must be some resonance for an audience in 2015.
 |
| Murder about to begin |
The bodies of the actors are everything for
Castellucci. Their physical appearances are also their allegorical significance
in the drama. Unlike the naked bodies of most actors we see on stage today,
Castellucci’s are bold and extreme in their size and shape: the actor who plays
Apollo is perfect in every way, except that he has no arms. Women are huge as
an expression of their power--Clytemnestra for example is obese “because she
weighed down heavily on the drama, and Agamemnon was played by a Down syndrome
actor “because he was a monarch, and did not enter into discussion.” Orestes
and Pylades are anorexic as a statement of their impotence, and because they are covered in flour, they have a ghost-like appearance, marking their
other-worldliness.
 |
| Torture before murder Photo by Guido Mencari | www.gmencari.com |
The events of the play are horrific -
murder, revenge, torture - when Oresteia kills his mother with a mechanical arm
holding a knife, thus, gives over all control, the bloody murder is
chilling. When the messenger whips the rabbit, having previously attached its
ears to a mechanical hoist, I wanted to jump out of my seat it was so violent. Much
of the action is accompanied by either music or silence. When there is talking,
the voices are often distorted, thus again, the meaning is not contained in the
words that are spoken, but in how they are articulated, and from what body.
However, none of this really articulates the
wonder of this theatre. It’s not about the story and neither is it about the
description of what takes place on stage. Castellucci says of Artaud in an
interview, that the great playwright was in fact a philosopher who happened to
present his ideas to the world through the theatre. I am tempted to say the
same of Castellucci. I am not really equipped to comment on his philosophy, but
I can comment on his mise-en-scène. Castellucci does everything. He is the
director, the scenographer, the lighting designer, the casting director, the
music director, and he creates a visual and sonic world of wonder. I kept
thinking that nothing is impossible to execute on this stage. Whatever he thinks of
he will do.
 |
| Monkeys |
To give one example, of which there are
many: in the final part of the surviving trilogy, after walking backwards and
forwards, over and over again, before a black-drawn curtain that extends across the stage, in silence, Orestes
rips down the curtain. Behind is a perfect circle in glass, through which we
see monkeys on scaffolding, free to move as they will. Orestes climbs into their space, together with
Athena (I think), and he becomes one of the monkeys. He moves with his
anorexic, almost pre-pubescent, body as they do, swinging from the scaffolding,
silently, crouched in reflection, before playing with each other and themselves
in the amber light of the aftermath of matricide. It was the most superb image:
it evoked the looking glass, the camera obscura, the telescope to another
world. We had already seen an albino donkey and a horse, as Castellucci uses
the animals for their significance to the definition of human nature, but
nothing prepared me for an image so beautiful to signify freedom from the barbarity
of the previous two hours.
This is avant-garde theatre at its most
exquisite and, to be honest, reading about it is not enough. Everyone must
experience Castellucci’s theatre at least once in their lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment