Woody shares some thoughts on our most recent project
Hello. So, on Tuesday we went into the middle of that London they have now to do a gig at Senate House Library. We were performing our adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae, called “Before They Told You What You Are”, to an academic conference called “The Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Reception of the Ancient World”. It went rather well, so I thought I’d tell you a bit about it.
In doing theatre, one is occasionally required to do odd things. Fairly close to the top of that list, for me, is smuggling two big bags of soil in through the café of a library. It is pipped at the post for the top spot because after the performance the soil was out of the bags and contained in a bundle of tarpaulin, which we threw into a nearby skip-looking thing. It’s tricky to seem nonchalant when one appears to be disposing of a body wrapped in a dust-sheet. This was made necessary because the centrepiece of our “stage” was a box full of earth. This, representing the mountainside outside Thebes, was where a lot of the impressive bits of the story, and all the supernatural elements took place. During the course of the play it is where the women of the Bacchic cult caused spouts of wine and milk to appear by divine magic; it is where I was torn apart by those women for intruding into their space and denying the divinity of their new god; it is where we ended the piece by having SJ Brady’s incarnation of Agave scrabble desperately in the dirt for some evidence of the divine spirit which uprooted her life and then abandoned her. At the beginning of the piece’s development, when By Jove co-Artistic Director Mr David Bullen first suggested having a box full of “Theban soil”, we the company played devil’s advocate and made him justify the idea in clear terms. I’m so glad he succeeded in convincing us, because it was a wonderful thing with which to play. The scent of the soil pervaded the room. Its position in the centre of the stage, with with audience sat in traverse either side of it, made the women of the Dionysian cult and their striving for liberation the focus of everyone’s thoughts. It meant that when I was playing Pentheus and intruding upon the rites, I did feel I was transgressing a sacred space when I stepped onto the soil. It meant our audience couldn’t sit passively watching at the end of the play, because the thing on which we’d been focusing and all it represented was now sent flying towards them in dark, earthy clods by SJ’s scrabbling. Also, serious theatrical practitioners though we are, it is still rather jolly to have a muck-about in some dirt. This fun alone justifies the fact it will be a few days before our fingernails are clean.
“Theban soil. Good dark Theban soil, which nurtured my mother, Semele.”
The piece itself was a series of short snapshot two- and three- handed scenes written by Ms Wendy Haines, interrupted by a few speeches and poems scribbled by yours truly. Our writing styles seem to contrast and compliment each other quite nicely. You see, when Wendy comes to a problem while writing she meticulously tweaks each word and phrase until the problem dissolves itself into the new perfect whole. I tend to throw paragraphs at it until the problem gives up and goes home. It works, I think, because we here at By Jove like to mix the political with the poetic, the human with the mythic. It meant that though our narrative and characters are lifted from canonical greats (in this case Euripides) our audiences get engaging, new pieces; and we get to make our own socio-political points. The stories have survived because they’re good, our versions kick arse because of how we tell ’em.
We told the story focusing on three main threads: Pentheus, King of Thebes in his well-meaning but misguided way trying to “save” the women of the city and return them to their normal, traditional roles; Agave, his mother and aunt to the god Dionysus, seizing the Dionysian cult as route to her own liberation and freedom; and Dionysus, the god whose mother was a mortal of the Theban royal family, proving his divinity by punishing the aforementioned characters he holds as guilty for denying his godhood and causing his mother’s death , respectively. The god manipulates Pentheus into disguising himself as a woman and intruding on the women’s rites, leading to them tearing his head off with their bare hands. Victorious, and laughing at the idea the audience think their different from the mortals whose lives he’s just ruined, he abandons Agave to her fruitless scrabbling.
Fun fact: when watching a piece of theatre academics stare intently at you, giving no hint of if they’re enjoying it. As it happens, when we re-entered the room for a bit of post-gig Q&A, they waxed eloquent about how bloody fantastic they thought it was. I have neither the time nor the powers of recall to go into specific points, but I’ll give you an impression to titilate you between now and the new year when we’ll flog you tickets to see the full thing yourself.
First, the aesthetic. Particularly considering we we performing in a seminar room, we made the piece shine with theatricality. Using well-known techniques like having each character played by several actors over the run-time, signifying the characters through totemic pieces of costume, and watching the play as actors when not in a scene we turned what we were doing into a definite performance – something with which to engage. The piece has moments of intimate emotion, high rhetoric and poetry, and jolly silliness. Swapping tone and style kept everyone paying attention; never let your audience have time to even think about being disengaged. One can imagine such a blend of styles easily looking messy, but ours didn’t. Firstly it’s key to do everything with conviction, if you don’t commit to what you’re doing the audience will never buy it, but if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. Second is clarity, complete each gesture before moving on to the next, fluidity between events comes with rehearsal not by rushing to the next one. Then there’s something that doesn’t get always get the credit it should in theatre: music. Not songs, though they can work wonderfully, certainly not piping in a bit of something to cover a transition, I mean music in a scene as an intrinsic part of it. In this piece we had sitting on one side of the performance space with an amp and a bass guitar our Musical Director Mr Todd James. His music gives the company another layer with which to reinforce or deliberately undercut the emotional tone of what the actors are doing. We here at By Jove HQ want our theatre to impact on the audience’s view of the world. Music is a fantastic way to do this, it gets into your soul and lets us steer you to where we can best try to make our point to you.
The point in this play, which I’m glad to say all the audience members got, was that liberation is complex. Dionysus, god of ecstacy, did help the women of Thebes free themselves from their restrictive, traditional roles. But then they used that freedom to commit murder. The only character who wins is Dionysus, he manipulates people’s impressions of themselves and others to achieve his own goals and then buggers off. Liberation, agency, freedom from oppression are rightly attractive and desirable ideas. Quite what the world will look like when they are attained and how to get to that world are still complex conversations which require attention, effort, and care.
We will continue to work on this piece and re-stage it for your consideration in the early months of 2015. When we have details of when and where, we’ll tell you. I just thought you’d like to know what we’ve been up to. In the meantime I will aim to provide you something interesting to read on the blog every week.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
Woody
