The verb “to be” in most modern European
and south Asian tongues can be traced back to a verb in the
Indo-European proto-language which meant literally “to be lost in the
woods”. This is a more cogent and interesting explanation of the
driving image behind Calixto Bieito’s Shakespearean mash-up than
anything one may derive from the piece itself, a contribution to the
World Shakespeare Festival seen in Birmingham in September and now
visiting London. Bieito and his dramaturg Marc Rosich appear to have
taken the forest as an emblem for love, violence, death… all sorts of
extremity, and most of the things that make us human. This casts the
net so wide as to make the exercise pointless.
Bieito’s cast (four British, three Catalan) begin by disporting
themselves around a bare tree perched atop a squat, cubical
2001 black monolith on an otherwise
bare white stage. The text in this phase comes predominantly from
As You Like It, marking out the
forest as a “temporary autonomous zone”, so to speak. Over the course
of 100 minutes, matters grow darker and more violent. The monolith is
shredded to disgorge a great mound of earth on which performers writhe
and half-bury themselves; singer Maika Makovski’s voice becomes less
Joanna Newsom and more Diamanda Galás; Katy Stephens staples Roser Cami
to a wall in a form of sexual assault; texts are now taken from all
over Shakespeare’s dramatic canon, as well as the sonnets and narrative
poems, and have long ceased to give a damn about any sylvan motif. From
violence to death, and a Beckettian despair as Josep Maria Pou crouches
beneath the
Godot-like bare
tree and records what is in effect Timon of Athens’ Last Tape. Suddenly
the lights snap up, the players resurrect and begin to bedeck the tree
with red balloons (are there 99? I didn’t count). This struck me less
as a kind of
Golden Bough
symbol of regeneration and cyclism than as akin to Bobby Ewing stepping
out of the shower in
Dallas
and indicating that the previous season has all been a dream.
Hayley Carmichael, George Costigan, Stephens and Pou all give of their
best, but in the service of what? I had rather expected Bieito, having
chosen his symbol, to give at least a glimpse of how and why it works
rather than just leaving it to sit there while he free-associates. More
fool me.
Written for the Financial
Times.