Is a puzzle without a solution
ultimately as pleasurable or fulfilling as one with? This stage
adaptation of the first novel in Paul Auster’s New York trilogy is
clever and adroit at finding ways of representing the book's
tergiversations and onion-layered level games in performance, but
doesn’t seem to convey a point to even such mentally gymnastic
going-nowhere.
As I say, though, 59 Productions’ presentation (which comes to the
Lyric Hammersmith in April) is admirable. It’s inspired by the
subsequent graphic novelisation as much as by Auster’s story itself.
Jenny Melville’s set is entirely a pretext for Lysander Ashton’s video
designs, which change locations in mid-sentence or animate metaphors
while we watch. (There’s even a Virtual Reality prelude available in
the foyer which, characteristically, I seemed to break just by looking
at it.)
Such virtuoso jiggery-pokery matches the story, which is a
metafictional detective noir. A writer named Daniel Quinn is seduced
into pretending to be a detective named Paul Auster in order to protect
a strange bird named Peter Stillman from a different species of strange
bird named Peter Stillman; in the process, writer Quinn/detective
Auster requests the help of writer Paul Auster (who is still not the
Paul Auster who authors or recounts this story) and, in order to get
close to Stillman(2), pretends variously to be Stillman(1), one of his
(Stillman (2)’s) fictional creations and, er, Quinn. He goes as mad as
Don Quixote (notice those DQ initials?) pondering authorship, creation,
reality etc. You may think this is a rubbish explanation, but I repeat
that there
is no explanation.
Leo Warner’s cast of six are deft at what they do, which renders
namechecks here impossible, what with actors taking multiple roles and
multiple actors taking the same role – that of Quinn/"Auster"/whoever –
often simultaneously. It matches the aesthetic of flickering,
constantly shifting realities marvellously. It strikes me, however,
that such confusion on the page allows us a requisite distance to
observe and evaluate it, whereas confusion performed is right there and
we with it and amidst it. That may be 59’s intention; after all, Quinn
(etc) himselves finds the trickery all pointless. But we’re allowed to
require more.
Written for the Financial
Times.