The opening of Simon McBurney’s latest
Complicité co-production was delayed for a week. This might not be
unrelated to the presence of a TelePompTer bolted to the balustrade of
the theatre’s balcony and clearly visible reflected in the massive
video wall upstage. This is a wordy evening, and the words are taken at
a gallop by the Anglo-American company of eight as they narrate and
re-create episodes from the life of Jewish Harlem kid turned Hollywood
actor turned Paramount supremo Robert Evans (the title is taken from
Evans’ memoir).
And yet it’s just possible that the conspicuous autocue may be part of
the whole complex of screen images in this stage production. Live video
projections are thrown upstage, off to one side and even on to a fridge
door; pre-recorded video backgrounds are projected to the side with
actors on stage performing against them, then the combination is shot
and shown upstage. Clips from Evans productions such as
Rosemary’s Baby and
Chinatown jostle with actors
onstage playing the other actors onscreen. It’s the kind of live
multimedia torrent that characterises much of Complicité’s work, trying
to round out and deepen stage presentations. And yet what is happening
here is that everything is purposely tending towards the two dimensions
of cinema.
It’s an often exhilarating kind of cubist rendering, but it has its
limits. McBurney and co-adapter James Yeatman try to portray not just
Evans’ life but that of America, sometimes too obliquely as when the
account of Evans’ movie
The Cotton
Club intercuts with audio clips from Malcolm X and Gil
Scott-Heron’s appositely titled 1980s state-of-the-nation rap “B
Movie”. I suspect McBurney is aiming for an Eisensteinian kind of
montage, but too often it comes out as a messier collage.
The company includes Heather Burns, Christian Camargo, Clint Dyer and
Danny Huston; it’s all but impossible to tell who is playing who and
when, but surely – surely! – Huston delivers the single line ascribed
to his father John. Technical jiggery-pokery might be much in evidence,
but this is driven by McBurney’s more recent fascination with the music
of multi-layered speech. In the end you simply have to let it all wash
over you, like Deborah Kerr in
From
Here To Eternity, or to shrug at the impenetrability and mutter,
“Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”
Written for the Financial
Times.