Magpie2 opens at Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide with the double header Future Tense, directed by Benedict Andrews.
Murray Bramwell
Magpie has returned. It now has a series number -like a software package, or an engine. Magpie2. Reconfigured by former State Theatre Company Executive Producer, Chris Westwood, the company has set aside its theatre in schools charter to provide theatre works with the eighteen to twenty-six year old constituency in mind. It is a big move and there are no guarantees. The post-secondary cohort is hardly a demographically defined group and they are often unified by what they don’t like, and not the other way round.
Director Benedict Andrews and his creative associates have made a bold bid -not to please their peers by second guessing them- but by doing what all serious young insects should do: pleasing themselves first. For a start they have set up at the Queen’s Theatre, historic relic of the colonial drama which, with its flaked lime walls and long use as an inner city car park, passes very respectably as an industrial ruin as well.
Andrews has also arranged for Dirty House and Mistress Sirena, high profile avatars in the club scene to run The Bunker for the duration of the Future Tense season. This is not opportunism- blue light discos by other means- but a plain recognition by the young director that the aesthetics (and the chemicals) of rave culture combine streams of influence from film, from postmodern text and from new media that are evident in contemporary performance also. Magpie2 is interested in renewing the claim for theatre as part of this cultural coalescence.
The director has chosen well, and uncompromisingly, uncovering two works any company in the country would be hard-pushed to make a fist of. Mercedes by German playwright Thomas Brasch is a fractured narrative which echoes some of the events around the kidnappping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schlyer in Cologne in 1977. But the exact chronology of events and the players are ambiguous. Sakko, a former delivery driver for Mercedes Benz is not so much downsized as atomised, reduced to counting Mercedes cars from a street corner. Oi, a young woman, co-conspirator, lost soul, succubus- who knows what?- taunts and tempts him, shares a sacrament of datura with him and helps him drive nails into the temples and knees of their unidentified hostage.
Designer Imogen Thomas uses the large performance space with cinematic flair. Lit with huge sprays of sidelights by Geoff Cobham and Mark Pennington, the performers, assisted by astutely managed voice mikes, maintain a stillness, a studied dissociation which is rivetting. The landscape is like that of a crummy Western- cattle bones and scrub, with bits of Mercs sticking out of the ground. Downstage right is one full size model, hood down, lights flashing, all mod cons for the Berlin badlanders.
As Sacco, Nathan Page, is a suitable case for treatment – the narrative is framed by the naming of sixteen experiments with lugubrious announcements such as “the Experimental Subject: First Dialogue” and so on. He also convinces at a more naturalistic level. Rebecca Havey is excellent as Oi, creating a hotchpotch of Australian suburban slang and American movie cliche. Affectless and disingenuous she provokes and observes her feckless comrade. As the unnamed hostage, Frank Whitten’s death speech- just as the last nail goes in – is as startling and incidental as Brueghel’s fall of Icarus.
The second work, by French writer Bernard-Marie Koltes has the aromatic title In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields. It is a dialogue between two strangers- one known as the Client, the other, the Dealer. As Andrews writes in his program notes -“Each speaks in vast aria like speeches about what it means to deal with each other, to fear each other and to need each other…language is used as a weapon, to probe, to protect, to subdue, to bargain, to lie, to betray and to strip.”
Frank Whitten is hypnotic as the Dealer, unctuously concilatory, temptingly reasonable, at turns kindly and menacing. As the Client Nathan Page is a match for the game, except his character keeps watching the goal posts move. The two players circle and stalk each across the vast stage, their voices muted but completely audible, Heuzenroder’s soundtrack lightly agitating the exchange. Imogen Thomas’s decor still includes the Mercs, now parked in rows. At the back of the stage is a large cloth which captured silhouettes of the actors.
Koltes’ writing is poetic and compressed, the situation could be something from David Mamet or My Menacing Chance Meeting with Andre. Benedict Andrews has found a fine text here- as when the Dealer says like some mysterious tempter: “Speak it as though you were speaking to a tree or facing the wall of a prison or in the solitude of the cotton fields where you are out walking naked at night .Tell me without meeting my eye.”
Future Tense is a creditable beginning for Magpie and for Benedict Andrews. It stakes a claim for new theatre in Adelaide that has already raised questions about accessibility and those fugitive fears about drama being too brainy. But Andrews has done his part, he has no need to defend his choices. It’s not his fault if the future is tense. But we can thank him for making it this bright.
RealTime June, 1997.