Adelaide Festival
Music Theatre
O dream of joy this departure is indeed, a spellbinding voyage through sight and sound
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Tiger Lillies.
Her Majesty’s Theatre , 58 Grote Street.
Duration 1 hours 30 minutes
March 12. Tickets $ 30 – $ 79
Bookings : BASS 131 246 or adelaidefestival.com.au
Until March 14.
One of the great narrative poems in English literature, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written in 1797 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a gripping tale of misadventure and doom. It is a nightmare life-in-death account of a sailor, who after impulsively shooting an albatross, brings supernatural vengeance on his ship and crew. The tribulations of the mariner are like a voyage to hell and he lives only to penitentially repeat his tale.
UK group The Tiger Lillies, along with animator and photographer, Mark Holthusen, have not just adapted Coleridge’s poem, they have keelhauled it. The result is a mind-bending ninety minutes of visual and musical phantasmagoria. Led by songwriter and vocalist Martyn Jacques on accordion and piano, fellow Tiger Lillies , Adrian Stout (on contra bass, theremin and musical saw) and percussionist Mike Pickering, navigate a seamless, sometimes relentless, score that has the mordant detachment and bitter humour of Weimar cabaret. .
Dressed in cream dungarees and cloth caps, the musicians, with garish white and rouge faces and black-ringed eyes, are like sinister clowns – especially Jacques, the baleful narrator. Singing in his snarling near-falsetto, he has replaced Coleridge’s Wedding Guest with Brecht and Weill’s Mack the Knife.
The songs, accompanied by woozy theremin, jaunty accordion and high hat drum are a mix of styles – polka, ballad, shanty, swing, slow blues and funeral march – with echoes of Tom Waits, the Divine Comedy and even, that other boat song aficionado, Nick Cave. The three Albatross songs are haunting, Water Water is an eerie lament, and the monstrous visions of Palace by the Sea are vivid. But not everything works – Hypocrites is jarring, and Cabin Boys needlessly casts the Mariner as depraved rather than, in the original, a man who suffers catastrophe for a single error of judgement. That said, Martyn Jacques’ jagged lyrics are a bold departure from Coleridge’s sonorous rhymes, retaining familiar fragments of the original but only fleetingly.
In this production the main narrative is visual. Mark Holthusen’s extraordinary design envelops the musicians with a huge projection screen behind them and a gauze curtain in front, on to which appears a continuous surge of images and apparitions.
It is like a giant Victorian pop-up book with curly waves, ice floes, sailing ships and increasingly gargantuan sea serpents. The albatross is a rudimentary stringed marionette given pathos by its simplicity. Then Holthusen adds the most sophisticated digital photography to create wraith-like sailors, or the diaphanous Death Maiden with lace and streaming hair. This spellbinding combination of sight and sound holds us as surely as the Mariner’s own telling.
Murray Bramwell
Published as “O dream of joy this departure is indeed a spellbinding voyage through sight and sound” The Australian, March 14, 2014, p.14