Theatre: A Dark and Beautiful Embrace.
Posted on Thursday, 20 December 2007 @ 18:29:33 by tim milfull
swirley writes:
Reviewed by Maree Boyce. 

A simple play showcasing the complexity of its characters, Beautiful, by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, has been lovingly translated by Mary-Brit Ackerholt, and brought to the stage in a fresh new Queensland production by director Andrea Moor. The production opens with waves cross-lapping on the shorelines of a ford; dialogue mimics this pattern before fading to a physical embrace in the shadow of the mountains above.

The waves of water evolve into the dialogue of characters whose words appear empty and lost in the phyical world and the suggested immensity of the stunning, mountainous Norwegian landscape. This suggested landscape is offstage, yet it holds centre-stage in the characters’ consciousness. So it could be seen as an unlisted pivotal cast member, shaping and impacting on all those living within its beautiful shadow. A shadow that lifts like cloud to reveal itself at the end. The relationship of landscape to the characters is an intriguing background to their complexity as they respond to each other and it.

Sometimes the dialogue and interplay reminds you of water lapping, fragmenting on the shore, echoing and resonating with what remains unsaid. It comes as no surprise that playwright Jon Fosse is also a renowned poet. The translator May-Britt Akerholt notes his distinctive use of rhythm and sound and when reproduced in English, audiences can experience its hypnotic cadence. Apparently, Fosse uses no punctuation in his plays and likes to use not just the word meaning, but devices like repletion, which are complimented by Andrea Moor’s direction and her use of the body language on the stage. It is a satisfying and faultless directorial debut, with Moor already having distinguished herself in acting, teaching and coaching acting. 

She is particularly successful in enacting this unsaid, as with the choreography of movement around a box as seat in early scenes of old friends meeting up again. These understated physical movements speak with more clarity about the state of each person and their relationship with others and their world than anything they could enunciate. Moor is on record as saying she was attracted to the play because it draws the audience in to listen to spaces that are particularly disturbing at times, especially with the relationship between the girl and the woman. 

This pattern of communication is refracted, and reflected by the set. An old boat shed two friends played in as kids stands, both real and symbolic, solid and yet see-through with perspex sides. This allows the audience transparency to see memories and shadows within, as well as present-day comings and goings. The whole set is pleasing as a concept, while functioning well as a space. It is built in the shape of an open, raised, sloping boat similar in shape to a balsawood raft, but showcasing local timbers in the flooring. The perspex boatshed acts almost as a square sail. The lighting draws out the subtle colours of the timber. There is one delightful sequence where the lighting mimics clouds passing overhead rapidly. The music acts as a motif throughout the production, but is subtle and supporting. The minimalist props work well, highlighting the starkness of characters’ interactions. 

The performances are notable with Ling-Hsueh Tang drawing audiences in with her unstable ‘Woman’, and Margi Brown Ash convincingly solid as ‘The Mother’. Jonathan Brand has real presence as ‘The Man’, and keeps the performances grounded with Christopher Sommers’s beautifully deliberate performance as ‘The Other Man’ down to his red-rimmed made-up eyes and slightly dishevelled clothes, suggesting that all is not usual there. Kevin Spink as ‘The Boy’ and Melissa Howard as ‘The girl’ are pleasing in their portrayal of a slow-budding, awkward interlude of youthful passion. 

This simply-wrought work will challenge audiences to consider the complexities between characters, the relationship interplay between them, and the backdrops of existence, the landscapes of memory and actuality sculpted in rock, tide and flesh - how we are shaped by the forces around us, and in turn shape each other. This play is simply beautiful in its starkness, but its dark embrace draws us closer.

Moor Theatres production of Beautiful
(2007)

Director: Andrea Moor
Writer/Playwright: Jan Fosse
Translated: May-Brit Ackerholt
Production design: Kieran Swann
Lighting Design: Jason Glenwright
Sound Composition: Jason Zadkovich
Audiovisual: Rebecca Paling
Cast: Jonathan Brand, Margi Ash Brown, Melissa Howard, Christopher Sommers, Kevin Spink, Ling-Hsueh Tang
Sponsors: Arts Queensland and QUT’s - Doctorate of Creative Arts program

Beautiful
…and moor theatre (The Loft, QUT Cultural Precinct)

By Jon Fosse, translated by May-Brit Akerholt

Professional production

So much can get lost in translation. The subtle nuances of a phrase often disappears when it has to speak in another voice from another civilisation where the resonances are different, the meaning never quite precise.

But not here, in May-Brit Akerholt’s rendition of Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s Beautiful. As Fosse’s official translator and a native speaker of Norwegian, Akerholt has a deep understanding of the text and brings its melancholy and hope alive for English-speaking audiences in what is a perfect translation of an almost perfect play.

There is a plot, but it’s as flimsy and ephemeral as the light on the windows of the boathouse on the edge of the Norwegian fjord where the play is set. A man (Jonathan Brand), his wife (Ling-Hseuh Tang) and their teenage daughter (newcomer Melissa Howard) come back to his home village for the summer, to stay with his mother (Margi Brown Ash). He meets up with an old school friend (welcome back Christopher Sommers), an old school friend who used to play in a band with him but who, since the age of fifteen, seemed to have lost his way in the world and remained in the village doing nothing.

The daughter meets a boy her own age (Kevin Spink) and young love blossoms. The wife seduces the friend, and eventually the married couple go home to the city leaving their daughter to stay with her grandmother and, we suppose, continue her first affair. The old school friend resumes his solitary existence, and the play ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Those bare bones can say nothing about the many-layered nuances of this exquisite play. Mysteries are hinted at but not explained until the end, by which time they are totally unnecessary, as we’ve already worked everything out, so that the final scene is a clumsy synopsis rather than a resolution. I would have liked it to end with the married couple walking off to their car.

But apart from that one flaw, the structure of the play is a mirror of Bach’s The Art of Fugue, where themes arrive and then leave, are introduced and forgotten until they reappear, where pairings and motivations continually weave over and under each other like sunlight on water, and where the parts eventually make a perfect whole.

The text is simple to the point of sublimity, where the word unspoken is more eloquent than the hesitant phrases and stumbling monosyllables of the tongue-tied characters, for these are no self-confident Shakespearian heroes, but ordinary people playing out a timeless pattern of story almost against their will, forced to articulate things that they feel should remain unsaid. Christopher Sommers, as the mysterious almost sinister left-behind school friend, is the best example of this, and his triumph in this performance is to make his character almost seem like a bad actor who hasn’t learned his lines, until we notice the utter control he has over his movement and his voice. Stage presence doesn’t have to shout “Look at me acting!” – in this case, it’s all done by understatement.

Melissa Howard, in her debut role as The Girl, also has this instinctive stage presence. She’s like every hesitant teenager on the edge of sexual break-through, but her body language is more controlled, I think, than its raw innocence seems, and when she’s done more voice work, she’ll be a young actor to watch.

Ling-Hsueh Tang, as The Woman, her mother, is another very relaxed and perceptive actor, making the difficult change from irascible wife to flirtatious seducer in different scenes so easily that one thinks, at first, that she is playing two different women, and that this is a play within a play or else a dream sequence, so that it comes as a shock when we realise that the two characters are different manifestations of the one personality. Margi Brown Ash, in an impressive under-playing of the role of Grandmother, adds another dimension of this puzzle play, which is basically about who is doing what and why, and who knows, understands or cares.

It’s a gem of a play, as fragile and as multi-layered as a rose, and the sensitivity of the text, so elegantly translated by May-Brit Akerholt, is mirrored in a truly magical set, where the walls of the boathouse, especially under the lighting of the talented Jason Glenwright, echo the moods of the characters as well as the time of day. It’s a brilliant start for a new theatre company, and Andrea Moor can be very proud of her first show as a professional director.

— Alison Cotes

(Performance seen: 29th November 2007)