Theatre: The Bridge Project

The past two Saturdays, I went to Auckland to see The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale staged by the Bridge Project. It's a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music in NYC and the Old Vic in London. Both plays are directed by Sam Mendes and performed by a cast that includes Simon Russell Beale, Sinaed Cusack, Rebecca Hall, Ethan Hawke, Richard Easton, Josh Hamilton and other extremely talented British and American actors.

Here in New Zealand (which they visited on their way to Singapore, Germany, Spain and England) they had to negotiate the difficult space (sound-wise) of the Aotea Centre, which some (the Britsh members of the cast, to be perfectly honest) did more successfully than others. I would have preferred to see both plays ina a smaller, more contained theatre, such as the Old Vic.

I had a few doubts about their take on The Cherry Orchard. Of course, the cast was excellent, especially Simon Russell Beale who interpreted Lopakhin with cringe-inducing social awkwardness, but also with a subtly repressed desire for acceptance and revenge, one that made his big scene in Act 2 - where he reveals he has bought the orchard - one of the most heart-stopping moments of theatre I've ever seen.

His elation for finally owning the property his slave father and grandfather were never allowed to step in is gorgeous: he tilts one by one all the chairs in the room, rages at Ranevskaya for not having listened to him, to his advice to save the property, but at the same time can't hide his internal gloating. If he cannot be accepted by the aristocrats he admires and lends money to, if he cannot be loved by Ranevskaya, he will, at the very least, enjoy the wealth they've wasted and become even richer out of their foolishness.



But there is something about Sam Mendes' staging, such a perfect stylisation of movement and characterisation, in his use of the set, of the lights that cast long shadows (making people look like trees, a human orchard that is about to be "cut" by the passing of time and history), the intervention of chilling, ominous music, that failed to touch me on an emotional level.

I've seen much less sophisticated versions of Chekhov's final play, less visionary productions, less polished and professional, perhaps, but that have touched me more deeply. This one, however, resonates as a warning for the present and we, the audience, are encouraged to identify with Ranevskaya and her silly brother Gaev, the ruling class aware of their inevitable demise, yet unable and most of all unwilling to adapt to the changing times, the rise of the new classes and the needs of an even poorer, more enraged class on their heels: bewildered and too enamoured with the memory of past summers in our orchard to accept that it doesn't belong to us anymore, that it never did.

With The Winter's Tale, instead, Mendes and the company achieve exactly the opposite result. Shakespeare's final play is a difficult one for a contemporary audience who likes unified style, clear-cut protagonists, over-arching themes, unity of time and perhaps defined morality. It is, in other word, a play that defies all kinds of emotional identification and easy moralism.

Mendes embraces all these challanges and the cast rises to the challenge with him, collectively. I honestly have never seen such a large cast work so beautifully together in even the "smallest" of roles. The first half is tragedy, dominated by an extraordinary Simon Russell Beale's King Leontes of Sicilia who, in his paranoid jelousy, causes the end of his friendship with King Polyxenes of Bohemia, the death of his own son Mamillius, that of his wife Hermiones and the abandonment/loss of their daughter Perdita.

Paulina, whose husband Antigonus also dies as a consequence of Leontes' madness, is the only one who truly stands up to him, who calls him tyrant and who eventually forces him to face his guilt through 16 years of penance and grief, both a support and a reminder of his folly. Sinead Cusack is wonderful in this role, much more convincing than her constantly bewildered Ranevskaya, in my opnion.

If the first half is darkness and tragedy, a perennial winter lit only by candles that are blown off one by one after Hermione's death, the second half, 16 years later, is youth, light, music in another land that looks very much like the American Western prairie: it's romance and comedy. It's spring.

As I said, all the cast is amazing, with Richard Easton as Time and the shepard who adopts Perdita, and Tobias Segal as his son, providing a truly funny counterpart to the tragic interactions of the first half. But to be honest, Ethan Hawke as the thief Autolycus steals the show. I was surprised, because I found his Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard adequate but underwhelming, in fact a little too neurotic; too - how can I say it - American for Chekhov's play.



But as Autolycus he shines: he has the opportunity to sing, move with the physicality of a confident rogue, sexy and cynical, funny and annoying, yet fundamentally "good", whether he likes it or not, even without final redemption.

Redemption comes for Leontes in the final act, the one that brings the American Arcadia in contact with the Old-World tragedy: below the surface, the two worlds are not too dissimilar, because also Polyxenes proves to be a tyrant, one who won't allow his son Florizel to marry beneath his social class. Of course, we know that Florizel is in fact in love with Perdita and that through appropriate revelations the order of things will be restored, but Leontes decides to plead the cause of Florizel and Perdita before he knows she is his long-lost daughter, having learnt through grief the lesson that Paulina was trying to teach him: don't be a tyrant, listen to the truth, be tolerant. Forgive.

Only once the two tyrants have learnt their lesson the final miracle can unravel and the statue of dead Hermione comes to life. Is it Paulina's magic that brings the queen back to life, or is it finally Hermione (whose death we only heard through Paulina's own words) who has decided that her husband has now grieved enough? I like to think the latter, of course, and imagine 16 years of Hermione and Paulina living secretly together, loving each other while measuring the penance for Leontes, until they decide he can be forgiven when Perdita reappears: the power of maternal love.

But it doesn't matter, really. What matters is that time has healed old wounds, winter is over, what was lost has finally been found (Mamillius and Perdita are interpreted by the same actress, in a clever twist on the tradition that sees Hermione and Perdita often played by the same person) and tyrants have become good fathers, husbands, kings.

Film: "Before Sunrise" (1995) and "Before Sunset" (2004)

I am one of the few people I know who'd never seen the cult romantic film of the 1990s, Before Sunrise, by Richard Linklater.



Nor its sequel, Before Sunset, set 9 years later and written and directed again by Linklater, again with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as protagonists.



And I'm glad I didn't, because this means I could see both movies one night after the other, from the perspective of someone who is more or less 9 years older than the characters find themselves at the end of Before Sunset. They've grown up, but I've grown up even more and I feel tenderness for both their 20-year and their 30-year old selves.

In Before Sunset the characters reassess their one-day/one-night encouter of 9 years earlier, confronting each other on that memory, checking the details, seeking reassurance that the emotional impact each of them experienced wasn't a dream, or an invention, or theirs alone. That that special connection was real for both.

They roam the streets of Paris as they had roamed those of Vienna, but in reverse, this time walking and walking, then catching a boat, then a car, while their younger selves had met on a train, jumped on a bus, then dined on a boat, then walked and walked.

Time is even more pressing now: while in 1995 they had a day and a night available, now there's only a couple of hours and yet they speak even more, jumping straight into a dicussion about politics, the world, American imperialism, then about their work, their lives since they last met, their loves. And finally each other.

Before Sunrise is a film that makes a grown-up viewer ache at the innocence of Jesse and Celine, their hope in love and fate that they cannot disguise behind the apparence of youthful cinicism. And yet, because they are clever and intense, they're also aware that what they are experiencing, this fleeting intensity between them, might also be nothing else than the making of a future memory in a life full other experiences.

They accept the possibility that they might never see each other again, chosing not to exchange numbers, names, addresses, setting just a vague date for a possible reunion that they might or might not keep. To them, at 23, it doesn't really matter, or not that much, because they're already launched in opposite trajectories (the bus that takes Jesse to the airport - the train that takes Celine to Paris).

But 9 years later they know that connections like the one they had are rare to come by and their reliance, their trust in fate has become tinged with the awareness of what they have lost. Will they let chance, time, casuality decide for them again?

Will they simply revise the memory of their first encounter with the endnote of their second meeting, just adding a chapter to the book Jesse has written about Celine, a line to Celine's song about Jesse? Will they continue to add appendixes every 9 years in random European cities?

Or will they have the courage to mesh the memory into the present, in the here and now?

The ending of Before Sunset answers the question and it's magnificent: a few seconds, one line of dialogue, one moment of Ethan Hawke's acting that illuminates the sense of both films and gives them one of the most perfect, moving, imaginative open closures I've seen in any film.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, I've always been. And these films reminded me of the Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs, for the incessant dialogue and the small silences and gestures that are equally important, all immersed in the reality of two cities that almost disappear vis-a-vis what is happening to the characters.

And yet, as in Rohmer's films, nothing could happen if not in those specific locations, with their real geographies and sounds. Epecially in Before Sunset, the soundtrack is minimal and perfectly integrated in the plot: Celine's song, the Nina Simone CD Jesse plays in Celine's apartment, an accordion player on the street, the noise of wind and water on the Seine, the traffic...

Before Sunrise ends with a collage of shots of all the places Jesse and Celine have visited in Vienna, now empty of people in the first light of morning, and redolent with the absence of our characters as they falled inevitably in love. Before Sunset, instead, opens with shots of empty places that, as the film progresses, we'll see Jesse and Celine occupy.

It is, of course, part of the inversion that Linklater adopts as the structure of his second film, but it's also much more than that, a suggestion that places - even iconic and beautiful places - such Vienna and Paris, only really matter to the extent that we exist in them.

Or as we remember them, and continue remembering them while we embrace new moments and new places.

Film: "Waltz With Bashir"

I haven't blogged here in a while, which is unusual considering how many plays, films and art exhibition I've seen lately (I haven't read as much, unfortunately).

Instead of talking about the relative disappointment I've felt for films that have received public and critical acclaim (such as Milk, Doubt and Slumdog Millionaire), and what I consider the ridiculous overlooking of Clint Eastwood's magnificent Gran Torino, I want to talk briefly about the masterpiece of 2008: Waltz With Bashir, by the Israeli director Ari Folman.



It's a film that has that rare quality of succeding in being a number of things at the same time, all successfully: topical (the disaster that is the Middle East now, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in particular) and historical (the 1982 Lebanon war and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila); political (Folman's condemnation of the Israeli military and ruling classes of the time and of now is presented indirectly, but without appeal) and highly personal (it's about recuperating one's memory by facing responsibility and guilt; dreams and nightmares; being young and then suddenly old); documentary and "fiction", thanks to the use of real interviews and the structure of an investigative piece, but presenting them through animation, which allows for beauty and poetry to surface even amid the horror of wars.

We follow the director/protagonist as he tries to remember his partecipation in the Lebanon war and especially what exactly he was doing during the three days he, together with the Israeli army, supported the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut by the Christian Phalangists, who massacred what conservative estimates put around 3000 civilians, including women and children.

In order to make sense of a recurrent dream that haunts him but that still doesn't allow him to recollect those days, Folman needs to talk with fellow soldiers, witnesses, journalists, politicians. The perspective is entirely Israeli, because it's about an Israeli soldier dealing with his role in the war.

Folman manages to connect the scenes of that war to our collective cultural visualisation of both Vietnam and Iraq; but in the final, devastating part set in the Palestinian compound, the references to our visual unconscious on the Warsaw ghetto and WWII, are even more chilling.

When the protagonist finally pieces his own personal and national history together, he can remember, at last. And what he remembers is so terrible that the animation is replaced by the real, uncensored scenes of what the news people found in Sabra and Shatila when they were finally allowed to enter.

No words, no music, because memory cannot and should not always be rendered poetic or exorcised by art. Sometimes what we need to do, more than anything else, is just remember.