Ceci n'est pas un blog

I'm not sure exactly what my take on this is yet but a coworker said he was going to a play this evening and thought I might enjoy it. Something a little offbeat. Not to worry about the language as it's mostly movement and dance, any spoken words won't be essential to the understanding. And to be fair he sent me a link to the theater: Grusomhetens Teater (Theater of Cruelty). This was the manifesto of Antonin Artaud, surrealist poet/playwright/director/drug addict/electroshock therapy recipient/long time sanitorium resident.

I know a little about Artaud. Not as much as my wife. But I had a feeling I knew what I was in for.

The venue was great. It was the sort of place that when you see in movies (mostly from the '80s) you aren't sure really exist. Imagine an old building that appears to have been completely abandoned and is absolutely covered in layers upon layers of spray paint. Inside, down heavily tagged corridors and through two imrovised plywood doors is a rather pleasant vegan cafe. If you hadn't been shown by someone, you'd never find it. Around the building in tha back where construction workers are driling into concrete and look like they might be setting up some sort of bigger job, there is the theater entrance. Only it's not. It's just the room where you buy tickets and hang out until show time.

And so we hung out and gossiped about a local celeb whose nude pictures of himself were on his cell phone when it was stolen and the images made it to all the papers. And we talked about the company director's commitment to the Theater of Cruelty manifesto; he'd been known to be relunctant to rent the space to other companies because it might subvert their brand, fool an audience into thinking he might do something traditional, narrative, easy. When it came time for the show, they led us back out into the drizzle and around even further to the back and then inside and down the steepest darkest stairs in Oslo to the theater.

The show was performed by 9 actors who essentailly laid out a series of intercut fairy tale references. But that's not the point of the show. The point of this kind of theater is to jar the audience, confront their desensitization and bring them to a state of awareness and engagement -- kicking and screaming if necessary. There were two women with violins, an accompaniest whose piano and vocal style semed more Weimar era than anything else, and lots of interludes that evoked classic Bedlam style mental asylums. But it wasn't all madness ... in one segment the cast is all running amok searching for something or someone and over time it becomes clear that each person has a clearly choreographed pattern and after an interruption, several of them have swapped choreographies. In another segment a woman wears a Marie Antoinette style outfit, complete with a meter tall wig and moves in a mannered and sad way. There is nudity without sexuality, there is staring directly at audience members and addressing them right to their face, there is a lot of somewhat dangerous ladder climbing.

At various times I was bored, intrigued, confused, genuinely interested, and convinced I had latched onto an underlying narrative thread only to lose it again. And although the philosophy of such a production is about the audience, I couldn't help wondering if the "cruelty" was to the actors who had to crawl, climb, push themselves around on their back, strip, meet the gaze of their audience, and remember complicated blocking not necessarily tied to any interaction between characters and without dialogue to anchor it to.

One of the actors is a bit famous. He's been in at least 16 movies or TV shows. I recognised him from the previews to Junk Mail, a Norwegian film that got some play on the art house circuit in the States. And I can see why an actor would be drawn to this sort of company. It is difficult and challenging and may not bring the audience with you - you are alone with your craft and your colleagues participating in a genuine art backed by the poetic theories of a cruel, mad, genius.

But it's the sort of theater you can only recommend to a very very few.