Of the Causes of Wonderful Things, Written & performed by Talya Rubin, Too Close To The Sun, Arts House, Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St Nth Melbourne. Until August 13.
Talya Rubin (with big bad wolf).
Mystery is an intrinsic part of Talya Rubin’s eerie, elegiac one-woman show, so I’m hesitant to give too much away.
It begins with a tiny figurine of a lost girl in a rabbit hutch, followed by short flashes of three different women sitting in silence – one anxiously waiting for a phone call, one mired in paperwork, and a third elegantly smoking cigarettes as she listens to a gramophone recording of Begin the Beguine in French.
From these fragments, Rubin builds a cast of characters into a multi-layered narrative. On one level, the show is the blackest kind of fairy tale, where big bad wolves win, and ghosts stalk the woods; on another, a taut, suspenseful, depression-era noir from the American South.
Yet the overall effect is something else entirely, redolent of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the death of children), a song cycle set to manic, private poems by Friedrich Rückert, written after his children died from scarlet fever. This show has a similar trajectory: anguish and fantasies of shadowy revival, bleeding into a transcendent sense of resignation.
The script is unusually distilled, dream-like and elegant. Rubin’s performance is chiselled and haunting, even if her Canadian accent sometimes overwhelms the Southern one.
Spectral lighting, visual effects and several kinds of puppetry are woven throughout. Rubin herself must manually switch lights on and off, and manoeuvre a miniature world. Our patience is repaid theatrically, though Rubin could learn a few tricks from the puppeteers at My Darling Patricia.
This is intensely moving theatre, and for all the bleakness, beautiful. Rubin makes the unbearable seem bearable. Horror bows to wonder. I left feeling stricken but radiant, and recalled Rückert’s line: “Now the sun wants to rise as brightly/ as if nothing terrible had happened in the night.”
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An Actor Prepares, Composed and adapted by Nela Trifkovic, From a script by James Adler, Eagle’s Nest Theatre, Broken Mirror Studios, 2C Staley St Brunswick. Until August 28.
David Howell and Nela Trifkovic in An Actor Prepares
Nela Trifkovic’s musical adaptation of An Actor Prepares is challenging experimental theatre that slips between porous borders of improvisation, song and text. I didn’t read the programme beforehand, and had only the vaguest idea what the show was trying to achieve until I did.
Adler’s script is allegorical, giving voice to a suicide bomber through shattered fragments of an actor rehearsing for performance. You hold on to Adler’s roiling text – it’s one of the few parts of the show rendered in English.
Trifkovic is a bold, uncompromising theatrical presence and I’d honestly prefer to see her do this piece without so much musical intrusion. The avant-garde opera does add something: the dark psychology of self-annihilating violence will, at some level, always remain an inaccessible mystery.
Yet the attempt to forge a performance language through partly extemporised song is at least as self-indulgent and obscurantist as it is illuminating. Expect shades of Slavonic folk music, cabaret stylings, Renaissance-era liturgical arrangements for countertenor, the disjunct harmonies of modernist composition, and even animal noises.
I understand enough Romance languages to pick out Lorca’s poetry in Spanish, but not untranslated grabs from Pasolini and Pope John Paul II. Adler’s direction keeps it brief and dissonant, with some fine visual moments, including a bugle that becomes a grenade.
Unfortunately, David Howell’s voice and confidence on stage don’t match Trifkovic’s, and while artists always rely on information extrinsic to the performance to generate meaning, you shouldn’t have to dive into academic programme notes to complete the experience.