I want to write something longer and more nuanced about this, the Australian premiere of Elfriede Jelinek’s work. I started to and … well it got a bit ranty, didn’t it? I’ll dig deep and try and revisit it. Meanwhile, here’s a version of my original review. The show’s tough going, but a must-see if you care about contemporary theatre.
Princess Dramas, By Elfriede Jelinek (trans. Gitta Honegger), Red Stitch Actors Theatre, Cnr St Kilda Rd and Chapel St, St Kilda. Until July 2.
Dion Mills and Andrea Swifte in Jelinek's Princess Dramas.
Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek is a difficult writer, hostile even. Yet there’s an easy way into her work.
Look at Sunday night’s news: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, at her first Trooping the Colour ceremony. The BBC voiceover unusually grave: ‘… an event on her calendar, every year for the rest of her life’. She’s there, but not really there. Stuck in the footage; trapped in a white double-breasted jacket, black straw and feather hat. Her clothes look more real than she does, and it’s that sharp silhouette the public will remember – not what she was thinking, with that far-off look in her eye.
For Jelinek, a princess is a shackled creature, burdened by the happily ever after, weighed down by the expectations of myth, history and gender. Princess Dramas seeks to expose the incarcerating power of princess stories, the way their clichés betray the senses and corrode being. It goads us into rethinking ideas of beauty and ugliness, nature and artifice, truth and lies – so they make sense in the world as we experience it now.
Her Princess Dramas takes three princesses – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Jackie O – and lets them out of the gilded cage.
Staunchly rejecting the comforts of naturalism, Jelinek wields a poetic pessimism reminiscent of her compatriot Thomas Bernhard. Traditional conceptions of plot and character are trashed. We enter a postmodern hall of mirrors. Snow White and the Hunter argue over death, time and beauty; the dwarves a confusion of voices. Sleeping Beauty, painfully trapped under the Prince’s leg, revives to hang up his washing; they fight, enormous purple genitals strapped on.
A photo of Jackie O – perfectly coifed, subtly blurred – begins an hour-long monologue, constructing mesmerising argument from fashion, the Zapruder footage, and all that sticks in the collective consciousness when we think of the former first lady.
Brilliant design creates a positive-feedback loop of cultural reference, compulsively plays off the text and injects undercurrents of Austrian and Australian nationalism. It also suggests more global tyrannies of fashion, gender, and narrative.
The performances asks the question, how is this work to be performed? The actors are still working it out.
Dion Mills and Andrea Swifte are too earnest, not always playful enough to draw out the profusion and barrenness of Jelinek’s wit, though I liked Swifte’s tetchy, disgruntled Hunter and the haughty, Masterpiece Theatre feel of Mills’ Prince. Reynolds can’t pull off a simulacrum of Jackie O’s voice, but the kernel of her performance possesses an engrossing coolness, a confining dignity.
I admire Red Stitch for performing Jelinek. The company sees greater risk in cleaving to comfortable sensibilities than in opening our minds to the strange, and if Andre Bastian’s attempt to graft the European tradition of postdramatic theatre into an Australian context doesn’t always flower, it remains a provocative and densely imagined piece.