Exeunt, Pursued By Ghosts
Yesterday, went with Shoshana and Xavid to see Sleep No More, quite a remarkable production.
Imagine Shakespeare's Macbeth crossed with Hitchcock's Rebecca, directed by someone massively influenced by Hitchcock, with a minimalist approach to dialog and an obsessive concern for the details of the setting.
I'm often less than enthusiastic about Shakespeare adaptations. I've seen too many that are just clumsy skinnings of Shakespeare plays (here's looking at you, Great Lakes Theater Festival), where the set and costuming are changed to be incongruous to the play but the characterization doesn't make it work. An adaptation should either build something meaningful on top of existing material or challenge that material in some significant way. "[Shakespeare play] but set in [20th century decade]" just doesn't cut it. Nor is your play laudably "post-modern" just because your set looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster as painted by Dalí.
Sleep No More is a meaningful adaptation, though. What's interesting is that it's not so much an adaptation of Shakespeare. Sure, there's the relative absence of dialog, the vivid choreography, the exceptional set, but from a narrative and character perspective, it's a pretty conventional telling of Macbeth. What's more significant is that it's an adaptation of theater itself.
The play (if "play" is still the accurate term) is spread out through a dark, abandoned school converted into a gigantic set. The conventional border between actors and audience is absent, replaced by white masks, silence, and the guiding presence of the unspeaking, black-masked stewards. The audience wanders the building, or follows members of the cast.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this format. Spreading the narrative out over a large space means that each audience member only gets fragments of the story. I'm still not quite sure how the Hitchcock movie plot elements were woven in (if they were), though perhaps I'd have a better idea if I was familiar with the movie in question. The ending also seemed abrupt and a bit confusing, though beautifully staged.
But those drawbacks are more than balanced out by the format's strengths. Changing the conventional boundaries of theater and giving the audience only simple, ambiguous* rules (be silent, mind the stewards, explore, don't get in the way of the cast) to replace well-understood social conventions creates an awkward but anticipatory state. That affect is magnified when the new boundary, too, is blurred. While the audience members play the role of silent, observing ghosts, this is Macbeth. Quite a few of the characters can see ghosts, especially the manipulative witches. Audience members, in their exploration of the setting, push back. Despite the denotative masks, it becomes less and less clear who is an observer and who is, in some sense, part of the production. And there was (at least for me) a growing temptation to bend the rules. There was one scene in which a character receives a phone call in an otherwise empty (filled with ghosts) room. The phone rings, he hesitates, and in that moment I was struck with an almost overwhelming temptation to pick up the phone and hand it to him. (I didn't, but perhaps I should have, for some value of should.)
Definitely see it, if you get the chance.
* Note that I'm not sure to what extent any ambiguity was intentional on the part of those introducing they play, the venue was quite crowded and they were hurrying.
Imagine Shakespeare's Macbeth crossed with Hitchcock's Rebecca, directed by someone massively influenced by Hitchcock, with a minimalist approach to dialog and an obsessive concern for the details of the setting.
I'm often less than enthusiastic about Shakespeare adaptations. I've seen too many that are just clumsy skinnings of Shakespeare plays (here's looking at you, Great Lakes Theater Festival), where the set and costuming are changed to be incongruous to the play but the characterization doesn't make it work. An adaptation should either build something meaningful on top of existing material or challenge that material in some significant way. "[Shakespeare play] but set in [20th century decade]" just doesn't cut it. Nor is your play laudably "post-modern" just because your set looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster as painted by Dalí.
Sleep No More is a meaningful adaptation, though. What's interesting is that it's not so much an adaptation of Shakespeare. Sure, there's the relative absence of dialog, the vivid choreography, the exceptional set, but from a narrative and character perspective, it's a pretty conventional telling of Macbeth. What's more significant is that it's an adaptation of theater itself.
The play (if "play" is still the accurate term) is spread out through a dark, abandoned school converted into a gigantic set. The conventional border between actors and audience is absent, replaced by white masks, silence, and the guiding presence of the unspeaking, black-masked stewards. The audience wanders the building, or follows members of the cast.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this format. Spreading the narrative out over a large space means that each audience member only gets fragments of the story. I'm still not quite sure how the Hitchcock movie plot elements were woven in (if they were), though perhaps I'd have a better idea if I was familiar with the movie in question. The ending also seemed abrupt and a bit confusing, though beautifully staged.
But those drawbacks are more than balanced out by the format's strengths. Changing the conventional boundaries of theater and giving the audience only simple, ambiguous* rules (be silent, mind the stewards, explore, don't get in the way of the cast) to replace well-understood social conventions creates an awkward but anticipatory state. That affect is magnified when the new boundary, too, is blurred. While the audience members play the role of silent, observing ghosts, this is Macbeth. Quite a few of the characters can see ghosts, especially the manipulative witches. Audience members, in their exploration of the setting, push back. Despite the denotative masks, it becomes less and less clear who is an observer and who is, in some sense, part of the production. And there was (at least for me) a growing temptation to bend the rules. There was one scene in which a character receives a phone call in an otherwise empty (filled with ghosts) room. The phone rings, he hesitates, and in that moment I was struck with an almost overwhelming temptation to pick up the phone and hand it to him. (I didn't, but perhaps I should have, for some value of should.)
Definitely see it, if you get the chance.
* Note that I'm not sure to what extent any ambiguity was intentional on the part of those introducing they play, the venue was quite crowded and they were hurrying.