Tea and house: 117 Kyoto townhouse April
29 2013
Two plays were
presented by a small company and visiting Hungarian actress at a townhouse near
Mibu in Kyoto. The Hungarian Lady Macbeth from Mtensk solo was interesting, but
in Hungarian, so it was Greek to me. I concentrate here on the first piece,
a “post-dramatic” deconstruction
by a trio of amateur actors.
When do personal memories become interesting to outsiders?
When does an interviewer’s raw material serve as building blocks for a theatre
piece? Intuitively, I would think three possibilities:
·
1 when speaker is famous enough that even minor
incident in their life have meaning towards their known oeuvre;
·
2 when the stories add up to a whole portrait,
revealing new perspectives on an era or personality;
·
3 when there is a disjuncture between what the
speaker says and what we know (ala Aunt Lemon by Wallace), so that there is a
built-in dramatic tension as we assess the speakers’ reliability
Unfortunately these were not present in 117, which we were expected to judge on
it own terms: a meandering journey through the life of Bridget Scott, 6th
of 8 children to artist couple, living in a large house in London, 117 Lewisham, who decided on a whim to come to Japan. Yamaguchi Keiko, who herself
spent time in London and is attempting a “bridging” project east and west, was
the dramaturg/director. Teasingly stimulating in parts, it failed to hold together
for me—but fell apart in interesting ways.
Returning to England for her mother’s passing, she then was
brought back by a gypsy palm-reading and her own intuition, twenty years ago.
The narration—heard on a tape and occasionally spoken by Bridget, translated
and somewhat acted out by a male and female performers—was banal, slow, and
sometimes repetitive. A taped interview with the Father, with his odd
reminiscences about serving a boiled egg to his wife after she decided to give
birth at home in hopes of a son, and his garbled memories (senility? Too many
kids?) provided some comic relief. But otherwise we endured the too-serious or
frivolous non-acting by the designated voices, who seemed shy and aggressive at
the same time: placing old photos w no apparent relation to text; old Japanese
newspapers out of suitcases; drinking tea or playing cup games.
It was absurd, moreso because the
low table had been used to pour in ingredients and make scones; after baking,
their sweet smells wafted over, and Bridgett announced “8 minutes,” becoming
the centre of the kitchen/her mother ordering the world. But this served only
as cue to repeat the play, this time in bits and pieces, the fragments adding
little but providing some interesting moments when Bridget spoke her lines in
exact rhythm and nuance to those of the tape, as she spoke to her father,
played in Japanese by live avatar. Laying down in foetal position, throwing newspapers
over her head, or opening a creaky door seemed to have more meaning to her than
for us.
This
was a personal homage to her mother, her own fate in Japan, the narrative
fragmentation serving to probe questions of memory, life’s choices, and family
role in shaping personality. Much centred on logistics: getting places, finding
hotels, paying for things, loans. Important elements—turn to dancing, loves,
studies—were spoken in other room by the other voice, so I heard little—another
fragmentation of text. By having actors controlling w ipods the recorded lines
and music, it certainly saved on technical support, but was glancing down at a
hand-machine useful for actors/narrators trying to express a story? Despite the
intimate space of an old Japanese townhouse, we felt distanced from the private
story of one woman’s journey, told in fragmented flashbacks, with not enough
description of what we needed, and too much banal detail to maintain attention.
Why not use the 8 minutes for questions from the audience? Or question them?
Yet
I’ll carry away the memory of the intimate surroundings, the 20 guests many of
whom I knew, and the delicious scones and tea afterwards. And strangely, by its very confusion and ambiguousness, it stays in the mind even two days later more than many a more polished work. I hope it continues to develop in workshop. A pause on the
journey for reflection on my own life in Kyoto.
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