My god. I
think I want to bear Anne Bogart's children. As the director/auteur
of Death and the Ploughman, she's crafted one of the most profound,
intelligent theatrical experiences I've ever had the fortune to witness.
But let's start by admitting that the play is difficult. After all,
it's a medieval religious text, never meant for performance, crafted
by Johannes von Saaz of Bohemia (c. 1350-1414), staged as a debate between
the spirit of death and a farmer in mourning for his young wife. Drawing
on antique patterns of rhetoric and argument, it's replete with dated
and esoteric vocabulary: "feculent", "alectryomancy", "Rubicon". It's
didactic and lengthy, repetitive, lacking in plot, and its 90-minute
running time is untempered by an intermission. Consequently, I'm willing
to forgive the young for fidgeting, and the weary for falling asleep.
And yet Death and the Ploughman is also beautiful - and by
this I don't mean florid in wide strokes, with showers of petals and
high-kicking houris - rather, it sustains an arresting visual aesthetic
through its extremely stylised light, sound and movement. SITI Company's
trademark blend of the Suzuki and Viewpoint acting methods instills
the actors with a constant dynamism and deliberateness of action. And
this can be seen from the very start as the audience enters a theatre
of gradually pulsing lights where the three players stand in position,
not immobile, but moving slowly as if through viscous water. Their precisely
choreographed movements mirror, dodge, and clash with each other, tinged
with polysemy but never quite corresponding to the literacy of the text.
It is this relentless, deliberate beauty that ensures that every moment
of the play remains purposeful and alive. It buoys up the weight of
the difficult text, allowing it to become almost music, exquisite even
without attention to its meanings, and spiritually dazzling once one
actually listens to the warring declarations of the sanctity and futility
of human life. This could be why the crowd of convent schoolgirls in
the circle seats audibly laughed at certain points in the play - at
appropriate and inappropriate junctures - demonstrating that as fiendishly
intellectual a piece like this does speak across purported barriers
of age.
I have to pause a while to remark on the specifics of the play's dynamics.
Death (Stephen Webber) is portrayed as a lofty, pompous, dispassionate,
occasionally annoyed gentleman in a black suit and bowler hat and with
an umbrella that never leaves his hand, while the Ploughman (Will Bond)
is distinctly proletariat, dressed in work clothes, tortured, grieving,
but perspicacious and clever. This isn't a game of heroes and villains:
both death and the Ploughman make valid and sympathetic philosophical
points. And although the Ploughman at times succeeds in provoking Death
to the point of growling like a beast, it is plain that he is at war
not against a devil that must be expelled, but against the ineffable.
Bogart's great coup, however, was in conjuring up the role of the
Woman (Ellen Lauren), a barefoot lady in a white dress. At first the
Woman embodies the perfect, virtuous qualities of the Ploughman's dead
wife, heightening the tragedy of his loss. But a quarter of the way
through the play, she joins Death in speaking the harsh truth of inevitable
doom, and the contrast between her strong, deep voice and her slight
figure creates a dramatic disjuncture of delicacy and power. As a third
player, Lauren expands the dimensions of the piece - she is the yin
to Webber's yang, and the two together are emblematic of Death as a
balancing force, even suggesting that the dead whom we miss speak on
behalf of Death itself. They even break the prevailing mood of the play
to form an absurd vaudeville team, viciously celebrating the gory totality
of death in this world with a series of mock-murders - and this gallows
humour rejuvenates the otherwise somber play.
The close of the play brings us back to the bare of bones of the theatrical
medium. Death and the Ploughman call on God to judge between them and
are confronted suddenly with silence as the music abruptly stops. They
begin to reenact the blocking of the play randomly and at triple-speed
to the sounds of a black spiritual, muttering the beginnings of cues
and crashing into each other - a bizarre kind of apocalypse, as the
past body of the play arises again in the form of its component skeletal
parts. Then, with all the stage presence that a deus ex machina demands,
the Woman speaks the part of God, telling the parties they have both
argued well, and while the honour may go to the Ploughman, the victory
goes to Death.
A day later, Bogart explained to us in a lecture how she believes
that in an age of imprecise speech, "The most radical thing you can
do is to finish your sentence." It's this sense that I get from watching
Death and the Ploughman: a presentation of clear and immortal
ideas that might have mouldered away in the library, but have now been
brought to life on stage. Certainly, there's profit to be gathered from
a contemporary TheatreWorks-style presentation like The
Global Soul, where cultures brush against each other, speaking
different languages, building toward a transcendent point. But it's
so seldom today that we see articulate, thoughtful speech being delivered
in a dramatic context. What the SITI Company have accomplished is extraordinarily
powerful, transmuting transforming dry prose into poetry, creating a
theatre of ideas themselves.
This is the first time I'm giving a full five stars to a production.
And I'm aware that many may have found this play intellectually
exhausting, unpopulist, and tiresome - even I was disturbed by
the unamplified volume of the actors' voices, though an acting
friend told me that microphones cause the lungs to be lazy.
Yet I am floored by the remarkable ambition of Death and the Ploughman,
and the immense degree to which it succeeded in resuscitating a work
apparently so intellectual that many would have said it should never
have come to the theatre. This play makes you consider the bare facts
of being human on this earth where all is mortal - and when did you
last see a professional production that dared to do that? The piece
is fabulously concerted, blending light, sound, movement and text into
a spellbinding blue-note harmony. If I can't bear Bogart's children,
I'll just aspire to create theatre of her standards - classically contemporary,
fiendishly beautiful, and breathtakingly difficult. |
"I am floored by the remarkable ambition of Death and the Ploughman,
and the immense degree to which it succeeded in resuscitating so intellectual
a work"
Credits
Director: Anne Bogart
Writer: Johannes von Saaz
Translator: Michael West
Set and Costume Design: James Schuette
Lighting Design: Brian H Scott
Sound Design: Darren L West
Sound engineer: Mark Huang
Stage Manager: Elizabeth Moreau
Cast: Will Bond, Ellen Lauren and Stephen Webber
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