cultural_philistine
HAL_9000Review of Tales from the Vienna Woods (Sydney Theatre Company)
November 28th 2007 00:46
C_P: This is the election night special of the Sydney Theatre blog… Important things first: shock, horror -- Hayley McElhinney goes topless in this play.
HAL: [laughs] Look, I know you couldn’t keep your eyes off her.
C_P: Well, I was trying to, yeah, but... you know... People have different attitudes to their bodies, but I think it was brave of her. But was it aesthetically necessary?
HAL: [laughs] I'm sure in your case it was.
C_P: It was a nice climax, but I would have been fine with her keeping her top on. I wonder if it was in the 1931 version of the play.
HAL: God, I doubt it. That was quite racy for the STC. I must say I didn't expect it, and it's brave. And I suppose it's almost expected for actors nowadays that they're prepared to be nude on stage, otherwise you don't get a part.
C_P: Incidentally, when Brendan Cowell was directing Wharf 2Loud, it was contractual that the actors had to be prepared to go naked.
HAL: I have a problem with that myself, as a female, but anyway.
C_P: As a female?
HAL: I think actors should be allowed to retain some dignity, and to have to give all on stage, and just to be expected to do that, is a tall ask for me.
C_P: So, risque by STC standards, passe by Griffin Theatre standards...
HAL: [laughs]
C_P: Although, admittedly, "The Lost Echo" had a bunch of guys with fake penises ejaculating blood.
HAL: Yeah, but it wasn't their penises.
C_P: "Season at Sarsparilla" had some naked guy (Colin Moody?) walking around in the background to take a shower.
HAL: But, you see, it's a guy. There's less to show.
C_P: You're clearly a sexist pig. Could you talk us through the plot?
HAL: [laughs] That's my problem. I don't know where it was going. Do we need to give the plot away?
C_P: Yes.
HAL: Okay, it's about a young good girl growing up in Austria, who defies her father's wishes to marry the man next door, and meets an entrepreneur who she thinks will set her free but in actual fact puts her into an economic prison, and, you know, forces her into becoming a stripper, or a nightclub dancer, whatever you want to call it.
C_P: And she winds up in gaol, and her child dies.
HAL: Yeah, I mean, it's quite a depressing script. And then she returns to daddy! And it's sort of ambiguous at the end whether she returns to the man her father wanted her to be with, and she's standing there with a stunned look on her face, possibly thinking, Gosh, I'm back to square one. So the idea is that here's this girl with all these dreams, this wonderful future, and they all turn to dust.
C_P: Due to her naivete perhaps.
HAL: In the play it's almost her wilfulness or her disobedience of her father that apparently plunges her into this state, because she refuses to submit to the role that's exepcted of her, to be a nice housewife, and the fact that she wants to marry for love, not for duty to one's father or whatever.
C_P: The fact that she's a free spirit condemns her? But she's screwed either way?
HAL: Yes.
C_P: I suppose you can read into it any situation where good intentions go bad, or hopes go sour, or the reality disappoints, or...
HAL: And the character in the background -- the university student, the Prussian... I'm just thinking how that works in, because he's someone who's totally inflexible and driven by this sense of duty to the cause.
C_P: That's true. So he's the opposite?
HAL: Yeah, he's the total opposite of a free spirit. He's her foil.
C_P: Watching it in 2007, I think you look at that character and think Rolf from "Sound of Music", or you're more awake to the anti-Semitic angle.
HAL: There were references to race in the play -- it wasn't fully explored.
C_P: No, there wasn't any looming sense of... I mean, this was written prior to the war after all. 1931. Most people read it as basically a political play, but I just don't know how much warning against fascism there was in the author's intentions, and how much was later interpreted into them.
HAL: If that was the main point of the play, it didn't come across to me in this production. Actually, it's an interesting choice of play for the STC. I'm just sort wondering why they chose it and what is the significance of it, and...
C_P: That usher lady who told the audience member off for filming was ironically a bit of a Nazi herself. The way she handled the situation was unnecessary I thought -- overbearing, depersonalizing.
HAL: I thought it was perfectly justified, but anyway we'll start the debating society afterwards.
C_P: So should people pay $73 to see this play?
HAL: [laughs] Look, it's not one of my favourites, but it did hold my attention. What I loved was that set, I mean that was sensational, the railway tracks, the way they used that in all the different scenes and just recreated the landscape, that was just incredible. I would pay $73 for the set, quite easily. That honestly was the best part of the play.
C_P: Believe it or not, I've read reviews that said exactly the same thing, that they thought the set was the best part of the production.
HAL: It really was. I mean, whoever designed that is a genius (Andrew Hays and Kimm Kovac). It was like being in Lego land or this doll's house that's been put to life. It was just wonderful.
C_P: But do you want a sense of a dollhouse here?
HAL: Actually, if you go to Austria or Europe, there is a sense of a doll's house, because everything is so cute and compact and everyone's sort of beside each other and every spare bit of space is used.
C_P: Sometimes having a suggestion of doll's houses makes a play less realistic, more abstract or fable-like.
HAL: Well, to me it almost was like a fairytale in some ways -- a fairytale gone wrong, really, for the main character... I don't know what the moral of the story was... Sorry, I'm just going off on my own tangent here, but... Is that the moral, do you think, that it was a fairytale gone wrong, or that, you know, this life isn't like a fairytale, or if you disobey your father you get punished.
C_P: I don't think you have to look for morals. It reminds me of this Chekhov play, "Uncle Vanya", which is basically about regretting, about the misspent life, but arguably it doesn't really have a message, it's more about conveying that sense, and maybe "Vienna Woods" is more about conveying something about pre-World War II.
HAL: The limitations of that life, if you're a woman?
C_P: Partly, but --
HAL: All sorts of restrictions on freedom.
C_P: But it's also about the attitudes of the different characters, right? Sort of satirising their attitudes.
HAL: What, their narrow-mindedness?
C_P: Among other things.
HAL: A sense of alarm bells: This is how fascism could happen, because you've got these bourgeois people who are narrow-minded and vicious.
C_P: If you think it's about fascism, yes.
HAL: You must admit -- very few of the characters are likeable. I mean they're not a particularly nice group of people. It's not a village that you'd like to live in.
C_P: Incidentally, it's good that even if they're unlikeable, you understand where they're coming from... Anyway, so is it worth $73? Sorry -- losing the thread of this conversation.
HAL: [laughs] There were a lot of German people in the audience.
C_P: Really?
HAL: And at half-time, I was trying to listen in to their conversations.
C_P: What did they say?
HAL: I don't know.
C_P: You didn't hear any of their conversations?
HAL: You know, what's ironic is that these people would have gone thinking, I'm going to relive my Austrian, German ancestry -- and then you get there and you've got all these broad Australian accents -- I mean, there was nothing Austrian or German about it! -- apart from the doll's house and the fake braids.
C_P: That's a phenomenon I've noticed, though you might not expect it -- plays about Germany do attract German audiences, plays about Russia do attract Russian audiences.
HAL: Well, you know the play "I am my own wife"? -- I mean that was full of German people.
C_P: Yeah, it's weird.
HAL: Well, it's called "Tales from the Vienna Woods". Of course all the German people are going to see it.
C_P: Well, if I were overseas and I saw the name "Tales from the Australian Outback", I'd avoid that freaking play like the plague.
HAL: [laughs]
C_P: I've got no attraction to see it, so I don't know why other people... So you're basically saying to me you should only see the play if you're German.
HAL: No, I think you'd be horrified if you were German, because it wasn't German. Except for the lederhosen. I mean, John Gaden's lederhosen really did it for me.
C_P: I didn't even notice he was wearing it. Was there any other sense of Germany?
HAL: Well, the set and the Christmas trees, but... Look, Hayley's wonderful, but her broad Australian accent, for me, didn't work with a German-Austrian play. It's appalling, it just doesn't work. "I'm in Vienna. G'day mate. Pass me another beer." I felt like I was in Sydney. I mean, if you actually try to put on a German-Austrian accent, it would sort of recreate Austria for me. Even if she had a neutral accent, it would have worked better for me. When I saw "I am my own wife", he did have a German accent when he spoke as the German person, and that worked for me, that transported me to Europe, and I didn't feel I was in Europe in this play.
C_P: Okay, let's switch to talking about Ms McElhinney. Good performance?
HAL: [laughs] Are we talking about acting here?
C_P: So rude. Okay, personally I thought she did give a lot. Not only the stunning nudity thing, but also emotionally. But on the one hand the performance was limited by the script, because the character is a bit cliche and unrealistic, and --
HAL: The accent killed it for me.
C_P: And I also thought that she never really allowed herself to be that vulnerable. Was always a bit controlled.
HAL: Yes, I did feel that. To be perfectly honest, I didn't like her character.
C_P: Why?
HAL: I found it irritating. It was just this whiny, irritating character that I couldn't sympathize with. It was a bit one note. I felt nothing.
C_P: Is this Hayley's best performance?
HAL: Personally I would say no.
C_P: Where did you like her best?
HAL: Well, "Mutter Courage" was exceptionally good.
C_P: You liked when she was banging that gong.
HAL: [laughs]
C_P: Well, that's the image I remember.
HAL: Actually, the other best part of "Vienna Woods" was Paul Capsis as the old mother. Having Paul Capsis on stage did reinvigorate the cast, it did make it more exciting for me. I must admit, I do like seeing new people on stage. No matter how good a cast they are, and they are very good actors, I still like to see new people. And that honestly was such a good performance, he was absolutely hysterical, it was scathingly funny, as he plays this revolting old lady, who is the total opposite to your nice old grandmother, it's mind-boggling how awful she was.
C_P: She reminds me of my grandmother, but anyway...
HAL: Well, Paul Capsis as the grandmother and as the Marlene Dietrich in the nightclub, that was sensational. And, look, I always like John Gaden, he's very warm.
C_P: I liked the first blowjob scene in this play -- when John Gaden was with Deborah Mailman in the forest and then he's talking to her, and suddenly he jumps on top of her. Much hilarity.
HAL: I thought Deborah Mailman, she was good... I'm just thinking... Eden Falk -- I mean, he played an unlikeable character, and he probably did it well. I mean he's sort of... shallow, entrepreneurial.
C_P: I didn't like his performance, to tell you the truth. A lot of it seemed too close to reading, declaiming.
HAL: And the butcher was terrific... Brandon Burke... That was fun.
C_P: Though you didn't like him as Oberon in "Midsummer Night's Dream".
HAL: No, he was miscast. That was just wrong. Maybe he didn't have a choice in the matter.
C_P: Steve Le Marquand, who played the fiance?
HAL: He did a good job of playing someone who was completely undesirable.
C_P: Did you like his characterization.
HAL: Oh, it was excellent.
C_P: Though those sorts of physical mannerisms can be quite limiting... You know, maybe we saw this whole thing too early, because I get the feeling that the actors weren't really connecting, in a lot of scenes. I think there were lots of breaks. Just small pauses. Maybe it's not that noticeable.
HAL: Actually, yes, you're right. I thought in some of the scenes, that John Gaden... Everyone was standing there lifeless, and it was John Gaden who was almost pushing the text along or... making it lively and chirpy and happening -- in the picnic scene, for example, he was pushing the pace, and he was the only person who seemed to be alive and not wooden...
C_P: Is that the script or the actors?
HAL: I have to say that would have to be the actors. I think the actors have to take the responsibility there. I mean he's just an exceptionally experienced and good actor who can make anything work.
C_P: Hmm... You know, there's actually a lot of things I didn't like about the script itself. I don't think it provided enough realistic motivations for the characters, particularly in the first half -- Hayley going nuts for Eden was over the top. Maybe it's not meant to be realistic. And here's my main problem -- you can tell it's a translation, and it's an awkward one, it doesn't know what aspects of the original to translate for. The dialogue is unnatural and often awkwardly phrased and often cliche. There's ockerisms and swearing and references to cockatoos, and then there's Latin quotations and pretentious formal language. Such a messy mix, and not in a winking postmodern way.
HAL: One thing I did like about the script was how it conveyed the sense of a day in the life of a small village, where, you know, you're walking down the street and you're walking past the butcher, the toyshop, the newsagency, and then... sort of the sense of time passing, and, okay, the next day comes and you do the same thing, and I liked that... I could relate to it, a life in a small country town, and you're walking past the paper shop and you're saying "Hi mate" and keep walking...
C_P: Is it stereotypical, though, or cliche...?
HAL: Well it creates this sense of this small village, this small intimate village.
C_P: And that was played for comedy, right? I wonder if you couldn't play it seriously.
HAL: Do you think the play was a farce, or a satire, or...?
C_P: Well, that's the thing, I think it was uneven.
HAL: Paul Capsis had to have been a satire, because it was so revoltingly funny.
C_P: But in the original, right, he would have been cast as a woman. And maybe it would have been played straight.
HAL: You couldn't play that character straight, it was so wrong.
C_P: I didn't think they knew if it was a comedy or a tragedy.
HAL: Actually... Yeah, yeah, I think that's a fair comment. I mean, there's a part of it where Deborah Mailman is wailing after seeing Marianne stripping. And, for me, that was probably the most moving scene of the play. I mean that wail just went straight through me.
C_P: It seemed to me undermotivated. It wasn't clear to me why she would be the most concerned. She didn't have that much to do with Marianne beforehand.
HAL: I think in the play she's meant to be the most perceptive person, the person who can see the truth most clearly.
C_P: Hmm... maybe she's the truth speaker.
HAL: I think she's lamenting what's happened to this beautiful young girl who had these big dreams.
C_P: Not that there's anything wrong with exotic dancing as a career. What about the scene when the baby dies -- that didn't move you?
HAL: That did... But I thought it could have been developed more.
C_P: I think they spoiled it with comedy. As soon as they find out the baby's dead, there's several comic things that happen, like Eden Falk goes and hugs Deborah Mailman, and...
HAL: But, I mean, it was truthful. That was a truthful reaction. That's where his loyalties lay.
C_P: To me it's just indicative of this uneven tone I've been talking about.
HAL: I do agree with that... If it had perhaps been a farce and played that way more strongly, perhaps it would have worked better as a whole. I didn't walk away from it really understanding what it was saying.
C_P: And even the comedy was off... the jokes were off, timing wasn't there, farce was heavy-handed... There were some painful silent moments that I think were meant to be funny, but the audience was just, "I'm not going to laugh at that." Maybe it'll get better; I don't know. And the stuttering poem, I didn't find that funny.
HAL: Yeah, that to me was trying too hard. I thought, what's the purpose. Maybe the pacing was too slow.
C_P: Actually, one major problem I had with the first act in particular. I think this is partly the director's fault (Jean-Pierre Mignon). To me, there were a lot of times when I was thinking to myself, Why the hell are these people standing on stage talking to each other. I mean, they didn't have any reason to keep talking, they didn't have any objectives. And there wasn't much suspense for the audience to keep watching.
HAL: Which scene?
C_P: Well, a lot of the scenes in the first act just seemed to me standing around talking. And I think a lot of the actions weren't clean. But anyway... Music intrusive?
HAL: Can't recall it now.
C_P: For instance, at one point they sing "Deutschland uber alles".
HAL: See, that doesn't fit in where one moment you have no accents and then the next you're singing that song. That's where I felt it didn't work.
C_P: Accents again. You know, it could be deadly if the cast tried to put on accents, and they all stuffed up. That could be horrendous. Accents can be tricky things. A bad accent is really bad.
HAL: But a broad Australian accent? I don't know. Anyway, it's just my personal problem.
C_P: What did you make of the musical moments in general?
HAL: Well, Marlene was wonderful...
C_P: The picnic?
HAL: Musical things like that can become very painful. Paul Capsis was sensational, that worked. The group singing scene... it's like, "Now we're doing a musical number."
C_P: It's not structurally built in? Actually, that "Deutschland uber alles" -- I'm wondering if they should be singing the song at all, given that they're Austrian. Austria wasn't annexed till later.
HAL: That's a good question, I don't know.
C_P: But maybe this production is set at a later time than the original. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to talk about?
HAL: As someone who loves Germany, I would have liked more sense of it.
C_P: That's your main problem with the play?
HAL: I wanted to feel like I was there, and I wasn't.
C_P: Did you feel you were taken on a journey in terms of character and story?
HAL: [laughs] Yes, but I didn't know where I was going.
~~~
Tales from the Vienna Woods is playing at the Opera House Drama Theatre from Saturday 17 November 2007 to Saturday 15 December 2007. More information (including special web deals) are available from the STC website.
~~~
Writted by Odon von Horvath, adapted by Tom Wright.
Director -- Jean-Pierre Mignon.
Designers -- Andrew Hays and Kimm Kovac.
Choreographer -- John O'Connell.
Lighting designer -- Nigel Levings.
Musical director/arranger -- Alan John.
Sound designer -- Steve Francis.
Martin Blum as "Erich".
Brandon Burke as "The American"/"Havlitschek".
Paul Capsis as "Grandmother"/"MC".
Kristina Chan as "Revue dancer"/"Girl at picnic".
Marta Dusseldorp as "Baroness"/"Second aunt"/"Lady customer".
Eden Falk as "Alfred"/"Waiter".
John Gaden as "Leopold".
Deborah Mailman as "Valerie".
Hayley McElhinney as "Marianne".
Amber McMahon as "Ida"/"Emma"/"Revue dancer".
Robert Menzies as "Captain".
Luke Mullins as "Ferdinand von Hierlinger".
Steve Le Marquand as "Oskar".
Pamela Rabe as "Frieda"/"First aunt"/"Helene".
~~~
From the program:
-- The setting is given as "Vienna and the Wachau Valley, 1931".
-- "His plays included... Tales from the Vienna Woods (1930) which satirically attacks the complacency of townsfolk amidst the insidious rise of fascism. Tales from the Vienna Woods had a successful production in 1931 by Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. When Hitler came to power in 1933 von Horvath tried to continue to work in Berlin but his next play, Faith, Hope and Charity was banned and he was eventually deprived of the right to live and work in Nazi Germany and officially declared an alien (being Hungarian)."
-- "[T]he characters try to speak a stilted and uncertain standard 'educated' German, but behind the idiotic catchphrases pronounced with forced elocution one must always feel that these are people who no longer speak their authentic language, can no longer think or feel authentically... behind every high-faluting and misunderstood 'educated' phrase there lurks the irony of what the speaker actually would have felt... Horvath's use of this 'Bildungsjargon' comprises the falsely romantic cliches of love-making; the moronic generalisations of Germans, Frenchmen, Jews and women; grandiloquent and misapplied quotations from the German classics; proverbs; nationalistic and other political slogans and catch-phrases; advertising jingles and the whole gamut of the junk-language of the media of his time. The characters in a play like Tales from the Vienna Woods, for instance, constantly wallow in the cliched self-image of Vienna as the city of golden hearted men and sweet loving girls, while, at the same time, behaving to each other in the most heartless and brutal manner and spouting the nationalistic slogans which, a few years later, will plunge the world into war... 'I am fully aware that I am destroying the old Volksstuck'... he wrote in 1935." -- Martin Esslin, Odon von Horvath: Plays.
So, it seems that what I identified as stilted, awkward, cliche was at least partly intentional, and what I identified as uneven tone is partly the result of Horvath's subversion of the German folk play.
~~~
Further reading (and quoting some bits that related to the review): --
-- STC website: "Von Horváth’s classic play is a bitter-sweet meditation on the complexities of confronting the future."
-- In the Sydney Morning Herald, Bryce Hallett writes: ""A muddle of accents and styles make for a tepid production of Odon von Horvath's 1931 folk play." Provokes the thought: to what extent can one get away with stylistic mix by calling it "intentional subversion"? Hallett goes on to deliver a number of insights that are at least 50 times more succint than anything I've written above, but don't know why he describes Marianne as "grasping for pleasure" (the character is surely more driven by dreams and necessity than by lust).
-- In The Australian (20/11/07, p 16), John McCallum writes: "Hayley McElhinney plays this astonishingly abject heroine with a sweetness that had me screaming in frustration" and "The tone of Mignon’s production, caught between exploring the realist complexity of Horvath’s rich play and trying to find something of the grotesque in it, is uncertain. The multiple set by Andrew Hayes and Kimm Kovac suggests a mechanised toy or a carnival ride, but its movement slows down the action."
-- There's a very good preview article in The Australian by Rosemary Sorensen if you're genuinely interested in this play -- "Prescience in weird times" (5/11/07). Among other things, features thoughts from adaptor Tom Wright and director Jean-Pierre Mignon. For instance, whereas Bryce Hallett regretted that "the production is stilted and distant rather than an exciting theatrical showpiece", there is the possibility that this distancing is a sort of Brechtian technique to convey a message, and Tom Wright, the adaptor, comments "I saw a production of it in German 12 years ago... and they went to town on it, but we have not sought to do director's theatre with this. We're presenting an important play relatively straight." Mignon adds: "It's our duty with this play not to interpret, but to try to reach a great purity." With regards to the lack of suspense in the scenes, Wright comments that it was written for a different theatre: "If anyone was writing like this [today], I hope they'd be doing it for film or television, these banal conversations that contain a great deal of wisdom." With regards to fascism, Wright says: "It's easy to overplay Horvath's role as a prophet of the rise of the Nazis, and it's not really the core business of this or any of his plays, but he was quite clear in describing how vulnerable this hurt, damaged society was coming out of World War I." Mignon says of the characters (Sorensen's paraphrase) that he "won't expect the audience to love this sorry bunch but he hopes that his production will avoid judging them."
-- In an article in the Daily Telegraph (24/11/07, p 3), Deborah Mailman comments: "I love Valerie, she’s a great character. But it’s a very cruel world and throughout rehearsal I struggled with the loose morals of some of these characters. Particularly Valerie. Her actions and thoughts seem to be quite illogical at times so it took me a while to understand where she was coming from."
-- Joanna Erskine at Aussie.Theatre.com mentions: "Because the play focuses on commonplace townspeople and their own problems, which are hardly anything to write home about, the play ambles along at a slow pace."
-- Diana Simmonds at Stage Noise comments "Von Horvath used the petty concerns of Vienna's petit bourgeoisie to thinly disguise his attack on the self righteous, well mannered, vicious mind-set which characterised the Nazi ascendancy. This is barely perceptible from director Jean-Pierre Mignon's tooth-achingly dull realisation of the piece." But, as I've said, and as Tom Wright mentioned in the Sorensen article, I wonder if fascism is really the point. Simmonds also comments: "Laughs come not from genuine jokes or comedic situations but from crass contradictions of inappropriate ockerisms and cheap nonsense."
-- Jason Blake in the Sun-Herald ("Prescient tale of the rise of fascism fails to deliver", 25/11/07, p 21) complains about the lack of an anti-fascist message, agrees with McCallum that the set slows things down, and says: "Jean-Pierre Mignon’s production is unable to exploit the tension between the chocolate-box fantasy of Vienna and the bigotry and hatred that underpins it." He also comments: "it’s hard to care much for McElhinney’s doll-like Marianne or be appalled by Falk’s blandly knavish Alfred."
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