In researching this article, I came across the keynote speech by Michael Gurr at the 2002 ADSA conference in Tasmania. Despite claiming it to be a ramble, his conception of theatre enthralled me.
I think at some level people still come to the theatre
for the truth. The kind of truth I’m talking about is not
the kind of truth which can be written into law, but a
truth of questioning, a truth of disturbance. Theatre is
not a place where you can successfully ask questions
which have rational answers. (Gurr ADS 42 April 2002 p.9)
Indeed, it is the coexistence of the rational and the irrational in everyday life that spurs the theatre maker on to make theatre. By Gurr’s own admission, theatre is an irrational act, not economically viable, not time efficient, not able to reach a large audience. Nothing about fits into the model of this globalised, economically rational, terrifyingly safe and unsafe world that we are all being asked to participate in. Theatre is a resistance to the absurd rationality of our daily lives and this is no more apparent than in Katz’s own writing. In actualising the unseen, in making that her mise en scene, Katz is responding to the irrationality of the world through her own irrational logic. Theatre may be an irrational act but its staying power comes from its ability to draw to light the irrationality of the reality we inhabit. Generating the irrational of the theatre world is perhaps the only way to have any kind of engagement with the real world. As Katz states of her own theatre, ‘You know how in life so often people aren’t honest? It’s hard, you can’t always be…but people have these really inane conversations all the time and both people are pretending to be interested in it. And people have developed their day-to-day personalities and they perform them everyday. And everyone is sort of doing these same performances, and theatre doesn’t have to be that as well’ (9/04/02)
In this unseen world between the irrational and the rational Katz makes her theatre. Being trapped between these two states, the roles we have to play in real life, and the truth that Gurr speaks of in theatre, is the location of Lallyland. The Eisteddfod, staged in July 2004, takes place in a tiny bedroom, the stifling space enacted in the production by a small raised platform upon which all the action took place. In this miniature room, every move was choreographed like a dance so that the two actors didn’t bang into one another or the miniature props – tiny bed, chair, desk, and chalkboard. But even in this space within a space, the coexistence of the real and the unreal went even further. By placing on a pair of oversized sunglasses (the only prop in the production that was bigger rather than smaller), Gerture entered her sacred space, a place that Abolone could not enter, in which she was a schoolteacher, the parallel world that might have been had Gerture’s life turned out ‘normal’.
In The Black Swan of Trespass, staged most recently by Stuck Pigs Squealing in December of 2004, the fictional life of the fictional Ern Malley is played out in a tiny basement, which the audience are led to through a maze of back alleys in inner city Melbourne. Afterwards, they are delivered out onto a main street through a front door of a house they do not recognise having entered.
The continual juxtaposition of the real and the unreal is played out in The Last Episode of the Bubble Teens, a commission for St Martins Youth Theatre and staged in May 2002, in which a group of teen friends find themselves in outer space on prom night and realise their entire lives have been televised to the inhabitants of outer space for their viewing pleasure. Their existence is nothing more than the product of a TV show.
As Herbert Blau so articulately states of theatre, ‘There are two realities meeting, then, at a single vanishing point, life and death, art and life, the thing itself and its double, which prepares the ground for performance’ (Eds. Schechner & Appel 1990:260).
The power of theatre comes from a fascination with space, with theatre’s doubling of space, the unique possibilities of its methods of representation and discourse. This is why there is a resurgence in independent theatre – there is an acknowledgement of the unique and important role that theatre has to critique through irrationality, to bring an irrational truth to light that does not work in the hands of any other system of representation.
Another way to state this is that ‘the lyrical space resulting from realism and the simultaneous exploding of realism creates an elastic theatrical territory’ (Moroff 1996:36), an alternative space part real, part fiction that allows those boundaries to be disturbed and transgressed.
In Lally’s theatre a strategy of flaunting dramatic conventions and employing the meta-theatrical is used to undermine the ideology of realism. Repetition, metaphor made real, unruly language.
In the wake of the theoretical explosion that is postmodernism, ‘it is no longer credible to box off “political theatre” as a separate category, because in one way or another all performance and theatre can be seen to be involved in the discourses of power, to be in some sense engaged with the political’ (Kershaw 1999:63)
At its best, theatre is about having your preconceptions mucked up, your prejudices undermined. It’s about those exhilarating moments when you’re not sure whether it’s appropriate to laugh. (Gurr ADS p.10)
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