The Exquisite Hour
The Exquisite Hour, Theatre Royal August 12-17, 2008;phone: 1300 795 012
THE MIDDEN is a concept well understood by most Australians: the slowly growing heap which represents the (usually comforting) detritus of your life, be it built of chop bones, baked bean cans and oyster shells or the overflowing laundry pile into which you burrow for a pair of socks that just might be wearable one more time.
Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days takes the midden-as-life quite literally and – characteristically – looks at it through much bleaker eyes. He places an elderly woman, Winnie, in the middle of a sand pile that grows through the course of the evening and her incessant prattling until she is buried to the neck. The sand – desert – is a particularly confronting medium because it also suggests a life as an arid, lonely desert.
When the late great Ruth Cracknell played the part in 1991 (Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Simon Phillips, set by Mary Moore) it was heartbreaking to watch her chirrup happily about how terrific everything was and how happy she was – even as her refusal to face reality, together with her husband Willie’s taciturn disinterest, inexorably buried her boundless and misplaced optimism. It was an unforgettable performance and probably the greatest of her long career.
Maina Gielgud OA achieves similar greatness in French dancer-choreographer Maurice Bejart’s interpretation – and variation – on Happy Days. The title The Exquisite Hour is apt and without apparent irony, although happily the performance lasts ten minutes longer than an hour.
Gielgud, now 63, is a ballerina who has been a source of inspiration for Bejart since she joined his company in Paris in 1967 and stayed four years. Beckett’s play was also a revelation for him in that he saw how a great actress could hold the attention of an audience despite being buried and immobilised in a sand pile. Beckett, who was famously disinclined to allow anyone to muck about with his work, allowed Bejart to adapt it and it finally took the shape and title it now has after four or five variations. In adapting the play to a mix of dance and spoken word he retained that minimalism while having Willie (Paul DeMasson in this production) encourage her into one last en pointe reverie.
The pathos of the production is heightened by the midden’s ingredients. Hundreds and hundred of old, worn out pointe shoes form a beautiful, pale satiny pink heap from the middle of which the perky Gielgud/Winnie smiles warmly at the audience. In her holdall she has the necessities of life: toothbrush, powder compact, revolver and a rose-pink parasol. In her mind she is young and life is as it was and should always have been. To see her perform these thoughts with youthful grace and confidence is to be made suddenly aware of one of life’s often forgotten truths: when we remember something we see ourselves as we were, not as we are. When Winnie dances she is remembering her heyday, remembering – seeing – the romance and achievement, the poise and balance that is her image of herself as she sees the young dancer.
Gielgud took on the role for the first time in 2002 and the reception, in London and Europe, was rapturous. Bejart died in November last year and this time Gielgud has had to prepare for the role alone. It adds another layer of meaning to her performance because, in essence The Exquisite Hour is the dancer’s tragedy – and in this instance, triumph – as the past and present are portrayed simultaneously in the same person. Gielgud is achingly sad in her merriment and hope; and her courage in taking it on and not only dancing but acting the part is remarkable.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the midden, on the sidelines of life and light, is Willie. Paul DeMasson, former leading dancer with the Australian Ballet and now ballet master at the Singapore Dance Theatre, returns to the stage in a performance of similarly dramatic and subtle brilliance. His depiction of alienation and inexpressible love is simply lovely and moving. The pair collaborates in one of the most memorable and probably never-to-be-repeated dance-theatre experiences to have come to Sydney and those privileged to savour it are more than fortunate.
