Before/After
BEFORE/AFTER, Sydney theatre Company/Next Stage 2011, Wharf 2, February 4-19. Photos: Brett Boardman.
CRISTABEL SVED’S production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play in 51 fragmented scenes is a marvellous piece of work: crisply realised and clear, spacious and intelligent. The actors, STC Residents Zindzi Okenyo, Richard Pyros, Sophie Ross and Tahki Saul with guests, Annie Byron, Justin Stewart Cotta, Johanna Puglisi (also credited as choreographer and she’s done a fabulous job) and Graeme Rhodes, take on 30 roles over the 110 minutes continuous, rolling action and are equally terrific.
But, you know there’s a but coming … but what a pity they have such piss-weak flim-flam to work with. Schimmelpfennig is a hot playwright as only a contemporary German playwright can be and that’s a worry in itself. Newly crowned emperors have a nasty habit of prancing around stark naked and, although the cast is mercifully permitted to retain their underwear for the most part, he does seem to want company and have them get their gear off at every opportunity.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, unless it’s supposed to signify bold experimentalism and daring, along with the handheld cameras, projections and dialogue fragmentation – in which case it’s even sillier than I thought. The STC blurb says of the play, “simultaneously weaving the mundane and the banal with the bizarre and the extraordinary in a seductive portrait of modern life, Before/After explores the construction and fragmenting of identity and community.”
Yes, well. So near, yet so far. There are tantalising moments of brightness and clarity when ideas are allowed to coalesce, but in the main the 51 fragmented scenes are just that: slivers of ideas that may or may not have had the capability to become more, if the writer had bothered to try. Yet it seems lazy and complacent – which insults the work of the cast and creatives, never mind the audience.
And the creatives do deserve a gong: designer Justin Nardella has transformed the Wharf 2 space into a reflective black void of smart hotel room-cum-inner universe that lighting and audio visual designer Verity Hampson has enhanced and played with to great effect: bare globes suspended in wire cages, photo studio lights used as virtual characters, by turns imprisoning and apparently observing the actors. Composer and sound designer Max Lyandvert has accomplished similarly playful and imaginative things with a wide variety of aural effects that wash through the goings-on with real impact.
Finally – and at an hour and 50 minutes straight through it seems an awful long time to finally – the 51 fragments of ideas reveal themselves as fewer because of repetition. While this is partially to examine the same event or incident from different viewpoints (nice), it really does mean plain, simple repetition: so many false endings it just about gives you the hiccups as anticipation is thwarted yet again.
For mod-German drama lovers only, but the cast and production are really fine.
A version of the review appeared in The Australian.
