Seemannslieder
The hypnotic pull of the ocean on human beings is something Australians know all about, but for the seafaring peoples of the Low Countries, it is a constant fact of life - and death. This becomes quickly apparent in Seemannslieder (sailors’ songs) as the men and women gathered in the cavernous bar-lounge of a ship almost as dysfunctional as a P&O bonk'n'booze-liner speak and sing of its omnipresence.
“Fish has a high price,” succinctly encapsulates the pain of a fisherman’s widow, or even the fears of a young man who begs his mother not to send him to sea - the same sea that took his father and which will surely claim him and his brother.
“And the sailor views the glassy surface so uneasily,” another sings, of the ambiguous relationship so many of us have with the sea. It could also be a description of the initial reaction of an audience, unfamiliar with director Christoph Marthaler’s world, to this two-and-a-half-hour without a break music-theatre epic of the mundane.
Going to sea is fraught with excitement and foreboding, so is the idea of sitting in a theatre for two-and-a-half hours: will I need to pee? Is this going to be worth it? What sort of conceit is at work here? When will the first person walk out? (9.15pm, actually, after an 8pm start.) Funnily enough, there is something similar about being aboard a ship and being in the middle of a row in an auditorium surrounded by waves of people: a niggling sense of claustrophobia and anxiety is coupled with the knowledge that it’s not easy to leave, you have to make a conscious decision and some effort of will to do so.
But these neurotic thoughts (which probably don’t infect a great proportion of the audience, let’s face it) are quickly banished in the face of the serious whimsy and serious intent which saturates Seemannslieder with potent charm.
A barmaid whose gin consumption is as alarming as her peculiar customers is the initial focus as she shuffles her 45s and plays bits of music inbetween serving drinks and dealing with hopeless drunks and their maudlin choruses of “I love you”. Then, almost imperceptibly and over time, each of the eight performers emerges as a personality via visual or character tics and jokes to engage the audience in a two-way relationship.
Australian director Benedict Andrews has written of Marthaler’s work that his theatre: “slows time to a standstill. He stages passages of wound-down time, of empty time and of memory time. His dramaturg Stephanie Carp calls him a director of the ‘meantime’ - when something has concluded and something new has not yet begun. A time between. A time of waiting, of remaindered thoughts, leftover people and once forgotten songs.”
Seemannslieder is a classic festival entertainment: it’s not remotely like anything we’re accustomed to. Some will hate it, many will be bewildered by it, many more will be transported by its originality, compassion, humour, wacky bravado and the way it almost casually throws up nuggets of emotional truth, eccentric behaviours and blinding insights into the laughter and pain of the human condition.
Time is memory and memory is time, seems to be one of the most comforting thoughts you could take away with you, along with the laughter and vivid sense of having been on a long, rewarding journey that somehow passed in a flash.
Seemannslieder - ZT Hollandia/NTGent, Sydney Theatre, to January 13; www.sydneyfestival.org.au
