The State Theatre Company of South Australia, Belvoir, and Malthouse Theatre, have collaborated once again to stage David Greig's play, The Events, as part of the Adelaide Festival. An Anglican minister conducts a community choir, but they have suffered the loss of a few of their members due to a lone gunman. The minister, Claire, in particular, is traumatised and seeks answers. She not only wants to know why it could have happened but, seemingly more importantly, why she was spared.
At each performance, a different Adelaide community choir appears as the minister's own group and, on this occasion, it was a superb choir of young women known as Aurora They have their own regular conductor, of course, but the musical director for this production is the extremely skilled and talented Carol Young, and their own conductor was happy to join the ensemble to sing with them.
This is modelled on Greek tragedy, with the main character, and a secondary character, plus the chorus, commenting and reflecting on things that have happened, adding narrative to move on to the next important section, and foretelling what is to come, but there is more to it than that.John Browne composed the music which, naturally, has been fully rehearsed, but each choir knows nothing about the script, even the few lines some of them are given to read, until just before the performance commences, a device intended to generate genuine reactions from the singers.
The production is under the direction of Clare Watson and features Catherine McClements, who began her career with our State Theatre Company, as the obsessive woman, Claire. Johnny Carr plays all of the other characters, including the gunman who is simply referred to as The Boy, as well as Claire's life partner, Katrina. Watson has thrown down a challenge in her strong direction that goes outside the sort of theatre that we are used to seeing for the majority of the time, and McClements and Carr understand her requirements and respond marvellously.
The ever busy Geoff Cobham created both the set and the interesting lighting design for the production, based around a tiered section at the rear for the singers, Young at the piano to the audience's left side of the choir, and a table with tea and coffee making facilities to the other, plus several stacks of chairs that are set out and removed by the two cast members as required. His always carefully crafted lighting, this time with banks of large overhead lamps of the type found in large building and industrial workshops, does the rest to take us from the community hall to the other locations.
Some people said that found it hard to connect and engage with this production, declaring it lacking in sufficient emotional range, and that Carr did nothing much to delineate his numerous characters. Some said that it left them cold, even bored. Perhaps Brechtian theatre techniques are not as well known and recognisable as I thought. Bertolt Brecht was not enamoured of realism and created what has been referred to as 'epic theatre', although that was not his own name for it.
It involves many of the techniques that we saw in this work: breaking the 'fourth wall' to talk directly to the audience, a degree of narration, a series of what he referred to as episodes rather than acts and scenes, alienation, or distancing the patrons from the action, making them spectators rather than audience, nonlinear presentation of events, the use of songs, often industrial sets, rearranging the set in view of the specatators, actors playing multiple roles, all summed up in his term "verfremdungseffekt" (alienation effect), meaning to separate the spectators from the emotional aspects to encourage them to engage intellectually.
By showing the theatrical aspects he intended to make it clear that theatre was not reality but a representation of reality. Spectators were expected to make a critical analysis and, hopefully, leave the theatre wanting to make social and political changes. He was, of course, a Marxist. Augusto Boal, another Marxist, later took this a step further, turning the spectators into 'spect-actors' and making them equal participants, in what he called Theatre of the Oppressed, with an actor, the facilitator, bridging the gap.
Armed with this knowledge of Brechtian Theatre, The Events takes on a whole new meaning and, to those who were aware of Brecht's work, there were plenty of overheard snippets of conversation which indicated that it had had the desired effect, with people discussing the issues, instead of the play itself. This is something a little different in Adelaide's theatre scene, so do go and experience it for yourself.
Here is the trailer.
