(Painting by Ben Quilty, for STC's The Histrionic,
featuring Bille Brown. © the artist)
I can't stand actors. Actually I
hate them, because as soon as they're in danger they side with the
audience and betray the author. They utterly ally themselves with
stupidity and feeble-mindedness. Actors destroy and annihalate
imagination, they don't bring it to life. And they are the true
gravediggers of literature.
-
Thomas Bernhard, theater heute, October 1985
Ever since Bernhard erupted onto European stages in 1968 he's been
like a pebble in the shoe for the western theatre. He probably
ponders exactly what the theatre is more deeply than anyone since
Beckett; his plays have a relentless verbal energy that has great
force. And not necessarily a force for good.
His work is about his own troubled, internecine, contradictory
relationship with his homeland, a nation that somehow (to him)
seemed to emerge from the horrors of the war pretending it had not
been complicit, able to wallpaper over its past. His writing seeks
to rip that wallpaper away with a sound like nails on a
blackboard.
The Histrionic's
title in German is der
Theatermacher. It's effectively untranslatable; it
means both someone who makes theatre a but also has all that
association with hysteria, with being a drama queen, with making
yourself the centre of your own tragedy. A histrionic in this case
is both the creator and the destroyer. A histrionic concocts a
universe then blows it up. For Bernhard it's as if the theatre,
like Austria, is just untenable. And in that tension is a
beautifully dark dark dark suite of plays.
I love The
Histrionicand I have loved working on it. It's on
occasions slapstick-hilarious, and a few seconds later you find
yourself wryly smiling at his sad anger. On occasions the central
character's monstrosity is exhausting but he's tempered with
vulnerability and intelligence. It's really a great role to give
one of our own larger-than-life theatremachers, Bille Brown. Years
ago Bille was just gargantuan in a version of UbuI did for Belvoir. It's
like an evil scientist has put a polymath's brain into a grizzly
bear. Gee, he's a gem.
The Histrionicsets up the
world as a problem. It's all set in a backward Austrian town, in
the local hall, where Bille's character Bruscon is going to play
his greatest work, a sort of sweeping survey of European
history…but we never get to see the play, even though it sounds
enticingly idiotic. We get Bruscon whinging about how bureaucrats
won't let him turn the exit lights out so he can have a full
blackout. We see him bully his own children, belittle his wife,
snidely harangue his hosts, rant, cajole, exhaust himself, get
kitschily sentimental, wallow in self-pity. He rails against
provincialism, against national failure, against the vapidity of
the young, the venality of the old, the tyranny of the past, the
banality of the present.
And all the while I was working on the script I kept think the only
difference between Bernhard's homeland and ours is two letters. I'm
hoping such moments might occur in The Histrionic, where an audience
member wonders to herself Did he
just say Austria…or Australia?
The Histrionic (Der
Theatremacher), Wharf 1 Theatre, 15 June - 28 July,
2012.
Feature: Tom Wright
Date posted: 25 Sep 2011Author: STC