Red Shoes
Thin Ice
PICA, Artrage Festival 2008
Perth, Western Australia
It was with great interest that I stepped into PICA’s performance space for the first time and also to see the ‘wonderboy’ of Australian theatre at the moment, Matthew Lutton. His new company Thin Ice presented an adaptation of the classic Hans Christian Anderson’s Red Shoes. In actuality it was an interweaving of three tales – one which was an HCA tale The Shadow and the other I didn’t recognise but had the hallmarks of that classic dark European fairytaleness about it. These stories are timeless, they are still around today because there is deep resonance in our culture for them – especially our white European culture, where we are still afraid of the dark, of the forest and of our shadow.
What immediately struck me was the visually striking set and the use of lighting and composition of the bodies in the space. And it is here that Matthew Lutton, Director, has the most talent. Time and again, with no hiding of the transitions between characters and location (all of it was done openly in front of the audience) we were allowed to see new stage pictures unfold and collapse.
This is as far as I got with the piece, for after 15 minutes I began to really struggle. And what seemed like such bold theatrical choices at the start, ran out of steam. The brash nature of the performance, which seemed edgy, became swamped by style over substance. And I began to question the very nature of what was being done. Why tell these stories now? What resonance do they have for a contemporary audience in Perth in 2008?
Matthew has spent some time in Melbourne working under Michael Kantor, and if I am led to believe he actually ended up directing Tartuffe due to Michael falling ill. By all accounts this was a great achievement. And there are definitely similiarities between Michael and what Matthew was trying to do here. Very stark European style contemporary set, pantomime or fairy tale as a backbone and larger than life performance style. So what was the difference? Did Matthew not have the budget? or the time?
I also believe (and this is absolutely my own personal taste) that if you are going to sing in a show, and use it as a narrative driver then you need to be absolutely sure of its context otherwise it is just singing and we don’t know why the person just didn’t speak it normally into the space. And the breaking of the tension built in the piece was jarred by these shifts, you could feel the audience shifting as if they to were marking the change in form.
Finally, I was dismayed at the blatent and completely uneccessary homoerotic scenes near the end. They were so unsexy and added nothing to the piece. I didn’t feel enagaged, aroused or moved by it at all. This was a great tragedy, as these final scenes where the protagonist gets his feet cut off should have been the climax of the piece and all I felt was uncomfortable for the performer whose balls were left out in the open for about fifteen minutes for the world to see.
Perhaps I saw an off night? It was second night after all and by all accounts the opening was a great success.
