Paracelsus and Frankenstein
There is a woman Asleep In Us All
Večer (Slovene daily), Anja Golob
Entangled in one spin of the reddened horizon are the endless
musings, drenched in imagination and pinched by the office door of the
average daily existence inside which they burgeon and wither alternately
four times in a row. Within us there is a woman sleeping, the ideal of
everything feminine. She is split between reality and the names of history,
which in Slovene becomes, how conveniently, feminine. From this perspective,
even Aristotle knew perfectly well why women should be kept away from
the politics (=the external), as Alcestis and Antigone where able to find
out for themselfs. For the same reason, same "feminists" cling
to Plato as the great man who was capable of acknowledging that deeper
quality in himself (= the woman), if I exaggerate a little. But I am only
mentioning all this because it is relevant to the performance.
Discussing its intentions would be a futile task, but I do want to expound
the all-encompassing metaphor or femininity that pervades it. Not only
on account of protagonists, who are all women, but rather on account of
the content whose merciless duality is mirrored onto the fine line between
reality and imagination to the point where the distinction becomes imperceptible.
When this happens, everything immediately returns within the usual bounds;
literally, too. The woman take off their costumes, put on their "work
clothes" and shut themselfs off in their latticed mini-offices, the
micro - worlds in which they follow the age-old routine. And this is where
we once again meet the mentioned gentleman, A., whose restrictive attitude
has proved wrong at this precise point - for the woman can. The thought
can be turned inside out - a woman is capable of transcending, if you
will, of opening the bolt of her office cage at any time she so wishes
and, if but for a moment, "defect" to the other side. A woman.
Still, Paracelsus and Framkenstein is far from functioning as a merely
deductive demonstration of ability - it is also a process of the actual
split between the two principles (in part) represented in the title. An
even repetition of the light of a photocopier - a metaphor for the web
of the utterly banal world - strikes into the gentle natural world pictured
by the playfully disordered clouds in the summer sky. The original is
unrecognizable and is at this very instant kneading a dough with her new
kitchen appliance, kneading a dough for yet another copy. The original
is dead, so to speak. Its only option for reanimation is an imagined (not
"technical") reproduction of the empty, the already seen and
ultimately labelled names, forms, images, through which it might speak
- a least as a principle, if it is buried under the rubbish of anxiety
of the "unnatural" as an individual. The original can only breathe
through Ophelia's lungs, so to speak. This is a faltering and an extremely
unsure breathing, but the only one possible.
In conclusion, which I append to the review of the
performance with as much attachment, let me stress the fantastic stage
interpretation of all the four actresses, espacially their truly extraordinary
expressiveness. The stage language is allocated with a sense of rhythm
and detachment that function perfectly and are, even more importantly,
polished to the last detail. A resume for those who always bother to read
nothing but the last line: an excellent, incredibly aesthetic show. A
must.
Radio Slovenija 1, Tadeja Krečič
As early as in the beginnin, the
audience is spontaneously introduced into a special form of theatre narrative,
resigning themselves to a cours of elaborate and purified images, to a
variety of voices and a host of words transposed from teh original context
into a new one. Indeed, this seems to be the very level that the production
is trying to effect and has been highly successful in doing so.
Parallel worlds
Dnevnik, Petra Pogorevc
Refind visual image, firm concept, excellent stage production.
The fifth stage project by the conceptual theatre Muzeum is set in an
anonymus modern office with an airy ambience of the purified sign and
unobtrusively hinted scenery. With melancholy music and glowing clouds
projected on a vast screen in the background, the introductory scene draws
the audience's attention for a while to a picture of four women sitting
in their isolated working "cells". This visual background matrix
is than replaced by the facade of a huge business building. The lirical
beginning is shifted aside by a disciplined stage presentation of working
routines in the form of elegantly and unassumingly performed tiny rituals
repeatedly done by the actresses sitting at the computers inside their
mobile metal constructions. This is an earthly world, yet its uniformity
makes it expressly abstract, too. On the visual level, it is evoked with
the use of black, white and several hues of grey, while on the level of
sound it is supported by mechanically interwined hackneyed phrases and
synthetic music rhythms. However, right before the spectators' eyes, running
parallel with the first one, there opens another world; it is bathed in
a blue light - let us recall Emma Bovary; her reveries shone in numerous
hues of this very colour! - while the music has a markedly electronic
sound. In such passages, which on the level of the whole performance cleverly
intertwine with episodes from the sphere of their "real" existences,
the actresses, as they go along, take on the parts of famous characters
from world literature. As they get under their skins, they continually
put on new costumes, and by mediating the quotations they enable the audience
to recollect various mythologized contents. In doing so, their performance
is permanently distanced from the staged material. They move wwithin diverse,
often quite witty and creative discrepancies and confrontations between
the variegated performance marked with a subtle mélange of styles, and
the evoked original context of the selected parts. Gradually, the identities
of these characters seem more real than "reality" itself; on
the one hand, the woman appear to be lithe and supple creatures, but,
on the other, their parcelled-out heteronomy makes them unstable and helpless.
For this reason, their actual office-based existences become increasingly
visional. Here, I have to point out a quite telling, remarkable scene
in which Mateja Rebolj, standing on tiptoe, gives her rendition of the
famous soliloquy of the irresolute Prince of Denmark. In this mass scene,
excelling in multi-level costumes, staging and performance, bringing to
life Isolde, Madame Bovary, Ophelia and Margaret, this suggestive image
of a pulsating protracted body whispering that "by a sleep we end
the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"
is one of the strongest moments of this condensed and impressive production.
Delo, Blaž Lukan
Paracelsus and Frankenstein follows
the parallel paths of four women, ipso facto running along separate lines.
They are united only by their mutual "destiny" their lines however,
never meet in a single identification point. They are perceived as a mellifluous
four-voiced confession, a parallel co-existance of "four women"
caught in a moment of rutine, which they flee for unpredictible aesthetic
and existential space where they re-create themselves out of themselves,
i.e. out of their womanly "nature".
As to its formal aspects, the production has a fairly coherent "aestheticist"
structure. It is staged without any dramaturgical delays and rests on
a convincing interpretation. In addition, its unobtrusive artistic, musical
and rhytmical beauty offers theatre-goers a chance to "put their
feet up".
