ARTicles vol. 3 i.2b: A Rougher, Wilder Music

Director, translator, playwright, artistic director, performer, novelist – Neil Bartlett is an artist of extraordinary scope. His theatre is passionate, articulate, and vital, always born from a strong sense of personal identification. His many translations and adaptations, which include texts by Dickens, Wilde, Marivaux, Molière, Kleist, and Genet, are among the freshest in the English language. His productions are characterized by an elegance, precision, and wit that barely mask a furnace of passion and rage. His novels, like his plays and adaptations, use historical settings to reflect on contemporary issues of class, alienation, intolerance, violence, and love, and have earned him a cult following. Neil was born in 1958, and grew up in Chichester in the south of England. During his undergraduate studies at Oxford he began to create performances with his friends, including a séance in what had once been Oscar Wilde’s living room. “We were all militant feminists,” he recalls, “causing trouble in the English faculty. We weren’t doing ‘acting’ or ‘plays’ – the mainstream theatre seemed very reactionary to us.” Upon graduation he moved to London, where he co-founded the 1982 Theatre Company, and later a performance group called Gloria, so called, Neil explains, because “we wanted our shows to be glorious, to be sexy and highly colored. In the late eighties, ‘theatrical’ was a pejorative term. If you described someone’s work as ‘theatrical’ it meant it was at best superficial and at worst homosexual. We always liked the theatrical. We wanted big costumes and if possible an orchestra, and we wanted to make people cry. We were interested in extravagance and excess, the passionate and the dangerous. The point was to assert some essential and unbreakable thing in the face of vitriolic, poisonous consumerism.” In 1994 Neil became Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London, where he specialized in foraging for plays in the recesses of the canon and restoring them to dazzlingly theatrical life. In November he stepped down, and his production of Dido, Queen of Carthage at the A.R.T. marks his first freelance production in a decade.Gideon Lester: When we asked you what you would like to direct at the A.R.T., Didowas one of the first plays you mentioned. Marlowe is rarely staged in this country or in the U.K. When did you first encounter his work? Neil Bartlett: I grew up in a boring town in the south of England, but it had a very good second-hand bookstore. On the way home from school I used to stand in the back and read. One of my early prized possessions was a second-hand copy of The Works of Christopher Marlowe, which I still have. It contains all the plays, and the poem “Hero and Leander.” When I was a teenager I loved it chiefly for the passage where Marlowe describes Leander. I still think it’s one of the sexiest things in the English language: “Even as delicious meat is to the taste, So was his neck in touching, and surpassed The white of Pelops’ shoulder. I could tell ye How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly, And whose immortal fingers did imprint That heavenly path with many a curious dint That runs along his back.” I’d never read anything that described a man’s body with such frank sensuality. You have a sense of Marlowe speaking directly to you, without inhibition, about human desire. Desire in the physical sense, but also in its grandest form; all his heroes and heroines are driven by limitless desire, often to their deaths. When Faustus says, “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” he’s saying, “look at that, isn’t it amazing? Is this what drove the world to destruction?” When Dido dreams of keeping Aeneas, she says “And if he leave me not, I’ll never die.” You hear a mad, rapacious desire for the world to be other than it is. There’s a rougher, wilder music in Marlowe than in Shakespeare. G.L.: What is the greatest challenge in bringing Marlowe to the stage today? Above:Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid. N.B.: Our contemporary theatre is based in a psychological notion of character, but it doesn’t quite hold for this play. Why does Dido fall in love with Aeneas? An Elizabethan would say, “because Cupid struck her with his arrow.” We don’t believe in Cupid. We know what it feels like to fall hopelessly and suddenly in love with a completely inappropriate person, but we don’t call it “Cupid” any more. We are going to have to discover a psychological truth, an emotional logic, to Dido’s infatuation. Of course it’s not a great stretch; Carl Jung wasn’t the first to show that the symbols of mythology can provide useful diagrams of psychology. Initially the play seems a beautiful but rather stylized parade of great, inhuman creatures, but the more I get to know it, the more I think it is psychologically very acute. G.L.: Can you give an example? N.B.: I’m always shocked by the moment where Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, sees Dido for the first time and says, “Madam, will you be my mother?” This boy has watched his mother killed in front of him, and now, when he’s been shipwrecked and rescued by this strange, bejeweled queen whom he’s never met before, the first thing he does is ask her to be his mother. There’s a brutality to Marlowe’s depiction of human feelings that I find challenging and appealing. When Dido is pierced by Cupid’s arrow, she loses her head completely in about twenty lines. She knows it’s happening to her but she can’t stop it. It’s a wonderful description of the way your stomach tips over when you see someone to whom you are overwhelmingly attracted. The theatre allows for many kinds of psychological representation. Ballet isn’t great on the subtleties of human psychology, but as an account of what it feels like to fall in love there are few things better than a good pas de deux by MacMillan. G.L.: Dido has been refigured in Western art for more than two thousand years. What about her story is archetypal? N.B.: We’ve all been left by men. G.L.: What else? N.B.: Marlowe ends his play with two worlds at war; a male world of empire, war, and destiny under the jurisdiction of a patriarchal god, Jupiter, who guides Aeneas to the founding of the Roman Empire, and the world of Dido the Virgin Queen, who rules Carthage on her own with her sister, Anna, the only mortal women we see. The women represent effeminacy, luxury, sensuality, child-rearing, love-making – everything that is gorgeous, fecund, and female. The two worlds are in absolute opposition. In the final scene Dido effectively says to the audience, “When I kill myself, I will assert throughout history the victory of the female principle over the male. I will make sure that my name is remembered after the fall of the Roman Empire.” Dido knew her history; here we are, retelling her story once again. She won. There are very few paintings of Aeneas, many of Dido. G.L.: Is there as much complexity in Marlowe’s portrayal of Aeneas? N.B.: I think so. He has the internal division of a Shakespearean character. On the outside he is a great military figure, but inside he is devastated by the experience of the Trojan War, the destruction of his beloved city, and especially the loss of his wife. Dido reveals herself very quickly – like Cleopatra she’s volatile, she speaks her mind. Aeneas has the hard carapace of a war-battered solider, while inside is a deeply wounded, ashamed, confused man. He’s heartbroken throughout the play. When he meets Dido he thinks he might see a chance to return to life. Then the gods call him to his destiny and he has a choice; he can stay with his heart, or go with his mind, which tells him that to overcome the guilt of the Trojan War he must go to Italy and rebuild Troy in the form of Rome. To communicate this vast struggle, Marlowe pulls out some astonishing tricks – the speech where Aeneas describes the fall of Troy and the murder of the royal family, for example. Suddenly his armor cracks open, and out comes this lava flow of memory. It’s one of the longest and most celebrated speeches in English drama – it’s also the one that Hamlet refers to when he greets the Players at Elsinore. Then there’s the moment when Aeneas leaves Dido, and this man who could talk with such burning eloquence leaves the stage in silence. If he speaks, he won’t be able to leave her. It’s fantastic. G.L.: You created the set for Dido with your long-time collaborator, the designer Rae Smith. The set echoes the architecture of the Loeb Drama Center’s stage-house. Can you explain why? N.B.: That’s always been the case with our design. Until I arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith, none of my work took place in a theatre. It had to be about the room where we were performing, whether it was a cabaret stage, an abandoned warehouse, or the street. My job has always been to get in the room, whatever it is, and talk directly to the audience, to make them feel as if they are in some wonderful, extravagant, beautiful, highly charged space. Theatre is very simple; it’s about a bunch of people getting up in front of another bunch of people and doing something for money. You can do that in any room, and it’s the performers’ job to make it exciting. There’s no such thing as an inherently boring room, though some take more effort than others. The Loeb needs work to make it really hum. The auditorium aspires to be neutral, which I think is an error of judgment on the part of its architects. You can’t make it work by decorating it, by saying to people, “let’s pretend we’re not really in this room. When the lights go down, forget where you are and just concentrate on the stage.” That old nonsense never works. G.L.: You strive for immediate communication with your audience, yet your plays, novels, and productions are always set in the past. How do you reconcile the contemporary and historical forces in your theatre? N.B.: When it’s successful, you get a great sense of the past and the present coming together. Historical characters can reach such intensity that they burst out and speak to us directly. My work centers on people in conflict with their own world and struggling to escape their time and place – men and women, for example, who are told by their society that they are wrong to love the person whom they love, and who resoundingly turn on the world and tell it to fuck off. The theatre is meant to challenge normality. G.L.: In what way? N.B.: It’s a place where you can assert a power that no one can take from you. When you see a great performer in a great moment – an actor or opera singer scaling one of the heights of the classical repertoire, or a drag queen in a bar, or Tina Turner or Bette Midler when they really let it rip – you encounter something unconquerable. I’m drawn to performers and stories where this particular power is opposed to the forces of reaction and destruction and conservatism. It can’t be destroyed or tampered with, and it’s very sexy, full of a certain fiery, dignified resistance. My colleagues and I always joked that over the front door of the Lyric we would inscribe in letters of gold, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” You go to the theatre to see the world as it is not, but as it could or should be, as it can be at its most terrifying – the world of your nightmares as well as your dreams. Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.