Carson's interstitial poetry

I adore Anne Carson. I want Nox but I probably want her Antigonik more. I mean, just look at this:

Of course, I'm obssessed with Antigone, so that's another reason to get this whenever I can.

There's a general post brewing about theatre, triggered by Swar's comment here last month; one of these days, I shall actually sit and write it all down.

Never quite getting there

A Disappearing Number. Directed by Simon McBurney. Complicite. Global Peace Auditorium, Hyderabad. 22 August 2010.

Remember Amadeus? There is one line from the film adaptation of the play that I will never forget. Mozart says to the king, "Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man, but I assure you my music is not." He may never have said such a thing; we will never know, but we do know that it doesn't matter. But with these few words, we approach something like an understanding of a man whose genius we know only through his music.

No such understanding is given to us of another genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan by watching Complicite's play, A Disappearing Number. In this very slick, techincally and choreographically admirable production, nothing of the man behind the numbers is revealed. Like his formulae, we only approach but never arrive at anything approximating the person Ramanujan was. When you consider that Ramanujan died only 80 years ago, that it shouldn't be hard to find out more about him, it's truly puzzling to see such an opaque representation of the man, even in his brief relationship with G.H.Hardy.

This is not a review. It is an expression of my dissatisfaction of the structure of the play that gives more importance to the modern love story of Ruth Minnen and Al Cooper (the character an Indian American), and an annoying sub-plot involving an Indian call centre employee who calls herself Barbara Jones.

There are curious, unexplored asides involving another character of Indian origin - a Ugandan who insists that she is a British national - in one scene, she comes to make Al Cooper's bed in a hotel and side-steps the question of 'where she's originally from'. Something is being said about identities - Cooper identifies himself as American, the son of Indian parents who left for the States even before he was born, and who has never, ever visited India - but it isn't clear what or what it has to do with Ramanujan. In another scene, Ruth, who is visiting India,  is in a train with a Ugandan of Indian origin - it isn't clear that it's the same character, though it could well be, since it would seems to bolster the play's central and only premise that the pattern is the thing - and asks her what the meaning of the sacred thread is. The Ugandan, in an astonishing display of mystical knowledge, says it represents the mind, body and the soul, all intertwined.

This is an example of the mystical bullshit that the play - perhaps unconsciously; let's be generous - is full of. At various times, characters, some of them supposedly mathematicians who should know better, are appallingly sentimental about numbers. Ruth's telephone number is significant because it contains a  number that Ramanujan once explicated (this telephone number is responsible for a large chunk of the play); in another scene, when Ruth finds out that she is pregnant, she calls Al and tells him that one plus one is not two but three. Oh please.

Then there is the character Ramanujan. You see him in his home, writing on a slate, erasing what he has written with his elbow. His wife remains nameless and is more often than not seen in supposedly respectful half-crouch. In England, to establish his awkwardness in wearing shoes, Ramanujan is shown waddling along Cambridge. Everything about him in England is overdone - his gestures, his facial expressions, even his accent. Is this supposed to be funny? Poignant? What, if we accept that one's demeanour says something about who we are, does this say about Ramanujan? That's he's infantile and incompetent? Comic and inscrutable in every way including in his mathematics that doesn't follow western methods? What do we make of the way he speaks?

Let's talk about accents. We're Indians speaking in English. To ourselves, we don't have an accent. To other ears, our speech might sound strange but no stranger than other accents sound to us. How is this to be represented on stage or on screen? I remember the first film appreciation class I'd ever been to in school. We were 15 then. Someone asked a teacher, who had just shown is Dr. Zhivago, why the people didn't have a Russian accent. "The film's in English. Why should they have Russian accents unless they're Russians speaking to each other in English?" we were asked in return. It was something to think about, and we did. But apparently Complicite didn't think to ask themselves this question, or how they wanted to deal with it.

What this demonstrates is that orientalism is alive and well. India is, to all intents and purposes, still a mystical place where even mathematicians, geniuses though they be, worry about crossing the kalapani, wear their sacred threads and cast their horoscopes and live out the outcomes exactly as predicted, and none of this is problematic in any way at all because this is a story about the early 20th century and such things happened then, this was so, Ramanujan did worry about all these things and probably spoke English with exactly that South Indian wobble we all know and love so well.

Except, this is emphatically not a story about the early 20th century. It's a story about the present, and a supposed discovery of the man and his math by a mathematician and her reluctant but besotted husband. The narrator, a Bengali-Telugu by his name, is also in the present, guiding us through the past to the present time (which we're told in another nugget of mysticism, is All Connected). And he can't seem to bring himself to interrogate anything. If anything, he also gives us his version of the three words that make the sacred thread a symbol of higher-minded abstraction instead of the socially oppressive one is also and really is. At the very least, he ought to have been shamed into silence but of course he won't because the director and the writer have no clue whatsoever of anything other than the prism of the mystic orient through they've decided to view the subject.

It's also an odd and not always unpleasing contrast between the abstract and stripped down mathematics that is at the heart of the play and the highly-overlaid and layered production. At worst, it seems to make math palatable for a viewing audience with spectacle; at best, it is another, spatial expression of concepts that are only half-comprehended but inuited to be beautiful.

*

There's more to say, but this should suffice. Other not laudatory reviews include this and this one. It should tell us something that most reviews that have appeared in the Indian press are all gushy bedazzlement. There are dissenting views but I haven't seen them written about anywhere. If anyone has, do point them out.

*

Update: Just for fun, here's Veena's take on the play form three years ago.

What's love got to do with it?

Last night's performance of Love| Death| The Devil at the Goethe Zentrum had the audience either leaving fifteen minutes into the performance, or stunned into silence by the end. It consisted of six dancers, a few animal masks and the most puzzling presence of a table and a few chairs.

Now I have a high threshold for performances that require patience, but this one was just weird: every once in a while some person would grab a megaphone and ask us if we were afraid to die and announce that s/he was not afraid to die.

Every once in a while they'd put on animal masks and writhe on the floor, gurgle and make animal sounds, change costumes and do a bit of Kraftwerk-y prancing, and John Woo-ish gunslinging, and then holler at us through the aforementioned megaphone. It was all headache inducing, not least because of all the dry ice they seemed to need. The final straw was one dancer who gagged himself on one microphone and left long strings of bodily fluid on it which dangled like a broken spider web until he flicked it off some fifteen minutes later. I tell you, the entire audience watched that string of spit with horrified fascination for the entire fifteen minutes while other no doubt more interesting things were happening elsewhere on the stage.

I mean, I think of death for a large part of my waking day, okay, and having a few people asking me in between dance moves if I am afraid of death does not convince me that this was supposed to be some deep, meaningful take on eros and thanatos. Love was conspicuous by its absence, and what the devil the devil had to do with any of it is something I'm still trying to figure out.

The one good thing about the performance was, of course, that at least a few people in the audience would have welcomed death in preference to watching more of the dance.

The 2nd Chorus from Jean Anouilh's Antigone

One of the most stirring moments in theatre occurs in Jean Anouilh's Antigone. The play itself is was an important one, especially when it was first staged in 1944, because Antigone was seen as representing the French Resistance. But the most interesting thing about the play is that it constantly digresses, in key moments, into the kind of philisophical discussions that playwrights today ought to study: no one can say these make the play boring or unwatchable, or that they dissipate the drama.

The second Chorus, in both the Sophocles and the Anouilh versions, is said after Creon gives the order to uncover the body of Polynices that Antigone has attempted to bury. In the Sophocles version, the Second Chorus is a celebration of Man. "Nothing is beyond his power" the Chorus declares, but ends on a cautionary note, warning against pride, as any self-respecting Greek tragedy ought to do.

Jean Anouilh's Second Chorus, however, meditates on the nature of tragedy. Anybody who has read Sophocles' Antigone cannot help noticing that whereas Sophocles makes man responsible for his own condition, for the tragedies that befall him as a result of his own hubris, Anouilh says that tragedy comes when Man refuses to surrender to his destiny or when he imagines that he can take charge of his fate and change it.

The whole Second Chorus from Anouilh's Antigone below. It never fails to bring on the goose pimples.

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. Anything will set it going: a glance at a girl who happens to be lifting her arms to her hair as you go by; a feeling when you wake up on a fine morning that you'd like a little respect paid to you today, as if it were as easy to order as a second cup of coffee; one question too many, idly thrown out over a friendly drink--and the tragedy is on.

The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason, and sorrow are on the march; and they move in the wake of storm, of tears, of stillness. Every kind of stillness. The hush when the executioner's axe goes up at the end of the last act. The unbreathable silence when, at the beginning of the play, the two lovers, their hearts bared, their bodies naked, stand for the first time face to face in the darkened room, afraid to stir. The silence inside you when the roaring crowd acclaims the winner--so that you think of a film without a soundtrack, mouths agape and no sound coming out of them, a clamor that is no more than a picture; and you, the victor, already vanquished, alone in your desert of silence. That is tragedy.

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama--with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.

In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from
them.

In melodrama, you argue and struggle in the hope of escape. That is vulgar; it's practical. but in tragedy, where there is no temptation to try to escape, argument is gratuitous; it's kingly.