Mabou Mines Doll's House
a school reading list staple stir fried and served up as naked lunch
| 08 Oct 2007
BEWARE! Insisted the programme stridently. TAKE CARE, it cautioned. THIS PRODUCTION CONTAINS FLASHING LIGHTS. And indeed it did. Strobes, dry ice, midgets, androgyny, a nightmare chorus of stilt-walking grotesques, comedy Norwegian accents, fiendish masques and a cloying atmosphere of oppressive claustrophobia, both literal and sexual, all figured in Mabou Mines' surreal production of Ibsen's The Doll's House.
The full house may have been warned, and certainly there were no petit mals stretchered out of The King's Theatre, but few could have been prepared to witness this school reading list staple stir fried and served up as naked lunch. Ibsen wrote the play at the end of the Nineteenth Century and to contemporary audiences his scathing critique of the institution of marriage was nothing less than scandalous. But a separation, heavily clothed in the mealy mouthed theatrical metaphor of its day, must have lost its satirical bite for today's jaded punters more used to witnessing multiple familial breakdowns live on daytime television.
Mabou Mines' founding artistic director, Lee Breuer, has taken this anachronistic plot line and created an entirely new piece of art. The cast – male roles are played by midgets and females by towering women – affect nasal Scandinavian accents whose cumulative effect - if initially off-putting - only adds to the cartoonish bad dream quality of the whole. The set is a literal rendering of the eponymous children's toy and its mini-furnishings are moved about the stage continuously in a kind of neurotic square dance as its hopelessly mismatched partners circle each other but never quite make contact or indeed understand each other. The powerfully staged dream sequences, where our famous flashing lights are used to great effect, amp up this sense of dislocation and tap straight into the shadowy recesses of our subconscious whose imagery may be shared but whose experience is by necessity solitary.
As the play reaches its dénouement and Maude Mitchell's Norah – by this time picked out by a single spot in the stagemost box – declaims her final lines she rips off her long blonde rig and corseted dress to reveal a flat chested, bald woman. The audible gasps of the audience were proof, if it were needed, that Mabou Mines had succeeded. Kept guessing to the end, we were privileged to witness a piece of avant garde theatre at its very best.
The full house may have been warned, and certainly there were no petit mals stretchered out of The King's Theatre, but few could have been prepared to witness this school reading list staple stir fried and served up as naked lunch. Ibsen wrote the play at the end of the Nineteenth Century and to contemporary audiences his scathing critique of the institution of marriage was nothing less than scandalous. But a separation, heavily clothed in the mealy mouthed theatrical metaphor of its day, must have lost its satirical bite for today's jaded punters more used to witnessing multiple familial breakdowns live on daytime television.
Mabou Mines' founding artistic director, Lee Breuer, has taken this anachronistic plot line and created an entirely new piece of art. The cast – male roles are played by midgets and females by towering women – affect nasal Scandinavian accents whose cumulative effect - if initially off-putting - only adds to the cartoonish bad dream quality of the whole. The set is a literal rendering of the eponymous children's toy and its mini-furnishings are moved about the stage continuously in a kind of neurotic square dance as its hopelessly mismatched partners circle each other but never quite make contact or indeed understand each other. The powerfully staged dream sequences, where our famous flashing lights are used to great effect, amp up this sense of dislocation and tap straight into the shadowy recesses of our subconscious whose imagery may be shared but whose experience is by necessity solitary.
As the play reaches its dénouement and Maude Mitchell's Norah – by this time picked out by a single spot in the stagemost box – declaims her final lines she rips off her long blonde rig and corseted dress to reveal a flat chested, bald woman. The audible gasps of the audience were proof, if it were needed, that Mabou Mines had succeeded. Kept guessing to the end, we were privileged to witness a piece of avant garde theatre at its very best.
run ended
http://www.maboumines.org