Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
4 stars
When director and designer Stewart Laing comes onstage two thirds of the way through his production of Jean Genet’s elegantly brutal power play to take questions from the audience during the set change, it sums up every deconstructed moment that preceded it. Laing may have obeyed Genet’s gender-bending maxim that all parts in his flight of fancy about two maids who role-play their mistress’s decadence be played by young male actors, but he takes things much further.
4 stars
When director and designer Stewart Laing comes onstage two thirds of the way through his production of Jean Genet’s elegantly brutal power play to take questions from the audience during the set change, it sums up every deconstructed moment that preceded it. Laing may have obeyed Genet’s gender-bending maxim that all parts in his flight of fancy about two maids who role-play their mistress’s decadence be played by young male actors, but he takes things much further.
The noises of war open the show, as the stage curtain
is painstakingly raised, lowered and moved backwards and forwards in an
extravagantly choreographed performance of its own. Three seated young men
rehearse a Metallica song on electric guitars, before performing it before
projected footage from Vietnam. Later, against a perfect reproduction of the
stage’s actual back wall, Scott Reid, Ross Mann and Samuel Keefe play songs by
the Velvet Underground and David Bowie before tearing emotional chunks out of
each other as sisters Solange and Claire and their Mistress. Their self-destructive,
sado-masochistic nihilism resembles a 1990s in-yer-face play.
One scene replicates a rehearsal room read-through. Genet
himself makes an appearance by way of an infamous 1985 TV interview when he
turned the tables on the crew and subverted the artificial construction of the
situation.
All of which questions the nature of performance
itself in Martin Crimp’s razor-sharp contemporary translation. Notions of
reality and artifice are pushed to the limit in a pop-art hybrid that is part
gig, part multi-media happening, part installation. It’s relentlessly and
radically sustained, right down to the final, wonderfully unexpected musical
interlude, and no, it’s not The Jean Genie.
The Herald, January 21st 2013
ends
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