(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)
The Dublin Theatre Festival has opened, and my sister-in-law and I have seen our first of the season. The Lulu House,
featuring Lorcan Cranitch and Camille O'Sullivan, and directed by
Selina Cartmell (who directed, among other things I've been blown away
by, both Woman and Scarecrow and the production of Sweeney Todd we saw at The Gate).
It's
on the more experimental side of things, since it's a site-specific,
"immersive experience" that mixes acting, music, projected video, and
installation. It ranged all over the James Joyce House (The Dead), as
we followed the actors from room to room for different acts. A lot of
it involved the two actors reenacting scenes from a film starring Louise
Brooks while the same scenes were projected into the room, with the
audience gradually coming to a deeper understanding of the circumstances
that this was happening in.
So, The Lulu House is about
voyeurism and the violence of obsession. And as it's immersive theatre,
it's trying to make you the audience feel complicit as a voyeur to a
crime as one who stands and watches victimization, who is invited into
the scene by a man who wants to show you his "presentation"about Louise
Brooks. You start in the sitting room on the ground floor, moving to
the hallway, and thence to increasingly intimate and disturbing spaces
and scenes, eventually ending up in the cellar (and then out the front
door).
It was really well-performed, beautifully designed, and
disturbingly creepy, and oh so close. Unfortunately, it didn't quite
work. A couple of the problems were logistical. There were too many
audience members. The "limited audience" was just plain not limited
enough. It's not an immersive experience when you're distracted by
trying to duck around shoulders to see what's going on, and getting
stepped on is the wrong kind of immersive experience. The other
thing was getting us from room to room -- the actors had to do the
herding as well as portraying their characters, and sometimes it stood
out awkwardly, diminishing the intensity of emotion. And, it was pretty
emotionally intense when logistical problems weren't getting in the
way, and as you figured out what was going on.Sis-in-law
pointed out afterwards that there was actually a simple way to do this
without confusing things: a plant. If they'd just had one "audience
member" to go where we were supposed to go next, the rest of us would
have followed like sheep no problem. You wouldn't have had to have
Cranitch's character in particular trying to call "Louise" on to come
upstairs, etc.
Another thing was that I could see exactly why
the episodes or acts were ordered the way they were ordered, but it
ended up feeling a bit too contrived . . . a bit of a cop out.
Although, it did end up with one of the weirdest ways to end something
I've ever experienced, as we all followed O'Sullivan's character out the
front door, watched her cross the street and walk across the bridge
into the distance . . . and then stood around not entirely sure if that
was it, eventually deciding that we'd been told it was exactly an hour
long, and it had been an hour so it must be over.
Anyhow, here's a blurb from the Theatre Festival's website:
"THE LULU HOUSE is inspired by George Pabst’s masterpiece Pandora’s Box,
the 1920’s silent film starring Louise Brooks, and German playwright
Frank Wedekind’s 19th century ‘Lulu’ plays. This immersive experience
will take you on a shocking, thrilling and intoxicating journey
exploring how Lulu has eluded and seduced, spreading desire and
destruction wherever she goes and offers a unique opportunity to get up
close and personal with the amoral psyche of this seductive femme
fatale."
I'm
very glad I just went "Oh! Selina Cartmell's directing that. I want
to see it!" and didn't bother reading the blurb too deeply until after
seeing it . . . because that blurb is really misleading. It's not about
Lulu, it's about obsession with Lulu. And psychotic obsession is not
the same thing as "seduction". That's what we call victim blaming.
It wasn't completely satisfactory, but I'm glad we went.
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