Machine Day/Diary Day/Career Nursing Assistants' Day
2008-06-12 @ 11:10 p.m.

Before I get into the details of tonight's production, indulge me as I say a few brief words once more about the experience of attending a play by myself. I think I was magnifying my latent personal insecurities yesternight. Tonight, I dressed in what's considered a step or two up compared to my outfit yesternight, and I felt more blended in. Terribly shallow, but clothes do make the man after all. It helped that the crowd tonight was also smaller. I have a strong dislike of crowds that I usually hide, but people like Shirley can attest to how often I bitch about crowds.

Okay, so here's what I think about the second night of The King Lear Project. In a nutshell, if Lear Enters is about the inability of man to inhabit the idea of Lear, Dover Cliff - The Conditions Of Representation is about the inadequacy of theatrical reality to faithfully reproduce the written word. The production was again divided into three parts, focusing on three scenes that have traditionally caused problems in the staging of King Lear. The first scene rehearsed was the storm scene with Lear and the Fool. The debate here raged around whether the external turmoil of the elements should have a physical onstage manifestation, or whether the internal turmoil of Lear was sufficient to hold the scene together. Sound, lights, set all had a crack at trying to tweak the scene, with the effect being particularly funny for the last, when James unveiled a representation of the storm that was distinctly phallic, in order to underscore the sexual subtext of the scene's lines. I liked the second version, when everything was stripped away and Remesh was left to convey everything through his delivery alone, but I do agree with Kaylene's remarks about the necessity of witnessing Lear contending with the elements and being defeated. Without the visuals, the sense of tragedy is reduced to mere distress.

The second scene rehearsed was where Cornwall blinds Gloucester. Variations here included adjusting the direction in which the chair Gloucester was bound in faced, as well as the precise way in which he should be blinded by Cornwall, which included a bizarre suggestion that the blinding occur while Rajagopal was situated offstage, so as to leave everything to the audience's imagination. That didn't work out at all. As the actors became more caught up in tweaking the action to maximise its realism and bloodiness, Kaylene lost her patience and ordered them to start over, but this time with a more restrained, mechanical quality to their acting. This version of the scene was executed brilliantly. Brendan and Janice radiated menace as the bloodthirsty couple, and at the points of blinding, a row of lights situated at the back of the stage flashed strongly, which had the effect of temporarily blinding the audience too. Regan's final lines were delivered in pitch dark, as the audience was forced to share the perspective of the blinded Gloucester.

The final scene that was rehearsed was when Edgar fools Gloucester into believing they have reached the cliffs of Dover, where the latter resolves to commit suicide. The scene inherently has an element of absurdity, for the audience can plainly see through Edgar's deception, and to share Gloucester's false belief is to ask for too great a suspension of disbelief even in a willing theatrical audience. The scene was initially presented in a decidedly comic manner, with pictures projected onto a screen to match Edgar's running description of the supposed surroundings. Elizabeth remarked that this was confusing, as it didn't make clear if the projected images represented Edgar's description, Gloucester's imagination, or physical reality. Kheng Hua then objected to it completely, instead advocating that Gerald and Rajagopal work to convey everything by invoking the linguistic richness of Shakespeare's text. Combined with some physical gestures, they sought to create the impression of a cliff, for which the audience could suspend disbelief because it is implied throughout by Edgar's physical motion that the cliff is a fiction. Then in what I personally found to be the most significant moment of the play, Kaylene said that perhaps it would be best to leave everything to the imagination, so everyone cleared the stage, house lights went off, and Gerald and Rajagopal delivered their lines in even, measured tones, devoid of emotional shading.

I must say that the way in which the play ended was highly unusual. Normally, we expect the house lights to come on and the cast to come onstage for the curtain call. Here, what happened was that the house lights came on and the ushers opened the doors. Just like that. Then as the audience is leaving the venue, they suddenly chance upon the cast, with Gerald snapping shots of Remesh and Crispian posing in raincoats as if they were still rehearsing for the storm scene. So a sizeable proportion of the audience is looking on, wondering what's going on, and just as suddenly, it's "Cut!" and the cast takes their curtain call, except there's no curtain here, just glass panels. It was a pretty cool way to end off though, that much you have to agree with.

I have a little theory as to why the ending of the production was the way it was, which I will elaborate in a moment. It has to do with something Paul said, so I'll just say something about Paul's role in tonight's performance. Once again, he was seated in the midst of the audience, only this time, his role appeared to go beyond that of producer, as he delivered summaries of King Lear's plot, and whenever he responded to a question that appeared to have been directed to him by Kaylene, the rest of the cast froze, as if his presence inserted one more layer of reality into the whole production. This led to the fourth wall being broken once more, as when Elizabeth responded to what the audience now realised was actually a question addressed by Kaylene to her, not Paul, with an apology that she had been "frozen" for a moment. Anyway, tonight, his lines definitely sounded like the intelligent pronouncements of a theatre critic.

So now we come to my little theory. At one point, Paul mentioned that the audience in the theatre has their freedom curtailed and they have to hide in the darkness. I suppose what that means is that as the audience, we cannot directly influence the course of events that are played out before our eyes, for we surrender, if only temporarily, the right to chart alternatives for the characters once we sit down to watch them perform. For the characters onstage, tragedy occurs when, as Paul put it, they act as if they did not have that freedom either, doomed to act out the dictates of the text. Yet doesn't that mean that ultimately, we are all slaves to the text? Kaylene brought this up when she told everyone to clear the stage at the end, remarking that even the director is subordinated to what I see as the tyranny of the text. Then why have the actors carry on posing outside the theatre? To me, that represented a complete dissolution of the fourth wall, just as when the sound and light people called out to Kaylene from behind our backs (at least the backs of those of us seated in the stalls). They were symbolically breaking free of the text, which had held sway in the final moments inside the theatre, by having the play spill over into real life, at the same time that the audience left the theatre and regained that ability to choose, to reimagine different outcomes and unfoldings of narrative. Thus performers and audience both stepped outside of the conventions of what we habitually perceive to be theatrical.

Finally, I think the issue at stake here is fidelity of representation. Can a thousand words paint a picture? Or must we always resort to concrete manifestations to buttress the power of language? Yet in doing so, are we not still enslaved by the words of the text, which seem to possess undeniable primacy after all? So stagecraft is but another example of the inevitability of our imposing interpretations on a text that once written, takes on a life and an identity of its own. Even so, the dramatic text remains incomplete unless it's performed, as reading of lines by Gerald and Rajagopal in the darkness demonstrated. After two nights, play and reality have merged, enfolding the audience into complicity with the cast. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow's production has in store, as it takes the form of a post-show discussion. I can't wait!