Telefunken written and performed by Stuart Orr, directed by Barry Laing.
Table 9 Productions @ the Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until September 25.
"Art, like suicide," says Ralph Manheim Mann blackly during the course of
this fascinating show, "is very, very personal."
It's an illuminating analogy. Suicide is at once the ultimate assertion of
self - the conscious decision to override even the deepest survival
instinct, a blasphemous refusal of life - and the self's ultimate erasure.
And if art, as Freud argued, is the sublimation of certain instincts towards
death and sex, it is not a sublimation which yields gratification but is
peculiarly circular. It is, in fact, a masochistic sublimation, erasing
rather than aggrandising the self.
Stuart Orr's one-man aria Telefunken is art of this kind. Orr's
electrifying physical presence is at the centre of the show, but all our
attention is splintered and diverted from Orr himself by his very
expressiveness. Personal this show may be, but it is the antithesis of
confessional.
It's a bit of a challenge to describe its complexities. Telefunken works on
several levels, and in reflecting on it, all of them seem to metastasise
uncontrollably, creating dense clusters of allusion and metaphor which
themselves collect more allusions, more metaphors...and it is no accident
that one of the presiding gods in this piece is Loki, the trickster. I fear
that one viewing is not nearly enough to absorb all of its implications.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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