Well worth seeing: get there if you can.
he Perjured City, Or The Awakening of the Furies, by Hélène Cixous, directed
by Kirsten von Bibra. Design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Jessica Daley,
lighting by Whitney McNamara, puppet design Lachlan Plain. With 2007 VCA
Drama Graduates. VCA School of Drama, 28 Dodds St, Southbank until June 9.
Hélène Cixous is one of France's most significant intellectuals, in that
honourable European sense which comprehends the artist as a critical
intellect, deeply engaged with the issues of her time and place. She is a
writer who exceeds all possible categories: as a philosopher, rhetoritician,
literary critic, scholar, novelist, poet and playwright, she has been
influential far beyond the borders of France.
Like her contemporary Jacques Derrida, Cixous was born in Algeria, and her
complex experience of colonisation and otherness there fed into the radical
project of rethinking the Western cultural tradition that has been subsumed
(and widely misunderstood) under the rubric of post-modernism. With thinkers
like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément and Monique Wittig,
Cixous is one of the formative intellects behind contemporary feminism,
focusing on the practice of l'écriture féminine (writing the feminine) as a
means of challenging the patriarchal logic that construes women as Other.
And her long collaboration with Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil
is one of the most celebrated in Europe.
Despite her undoubted stature, Cixous's work is seldom performed here (even
in book form, it can be difficult to find, and prohibitively expensive if it
is available). The VCA offers a rare opportunity to see her work with a
performance of her 1994 play The Perjured City, and offers a passionate
realisation of a passionate work. The Perjured City is an unruly,
unpredictable, fiendishly complex play, which takes full advantage of a
poet's imaginative right to do, well, practically anything she damn well
likes. Cixous is nothing if not excessive, and nothing if not liberating. If
you're interested in the possibilities of theatrical language, textual and
otherwise, this is not to be missed.
There's no doubt that this play presents unique challenges, to both artists
and audiences. It's vast, with a cast of 23 playing 32 characters (plus a
chorus), and it runs for more than four hours. It's a forceful reminder that
French theatre has a very different political history to the
English-speaking tradition; Cixous's theatre assumes itself to be a dynamic
and vocal part of the polis, a site of literal as well as metaphorical
revolution. In this play, the appeal to the audience is direct and visceral:
we, who are citizens of this city, speak to you, also citizens of this city.
We tell you of this wrong, and we ask you to act.
Whole review at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
xA
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Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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