Tangled Narratives Of Tragedy And Hope

by Murray Bramwell

The American novelist William Faulkner took the title of his 1929 masterwork from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The inventive Brooklyn-based Elevator Repair Service has taken the first section of Faulkner’s complex text and given it such a lift that it signifies much — and makes mesmerising theatre as well.

Divided into four, the novel has different narrators. Three of them are brothers: Benjy, Quentin and Jason Compson, from a Mississippi landed dynasty now seen (like the American south, in Faulkner’s view) to be in racist decline. This production uses only Benjy’s tale, which prefigures the dysfunctional family’s tragedy. And, given that he is a mentally disabled mute, it is a tangled telling. Directed by John Collins, the accomplished actors of Elevator Repair Service take this torrent of poetic consciousness and present it not as naturalistic dialogue but as read-aloud text. This establishes a dissociated but lilting cadence that carries the story (and the book it is being read from) from player to player, adding layers of implication and perspective as roles are shared and reinterpreted.

The story of the Chooky Dancers from Yolngu country on Elcho Island, off northeast Arnhem Land, is an inspiring one. Putting their zany interpretation of Zorba’s Dance on YouTube, to the delight of millions of viewers, brilliantly reminded us, particularly here in Australia, that remote is not remote in the old way any more. Mobile phones and the internet are transforming culture.

Building on these contrasts, writer and director Jamieson mixes video, techno and re-runs of YouTube, alongside traditional dancing and singing, to tell a fragmented version of Wrong Skin: two young lovers caught in Romeo and Juliet style conflict because their clan and kinship lines forbid their relationship.

While this commendable production has been a huge venture for all concerned, its ambitions are greater than the capacities of the performers and its tragic theme is curiously at odds with the exuberance and energies of the Chooky Dancers and the cultural adventure they have created.

While not minimising the challenges facing indigenous communities, perhaps, for once, the real story here is one called Right Skin.

View the original article on the Australian website here .