The Sound And The Fury (April Seventh, 1928)

by Joao Carneiro

In a living/dining room that remains throughout the show, the memories of Benjy go by, those of a 33 year-old man, mute, with the mind of a 3 year-old. In other words, an idiot. Yet what the actors of New York’s Elevator Repair Service, directed by John Collins, have done was to display the words of Faulkner’s text – the first section of his novel The Sound and the Fury. The sentences are organized according to a complicated logic that articulates time and space. And to display is also to create images for the confrontation between an innocent – this is the meaning of “idiot” in Faulkner’s novel – and the world. Everything that’s written is said in the show, everything is read, everything is played out. What ERS proposes, under the guise of a show, is the dream of every reader: to really see what is written. For this to be a vision is inevitable, each reading constructs its own images. Those created by this company are a perfect and unusual example of what be can be theatre rooted in text.