Testimonium

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on TESTIMONIUM at the Tramway, Glasgow for The Scotsman 23.11.12.
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4 stars ****

IT’S NOT EASY,  it’s not accessible, and a few audience members at the Tramway left during the performance, never to return.   Yet all the same, this show created by two founder-members of the legendary Chicago experimental group Goat Island, and featuring their new company Every House Has A Door as well as a fierce three-piece garage band called Joan Of Arc, strikes me as a remarkable piece of performance art, full of a strange inner poise and poetry.

Testimonium is inspired by the work  of the American objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, whose unfinished work Testimony involves a response to the transcripts of dozens of criminal and industrial injury cases heard in America between 1855 and 1915.  If the strong, sad backbeat of the show lies in this historic record of personal and economic violence, though, its style shifts thought-provokingly between the meditative geometric abstraction of its choreography – involving endless meticulous rearrangement of simple props around the space, in a tribute to Spinoza’s idea of a link between ethical and geometric integrity – and the rough-edged, surreal  lyricism of the songs, belted out at such a volume that the audience has to be issued with ear-plugs.

The show is perhaps a shade overlong, at just under 2 hours including an introduction, by dramaturg Matthew Goulish, which seems strictly unnecessary; and it has its pretentious moments.  It revolves, though, around a performance of terrific dignity and integrity from the actor Brian Saner, who reads and recites the courtroom testimony; and in the end, this strange collision between text, music and meditative movement comes to seem like a sorrowful and insistent search for the pure vibration of truth, in a world full of incitements to lie, and to fill our minds with the ugly bluster of falsehood.

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Sam Shepard At The Citizens’

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on SAM SHEPARD AND THE CULT OF THE PERSONAL APPEARANCE for Scotsman Magazine, 23.11.13.
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SATURDAY NIGHT at the Citizens’ Theatre, and the excitement is intense.  The final performance of the Citizens’ acclaimed production of Sam Shepard’s great 1980 play True West is due to finish at any moment; and the spacious old foyer in the Gorbals is filling up with a motley crowd of theatre fans, hoping to slip into the auditorium for the second part of the evening’s entertainment.

For tonight, for one night only, the playwright Sam Shepard – legend of American stage and screen, author of more than a dozen award-winning plays about the American dream and its attendant nightmares, sometime partner of Patti Smith and Jessica Lange, and the man who played test-pilot hero Chuck Yeager in the great 1983 film The Right Stuff – is to appear in person, in a post-show question-and-answer session on stage.  In a historic moment, the 135-year-old Cits’ has opened its ancient, rarely-used upper circle, to  accommodate the crowd.  And after a brief break, the great man slopes without ceremony onto the stage, accompanied by the show’s director, Phillip Breen; both of them look strangely large in the perspective of Max Jones’s set for True West, set in a modest suburban house on the edge of  Los Angeles where two contrasting brothers, Austin and Lee, confront one another in a dialogue brillliantly played, in this production, by Alex Ferns and Eugene O’Hare.

The thrill of seeing and hearing Sam Shepard in the flesh, though, still fails to answer a few nagging questions about the huge and growing popularity of the personal appearance as an art-form, and what it means for our culture, in an age when the mere fact of celebrity often seems to trump the real content of any work those celebrities may have done.  Across the UK, after all, there are now literally dozens of festivals – including Edinburgh’s own hugely successful International Book Festival – which consist almost entirely of personal appearances by artists who have long since completed the work under discussion, talking to audiences who have already experienced it.  And large theatres in Britain are now able to programme many nights a year of events which are essentially personal appearances – of varying quality – by people famous for something else, including ex politicians and soun-doctors like Tony Benn and Alasdair Campbell.

So how did it go with Sam Shepard, last Saturday night?  Well, Shepard, now 70, had been in Derry/Londonderry, one of this year’s European Cities Of Culture, working on a new version of the Oedipus myth.  He was clearly in relaxed mode, after his first-ever day in Glasgow; and an easy-going chat with the audience ensued, often focussing on Shepard’s writing process, what it was like to work with Patti Smith, or the extent to which True West is autobiographical.

It’s not that Shepard said nothing of note, in his 40 minutes on stage.  He spoke powerfully, for example, about the relationship between writing and acting, noting that “there’s a certain lyricism in film acting that is often akin to writing”.

What was completely absent from the conversation, though, was the life-changing political  intensity of a play in which Shepard clearly suggests that between them, these two ill-fitting aspects of the American male psyche – the one puritanical and conventional, the other violent and rebellious – will succeed in devastating the place, if not the entire planet.  To experience that transforming dramatic energy, we have to focus on the work, not on the life.  And while that makes it no less thrilling to see a true American icon and hero live on stage at the Cits, it also comes as a valuable reminder that great art is always something of a mystery; and that the  people through whom it comes are flawed human beings  like the rest of us, tentative, imperfect, and often as baffled as we are by the sheer power of their work, at its magnificent, unfathomable best.

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