You could be happy - ‘Optimism’
- Nick Terrell
Optimism presented by the Sydney Festival, Sydney Theatre Company, Edinburgh International Festival and Malthouse Theatre.
Playing at the Drama Studio, Sydney Opera House.
Directed by Michael Kantor
By Tom Wright (“after Voltaire”)
Optimism offers up a barrage of novelties that seek insistently to divert. See the dancing monkey-men, the bubbles, beach balls, strobe lights and smoke machines, count the industrial fans and cap guns, and marvel at the cheesy dance-craze choreography. Kantor’s theatre is determined (almost to the point of neurosis) not to be dull. In a little over two hours, Wright, Kantor and their clown troupe of theatre makers serve up such a smorgasbord of theatricality it would be indigestible if it wasn’t so shiny, sugary and easily absorbed.
Candide is a picaresque and Wright’s ‘19 short scenes’ approach embraces the unrelenting, episodic momentum of the original. Some of the connective tissue is missing, which makes it a challenge to fully comprehend the sequence of events, but perhaps this is no accident. Perhaps this approximates the disorientation and confusion of the innocent Candide as he moves through battlefields, pox wards, plane crashes, slaughter, torture, the Old World and the New.
Most picaresque tales move towards a point where the formerly questing protagonist finds their stores of motivation have been all used up. The accumulation of experience and the disappointment of grand ideals leads to the gradual exhaustion of aspiration and ambition. It seems as if Kantor has set out to lead his audience to a similar point of exhaustion - to dazzle, seduce, flatter, trick, pamper and hurry them into a contented pliability, such that we might all happily embrace Voltaire’s simple (or simplistic) conclusion. Iain Grandage’s incidental music, for example, is quite charming, but the fact that it’s there at all (performed by Alan John) is another clear sign of Kantor’s prevailing reluctance to allow the audience too much time (or any) on a free rein.
There is much in Kantor’s theatre-craft that would find a place in a procedural guide to brainwashing – but if theatre is to be more than a mind-altering experience something is missing.
Voltaire’s own wit, his numerous gags and one-liners, seems to have been shackled or cowed somehow. The lines are still there, but they’re drowned out, swallowed or hurried aside for the next routine. There is so much going on, so many approaches being made to the audience that the more convoluted or involved satirical thrusts are competing for oxygen and failing to ignite. Instead, most of the laughs arrive courtesy of physical comedy (the visual riot of effects and costume, wacky dance routines and slow-motion slapstick), in Woodley’s plot recaps and stand-up repartee at ‘front of curtain,’ and in sporadic moments of comic patter.
The production is more than content to hurry on because there is always the prospect of a saving grace to hurry to. This is in keeping with the dominant vaudevillian aesthetic – scatter-guns on rapid-fire – but haste here comes at the expense of some control over the audience. This will probably be subject to nightly variation but with so much to get done, the cast are often forced to keep moving before the audience have had a chance to soak up a laugh-line. Timing is critical to comedy, and too often the production treads on the audience’s lines.
Kantor’s direction is hyperactive and eclectic with little intention to garner any cumulative emotional involvement. But after all, Candide, Pangloss, Cunegonde, Cacambo, Martin … they’re clowns; they’re not people at all, they’re putting on a show. The best clowning takes place around the margins of Woodley’s variously uncomprehending, inarticulate and inoffensive Candide. David Woods and Francis Greenslade have the knack - neither is bashful about hamming things up, but they also know how to get more nuanced results from playing things straight.
I’ve always believed that fun is what other people have, so rather than savouring Optimism’s frothy and effusive confectionary, I admit I was waiting anxiously for it to give way to the sanguine irony Wright promises in his “Writer’s note”. All those clowns, all that clowning. The arresting moment came though, as the shiny-shiny sheen gave way to the artfully grotesque.
Hamish Michael shuffles to centre stage in (ironic?) black-face, introduces himself as the one armed, one legged slave of Surinam (“That’s the price of your eating sugar in Europe”) then temporarily stops the merry-go-round with an arresting rendition of Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy”. Michael’s slow, deep and tar-thick vocal is full of longing and defiance. No laughs here then. The abjection of the slave is one of Voltaire’s most piercing thrusts at the pretensions of western enlightenment and the progress enjoyed by colonial powers, and its unsettling effect resonates even more, perhaps, with a modern audience. In this song more than any other Grandage, Wright and Kantor have successfully and profitably alloyed the plastic pop of the 1980s and Voltaire’s text. And with the temporary halt in momentum, the audience is given time to absorb the relationship between the maimed and dingy slave, and the chattering and brightly clad globe-trotters from the Old World.
All of these things I do,
All of these things I do
To get away from you.
Get away, run away, far away, how do I?
Get away, run away, far away, how do I
escape from you?
Iain Grandage’s adaptations of pop tunes from the 80s and 90s are often played for easy laughs (hard to play Hampton the Hamster’s ‘Hamster Dance’ for much else) but they also convey the most sincere, or at least direct, emotional appeals in a work that is content for the most part to skate across the surface of the profundities it conjures with. Intellectual dilettantism? Maybe not, Wright explains that “Voltaire let his novella jog along asking questions and avoiding answers until the end. I hope this piece does the same.”
Kantor has chosen the convention of riotous clowning as an alibi for the many cruelties, inconsistencies and travesties which Voltaire, via Wright, brings to the table. But this choice begs an interesting question, can a skilful actor simply play the role of a clown? It certainly takes more than a pierrot suit to make a pierrot, and while the commedia, circus, and vaudevillian costuming is flawless, the actual performances feel mostly like a homage to clowning rather than the thing itself. The cast certainly look like they’re enjoying themselves, but the exhausting, strictly choreographed anarchy surely requires such a level of alertness and forward thinking that there is rarely time (or need) for them to flesh out their costume-deep characterisations. There is no pretence, of course, that this is anything but a performance – Optimism wears its theatricality plainly and proudly on its sleeve – so any hankering after naturalistic emotional depths would be inappropriate. Voltaire’s characters are satiric devices and so are Wright’s.
Still, it’s not just Barry Otto’s leering Pangloss who relishes the details of Cunegonde’s ordeals (raped “in the fundament” he helpfully clarifies), Kantor and Wright are also banking on an easy laugh. The fact that they get it is a fair indication that the audience has accepted the unreality of Optimism’s clown violence. With that acceptance, though, any sadness, resignation and dawning wisdom portrayed by the cast are also cordoned off from more serious regard. A shame? Or just good clean escapism?
In reality escapism often boils down to tourism and travel. Voltaire’s ever-present ships have been replaced by planes, and the symbols and paraphernalia of air travel provide a recurring design theme for Anna Tregloan’s set, and a conceptual frame for the adaptation. This is more than just a cursory updating, boats play an important part in Candide (as mixing pots and meeting places, gateways to the wider world and platforms for lengthy discussions and storytelling) and in Optimism planes and airports take on this same significance and more. Kantor describes “the cultural motifs of wind and flight” as expressions of optimism. For good or bad, everything is up in the air. The transit lounge aesthetic and the continual arrivals and departures, frame and evoke experiences of disorientation, discovery, incomprehension – the cultural and sensory overload that keeps Candide in a state of childlike puzzlement.
The motif of air travel is fully embraced in the latter half of the play, in which most of the action takes place among a few rows of a stylised first-class cabin. Cruising through the heavens again, but this time in a dignified and hushed cocoon, temporarily insulated from strife. It is a perfect environment to meet David Woods’ dapper Martin, and the jaded connoisseur, Count Pococurante (Francis Greenslade). Then, in the cabin’s sedate and comfortingly dim lighting, the hostesses perform a dirge-like rendition of Black’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (a dirge to begin with) which reduces Candide to tears. Luxury, then, is no cure for the ills of the human heart.
A note from Kantor on the cultural motif of flight goes on to suggest that air-travel is one concrete way in which our vain search for gratification is making us and our planet sick. Our need for answers, our need to see something new, seek out experience, our consumer tourism - it’s all an illusion of progress: “we zoom around the world in huge birds of steel, meanwhile billowing out carbon laden poison behind us, that threatens to suffocate the natural world.”
The most cogent, or at least overt, attack on contemporary optimism was (strangely) confined to a fierce rant about the prospect of environmental catastrophe – all that unnecessary jet-setting which Kantor fears will snuff out the last vestiges of our enlightened civilisation. A laissez-faire attitude to climate change is a legitimate target, nevertheless, it is strange to see this protest placed in the mouth of a plane-hijacking Guerilla Girl. Bearing in mind the Guerrilla Girls’ defining commitment to radical feminism, it seems unlikely, in the midst of the violence, rape and general misogyny of Candide’s world, that one of their frazzled number would bring down a plane on behalf of the polar ice-caps. Then again, that cigar shaped silver phallus sewing its poisonous seed throughout the once pristine atmosphere, is probably as good a symbol of patriarchal rapacity as any.
Either way, if Kantor and Wright were intending to show the death-struggle that binds progress and fundamentalism, fair enough. This final cataclysm delivers the core clown posse to the winds between heaven and earth and they float to the solid ground where they will finally realise the virtue of ‘cultivating your garden.’ No more hustle and bustle, no more hurly-burly, no more comings and goings. Seeking is evading, theorising is futile.
From Wright’s ‘Writer’s Note’ it’s clear enough that he was hoping to deliver satire – food for thought – that could sit outside the hysteria, shrill righteousness or obtuse ‘sceptical’ conservativism which typically prevails among the various camps of the commentariat. ‘Asking questions, avoiding answers’ might well be preferable to the convinced ‘fundamentalism’ of Pangloss, but if the only wisdom this approach stores up is the quietist, middle-class piety “we must work in the garden,” then it is even more vital that the audience be given that little bit more breathing space for contemplation throughout the piece. Just enough so that they can arrive at this conclusion with enough energy for some free thinking of their own, rather than in a state of disoriented, distracted, grinning compliance.
Optimism has left my appetite for knowledge and experience quite surfeited - it’s all a pointless charade, so I’m off home to the Happy Valley and henceforth I will tend my garden. Soon the slave’s song will have quite faded from my mind. The Turkish farmer’s sorbet has already begun to dissolve all vestiges of that bitter appeal.
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This review is a longer version of a review originally produced for M/C Reviews.