Over to Riga now, where I am spending 5 days at the annual Latvian Theatre Showcase: nominally a selection of the year's best shows gathered into a short period.
As usual, I go in blind to much of the subtleties of the context of Latvian Theatre, with its heavy historical and contemporary Russian influence (or perhaps German if you go back far enough).
I'm being hosted here by Latvia's Theatre Labour Association, who will also nominate awards for some of the works, and run a press conference where I will discuss the works viewed together with other experts from Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia.
Sometimes we're being required to piece together information from different sources - synopsis, google-translated text, so on. Nevertheless, there's something about great theatre that doesn't need translation, so I will be relying on that universality here to pull me through. (As usual, actually).
The Soul Boot Sale
The way that history is passed down through generations as collective memory is discussed extensively by theorists in psychology, sociology, geopolitics and other fields. The former USSR and Eastern Bloc states can appear to outsiders to be largely obsessed by it - continually reworking their national identities in response to newly-found (and simply re-evoked) historical disputes large and small. Germany is perhaps the king of this, forever occupied with its previous atrocities, the country is occasionally unable to properly conceive of its current ones. Trauma is constantly relived and reworked to suit new political ends.
It's a site of significant interpersonal and social politics, and a rich - if perhaps overused - site for theatre as well. This collaboration of young artists led by director Inga Tropa make full use of its potential in The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis), essentially the story of a sharehouse of internationals trading blows over their historical differences.
Given this slightly cliché premise, The Soul Boot Sale really shouldn't be good theatre. But it really is. The conceit of the sharehouse is present in the form of 6 freestanding refrigerators (set: Pamela Butāne), each containing an actor invisible to the audience, which open and shut as the protagonists talk - immediately creating a feeling of teenage drama, complete with regular slamming of doors in disgust. The bickering over minor details begins almost from the outset ("do I ever complain when you forget to wash up your stupid saucepans?") as the housemates discuss Dollar's farewell party to happen later in the evening. The rapid-fire script (Justīne Kļava) begins in this gear and doesn't let up for the entire play, even as the scenes evolve.
Following this Beckettian opening, the plot gets even more futile, moving through a series of modules, as the set transforms in response to new states. The TV screens on top of the fridges (a features of many sharehouses) come on to reveal the actors inside the fridge - showing first their mouths, then the eye, and finally entire bodies. The effect is a sextych of portraits interacting with each other - eerily synchorinised as well (I actually thought it was pre-recorded) as the actors trade racial slurs and jibes about housekeeping, smoke and set off firecrackers inside their tiny rooms, and generally trade blows in violent, energised contest.
The dialogue goes some way to explaining to a non-European like me how these entrenched conflicts re-create themselves in new generations, pointing to what is present, as well as what is forgotten. As one character states mid-argument: "Just because shit happened 500 years ago doesn't make it important".
The ensemble cast are all superb and work together flawlessly - the only other time I have seen a cast so connected was in Mikra Theatrical's The Baccanales last year, and it's truly special to witness the blink of an eye on one side of the stage being met by a raised eyebrow on the other. Like that performance, it's a cast that operate as though connected by invisible strings - all the more remarkable for the fact that they spend a good proportion of the play enclosed in fridges. The dialogue is full of interruptions and actors talking over each other, but despite this, makes a perfect harmony and not a cacophony. The low-brow set design is perfectly deployed, making the most of the transformability of the stage, being re-invented in new ways that turn from doll house, to puppet-show, to diner scene.
The finale of the fight/orgy is full of unneccessary pyrotechnics that would have made Frank Castorf proud - the stage is a total mess of beer and chips, as the characters resolve their differences through slow-motion sex. Perhaps youth have the advantage of sexual energy to help them overcome their ethinic and historical differences? Or the ending is a suggestion of the impossibility of such - something like 'we might as well just fuck'. If I was feeling poetic, I might propose that the pile of half-naked bodies realise the utopian dimension of the script - that a certain oneness is finally achieved, and the characters have blended physically into one being.
Whatever. It's a great piece that needs a full subtitle translation and tour organised soon.
The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis)
Director – Inga Tropa
Playwright – Justīne Kļava
Stage and costume desiger – Pamela Butāne
Composer – Jēkabs Nīmanis
Actors: Klāvs Mellis, Āris Matesovičs, Reinis Boters, Anastasija Rekuta-Džordževiča, Igors Šelegovskis, Ance Strazda
As usual, I go in blind to much of the subtleties of the context of Latvian Theatre, with its heavy historical and contemporary Russian influence (or perhaps German if you go back far enough).
I'm being hosted here by Latvia's Theatre Labour Association, who will also nominate awards for some of the works, and run a press conference where I will discuss the works viewed together with other experts from Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Russia.
Sometimes we're being required to piece together information from different sources - synopsis, google-translated text, so on. Nevertheless, there's something about great theatre that doesn't need translation, so I will be relying on that universality here to pull me through. (As usual, actually).
The Soul Boot Sale
The way that history is passed down through generations as collective memory is discussed extensively by theorists in psychology, sociology, geopolitics and other fields. The former USSR and Eastern Bloc states can appear to outsiders to be largely obsessed by it - continually reworking their national identities in response to newly-found (and simply re-evoked) historical disputes large and small. Germany is perhaps the king of this, forever occupied with its previous atrocities, the country is occasionally unable to properly conceive of its current ones. Trauma is constantly relived and reworked to suit new political ends.
It's a site of significant interpersonal and social politics, and a rich - if perhaps overused - site for theatre as well. This collaboration of young artists led by director Inga Tropa make full use of its potential in The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis), essentially the story of a sharehouse of internationals trading blows over their historical differences.
Given this slightly cliché premise, The Soul Boot Sale really shouldn't be good theatre. But it really is. The conceit of the sharehouse is present in the form of 6 freestanding refrigerators (set: Pamela Butāne), each containing an actor invisible to the audience, which open and shut as the protagonists talk - immediately creating a feeling of teenage drama, complete with regular slamming of doors in disgust. The bickering over minor details begins almost from the outset ("do I ever complain when you forget to wash up your stupid saucepans?") as the housemates discuss Dollar's farewell party to happen later in the evening. The rapid-fire script (Justīne Kļava) begins in this gear and doesn't let up for the entire play, even as the scenes evolve.
Photo: Janis Amolins
Following this Beckettian opening, the plot gets even more futile, moving through a series of modules, as the set transforms in response to new states. The TV screens on top of the fridges (a features of many sharehouses) come on to reveal the actors inside the fridge - showing first their mouths, then the eye, and finally entire bodies. The effect is a sextych of portraits interacting with each other - eerily synchorinised as well (I actually thought it was pre-recorded) as the actors trade racial slurs and jibes about housekeeping, smoke and set off firecrackers inside their tiny rooms, and generally trade blows in violent, energised contest.
Slowly, as the characters emerge from their cocoons and reveal themselves fully to the audience in preperation for the party, these entertaining trivialities slide into darker territory. Their grandparents alcoholism, their stories of war and conflict, and the absurdities of ethnicity come out, and as the party begins, the characters drink their way into long monologues about each of their histories - German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and 'Gypsy'. There are tragicomic elements to each of these, ranging from futility ("He went to defend Poland on horseback. The
Germans had tanks called Panzer II – my grandad had a horse called Jasma") to shame ("sometimes I wish I’d been born somewhere else") to absurd wristwatch stories being used as defence mechanisms, to a remaining fear of lakes due to a relative drowning drunk.
The dialogue goes some way to explaining to a non-European like me how these entrenched conflicts re-create themselves in new generations, pointing to what is present, as well as what is forgotten. As one character states mid-argument: "Just because shit happened 500 years ago doesn't make it important".
The ensemble cast are all superb and work together flawlessly - the only other time I have seen a cast so connected was in Mikra Theatrical's The Baccanales last year, and it's truly special to witness the blink of an eye on one side of the stage being met by a raised eyebrow on the other. Like that performance, it's a cast that operate as though connected by invisible strings - all the more remarkable for the fact that they spend a good proportion of the play enclosed in fridges. The dialogue is full of interruptions and actors talking over each other, but despite this, makes a perfect harmony and not a cacophony. The low-brow set design is perfectly deployed, making the most of the transformability of the stage, being re-invented in new ways that turn from doll house, to puppet-show, to diner scene.
The finale of the fight/orgy is full of unneccessary pyrotechnics that would have made Frank Castorf proud - the stage is a total mess of beer and chips, as the characters resolve their differences through slow-motion sex. Perhaps youth have the advantage of sexual energy to help them overcome their ethinic and historical differences? Or the ending is a suggestion of the impossibility of such - something like 'we might as well just fuck'. If I was feeling poetic, I might propose that the pile of half-naked bodies realise the utopian dimension of the script - that a certain oneness is finally achieved, and the characters have blended physically into one being.
Photo: Janis Amolins
Whatever. It's a great piece that needs a full subtitle translation and tour organised soon.
The Soul Boot Sale (Dvēseļu utenis)
Director – Inga Tropa
Playwright – Justīne Kļava
Stage and costume desiger – Pamela Butāne
Composer – Jēkabs Nīmanis
Actors: Klāvs Mellis, Āris Matesovičs, Reinis Boters, Anastasija Rekuta-Džordževiča, Igors Šelegovskis, Ance Strazda
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