Lost in the Theban throng

part

NOT even a first full season completed and artistic director Kenny

Ireland has a Royal Lyceum audience up on its feet. He has made a grand

promenade of Oedipus Tyrannos by flooring over the stalls area and

creating a skateboard of a playing space, flattening over the main

auditorium and rising with the natural rake of the stage up to the

portico of the Theban Palace. It is surely a brave gambit for a

repertoire theatre to go for bums on seats by taking away the seats.

To describe it as a promenade is actually inaccurate if this implies

mobility. The audience presses in, seeks individual vantage points,

huddles and then stays put. In the darkness before the action begins

there is a mildly panicked claustrophobia mingling with expectancy, and

a loss of balance as though we have lost our bearings. The sense of

impending event is pungent with the strong waft of burning incense, and

with it comes a mixture of apprehension, physical involvement, and

tension.

This experience of anticipation and disorientation is important to

stress, because it represents not only one of the major theatrical

achievements of Ireland's production but it signifies a profound change

in his relationship with a repertoire theatre audience. Until now

Ireland has offered a kind of security in a programme of summer farces

followed by classics, curriculum-friendly adaptations, Neil Simon and

Gaslight, and the excitement he has generated has been through the

introduction of stage stars as actors, directors and associate artists.

Stars make their own very special relationship with an audience, but

suddenly in this production Ireland has his actors jostling through the

crowd to make entrances. It creates a brutal intimacy.

Ireland has always stated that his approach with the Lyceum would be

about seduction. Big men like himself can display an unsuspected

gentleness in the wooing game, whispering sweet nothings, but we always

knew that Ireland was schooled as a wrestler, and there had to be that

moment when he would throw his weight. This is that moment.

The forced manoeuvre in Oedipus Tyrannos is to make the audience act

out a crucial part of the drama. ''Children of Thebes, why are you

standing here?'' is Tom Mannion's first line as Oedipus. Thebes is

currently twinning with both Edinburgh and Glasgow, but this is the

municipal version, the highly public version. It is probably safe to

speculate that a Lyceum audience does not have wide experience of being

part of the mob, and if Oedipus was around today he would give a

television broadcast to the nation before de-briefing Creon in private,

so the promenade also changes our relationship with the tragedy that

unfolds. We are part of it. We are pressing our noses up against it.

There is a steep ramp upon which several of the scenes are played, and

at the opposite end there is a pedestal just below the level of the

circle. Between them are little islands of rostra which actors scale to

make themselves heard above the crowd. The rest is a great sea of

audience through which parts of the action break, and there is some

scurrying to part waves for the self-mutilated Oedipus as the tragedy

reaches its climax.

In such a swell a cast of five might drown, or might seem to multiply,

and on Friday night's opening there were moments of both. But, whether

it likes it or not, the audience is physically involved in the

spectacle, and in a continuous 90-minute piece this inevitably makes

demands. Three Thebans near me were overcome by faintness. There is

reserved seating in the circle, but even from here the audience

perspective is radically altered, no longer a lofty gaze but a side view

on to an arena of disaster.

Jane Bertish is a frenetic Jocasta and even she doubles to join

Janette Foggo (Priestess), Michael Mackenzie (Creon) and Benny Young

(Teiresias) in the chorus. This has less of the ritualistic ensemble

available within the resources of the Royal Shakespeare Company when

Timberlake Wertenbaker's translation was first used, and the pitch of

Ireland's production is much more histrionic than the natural tone of

that text might suggest as appropriate, though itself not as colloquial

and interrogational as the very latest adaptation by Clare Venables for

the Citz studio production. Other than that, comparisons are of no

value. The objectives pursued by Ireland and Venables are so completely

different that we might as well be watching entirely different plays.

This is a useful reminder. Theatre is about what is experienced, and

little to do with literary interpretation. The most positive aspect of

Ireland's promenade is that he forcibly dispossesses those (and there

are many) who approach Greek tragedy with a checklist of required

emotional engagements. The sheer physicality of this Oedipus forces us

to leave all our baggage of preconceptions at the door. In a sense it

offers an interesting paradox. We think we are entering the Royal Lyceum

theatre, but we are not. Francis Gallop's design implies an outside

location, with rocks and traces of red soil. It could be argued that the

intentions of the production would be better served by an open air

performance, but this would be to miss the point about what Ireland is

trying to do in literally changing the very plastic reality of a theatre

building, and our physical relationship with it.

In good theatre this should happen every time, but repertoires build

up their layers of comfort blankets, habituality, complacency, and

emotional cushioning. Sometimes it is necessary to strip the place to

begin again. That is something for which I am prepared to stand up.