One Blonde Play, One Red Play

Parlez-vous Genet?

Two international stars have lost the plot. One of them, Cate Blanchett, has her head jammed into the bidet (it’s far too posh a production to have been a toilet pedestal); the other, Isabelle Huppert, is holding her down and doing the flushing. It’s a bit of Genet that Jean Genet never wrote in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Maids. Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton hacked out the new bidet-plus translation. At this point in their play the stars have wandered into an offstage bathroom built at the back of the set. A bidet-trained video camera is projecting their water games onto a large screen. When they come back Blanchett shakes water droplets from her damp locks.

The idea of a Sydney production of something interesting with two crowd-pulling big names must have seemed like a good idea. The Maids, a one-act 1947 play, is certainly pretentious enough, and short enough, to have promised a quick-rise success. And it might have worked if they had taken a small stage, dragged out some basic props, given each star a script and a butch haircut and told them, after scraping off the makeup, to get on with it. The intensity of their interaction around some Genet-fired hysteria could have ignited something worth applauding. That’s not what they did. Benedict Andrews directed, and the STC said au revoir Monsieur Genet.

The play is a three-woman piece, with two maids, Blanchett and Huppert, and their mistress, played by Elizabeth Debicki. Generally the servants, whether played by girls or boys, are young and the mistress is older. This time around, that was reversed. Playing in the mainstage Sydney Theatre the slight piece was given a luxurious and extravagant staging: even the audience came in smelling nice and the upstairs men’s toilet was equipped with lavender liquid soap. There is a huge bedroom with black glass walls on both sides. Behind one of these wanders a spying technician with a video camera. In the middle, at the front, is a dressing table and chair, and to the left of that, beyond a mass of flowers, a large double bed. Further back there are two large white couches, one on either side of the stage. Across the back a railing runs almost the full length of the stage and on it hang the mistress’s dresses and furs. The richly attractive line of luxury clothing is colour co-ordinated. Tall vases of brightly coloured fresh flowers are spread throughout the set. The two maids are lost in luxury. Higher up at the back hangs that large rectangular video screen. The set, by Alice Babidge, is a glossy frame for two famous names. 

Blanchett and Huppert are nothing like the raw sisters who the author said should look as though “they could teach piety in a Christian institution”. Neither do they look or sound like siblings, there is twenty years difference in their ages, and they have strangely different accents. The sisters, who don’t seem to be sisters, act a ceremony or ritual in which they pretend to be each other and their mistress. But the ritual Genet wrote has given way to burlesque. Huppert lies on that big bed and bounces about waving her feet and arms as Blanchett is messing about at the dressing table. Above the bed a mounted video camera records and the screen shows us Huppert from above—a lively black bedbug spreadeagled on the bedspread.

This is their mistress’s bedroom. Genet says they should be “Furtive. This is the word that’s needed first. The theatrical play of the two actresses playing the two maids must be furtive.” They look assertive. Blanchett has her back to us and she plays with the makeup, spraying perfume and banging powder into the air and the lights pick out the droplets of perfume and the fine powder that float in the air about her. A camera in the dressing table projects her facial contortions onto the screen. Though the stage image is more interesting the video screen acts as a magnet diverting us from what is theatrical to what is merely big.

This afternoon something unexpected happens when the camera captures the faces of each star in close-up. Blanchett’s face is unexpectedly ordinary. On the big screen Blanchett is not Blanchett. Without the makeup artists, lighting technicians, cameramen and expensive filters the classic face is unremarkable. The actress up there is not the familiar image of film Blanchett. It’s the face of a working actress pulling faces and playing her role but it’s not the great film star—the familiar glow is extinguished and the woman acting on the stage is more interesting than the big face on the screen.

On the other hand, Huppert isn’t greatly interesting on stage but her blown-up image generates a shock as though an electric neon star has just been turned on. Her English is poor, often difficult to understand, and for much of the play she acts and sounds like a comic French maid in an English farce. In some speeches her mouth opens unnaturally wide as she articulates the foreign words. But when the camera looks into her face an amazing thing happens. The big face on the screen is extraordinarily sensitive and captivating. At one point she goes off the side of the stage and walks behind the glass wall. She looks back at Blanchett and then, for no reason, puts her face against the glass and pulls faces. Watching her, it’s a silly, pointless action. But the camera focuses on her face and the giant image of rubber flesh is suddenly funny, brilliant and even rather touching. It’s an image that has nothing to do with Genet’s play and seems to bring an entirely different person into the theatre.

Blanchett and Huppert share the stage but they are playing from different postcodes. Early on, near the beginning, there was a moment when the play seemed to be coming together. The two women were talking and were at last getting serious and taking us into a common world they shared. Then they both got up and moved to a couch at the back of the stage. And both vanished from my view. My vision was completely blocked by the makeup table and chair. I felt as though I had been slapped. It seemed a completely pointless piece of stage direction. Then Blanchett got up and walked to the other side of the stage. For a moment I saw her crossing the open space, and then she vanished behind a flower arrangement. The performances had been sabotaged by the direction. When Elizabeth Debicki finally came on as the mistress, the play again lurched as her character was performed as a caricature.

Genet is a phony. The Maids is verbose, pretentious and empty. To play it the actresses must commit perjury. They must take the blank words and movements and fill them with their meanings. It’s a good opportunity to go over the top with lashings of camp and hysteria. Benedict Andrews has given us a Potemkin play—all surface effects with irrelevancies meant to deflect our attention from the play’s emptiness. When we go behind the Potemkin and encounter Genet’s unadorned words there is dullness and verbal dross because the players have not been given the opportunity to make the play their own—and it should be theirs, not the director’s.

Several stunning costume designs by Alice Babidge were featured. But even when Blanchett leaps about in show-stopping red it’s slightly less than perfect because it has to contend with the colours and luxury that are already on display. Tall, blonde Elizabeth Debicki wore a dress that ran seamlessly down her body like spilling mercury. Unfortunately she turned around. Two lumps, two rectangular boxes, stuck out from the fabric, one above each buttock. From gorgeous she transformed into a Stepford Wives prototype. Forgetting the play, I search and find the same boxes under the costumes of Blanchett and Huppert. Although I had noticed the ugly black wires running down Blanchett’s back I hadn’t seen, until now, the bulky transmitters. Perhaps what I’m watching was pre-recorded.

Just before the end Blanchett has a nice lie-down on the stage floor while Huppert comes forward and talks to the audience. It needed subtitles. With Blanchett’s legs sticking out from behind the furniture Huppert delivers a very long and unclear speech. Then Blanchett is back on her feet and gets her sister to serve her the cold poisoned tea they had prepared for the mistress and which she had not drunk. Sometime before this the video operator got bored and for a long while the screen has been showing a still life of flowers. Conclusion, big dramatic stuff with music and blackout as Blanchett drinks the tea. Fortunately she is brought back to life for the curtain calls. She seems bored and comes forward without enthusiasm, looks toward the audience and shows her teeth in a low-beam smile that rakes across us. We applaud tepidly, though from behind me come several cheers. It may be the woman with the Louis Vuitton bag, or perhaps the clique of walking-frame ladies have turned themselves into a claque. The applause only holds for two curtain calls and then it’s over. It hasn’t been a good Wednesday afternoon for Isabelle Huppert, Cate Blanchett, or Jean Genet, and it all has to be repeated again tonight.

Salem’s Red Witch

The Crucible needs headscarves. Arthur Miller’s play hasn’t dated, it’s what it always was, dishonest and deceitful propaganda. It could do with a few repairs and a coat of paint, for the holes in the allegory are leaking, the lies are peeling off and it needs to admit that the witches (with or without head coverings) really were witches: instead we still honour a play which covers up for hardline Stalinists, KGB spies and our jihadophile contemporaries.

In 1953, as the first production of The Crucible was playing in New York, Stalin died and the Rosenbergs were executed. Commemorating one, or all of those events, sixty years later a revival of The Crucible was staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company. During its run Prime Minister Gillard lost her job and Bradley Manning was found guilty of espionage—plus ça change ... In the right-thinking MTC program, the writers wandered into a past they don’t remember and are too conventional to question. In one essay, praising Miller and sniping at Elia Kazan, the writer scorned the courageous hero of Kazan’s On the Waterfront as “a stool pigeon”. A starting point for a more profound journey through the Red USA of the 1940s and 1950s is Ronald Radosh’s The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.

More important than The Crucible’s life on stages where it entertains elderly theatre audiences is the use made of it in teaching Left in our schools. It’s very teachable, with sugary Left moralising coating an easily digested tale of good and evil. On one hand it tells a dramatic, though not historically accurate account of the Salem witch trials, and on the other it is an allegory offering a dishonest rendition of McCarthyist persecution. 

It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only a small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse. I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did.

Miller published that in the Guardian in 2000. It was as if the Venona revelations on Soviet espionage in the USA, the publication of information from the former Eastern Bloc and Soviet secret files, and even confessions by some of those who spied, had never happened.

Sam Strong’s strong cast included David Wenham as John Proctor, Anita Hegh as his wife Rebecca, and Brian Lipson as Deputy Governor Danforth. You can catch a less Miller-depressed Anita Hegh presently doing dual roles in a clever AAMI commercial. The curtain rises, and there really was a curtain, on a big open stage. In the middle of the space is the attic room of Reverend Parris’s house in Salem. The house is white and the frame, Dale Ferguson’s design, could be a single giant sheet of paper bent about like a simple origami roof and room. For each of the four acts the same simple idea is used to represent the changing scenes. In Act III we even get a slow tantalising curtain rise to reveal the scenic changes. It’s a cool, classic presentation with no textual or directorial messing about. Within big clear stage images, and aided by Paul Jackson’s stark lighting design, Strong moves his Salem players about in formalistic groupings like pieces on a Puritan chessboard.

Michael Frayn’s comedy Noises Off tells a story by showing us the same actions from different sides of a theatre set. The Crucible needs viewing from both sides of its iron curtain. Play one act as Miller wrote it and then look at it from the other side, this time noticing that the witches and their familiars really do exist and that the noble Miller sentiments are self-serving lies and deceptions. Or simply change John Proctor’s name to Julius Rosenberg or Wilfred Burchett or Mohamed Atta. The stage direction says this striking outburst of liberal anguish by Proctor should be said with a cry of his soul: “How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name.” It’s not quite the same if you now notice the smirk, and the wink, which accompany it.

Australian theatres can’t do honest plays about our recent past that disturb the Left’s comfortable dreams and fantasies. A new US play by Amy Herzog, After the Revolution, turns an obvious but much-delayed Left dilemma into a thoughtful drama. Three generations of a prominent New York progressive family are shocked by a book which, with evidence from the Venona decrypts, reveals that the protagonist’s dead grandfather, who the family have canonised as a left-wing martyr and blacklisted victim of McCarthyist intolerance, was a Soviet spy and a multiple liar. Emma, his granddaughter, then finds that the older family members were well aware of his treachery and dishonesty. The senior generations make excuses and cover-ups and Emma shocks them with her response: “No, he shouldn’t have been blacklisted. He should have been tried for espionage.” A friend unnerves her father by telling him that his daughter wouldn’t be playing the family game plan, that she “wouldn’t be apologizing for Joe’s radical politics. She’d be apologizing that he spied for Stalin.” And an old and trusted family associate explains the radical facts of life to Emma: “We’re talking the 1940s? Take a walk in the East Village, throw a stone you hit a spy. I mean you didn’t say that. You say that, you sound a lot like a certain senator from Wisconsin who you do not want to sound like.”

Interesting and provocative, and written by a liberal writer, After the Revolution is unbelievable in the reaction of Emma who, when faced with uncomfortable truth, re-evaluates her commitments. In life her generation would either not know much about Stalin, wouldn’t care, or would actually be proud her grandfather was a traitor. This is the reaction Herzog should have faced up to in the play, the complicity of the modern and young Left in the conspiracy to misrepresent and disguise the past. Produce the Venona decrypts from Miller’s Salem showing that Mary Warren did turn into a satanic bird and that Goody Nurse and the other accused really were witches and it would make no difference at all. There is always an intellectually adroit argument leftists find to avoid responsibility for their romantic attraction to brutalities past and present.

Colin Clark wrote a book about being a gofer during the making of the Laurence Olivier–Marilyn Monroe film The Prince and the Showgirl. Though the program makers at the MTC rather like Arthur Miller, Clark wasn’t so impressed: “big-headed, insensitive and super-selfish”. A theatre textbook suggests The Crucible, a “spellbinding drama of real conflict and impassioned action”, may be his “finest work”. Truth doesn’t matter. The spell Miller casts over the Left looks as powerful as ever.