David Greig’s new version for the National Theatre of Scotland aims to repatriate J.M. Barrie’s classic tale to Edinburgh, strategically roughening the play’s edges in the process. So these Darling children are subjected to an educational viewing of a work-in-progress Forth Bridge, where a tribe of ragged boys swagger and swoop among the ironwork , while their engineer father fumes over each second wasted (tick tock, tick tock).

Laura Hopkins’ design splashes lurid, fantastical sunsets against the steely lattice of the unfinished bridge, effortlessly showing what Greig’s script laboriously strives to explain. Her wondrous transformation of this imposing silhouette makes Neverland an anarchic, shadowy subversion of stifling Victorian industriousness, where a lichen-covered stone beehive (with some distinctly magical properties) banishes all hankerings after tradition’s prim Wendy house.

The show also teems with traditional music, work-songs and sea-shanties and hauntingly sad lullabies, a melancholy sound-scape (arranged by Davey Anderson) in sombre contrast to the young cast’s apparently boundless energy. A gasp-inducing Tinker Bell (reincarnated as a bad-tempered ball of fire), Peter’s casual defiance of gravity and some viscerally exciting flying all make a pretty strong case for believing in fairies – though it sometimes seems that the author would prefer it if we didn’t.

Greig’s rewriting of Barrie’s insouciant prose seems determined to spell out what the older play left unspoken, but too often only manages to replace shimmering sentimentality with well-intentioned banality. His re-imagining of Wendy as a stroppy proto-feminist (shades of Pirates of the Caribbean) is occasionally wince-inducing, and making loveable Smee into a gauntly laconic fiddle-player leaves Cal MacAninch’s Hook (a tattooed, kilted hard-man, who definitely didn’t go to Eton) with nobody much to talk to.

Thank goodness Wendy’s last bedtime story survives more or less intact, along with Peter’s tragically un-punctual return to the nursery. The old play’s magic flickers intermittently, but grafting a social conscience onto Barrie’s blithely heartless hero apparently isn’t as easy as re-attaching lost shadows.

11 and 12 is based on a novel by Malian author Amadou Hampaté Bâ, The Life and Teaching of Tierno Bokar: The Sage of Bandiagara. Tierno Bokar was a sufi mystic born in Mali during the late 1800’s and served as Hampaté Bâ’s spiritual teacher. Their relationship serves as the basis for the play which focuses on the consequences of a disagreement between followers of the same faith over how many times their sacred prayer should be said – eleven or twelve – who’s right, who’s wrong and does it really matter?

The play opens in Mali under French colonial rule. The French officers are portrayed as arrogant and ill-informed colonial masters who feel nothing but contempt for those they are meant to govern. When the spiritual leader of both groups dies before he can issue a final decree as to who is ultimately right, should it be eleven or twelve, his followers split and decide to follow separate leaders. Both leaders are shown to be men of true faith, exhibiting a genuine desire to find a solution to this theological problem. Meanwhile, the French officers stand back and watch tensions rise, hoping to capitalize on the civil war they know will surely follow.

One of the most touching moments in the play comes when the two leaders of 11 and 12 meet and talk through the night about their conflicting beliefs. After the meeting one leader converts to the other’s cause having been convinced that his interpretation is in fact correct. This genuine act of conversion is the spark that lights the flame which will eventually lead to wholesale slaughter.

Peter Brook brings his customary magic to this fascinating piece. With a minimal use of props and set, he manages effortlessly to evoke a Malian village, a river boat journey and towards the end of the play a Parisian cemetery. Perhaps the play’s most ecstatic moment comes during the meeting of the two religious leaders, a meeting illuminated by a single shimmering light.

The play concludes with the death of both leaders. One still living in his native Mali but now serving a sort of self-imposed exile from the church he once led, due to the fanatical fundamentalism of the cleric who now preaches there, while the other dies in Paris, exiled by the French colonialists who feared the power they thought he had over his followers. 11 and 12’s climax can be seen in two ways, one perhaps that those who practice religion rarely make room for debate but are ultimately happier with religious absolutes or two, true followers of god will always be willing to strive for what they feel is ultimately the true message.

Mika Eglinton: You performed Resurrection in Bradford earlier this year and you’ve just opened Visions at the Barbican in London, both pieces are part of a trilogy of works called They Only Come at Night, could you talk a bit about where the idea came from?

Alan Lane: It started a long time ago. We all live quite close to each other in Leeds and there’s a petrol station round the corner from us where a man was beaten to death one night. It was a horrible and disturbing incident, but by the end of the week the local papers and people had come up with different ideas as to why it had happened. No one knew the truth, but everyone was willing to speculate. Some people were saying the man was definitely from Eastern Europe, and others were saying he was into drugs, but what became increasingly clear was that people were happier with the idea that this was just a piece of mindless violence, a horrible accident. It was quite strange that a community presented with something so horrific should start to create myths – stories based on very little truth.

Then a few years ago we spent some time in the Balkans, in Bosnia. A woman was telling me one day that after some of the massacres, in which all the older men had been removed, they would tell their younger children that vampires had come for their fathers, because it was easier to believe that vampires had killed your dad than it was to believe that the man down the road had done it.

We started to think about vampire myths and how we tell stories to shield ourselves but also as a means of understanding the extremes of life without having to be horrified by our fellow man. The world is a mad place at the minute, so we thought the most comfortable way for us to talk about it was to make up a massive, new vampire myth with different rules so that we could have a look at the world, because it’s a bit too scary to look at head on.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Could you talk about why you’re interested in subjects that are often related to traumatic histories or memories?

Alan: It’s to do with how we turn our own personal histories into a set of stories, and then we turn our collective history into a set of stories too, so to an extent we’re defined by and made up of stories. We tend to look at what we call the ‘macro myth’ in traumatic events; so for example what is the place of Dresden or Srebrenica in a shared national history and how does that end up filtering down and affecting a single person? It’s to do with how ideas at the level of nation, culture or community affect the individual in that tiny moment when it’s just a man and woman having a cup of coffee. All that pressure of history that we feel all the time but we ignore, sometimes it just explodes into a personal story and that’s really fascinating to us.

Mika: Did this interest begin when you were still students at Sheffield?

Alan: Yes it did. The company is made up of 8 people and 5 of us were at the University of Sheffield together ten years ago. We developed an interest in how theatre could reflect the pace and style at which we live our lives, how we read information, how computer screens are used and so on. That’s grown over ten years into creating immersive environments.

Mika: What do you mean by an immersive environment?

Alan: It’s where we put the audience into the middle of a film, except that it’s real, it’s 3D, you can touch it, and if there’s water you’ll get wet, because water is wet. It’s where you can look behind you, in front of you, above you and below you and there will be the world we create, and the world might only be 6” x 6”, or it could be the whole building, but until you actually decide to leave the world it will completely surround you. It will smell like we want it to smell and it will feel like we want it to feel. So it is a lot like being in a film that we’ve made for you; you’re the hero in your own film, but you just don’t have to do anything.

Mika: How much ‘free will’ does the audience have or in what way, if at all, do you control the environment?

Alan: We try and make the audience feel like they’ve got total free will and then we try and make sure they go where we want them to go. So in Resurrection for example, the audience can walk anywhere they like in a huge studio space, but they can’t leave the room. In the Barbican car park, they have to follow a path and if they leave that path then the show will stop working, because they won’t be where we want them to be; but hopefully when we take you around, it feels like you’re in complete control of your own experience. In reality of course, it’s a piece of theatre, it’s rehearsed and it’s timed. So I think that’s always a big challenge for us to try and constantly make the audience feel like they’re in control, but also for the show to feel like it’s got a discipline to it.

Mika: Moving on to methodologies, as a creative ensemble I know you spend a lot of time conducting research as well as actually building the piece, could you explain the basic creation process for one of your shows?

Alan: It always makes us laugh, because at the minute we’re working with the University of Huddersfield and the University of Salford, and we often get emails from students asking us to describe our process to which we always answer: “we come up with an idea and we sit round a table until the idea is much better than it was”. And on the one hand that’s a very flippant answer, but actually it’s quite truthful. We’re not made up of performers. There are performers in our company, but a lot of us aren’t and so as a result we tend to have quite a passive process in the sense that we don’t improvise, we don’t rehearse in that way like other companies do.

What we do is we sit down and we build the show in concept. We don’t just come up with the idea, we think exactly how much it’s going to cost to make it, how long it will take and so on. In other words we work through what would normally be called the creative process and the production process, and we keep fine honing it and asking questions of each other and that can take weeks. So we can be sat round that table for a month, and then finally when we’re ready to make something that’s worth making, we start making it.

It’s a very discursive process and it’s one in which the composer could come up with an idea for the script, and the novelist could come up with the idea for the video, we are all equals round the table, it’s just that we have specialities, but it’s basically a meeting of people with ideas and we don’t leave the table until the idea meets everybody’s satisfaction.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: I’m sure you’re aware of other companies that are working with disused or non-purpose built performance spaces such as Shunt or Punchdrunk for example, where do you see Slung Low in the UK theatre landscape today?

Alan: I think we’re clearly part of a recent interest and enthusiasm for installations, of being put in immersive environments, but we’re also from a very traditional theatre background in the sense that we start and end with a story and everything we do, no matter how experimental it is, is to try and push the story into being clearer and more compelling. It’s vital to us that the story is clear to our audience and that we are taking them on a journey that is both a literal journey, we’re moving through a space, but also an emotional one like theatre has always been. I hope that we sit in both camps, or we take our inspiration from both camps.

Mika: Where do you think this renewed interest in ‘installations’, as you put it, comes from?

Alan: Firstly, companies have been working with installations for a long time and it’s just that we tend to forget about those people and hone in on a new person, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works, but I think it’s also to do with the way our world is changing. You know, I have an iPhone and that phone is my bespoke phone, it makes me feel special, I go onto Amazon and there is a shopping list made just for me. You have a choice in everything now, you can go into the coffee shop and ask for your coffee to be made exactly the way you want it, and that’s something that in the last 10 – 15 years has become increasingly important; that the world is set up to deal with us en masse, but as a group of individuals.

So it’s constantly about something that makes us feel unique and bespoke and that’s what this type of work does. You go into an installation and you might be with 200 other people, but you feel like you’re the only person who had the experience you had that night, that it was special, and that in some way you chose that experience for yourself, even though obviously it’s a collective experience, shared by many others. If you can find a way to make a show so that it’s a shared experience in which everyone feels they’re unique, then I think that’s a very contemporary way of looking at the world and I think that’s why this sort of work is so popular at the minute.

Mika: So in that case is it possible to say that the trend is to a large extent influenced by technological developments?

Alan: Absolutely, if you walk into a train station now, you’re listening to your iPod, you’re reading the headlines on the BBC big screen, you’re checking which platform your train is, you’re checking your emails, your Facebook page, you’re taking in information so quickly, much faster than our parents generation did, much faster than even we did 20 years ago. Just look at the way television is edited, the scenes are shorter, the snaps between each scene more abrupt and on the bottom will be some scrolling information that you’re also taking in.

So in a similar sense the immersive installation allows us to transmit information to the audience through a number of different ways: it could be through a live performer, or you could have a soundtrack, it could be through smell, you could be watching a screen at the same time, you could be reading something while someone talks to you, all of this is possible, and I think that’s absolutely the influence of technology. Our brains are soaking up information much faster than they used to be because technology has trained us to do it.

Mika: What are the company’s artistic influences?

Alan: I think the thing that influences us is just people who tell stories incredibly well, and so the last show that we all saw as a company was Robert Lepage’s Lip Sync. We don’t aspire to make work in the same way that Mr. Lepage does, but just watching someone who is that good at telling stories is inspiring. When you attempt to push form and content and try to innovate as a company, you have to be careful about inspiration, because otherwise you just end up being a version of someone else. So we tend to be inspired by great storytellers across genres rather than necessarily having a theatre company that we follow and adore.

Mika: What is Slung Low’s relationship with text?

Alan: In They Only Come at Night, we came up with an idea for a show and then we turned that idea into a graphic novel, a comic book, and then we took that comic book and we adapted it for the stage. In that sense there’s no play script, but we all have a copy of this picture book that we follow, and we work out what we’re going to say, how we’re going to act and what we’re going to make accordingly. So our first focus and priority is the story, not necessarily a play script or even a text, because we might not have one, but we would all have some form of artefact. With Helium last year at the Barbican, it was based on a short story and this year it’s a graphic novel, but we did a show earlier in the year that was a script, it was a text in a traditional sense, but it could also be a video or even a song.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Is there any sort of preference among types of technology you use in production?

Alan: We’ve just don’t a show that was all based online, an alternative reality game called TOCAN Live and it had no sound or moving pictures. In other shows we use a lot of video and orchestrated sound. So in a sense the media we tend to use is not film but the components that are used in film. In Visions we’re using a very cinematic soundtrack and video in an atmospheric way, so we also try to make sure that we go across media.

Mika: Does part of your work have a documentary element to it?

Alan: I think although our work is always based on some thought about the real world, like the Bosnia story I told you about or the incident at the petrol station, actually what we’re creating are massive immersive metaphors in a sense.

Mika: What is the company’s artistic policy?

Alan: The artistic policy is firstly that it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, it just matters that it’s a good idea. So even as the ‘boss’, if I come with an idea and everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish. That’s very important, because otherwise it can be very ego driven for us. And the other one is that we will learn whatever we have to learn in order to accomplish what it is we want to do. So we edit all our own video, we make all our own music, but when we started we didn’t know how to do any of that. So if we need to know how to do animation, which is something that we’ve had to do for one of our projects, then one of us goes away and sits in a room until he/she knows how to do it.

Mika: Some of the company members teach at universities. How does teaching and creating theatre fit together?

Alan: Well one of the most important, pragmatic things for us is that we have to make a living, and this year we’re creating 4 large-scale shows which is incredibly tiring, so teaching is a different type of challenge. The other thing is that we make much bigger shows than our resources perhaps allow us to, and working with students means that we can let them into our genuine process. So we don’t go in and teach conceptual work, we go in and say “right in 6 months we have to make this show and we’re going to spend the next month making it with you”. We then break it up into little bits and get to work. So in that way, the student are learning new skills as they work on the show with us.

It also means that in terms of research and development and in throwing ideas around, all of a sudden we now have many more minds throwing the idea around, and that’s a really exciting artistic feat for us. So I think we’ve found a way to both teach and make work and the two aren’t in any way exclusive of each other, they are integral to how we make work. In a really practical sense we often need an awful lot of bodies and the students have been brilliant over the last 5 years in helping with that process.

Mika: The last question is what’s on the horizon in terms of projects over the next 5 years for Slung Low?

Alan: Well, hopefully within the next 6 to 12 months, we’ll find a residence, a premises. We want to take over a warehouse and turn it into our studio. The other thing is that we’re looking to collaborate abroad. We’ve spent the last 10 years working in this country, and hopefully through our recent British Council showcase in Edinburgh and with this show at the Barbican, along with all the things we’re doing this year, we’ll have the chance to work with artists from abroad.

Peer is a compulsive dreamer, drinker, womaniser and liar. His fantasies are his escape from the miseries of rural poverty, but roaming through alternative worlds of his own creation he misses the crucial moments that might have made his real life liveable.

The vital presence at the heart of this sprawling story is Keith Fleming’s Young Peer – a poet among piss-artists, aflame with incorrigible imaginings, bright blue eyes brimming with devils. Full of boastful self-aggrandisement, whirling his hard-as-nails mother on a sleigh ride into the beyond, he’s an endearing, repellent, self-destructive and compellingly vulnerable figure. Ann Louise Ross is ferocious and soft-centred by turns as his determined, devoted survivor of a mum, while Cliff Burnett’s gaunt Button Man is a mutely sympathetic companion to Peer’s many and varied misadventures. And Robert Paterson and Carmen Pieraccini as King Bastard and the Green Woman, succeed in bringing their gloriously grotesque mythic personae onto the mean streets of contemporary Scotland.

Colin Teevan’s adaptation is both earthy and epic, but the play’s difficult fourth act remains troublesome, despite a rather terrifying musical coup. The wonderful ensemble perhaps do too thorough a job of establishing the community from which Peer flees in fury and disgrace, and we miss this note-perfect sense of locale, beautifully backed by Naomi Wilkinson’s unromantic design, when the action shifts in time and space to an un-named, ape-infested desert.

Peer Gynt isn’t an easy play. Nor – at a smidge over three hours – is it a short one. But Dominic Hill’s production is gutsy, inventive and stylish, finding a gripping, discomfiting immediacy in Ibsen’s perplexing tall-tale of a life squandered in pursuit of the wrong dreams.

Shun-kin is played by a Japanese cast in the original language, merging western dramatic conventions with Japanese theatre traditions. Let’s face it, it’s annoying to be asked to read surtitles during a performance, especially if the work is a visual piece by a British company. Is Complicité being pretentious here? My answer is no. Indeed, in the first half hour it’s difficult to keep up with reading and watching at the same time. The narrative isn’t simple and the surtitles are placed at the two sides of the stage, so one can only do one thing at a time: either read or watch the performance. But this mechanism builds up an alienating distance between the audience and the play, which makes what happens on stage mythical and otherworldly: it simply makes it more magic.

If you think about it, the story of Shun-kin and Sasuke is virtually untranslatable, like signatures and proper names. It is so closely connected to Japanese culture that it would become a completely different thing in translation. Among sliding doors and caged singing birds, shamisen and kimonos, this love story of sheer self-denial and blind self-affirmation happened in Japanese and it can only be told in the same language, with its rhythm, cadences and musicality.

A contemporary narrative frame (already in Tanizaki’s book, but perhaps not the most successful aspect of the show) and the use of Japanese Bunraku puppets implement the estrangement effect. As the story progresses, the blind protagonist slowly becomes a flesh-and-blood woman: first, as a young girl, she is embodied by a puppet controlled by no less than three women puppeteers, who are always oddly around when she attends her secret encounters with Sasuke, moving her limbs as though she were a living creature and giving her a strident, petulant voice. Then, as a young lady, she is played by a woman wearing a neutral mask, but still restrained by the puppeteers; lastly, the main puppeteer transforms herself into Shunkin. A journey towards a shameful desire makes Shunkin human – and condemns her to even more humiliating suffering.

There are moments of pure poetry in this show, such as when Shunkin (still a puppet) and Sasuke first have sex, when she gives birth to their first child, and when Sasuke blinds himself. Everything takes place on a dimly-lit stage, where a shady ambiguity mesmerises our imagination much more than clarity.

Is this wild orientalism? I see this as an attempt to explore difference from within, to embody it. But it would be interesting to hear what other people have to say about Shun-Kin.

Background & Plot

The play opens at the dawn of the Abbasid Revolution (750 AD) and ends just after the murder of the play’s main character, the court scribe and creator of the Kalila Wa Dimna tales, Ibn Al-Muqaffa (circa 759-762 AD). According to the entry in Wikipedia, ‘Abbasid’ (Arabic: العبّاسيّون Abbāsīyūn) was the:

“Dynastic name generally given to the caliphs of Baghdad, the second of the two great Sunni dynasties of the Islamic empire, that overthrew the Umayyad caliphs from all but Spain. It seized power in 750, when it finally defeated the Umayyads in battle, and flourished for two centuries, but slowly went into decline with the rise to power of the Turkish army they had created, the Mamluks. Within 150 years of gaining power across Iran they were forced to cede power to local dynasties who only nominally acknowledged their power and cede the Maghreb to independent Aghlabids. Their rule was finally ended in 1258, when Hulagu Khan, the Mongol conqueror, sacked Baghdad. While they continued to claim authority in religious matters from their base in Egypt, the dynasty’s secular authority had ended. Descendants of the Abbasids live in modern day Iraq.”

Amidst the Abbasid revolutionary fever that has spread throughout Iraq and neighbouring lands, the poet/scribe Ibn Al-Muqaffa and his fellow poet Bashar are walking through the streets of Basra where a grand, bloodlust reception for the first Calipha Al-Saffah and his elder brother Al-Mansour is being prepared by the governor of Basra, Sulaiman, and the scheming courtier Sufyan. Sufyan intercepts the wandering scribes and challenges their presence as Persian imposters, but Al-Muqaffa’s alluring rhetoric wins Sulaiman’s approval and grants them safe passage. Asia, cousin of Al-Mansour follows Al-Muqaffa and persuades him that he is needed in Basra to rally the people through the ‘power of the pen’ against the brutal Calipha and his general who threaten the lives of Umayyid sympathisers. Muqaffa is rapt by Asia’s beauty and desires her love, but Asia is defiant and says “only in Basra would I love you”. Her plea is for Muqaffa to infiltrate the Calipha’s ranks and use the power of his stories to quell the tyrannical regime from the inside. Thus the fables of Kalila Wa Dimna become a political weapon, with a chance to change the political landscape. The history behind the Kalila Wa Dimna tales is complex and the entry in Wikipedia gives a mere whistle-stop tour of their history:

Kalilag and Damnag in Syriac or Kalila wa Dimna كليلة و دمنة in Arabic, is the name of the translation into Syriac of the Sanskrit Panchatantra literary work of fables originating in India. It was translated to Pahlavi Persian then into Syriac, then into Arabic, and from there to European languages. Thomas Irving (1980) further states that from North Africa the stories were carried south to Sub-saharan Africa, and on to North America by African slaves.

The book is about symbolic wisdom fables put in the mouths of animals. All the tales have a moral message, and many have a political undertone.

Two main figures are the jackals Kalila and Dimna (Sanskrit: Karataka and Damanaka). The main narrator is the philosopher (Hakim) Bidpai (Arabic: Baydaba, French Pilpay), who is asked for a fable by the king Dabshalim.

Later on in the play and Muqaffa has become the official court scribe and advisor to the Calipha. Al-Mansour demands a performance of Kalila Wa Dimna in honour of the military high-commander, Abu Muslim, but the performance is sabotaged and Abu Muslim killed. Al-Muqaffa is told by Asia that in one of her ‘visions’ his writing will cause a revolution and bring with it ‘the real religion’ and ‘the real empire’. In reaction to her vision, Muqaffa pleads with the Calipha to retire from the court and take leave. This request is denied and Muqaffa and Asia are kept in a room under surveillance and forced to finish the animal fables. Muqaffa hears that his tales are spreading amongst the people, and the political messages are beginning to take root, just as in Asia’s vision, but before Muqaffa can witness the effect of his words, he is summoned to court by Sufyan (now Governor of Basra) who tries Muqaffa for heresy and Muqaffa is murdered. Asia and Bashar continue to spread the tales after Muqaffa’s death in an attempt to put an end to Al-Mansour’s empire.

The Performance Space

Entering the space, the first impression I got was one of ‘depth’ and ‘energy’. The sense of depth came from the very simple yet effective use of black, gauze-like curtains drawn around the three sides of the stage (see the rough diagram from my notebook below). A simple change in lighting state would allow the curtains to invite or block the audience’s gaze, adding the potential for distinctive ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ layers to the performance. Sometimes these background ‘corridors’ were inhabited by the performers, sometimes they were the object of video projections and/or puppet and mask scenes, but by isolating parts of the space in this way and superimposing them as alternate layers to the whole performance canvas, the audience experienced alternate, meta-theatrical narratives that ran parallel to the play’s main story and action. Pluralism of action in space, in my view, is a pillar of any living, breathing theatre – it is part of the definition of a theatre ‘environment’. Part of the reason for this is the way we perceive life as pluralistic – in any given situation there are a mulitude of facets and angles, life is ‘chaotic’ in essence and exists in stark contrast to minimalism or singularity which is a man-made and heavily contrived state only sustainable and effective in short, sharp bursts. Finding the balance between the two states is vital in all art forms, and Kalila Wa Dimna is in that sense a well balanced piece.

The impression of ‘energy’ came from the live musicians tucked away behind the curtains stage left. Their space was small and barely lit by pilot lights; the effect was almost cave-like, a ‘cave’ in which the audience caught the occasional glimpse of silhouettes concocting mesmeric sounds. Live music, and the inclusion of the musician in performance is another pillar of the living, breathing theatre environment. Recorded sound is equally as valuable in contributing to the world of a performance, but by cancelling out the human source of the music we are stripping away another layer of the kernel of theatre: the experience of other people telling a story – and music is like language, another storytelling device that covers the gamut of human emotion. I would have liked to see even more inclusion of the musicians in this piece, perhaps with heightened lighting states that bring the muscians into focus at key points.

Performance ‘Memory’

In the main performance space there were four mirror-like (but transparent) movable screens arranged side by side, with a rough contour map of the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to Iraq inscribed on them from the beginning. These screens not only served as a changing dynamic in the architecture of the main performance space, but they became locus of ‘performance memory’ – silent and statuesque.

As the play evolved, the ‘Jackal’, a wandering character wearing a full-faced black jackal mask, ‘orchestrated’ the history of the performance by writing pivotal words, expressions and diagrams from the play, over the screens, so that by the end of the performance when the screens were lined up right at the front of the stage and a beam of light moved slowly across them, the audience had one last look at the ‘memory’ of the play. It felt almost like a testament or epitaph to the life of the performance, a statement reminding us that life exists within the walls of this theatre and it is worthy of celebration and remembrance just as it is on the outside. I have seen the device of writing on stage used time and time again in performance, but never with this level of focus and integration into the piece as a whole. In Kalila the inscriptions enhance the environment, they bring texture to the set, and meaning to play, and they form the leitmotif of the power of the written word.

The mythical dimension

The tales of Kalila Wa Dimna are “animal fables spun around the two Jackals and their dealings in the court of their king – the Lion. They are stories within stories; each tale unfolding and leading another beast’s dilemma, anectdote, tribulation.” (Excerpt from the Programme) The concept of a story within a story is what prompts the mulitude of layers in Sulayman’s Kalila, not only physical layers with action in space but also psychological layers within characters and overlapping stories. One clear example of this is the Jackal character.

This is a silent character, fully masked and dressed in black that roams freely around the space, at times intervening in the action in the main space by moving objects or simply watching other characters and, as mentioned before, by writing on the screens. The Jackal was extracted from the original Kalila tales, which feature a pair of Jackals, and personnified/physicalised on stage. The form of this figure with its dark and mysterious demanour, and the iconic shape of the mask was reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis:

“The jackal-god of mummification, he assisted in the rites by which a dead man was admitted to the underworld. Anubis was worshipped as the inventor of embalming and who embalmed the dead Osiris and thereby helping to preserve him that he might live again.

Anubis is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal holding the divine sceptre carried by kings and gods; as simply a black jackal or as a dog accompanying Isis. His symbol was a black and white ox-hide splattered with blood and hanging from a pole. It’s meaning is unknown.

Anubis had three important functions. He supervised the embalming of bodies. He received the mummy into the tomb and performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and then conducted the soul in the Field of Celestial Offerings. Most importantly though, Anubis monitored the Scales of Truth to protect the dead from deception and eternal death.” (Quote taken from www.egyptianmyths.net)

Through its recurring appearance in ancient mythologies, from Egypt to India and probably other cultures too, the presence of the Jackal on stage is in some ways the representation of an archetype; a figure whose primary function may not be fully understood by the spectator (and indeed does not require the ‘inflcition’ of clarity) but whose form with its mythological ramifications conjurs emotions that relate to a deeper/spiritual side of humanity. Thus, for me, the Jackal became a hinge between the animal tales of Kalila Wa Dimna being recounted and discussed on stage and the evocation of an underworld, a darker mythical element in the performance.

Poetry, formalism and anachronism

Given the depth and multi-faceted nature of most elements I have discussed so far, it is unsurprising that the language of the play should also operate with varying modes and layers. The overall feel of the language was archaic in its formalism, deeply poetic with constant recourse to metaphor and similie and an acute awareness of rhyme and rhythm, and contrasted with moments of ‘anachronistic’ speech (in the sense of it feeling distinctly modern), especially from Muqaffa in his asides and casual dialogue with characters such as Asia and Bashar.

Two of the most arresting metaphorical images that remained in my mind after the performance were as follows. The first was in Act 1 scene 3:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Three things are perilous: entrusting yourself to a woman, and be-friending Kings.

ASIA: What’s the third?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Testing poison for strength.

Particularly the last line quoted here, which for me portended to Muqaffa’s fate; his words become his own poison that out-do him in strength.

The second was in Act 5 scene 5:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Palace. The perimeter is the halo and the palace is God.

BASHAR: Why is it on fire?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: To see it! They used ropes of wool doused in tar. The sky is orange.

BASHAR: Black night opened its wreaking orange gob
Wide as an oven stoked on poor human sods!

Without the changes in register of language and the contrast they created in performance, this text could have suffered from being over-dense, but instead Al-Bassam never allows the audience to get too ‘comfortable’ with one style or tone and in this sense the language of the play has its own dynamic within the overall performance.

Multimedia

As I mentioned in the beginning, this performance was the result of a collaboration between artists, one of whom brought a fascinating visual depth the piece through the use of video and image projections, this was Julia Bardsley. Most notable were the projections of Arabic writing over the whole stage during major transitions, these moments worked as the ‘glue’ that held the hinges of the play together; then there was the more isolated video projection of a human eye – a very simple but strikingly evocative moment in the flow of the play. The eye, when seen up-close, has a rhythmical, mesmeric quality with the batting of the eyelid and the retraction/dilation of the pupil, it is also symbolic of the gaze – watching and being watched in a surveillance state and finally it represents the archetype of the all-seeing, omniscient god. In the latter sense the eye in Kalila reminded me of the great eye that appears between the hills of Hiroshima in Kurosawa’s last film Rhapsody in August – it is the eye of the storm, of destruction, but also of knowledge and power.