Sydney Bridge Upside Down (play)
Sep. 7th, 2013 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraSydney Bridge Upside Down, by David Ballantyne, is the book my NZ Lit lecturer would constantly enthuse about as the great lost NZ novel. Despite this, he hadn't actually put it on the curriculum (I am trying to remember what novels we had, actually - Owls Do Cry (Janet Frame) and Man Alone (John Mulgan) in first year, both of which I hated for different reasons, but maybe second year was Patricia Grace's Cousins and Albert Wendt's Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree? I am unsure. I also have a highly ambivalent relationship with pretty much all NZ literary novels except the bone people, and pretty much just wallowed in poetry and plays), and although I remember tracking Sydney Bridge down in the university library and reading the blurb, I never read it. Still. The memory of not reading it stuck with me, and when I saw Taki Rua was doing the play, I wanted to go.
The only performance I could get to was over two hours on Sunday night two days after getting back from an international trip, with work on Monday, and I pretty much showed up telling my fellow theatre goer that I totally reserved the right to leave at intermission. Fortunately, the play totally grabbed me, and I had absolutely no problem staying for the whole thing - it was vivid, strange, not entirely successful and completely compelling by turns, understated and over the top. I am still not sure what happened, in many respects, and now I really want to read the book.
The play started with video projections of parts of a horse - teeth, ears, eyes, legs, a Picasso like deconstruction - on to the back screen, and the recital of the opening lines of the book - "There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world, and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down...". What goes on after that is very much NZ Gothic - a small town, an abandoned meat works, two brothers whose mother has gone away to the city for unknown reasons, a butcher whose every step is accompanied with frightening orchestral crashes, a girl who watches, a attractive older cousin who flirts, a father with one leg who is supportive and threatening all at once...the staging, however, and the production itself, made it very much more than that. A lot of physical drama, a lot of comedy, and above all, repetition, which is something I find fascinating in theatre (itself an inherent product of repetition, but time limited).
There's a particular NZ literary cliche in which idyllic holidays with incomprehensible adult goings-on are observed from a child's pov, and then one of the kids dies ironically (it tends to come across as the fictional equivalent of a particularly smug road safety commercial). Here, though, repetition - and less obviousness - made it something else entirely.
The brothers are at the beach. The older talks to the watching girl; the younger fetches a bucket of water and then enthusiastically drowns himself in it, bringing his head up to gasp at increasingly longer intervals. And the dialogue between the brother and the girl starts to repeat, stuck in that moment, while the sun shines down overhead and the drowning boy gets more and more desperate (the old man and his horse rescue him, eventually). There's another moment of repetition between the older brother and his cousin, where he's trying to stop her from going out, jealous and afraid - she pulls off her underwear and flings it at him. And then does it again, and again, while their conversation also starts to loop - he's questioning her about different things, but the underlying message - and her answer, "Doesn't matter!" is the same. And, after about ten pairs, she landed the final pair on top of his head, and stalked off.
It wasn't all successful - I am still not sure entirely who died, or how, although this may be the book as well, and some of the physical bits worked less well - but it was great theatre. And, having checked - my lecturer is still doing the same course, and now it's on the curriculum.
The only performance I could get to was over two hours on Sunday night two days after getting back from an international trip, with work on Monday, and I pretty much showed up telling my fellow theatre goer that I totally reserved the right to leave at intermission. Fortunately, the play totally grabbed me, and I had absolutely no problem staying for the whole thing - it was vivid, strange, not entirely successful and completely compelling by turns, understated and over the top. I am still not sure what happened, in many respects, and now I really want to read the book.
The play started with video projections of parts of a horse - teeth, ears, eyes, legs, a Picasso like deconstruction - on to the back screen, and the recital of the opening lines of the book - "There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world, and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down...". What goes on after that is very much NZ Gothic - a small town, an abandoned meat works, two brothers whose mother has gone away to the city for unknown reasons, a butcher whose every step is accompanied with frightening orchestral crashes, a girl who watches, a attractive older cousin who flirts, a father with one leg who is supportive and threatening all at once...the staging, however, and the production itself, made it very much more than that. A lot of physical drama, a lot of comedy, and above all, repetition, which is something I find fascinating in theatre (itself an inherent product of repetition, but time limited).
There's a particular NZ literary cliche in which idyllic holidays with incomprehensible adult goings-on are observed from a child's pov, and then one of the kids dies ironically (it tends to come across as the fictional equivalent of a particularly smug road safety commercial). Here, though, repetition - and less obviousness - made it something else entirely.
The brothers are at the beach. The older talks to the watching girl; the younger fetches a bucket of water and then enthusiastically drowns himself in it, bringing his head up to gasp at increasingly longer intervals. And the dialogue between the brother and the girl starts to repeat, stuck in that moment, while the sun shines down overhead and the drowning boy gets more and more desperate (the old man and his horse rescue him, eventually). There's another moment of repetition between the older brother and his cousin, where he's trying to stop her from going out, jealous and afraid - she pulls off her underwear and flings it at him. And then does it again, and again, while their conversation also starts to loop - he's questioning her about different things, but the underlying message - and her answer, "Doesn't matter!" is the same. And, after about ten pairs, she landed the final pair on top of his head, and stalked off.
It wasn't all successful - I am still not sure entirely who died, or how, although this may be the book as well, and some of the physical bits worked less well - but it was great theatre. And, having checked - my lecturer is still doing the same course, and now it's on the curriculum.
