garden of delights: vicious

Alice in Wonderland is an influential force in the theatre, and Spanish writer  Fernando Arrabal's play Garden of Delights is no exception. A woman capped by a pair of pink bunny ears lies prostate on a sofa, wholly immersed within a sparse set shaded dazzling white. Her name is Lais and apparently, she is a famous actress. Holed up in a vast castle for reasons unstated, Lais takes calls from a television game show; her undying fans desperate for a snippet of information in their attempt to make sense of a women they have never met, but idolise. Diametrically opposed to Lais, on the other side of the stage, is a glass cabinet covered by a sheet of white muslin. Lais removes this sheet to reveal three of the cutest white baby rabbits that a person could ever wish to see; the innocent Child externalised by a romantic vision of purity interpolated and connected to Lais by the presence of her pricked bunny ears. 

Beneath the glass cabinet and covered by a second sheet of muslin, there is however a grotesque, yet loveable troll who, because of his crude and unpredictable demeanour, is chained to a post. Lais is ambivalent in her feelings toward this incoherent beast whose head, neck and shoulders are wrapped in yellow fleece. Later, during a fit of pique prompted by Lais' perceived lack of love and affection, this hirsute troll slaughters each and every rabbit as they nestle safely in the glass cabinet. Between these two incidents there occurs a sequence of snappily directed scenes that shift in time and place. It soon becomes clear that Lais' Greta Garbo persona is a pipe dream she has constructed for the purpose of exploring motives unconscious, repressed memories, and a violent impulse that is a consequence of physical abuse packaged as religious devotion. As a convent schoolgirl Lais, or a figment of her innocent self, masturbates with a crucifix, is tampered with by a big, hairy purple creature and subjected to sadomasochistic acts where she is a willing participant. In Arrabal's chaotic world we are all complicit in the unspeakable acts perpetrated against us because, in the space occupied by the unconscious mind the external world's superficial moral order is no longer recognised. Roughly approximated within the Modernist project, Expressionism was replaced by a desire to further explore the wild dreams of the individual, and so it is the case in Garden of Delights.

Pipe Dream's interpretation of Arrabal's difficult script is a pretty decent effort. Confronted by a multitudinous melange of ideas and images, strange sounds, anonymous voices and the mad landscape that was the modern, industrialised mind, how does the theatre articulate that which defies explanation ? Director Paul Terrell has ambitiously chosen to go after the lot. In doing so, this production raises two interesting questions. Are conventional theatrical structures such as clear character delineation, dialogue, and the actor's craft, adequate for communicating to an audience the maelstrom of the unconscious mind ? And how important is it for a non-naturalistic play that is open-ended and explorative by impulse to be characterised by an overarching spine of vertical descent, such as in the work of Jenny Kemp ? These are questions not easily answered, as Arrabal's play was written with conventional theatrical structure in mind. Even so, like many plays of this type, the cathartic moment occurs as a ritualistic death. And always after death there is once again life; blade of grass, flesh, blood and consciousness only ever decompose so as to reconfigure elsewhere in the external world, and so it is in the Hieronymus Bosch inspired Garden of Delights.

Garden of Delights

Writer: Fernando Arrabal

Director: Paul Terrell

Performers: Jono Burns, Austin Castiglione, 

Marita Fox & Julia Harari

Set: Yunuen Perez

Light: Katie Sfetkidis

Sound: Keith McDougall

Costume: Chloe Greaves

Stage  Manager: Amelia Jackson

Theatreworks, May 1-16, Melb.

*image: ben landau