The bun in librarian #1's hair is as tightly wound as the knot in her intestine. The realm within which she at once stamps, decodes and stacks books is a floating world of ephemeral pulp; soft cover airport novels suspended in three rows from La Mama's ceiling. Her rodent like colleague, librarian #2, is just as retentive. But her cherished constipation is expressed in a manner reminiscent of comedian Jerry Lewis dressed in drag. Where as her colleague personifies Hitler's Third Reich, librarian #2 is all twitches and tremolo, fidgets and cowering; a mole with poor vision burrowing into this world of letters and the sadomasochistic relationship she shares with her tyrannical supervisor. Put your finger to your lips and do not dare utter a single word. Shhhh ! Welcome to the library...
As a conceit constructed in a theatre, this library is a metaphorical representation of the infinite permutations present in the minds of its creators. Librarian #1, wearing smart, navy blue woolen suit, apparently dominates proceedings. She decides when she and her submissive colleague break for treasured ginger snaps concealed within a secret book. She decides when the flow of work must continue, and the two women must crank up their book collating trolleys and administer the ISBN numerical system. This library is her library and nobody is allowed to forget this; let alone question her authority and thereby subvert her sadistic pleasures. But history tells us that the oppressed peoples of this or any other world will only stand for so much tyranny. Librarian #2, dressed in pleated tartan skirt and so bespectacled that she innocently buttons her cardigan in reverse, is complicit in this power struggle. Like all people, she feels lost if not dominated by another. And is only capable of finding meaning in life by submitting herself to the cruel rule of her arbitrary supervisor. A strange dialectic, but one played out each day in workplaces of the world. The complex interplay between the masochist's desire to dominate, and the sadist's need to submit, is delicate. Unable to initiate a shift in this balance for fear of disrupting the status-quo, it is usually disrupted by the arrival of a third party. In Shhhh ! this force for change is librarian # 3, a male in a mauve coloured cardigan. Of course, the rest is history...
The theatre too, in its own sadomasochistic way, is dominated by languages. All too often, theatremakers submit to the verbal exchange as the primary means of communication when it comes to performing a play. When the word is deemed sacred, the theatre becomes sterile and empty because the various other languages there to be used, are neglected. Shhhh ! is a performance that completely rejects the verbal exchange and instead, uses bodies in space, in relation to objects that form a conceptualised design, to communicate its comedy. This is not to say that the verbal exchange does not have a place in the theatre but rather, that the verbal exchange is only one of several other modes of communication - space, time, body, light, design - available to theatremakers, and that the most satisfying performances are often an integrated presentation of a combination of all of these theatrical devices. As a matter of personal preference, what I would like to see in Shhhh ! is a trajectory of vertical descent. The labyrinthine libraries dreamed up by Eco and Borges are always places of extreme disquiet prompted by disjunctive extrapolations upon conventional understandings of space and time. People often get murdered in these libraries, and the thrill is in the subsequent investigation of the death. I did however enjoy the slapstick quality of Shhhh ! As a show that emphasised exploring the imagination, and the imaginative use of the elements that combined, contribute to a performance, I wonder what resides beneath its comic surface ? Infinite time, the death of the self... Shhhh ! In space, no-one can hear you scream...
Shhhh !
Director: Xanthe Beesley
Performers: Amy Dwight, Allen Laverty
& Ella Watson-Russell
Set & Costume: Yunuen Perez Martinez
Sound: Nedd Jones
Light: Anna Schoo
Stage Manager: Laura Harris
May 20 - May 31, La Mama, Melb.
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