No Rain on Easter Parade
I didn’t go to church and I didn’t eat any Easter eggs. Otherwise, it seemed like a pretty conventional holiday weekend to me: I saw three plays, wrote an obituary, ran ten miles to the Limehouse Basin in glorious sunshine and enjoyed a big family lunch in Rowley Leigh’s Cafe Anglais.
The lunch was enlivened — before we got stuck into some arguments about the Royal Family and Terence Rattigan — by a balloon-blowing clown and a “close” magician working the tables. The parti-coloured balloonist made an orange sausage dog for the youngest of our party and the magician cheerfully asked us for any requests.
“Can you make yourself disappear?” I suggested, only half entering the mood of the occasion. He then proceeded to do the most amazing things with a pack of cards — which at one point changed into a glass block while being held tight in a fist.
How do they do that? And what are the physical signs to enable telepathy? I was asked to think of a name of someone round the table, write it on a pad, and show the rest, but not him. He got it in about ten seconds. By just reading my face, somehow, while I answered a few questions. There was no indent on the writing pad. We made sure of that by tearing off a few sheets while he wasn’t looking.
I had to make a few last minute adjustments to my schedule as my friend Jovan Cirilov, the longstanding programme selector for the Bitef festival in Belgrade, rang to say he was swinging through town to catch Romeo Castellucci’s latest extravaganza at the Barbican Theatre. And could I join him.
He arrived at the house lugging an incredibly heavy, newly published pictorial history of the Bitef festival, as a gift. The least I could do in exchange was endure Castellucci’s 60-minute piece about the metaphysics of excrement.
By describing it thus, and just quoting the title — On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God — I can hear jeers and hackles rising. All that happened was: an old man in an old folks home filled his nappy at regular intervals, while his son dutifully and lovingly cleared up the mess, wiping, scooping, comforting, cleaning.
The stage was literally full of shit. And it was dominated by a huge reproduction of a beautiful Renaissance portrait of Jesus, which itself starts streaming brown liquid from every pore and orifice in a mockery of tears. “Jesus wept,” we say, all too easily. Or did say. Not so easy now. For the performance, for all its earnest provocation, was the absolute opposite of blasphemous or disgusting.
It seemed to me a serious, startling and original metaphor of Christianity, of the relationship between God and his son, the responsibilities of sustaining the Church and the ineffability of the human condition.
The physical expression of the piece formed an ironic commentary, too, on the nature of modern art, as the pristine white neutrality of the stage accumulated blobs and blotches of the brown stuff and the Renaissance portrait elided with the modern studio bowel “action” painting.
So now you can understand why I wasn’t too keen on stuffing myself with Easter chocolate when I got home. The play had an unsettling effect on my digestion as well as my mental equilibrium.
I can see how you might not rush to see On the Concept of the Face (well, you can’t, anyway, it only played three performances) if you loved Legally Blonde or Flare Path.
But the performance (“show” is the wrong word) did something rare in the theatre. It broke boundaries and taboos — and much wind — in a serious and poetic way, and offered an experience as profound and disturbing as any Easter message emanating from the usual pulpits. And it went way beyond Beckett, way beyond words.
