The Plank Panel in Flux
The Play:
Flux, an in-concert reading of an operatic musical about
Scottish history and war by Margaret Sweatman. The play is almost as
confusing as the panel you are about to read.
The Panel:
Rebecca Applebaum is a Toronto-based actor and musician. Check her out at in Tara Beagan’s Foundlings tonight at the Gladstone Hotel Performance Gallery.
Waylen Miki is Dora Award-winning theatre composer (in 2007 for Sarsical) and purveyor of many witticisms.
Alison Broverman is a playwright and arts reporter who is just about SummerWorksed out by now.
Rebecca: I'll start by saying that this piece is difficult for me to talk about because there's so much about this production that makes me feel like I need to qualify my experience:
1. It's presented as a staged reading complete with music stands and indirect interaction between characters.
2. It's been cut down from 100 minutes to 60 minutes.
3. It's ostensibly an opera -- a form of theatre I'm not completely familiar with.
4. It plays with Scottish history -- another subject in which I'm not well versed.
So I'd like to be able to discuss this play on its own terms -- but I don't feel like I'm able, at this point, to get to all those terms.
What I can say is this: the music is interesting (although the pre-recorded stuff was distracting and seemed unnecessary) and, although it is performed for the most part out to the audience (a strange directorial choice considering most of the dialogue takes place between actors who are standing side by side), I sensed that the performers were committed to the world of the play.
One problem I had was that the impermanence of death really took away from what was at stake, especially since people seem to come back to life so easily and without much disbelief from the other characters - it was almost cartoonish. I didn't completely get the anti-warness of it - maybe that's why...
Alison: There's a problem when your anti-war musical about medieval Scotland doesn't read as anti-war at all. For heaven's sake, there are two characters who are about to die unless they do battle! There's a line in the rousing, pride-filled final number about how Scotland will never stop fighting, ever. Lists of kings and how they were murdered are rattled off gleefully. Every single character who dies randomly comes back to life.
I didn't understand Flux. The beginnings of so many good ideas were in there, like when Annathema scolds someone for calling her the "woman-king", insisting that she "doesn't want to be hyphenated". But nothing was fleshed out. Some of the music was quite beautiful but it was sometimes repetitive and often stopped the plot dead in its tracks.
Waylen: Yes, while I agree that it seems to fall short of being an anti-war musical, I thought that the pretense of re-telling so-called Scottish History, an interesting choice. History is at the behest of story-telling rather than as an empirical truth. I think the play suggests that history is the thing in "flux", shifting depending on the victor. Also that we construct history to validate and justify the position we have now in the present.
"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it," is a popular saying that holds that history holds answers to our present position, however, the play suggests that we reconstruct history to suit our present ideology and political stance. The list of Scottish kings rattled off is actually a reconstruction of history within a play about reconstructing history. The characters "justify" the need for war by showing the lineage and pomp of other "noble" deaths. The satire seems quite clear.
As for suggesting that this play is an opera, that too is a reconstruction of the medium. This is not an opera, if one judges it by the relationship between musical themes and orchestral individuation. But one may as well call it an opera, and give it some pomp and circumstance
Rebecca: Thanks Waylen. That actually clarifies a lot in terms of what the piece is trying to do. But I'm still not clear on how history is being rewritten "to suit our present ideology and political stance." Are you saying that the satire comes from how ridiculous the characters are in their enthusiasm to engage in battle? That they use "history" to justify war in a way that is clearly unjustifiable from our point of view?
And you're right, I shouldn't have called it an opera. It's clearly in reference to the form, but the piece is referred to as a musical and Margaret Sweatman has said herself that in the process of creating the piece they discovered "there was no way it could be high opera."
Waylen: What I mean about history being re-written to suit our present ideology is this: in order to justify war in the present, political power seeks to justify it in the past. War becomes reframed as liberation or the negation of aggression. The present war in Iraq is continually framed as a "defensive" move, in order to quell aggression.
The play places the Scots as the subaltern in relation to the dominant English and below the status of women. It doesn't, however, deal with its own paradox: that the play has been set in a time and era in which non-whites could participate. Hence, the play erases, though seemingly harmlessly, the evidence of the non-white in history.
And notice that the play offers no "essential" reason why the Scots and the English are at war. Simply that it has always been, and therefore must continue, in perpetuity, passing from the serious into similar altercations without origins.
Alison: I went into Flux without any background info, and I was very confused. Having now read what Sweatman has to say about the show, I sort of get where she's coming from, but I shouldn't need to read an interview with a playwright to understand her show, should I?
Waylen: I guess that depends on what sort of audience/critic one chooses to be. Is theatre meant to be understood without a background in theory? Possibly, but perhaps there is a new form of theatre that requires such a background in order for an audience to dialogue properly with a work. Personally, I think the author is trying to hide behind theory. Her theory of "we're all one another" is not post-modern but rather, covert Christianity rearing its ideological head. It's really the Golden Rule that centres the play.
Rebecca: After thinking about it a little more, I have to say that there is a lot about this "in-concert performance" (apologies for calling it a staged reading earlier) that really doesn’t hold together for me at all. The music heightens the piece but the action of the play feels arbitrary. I don't know why any character decides to do anything except for the fact that it's the next plot point in the play. "Oh yes! Let's kill our good friend the woman-King because Scots' traditionally murder kings! Ok!" Is that really a justification?
I understand how that might be a comment on history, sure. But this is just one example of how there’s barely any internal logic to the plot or to the characters, which is slightly of consequence when the object in question is a play with a plot and characters. And the whole flux thing seems completely irrelevant. If there's actually some really deep idea going on here, I think I need at least little help finding out what it is. Even if the collision of atoms showering above has to do with democracy somehow (see program) - and I don't really know how it does - how is that of any consequence to anything? What does it say about democracy? What does it say about our lives? What does it say about leadership? What does it say about history? What does it say about our responsibilities as human beings? What does it say about war? For me, the answer is a big, I DON'T KNOW. And you know what? I know it doesn't have to answer those questions. That's not really the problem. The problem is I don't even think it's even asking those questions - or any questions - in a clear or meaningful way.
Flux; Script and lyrics by Margaret Sweatman; music by Glenn Buhr; Directed by Margaret Sweatman. Music director: Glenn Buhr. Presented by Flux Collective. Featuring Benjamin D’Cunha, Madeleine Donohue, Kate Kudelka, Craig Pike, Michael York. Part of the 2008 SummerWorks Festival. You can find more information about the show by marching here.