antipopper

A weekend at the Opera House:

Saw Measure for Measure, which I found unbelievably interesting — all sorts of whacky stuff about sovereignty and governance. Duke Vincentio of Vienna decides to go undercover to ferret out corruption high and low, placing his sanctimonious deputy Angelo in charge of the kingdom. As the Duke watches from the shadows, Angelo promptly sentences a guy to death for knocking up his fiancee, and then tries to extort sexual favours from the dude’s sister Isabella, a novice nun, in return for clemency. Cor!

I knew nothing about the play previously, but from what I can tell, director John Bell went for a “deconstructive” reading, working with the text to tease out its own aporias. The last scene is the kicker: finally revealing himself after an unnecessarily tortuous bit of drama, the Duke rights all wrongs and grants all sorts of compassionate pardons, and then proposes marriage to the wronged nun Isabella. The happy neatness of this ending, the sort which Shakespeare seems to favour in his comedies, is belied in the text by the fact that Isabella actually doesn’t get to reply before the curtain falls. And Bell played this wonderfully: when he proposes, it’s clear that the Duke’s just talking shit in some kind of power-mad dreamworld, while Isabella just stands there with a stricken look on her face. Fade to black. The audience gasped.

Also made it to Patrick’s “Beirut to Bombay Nights“, which I must say was a bit wary about, if only because if you look at these celebrations of culture in terms of ethnicity in a structural context, questions of (self-)orientalisation and exoticism inevitably rear their head, regardless of your intent. “Autonomy” can’t simply be expressed in these kinds of spaces (and in case I’m misread, hey, I really like the Opera House people involved in stuff like this, too). But when you’ve got people like Claudia there, doing her doing hilariously over-the-top performance-art dramatisations of the idiocies of “cultural authenticity”, there’s always, at least, a struggle over culture. Plus, the content was just fucking good, in terms of “general entertainment quality”, which then helps to deflect the more unwelcome kind of (fetishistic) specificities of attention and desire.

And yeah, the Lebanese trip-hoppers Soap Kills really were killer. Imagine Massive Attack if they were still actually good, and uh, sexy to begin with. Or Lamb without the toe-gazing self-possession.

N dismissed the singer Yasmine as a “Beirut princess” (ha!), but in this context, I really preferred that the people drooling after her (you know who you are!) weren’t clueless white people into “world beatz” (yawn). I’d better stop before I get accused of proposing some dodgy hierarchy of objectification… :)

[ tags: sydney-opera-house, orientalism, exoticism, cultural-politics, race, shakespeare, soap-kills, drool ]