Text meets Texture Halfway
From the dynamic series of monologues that open Hell Meets Henry Halfway, Maya, played by the vivacious Sarah Stanford closes her opening banter with a statement that seals the fate of an otherwise explosive piece of theatre. Wedged in a claustrophobic train carriage, she lashes through a verbal tirade of her own decaying sexuality that culminates in an exhausted throwaway: “Stupid words.”
As Maya hints, words are both the sustenance and downfall of performance: when are words enough for the audience to marry text and character in the same plane, and when does it fail? Hell Meets Henry Halfway is ambitiously wordy, and as both Quinn Bauriedel (playing Maya’s tennis coach, Walchak) and Stanford admit, it is the first time Pig Iron Theatre Company has embarked on such a text-heavy production. Pig Iron Theatre Company has otherwise been known as proponents of rapturous physical theatre. Most of its members hail from Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, an institution after Jacques Lecoq famed for his research into mime, clowning and “neutral mask” technique. Strong physical characterisation is expected from a troupe of such repute (Bauriedel was an immediate student of Lecoq), and the company did not disappoint, delivering with self-assured aplomb. Characters were crafted with definite eclecticism, as well as the occasional defects. Dr. Petar Hincz (played by Michael Crane), for example, sported a wasted ankle whilst James Sugg triumphed as the mentally challenged Ballboy, Jon.
Hell Meets Henry can be reinterpreted as an experiment onstage as much as it is offstage. Within the confines of the rehearsal room, Hell Meets Henry represents the company’s attempt to find a new theatrical language through first-time collaboration with writer Adriano Shaplin of The Riot Group. The conversation between physical and textual eloped to an onstage experiment that questions the sufficiency (or insufficiency) of communication, framed through loose associations with Witold Gombrowicz’s 1939 novel, Posessed. The production races through the absurd, revolving about opportunistic secretary Henry (Dito van Reigersberg) in service to Prince (Mary McCool). Henry struggles with his mundane attendance of the Prince in secret hope he will bequeath his castle to him when he passes. Meanwhile, Henry’s denial about his failing marriage to Maya is further exacerbated when she becomes more engaged in Walchak, her tennis coach, than she is with his illusions. The castle’s latest guest, the dubious Dr. Hincz sides with the Prince and threatens to undo his ambitions.
Hell Meets Henry stumbles through the messy substance of words and communication. The theme of miscommunication and the slippery nature of understanding are tirelessly reiterated. Maya rails in exasperation that her body, represented as a textual instrument, has become “a difficult curriculum, […] illegible”. Her boredom is reflected as a double disappointment with her courtiers. Firstly, they are unable to ‘read’ her, and secondly, they fail to charm her with a language she desires and seeks. She admits:
“Lazy, lazy boys with poor vocabularies and poor judgement. … [H]alf-wit amateurs. Illiterate, lop-sided mouth-breathing teenagers. […] Nobody wants to be excellent anymore. Nobody tries hard enough to please me.”
In Maya, misunderstanding arises from a failure from the interpretation of text; her text extends beyond the sexual and into the psychological. However, none is able to grasp or speak her language. She seeks a new method of communication that entails a new form of abstraction. Walchak similarly shares her boredom of corporeal language, decrying the “same predictable, boring […] set of bullshit desires and petty opinions […] invented by retards who live in shit.” Walchak refers to explicit linguistic-mnemonic theory that seems a strangely ‘out-of-character’ experience, drawing attention to “opinions strung together by selective memory” and “chicken-scratch alphabets of unreason”. Both characters seem to slander at the insufficiency of classical linguistic modes of communication, providing a common space for both characters to invent their own narratives with respect to each other.
Likewise, Dr. Hincz contemplates the unstable marriage of belief and truth, himself embodying the dichotomy of science and its fickle truth. While he grants that “Nobody understands” his work, he warns Henry not to “collapse under the strain of scepticism” because “Mystery only learns to knock louder at the gates of a closed mind”. However, Hincz’s statement only serves to throw the apparent transparency of belief into further crisis: how fully are we allowed to believe what we see (or hear)? Hincz’s supposed embodiment of the scientific pillar of truth is further subverted when he misuses the word “avuncular” as an ill-meaning condition. When Henry replies that “Avuncular means ‘friendly’”, Hincz smugly assures: “That is not the way it sounds Mr. Kholavitsy, is it?” Arguably, Hincz offers one form of liberation from the semiotic crisis whereby the signifier is locked up by the signified. What a word means can be bypassed if text is returned to its basic pre-Structuralist elements. However, is it enough to save the characters in the play?
In the case of Maya and Walchak, however, it apparently fails, because both characters consistently try to read and out-read each other’s languages. Because meaning plays such a central role to the core of their competition, neither character can escape the escalating absurdity of which they are bound to. Maya and Walchak’s competition is crystallised in the physical realm through the premise of a tennis match, a competition that is founded upon their common boredoms. Their competition is also fuelled by the ability to make the other ‘feel’ or to disable (de-familiarise) the reality of the other that he or she gives in. Most disturbing is the way the bodies (or physical representations) of the characters try to ‘catch-up’ with the fast-emptying meanings of their discourse. In one of the most intense scenes of the play, Maya and Walchak hurl insults at each other within the confines of a wardrobe as they proceed to taunt each other into the act of sexual intercourse. Here, physical action betrays verbal intention: it appears that the textual context which gave rise to intercourse suddenly became discontinuous with the act altogether. However, the very nature of their competition depends on this ridiculous escalation of the absurd: losing means breaking out of the textual gridlock and acknowledging the physical, of which neither would concede to.
Contrastingly, monologues in Hell Meets Henry serve a different function, a permissible debilitation of meaning. Both Maya and Walchak’s opening monologues become increasingly abstract as they banter on, until they breach a certain threshold whereby word and noise nearly become indistinguishable, text is illegible and indecipherable. Words betray character, and words establish themselves as a source of their own, separable from the mouths of origin: “Everyone talks and talks and talks, spitting words from dry lips…” Perhaps at these thresholds where meaning is insufficient to support text and text is insufficient as a tool of expression, text undergoes a certain artistic objectification, to be viewed, tasted and examined as a work of art rather than a tool of communication. Fascinated by the incomplete structures of the castle, Hincz remarks to Henry:
“As you know, the men who built these dwellings frequently did so in an effort to satisfy artistic rather than architectural ambitions.”
In this, the play examines its own constructed nature, its comprising of text and meaning. In remembering its own functions as a means of theatrical performance, it treads the fine lines between what theatrical text means as a mean in itself versus text as an artistic end. It is where the seams of its own fiction reveal itself, and where the characters are helpless against it.
Plagued by a crisis in signification, Maya and Walchak propel themselves further into a free-play of actions and meaning, each of them daring the other to break the spell of the game that will bring the other back to reality. In a wrenching sequence, both Maya and Walchak engage in a series of verbal contradictions (the state of derision which has affected their discourse) that leads to Walchak tearing apart a tree squirrel. In that crisis, the Lacanian Symbolic (represented by the discourse of killing) collapses into the Real (the act of killing), driving both characters back into reality. Suddenly, the semiotic crisis is resolved, but with devastating circumstances that neither can bring themselves to acknowledge. Competition turns to blame in a heated exchange that picks up on the widening textual-physical divide:
Walchak: Why ask me then? Why ask for that? You’re sick.
Maya: YOU KILLED IT!
Walchak: YOU THOUGHT IT! I never would have thought it.
Maya: You MADE me think it. It’s what YOU would DO.
Walchak: YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE. YOU DON’T DESERVE IT.
Maya: Who are you to judge?
Walchak: Nobody.
Maya: Nobody.
The violent reassertion of the “real event”, however, is short-lived. The inexpressible void left by Walchak’s heartless killing is similarly shared by Maya, both characters are implicated in the scheme of competition such that it would not have mattered who committed the actual killing. Perhaps word takes on a vivid life of its own, forcing characters to become prisoners of their own thoughts. The cruelty of text as an incarcerating device echoes of Jacques Derrida’s own assertions that there is “nothing outside text”. In this system of textual provocation, both Maya and Walchak are powerless to the whims of their texts. However, it is their attempts to reconcile “event” and “text” that leads them almost inevitably towards their own fate fore-crafted by their own texts. In the end, their competition drives them to accept ridiculous ends, each dragging their bodies impaled along a javelin closer together to stop living. Here there is a desperate reversal along the narrative of the absurd. No longer able to transform the event with text, both try to label the event (death) as it occurs, finding fetishism in a new and even more absurd form of competition:
Walchak: Stop breathing.
Maya: Stop moving.
Walchak: Stop trying.
Maya: Stop talking.
(They collapse. Blackout)
Neither can bring themselves to acknowledge death impending, so they fend it off through mock instructions, in hopeful delight that text will produce their desired outcome of the other. For once in the play, communication and interpretation are reconciled, but are reconciled with one catch: the death of text.
As Maya hints, words are both the sustenance and downfall of performance: when are words enough for the audience to marry text and character in the same plane, and when does it fail? Hell Meets Henry Halfway is ambitiously wordy, and as both Quinn Bauriedel (playing Maya’s tennis coach, Walchak) and Stanford admit, it is the first time Pig Iron Theatre Company has embarked on such a text-heavy production. Pig Iron Theatre Company has otherwise been known as proponents of rapturous physical theatre. Most of its members hail from Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, an institution after Jacques Lecoq famed for his research into mime, clowning and “neutral mask” technique. Strong physical characterisation is expected from a troupe of such repute (Bauriedel was an immediate student of Lecoq), and the company did not disappoint, delivering with self-assured aplomb. Characters were crafted with definite eclecticism, as well as the occasional defects. Dr. Petar Hincz (played by Michael Crane), for example, sported a wasted ankle whilst James Sugg triumphed as the mentally challenged Ballboy, Jon.
Hell Meets Henry can be reinterpreted as an experiment onstage as much as it is offstage. Within the confines of the rehearsal room, Hell Meets Henry represents the company’s attempt to find a new theatrical language through first-time collaboration with writer Adriano Shaplin of The Riot Group. The conversation between physical and textual eloped to an onstage experiment that questions the sufficiency (or insufficiency) of communication, framed through loose associations with Witold Gombrowicz’s 1939 novel, Posessed. The production races through the absurd, revolving about opportunistic secretary Henry (Dito van Reigersberg) in service to Prince (Mary McCool). Henry struggles with his mundane attendance of the Prince in secret hope he will bequeath his castle to him when he passes. Meanwhile, Henry’s denial about his failing marriage to Maya is further exacerbated when she becomes more engaged in Walchak, her tennis coach, than she is with his illusions. The castle’s latest guest, the dubious Dr. Hincz sides with the Prince and threatens to undo his ambitions.
Hell Meets Henry stumbles through the messy substance of words and communication. The theme of miscommunication and the slippery nature of understanding are tirelessly reiterated. Maya rails in exasperation that her body, represented as a textual instrument, has become “a difficult curriculum, […] illegible”. Her boredom is reflected as a double disappointment with her courtiers. Firstly, they are unable to ‘read’ her, and secondly, they fail to charm her with a language she desires and seeks. She admits:
“Lazy, lazy boys with poor vocabularies and poor judgement. … [H]alf-wit amateurs. Illiterate, lop-sided mouth-breathing teenagers. […] Nobody wants to be excellent anymore. Nobody tries hard enough to please me.”
In Maya, misunderstanding arises from a failure from the interpretation of text; her text extends beyond the sexual and into the psychological. However, none is able to grasp or speak her language. She seeks a new method of communication that entails a new form of abstraction. Walchak similarly shares her boredom of corporeal language, decrying the “same predictable, boring […] set of bullshit desires and petty opinions […] invented by retards who live in shit.” Walchak refers to explicit linguistic-mnemonic theory that seems a strangely ‘out-of-character’ experience, drawing attention to “opinions strung together by selective memory” and “chicken-scratch alphabets of unreason”. Both characters seem to slander at the insufficiency of classical linguistic modes of communication, providing a common space for both characters to invent their own narratives with respect to each other.
Likewise, Dr. Hincz contemplates the unstable marriage of belief and truth, himself embodying the dichotomy of science and its fickle truth. While he grants that “Nobody understands” his work, he warns Henry not to “collapse under the strain of scepticism” because “Mystery only learns to knock louder at the gates of a closed mind”. However, Hincz’s statement only serves to throw the apparent transparency of belief into further crisis: how fully are we allowed to believe what we see (or hear)? Hincz’s supposed embodiment of the scientific pillar of truth is further subverted when he misuses the word “avuncular” as an ill-meaning condition. When Henry replies that “Avuncular means ‘friendly’”, Hincz smugly assures: “That is not the way it sounds Mr. Kholavitsy, is it?” Arguably, Hincz offers one form of liberation from the semiotic crisis whereby the signifier is locked up by the signified. What a word means can be bypassed if text is returned to its basic pre-Structuralist elements. However, is it enough to save the characters in the play?
In the case of Maya and Walchak, however, it apparently fails, because both characters consistently try to read and out-read each other’s languages. Because meaning plays such a central role to the core of their competition, neither character can escape the escalating absurdity of which they are bound to. Maya and Walchak’s competition is crystallised in the physical realm through the premise of a tennis match, a competition that is founded upon their common boredoms. Their competition is also fuelled by the ability to make the other ‘feel’ or to disable (de-familiarise) the reality of the other that he or she gives in. Most disturbing is the way the bodies (or physical representations) of the characters try to ‘catch-up’ with the fast-emptying meanings of their discourse. In one of the most intense scenes of the play, Maya and Walchak hurl insults at each other within the confines of a wardrobe as they proceed to taunt each other into the act of sexual intercourse. Here, physical action betrays verbal intention: it appears that the textual context which gave rise to intercourse suddenly became discontinuous with the act altogether. However, the very nature of their competition depends on this ridiculous escalation of the absurd: losing means breaking out of the textual gridlock and acknowledging the physical, of which neither would concede to.
Contrastingly, monologues in Hell Meets Henry serve a different function, a permissible debilitation of meaning. Both Maya and Walchak’s opening monologues become increasingly abstract as they banter on, until they breach a certain threshold whereby word and noise nearly become indistinguishable, text is illegible and indecipherable. Words betray character, and words establish themselves as a source of their own, separable from the mouths of origin: “Everyone talks and talks and talks, spitting words from dry lips…” Perhaps at these thresholds where meaning is insufficient to support text and text is insufficient as a tool of expression, text undergoes a certain artistic objectification, to be viewed, tasted and examined as a work of art rather than a tool of communication. Fascinated by the incomplete structures of the castle, Hincz remarks to Henry:
“As you know, the men who built these dwellings frequently did so in an effort to satisfy artistic rather than architectural ambitions.”
In this, the play examines its own constructed nature, its comprising of text and meaning. In remembering its own functions as a means of theatrical performance, it treads the fine lines between what theatrical text means as a mean in itself versus text as an artistic end. It is where the seams of its own fiction reveal itself, and where the characters are helpless against it.
Plagued by a crisis in signification, Maya and Walchak propel themselves further into a free-play of actions and meaning, each of them daring the other to break the spell of the game that will bring the other back to reality. In a wrenching sequence, both Maya and Walchak engage in a series of verbal contradictions (the state of derision which has affected their discourse) that leads to Walchak tearing apart a tree squirrel. In that crisis, the Lacanian Symbolic (represented by the discourse of killing) collapses into the Real (the act of killing), driving both characters back into reality. Suddenly, the semiotic crisis is resolved, but with devastating circumstances that neither can bring themselves to acknowledge. Competition turns to blame in a heated exchange that picks up on the widening textual-physical divide:
Walchak: Why ask me then? Why ask for that? You’re sick.
Maya: YOU KILLED IT!
Walchak: YOU THOUGHT IT! I never would have thought it.
Maya: You MADE me think it. It’s what YOU would DO.
Walchak: YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE. YOU DON’T DESERVE IT.
Maya: Who are you to judge?
Walchak: Nobody.
Maya: Nobody.
The violent reassertion of the “real event”, however, is short-lived. The inexpressible void left by Walchak’s heartless killing is similarly shared by Maya, both characters are implicated in the scheme of competition such that it would not have mattered who committed the actual killing. Perhaps word takes on a vivid life of its own, forcing characters to become prisoners of their own thoughts. The cruelty of text as an incarcerating device echoes of Jacques Derrida’s own assertions that there is “nothing outside text”. In this system of textual provocation, both Maya and Walchak are powerless to the whims of their texts. However, it is their attempts to reconcile “event” and “text” that leads them almost inevitably towards their own fate fore-crafted by their own texts. In the end, their competition drives them to accept ridiculous ends, each dragging their bodies impaled along a javelin closer together to stop living. Here there is a desperate reversal along the narrative of the absurd. No longer able to transform the event with text, both try to label the event (death) as it occurs, finding fetishism in a new and even more absurd form of competition:
Walchak: Stop breathing.
Maya: Stop moving.
Walchak: Stop trying.
Maya: Stop talking.
(They collapse. Blackout)
Neither can bring themselves to acknowledge death impending, so they fend it off through mock instructions, in hopeful delight that text will produce their desired outcome of the other. For once in the play, communication and interpretation are reconciled, but are reconciled with one catch: the death of text.
posted by HT, with T for Teh at 10:56 AM
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