Her sisters and her nurse minister to Agnes
It’s been 30+ years since I’ve seen the
Bergman movie on which Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam production is
based, but in any case, this production’s searing theatricality provides the
same story in a medium so utterly different, reference to the original seems
unnecessary. Charles Isherwood, in his New York Times’ review, called this
production “clinical.” I can't imagine
what he was smoking before he saw it, if he missed the passionate and powerful
emotion of this investigation into death and dying.
Perhaps his blindness to the import of gender
in theatre once again mislead him, because the production analyzes in minute
detail the physical and emotional costs of suffering a death, and the ways in
which, much as women might desire physical and emotional connection, it remains
so impossibly difficult to open ourselves to one another.
With post-modernist scenography by Jan
Versweyveld, the stage is built as an environment connected by flesh and blood
human beings as well as by their live video-feed images. Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) begins the performance
on a hospital bed center stage, with a close-up of her vomit-caked lips and the
green-yellow spit-up coloring the pillow where she lays projected on a screen above
her. When she gets up, the rest of Agnes’s
body is stained with feces and other bodily fluids.
Evidence of her body’s loss of control frequently
recur in the play, making the performance very much about what feminist
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz called the “volatile” female body, one whose
leakages reject boundaries and containment in ways that offend and threaten a
conventional patriarchal order. (No
wonder Isherwood couldn’t stomach the piece.)
Agnes is dying, under the ambivalent ministrations
of her two sisters—Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Halina Reign)—and the more
compassionate care of her nurse and the family’s maid, Anna (Karina Smulders). While in Bergman’s film, the relationships
are detailed through the intimacy of extreme close-up in a film that moves glacially
through its record of primary emotions, van Hove makes of his live production a
more quotidian record of the intimacies of death.
Because the play moves back and forth through
time—from Agnes's death mid-way through to an earlier moment in her illness,
then back to the post-funeral familial aftermath—the linear story isn’t as
important as how these characters react, often in wordless scenarios of
interaction that clarify the complexity of their emotions.
Performed in Dutch, the dialogue proceeds
as supertitles projected on two suspended flats above the set. Canvas walls, too, hang over the proceedings, like the art work Agnes creates
and refers to throughout. But the projected words
and the actors' intonations are much less important than the physical pictures van Hove and
his performers create.
While Agnes
describes her unbearable pain, and reminisces in between bouts of agony about
her parents and their various relationships to her and her sisters, the others
observe the progress of her dying. Maria
and Karin tend to her fitfully and reluctantly, their hesitations communicated
by the distance they keep from Agnes's soiled bed and from the cautious,
unwilling ways they touch their sister.
Maria, the more immature and impetuous of the two, brings little toys
and children’s books to the bed to entertain Agnes. The dying woman appreciates the distractions,
but surprise also registers on her face, that her sister thinks these childish
objects will stand up against the profundity of her pain.
Maria with her books and toys, distracting Agnes, with Anna and Karin
Maria also flirts with the doctor (Roeland
Fernhout) whose impersonal ministrations to her sister can’t begin to ease her
way into death. Maria and the doctor
have had an affair, we learn in the play’s second half, when the two act out a
moment in their relationship when he tries to resist her and she throws herself
at him. The scene is notable for how the
Fernhout morphs halfway through from the doctor into Maria’s husband,
Joachim. As the doctor and Maria prepare
to have sex, she pushes him onto the long wooden tables that have replaced Agnes’s
hospital bed at the center of the set.
As she rips off his shirt and prepares to undo his pants, he flings
himself up and they wrestle with a new costume, redressing him as violently as
he was undressed the moment before.
As
he brutally shrugs himself into a sport coat, the doctor’s brusque and violent
manner is replaced by the taciturn, remote affect of Maria’s husband, who
proceeds to sit back down to a meal at the table and eat over his newspaper,
barely grunting in response to her entreaties.
The transformation is powerful and apt—that the same man could be the
vessel for passion and lovelessness demonstrates van Hove’s point about the
unpredictability and even the impossibility of real human connection.
But when Joachim leaves the table, he
clutches Maria to his chest wordlessly, exiting only to return shortly after
with his chest covered in blood, holding a knife before him that drips with the
tacky cells of his self-immolation. The
image is shocking and effective. Van
Hove’s refusal to respect the differences between reality and fantasy make for
powerful theatrical metaphors, in which actors’ bodies, the stage effects
(never meant to be convincing, only allegorical), and the performances are
pressed into service to communicate physically what can’t be said or expressed
otherwise. The actors’ bodies wear the
play’s subtext. That none of the other
characters comment on Joachim’s gaping wound, for instance, illustrates the
chilling consequences of our inability to communicate our deepest, truest
emotions.
Likewise, Agnes’s death scene is a
beautiful, fierce theatrical metaphor for excruciating pain and a soul’s
resistance to leaving its body.
Nietvelt, as Agnes, rolls out a stage-wide piece of glossy white paper
on which she centers herself. Then she
proceeds to pour blue paint over her head, after which she rolls around on the
paper, body-painting in a corporeal representation of her agony. She moves her arms back and forth as though
she’s making a snow angel (an image that returns beautifully at the production’s
end), and flings herself across the paper until she's covered in vibrant blue
from head to toe.
Agnes's death scene
Agnes uncovers a large industrial bucket
near the stage of her dying and pours from it a brown fluid that mixes with the
blue blood, a searing representation of the body’s failure at death, as feces
and body fluids co-mingle to overflow its borders. Just before she dies, Anna approaches Agnes,
lifting the dying woman’s arms to wrap them around her neck. The image of the two sitting together, Agnes
exhausted by her death throes, her blue face as elongated and sorrowful as a woman
in a Modigliani painting, offers a moving, pieta-like portrait of the final moments of
someone who’s railed against death but finally can’t escape its arrival.
In fact, one of the production’s most
mournful reminders is of the loneliness of death. Agnes is surrounded by women who sit vigil
with her, but that moment of pain on the white paper illustrates that death is
a territory the dying walk alone. And
although her sisters and Anna live on, van Hove suggests that their living,
too, is solitary and unobserved. For
example, when Karin and her husband have a loveless exchange that echoes Maria’s
with Joachim, Karin breaks a wine glass and uses one of its shards to cut her
vagina, dripping her own blood between her legs and staining her slip. Once again, none of the other characters
notice, and she continues on with her actions as though the wound is invisible.
In
Cries and Whispers’ final moments, Agnes
speaks to us from someplace after her death, touring us through her art work
like a guide through what had been heaven before illness made her life hell. The canvas-cubed walls of the set descend to
the stage floor, so that projections of Agnes art work can light up the
screens. Close-ups of body parts waving
on the snow slowly pull out to reveal winter-wear-clad people lying on the
ground, making the angels that Agnes echoed at her death.
As the camera moves back farther and farther,
the group of people makes a singular geometric shape in the snow, all moving
different parts of the whole. Agnes
notes wryly that she used to think that she make art to understand life. Now, she understands that art is made to stave off death.
With Cries and Whispers, van Hove does both.
The
Feminist Spectator
Cries and Whispers, directed by Ivo
van Hove, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2011 Next Wave Festival, October 28, 2011.