(Note: unfortunately, I was unable to upload any photos to the blog post, not sure why it wouldn't work.)
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(May 2025)
I received an invitation from the director. I know Jo-anne well enough that I would attend anything she put on, regardless of its subject. I also love this theatre (The Living Arts Centre) so much that I would leap at any opportunity to enter that building, even if there were nothing onstage.
I walk in blind, totally ignorant of the play's subject, history, style or themes, and though the opening scenes present a chanting chorus that seems to forewarn of struggle and tragedy, I quiet my expectations and open myself to the drama.
I open myself so that whatever the story wants me to feel,
I want to feel that.
A murder, a woman in flight with a baby, an escape.
Oh, this is a hero origin story, I think, and find comfort in that assumption.
Silly me.
But I don't want to tell you the story, I'm not equipped for that, I'm still dizzy with the spectacle I have only this night witnessed and I could not string the events together. But I can tell you what I felt.
Being inside that theatre,
that magically sculpted room that makes every sound into music,
being there with those robed women speaking with Godly voices that command the limits and mysteries of the universe,
being inside that sound, inside that timeless rhythmic chanting of the Chorus
I am a child again, I accept the magic of the world inside the dome of the Chorus' song.
And so, with startling alacrity, I let myself be swept into the quest, not asking questions, but rather accepting my part as witness. Bliss. Seated close to the orchestra, I glimpse the musicians faces by lamplight, watch their fingers caress sweet songs from strings and wood, and I am seated inside this music, inside the Chorus, inside the theatre...
A man lies dead, his wife cradles him, weeping. The hero asks my question for me...
What's happening?
and the grieving woman's reply pulls unbidden tears from my eyes.
The world happened, all at once
As if by force, I sit back in my seat and blink through my blurring vision.
I let it happen to me. Her grief. I let the dramatic force of her cries break through, and I think,
oh, this play is much more than a hero tale.
This is a light inside the dark poetry of the world. This is hope inside utter desperate grief. This is a dream inside the music, inside the Chorus, inside the theatre, and we are allowed for these precious hours to exist inside all this with the dreamers and makers of this magnificent interpretation of an ancient classic drama, told and re-told. A ship of Theseus sort of play, re-made for our own age, for our own country. We, the audience, are part of a history now, the story of a story, inside the music, inside the chorus, inside the theatre, inside the world.
This is not just a hero story. We moderns have gotten used to a certain format of hero tales, dominated this century by American legends. Parsifal is a hero who quests not to defeat an Evil, but to discover the Good. His only real nemesis is himself.
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(Writing now the morning after the play)
So now, to speak technically for a moment:
I've read a few ancient Greek plays and understand the reason those plays are still in print, still being performed. Those plays are not ancient, they are contemporary with every moment of human history. I feel that way about a lot of ancient literature. Parsifal seems the same. An ancient tale, continually re-told because it feels continually relevant. I mention the Greek plays because of their famous use of the Chorus, the voice of the world who, like us in the audience, are both witnesses and participants in the story.
The use of this ancient dramatic method does something to me: It lets me know that this presentation is not a mirror of reality, it is a dramatic presentation. In order to really participate properly, and by that I mean - to watch the play with the best frame of mind - I have to enter the dramatic mindset, I must suspend my disbelief and silence my critical mind. I have to cease all assumptions, cease predicting the outcome, cease testing the characters by my own ideals. I have to let them tell their story in the way they tell it, and I must receive it as true in that moment.
Myths aren't lies. No-one who reads them is expected to interpret their events in the same way we must read the daily news. Yet neither are myths True, not in the scientific sense. Myths are emotionally true, emotionally real. They describe a world that is both utterly familiar and magically foreign and if we are to best absorb the benefit of their wisdom, we must let them speak to us in their own language. For the stage this is a visual language of costume and choreographed movements, a sonic language of harmonies and dissonances, a transformation of written text into living representation.
The dramatic Chorus, robed, masked, mysterious, chanting in unison, speaking seemingly from the stage and the wings and the darkness of the ceiling above me, surround me with the magic of their word - the Chorus are the gateway into Myth. When they speak, I exist inside their truth, I am held inside the limits of their knowledge and I can relax.
While I am here, inside the theatre, the outside world does not exist. The Chorus gives me permission to allow the myth to be true, to allow the actors' actions and words and movements to be natural expressions of their own reality. This is dramatic reality. I have experienced this continually in dance, and it is what I love about the stage. Taken away from the context of the theatre, those behaviours and movements resemble madness. If a dancer performed her routine in the supermarket, sans music, most people would turn away, aware only of their discomfort at the conventions of civil behaviour being ignored so openly.
But on the stage, accompanied by music, those same movement are the pinnacle of beauteous truth.
Inside the dome of the Chorus' magic spell, the magical characters are real.
I relaxed back into the comfort of assuming nothing, and of letting the mythological reality this production wanted me to believe, to be real.
This was not Parsifal set in a familiar European world. This was a new myth, and to return to my Greek comparisons, a ship of Theseus, built of familiar seeming parts making a familiar shaped craft, but the completed vessel is in truth, a completely new ship in which we the audience are swept away on the tides of history being made in the present.
This present, our present, does not have the ancient borders of medieval Europe; cultural, geographic, ethnic. So when several Indian, and Australian aboriginal actors appeared, knights in armour wielding long swords, Queens in their throne rooms, speaking with unmasked Indian or Australian accents, again I was forced out of my assumptions about the characters they portrayed. This was not a medieval play for a medieval audience. This was a modern play for a modern, Australian audience. I sat very still and allowed the story to be told to me, I allowed it to be true, to be real. I stopped trying to guess what might happen next, I stopped trying to be clever and outwit the story in my mind.
This kind of modernisation and cultural updating succeeds or fails in dramatic re-tellings for reasons perhaps too subtle for me to describe. At its worst it can feel forced, shoe-horning modern references into an ancient frame in way that makes both setting and characterisation feel false. At its best, (and I consider this production of Parsifal to be a beautiful example of this), it delivers a completely honest, sincere, faithful re-imagining of an already imaginary world. The actors in Parsifal were so invested, their performances so powerful, their delivery so believable, emotional, articulate and passionate that I could do nought but stare in awe at their embodiment of archetypes whose familiarity reinforce in me the belief in the universality of human experience.
So that's what I've been digging down to. The universality of this production lifts it out of its medieval native soil, and sets it running free in a new world, for a new audience. Yet, universal as it's themes and narratives are, I'm fully aware of how successfully the script has been adapted for a specifically Australian audience. It spoke to me with a familiar vernacular, but it did so in such a way that I was continually surprised and not for a moment could I rely upon pre-conceived notions to make judgements.
I spent an evening sat inside this magical world and I stepped out of it at the end of the show a changed person. To be in the audience for such a production is to have participated in the long history of the story of Arthur and Parsifal. That history is now a part of my story, I am a part of that history. We are a part of that story. Participants in something much bigger than ourselves, something universal and personal and timeless and magical and real.
