A distinguished critic wrote that ‘it is what it is’. A punter behind me in the theatre said that it was ‘total crap’. This is Peter Brook directing Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni. Are these judgments reasonable? Or are they missing the point?
The Valley of Astonishment, by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, is about synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which people experience sensations through an apparently unrelated other sense – words become colours, touch is experienced as smell and so on. Brook and his company have explored the hidden and the unexpected in human behaviour for many years. The plays derive from extensive research and the script, structure and performance emerge from lengthy rehearsal. This performance was at the Young Vic, in London.
I saw Peter Brook in a platform discussion after a performance of 11 and 12 at the Barbican in 2009. He sought, he said, those moments between actors and audience when the house knows that a connection has happened, that a moment of real experience has been made in the theatre. He spoke of the tide that flows between stage and audience, communicating and receiving. When the participants, through skill, concentration, expression, listening, behaving create a common understanding at a more than, deeper than intellectual level, that shared human experience is a priceless moment of communion. It may last for just a few seconds. It may happen, said Brook, only once or twice not in a performance, but in the whole run of a play.
James Joyce speaks of something similar, through one of his characters, which is apparent in his own writing – the epiphany, the ‘showing forth’ of a moment of experience. Joyce creates such moments by gradually repeating images, lines, phrases through the course of a story or passage, so that an awareness or familiarity with an idea or sense or expression may develop between writer and reader. At the moment of epiphany, the phrase or image is placed into the character or narrative context and if the connection is made a recognition, a subconscious nod or shiver of understanding, a communion is formed.
Did this happen in the performance of The Valley of Astonishment? Perhaps, kind of, maybe not really. Marcello Magni, in his various characters in the play, is real and creates belief and understanding. There is a clear connection with the audience, but most strongly when he is playing an entertainer whose overt job is to contact the audience and ask for a response. This is not communion. Kathryn Hunter inhabits her character, the main protagonist who has the story, and we hear what it is to have a prodigious memory, in which words are seen in colours and pictures. We hear and see the stress and anxiety caused by being unable to forget. This was touching, full of images and believable but it was not communion. The music was subtle and plangent and set a tone. The third actor did not project well, and was inaudible to some members of the audience.
Did the audience come with inappropriate expectations? This is Peter Brook at 85, exploring the human senses and what ‘mind’ means. It is not Coriolanus or A View from the Bridge. In his catalogue note, Brook writes that ‘as we explore the mountains and valleys of the brain, we will reach the valley of astonishment…..we will take the spectator into new and unknown territories through people whose secret lives are so intense, so drenched in music, colour, taste, images and memories that they can pass any instant from paradise to hell and back again’. He did this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970, which left me in tears and scarcely able to breathe. In this production, we reached some foothills of interest in the presence of two of our finest actors, performing beautifully.
It wasn’t total crap, and the punter who wanted to be taken on a journey with fully rounded characters had come unprepared, with the wrong expectations. It was what it was, something like a chamber piece, carefully done with simplicity and elements of wonder and surprise. It wasn’t what Brook wrote it was going to be, which was a puff, but it was ‘deeply human’ as in his description of the research and rehearsal process.
So that is what it was – human interest, humanely and carefully expressed in the theatre by fine actors.