the bettybooke
what if He (the great figure-head
of our cultural, constructed
meaning)
should re-appear to tell the truth?
Some time in the relatively
near
future,our society has suffered
what could be described as a 'cultural
catastrophe'. History, literature, philosophy, community -
all that we use to make meaning of the world and our place in it - lies
buried in the ruins of a civilization past.
In a world in which history has
lost its meaning, three
traveling players, inspired by hearsay of an age of meaning and
culture, travel from town to town to perform their mystery
drama - a sacred theatrical performance which attempts to make sense of
how the world came to be in this shattered state, and to salvage some
meaning from this world. Using the shards and remnants of a
passed-down oral tradition, they entertain and educate their audience
with a story which, they have been
told, was once a defining piece of culture - Hamleth.
Upon this particular day, they
stumble
upon the ruins of The Globe theatre and meet the mysterious
grave-digger, who engages them with enigmatic riddles. The players play
out their
scene, only to uncover amongst the
rubble a being very like Hamleth, the hero of their tale - it is,
indeed, Hamlet himself. He is keen to join in their presentation of his
story and they ecstatic to have him. However, it becomes apparent that
the
story and character of
Hamleth, as the genuine Hamlet enacts it, is at variance with the
players' 'script-chars' and their
understanding of the moral and meaning of that story. The players
eventually come to realise that their audience is in danger of being
misled about the
received truth - that Hamleth is a tale of purging the world of the
evil state it is in, through revenge and the destruction of evil - by
Hamlet
himself. Hamlet is loathe
to act out his part; and when Hamlet causes Ofelia and her 'innersense'
to die, and afterwards kills Poloninose contrary to tradition, the
players
resentment towards him boils over.
this
distraktit globe utilizes a created language, a poetic, deformed
quasi-Elizabethan language which serves to slow the audiences
intellectual processes,
allowing them to enter a more perceptual state, in which
elements, character - and indeed meaning - can be experienced
more deeply.
|
|
this production engages all of
the languages of theatre in an attempt
to salvage and create a sense of meaning for the culture in which
we find ourselves : our quest in this, then, is just that
of the
characters in the narrative.
|
this
distraktit globe
explores one of the mysteries
of the complicity of theatre :
how is it that the pretending of reality on stage can somehow sometimes
be more 'real' than my 'real' life?
