Drama is in love with the productions of time, to misquote William Blake. Drama is an artform concerned with duration. Unlike, say, lyric poetry or sculpture, drama represents what happens next.
This was done and so This followed, and then This … and so on. As Arthur Miller has suggested, drama is the artform that portrays the chickens coming home to roost.
As a consequence, dramatists have long been attracted to historical stories. (Shakespeare wrote plenty, over a third of his output. But more on him later.)
Song of First Desire is set in Spain, and through intertwined stories, explores the ways in which the Civil War of the 1930’s continues to cast a dark shadow over that nation. If war is hell, then civil war is its innermost ring (to borrow from both Sherman and Dante.)
One strand of the story tells of a Columbian immigrant who comes to contemporary Spain and finds himself working in a house with some rather scarred occupants. The other strand of the story is set in the same house, but in 1968, nearly thirty years after the Civil War, but while the nation was still controlled by Franco’s victorious fascists (a dictatorship which lasted until at least 1975.)
The characters in the two story lines are personally connected, but I have to admit it took me a long time to figure out exactly the nature of those connections. Now, I know that there are members of the audience who like to have something to think about while the characters onstage are just talking – but for me, having to pay attention to the present action while simultaneously attempting to draw the connections with the past was a multi-tasking challenge: not so much chewing gum while walking as putting together a 3D jigsaw puzzle while riding a unicycle. Homer is rightly blamed for inventing the flashback, and it’s probably worth noting that Shakespeare maintains a healthy abstinence from the technique. (What happens next? always being a more interesting question than Why did that happen?)
But having said all that, this production is one hour fifty minutes long without an intermission – yet the time flew, and offered the glorious, heartrending vistas born of such flight.
Writer Andrew Bovell and director Neil Armfield are Australian theatre legends, and masters of the craft, and this piece is utterly enthralling. The four-strong cast (Kerry Fox, Borja Maestre, Jorge Muriel and Sarah Peirse) are brilliant, embracing the challenges of doubling and creating remarkably vivid characters in each of the two storylines.
If Bovell is more interested in disrupting a story’s chronology than, say, Shakespeare, it’s possibly because as a modern he’s working our contemporary interest in historical sociology. We knowing our present is a product of our past, but is it also its prisoner?
In Song of First Desire several characters suggest there are some doors to the past that should be left shut, but they say it in such pained desperation we wonder if it’s a word of the wise or a cry of the wounded.
Now, I know there are members of the audience who like to have something to think about after the characters stop talking – and Bovell’s powerful play is a provocative invitation to consider our own nation’s dialogue with its past. As a society, do we consciously forget in order to move forward? Or do we consciously remember in order to heal? And is either of these options actually psychologically possible?
Though no Spaniard, French philosopher and later mystic Simone Weil volunteered for the Republicans in their battle against the fascists in the Civil War. And though not concerned exclusively with the history that each of us carries, she wrote a line that resonates with Bovell’s vital interrogation, and which here I’ll paraphrase: What’s taken from us does us harm; what we relinquish does us good.
Paul Gilchrist
Song of First Desire by Andrew Bovell
At Belvoir until 23 March
Image by Brett Boardman
Theatre Red 