A very odd set of señor moments!
The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety (Birmingham Rep) Verdict: Highly strung ★✩✩✩✩
THERE are some who consider Spanish director Calixto Bieito to be the best thing since sliced tortilla. He revels in the shocking and employs classical music to suggest emotional depth.
I have not yet been able to discern his genius. His work strikes me as pretentious and degrading piffle. But one must try to keep an open mind
With the appearance of the latest Bieito at the publicly-funded Birmingham Rep (the show also has a couple of dates at the Brighton Festival next week), let me attempt a precis of what happens. The stage has a high wall of stacked chairs at the back. Mid-stage are numerous music stands, empty. At the front, a single chair.
A short, curly-haired, wellspoken man (let us call him Man One, though no names are used in the 90-minute show) walks to this chair and starts reciting from the 17th-century Anatomy Of Melancholy by Robert Burton. The opening words: ‘Man, the most excellent and noble creature in the world’.
Three other actors arrive, silent, thoughtful. Let us call them Man Two (balding, in cardigan), Woman One (long knitwear) and Woman Two (Irish accent, cocktail dress).
Behind them, a string quartet tiptoes in. Once the actors have taken their seats and Man One has ceased reciting stuff from Burton, the musicians do a loud pizzicato ‘PING’ and we are into some jagged music by late Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti (played ‘allegronervoso’).
Thus is a pattern set. Speech by one of the actors. Then some Ligeti. The music becomes no more melodic.
Woman Two gives us a soliloquy about her oral sex techniques and demonstrates this on a music stand. Man One describes oral sex from the other end of the gun, if we can put it like that.
Man Two talks (with some comedy) about his depression, phobias and ‘existential dread’. Woman One relates a sad story about a child being killed by a car.
Between each monologue we are dished yet more Ligeti, tempi indicated by surtitles
(‘molto calmo’, ‘come un meccanismodi precisione’, ‘brutale,tumultuoso’ etc). More pizzicato. Man One, in black shoes but no socks, says: ‘My whole life I’ve been a fraud.’ He starts ripping pages out of a book.
Woman Two described shoving a bottle of Bombay gin up a chap’s bottom. We never do learn if the bottle is empty or full. ‘Life is so merciless,’ gasps Woman Two, producing real tears.
We move from Ligeti to Beethoven (relief) — string quartet in F minor, Op. 95, ‘Serioso:allegroconbrio’.
Man One goes walkabout. Something dramatic happens with the wall of stacked chairs. Man One removes his glasses and shoes and wristwatch and either dies or goes to sleep. Join the club, mate.
Actors Miltos Yerolemou, Nick Harris, Cathy Tyson and Mairead McKinley are impressively in the zone. The Heath Quartet plays conbrio.
Leaving, I chatted to three fortysomething local ladies (the sort of people the Arts Council yearns to attract).
They were in gales of scornful merriment, laughing at, not with, Señor Bieito. They thought the show a daft waste of time and money.