A befuddling take on Bergman at the chicest new venue in London
The wonder is mainly supplied by the Earth Harp, apparently the world’s longest stringed instrument
Persona
Riverside Studios, London W6 ★★★★★
Everything has changed and yet it’s business as usual at the Riverside Studios. After five years and a redevelopment of £50million, the legendary mixed-arts venue that lies beside Hammersmith Bridge in west London has reopened its doors (this time, facing Thameswards) in a gleaming, glassy block that combines des-res flats above with a residual hint of bohemianism below.
Income generated from the muchenhanced TV studio (the most state of the art in Europe, we’re told – already used by Channel 4 for its election night broadcast) plus the revenue that flows from the swanky new eateries will help sustain a theatre and cinema programme that gets nothing from the Arts Council. You have to take your hat off to William Burdett-coutts, who runs the place: he’s had many rivers to cross in transforming a cultural destination that was falling off the map.
Due to the much nicer surroundings, a dud doesn’t hit so depressingly hard as it did back in the day. And there’s something reassuring about the befuddling-bemusing arty first offering in the smaller of the two theatre spaces, a chamber staging of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 febrile classic
Persona, in which an actress manifests an existential malady of muteness while performing Electra and forms a strange, symbiotic attachment to the quietly troubled nurse assigned to bring her back to the land of the living.
It’s reassuring because the Riverside’s illustrious past is awash with memorable Eurocentric experimentalism – ranging from work by the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor to a Beckett retrospective and Complicite’s Mnemonic too. The misses have been as pronounced as the hits – I still shudder at the thought of XXX, a tacky carnival of erotica by Spanish company Fura dels Baus. But unpredictability and even pretension are part of the programme’s charm.
Adapted by theatre- and film-maker
Paul Schoolman (who sits on stage providing a would-be Bergman-esque presence as a watching narrator, interjecting descriptive elements and bits of dialogue), the evening has aspects of wonder, and moments of tedium. The wonder is mainly supplied by the eerily sonorous presence of the “Earth Harp” – apparently the world’s longest stringed instrument – its radiating, synthconnected wires – some 23 in all – extending above the audience’s heads. A physicality more languid and inert defines the two female characters. Alice Krige plays the nurse (Alma) – a generation older than Bibi Andersson was when she created the role, which isn’t a gain. South African ghetto-born actress Nobuhle Mngewengi lends an air of amused ruthlessness to the part of the withdrawn actress, immortalised on film by Liv Ullmann.
Even with fairly constricted performances and deprived of the lingering close-ups that were part and parcel of Bergman’s perturbing black-and-white, avant-garde gaze, some of the screenplay’s power remains – not least in Alma’s still shocking drunken monologue recounting a seaside orgy involving herself, an adult female friend and two pubescent boys. It’s a theatrical footnote, then, to a cinematic masterpiece – a tie-in screening in one of the new cinemas might well have benefited the show. Early days, I guess.