Bed
By Benjamin Henson
Produced for the ‘Next Big Thing’ Festival by Auckland Theatre Company
Directed by Virginia Frankovich
Assistant Director Freya Boyle
Set and Costumes by Christine Urquhart
Lighting Designer Rachel Marlow
Sound Designer Clovis McEvoy
At The Basement Theatre
From 10 July, 2015 to 15 July, 2015 at 6.00pm
Published at http://www.theatreview.org.nz
My family and I turned up on Tuesday 14 July, 2015 to review the three shows in the ‘Next Big Thing’ Festival all on one night. What a challenge, and what a great opportunity to be right there in the theatrical moment at Auckland’s wonderful Basement Theatre participating in what purported to be the next step in the evolution of new performance art created by exciting and evolving ‘new’ artists. Sadly, it wasn’t to be as we arrived to review ‘Bed’ at 6.15pm only to find that it had gone up at 6.00pm and that there was, and rightly so, no late admission. I checked my emails and sure enough I’d been given a ‘kick off’ time of 6.30pm by the publicist so the chance of a having a theatrical threesome went down the gurgler which was a shame. The FOH manager at The Basement deserves special applause for the way he immediately organised tickets for the following night (Wednesday) which was better than nothing and his sweet-natured, unflappable demeanour quickly assuaged my disappointment. Big ups to him.
Benjamin Henson
The performance of Benjamin Henson’ extraordinary new play ‘Bed’ begins the moment you arrive. A gauntlet of trench-coated, sober-faced minions must be braved to even get into the foyer and these featureless beings mercilessly haunt the subsequent hour and bit endlessly haranguing us to stop smiling, to stop enjoying ourselves and the play and encouraging us to understand that what we were experiencing was simply meaningless nonsense and that we would be better occupied elsewhere doing something truly meaningful like peeling potatoes (my image, not Henson’s).
Virginia Frankovich
To be perfectly honest, and with abject apologies to the cast, director and certainly the writer, I’ve not had such an exciting evening in the theatre with a performance of this innovative nature for decades and I image, in their secret, slightly-more-human hearts, they’ll be more than pleased to hear that. It was invigorating stuff, intellectually challenging, and as reminiscent as I could have wished of every other piece of theatre I’ve ever seen anywhere on the planet. Having made that somewhat grand statement, ‘Bed’ was, like each and every member of the audience, as unique and as inimitable as Henson’s vision and director Frankovich’s interpretation could possibly make it and that’s without including the excellent contributions made by each and every actor and of the seemingly endless cast of characters who people this play.
Did I like it? Bloody oath I did!
Yes, there’s a narrative and yes, there are themes. There are extraordinary visual threads throughout the work and reference is made to what Lewis Carroll would call ‘cabbages and kings’ but, in Henson’s Daliesque world, these become dogs, coffee, booty and acorns and these threads are woven into a whole by both the trench-coated chorus and the re-occurring characters who quite literally pop out of the woodwork, emerge from under, in and behind the colossal bed of the title and even down through a person-hole in the roof. It’s an extravaganza of sublime absurdity that makes perfect sense and is a delight on each of its gazillion levels.
Lizzie Morris
The set and costumes (the sublimely talented Christine Urquhart finally given some real resources to play with) are characters in themselves. The massive sloping bed in which our many-monikered Hero (a suitably bemused Devin Grant-Miles) spends the entire play is perhaps the most inviting setting I’ve ever seen. The desire to climb in, have fights with the numberless pillows, become entangled with the huge sheets and find the rare and exotic creatures also living in this eiderdown paradise was almost too much to handle especially since almost every person in the nineteen strong cast ends up in there at some time or other. Special mention should be made of the wonderful Mirabai Pease as ‘Woman under bedclothes’ for her sterling work throughout. If there’s a more selfless actor working in Auckland I’ve yet to see them.
The structure of the set is a director’s dream with an abundance of sliding windows, excellent ramped entrances and easy access to the foyer for the myriad quick changes that we’d been privileged to witness the previous evening on the ‘night we missed the show’.
There’s a sense of 1950’s Cold War communist Russia in the posters that bespatter the walls and in the Red Army militarism of some of the observer minion’s costumes, evocative, in their own unique way, of the emotionless totalitarian control best typified in the writings of Gorky (‘The Lower Depths’), Kafka (‘Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis])’ and even Orwell (‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’). The overall impact is profound and provides a visual anchor to Henson’s ongoing emphasis on the pointlessness of life and Hero’s insistence that ‘indifference’ is the only answer.
The narrative is simple. Our Hero (the excellent Devin Grant-Miles) is in bed and things happen to him but they all fail to engage or enthuse him. His Mutter (an impressive Lizzie Morris who also plays a worker and the sublimely funny Olga – that’s her with the fake Kim Kardashian booty) and Vater (Matthew Kereama who quadruples as Headmaster, Agnes, a worker and the delightful Beer Society President) are unable to get him out of bed despite their best, singularly puerile, efforts. We are visited by Sausage (the divine Rahul Shahil), an exotically dressed and outrageously camp chi-chi boy, and encouraged, as audience, to read from Brecht-like signs that tell us ‘death is just around the corner’, that ‘minimal is optimal’ and to ask ‘why try’. We do as we’re told with glorious fervour, and the play makes its point. Hero informs us, as if we need to be told, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been happy’ and is accused by his folks of ‘dirty, filthy, naughty thinking’. Sex is never far from the surface and this oblique eroticism is essential to our experience of this complex bravura work.
Natasha Verney
Just when we get a handle on what’s going on – how agreeable we humans are, we try to construct meaning out of everything – an anonymous voice declares ‘we regret to inform you that the actors have a clause in their contract that says they need a break, so there will be a one minute interval starting now’ and, sure enough, nothing happens for exactly one minute. It’s theatrically outrageous and very, very funny but somehow nobody laughs. Playwrights demand intervals so why shouldn’t actors yet somehow it seems a step too far in Henson’s fabricated, authoritarian world.
The Beer Society meet – a crew of moustachioed types – and Hero assists them in reciting their rules by remembering the word ‘beer’ every time they forget, which is always. The sing a rebellious drinking song and leave never to be seen again.
Mirabai Pease
‘Woman under bedclothes’ (the first-rate Mirabai Pease) and our Hero go through the entire repertoire of a relationship from the initial ‘I have loved you since the moment you turned up in my bed’ though the essential cutesy nicknamery – ‘Snugglebum’ she calls him – right through to the ‘you never listen to me’ and ‘why should I do all the housework’ phases in a matter of moments. It’s fast-forward stuff but it’s also very moving because most of us have been there, done that, got the T shirt and the scars. It’s funny as hell too, as much because these two actors know how to play comedy that’s anchored in human truth as for any other, more random, reason.
The minions perform chorus lines of rare quality, the cast drop their pants on the arrival of Headmaster (Matthew Kereama) who introduces us to range of drop-kicks who talk about their keys to success. Sexy Olga (the unflappable Lizzie Morris) arrives and immediately has us hooting with laughter – very clever stuff – while every so often Dog Man (the admirable Caleb Wells) turns up to sniff crotches and bite ankles. Equally impressive, and often off-the-wall, performances are delivered by Freya Boyle, Doug Grant, Ahrin Swift-Major with especial praise due to Natasha Verney who created ‘Stephanie Barker’ and ‘Sasha’ from a long way out in left field. Verney’s performance of these characters is especially interesting in that she manages to establish and maintain a rapport with the audience that is critical to our sense of balance each and every time she appears but without it affecting our belief in who she is portraying. It’s as though, through Verney’s characters, Henson has preserved his hold on the audience’s sense of collective reality around which everything else revolves. She’s his Alice to everyone else’s Mad Hatter.
Caleb Wells
There’s a bed scene where Hero has work done on his fangs and huge molars fly – my son Finn caught one and it quite made his night – followed by a childlike game of ‘pass the pillow’ with each winner finding a party favour in the pillow case. ‘I got a knighthood’ says ‘Woman under bedclothes’ before Hero discovers, somewhat unsurprisingly, that he’s ‘got pregnant’. The subsequent labour is profoundly funny in a dark sort of way and Hero finally gives birth, first to a giant screw, next to an acorn, and finally to a bizarre, man-sized baby. The screw comes first of course, then the acorn and finally the giant, man-baby oak. It’s bizarre yet wonderful at the same time, and we leave as we came in, reminded by a reassembled gauntlet of minions, that what we have just experienced is totally without meaning and should be treated with the absolute indifference it deserves.
It all seems absurd, and while it should be, it never actually is.
As a participant in the experience I found it rich and cohesive, touching, profound and endlessly funny. Wilde said that life is too important to be taken seriously and Henson has put this on the stage. It all made perfect sense to me and, in discussion afterwards, had done so to my son and my wife Cushla as well. We’d all thoroughly enjoyed the romp but agreed it was much, much more than just the passing of a happy hour.
Matthew Kereama
As a person gifted the privilege of writing about ‘Bed’ for a theatrically judicious audience it has resonances from so many varied sources that it would take days to reflect on them all but, in saying that, it is in no way a copy of any of them. It owes allegiance to playwrights from Ionesco to Genet to Simpson to Stoppard and to Beckett but, in saying that, it actually owes nothing to any of them. In the same way there are visual recollections sourced from Dali, Ernst, Bosch, Miro and Tzara but Urquhart’s work is uniquely, and preciously, her own. Personally, I hope we see more collaborations between Henson, Frankovich and Urquhart. They make a most impressive team, and I would go as far as to suggest that, of the three shows in ‘The Next Big Thing’ festival, ‘Bed’ certainly deserves another outing preferably with the same cast and crew and resourced by ATC in a similarly satisfying way.
It’s easy to lavish praise on everyone involved in this outstanding production and while they all thoroughly deserve it, the last tribute must be reserved for Colin McColl and Auckland Theatre Company for picking up this ball and running with it. John F Kennedy said ‘If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow their vision wherever it takes them.’ McColl and his team at ATC have the resources to make this happen and it’s fantastic to see them taking up this artistic challenge and succeeding so famously well with it.
Top stuff!
dykiegirl 