How to Mime

Miming our Own Business

By Mime International Half-Way-Up Theatre, Downstage

Mime as a means of expression has very severe boundaries. Language, and often sound altogether, is done away with. Props and sets don't usually exist. Costume is limited to a very simple neutral garment. All that remains is a silent performer and audience in a complete void. Why perform mime when you could have a cast of thousands, brilliant dialogue, beautiful music, sets, props, and costumes, in fact the whole magic of the traditional theatre? It seems masochistic. There must be a value in this form cannot be achieved in any any other.

And that value is the glorification of the human imagination. The void can be filled by the rarest fantasies the mind can conjure up. In mime, objects, events, worlds are created, but have no intrinsic reality. They exist solely in the portrayal of the performer's relationship to these chimeras.

A chair is not created from nothing merely because the performer can do so. It would be far simpler just to put a chair on stage. Rather the thing being conveyed is the essence of the relationship between thing, chair, and a human being.

Thus to create a character, the essential features that make that character unique must be understood and conveyed. A phantom being can be brought into being but, as in life, it has the degree of substance consistent with the significance it has for the performance.

It is obvious that tremendous demands are made on the performer. As nothing else exists on the stage, any irrelevancy or vagueness is severely punished by the audience's loss in concentration. The performer must have an intense awareness of what is to be portrayed and have the skill necessary to convey it.

These aspects of the art were little in evidence in the Mime International performance. Much of the show seemed to be simply and excuse to show off a limited ability in the classic mime techniques.

For example, "Swing" seemed to be an attempt to combine the mimes, swings, picking flower and smelling it, riding in a gondola, eating an apple into a loose form. That form took a theme that was much in evidence through the whole show, that man meets woman, falls in love, man loses woman to another man.

This theme was elaborated on in a very sexist way. The man wants the woman to fulfill certain needs. The woman exists in the pieces soley as a need-fulfiller. But because the man does not come up to the steroetype image of "Man" the woman commits the crime of leaving him for another man. Never are these relationships explored in any real depth.

A classic example of this failure is in the the piece "Red Bird". The woman is actually portrayed as the slang expression "bird" or "chick" personifies. She exists solely to satisfy a male fantasy. If only this fantasy was explored and shown up for its destructive and demoniacal reality. But no, the fantasy was accepted as reality.

This lack of sensitivity came through most forcibly when the man and the woman actually mimed fucking. It seemed to have as much validity in the mime as the word fuck has in this review, and seemed to be included for the same reasons. Instead of drawing us, the audience, into awareness of the sensual and sexual relation relationship we are left to be voyeurs watching two people copulating. That is mere pornography.

If the performers could only remain within the scope of their abilities. When they do so, the mimes actually work. With a little tightening here and there the sketch "The Box" could be very funny. It attracts by its simplicity and gentle humour. Very little in it is embarassing.

"Balloon" has a similar charm. It begins as a fantasy about imbuing a balloon with totally unexpected properties, such as incredible weight and total immovability in space. If that simplicity could be kept it would be beautiful to watch. But it was ruined by making out that the male performer could not budge the balloon because of a major physical weakness.

To sum up, watching the performance of Mime International made me very angry. They are setting themselves up as the chief exponents of mime in this country when they have barely scratched the surface. They should either perform within their, at present, limited capabilities or work in private for a few more years until they can present something which shows them worthy of the title Mime International.

John Bailey

Polish without Politics

The Resistable Rise of Arturo UI

By Bertolt Brecht Directed by Jean Betts Circa Theatre

The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is

one of Bertolt Brecht's lesser known plays and, when it was written in 1941, one of his most direct examples of political theatre. The story concerns Arturo Ui, a small-time Chicago gangster who starts up a protection racket in the cauliflower business and soon has the city at his feet.

On the way up he succeeds in corrupting the city's old and revered councillor, forces the Cauliflower Board into a position where they must cooperate with him, exterminates the opposition, copes with rivalry in his gang by staying one double-cross ahead, and all the while fervently maintains his honourable intentions.

Although it is the story of any gangster, Brecht had one in particular in mind: Hitler. The identification of thuggery with fascism was specifically meant to demonstrate the nature of the latter. To achieve this the text advocates a very striking technique: after each sequence a placard is to be displayed relating events in Hitler's Germany which closely parallel the events of the sequence.

For example, in one sequence, the greengrocers make their qualms about Ui's proposals known. Their spokesperson's warehouse is burned down and a reign of terror begins. The placard which follows announces the 1933 Reichstag Fire and the Night of the Long Knives.

This is not to say the play is just a political tract. In the main it is a ribaldrous comedy, with scope for plenty of fast paced action, music and showmanship. This is the aspect Jean Bett's production at Circa has capitalised on to a tee.

Indeed, Betts has left out the references to Hitler altogether. Her program note which quotes critic Martin Esslin gives us the clue to why she has done this. Says Esslin: "Brecht's world is as unlike England or America as it could possibly be . . . Everything in this mythical empire which extends from Alaska to the South Seas is bigger than life size; savage, adventurous and free."

This is certainly true. Brecht's gangsters are a mixture of every cardboard image one could possibly conceive, and deliberately so. In addition, his political analysis is simplified to say the least. This does not weaken the import of the play, but gives it a powerfully dramatic nature. Whatever the simplification and fancification, nothing of the inherent truths of the story are lost.

Betts, I imagine, had decided that specific references would, in contemporary circumstances, merely tie the action down and deny it its free dramatic scope. Her production is not just Brecht minus the specifics, but perhaps the best example of her style seen here to date.

This means that she has coaxed from each actor a fine example of their personal idiosyncrasies, each providing an intriguing and often captivating display of style which does not infringe on or eclipse that of another. Such ensemble playing where each actor is so different from the rest is a rare occurence.

It means that the set, by Tony Lane, the lighting by Keith White house, and the music by Paul Baeyertz all measure up to the vital part they have to play. The atmosphere is indeed "mythical" and yet retains an interior cohesion which is immediately recognizable.

It means a combination of energy and strategic balance, a mixture of pathos and the ludicrous with purpose and strength. It is a black world she has painted, yet one in one in which the light is that of imagination. This has been her aim and in this she has succeeded.

Some of the work is remarkable. In a courtroom sequence she has replaced Brecht's punctuating Funeral Waltz by Chopin, with a drag stripper. The songs, some Brecht's, some new, are mostly given a pseudo-contemporary treatment.

It is unfortunate that Betts found no way to reconstitute the seriousness of Brecht's political intentions. In building her own Chicago (notably, she calls it Shikago) she has preferred to leave the explicitness to one side. As a result the importance of the theme is perhaps too underrated in favour of the play's dramatic potential. The one need not restrict the other, but nor does either necessarily carry the other with it.

At the end it is said to us of Ui, "But don't rejoice too soon at your escape/ The womb he crawled from is still going strong." This comes as something of a shock, and it shouldn't. Neither Brecht nor Betts explain clearly enough why Arturo Ui's rise is resistable. This is a mistake of Brechts which the director has not been able to totally circumvent. Nevertheless the production is well worth a a visit. It is one of Jean Betts' best works, which places it among the very best of Wellington theatre for some considerable time.

Simon Wilson