Creative and imaginative theatre

The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol
Based on a story by John Berger
Theatre de Complicite
Seymour Centre, Sydney
Reviewed by Jorge Sotirios Given that film and television have incorporated much of theatre's past traditions, whether it be realism, melodrama, and social comment, it's fair to ask what is the value of theatre today? What is left for an actor and the spectator to do in this empty space? Britain's Theatre de Complicite shows that this oldest of rituals is at its most profound when harnessed to a creative imagination. Although The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol was not as poetic as their previous Street of Crocodiles, nevertheless the intensity of vision in this drama was deeper. The play depicts the three lives of a peasant woman in mountainous central Europe from her early years as "wild child" known as the Cocadrille, through her second as a social outcast in affluent Paris, to her third as a member of the dead. Theatre de Complicite's skills are well honed; the actors play a wide range of characters: young, elderly, country folk, not to mention such esoteric elements as the dead and nature itself. Here the environment is of paramount significance. There was a rustic feel to this play — wood, axes, sheet metal and slates on a dirt-layered earth — a cross between rough and highly stylised theatre. It reminded me of certain Italian films such as Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs, the Taviani's Padre Padrone, and Pasolini's Teorema which explored the primitivism of a rural agricultural class. This "pre-civilised" consciousness is able to evoke visions and magical associations. Here the play could well have gone astray. Peasant life, with its folkloric magic, can often be romanticised by jaded city dwellers seeking a less confused and simpler life; its hardships and neuroses conveniently swept aside for an ill-conceived "rural harmony". But Berger, the socialist, reminds us that this is a sentimentalised perception. The price extracted in the drive for development is likewise never forgotten. I wondered why the emphasis placed on the dead in The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol was so powerful. Perhaps Theatre de Complicite had absorbed the perceptions of the French poet and dramatist Jean Genet. For it, as for Genet, the theatre is a ceremony anchored by the dead. Ideally its ritual should be performed within the shadow of a cemetery where death would be closer. The theatre is more solemn: "What is needed, then, is an art that has the strange power of penetrating the realm of death, of seeping, perhaps, through the porous walls of the kingdom of shadows". The last part of Three Lives was exactly this. A marriage took place in the realm of the dead. Theatre can have a metaphysical basis, where gestures are not movements flung into the void, but are secretly catalogued by our absent ancestors. Above all, our actions have meaning and each life its own magic. Death is not something to be neglected; it is the casing that makes everything meaningful. The romantic Schiller knew this well: "That which on earth appeared to me as beauty/ will meet me on the other side as truth".