Their legends and legacies looming large, playwright Samuel Beckett and composer Dimitri Shostakovich would have both been turning one hundred this year, a milestone marked – the program suggests ‘celebrated’, though that word somehow seems ill-fitting, too bubbly given the artists in question – by A is for Atlas’ I Start Again.
An intriguing and rigorously conceived production, I Start Again takes its title from a recurring line in Beckett’s What Where, using it as a kind of formal and thematic structuring principle, the point around which the whole show pivots. But here I am getting ahead of myself, not to mention too cerebral. No good. Like Beckett’s Voice of Bam (Farayi Chipungu), I start again.
Their legends and legacies looming large, playwright Samuel Beckett and composer Dimitri Shostakovich would have both been turning one hundred this year. Directed by Xan Colman and David Myles, with musical direction by Peter Baker, I Start Again comprises a number of short works and movements by Beckett, Shostakovich and others, opening with What Where – performed here for the first time by an all-female cast – before proceeding onto Carl Laszlo’s Let’s Eat Hair, Colman’s Beckettian Plum, and Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu. Each piece is followed, as if by punctuation – an exclamation mark! – by a Shostakovich sonata; the effect is to give a kind of rhythm to the proceedings, an overarching pattern which may or may not ultimately mean something. Good.
None of this is to say, of course, that while I Start Again is conceptually taut, it is lacking aesthetically. It’s not. The acting across the board is serviceable (which perhaps sounds harsher that it’s meant to) and the musical performances are consistently stunning, filling the otherwise desolate basement of the Abbotsford Convent as though seeping into the walls themselves. In fact, next to the production’s conceptual rigour, it is perhaps the sound that it makes – and I mean this quite literally – that is most deserving of praise. With the exception of the occasional moment of deafening silence, I Start Again is wall-to-wall words and notes, from start to finish, as dynamic and exciting to listen to as pure sound as they are as language or music.
As a writer, Colman is acutely aware of this potential, which Beckett and Laszlo harness to great effect, all three creating rhythms and patterns in their work anterior to the actual meanings of the words they use to do so. Itself starting again three times over, its characters returning endlessly – fatalistically? – to their opening lines, Plum holds its own against the lofty company it keeps, not merely as an homage to its predecessors, but rather as an extension of them and their formal and thematic concerns. But again I’m getting ahead of myself and I haven’t yet said everything I should have about the Convent’s merits as a space. No good. I start again.
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With the exception of the occasional moment of deafening silence, I Start Again is wall-to-wall words and notes, from start to finish, as dynamic and exciting to listen to as pure sound as they are as language or music. This quality is due, not only to the writing, but also to the acoustics of the Convent itself, though the space presents its own set of problems, not all of which are successfully addressed. The audience is forced – deliberately? I can’t be sure – to sacrifice certain vantage points in favour of others, depending on where they sit, each with their own pros and cons. From where I was sitting, for example, one could easily see all of What Where and Plum, but had to crane one’s neck to see Let’s Eat Hair and saw almost nothing of Ohio Impromptu. Thankfully, however, the atmosphere of the space is such that quickly dispels any frustration one might have with its shortcomings, the already disquieting air of the basement only enhanced by the stage and lighting designs of Hope Hayward-Rowling and Bronwyn Pringle respectively. Good!
In the end, motifs appear. Reappear. As suggested earlier, the notion of repetition, so important to Beckett’s work and striking, too, in Plum (if not in Let’s Eat Hair, which is the odd piece out in this respect), can be seen to inform the overall structure and organisation of the entire show. I Start Again is forever circling back on itself, passing through the Shostakovich pieces, ‘starting again’, three times over, with a different text but the same recurring obsession with recurrence.
The result is an engaging, must-see – and hear! – evening of performance, intelligent, aesthetically pleasing and – ultimately – elusive. Their legends and legacies looming large, playwright Samuel Beckett and composer Dimitri Shostakovich would have both been turning one hundred this year, and still we try to grapple with just what it is that their works mean. And just like these works, I Start Again – with its meticulous structure, all its words and notes – is open to interpretation. This can only be a good thing. Unlike What Where’s Voice of Bam, at the end of I Start Again, we switch on.
Melbourne Stage Online, 19 September 2006
