Andrew Morrish, Regina Heilmann, Nigel Kellaway, entertaining paradise photo Heidrun Löhr |
Kellaway’s enthusiasm for entertaining paradise is undimmed by his straitened circumstances. Inspired by the material and especially the structure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, he is collaborating with sometime opera Project cohort, performer Regina Heilmann and, for the first time, the improviser Andrew Morrish. The Fassbinder, described by Kellaway as “a classic piece of German anti-theatre” was taken up around the world in the 70s and realised in wildly differing versions. “There is a kind of narrative made up of mobile, fluid scenes including part of the story of Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—from how they met as young people and up to the first 2 murders. There are 9 pas de deux dialogues between them. There are 20 contra scenes each with 3 people. They’re all about 2 people ganging up on a third, for example 2 prostitutes versus a transsexual prostitute; 2 fag bashers versus a homosexual...The scenes can be performed in any order. There’s a sense of scenes being replayed or re-assessed as information recurs in different ways.”
Ever one for a challenge, Kellaway is fascinated with “how to make a show working from limited information and with how a small kernel of an idea can develop.” Having Morrish in the team is another kind of challenge. Although Kellaway always sees the process of making work as improvisation, the prospect of having a professional improviser on stage, in performance, is another matter. Kellaway has a meticulous sense of structure which firms as the work emerges. Fortunately he’s found in Morrish a like-minded collaborator—an improviser preoccupied with structure. “I’ve never met anyone who can jettison material as fast as he can...if it’s not working he jumps to the next moment...an extraordinary facility for self-censorship. He’s very intuitive. I’m more calculating—I think before I do. Regina does, thinks and then does again differently.” Kellaway and Heilmann have been working as Hindley and Brady “with Andrew intervening quite left field...then we respond and rewrite our material and eventully jettison the Fassbinder text.”
While the Fassbinder has provided a formal springboard for entertaining paradise, Kellaway feels that the German writer’s preoccupation with the roots of fascism in racism, homophobia and cultural paranoia still warrant exploration, and we’ve had plenty of evidence recently in this country why this should be the case. The Moors murderers “were the products of Glasgow and Manchester slums—their limitations were forced on them. Brady did reform schools, jails. But he did well—he was a bookkeeper in a soap factory and wore a tie. He and Hindley met there, products of the class system. But the work is not about the Moors murderers. It’s about a neo-Nazi mentality—they talk endlessly about superior forms of life and those with no right to be here. It’s about the massive insecurity that makes people go for the weakest, that’s fascism.”
This is an opera Project venture, so what role does music play in the scenario? “High art is very scary for Ian and Myra and therefore is everything they fear. Especially when the singer is a counter tenor and Indonesian. This is paranoia about the elite artist.” Eleven songs make up 35 minutes of the show. There are Purcell art songs, an aria from Handel’s Rodelinda—“a burst of extreme energy”—and the 1910 Alban Berg Early Songs—“lush, decadent, cabaret quality and pre-serial.” Of Purcell’s “Sweeter than Roses”, Kellaway enthuses: “it’s like a Restoration soundtrack for a hard core porn movie, the foreplay, the sudden cum shot (“and shot like fire all over”) and then, marvellously post-orgasmic. It’s onomatopoeic, it’s in-yer-face, it’s the rattling-in-the-dark world of Hindley and Brady—not that they’d recognise it!” They cling to an Elvis songbook.
Kellaway, Heilmann and Morrish are joined by the remarkable young counter tenor Peretta Anggerek and the accomplished pianist Michael Bell in what promises to be a grimly thrilling experience, where the pleasures and horrors of decadence tangle, exploring, as Kellaway puts it, “the obscene limits to which intimate relationships can degenerate.”
The opera Project & Performance Space, entertaining paradise, Performance Space, Sydney, April 19-27.
RealTime issue #48 April-May 2002 pg. 36
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]