Sydney Opera House
August
In the opening seconds of Can We Talk About This? Hannes Langolf asks the audience to put up their hands if they feel morally superior to the Taliban. "Not bad," he says, scanning us, 'that's about fifteen percent." Then he goes on to detail the Taliban's known atrocities and challenge the more cautious remainder of the audience over their uncertainty - a dramatic introduction to the dilemma at the heart of the work.
Can We Talk About This? is DV8 director Lloyd Newson's third foray into verbatim theatre, and depicts a Britain in deep difficulties over conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and the policies of a multicultural democracy. The crisis manifests particularly in the plight of women, gay men and dissidents persecuted under religious law. Parts of London struggle with issues like forced marriage and honour killing while across Europe and the Middle East there have been numerous murders of writers, artists and political activists who were perceived to have insulted Islam.
The live and recorded voices of Can We Talk About This? explore not only these issues but the political and cultural anxieties that cause well-meaning democrats to look the other way. Newson has a key assertion: in a democracy, the state has an obligation to protect its citizens by preventing religious authorities from persecuting dissidents and violating human rights. Equally to the point, it seems that in the UK all levels of government lack the political power, clarity of vision and integrity of purpose to safeguard the most vulnerable citizens. And everyone finds it very hard to talk about.
Everyone, that is, except Newson's interviewees, who are specialists, activists and authorities of all stripes. One of the virtues of verbatim theatre is its spectacular eloquence, and the complexities of the matter are teased out for us in a barrage of articulate soundbites from dozens of interviewees - teachers, police, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, religious leaders - all of whom are listed and profiled in the program. Their words are punctuated by the dancers' bodies, sometimes following the cadences of the speech with movement, sometimes setting up steady rhythms for the accelerating text to ride to a climax. DV8's lavishly deployed languages include projection, music, costume, lighting, set design and even writing on the wall, but it's those insistent voices and the physical expression of these confident, intelligent performers - now furious, now whimsical, now chilling - that will stay with you.
The most substantial criticism I could raise was that perhaps Newson was preaching to the converted - that the left-leaning audience one might expect to see at DV8's shows is already on top of what he's trying to say. But then that's his point: he says in the program notes that even his dinner companions were in conflict. Can We Talk About This? will provoke lively dinner party discussions everywhere it goes. In Australia, with a similar Islamist issue on a smaller scale, one could suggest that a related conflict between Christian fundamentalists and the state is a subtler but more substantial problem. I wonder what local dance theatre company might look at that.
- JAQI PASCOE