Adaptation
In Max Frisch's novella Bluebeard a Swiss doctor puts himself on trial for the murder of his sixth wife. As readers we witness Dr Felix Schaad's fragmented memories and imaginings as he compulsively subjects himself to intense self-scrutiny, a cross-examination which becomes increasingly frantic as he collides with Frisch's central theme - the twin problematics of self-image and perception. Schaad is ultimately unable to reach any verdict due to the unreliability of his only witness - his own self.
At first sight Bluebeard is ready-made for a mixed-media interpretation
- the text is a constantly changing phantasmagoria of locations, voices,
fetishised objects, sounds, and personalities, all of which can be
mapped onto a dynamic structure of technology with a single actor at
its focus. The consequence of this approach, that every element of
the performance which is not Schaad himself is clearly either a highly
subjective interpretation or a pure fabrication, gives the piece a
conceptual structure which mirrors directly the problematic relationship
between Schaad and his perception of the external world. Experience,
as Schaad discovers to his confusion, and as theorists have been telling
us for a long time, is 'always already' mediated.
The performer's role as actor adds another layer to the structural similarity between the content of the work and the mode of performance. Once Schaad begins to doubt his direct perception of the world it is only a short step to doubting his own self-identity - he discovers, once more wandering in company with theorists such as Jacques Derrida, that the self is always already 'other.' The position where Felix Schaad was the only 'real' element in a performance space otherwise populated by 'unreal' media has been eroded and the actor is revealed as just one more media/tor.
The upshot of this is that Bluebeard lends itself to the exploration of the idea that technology - particularly media technology - rarely presents us with genuine newness but rather embodies old problems in new forms. The seductive power of technology is such that it is all too easy to be convinced that an insoluble problem (such as, for example, the lack of real presence in mediated communications) has been overcome. This concept was one of the seeds of both makb3th and antigone in which issues of tyranny and duty were approached through a combination of old stories and new technology.
The conceptual structure of the piece is not only evident in the connections
between content, form and underlying theory but is also concretised
in the physical components of the performance. The encircling opaque
screen on which Schaad's 'experiences' are portrayed evokes Frisch's
statement that the universe of our perceptions is a prison/prism which
confines us, whilst at the same time referencing Plato's allegory of
the cave - an archetype for the problematic of mediated experience.
Trapped at the focal point of this screen the actor/Schaad is not only
the subject of his own experience he is also subjected to it. When
the nature of this physical space is coupled with the themes of crime,
guilt and surveillance/voyeurism from Frisch's text Schaad is projected
into the world of the panopticon, a place where our fear of technology
coexists with our desire to use it to dominate and control.
There is, of course, an accident waiting to happen when live performance does anything more than nod to the world of theory - such a performance could become inaccessible, even tedious. This risk becomes so much the greater when both the theory and the content conspire to generate a piece which is both 'radically indeterminate' and aware of its own indeterminacy. The first response to this problem is drawn from theory - as the work of Derrida, Zizek and others indicates, a good strategy in the face of insurmountable indeterminacy is to highlight the efficacy and necessity of choice-making as a route to a new morality. Previously we have highlighted the importance of choice through technological means - by confronting the audience, most notably in antigone, with choice making apparatus. On this occasion the content of the piece itself encourages choice - we are, after all, watching a trial, and the final judgement is left explicitly to us. The tension created by this need to come to a judgement is the second antidote to theory-induced boredom. Just as much as Bluebeard lends itself to deconstruction and suits media experimentation it is also a murder mystery, a courtroom drama and a psycho-thriller. The challenge Bluebeard presents for us is to combine these elements to produce a tense, original, thought-provoking and accessible drama with strong theoretical underpinnings.
