Theatre, we are always told, is a total experience. You could hardly have better proof than James Kerr's staging of this first play by the Pulitzer prize-winning American poet Rita Dove. Light, sound, music, movement and design are used with an imaginative freedom that helps to disguise some of the weaknesses in this text.
Dove, like the French dramatists of the 40s, applies classical myth to modern history: in this case, Sophocles's Oedipus to antebellum South Carolina. In the prologue, staged behind a muslin veil, a plantation-owner's married daughter finds her mulatto baby wrenched from her arms to be sold into slavery. So when, 20 years on, the princely, much-punished Augustus Newcastle arrives to work on the now-domineering Amalia's land, it doesn't take long for us to guess his origins. Enlisted by Southern conspirators to foment a slave rebellion while, at the same time, occupying Amalia's bed, the hero finds himself torn between his political instincts and his incestuous passion.
Dove contrives strong situations and her language, as befits a poet, is rich and supple: listening to the mournful music of the slaves, the hero tenderly remarks to his mistress "as many songs as sorrows". But Dove's use of the Sophoclean framework often allows her to short-circuit dramatic probability. Why, in 1840s South Carolina, would Amalia buy a notorious troublemaker like Augustus? The hero's murder of an old swamp-inhabiting snake-man, symbolically named Hector, also seems awkwardly contrived. And it crosses one's mind that Augustus, educated in the Greeks as well as Milton and the Bible, would be acutely aware of the Oedipal myth he is enacting.
But I found my rational objections were swept aside by the staging. For a start Tim Hatley creates a brilliant set in which four sloping wooden walkways define the rectangular acting-area allowing it to operate as cotton field, forest or fortress-like home. Mick Sands's music and Christopher Shutt's sound also richly evoke plantation life: the distant hum of slave songs, bird cries, even baby wails gives the action a sonic context and creates a world where man and nature rarely seem to sleep.
Kerr's production, exploiting the choric work he did on Aeschylus's Suppliants at the Gate, orchestrates this beautifully. With the aid of Shelley Washington's movement, he also recreates the rhythms of work in which cotton is constantly picked, tramped, toted and weighed. Saskia Reeves as the tragically isolated Amalia, Peter de Jersey as the proudly educated Augustus, Tanya Moodie as an unrequitedly loving slave and Sara Powell as a cursing conjuration-woman also give striking performances without destroying the fabric of the ensemble.
Dove's play, while not unpromising, cramps the action within a classical format; but Kerr's dynamic production suggests that, along with the Gate's Mick Gordon, he will be one of the dominant forces in British theatre over the coming decade.
