"Edgy". The word renders my teeth so. Humour puffed-up as "edgy" makes me think of Woody Allen's quip about satire not being as effective as bricks and baseball bats. English satire on the BBC, of which I tire, encourages us, say, in the face of Murdoch influence in the police and at No10, to snigger, sneer and have another pint. When Jonathan Swift reached for his pen, it became a baseball bat, and 'Gulliver's Travels' was being read 'from the Cabinet Office to the nursery'. Such is the extent of litigiousness in our land, that I imagine him, if alive today, being pussyrioted from the airwaves. Just when we need him.
Romanian director Silviu Purcarete's production reflected the arclight of his satire back into the blinking eyes of his home nation, though the 'Travels' are, more correctly, Purcarete's - through the more seductively stageable bits of the wider Swift oeuvre. I, for one, am not complaining, and I gratefully placed my anxiety, about trying to remember the species which inhabit the four parts of the book, to one side. This production is a rich comic feast served up, like dim-sung, freshly and in no particular order.
Rocketed in and out of his domestic orbit by international success, Purcarete's support has evolved from Soviet-styled, art-for-the-people, automatic subsidy, to worldwide co-production with well-funded festivals. Thus, his rehearsal regime, involving lots of people for lots of time, has been, thankfully, preserved. His methodology seems to be deliciously pitched between experimentation and play, and his works, in many ways a paradigm of 'director's theatre', are known for wit, either comic or non-comic, and a trademark blend of invention and string-and-pulley simplicity. This production tours under the banner of the Radu Stanca National Theatre of Sibiu; effectively his home company, and boasting a substantial number of adaptable performers.
The rough, magical flow of the rehearsal room process brings forth a succession of hilarious and gruesome images, one of the earliest ones being Swift himself, bewigged and fussed over with a microphone on a stand. He is, effectively baseball-batted from the proceedings before he can utter a word, demonstrating that no reverence is going to paid, even to the heroically irreverent. Subsequently, we see shadows of giants biting off the heads of little shadows; a row of miniature whores, hilariously just too short for convenient fellatio and mysteriously surviving a good slashing; a boy pedalling onstage on a wheeled white horse to remain a benchmark of innocent sanity; surgeons purging gleeful patients of huge amounts of sawdust; a long train of businesspeople, in suits and with briefcases, who regress to warring apes; actresses garbed as fillies frolicking before a real stallion, and mothers bestrewn with (stage prop) children being forced to hand them over to the authorities who offer them to a chef who proceeds to fillet one for the (real) griddle. This last sequence proved too strong for one audience member who, queasily, strode out. She had my sympathy. It was a visceral moment, both figuratively and literally. The resulting dish is served to the little boy who, in turn, offers it to two giant and extraordinarily convincing rats who dance off and promptly die. This is satire of weapons-grade strength, and it keeps on coming.
Overarching irony surfaces when you realise that, with the greed, corruption, the tolerance of the absurd and the unpalatable, and the privilege-fuelled contempt, everything we see is traceable in some way to the contemporary world as portrayed by our news media. Swift's avenues of complaint are still neatly arrayed on the streetmap, and the balance of the news is being, somehow, tipped away from our outrage. Let us bask in the perspective of a theatre artist who can easily reflect upon the evil pinnacle of his government of his country being lined up against a wall and machine-gunned.