Victory over the sun, by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin and Alexei
Kruchonykh in a new English version by Rosamund Bartlett with additional
music by Jeremy Arden

Director      Julia Hollander
Composer      Jay Arden

Actors        Nicholas Chambers, Louise Dawson, James Fortune, Peter Joucla,
              Rosanna Lowe, Roddy Maude-Roxby
Opera singer  Rebecca Smith
Acrobats      Anna Cohen, Rachel Smith

Victory over the sun was a futurist opera performed in St Petersburg in
1913. It caused a riot at the time because of its unconventional content
and form. The futurists capture the sun and destroy the past. Everything
becomes happy and weightless with brutal hilarity. A traveller arrives from
the future. A Certain-Person-With-Bad-Intentions declares war, but the sun
is finally buried. A fat man wakes up into the new world and is comically
confused. An aeroplane crashes on the stage. In 1913, the aim seemed to be
to assert that the world must ditch its messy, liberal past through
military and technolgical force and enter a tough, purely Slavic future.

This reconstruction, part of the Barbican's Romance, St Petersburg,
Revolution season, and is based on the text and three surviving fragments
of music. It began with a strong sense of deja vu outside the auditorium
with a poem about laughter (I think) in Russian, translated into gibberish.
The audience was invited to become all mouth, and led past pictures with
sinister grins, which were also added to the signs for the toilets, into
the appropriately named Pit, where they stood in the performance space
while the performers sat in the seats. The futurists were introduced -- the
performers all wore large masks with their faces --, there was some noisy
music, and the sun was wrestled out of a bag hanging from the roof and put
in a box. It was all very 1960s.

But the flaky old actor who spoke for the futurists made it clear that this
version deals with our future as well as future of 1913. He reminded us of
where we were in time and space, of the ghastly dated modernism of the
Barbican and the plague dead from the middle ages buried under the
building, of the nearby church where Oliver Cromwell (another revolutionary
who thought the future would be monolithic once he was in power) was
married, and the wedding of Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones. Just as in 1913,
there is a Slavic drive towards Kosovo, and a fantasy that the surgical use
of military force and technology can blow everything difficult away.

The traveller from the future sang a striking aria that described the
purely male nature of the future, while the futurist declared war on all
aspects of femaleness, including the femaleness implicit in himself as a
human being. It was difficult not to think of lads' mags full of motors.

That was about as much opera as we got. (There was a brief chorus later
about the gun and the gallows holding the caviar, which involved a man on a
bicycle and somehow reminded me of a staged version of The third policeman
I once saw.) But the production met any possible complaints by decapitating
a Brazilian man who demanded Puccini and throwing his head around the
audience. (Wat Tyler's head in Richard II at Stratford, Ontario in about
1980, though that was dripping with stage blood.)

Life after the fall of the sun had a bizarre charm. Without gravity, in
either sense, we had to learn to deal with things floating around as well
as the end of sadness. Members of the audience (I think) were given smiles
to wear and formed a ring while the Certain-Person-etc encouraged them from
the top of a ladder to hide and not join in. The fat man's confusion was
quite touching. His main worry was that people had forgotten how to pick
mushrooms, and he was concerned about other simple things to do with food,
which it somehow seems serious and right to remember when you are
fantasising about blowing everything away and starting again.

The aeroplane crash was comparatively low impact, and the only sign that
the performance was over was that the futurists put on their masks, took
their original seats and waved us out of the theatre. I think they were
hoping for a riot so that they didn't have to reach a closure but could
have a brutal break with the time and space of performance instead of an
inevitable anticlimax.

It was intriguing, a bit disturbing and very funny. I felt short-changed by
the music, which could have been developed a lot more. There was a powerful
string trio that formed an intermezzo, but apart from the aria and the
chorus, the rest of the music was a simple representation of the futurists'
brutality, or background to speeches.  But this production caught the mood
of the present as well as giving an idea of the history of the future. Well
worth queuing for returns tomorrow.