Matthew Krouse
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
William Wharton’s Birdy – widely known as a bestselling novel and an Alan Parker movie – makes for an intermittently moving piece of stage drama, even though Naomi Wallace’s adaptation is in a writing style that’s somewhat out of date.
Like Peter Schaffer’s Equus, it’s about a youth who develops an animal obsession, seemingly to the point of no return. From the start, one has to feel some degree of empathy with wildlife if one is going get fully into the play’s subject matter. Birdy obviously uses the bird as a metaphor for freedom and the ability elevate oneself above difficult situations in to order to escape.
Recent works about ”madness” seem to have concentrated more on the current obsession with the inner workings of the brain, and less on the issue of circumstantial insanity brought about by non-conformity, as in Birdy. One need only think of Peter Brook’s The Man Who … that played in Johannesburg late last year.
That’s probably why Birdy, these days, comes across as a bit of a relic. One has to endure a bit too much avian imagery in the course of the play. The question stands as to whether the fault lies entirely in the script or in the playing that, in Joshua Lindberg’s current production, wallows a bit too effusively in this department.
Of course, as Lindberg correctly points out, Birdy is more than just a play about birds. So perhaps playing against the grain might have better served his robust cast, making the whole thing seem less, er … birdy.
The play is about two youths who grow up in middle America and are sent off to war where they discover the true horrors of life. Sub-textually, the play raises an interesting point. If the whole of humanity is mad then what’s the point of maintaining a barometer by which to measure sanity? In theatre terms one wonders why Wallace has used such rigid convention to show how screwed up everything is. One can only imagine that such a gut-wrenching lament is basically an exercise designed to show something contradictory about life – something like, ”We’re all mad but we’re really sane.”
That’s the thing about the major friendship between the two boys Al (Langley Kirkwood/Robert van Vuuren) and Birdy (Nick Boraine/Anthony Coleman) in the play. They’re too close, they’re too isolated, they’re too sensitive, they’re a recipe for disaster, but deep down inside they’re just normal guys.
All Al and Birdy need is a great big war to set them off for life. That’s the internal voyage of discovery bit, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way it’s articulated in the play. If anything, this is Birdy’s strongest point. The problem comes in with the actors’ articulation of the mainstream Euro-American theatre style. The writing is tailormade for the actors’ ease. Watching Birdy, I got the feeling that the cast was feeling absolutely nothing at all – even though there were tremors and tears all the way.
Somehow, in this day and age, this type of formulaic writing and acting is too easy. For the audience, it’s just a case of waiting for that special moment when a character will come up with a shattering, universal truth, to know the meaning of the play. One doesn’t have to do any mind-gymnastics at all to figure it out.
I must say, I personally don’t enjoy being spoon-fed, and Birdy did just that. Wallace’s tired old script is so stuck in its lunchtime that you could see the main cast members employing all sorts of tricks to break free from the mould.
Other than that, Lindberg’s set is wonderful and Wesley France’s lighting is great.
Birdy runs at the Tesson Theatre in the Civic Theatre Complex until March 5 and then transfers to the Nico Theatre in Cape Town