This is a darkly disturbing, confronting work that is extremely powerful. It is a piece of verbatim theatre in which the text is derived entirely from interviews with real people, reworked into a usable theatre script.
DV8 Physical Theatre has produced 18 highly acclaimed dance-theatre works and four films for TV to date, gathering over 50 UK and international awards. Previous DV8 works To Be Straight With You and Can We Talk About This? I, for example, collated a mass of voices, but this work focuses on just one voice, that of John.
Portrayed with gentle , calm and quiet poise by Hannes Langolf, John seems to have been chosen as the main subject because of his suffering in his unfortunate life. The pain John has been through, and the depths to which he sank into drugs and criminality, are shown as being the result of a childhood of horrific domestic abuse.
His father repeatedly bashed and raped his mother, and the babysitter, and beat his brother until the boy’s ears bled. His mother and brother eventually drank and drugged themselves to death. The family home became a chilling house of horrors, a place of dark rooms and narrow spaces where the family are seen posed like broken plastic dolls. Later Anna Fleischle’s design transforms the stage into the corridors and bars of a prison and then the gay sauna .
Newson uses movement to underline character and expand verbal ideas, showing us the languid helplessness of smack-addled bodies or the shifty, nervous walk of the professional shoplifter. As John and his brother descend into heroin addiction, the dancers slope, seeemingly boneless, rubber-legged, falling even as they stand. Some of the movement is disjointed, fractured and angular. The constant agitated movements of the performers underscore the spoken text like an extra soundtrack and emphasises the way life ebbs and flows like a tide .
When John describes the catastrophic death of a friend, he folds and unfolds his body in cramped, almost unbearable pain. Attempting to sort out his life, he stands as if rooted to the spot by temporarily hypnotised feet, describing his dreams of being normal in delicate movements to the air. In prison, his exercise routine thrusts him high above the back wall; figures in the judiciary system turn like music box dolls.
There are some extraordinary pas de deux with astonishing lifts and weight transfers and wonderful sculptural duets and floorwork. There is a strange duet where one of the dancers has a T shirt over his head and face for the duration…again disturbing. .Warning to some patrons who might be offended: There is plenty of strong language and in the second half nudity.I n its second half, JOHN becomes an extended examination of the meaning of life in the world of the gay sauna.
Newson, in characteristic style, neatly transforms Anna Fleischle’s revolving design into an exceedingly accurate depiction of Byzantine decadence in which we are treated to lengthy monologues of pimps and clients, homosexual practices are performed and there is the haunting yet often ignored specter of AIDS .
We’re also subjected to Newson’s starkly presented judgments on men who seek intimacy while practicing unsafe sex; the verbatim method essentially allows him to use the words of his interviewees and turn them against them. In this second half there are discreetly adjusted towels and the artist/painter/sculptor is itching for pen and paper at the same time as being scandalised by what is said.
We discover a different side of John, who is searching for love in all the wrong places. Right at the end of the work we learn that after years of addiction, loss , prison stints and assorted girlfriends, what John is trying to find and really wants in searching the discreetly darkened halls of the sauna, is a boyfriend. JOHN defiantly works because there are themes that thread all the way through: the search for something, whether it is obliteration , escape, sensation , intimacy or love,— no matter what it costs.
Running time – just over 90 mins (approx) Includes a brief documentary about the history of DV8 Physical Theatre and the making of JOHN with commentary by Lloyd Newson.
DV8 in JOHN, part of the NT Live series, is screening at selected cinemas now. The live season has only just finished in London .
http://www.sharmillfilms.com.au/?page_id=2197