“My quest for you,” he told Miss Salma R, “has not been for you alone, but also for my own compromised goodness and virtue. I see it now. By attaining you—the impossible!—I thought I might validate my life. By becoming worthy of you I might feel worthy of being myself.”
“That’s quite a speech,” she said.
“What I hoped for is indeed beyond hope,” he said. “I was out of my mind, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. And all around me America—and not only America, the whole human race!—yes, even our India!—was also losing its reason, its capacity for ethics, its goodness, its soul. And it may be, I can’t say, that this deep failure brought down upon us the deeper failure of the cosmos. But I at least have woken up. I am sane again, and if the story of the world is coming to an end, and maybe our stories will end with it, then let us make that a happy ending, a peaceful coming to rest in a good place. But I still hope we may save ourselves. At least I hope that we may try.”
What vanishes when everything vanishes: not only everything, but the memory of everything. Not only can everything no longer remember itself, no longer remember how it was when it still was everything, before it became nothing, but there is nobody else to remember either, and so everything not only ceases to exist but becomes a thing that never was; it is as if everything that was, was not, and moreover there is nobody left to tell the story, not the whole grand story of everything, not even the last sad story of how everything became nothing, because there is no storyteller, no hand to write or eye to read, so that the book of how everything became nothing cannot be written, just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because we are no longer there to know them.
Let us think of it this way. Here at the heart of a canyon of light an old man and the woman he loves stand in front of an open door. Who knows what lies beyond it? But on this side of the door, there’s hope. There may after all be a life after death. He grasps her hand. She squeezes his hand. A long quest comes to an end. Here they stand in the Valley of Annihilation, with the power to disappear into the universe. And just possibly into something new.
Quichotte, a sane man, understands that it won’t happen. But on this side of the door, it’s possible, for a few last moments, to set that knowledge aside, and believe.
法国Odéon剧院官网的Théâtre et canapé系列，最近推出的是Cycle Luigi Pirandello，也都是Stéphane Braunschweig导演的作品。我的海外版的疫情期间戏剧挑战已经持续了50天出头了，就此结束吧，现在都已经看得有点麻木了。就比如皮兰德娄的这个系列，剧情在前进、声音画面走过，却没有留下什么印象。所以只能特别简单地写一写。
Hampstead
Theatre At Home这次推出的一系列话剧主题都挺政治的，这部剧是《Drawing the Line》的编剧加上《Wild》的导演，讲的又是艾未未的故事，可以想见一二其内容走向。此剧根据艾未未2011年被捕一事改编，讲艾未未在机场突然被捕，然后在不同的地方被监禁审问，最后被定罪经济犯罪。这一逮捕背后，是因为艾未未一系列的艺术作品以及政治视角和当局的相左。
山羊之歌在舞台上唱歌加上前面的舞者跳舞，剧的标题是把安提戈涅拆开来成了“I
was Anty, so I am gone”。故事理论上讲的就是安提戈涅的故事，但是反正歌词我也听不懂舞蹈我也看不懂，只能默认了。歌和舞不完全是同步的，有的时候歌唱完了舞还没有跳完，然后就是没有任何背景音乐的干跳，也不知道怎么掌握节奏，所以群舞的话不那么齐。总之，可以说我没看懂吧，所以也不多评论了。
Tag: Grzegorz Bral, Teatr Pieśń Kozła, 山羊之歌剧团, Sophocles,
