Irony Is Not Enough:
Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve
Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on my life as Catherine Deneuve
Created by Luke Mullins and Leisa Shelton
with
Anna Cordigley, Jethro Woodward and Jen Hector
From a text by Anne Carson
A writer imagines herself as the French film icon Catherine Deneuve, in Paris, lecturing at a university and tempting the possibility of an erotic relationship with a young female student – how would it be done, if she were Catherine Deneuve.
Irony is not enough... is an exploration on the nature of identity and love. It explores the construction of self, what we are capable of, or allow, within the frame of the various personas we create around and within ourselves through our attempts to know love.
.Writer, Anne Carson weaves literal images and lines from key Deneuve films alongside an imagined dialogue between the Greek philosophers Sappho and Sophocles, to create a complex web of interrogation.
“Shame is a rusty edge that Deneuve sits on as she pages through lecture notes in her Monday office. Outside a flag shreds itself in the icy wind. Telephone rings. Jagged pause. Girl’s voice, which she has never heard before on the telephone, is animal. Claws lope through her and turn at the wall...”
Anne Carson / ‘Irony...’
Created and performed by: Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton, Jethro Woodward, Jen Hector, Anna Cordingly
Sound Designer: Jethro Woodward
Designer: Anna Cordingly
Lighting Designer: Jen Hector
Presented by Arts House
Photographs: Ponch Hawkes and Heidrun Lohr
Supported by The Australia Council for the Arts.
Each scene is sculpted in filmic detail, each physically and narratively disconnected from the other, each floating as an island of naturalistic imagery in the mangle of props and wires of the Meat Market stage space. Sound, light, set, actors and musician, and designers, onstage too, come together in fitful fragments—the coalescing of the desiring, decentred self into one sharpened and fuelled by love. Even the narrator, Carson/Deneuve, is played by two actors: Leisa Shelton for body, Luke Mullins for voice. It is an attempt to discipline desire with a muffle of irony, dissimulation. But irony is not enough to stop infatuation; self-knowledge does not mandate control. Desire shows through. Jana Perkovic - Real Time
Fragment 31's approach is an anatomy of desire. Through the metaphor of cinema, each organ of performance is laid bare. Anna Cordingley's set is a film set, each scene spatially isolated. Two actors supply separate techniques: Luke Mullins (who created a one-man show from Carson's Autobiography of Red) voices the poetry, Leisa Shelton provides physical theatre.The piece creates a wavering sense of distance and proximity. Its disjunctions allow sublime moments of evanescent fusion: Shelton's hand, or her stilettoed heel, posed in a black frame, draws focus to the quality of Jenny Hector's lighting; Jethro Woodward riffing at a piano, walking away, the music not stopping; Mullins and Shelton repeating the same rocking motion in unison, trying to capture the perfect shot. Cameron Woodhead - The Age
Fragment 31's production is a brilliant collaboration between some of our most interesting theatre artists: performers Luke Mullins and Leisa Shelton, designer Anna Cordingley, composer Jethro Woodward and lighting designer Jenny Hector. Alison Croggon - Theatre Notes
Irony is not Enough -
Full Review by Alison Croggon
"Irony is a mask," says Anne Carson in her poem Irony is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve. "The problem is that we become the mask". It's an understanding of the paradox of performance that perhaps explains why Carson's work, intentionally or not, so often enters the theatre: in 2003, this particular poem also formed part of the basis for a dance/theatre work by William Forsythe, Kammer/Kammer.
Fragment 31's production is a brilliant collaboration between some of our most interesting theatre artists: performers Luke Mullins and Leisa Shelton, designer Anna Cordingley, composer Jethro Woodward and lighting designer Jenny Hector. In their rendition, the poem is presented unchanged: as they explain in the program, "to edit, re-write or change in any way the writing of Anne Carson is to defeat the purpose of choosing this writer and her work as the source material".
This signals what could potentially be an inhibiting reverence for the text. But this profoundly intelligent collaboration avoids fetishising the text, instead opening up its complexities into a parallel essay about fetish, the irrational displacement of desire. The poem's fragmented narrative is refracted through an equally fragmented performance, in which the component parts of theatre - design, sound, staging, performance and text - become fluid constructions that are made and unmade before our eyes.
When we enter the theatre, we seem to be entering a workshop: there are tables covered with technical equipment, and parts of set are still being dressed. The designer is kneeling on the floor, working on a design detail with tape and a box-cutter; the performers are leafing through files of script, checking the pages are all there, the sound designer is testing levels. There is an air of industry and preparatory concentration. Once the audience is seated, Leisa Shelton sits down with a businesslike air at a desk at the very front, only feet away from the audience. Darkness pulls in around her, a single light on her face. She says the first words of the poem: "Je commence". And so it does.
Most of the poem is spoken by Luke Mullins, with interruptions of pre-recorded text and dialogic lines spoken by Shelton. The writerly self, which seems a binding unity in the text despite its fragmentations, is immediately split and mediated. Carson's exact language is full of raw spaces, caesurae which electrically shift the speaker's realities. She is a classics lecturer suddenly pierced with desire for one of her students ("Knife of boy. Knife of girl.") Burned by this impossible desire, she imagines herself as Catherine Deneuve. She speaks of herself in the third person in one sentence, in the first in the next. She enacts the repetitions of traumatic desire in a cityscape chilly with snow.
Desire is traumatic, as Carson says, because it is felt as a disintegration of the known self. It can only be experienced as fragmentation. In response, Fragment 31 takes apart the supposed coherence of theatre: they present a series of contingent unities, theatrical images that collapse back upon themselves. Shelton dons a blonde wig and becomes Catherine Deneuve behind a table of telephones in a miniature set that mimics a bourgeois Parisian apartment: she does not answer the insistently ringing phone, but it is answered nevertheless. The designers focus a light on her, rearrange her clothes. They hold an empty black frame in front of her hand or her foot, so we might examine the parts of her body, adorned by a bracelet, a shoe, as if they are a close-up in a film. They hand Mullins a microphone, and he speaks into it.
The tableau collapses. The stage returns to a raw state of preparedness, and then is remade as something else. These pauses begin to generate a particular electricity: we are continually reminded that this is a performance, that it is an artifice. A poem, said Marianne Moore, is "an imaginary garden with real toads in it": what is real here is the articulation of feeling. Once or twice we seem to see the performers stripped of any mask at all. They stand in front of the audience at a momentary loss, and the entire pretence briefly dissolves into a larger understanding of our own implication in this anxiety, this painfulness and loss. All this occurs with an delicate and precise attention to rhythm - not merely the rhythms of Carson's language, but the breath of the stage, how it contracts and expands in the light, how the performers inhabit or leave a space.
And then, quite suddenly, we are at the end of the poem, and the work is finished. Blackout.
Performed around a improvised structure, the company creates a new version each time it is performed. All sound is created live in concert with the performers and the audio here is a live recording of one performance.