The Venice Biennale is always associated with big exhibitions. But there is also a strong programme of dance, currently run by Wayne McGregor, and of theatre, now in its 52nd edition. In the case of theatre, 15 shows are packed into two hectic weeks in June with all the events taking place in the Arsenale: the vast naval shipyards that in the 17th century turned out 100 ships in 60 days and that still retain an aura of industrial power.
Britain has its place in this year’s theatre programme with Tim Crouch performing Truth’s a Dog Must To Kennel and with Gob Squad, co-founded in 1994 by Nottingham and Berlin students. The UK’s current anti-immigrant policy also was a key factor in one of the two productions I caught: a mesmerising piece called Blind Runner written and directed by the Iranian Amir Reza Koohestani who is currently based in Germany. His production has toured all over Europe but it is a sign of our woeful cultural isolation that there seems little chance of its getting to Britain.
The piece, written for two actors and lasting 60 minutes, starts with a husband visiting his wife, a political prisoner, in jail. Their relationship, closely monitored by cameras and recording devices, becomes increasingly strained. But, at the wife’s insistence, the husband agrees to assist a blind Iranian woman competing in a marathon race in Paris. As a guide-runner, his task is to help the athlete achieve the right propulsive rhythm and the bonded intimacy that inevitably results proves to be ideological as well as implicitly sexual.
What impressed me most was Koohestani’s classic ability to interweave the personal and the political. The marital estrangement at the work’s core clearly derives from the wife’s activism and the husband’s passivity. But by agreeing to act as guide to a blind athlete, who has lost her sight through a government bullet, the husband finds his dormant political conscience awakened. Koohestani also suggests intolerance is not confined to Iran by showing the athlete and her guide defying the UK’s Illegal Migration legislation by undertaking a life-threatening run overnight through theChannel tunnel. If they succeed, as the female ironically remarks, even the British would find it hard to reject a blind marathon medal-winner. Stunningly performed and with a restrained use of video, the piece not only attacks any form of oppression but asks whether athleticism itself is potentially a form of protest. It is not so much about the loneliness as the resilience of the long-distance runner.
I was deeply moved by Blind Runner. When it came to Tre Sorelle, a 90-minute distillation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters presented by an experimental Roman company, Muta Imago, I admired the technique without being profoundly stirred. Director Claudia Storace and dramaturg Riccardo Fazi make the point that the words spoken are all from Chekhov’s play but, as with the notes in Eric Morecambe’s piano-playing, they are not necessarily in the right order. In a nutshell we see three actors representing Masha, Olga and Irina occupying an empty house where they are seemingly caught between a nostalgically remembered past and a terrifyingly uncertain future.
What comes across strongly is a sense of entrapment and despair: “It’s hell in here” is a line that echoes and re-echoes as if Chekhov’s play were an anticipation of Sartre’s Huis Clos. The production also deploys an impressive array of effects: strobe lights, shadow-play, ominous sound and guitar music (both provided by a visible fourth character behind a console). We even get white telephones and a portable radio that plays Tea for Two.
The three performers – Federica Dordei, Monica Piseddu and Adriana Pozzoli – are physically expressive and suggest that the three sisters are not so much individuals as different parts of a single entity. What I missed was the pervasive Chekhovian irony that shows how life mocks one’s hopes and I found myself wondering what the experience would mean to anyone who didn’t know the original play. But the great virtue of the Biennale is that it gives a beleaguered Brit a welcome glimpse of what is currently happening beyond our barricaded shores.