Blah, Blah, BASTARD, Blah

Monologues performed in languages I do not speak can make me feel like a Peanuts character listening to adults.

By now, I have seen a quite lot of plays in languages I do not speak. Often it just doesn’t work for obvious reasons. When it’s a talented troupe, however, & a play that I know (or a play with a clear story) this can be just fine. Knowing the story, I focus on the directing, the set design, the costuming, the acting styles. My favorite example of this working well was when we saw two excellent & very different productions of Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Artuo Ui” in one year, first in Australia, then in Berlin (in German). Later, we saw it again in the US.

Typical of print advertising here, the Jakarta Post didn’t announce Teatre Payung Hitam’s play until the day AFTER it left Jakarta. So we chased it to Bandung.

This was a performance of 4 poems by WS Rendra, somehow involving a Javanese tyrant & the 120 anniversary of the death of Multatuli (pen name of the Dutch author Douwes Dekker), co-sponsored by the Dutch embassy. I’m still not sure what one has to do with the other. But it promised to be action & story light & prose heavy: bad news for me. It didn’t sound good.

And yet, it was! It was good for three reasons. First, because the acting was strong & there were long stretches of silence in which it was mostly movement, dramatic & highly narrative. It didn’t take language to explain the relationship between the lovers, the abuse of the tyrant, etc.

Second, because it was imaginatively staged: the clever euphemism of a rape, implied with a sarong held & shaken just so, without literally enacting it; the angklung playing music (bamboo shakers that sound like their name); the visual beauty of stone bowls filled with water & petals, used bathing each other’s faces or pouring it over heads. Parts of it were so moving that I almost cried.

Finally, because of the monologue! Normally a foreign monologue is deadly. And indeed: I started drifting off because didn’t understand the tyrant’s long rant at all. Then, suddenly, the Bad Guy shouted "BRENGSEK!" & I sat up again thinking, Hey, I know that word! That means Bastard!

Now I’m really paying attention. In fact, now I like it, not because I understand but because he’s articulating really well, shouting everything, & it gives me the surprising opportunity to notice how many words I actually DO understand. To my ears the tyrant’s maniacal monologue ran something like this:

…Blah, blah, blah TODAY! blah, blah, blah WITHOUT! blah, blah, BASTARD! blah, blah, blah, SATAN! blah, blah, EXCUSE ME! blah, blah, BASTARD! blah, blah, CHEROOT! blah, WITHOUT blah! WITHOUT blah! WITHOUT blah! Blah, blah, NO! NO! blah, blah WOMAN! blah, blah, blah, IT DOESN’T MATTER! blah, blah, STRAIGHT AHEAD! blah, blah, MULTATULI! [Dutch author] blah, blah, MULTATULI! blah, blah, MULTATULI! blah, blah, THANK YOU.

I turned to E: “That was great.”

By & large, I’m no longer attending plays with E here.
I thought I’d leave it at a high note.