Setting the Catalan Among the Pigeons

 

Forests by Calixto Bieito

Birmingham Old Rep, Station Street

Until  15th September, then touring

Tix: 0121 236 4455

By Richard Lutz

The forest: place of magical refuge or  a horrorhouse of  nightmares?

Books have been written about this- big tomes looking back at myth and culture.  Simon Schama did a great volume called  Landcape  and Memory which analysed why Britain saw safety in the woods (a la Robin Hood)  but central Europeans viewed forests as dangerous hellholes  housed with goblins, witches and night terrors (as in a cascade of fables).

Catalan playwright  Calixto Bieito grabs the use of woods in Shakespeare’s works and thrusts it down your neck in this addition to the current World Shakespeare Festival. It is lyrical and light when it comes to ‘As You Like It’ and  threateningly sadistic and nasty when it heads deep into  ‘King Lear’ and ‘Macbeth’- its sexual scenes  edge near the borders of abuse and violence at times.

So, this is not a play with a narrative. It is more of a heavyweight theatrical essay using both British and Catalan actors scripted in both  English and Catalan dialogue.

At times, as the person sitting next to me said at the end, it was somewhere between Beckett and Hieronymous Bosch …bleak, surreal, stark, difficult to digest.

But whether you like it or not, Bieito, who has attacked Shakespeare before in Macbeth and Cymbeline, doesn’t let you forget you have seen one of his physically overwhelming and  disturbing productions. You do bring this play, produced by The Birmingham Rep,  home with you- just as an Elizabethan audience must have brought home tongues getting ripped out, eyes gouged and kings bloodily slaughtered.