Grand
Guignol – Tonight terror and laughter |
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The
Cornfields
Mr Cornfield – Micke Klingvall
Mrs Cornfield – Anna Svensson
Herring – Paoblo Sanchez Perez
Felicity – Amanda Olls
The
Laboratory of Hallucinations
Dr Gorlitz – Per Forssell
Sonia – Amanda Olls
Mitchinn – Micke Klingvall
Mariza, the Assistant - Desiree Burenstrand
De mora – Paoblo Sanchez Perez
Doctor, patient - Anna Svensson
Director
- Michael Fields
Set design and costume - Karin
Lundberg, Anna Komarek
Assistant - Judith Vitez
Lighting - Irmeli Strand
Original music and Sound design
- Tim Gray
Special effects - Tyler Olsen
Marketing - Therese Hörnqvist
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The performance was really three small performances, were I took part
in two: The Cornfields and The Laboratory of Hallucinations.
In the beginning of September 2003 we played two shows, as a sneak preview
in Kristinaladan in the north of Stockholm. Then, in January 2004, we
played at Kilen in the Culture house in Stockholm for three weeks. The
performances was organized by the Molière ensemble.
I played Mr Cornfield in ”The Cornfields” by Georges Courtelinne
from 1918. It was a strictly psychopathic husband in a seriously dysfunctional
marriage, where the husband and wife take turns to metaphorical and
literally maltreat a parasiting visitor. The Play is a sort of brutal
comedy with a twisted psychology, or as in Mel Gordons book ”The
Grand Guignol” where it is placed under the headline: ”Suffering
of the Innocent”. |
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| In
”The Laboratory of Hallucinations” by André de Lorde
from 1916, I played Mitchinn, a slight educationally subnormal sidekick
to Dr Gorlitz, the diabolic doctor, who performs a lobotomy on his wife’s
lover, when he meet with a car accident. It is all about jealousy, insanity,
maiming and revenge in a performance that is more of a psychological
thriller with a very bloody conclusion.
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Grand
Guignol
Grand
Guignol is a French form of theatre from the second half of
the 19th century. It is a sort of ”splatter theatre”
where the foremost characteristics are terror and violence.
The name is from the Parisian theatre of Oscar Meteniers: ”
Le Theatre du Grand Guignol”, that was located in Montmartre
between 1897 and 1962. They played anything from thrilling criminal
stories to sex comedies, but the basics in the repertoire were
the horror performances. That is also what the genre is all
about. A night at ”Le Theatre du Grand Guignol”,
could consist of 6 to 10 small performances, alternating dramas
of tension, macabre comedies and sheer orgies of violence, where
plucked out eyes, acid baths, fried faces and spraying blood
belong to normality in the form. It was common that people fainted
during the performances and off and on the theatre even had
a physician in the audience.
The genre was popular and it sprung from naturalism and the
French melodrama. The gothic in the genre was more pointed to
the naturalistic searching in the human inner depth in the spirit
of Zola than to gothic monsters and ghosts. The plot concern
instincts, death, sex, insanity, and deform absurdities. Grand
Guignol was a great model for the expressionists and filmmakers
that were later to come. It is a forerunner for horror film,
which finally was the genre that ousted the Grand Guignol.
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was at a party in Stockholm that Michael Fields and Anna Svensson first
talked me in to join the ensemble. I had just started to think about
getting up on stage again and it was hard to find a better offer. I
came both to work with Anna who I had been teacher and director to before
and Michael who was my former teacher and director in the US. Besides
the timing was perfect. I had time to learn the text and rehearse during
the summer when I did not have to much to do. And it really became that
eagerly longed for return to the stage.
A
word from the director Michael Fields:
“Now
in 2004 I think this form of theatre has never been more resonant. Just
read the newspaper or watch the news, any news. In the play the LAB
the character of De Mora says at one point, in reference to a brutal
murder com¬mitted by an insane man, "how in our so called civilized
society can such things still happen?' And yet they do, as the violent
events of our world constantly remind us. And when they do, espe¬cially
when they happen close to home, they can have the special power to shock
us, as we in our so called civilized society often are lulled to believe
that we have evolved past the point of human cruelty, excess, violence,
unbridled passion, obsession, fanaticism, and love gone horribly wrong.
Grand Guignol is not an "old form" of the theatre that has
been recreated here today. It is actually a form of theatre that could
be ripped from today’s headlines. And via its unique style of
theatrical expression it serves to remind us that the facades we create
of the perfect culture, the perfect family and the perfect relationship
is just the thin, easily breakable surface, of a bottomless well of
human impulse that has a far evolutionary distance yet to get.”
Michael Fields |