Judith

Howard Barker’s Judith is a brave choice for fledgling theatre company The Impeding Room’s first production.

Barker’s dislike of the easily digestible and disdain for the prevailing styles of British theatre has placed his oeuvre on a formal trajectory quite separate from his contemporaries’ social realism. His work is better understood in relation to continental traditions that owe more to such early radicalism as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or Brecht’s great, later works of epic theatre. Barker does not wish to draw his audience together in sentimental unison; to his mind, this kind of theatre is shallow and vulgar manipulation. Rather, his characters deliberately confound our sympathies, disorientating us, denying us the cleansing of catharsis, turning humanity inside out and rubbing our noses in the blood and guts.

It is in this alienation, or Verfremdungseffekt, that Barker’s debt to Brecht is most clearly manifest. The Wrestling Schools’s production of The Castle has persisted as a haunting memory since I saw it in the mid-1990s; all these years later, I cannot sum up the experience, except to say that it profoundly expanded my notions of what theatre can be. Barker’s plays, their propensity to stick in the craw, to isolate each audience member to wrestle alone with the contradictions and complexities, are full of strange beauty and grotesque energy.

It need hardly be added that they are notoriously difficult to stage successfully. It is hard, as an actor or director, to tell if a moment ‘works’, when the drama operates on such unstable aesthetics, the very instability of which is central to the effect – or rather, the totality of many effects depending on the individual response of the audience member. It is like building a house during an earthquake: one has to accept that not the structure but its collapse is the object of spectacle – and hope that the result is as viscerally and intellectually disturbing as the material demands, and not merely baffling or revolting.

Judith dramatises the story of the eponymous heroine of the Apocryphal book. On the eve of a battle in which Assyrian general and master strategist Holofernes plans a mass slaughter of the Israelites, Judith is tasked with his seduction and assassination. Holofernes – cold, abrupt, amoral, given to death-obsessed philosophical diatribes – is he who ‘cannot be loved’. In the struggle to penetrate his resistance and discover some common ground between them, despite – or because of – the web of lies surrounding both characters, Judith succeeds too well. The central moment of the play is her hesitation over killing Holofernes, urged on by her gung-ho compatriot, the Servant, unnamed, and unplagued by doubt. Judith is forced to confront the bloody intimacy of the act for which she is famous. What is heroism, the piece asks, and how is it different from murder?

It is difficult material, intensely serious yet shot through with black humour. The danger is that it crosses the line into dark farce. The temptation is to play up the absurd moments to such an extent that the play as a whole is trivialised, dissipating the tension and dodging the central tensions of the piece. Director Cathy Hunt is to be commended for the skill with which she negotiates this risk, as are the actors: in particular Anna Houston, the actor playing the Servant, whose nervous, comically trivial ramblings act as a foil for, but never upstage, Judith and Holofernes’ duel of wills played out beneath the tent-roof that spans the thrust stage.

Benedict Samuel (Holofernes) gives a consistent performance – harsh, abrupt, and suitably intense – although there is a woodenness and lack of range that cannot be entirely attributed the emotionally stunted character (since they persist through the character’s journey on stage) but either to some excessively constraining direction, or more likely to the actor’s own limitations.

Luisa Hastings Edge, who plays the lead, has the hardest job to do, and there are some off-key moments; when Judith realises that Holofernes is a compulsive liar, the relief is played entirely straight, allowing some of the ambiguity to dissipate. But there are few such misses. Her performance as a whole catches the tone of the character, no easy feat for a Barker character, the instability of which does not permit a straightforward Stanislavskian-empathic route from given circumstances through emotion to presentation. In particular, she captures Judith’s turn from immobility to tyrannical self-assurance without compromising its strangeness.

With this ambitious and compelling production, The Impending Room promises to be a valuable addition to Sydney’s theatre scene.

Rating: Four stars

The Impending Room in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company present
Judith
By Howard Barker
Director: Cathy Hunt
Designer: Michael Hankin
Lighting Designer: Chris Page
Composer and Sound Designer: Ekrem Mulayim
Stage Manager: Bec Poulter
Producer: Bec Allen for The Impending Room
Cast: Luisa Hastings Edge, Anna Houston and Benedict Samuel

The Bondi Pavillion Theatre
October 13 – November 6