Crying at Tabula Rasa
Last night on a whim I bought a ticket to see Tabula Rasa at Tramway, a collaborative project conceived by the Scottish Ensemble and Vanishing Point which explores the connections between Arvo Pärt's music and its significance to the dying.
I went in fully expecting a play with some music accompanying it and I left with no words, stunned by this work that is unlike anything I've ever seen - a partnering of words and music.
The piece opens with the piano playing Für Alina, a hanging strip light turns on and a woman dressed in red makes her way on to the stage and takes a seat facing the audience. The actress, Pauline Goldsmith, begins to reminisce about how she found out her friend Peter had died and how she had rushed to make it to the funeral on time after just returning from a holiday. A man standing at the back of the stage is dimly lit up, before fading back in to the shadows.
What followed was the hilarious and sad tale of her arriving at the crematorium to find that the service which should have been ending had not actually started yet because the person responsible for the playlist, Trevor, was missing. And so the funeral began in silence, the director of the funeral leaving long moments of silence where the music should be, asking her audience to "imagine" the music with a condescending smile. At the back of the stage the black wall of curtain opens to reveal a transparent coffin with the assumed Peter lying inside, surrounded by funeral-goers swaying in silence to imagined music. To fill the silence, the funeral goers in the story desperately share stories and memories of Peter until Trevor eventually turns up, arriving in the background of the stage silhouetted by a glowing doorway.
Despite his arrival the music still won't play because of technical difficulties resulting in what Pauline said was the worst funeral she had ever been to. In the end it became quite a fitting funeral because at the end of his life Peter, who had been an avid music lover, lost his hearing to a tumour. Now that it was his funeral, his mourners couldn't hear the music either.
The curtain closes again on the background and a violinist approaches the stage slowly, playing Fratres, walking around the stage as he does so, at points accompanied by the piano in a conversation-like manner before slowly leaving the stage as the piece comes to an end. Pauline wipes genuine tears from her face before going on to talk about visiting Peter in hospital and how he changed as he grew sicker, became more judgemental and nasty, making it more difficult to know what to say to him or for her anonymous friend, Margerie, to even visit him as she claimed "it wasn't him anymore." The background of the stage opens again - this time to a hospital bed and IV drip with a glowing head acting as Peter, a nurse at the bedside reading the novel Snow by Marcus Sedgwick aloud to him, a gift that Pauline had given him.
More of the story follows from Pauline before the background disappears and reopens with a crowd of people (actually members of the Scottish Ensemble) wearing the uniforms of nurses and carers who walk off stage one by one as the pianist and a cellist play Spiegel Im Spiegel, leaving only one nurse on stage before the curtain closes again. Pauline speaks some more about her memories of Peter before a passage from Snow is narrated by the voice of the nurse while the entire Scottish Ensemble take their positions on stage to play Tabula Rasa, possibly the most incredible and intense piece of music I've ever heard.
Watching the two lead violinists, Jonathan Morton and Cleo Gould, play at such speed and intensity, rocking their bodies and losing themselves to such emotional music was an incredible thing to watch. The background of the stage opened again as they played, this time back on the hospital bed and the nurse at the bedside, and as the music grew more and more intense suddenly snow started to fall on them; I became so overwhelmed with sadness that I actually started crying. It was the end of Peter's story and life, and the curtain closed again. Reopening as the musicians kept playing to a large white screen separated from the musicians by a layer of gauze. One by one the musicians slowly stopped playing as the notes became lower and lower, leaving only the double bassist until she too fell silent. The lights dimming on the stage after a long and weighty silence.
Speaking on a panel after the show, Vanishing Point's artistic director Matt Lenton explained that the work was written with the intention to be a political piece about what the British Government has done and is doing to the NHS, a meaning that he has "buried" amidst the structured chaos and ambiguity of the work. The biggest criticism his work tends to receive is that it isn't necessarily clear what it is about, which Lenton takes as a compliment, more interested in how the audience interprets the work for themselves. He went on to explain that the work he tends to make "lives more in the world of music than in plays" even if the work itself doesn't necessarily involve music. This piece, however, was born with only the music being predetermined and the idea of having only two actors in the show - the narrator and the nurse. The rest of the show came together through the development process of improvisation and discussion with the Scottish Ensemble and the actors, talking about death and things which they had heard or experienced - the silent funeral for example.
The musicians were pushed out of their comfort zones by becoming actors in the show, they were the funeral goers and the "disappearing" nurses and carers in the background scenes, and were challenged by the unusual act of not being present on stage from beginning to end as they would in a typical concert. For me this actually gave them a higher level of importance to the piece, as they were not only providing the music which forms one half of the dialogue to this show, but they were embodying it as well through their movements as they walked around the stage or played their instruments with such intensity that their bodies moved almost involuntarily.
Up until seeing this show I'll be honest in saying I wasn't quite convinced by theatre - I am a film fanatic through-and-through - but the power of Arvo Pärt's music and the way it spoke to the story Pauline told has me sold. If Tabula Rasa makes a second tour I would absolutely go and see it, this is not one to be missed - a genuine masterpiece in my eyes.
Did you manage to catch it in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Inverness over the past month? What were your thoughts?
- Melissa x