Anna
Arianna
TRUTH AND TREASON is a new play by Rahul Varma, one of the most politically provocative playwrights in this country. I went to Teesri Duniya’s new rehearsal venue to interview the young director Arianna Bardesono with a sharpened pencil. Political theatre and directing are two of my personal obsessions. Like the old Diaghilev story, Ms Bardesono managed to astonish me.
I had mistakenly assumed that she was a novice who would not know a diagonal cross from a hot Fresnel. I was very wrong. Bardesono studied acting in Italy where she soon started to direct. She managed to adapt a novel, and working with a dramaturge, she had her first success. From there she went to England where she studied with a teacher of the Lecoq method, or as we know it here, very physical theatre. She followed up with the National Theatre of School of Canada, where she started in English and completed her studies in French, and she noted ironically that the two styles of teaching (and directing) were very different.
Due to her extensive experience with playwrights and dramaturges, she was truly enthusiastic about working on TRUTH AND TREASON. She directed a reading of it last November and has seen it through various rich and fruitful re-writes. In fact I was informed that the version being rehearsed while I waited for the interview, was brand new, and was being integrated as I watched.
Bardesono said that she felt at ease directing a work in progress, where the blocking is in continual flux. The most important thing was to focus on the characters and their very realistic relationships. The style of this play is very cinematic and she called it an action based play. Therefore it is naturalistic, and based on an historical event.
The young director said that her dream was to direct her version of Goethe’s Faust in Italian. She explained that working in a second or third language creates a kind of distance from the material and pointed out that communication with the playwright was yet another layer of language and its traps. She was fascinated by a play in which so many voices are heard and she was delighted with the multiculturalism of the cast.
This play has some of Montreal\s most accomplished actors. David Francis, Sarah Garton Stanley, Alex Ivanovici, as well as a distinguished multi-ethnic cast, promise to make this a provocative and inspiring evening of theatre.
The play, said Bardesono, is about “failed democracies” The United States being the foremost example. We are all complicit in their failure and also their victims. There is no such thing as a “modern war” people die, and whole cultures are bombed into oblivion, and t’were ever thus.
As Sartre said; “There are no villains, only victims and accomplices.”
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