Building a theatre work at Odin Teatret

The many young and not-so-young performers who attended Eugenio Barba’s explication of dramaturgy as practised by him and his staff and students at the Odin Teatret (Aula Magna, University of Malta’s Valletta campus), a famous theatre based in Denmark, must have been impressed as I was.

Varley has the difficult task of performing almost throughout without seeing- Paul Xuereb

With seriousness and perception, Barba introduced a work in progress, asked members of the audience to suggest “telegraphic” statements embodying the spirit of what they have just seen, and above all to conduct a public rehearsal of scenes from the work they have witnessed.

His comments on the three long stages comprising a student actor’s training and on the way in which an idea for a new work submitted by a performer goes through various layers of development before it is accepted and developed for performance were stimulating.

The work in progress, Ave Maria, features one of Barba’s senior actresses, a major figure at Odin Teatret, Julia Varley, and has been in preparation for some years.

Based on Varley’s desire to commemorate a famous Chilean actress, Maria Cànepa, the work developed under Barba’s influence into something much more complex, though Barba himself admitted that some who have seen it have criticised it for trying to be two different works at the same time.

Barba’s dominance as director and Varley’s carrying out, not without occasional symptoms of weariness, his requests to repeat a sequence several times until it met Barba’s expectations, showed what it is like to work in a theatrical environment where technical perfection is expected of the performer at all times. There was only one moment when Varley, answering a question from the audience, said she was finding it difficult to perform when Barba’s reaction to the same movement was inconsistent from rehearsal to rehearsal, a statement on which Barba himself refrained from commenting.

I was able to attend the Tuesday morning session of the exercise, so I cannot comment on its continuation and completion on Wednesday.

Barba, a director and theatre theorist who has been celebrated for many years, is clearly a man with whom it must be a privilege to work but also who knows his mind very well and not easily crossed.

This man, now in his 70s but looking a good 10 years younger, is a man with a strong personality, a director who stamps his image on works developed by his performers from their own ideas and in their own way.

Malta has by now seen a number of Odin Teatret productions. I, for one, would welcome seeing more in the next few years.