Toronto

Red Bull Theater’s Sardanapalus & Global Watch Party Review

By Rebecca Dillon

Toronto hosted a successful viewing party on October 29th at the Robarts Library Theatre! Below is a summary of the salient points raised from the performance’s reception:

Our Toronto-based audience agreed that the staged reading of Sardanapalus by the Red Bull Theater enhanced overall enjoyment and appreciation of the text. The actors’ nuanced delivery of the play’s poetic language teased out striking shades of humour with well-turned phrasing and comedic timing. The audience additionally observed elements of ‘inadvertent’ comedy unique to this production. 

Distinctive moments of humour arose due to the dramatic rendition’s form as a staged reading, which sits halfway—rather more than halfway—between any silent, individual reading of the text and an all-out theatrical performance. Contingent on the performance’s structure as a ‘reading,’ several moments from the play produced an ironic dissonance between the actor’s spoken words, or a stage direction, and its affiliated action on stage. Moments of mirth arose when lines like “She’s dead” were not preceded by Zarina’s (Atra Asdou) expected swoon; tragic stage directions such as “He draws out the weapon from the wound, and dies” prompted audience laughter when they were accompanied by Salemenes’ (Sanjit De Silva) return to his seat after withdrawing an invisible weapon from his side. The situational irony produced by such ‘unscripted’ moments were of great benefit to the production and were well-acted by the cast.

Some of the audience thought that the performance might have benefited by the inclusion of the play’s atmospheric and auditory directions, such as thunderclaps during the storm sequence. However, in considering the play’s closet drama form, which implies Byron’s intention that the ‘sounds’ of thunder and music remain for the eyes of his readers and not their ears, the absence of auditory support for this production is perhaps fitting. 

In addition to audience interest in the stratified and gendered power dynamics between Sardanapalus and Myrrha, as well as the language of dust, astrology and names which accompanies the play’s prevalent themes of legacy, fatalism and mortality, the generative post-production discourse culminated in considering the significance of viewing a live play screening from an alternate place and time. Though it did not quite have the element of Hamlet’s Mousetrap of watching a play within a play, the curious doubling of the live and screen audiences, with separate reactions and post-performance queries, poses an interesting question about the appreciation of art in ‘live’ time. How do the experiences of those present for the production differ from the experiences of audiences at a spatial and temporal distance from its source? It was a wonderful opportunity to witness what would, if not for the recording, have remained an ephemeral, and to those not fortunate enough to live in New York, inaccessible performance.