Scott Walker’s Drifting and Tilting at the Barbican Theatre last week was a consummate performance art miracle. The custom-set song cycle was presented with chilling honesty of spirit and consistently gut-wrenching intensity, an unequivocal masterpiece in directorial authenticity and haunting clarity of intent.
A rightly-dubbed “heavyweight cast” of collaborators came together with extraordinary focus to present a series of eight surrealist snapshots with a style not unlike a living, breathing music video. The harrowing result was a hypnotically abstract feast for the senses$$s$$ an anguishing, languishing opera of mental, emotional and sociological disturbance.
Walker’s concepts are visual, visceral, muscular, yet at the same time satiny and slippery. We see the implicit question mark that hovers over the stockinged head on a potbellied crossdresser, flailing for a newspaper buffeted by wind, his euphoric desperation for good news, bad news. We see the slamming of a paint-soaked wrecking ball into an elasticized drop screen, threatening to burst the grotesque arches into the life of a tormented, blindfolded Valjean, kneeling with husky whip. The fleshy, flubbery heartbeat of the bassline as a boxer throws punches into the belly of a suspended pig carcass, the disconcerting tenderness as he embraces the body to still it as he would cradle any punching bag. We see images of war, images of death, baritones in nooses, naked bodies with heads shrouded in a wind sock. We see puppetry and object animation, skittish, spasmodic choreography.
Billed as one of the major musical events of 2008, the much-anticipated collaboration indeed attracted a “seasoned team of creative visionaries” with feature performances by Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Dot Allison (Massive Attack) and Gavin Friday (Virgin Prunes), lyrical operatic powerhouses Owen Gilhooly, Michael Henry and Nigel Richards, and a finale with London’s own boy-next-door current cult phenomenon, Damon Albarn at the rostrum.
The sequence of tragedies was buoyed by all the opulence of a full 50-piece string orchestra alongside Walker’s original band, a shrieking, wailing, throaty soundworld supporting the internal structures of the narrative concepts, fleshing out the skeleton of Walker’s sparse song settings.
Realised and embodied with a jarring neutrality and lack of pretention, Drifting and Tilting was a dirge-like visual chaconne, base and elemental to the human condition. Curiously simplistic and refreshingly non-referential: wholly engaged, wholly engaging. If this is the future, bring on Tom Waits, David Bowie, Rufus Wainwright.
Season Closed
