TO use the work of William Butler, Yeats as the basis for an experiment in multi media art, as the Throwin' Shapes company does in its production of The King of the Great Clock Tower at Arthouse in Dublin, is to be confronted almost at once with a fascinating ambivalence. On the one hand, Yeats railed against "the filthy modern tide" and complained that "When I stand upon O'Connell Bridge in the half light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark." This Yeats seems to be the antithesis of technological modernity, seeing in electric lights a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. But, on the other hand, there is the Yeats of Sailing to Byzantium, choosing a robotic machine the metal bird as his image of aesthetic perfection. And the ambivalence is carried through into his attitude to theatre itself, an attitude which combines a search for ritual purity with a practical willingness to use diverse forms and technologies to achieve it. With Yeats, every statement and its opposite tend to be equally true. The answer to the question of whether it makes sense to use video, computerised music, and multi media techniques to produce a Yeats play is yes and no. If the strain of contradiction, the sense of impossible ambivalence held in place by the power of the ritual, is present, then so is Yeats,
The King of the Great Clock Tower is a good choice for such an experiment. It was written for the dancer Ninette de Valois, and then re written (as A Full Moon in March) for actors, suggesting that Yeats himself saw it is as a piece whose form was unstable and adaptable. It is all ambivalence, poised between an outward stillness and a wild, raging eroticism, as the initially silent and unmoving Queen (danced by Halinda Froudist in this production) gradually gives way to an ecstasy of sex and death.
It belongs very definitely to the "total theatre" strand of Yeats's work, in which the words are intended to be lost in "patterns, of sound as the name of God is lost in Arabian arabesques". And it plays on the idea of disembodied voices (the voice of the Queen, sung here by Delia Scaife, who also co wrote the music, comes from one of the two attendants) in a way that almost invites the use of electronic technology.
The weak points in Sarah Jane Scaife's uneven but sometimes mesmerising production, then, have nothing to do with the desecration of a sacred text. The play is quite open to the kind of invention and experiment brought to it. The problem, if anything, is that the experiment does not go far enough. Though surrounded with screens and lights, and counter pointed by intermittent episodes of wordless filmed action that is inspired by, but certainly not a part of Yeats's text, the conventional play is actually presented with a good deal of inappropriate conservatism. There is actually nothing at all in Yeats's text to suggest that the actors and dancers should be dressed, as they are in Chisato Yoshimi's designs, in Cultic Twalette costumes.
By doing so, the production obscures the central contrast on which the play hinges, that between the ethereal, timeless world from which the Queen has come, and the mundane time bound world (hence the play's title) in which she finds herself. The cod Celtic costumes place everyone in a world that is, to our eyes, ethereal and timeless anyway. Having gone so far to give the play a modern technological context, it would have made far more sense to put the actors in: modern or neutral dress.
As it is, the uncertainty rubs off on the performances of Raymond Keane as the King, and Jack Walsh as the St roller who demands that she dance with him and kiss his lips. Both are strong on rhetoric and comfortable with the language and Walsh's physical skills are evident, but neither seems sure of where they are or of how precisely they are meant to relate to the technology that surrounds them.
Against these weaknesses, though, can be set some genuine enrichments. The drama depends on the idea of dream world behind the world of reality. The use of video technology to give his dream world visual substance runs the risk of making it literal and therefore risible. But Scaife's visualisation, with director of photography Henri Clairon, of the Stroller's encounters with the supernatural manage to be at once physical and abstract and to achieve, with their stark black and white atmospherics, the feeling of being, in the words of the King, "a screen between the living and the dead". The fact is that new technology, when handled as intelligently as this, does offer a way to convey the notion, so central to all of Yeats's work, that there are worlds within worlds. We get, literally, a deus ex machina, the world of the gods evoked through technology.
Most fascinating of all is that the result of bringing art and technology into such close alliance is not that the art becomes mechanical but that the technology becomes spectral. The ghost in the machine, the spiritual yearning at the heart of technological inventiveness becomes haunting. For that alone these experiments deserve to continue.
