fri 29/03/2024

Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, Network Theatre | reviews, news & interviews

Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, Network Theatre

Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, Network Theatre

An absurdist royal wedding is a so-so theatrical find under the Waterloo arches

I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, suggesting a rich theatricality to come. And so in Ivona it proves in some aspects, if not in others.

Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was an early Polish Surrealist-Existentialist. His story of the commoner hauled out of obscurity to marry a young Prince potentially could have a timely resonance in view of the impending royal wedding, but I’m not sure that’s where this version of Ivona will strike most forcibly.

You have to have a care with Polish drama. There’s an absurdity and edgy metaphorical quality to Polish writers that often eludes directors over here. Scarlet Theatre had quite a success with their 1997 version, Princess Sharon, directed by Katarzyna Deszcz who understood Ivona as not just "simple" nor "stupid" as we are given to believe, but highly intelligent and in the end, something of a revolutionary in her refusal to bow to conventions of speech, form and manner.

Sturdy Beggars’ director, Kos Mantzakos, clearly comes from a different cultural stable. He perceives Ivona as partly a symbol of difference, a mirror upon which the vices of others are reflected and an allegory on silence. Gombrowicz’s eponymous anti-heroine is both silent and supposedly so ugly it becomes a turn-on for a young Prince at a court saturated in dissipation. Anything goes, but for this Prince Ivona’s passivity and rectitude offers something entirely more seductive: humiliation as arousal. One can imagine how this idea could have theatrical pay-offs but they don’t happen here.

Mantzakos’s vision runs to something entirely different. A slightly heavy-handed, heavy-costumed melodrama of whey-faced all-male cross-dressing performers, they act out this strange fable with stylised solemnity and occasional grotesquerie. Moments of psychological insight do nonetheless shoot out through Alexander Andreou, Sturdy Beggars’ founder, who makes his Queen Margaret a character who conveys an understanding of grandeur, ritualised majesty and character disassociation very reminiscent of French playwright Jean Genet.

Christopher Hughes’s un-Prince Charming, too, manages to underline Gombrowicz’s intriguing understanding of perverse emotional entrapment. "She’s still got us, we’re in her," he cries with surprising insight, trying to offload an entanglement of which he’s quickly grown tired.

One can see why. Bjorn Drori Avraham plays Ivona as if a traumatised marionette. Echoes of Lindsay Kemp, that extraordinary master of mime and creator of a gallery of complicatedly silent and passive characters, momentarily surface - but as quickly die. Avraham and Mantzakos perceive Ivona as almost complete victim. Handed an unenviable task for any actor, Avraham, with shaven head and gossamer shift, has fewer than a dozen words to speak and is left to wander the stage, for the most part shivering and adopting various attitudes of subjugation.

If the point is to show how such passivity makes itself a scapegoat, a magnet for attracting scorn, anger and violence in equal measure, then Mantzakos’s production unfailingly hits its target. By the end, King, Queen and Prince are all plotting Ivona’s death as an escape from uncomfortable memories her very existence inadvertently triggers. For the King it awakens memories of a sexual liaison with a maid that ended in the maid’s suicide; for the Queen, comparisons between herself and Ivona that expose her innermost feelings and herself to ridicule. For the Prince, it is simply a reminder of weakness. And none of us like to be reminded of that.

The piece is crying out for a wilder, sharper, more expressionistic form of production

Intended as a biting satire on class and power, for my taste, Mantzakos’s histrionic style seems misplaced on a piece crying out for a wilder, sharper, more expressionistic form of production. Congratulations however to production team Charlotte Randell, Gareth Howells and particularly costume and make-up artist Josie Martin who creates a heady collage of dark-green and blue eye make-up designs to accompany the white faces, scarlet lips and dizzying assortment of wigs and textured hats.

Ivona is part of Sturdy Beggars’ ambitious Brain Drain Season that will also include other "lost gems" of Eastern Europe by Stratiev and Molnar. A young company – Andreou only founded Sturdy Beggars in 2007 (the name is taken from the Poor Law of 1598 that designated actors as the lowest of the low in society!) - there’s nonetheless enough young talent here alongside Andreou himself and David Bartlett (a silky-smooth Chamberlain) to make one look forward to their next productions with keen and real interest.

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