Edmund. The Beginning

Edmund. The Beginning
Written, performed and designed by Brian Lipson. Antechamber Productions. Arts House, North Melbourne. 10 – 22 November 2015.

Early evening sunlight floods a large bare room in North Melbourne’s Arts House – no lighting grid above – it’s as if to say, ‘no artifice here’.  As if.  Brian Lipson enters in an arresting, intriguing costume – half man, half woman, but far more detailed than merely that.  A crown, a school blazer, a string of pearls, half an Elizabethan ruff, a 50s schoolbag, a sword.  One (rather shapely) leg in pantaloons and hose and a black high heel pump, the other in jeans and a heavy work boot.  As the light fades to dim during the show, these elements of Mr Lipson’s ensemble - and some items he takes from a large sports bag - turn out to represent each of the fourteen characters he weaves together – or segues between - in his one hour and twenty minutes monologue.  Mr Lipson has an attractive personality – intelligent, thoughtful, ironic, melancholy - and that helps carry us through what is a knotty and mind-stretching work.  Mr Lipson has said, ‘I like theatre to be hard work.’  His Edmund certainly is.

If you are not au fait with the following, you may find yourself bemused, confused, left out and possibly annoyed: Shakespeare’s life, King Lear, Hamlet, Harold Pinter’s first marriage and his estranged son Daniel, Pinter’s plays, in particular The Homecoming, Japanese Noh drama, as well as Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and their daughter Frieda. A character called ‘Brian Lipson’ (aged 13) also appears, together with his brother Martin (17) (that’s the school blazer) when they go to see The Homecoming at the Aldwych for a second time. 

All these things are evidently important to Mr Lipson – they engage his emotions as well as his questing curiosity – but how far do they engage an audience who have come to see an entertainment?  Or, that is to say, something recognisable about their lives or Life?  In general?

If there is a theme or thread holding the disparate elements together, it is the collateral damage, so to speak, or the discards, of the famously artistic or creative.  Mr Lipson’s narrator (some of the time) is Pinter’s son Daniel Brand – the son who changed his name after his parents’ divorce and his mother Vivien Merchant’s death from alcoholism at only fifty-three. The eponymous Edmund is Shakespeare’s younger brother, his junior by fifteen years and with the ambition of being an actor like his famous brother.  Absolutely true, apparently.  Who knew?  As far as we know, he failed utterly, never appearing in any play of his brother’s or anyone else’s.  His contribution to posterity was to lend his name to the ‘base bastard’ villain of King Lear.  Mr Lipson makes much of the very expensive funeral a presumably remorseful William Shakespeare laid on when the kid brother died at twenty-seven, riffing with some quite fine Shakespeare-like poetry describing the icy winter of 1607. 

As the series of stories proceeds – or as they are laid edge to jagged edge – Mr Lipson removes an element of his costume and lays it neatly on the floor – along with the glass of milk and plate of sandwiches he put down on his entrance (for Santa?) and to which no reference is ever made.  With his item-by-item striptease, he builds the expectation that he will eventually remove everything, until all that is left is, well, Brian Lipson. 

But no.  He stops short of this – which seems strange given that the piece is obliquely (or really) about Brian Lipson and Brian Lipson’s concerns - asking ‘why [is he] this strange actor-y creature?’ 

He has said in an interview that he has or had no choice but to be an actor, but he is ‘puzzled that this is [his] fate.’  The show (I am consciously using different words to define it – show, piece, presentation, etc.) then is of personal significance or importance to Mr Lipson.  The question then might be, ‘Is it of personal significance to us?’  Of course, it’s Mr Lipson’s job as a performer to make it so.  Apart from the fans and the cognoscenti, I’m not sure that he succeeds.

Armed with some prior knowledge, the show is, from point to point, interesting, insightful, amusing, moving, angry and speculative.  But it only just hangs together as a coherent whole – and it shouldn’t since so many things in it seem completely arbitrary or mischievous or (no doubt deliberately) alienating.  The program credits two prestigious directors – Peter Evans and Susie Dee – and Mr Lipson thanks a raft of collaborators – but this is decidedly and definitely Mr Lipson’s show.

Towards the end, when the natural light is almost gone and the room is really quite dark, Mr Lipson consults a notebook by the light of his mobile phone and reads out some ideas that he might have included in the show (and didn’t but now he has). Then suddenly there is a heartfelt plea for the validity of the misery of Daniel Brand (and Edmund Shakespeare and Nicholas Hughes and Frieda Hughes) against the historic, famous and therefore eternal misery of their parents and siblings.  It’s a big finish and almost emerges as a clear cri de coeur were it not for the many bits and bobs with which Mr Lipson has loaded it and muddied his own intentions.  On the level of performance, this is a tour de force – but the interest of someone’s subjectivity does depend on the subject whose subjectivity we are asked to witness.

Michael Brindley 

Photographer: Sarah Walker.

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter, buy our latest print edition or find a Performing Arts book at Book Nook.