Theatre review: Maria-Magdalena (Wayn Traub)

Published on Sunday 7 June 2009 19:31

**** TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

ON STAGE, a man dressed as a kind of crazy raven prowls around a revolving platform like some dark celebrant of a religious rite, making fierce stylised gestures and singing strange, brilliant falsetto arias of invocation or satirical denunciation.

Behind him, there is film, sliced, startling, driven by the post-electronic score of composer Jaan Hellkvist. Sometimes it shows a team of five gorgeous Asian beauties dressed in old-fashioned nuns' habits, dancing, taunting, accusing. Sometimes it shows a blurred and voyeuristic sexual vision of a modern urban scene. And somewhere, a glib female estate agent tries to market an old monastery, while the walls ring with shrieks of a medieval monk who castrated himself for shame.

This is Wayn Traub's Maria-Magdalena, the last in the astonishing "Wayn Wash" trilogy of this young Belgian film and theatre-maker. And, like its predecessors, Maria-Dolores and Jean-Baptiste, seen at the Tramway in 2003 and 2005, it uses a range of theatrical and filmic means to explore a post-religious landscape in which Europeans can no longer live with their old, discredited religious faith – misogynistic, repressive – but are grotesquely impoverished if they try to live with no faith or ritual at all.

Unlike them, though, it also features Traub's live presence, alone on stage. In the end, it comes across as a fierce, brilliant apocalyptic warning that through repressive Christianity and numbing consumerism we have lived too long in ignorance of the dark, bloody life-forces of destruction and creation that lie deep in our psyches; and that our only hope of survival lies in a creative unleashing of them, which may terrify us out of our wits, but will also put us back in touch with a reality that we have dangerously lost.