Thrillers and Theatrics Text by Ole Petter Ribe (NO), translated by Maria Nichols Francesca
No one combines the theatrical with the cinematic like the theatre company Susie Wang. They have made a strange vow to the B film genre – and yet the result is so much more than a nostalgic spectacle: something totally unique, almost utopian.
The public is asked to take off their shoes and jackets as they enter the theatre space for the company’s 2017 production, The Hum. The shoes, because the stage setting depicts a beach; the jacket, because a strong lamp represents the sun and heats up the room. The performance begins as a supposed member of the audience undresses and disappears into the seaside scenography. Diaphanous silk fabric illustrates waves, and corrugated cardboard represents the sand on the beach. The vanished figure never returns from the “sea”. And that is how we are invited to join in the game of charades.
This is the real achievement and the most interesting aspect of Susie Wang: how they work with a utopian theme by choosing materials that undermine the perfect illusion, and then they do everything they can to create an illusion anyway. The impression continues to teeter and oscillate between fiction and the concrete theatre setting throughout the performance. Have you seen Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rabbit and duck illusion; you know, the image that represents both animals, but which is open about trying to trick the reader? Susie Wang intensifies and sustains the unpredictability inherent in this concept by combining the fun and games with the most profound solemnity. Background from Baktruppen
But then the members of the Susie Wang ensemble are not novices either. With years of experience from the legendary performance group Baktruppen, the director Trine Falch and set designer Bo Krister Wallström have total control of the theatrical devices and references. For the past five years, together with sound designer Martin Langli and actress Mona Solhaug, and with Kim Atle Hansen as associated actor, they have created well-composed tributes to human nature and its foibles. Susie Wang has made it loud and clear that – from their first hedonistic horror production The Hum (2017), to the second Mummy Brown (2018) and the third Burnt Toast (2020), which together form a trilogy, and the separate play Licht und Liebe (2021) – this alternative theater dimension has come to stay. “The new new theatre”, that’s a good way to characterize Susie Wang. They have a clear goal of finding new roads into the fiction and lean heavily on the poetics of the theatrical, for instance with their visible technical stage design aesthetic and an intense visual effects scheme. One of the fiction- creating techniques Susie Wang employs that I am particularly fascinated with is the use of obvious genre references from film; horror in particular.
Sadly, I do not belong to the generation that hid copies of monster movies in my underwear drawer, or grisly slasher posters under my bed. But I did work in a video shop from the time I was 16, and since then I have seen an average of one film per day. But it wasn’t until I saw the first of Susie Wang’s shocking performances that I was reminded of that virginal feeling of smuggling bloodcurdling R-rated films home and carrying on a horror marathon in my boyhood room.
So if you want to relive this rather juvenile echo, you should see Licht und Liebe at Nationaltheatret this fall! Shows the Way In
It is from an explicit genre cult that Susie Wang garners their style, among cinema classics such as Gaspar Noé’s drawn-out Irreversible (2002), Alexander Aja’s explosive The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and other midnight films from the many lesser-known crusaders of gore of the early 2000s. They are part of the New French Extremism, a sunken pool of cult films that, with their picturesque and grotesque style, stem from the 1970s splatter film genre and play heavily on the art of transgression.
Despite this Susie Wang has a humoristic approach to the somewhat esoteric film sources. You don’t have to be familiar with all the references in order to enjoy Susie Wang’s universe. Because it is also extremely direct and interpersonal. The best thing about the artistic project is that the prejudices or expectations never gain a foothold, because Susie Wang shows the way into their very exclusive surrealistic world. The Cinematic Influence
Let’s return to the play The Hum. After the “member of the audience” disappears in the waves, the same thing happens to Barni (Kim Atle Hansen), one of the main characters. However, half an hour later he shows up again, and it all goes to show to what extent the characters create the universe, and yet how artificial they become in the big picture. As when Chrissie Watkins is eaten by the great white shark in the first minutes of the film Jaws (1975), or Laura Palmer, who never appears alive in the television series Twin Peaks (1990–2017). The figures have an emblematic function; they are simple logos that represent persons. Because if terrible things are going to happen to them, which is common in horror films, then it’s best that we don’t feel that we know or understand them too well.
The cinematic influence in Susie Wang results from the fact that they build up the medium more strongly than the message. In other words, the form is so obvious, almost intrusive, and the content subtle. I never ask myself where the people come from or who they are, but rather how they interact and how they subjugate the time and the space around them. This is what is so seductive about the Wang universe. Porn and Modesty
The next production, Mummy Brown, is more tightly composed than its forerunner. This second production in the trilogy is set in a sparsely furnished museum. Yet it evokes something equally dark and instinctive in us. The spotless marble walls and exhibition objects play on our urge to want to touch something forbidden, the way children are drawn to stick their fingers into holes or pick at the scabs of their sores. It comes as a relief when the Danish-speaking Museum guide (Mona Solhaug) introduces the public and the visitors to the museum’s regulations: “You may touch it. It is from the past.” The alternative and deviating connotations are delivered in one single remark.
In Mummy Brown the story is driven forward almost exclusively by theatrical effects. The guide chews crispbread, crunching the rhythm. A tennis player comes in, sits down on a bench, and when she stands up again we see that she had bled through her white tennis skirt. A perfect spot which illustrates the first of the ten known ink drawings on the image cards created by the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. What we see evolving is thereby up to us to judge the significance and consequences of, just as the personality test by Rorschach is about what we see, rather than what the drawings represent. As in a murder mystery, we are given small hints ad absurdum. Visible Theatrical Skeleton
It all reminds one of the Italian film genre giallo: elegant and horror-tinged thrillers with Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) as a prime example. Argento focuses keenly on the bloody clues rather than on the common theme of the plot. Just as Mummy Brown displays a visible skeleton of theatrical devices.
The past is one of these devices, as it rises up from the stage floor in the guise of a comic book-black hole. An abyss that ultimately drags the humans down with it. It is just so incredibly effective to use such visual tricks, when the quality of some of the costumes is simultaneously so excellent. The combination is shocking. By costume I mean the prostheses created by Fanney Antonsdottir. Pulsating organs and monstrous boobs – that are cut off, eaten or sewn back on. A bloodbath that attains HD quality compared to the Mickey Mouse hole on the stage.
In Mummy Brown one is served the entire spectrum of the human body’s vulnerability. From the infant that is torn out of the pregnant abdomen to hairless penises that are cut off and left vibrating on the floor. And the pact Susie Wang has made with us allows them to incontestably carry on infinitely, without our wanting to divulge them. They have in fact already shown us the theatre skeleton in their closet. Because this utopian premise has such a suggestive effect, there is no reason to complain about the apparently amateur style. Chance Encounters
The hotel lobby in the production Burnt Toast may also visually be mistaken for amateurism, but is essentially both accomplished and genuine. Susie Wang employs suggestion with an intuitive flair. The lobby is nothing more than a convenient place for chance encounters – after Danny (Kim Atle Hansen) and Violet (Mona Solhaug) sit down in beanbag chairs after checking in at the reception desk. The performance consists of an hour-long dialogue in an English from the southern United States. The conversation is so brusque and bizarre, but also banal, that it becomes spectacular.
In other words the universe of Susie Wang is not a loco world without associations to our own, no matter how skewed it is. It is with loyalty to their own logic that Susie Wang elegantly avoids ending up in some lofi film category, despite my comparisons. It might easily have become gorno (fetishizing gore) or splatstick (comic splatter). Because the company concocts its own world in its own language, it also imbues the violence and body fluids with a certain deformed meaning. The entire universe seems to consist of active, metaphysical phenomena, as when Susie Wang writes that the Present has an outer edge, or that the Past can attack. To attribute poetic personality traits to the most intangible concepts is a refreshing contribution to our times.
The sound is absolutely essential, especially in Burnt Toast. Here the sound design takes on the job exactly the way a long dolly zoom or a sudden jump cut might have in a film. The sounds are responsible for much of the animation. Just as the museum guide in Mummy Brown constantly munches crispbread into the headset microphone, we can hear the receptionist Betty (Julie Solberg) in Burnt Toast scribbling loudly each time she signs a piece of paper. All of the actions are amplified and add a psychological aspect to the theatre space, where the matter in the Wang universe seems to have a life of its own. A Place Unto Itself
I could write from here to hell and back again to the 1970s about references and technique. There’s a lot to dip your hands into, and to love. The combination becomes a long, almost scrupulous narrative style with mercilessly tight sound editing and a substantiated visuality. In all the different narratives it is impossible to catch the ensemble in one single superfluous second. It’s difficult to come to terms with whether it is the details that complete the whole, or whether it is the whole that allows the details to fall into place.
Susie Wang mainly keeps to the sublime world of drawing room theatre, where it is precisely the world – this rarified universe – that plays the main role, and the many characters play up to this world. If you are lucky enough to see Licht und Liebe, I want you to notice one thing. All of it transpires in the same way as in the famous television series by the Danish film director Lars von Trier, The Kingdom (1994–1997): The hospital in the series, which is supposed to depict a general hospital and provide the framework for a medical drama, is simultaneously not a hospital and far from being a soap opera. Not as we understand the concepts, in any case.
In the same way, the beach in The Hum is not a beach, and the story not a adventure horror story. Nor is the museum in Mummy Brown a museum, nor the plot a murder mystery. And the hotel lobby in Burnt Toast is absolutely not a lobby!
And in conclusion, as the jury of the Ibsenprisen described Susie Wang’s latest production, when it was nominated for the prize for 2020: “Licht und Liebe is a place unto itself”.