We went to see a play at the Odeon Theatre Bucharest. It’s been about three years since we last went. Because when we last went, it was so awful that we swore to never go again. Time and circumstance conspired against us, however. So we wound up jammed in a loggia without hope or expectation. And, unsurprisingly, that total lack of both was completely fulfilled.
The play was ‘Hotel Room’, a piece originally written for TV, for David Lynch, in fact. So one might expect dark, one might expect moody. At the very least, I imagine, a sense of intangible strangeness. But that’s not how they do things at the Odeon.
The Odeon has a set procedure for all plays. Rule number one is ‘Make it quirky!’ (the exclamation mark here, is essential). The rule dictates that, any chance you get, make a character do something odd. Have them fall over. Make them stand in a corner. Song and dance numbers are mandatory, even in Ibsen. I’ve even see them have every character on stage raise their right leg, all at once, for absolutely no reason other than a pause in the dialogue.
Rule 2 is ‘Distract the audience’. This can be done by having one character creep up on another, or by having a few totally unrelated characters talking and moving in the background, or (as I also saw once) have a thousand different colored ping pong balls roll onto the stage down a hill. As long as it distracts from the text or nuance, it goes in.
Rule 3 is ‘Always use the same characters.’ The Odeon has about four or five stock characters, drawn from the archaic world of television soap opera. There’s the ‘Cute Kid’ – a little girl, always smiling, always happy. There’s ‘Block Mom’, the older woman, resigned, in charge, wise but hard-working. There’s ‘Daft Old Guy’ – he shuffles about muttering to himself. There’s ‘Naive Guy’ – always played by the same actor, who specializes in innocence. And there’s ‘Guy In Charge’ – who speaks for himself, really.
These rules were assiduously applied to ‘Hotel Room’ just as they are to any other play, be it by Shakespeare, David Mamet, Chekhov or Sophocles.
Part one of ‘Hotel Room’ is about two men and a prostitute. Lots of potential for dark meandering there. But not with the Odeon. We got ‘Daft Old Guy’, ‘Man In Charge’ and, naturally, ‘Cute Kid’ as the most unlikely prostitute ever seen on stage. When one of the characters visits the toilet, we get the quirky distraction of the sound of them peeing, played for an age, while ‘Cute Kid’ giggles along, knowingly, with the audience. We also got an islamic bell-hop, dressed in tribal clothes, who does nothing other than wander about and be ‘hilariously’ islamic.
Part two concerns a husband and wife struggling with madness and the death of a child. We got ‘Naive Guy’ and ‘Cute Kid’ – along with lots of candles. They were so inept and inappropriate that the piece took on a strange new level of surrealism all its own – that of characters mouthing words which have nothing to do with them.
The Odeon saved the best for last. In part three, we got treated to ‘Block Mom’ and ‘Cute Kid’ doing an extended dance number to ‘Woolly Bully’ by the appropriately named ‘Sam the Sham and the Pharaos’.
It was an evening I won’t forget. Never before have my sensibilities been assaulted by ignorance on such a large scale. I was left drained and depressed, and I carried home an extended migraine that lasted all weekend. So stunned was I that I got hold of the original TV version, directed by Lynch and starring Harry Dean Stanton and Christian Slater. And there it all was – the darkness, the undercurrent of malevolance and despair. Pitch perfect performances and absolute realism of character. While the script is by no means perfect, the film managed, at times, to achieve a genuine sense of brilliance. I am sure that Lynch was sorely tempted to throw in a song and dance number at some point, but being the genius that he is, he resisted that particular path to easy money.
