Sergio Blanco’s latest offering with Tangram Theatre Company, which he directs, is radically different from his other works. He describes Divine Invention Or The Celebration Of Love as a talk rather than a play and the performance by his translator and long-time collaborator Daniel Goldman, is precisely that.
A fascinating, surprising and challenging work
The work's beauty lies in the descriptive and life-affirming passion of the prose. It has the meta-theatrical, auto-fictional style made famous by the acclaimed Franco-Uruguayan playwright; it’s simply applied to the format, perhaps unexplored until now, of the performance lecture, told from behind an old wooden table, that itself could probably tell a few stories, appropriately in a dimly lit lecture theatre at Summerhall.
On the table is the text that Goldman reads, though he clearly knows it too. Each of the 30 scenes, along with a prologue and an epilogue, is printed onto a separate sheet of heavy paper. Each is announced by name or number and when completed the page is meticulously placed to the side. Also on the table are some books, a notebook, a microscope, an apple and a human rib bone. Blanco’s directions say that ‘the text should be read with a certain vocal and gestural restraint, a certain containment as befits the reading of any lecture or talk’ though that should ‘not exclude the swell of certain emotions’.
Goldman follows these orders, but from a listener’s perspective, given that there is no movement, more variations in tone would be welcome. While his forceful delivery builds as the scenes unfold and its consistency become captivating, some softer, gentler moments would suit certain scenes and provide an element of variety and changes of mood.
The content is wide-ranging, with people, locations and themes changing from scene to scene. He interweaves first experiences of love as a teenager with his boxing instructor and the story of Francis Bacon's doomed romance with George Dyer. He journeys through the history of love in art, literature, music and science and from his childhood devotion to Superman, to Egyptian love poetry and from Tibetan meditation to Shakespeare.
His self-confessed attempt to say something new about love is a fascinating, surprising and challenging work. “One morning, as I was writing, I suddenly understood that as a species, through incredible stubbornness, we were able to write love into our genetic makeup, and that this is enough to redeem us all. We were given mouths to bite with, and with deep intelligence and beauty, we learned to kiss each other.”
