The body is a clown on stage and illusion brings us back to life.
By Rashed Issa
Al Safeer 19/11/2001

"Stiff" seems like a highly illusive play because of the skill it uses to camouflage itself and delude the spectator. For at first sight the play seems to aim at nothing but laughter. The play hides behind this laughter a revolution in theatre rules
by presenting a new genre of comedy which is not familiar in our part of the world: the comedy of the body. We are rather used to see the comedy of movement (farce); this is because we are good at stumbling and falling, which we use as a source of laughter. The comedy of the body deals with the body as a tool and a topic at the same time. The play starts with a man, who wants to have his beloved wife buried, calls the undertakers for whom death is a casual procedure and the dead are mere commodities. This is what makes this play more of a black comedy. Human emotions are received with utmost indifference.

At the caretakers, the widower passes through many controversies: The receptionist, who is always ready for romance, falls in love with him. She recites a scene from a play in exactly the same words; she, even, uses the name of the character in the play.

She also gives him back a ring, which he hasn't given her. Petra Massey gives in this scene a perfect performance for love scenes. Then we move to the hot competition among the workers to sell the tombstone; every one displaying his design as in auctions. Then we get to the part when they dismantle the body of the wife to sell its parts. We watch the dismantled body performing a very harmonic dance with puppets.

This dramatic game borders in every moment on the verge of tragedy, for the distressed husband is the one leading the game. He often finds himself in a critical situation because of his undisciplined actors, who do not abide by the rules of the game. And when he is deeply involved in the character, while other actors seem to go back to their original personalities (the Spanish actor, Aitor Bassauri, babbles in Spanish, and the German actor Stephan Kreiss gets back to his German identity), he explodes in their faces because they haven't provided the suitable atmosphere for reciting his elegies for his dead wife and decides to end the game until one of the sympathetic actors brings him back to stage. The end of the play is announced by uncovering the illusion process: we hear the phone ringing through a tape recorder carried by the actress; the curtains open to reveal an unprepared actor and the sound effect is not in harmony with the movements: the knock on the door is heard separate from the moving hand. All this arouses laughter and blows up the cover of illusion. This play proves that the spectator is ready to conspire, believe and get involved in whatever happens in front of him, as long as the rules of the game do not underestimate him, but rather consider him as a partner.

This British theatre group has chosen a very simple design in its show: few chairs, a table, a coffin, and a wall with a window through which you can see two words written backward (tombs- funerals). This gesture is part of the whole process of illusion, which turns the stage into real life.

The actors were very eager to build a lively relationship with the audience, addressing them amicably and always promising more laughter and using some colloquial Syrian expressions, which they picked up very quickly. Of course language was a barrier for the actors who depended in their performance on spontaneity.

Spymonkey is a group that started its career with this performance in 1997 with the Director Cal McCrystal. The play was performed in many European cities like Zurich, and London and won the Total Theatre Award in Edinburg Festival in the year 2000. Members of this theatre group have a rich and varied theatre experience starting from writing script on stage, as in this performance, passing through street performance and even circus theatre.

Comedy is not an easy kind of plays, and a comedy like Stiff needs very serious work. The danger in a work like Stiff lies in its choice of a very tragic topic: "death" and taking it to the path of laughter. Such a work makes us speculate about our own ready made theatre forms and the fact that some Arab comedians have been pre-occupied for over two decades now with one particular play. Isn't it time for something new?