TS ELIOT’S poem “The Waste Land” is brought to life in a vibrant recitation by Julian Lamb accompanied by the haunting cello of David Pereira .
TS Eliot
In the flow of performance it is certainly difficult to make sense of the poem. At one moment Lamb is playing a gypsy woman reading a tarot and at another he is asking us to meditate on the dead body of the soldier. There is no apparent order to the poem’s fragments and the many difficult and obscure references are a further barrier to understanding.
With limited success making sense of the words, I was drawn into the sound of Pereira’s beautiful cello, which fused with the feeling in Lamb’s voice to convey struggle and anguish.
Lamb slowly dresses over the performance. While doing up his tie I imagined him as a businessman speaking affirmations into the mirror so he can bury his pain and put on the correct face. At the end of the performance, Lamb takes a briefcase and slips offstage: if not healed by his trek through the abyss, he is at least now in control enough to face the social and professional word. He has survived the waste land.
The performance is accompanied by “Tales of Ordinary Madness”, a poetry collage developed by Ernie Glass and performed by Cassie Brizzi. Brizzi performs snippets of songs and dramatic writings on madness, for example the Chief’s monologues from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. While some of the stories were engrossing, many of the pieces needed more context: the whole was not greater than the sum of the parts.
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