Review: Eschet, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Death is always present in the puppets of Etgar Theatre. They are immaterial waifs: empty, trailing shirts that float with a ghostly grace. Their fleshless heads, gaunt bone-white creations with sooty sockets for eyes, hover just above the collar. In fact, they don’t so much seem puppets as lost souls trapped in a timeless morality tale and forced to endlessly retread their regrettable actions.

Eschet (literally ‘Wife Of’) works its way steadily through the Old Testament tale of Yehuda and his three sons, the eldest of whom is married off to Tamar before dying without fathering a child. In accordance with the law transferring his marital obligations onto his brothers, Tamar weds Onan so as to preserve the family name. In turn, Onan dies, as divine punishment for his refusal to impregnate his brother’s wife, and Tamar ought to pass to Yehuda’s youngest son, Shelah, still in infancy. Finally, out of desperation to conceive, she disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces Yehuda himself.

It is a story without absolute sinners and saints; one of forced hands and impossible positions. The puppeteers are simultaneously guard and guardian, enforcer and protector. They strap themselves into a chest place, drape a shirt around their lower torso and share legs with the creature, literally walking them through their painful deeds. At times, they throw off their puppets out of sympathy, standing up against the injustice done to them. Elsewhere, they force that of other, plunging heads downwards and dragging by sleeves.

Besides this external impulse, these puppets – Tamar in particular – are stalked by dissociation and rupture of self. In the throngs of true love and sexual passion, their heads float from their bodies, as if elongated necks entangling one another. At other points, the self splits for the skull to witness the trials of the body. Loss of identity, of Tamar’s identity as always defined in relation to another – wife of, mother of – is brought to the fore.

However, while the lightness of these puppets suits love, it is less accomplished in portraying the weightiness of grief, which is more often where the narrative thrust lies. Grief only comes when the performer is burdened with an object, literally weighed down by the awkward wooden tabletops that double as graves.

There are a couple of wrong turns. Onan’s sin is treated as an act of lust, his hands crawling over Tamar’s legs before intercourse, where the text – sung in the original Hebrew and projected in translation – suggests a guilty inability to cope with the situation and we could certainly make do without the bluntness of a pregnancy slideshow.

Simple, muted and perhaps unable to send the mind spiralling, Eschet is nonetheless a very human piece, always in touch with the impulses and emotions that drive it forwards.