The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn’t just a good title for a film. As theatre director Tue Biering points out, it encapsulated exactly why westerns have been so universal in their appeal: having a moral compass that always points to either good or bad, they make a virtue of stereotypes. No grey hats, if you like.
Thanks not only to films, but to TV shows, books and comics, children around the world have donned cowboy hats and mock-shot each other for decades. That westerns were also part of Biering’s childhood in Denmark partly accounts for the immersive theatre production that he and his South African co-director, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, bring to Sydney Festival: Dark Noon.
“I remember my dad introduced me to his number one favourite movie, Once Upon a Time in the West,” says Biering via Zoom from a wintry Copenhagen. “I have seen that movie hundreds of times, and it’s now, of course, my number one favourite movie, and I will give it to my kids.”
Biering did not set out to make a homage to westerns, however. His interest lay in the hallmarks of colonisation, regardless of continent: conflict over land and conflict over power structures. He was also fascinated by the difference made by the perspective from which a story is told.
“That was why I went to South Africa,” he explains, “and asked these amazing actors, performers and creatives to do a performance about Africa, with the western genre as a format or dramaturgy.” But he soon realised he was in danger of imposing a western story on the African cast, which was the opposite of his intentions. “So I said, ‘How about you tell my story?’” he continues. “And everybody had a lot of fun by reversing the representation, and also by reversing the power of who is telling whose story.”
Actors, of course, conventionally represent other people, a process Biering has extensively explored with students. “I found out that we actually really like somebody else to dress up as us,” he says, “so we can see ourselves from the outside. Not when it’s for the purpose of mocking or being mocked, but for the purpose of trying to do our very best in becoming the other person. And then it’s ‘Oh, do I actually speak like this?’ And it becomes a conversation, and I find it very powerful. But when it comes to mocking or using your power over others by telling their story, I think that is problematic.”
Humour, nonetheless, is a big part of Biering’s process – “having fun and playing with things” – and of the end production. “At the same time, I’m always aiming for the spot where it hurts,” he says. “In this production, my co-director, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, was always pushing the actors to relate personally to everything they were doing. So when you see this production, it’s not just a western about European migration. It’s also a production about these people’s experiences living in townships where killing and shooting was the daily life, and where the sheriff was not necessarily at work every day. Also the set design is kind of in between a western setting and what the actors recall of a township setting in Joburg.”
Biering doesn’t believe that theatre holds a mirror up to life, so much as it provides insights into it, and he encourages the actors to bring their own personalities to bear in their performances. He believes this deepens the theatrical experience, and gives audiences a sense of getting to know other people in a different way to reading about them or watching a documentary.
The show was devised via workshops held firstly in Johannesburg and then in Copenhagen, and from these a script emerged, in which the audience plays a part in populating the town that’s constructed in the course of the show. As part of the immersive experience, audience members might become anything from saloon patrons to builders. So should anyone who’s terrified of audience participation shy away?
“No. Absolutely not,” Biering insists. “Now I’ve been doing this for the last 25 years, I’m very confident in saying that you don’t have to be afraid because I’ve had audiences who are super afraid of this and really hate it from the bottom of their hearts. And they have said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting because I didn’t have that feeling.’ It’s very much about how you’re doing it… I am pretty sure that nobody has been walking out saying that this was uncomfortable because I think I’ve been very observant about what works and what doesn’t work. I really hate it myself, so I’m the best one to test it on!”
Dark Noon: Sydney Town Hall, January 9-23.