Go Down Moses

The Adelaide Festival Centre’s website declares Italian writer/director Romeo Castellucci to be “unquestionably one of the most important figures in contemporary theatre” – to which I say, the emperor is wearing no clothes. Arguably the worst play written this century, Go Down Moses is an insufferably pretentious slog that amounts to long stretches of boredom, interrupted occasionally by moments of disgusting, utterly brainless sensationalism. The play is structured as a series of short tableaus that lack a strong unifying theme and are of little interest in and of themselves.

The performance opens with a mind numbingly tedious sequence in which a bunch of silent suburbanites walk slowly around a sterile street corner, occasionally bumping into each other, with most of these confrontations ending with one of the participants meekly collapsing to the ground… next we are treated to the sight of what appears be a small animal being slowly lowered by rope into a meat grinder. These two scenes are staged in such a maddeningly obtuse way it’s hard to tell exactly what is happening.

More clarity ensues in the following three scenes… a woman writhes in agony, bleeding copiously, as she struggles to give birth in a cramped toilet cubicle. She abandons the child soon after, under the delusion that the baby is the second coming of Moses. A kindly police officer interviews the distraught mother, trying to break through the barrier of her religious mania in order to ascertain the location of this missing child. These scenes seem like the setup for a gripping thriller, the characters are intriguing, the dialogue fiercely intense and the acting chillingly persuasive. Unfortunately, it’s all build-up and no pay-off, once the interview sequence is over, the audience is plunged into two totally unrelated scenes… an excruciatingly drawn out sequence of a woman having an MRI scan, and then a “day in the life” of a tribe of cavemen – in which they skin a rabbit, eat dinner, bury a dead child and then have sex before going to sleep. 

All of this is accompanied by an obnoxiously intrusive score by Scott Gibbons, which tells the audience what to feel with all the subtlety of a whack round the head with a sledgehammer. Castellucci’s lighting design is similarly heavy-handed in its attempt to underline the emotion of each scene.

The best that can be said of this production is that the entire cast – Karen Beins, Kim Browne, John Brennard, Rascia Darwish, Gloria Dorliguzzo, Luca Nava, Stefano Questrio and Sergio Scarlatella – all deliver bravura turns that try hard to inject some genuine human emotion into this incoherent mess of half-baked ideas. The stunned, slightly subdued applause that Go Down Moses ultimately received is probably more a testament to their valiant efforts than Castellucci’s self-indulgent vision.

Benjamin Orchard

Photographer: Guido Mencari