Monte Carlo is famous for its casino, its royal family, its Grand Prix motor race, and its status as a tax heaven. But how many people know that a world amateur theater festival is held there every four years? Last August, amateur theater groups from twenty-three countries strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage. It was an immense gathering from all corners of the globe, held in Europe's answer to Hollywood, and yet the publicity the festival receives remains a quiet whisper.
Although under the auspices of the International Amateur Theater Association, the World Amateur Theater Festival in Monte Carlo is actually organized by the amateur Monegasque theater company, the Studio of Monaco. The ammeter status of this group, as well as the festival's aim of giving amateur theater an international stage, explains it low profile.
With the odds stacked against them, these productions that were successful were triumphant indeed. Poland gave one of the most interesting presentations. Scena Plastyczna, a student company from the Catholic University in Lubin, performed a strikingly experimental work, so different that it took its stunned and confused audience several seconds before it began applauding. The Herbarium, by Leszek Madzik, was an allegorical play tracing man's journey through life, presented in a series of half-lit images inspired by the work of a Polish sculptor, Alina Szapocznikow.
Ominous Imagery
It was a work of often disturbing, dark, and brooding visual images - a figure descending, in string harness, onto an egg cracking open with a blood-red interior; the disembowelment of four mother figure, huge, gaunt puppets lit by blue and black light; and hanging corpses left dangling over the stage, as the eerie, echoing music retreated, giving way to the uncomprehending silence of the audience. While it was a test of purely visual imagination and its overall message may have remained shrouded in ambiguity, the group deserves applause for accepting the challenge to experiment within the theatrical medium.
In stark contrast to most of the other productions, Finland triumphed in the standard of its presentation and the powerful acting it displayed. Although the Tampere Student Theater did not use an original piece - performing instead a Finnish translation of Nigel William's Sugar and Spice - they had chosen a play with which they clearly identified. They were so in touch with the themes in the play that the performance was alarmingly convincing, and one felt as if intruding on real individuals in their apartment in London.
Survived Limits
These were the two productions that most lived up to amateur theater's role as one quite different from that of professional theater. They survived the limitations of the festival, and both refused to be mere copying machines.
The Monte Carlo Festival must be commended, however, for giving amateur theater a stage, and a forum that crosses all national barriers. It is all the more disappointing, consequently, that many of the performances presented so uninspiring an image of the state of amateur theater in the world today. This disappointment undoubtedly stemmed from the failure
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