As Madame recalls tender erotic times with Ehud, a soft organ melody underpinned with a slow pulsing is counterpointed with a clock ticking like dripping water. Ambiences are woven through with music (Gail Priest). Save for a few pieces of furniture, Madame D’s home is a spectral space large painted drops hung at each end are screens onto which are projected images cast by her psyche, drawn and animated (Gomes and Sam James), sometimes abstract (geometric steps), sometimes concrete (a sketched stairway).Įerily mutable, Madame’s home is ours, her eyes ours, our earphones her ears, open to the soundscapes of memory and curiosity: “What is a wing?” triggers the flap of wings, mention of the heart brings its beat. The interior world of Madame D conjured in the book’s poetic prose is rendered vividly theatrical by Gomes and his team.

Madame D (Katia Molino) obsessively relives her late husband Ehud’s repudiation of her urgent philosophical querying and his reduction of her to mere sexual being.Īggressively reclusive, the ageing Madame D bares her bottom at the window to passersby, dons monstrous masks, frightening the locals, cruelly refuses the sympathies of a neighbour and immerses herself compulsively in recalled dialogues with her husband. The subject’s stream of consciousness engagement with the past is fused with intimations of mortality and an intense focus on the body and the world of the senses. Once again, Theatre Kantanka, led by Brazilian-Australian director-designer Carlos Gomes (he’s written about scenography and about Brazilian theatre for RealTime), has created an idiosyncratic work that entices its audience to brave an unfamiliar world, this one conjured from the writing of Hilda Hilst (1930-2004), a Brazilian whose work is only beginning to appear in English translation.Ī poet, novelist and dramatist, Hilst was above all an experimenter who defied the formalism of the patriarchal literary order, writing from a distinctive female perspective: sensory, corporeal and aching to know “the sense of things.” All of this is evident in Hilst’s short novel Obscene Madame D and Kantanka’s account of it.

The obscene madame d