Over the hubbub of people filing into Queen Elizabeth Hall you can just make out the cries of seagulls, the slap of rope and the sighing of the sea. On stage there stands a projection of a proscenium arch, decorated with mermaids and sea serpents, while ‘Tiger Lillies: Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ hovers in front of the projected curtain. The lights dim and the eerie sound of a theremin fills the auditorium, we discern three musicians dressed as what can only be described as the fusion of a mime artist with a zombie sailor. The central figure strikes up a jaunty tune on his accordion, and the show begins.
From this point to the final scene, the three Tiger Lillies do not move, except to change from one instrument to the other. Around them, however, a staggering range of projections, designed by Mark Holthusen, come to life. As the first number goes its merry nautical way, we watch sailors staggering around a port before sailing off under the lighthouse. Yet because these are all projections, the figures seem like ghosts or visions, something not inappropriate for this version of Coleridge’s poem.
Lasting ninety minutes, this show uses The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a skeleton, incorporating chunks of the original verse throughout, yet not binding itself to the original narrative too closely. The Tiger Lillies, for the most part, did an excellent job of bringing out some of the music inherent in Coleridge’s lines and fitting it to their own style, particularly the description of ‘the curse in a dead man’s eye’. One weakness of the show, however, lay in the repetitive nature of the chosen style. An alternation between eerie piano and jovial accordion soon became so predictable that a brief piece sung with guitar backing was greeted with relief. Such musical repetition may well have aimed at capturing something in Coleridge’s verses, with their roots in oral narrative, but the poem succeeds by maintaining its disturbing mix throughout in a single voice, not by such foreseeable shifts as found in this show.
Indeed, the focus of this performance on the static musicians at its heart also meant that the figure of the Mariner became little more than a slightly more prominent ghost amongst the other projected ghosts. As for the Wedding Guest, he did not appear at all.
Many of these changes are excusable in the movement from one medium to another, even if we lose something of the Mariner’s ‘glittering eye’. An extended passage on the ‘water-snakes’ makes good sense in terms of spectacle. Less useful, though, was the insertion of a song on ‘Cabin Boys’ during which the Mariner’s molestation of a younger crew member was silhouetted on the stage. As well as being alien to the original work, this added nothing to the protagonist, and was not needed to comment on the character of the crew, evoked elsewhere in the ‘Hypocrites’ number.
As the show went on, the lack of variation in the music meant that it was up to the projections to support the evolution of the Mariner’s tale. This they did admirably, veering between the ghostly and the Pythonesque. Careful attention to each scene was rewarded as certain motifs were repeated: the resemblance of the ship’s mast to a crucifix was brought out through clever positioning, and the moon that shone over the frozen sea appeared to have a skull within it, a memento mori that remained until the Mariner repented.
Overall, this version of Coleridge’s poem did not captivate me as much as I thought it would. The program notes employ adjectives like “startling”, “emotional”, “raw”, “quirky” and “unexpected”. Although I can trace all such elements in the performance, its power, in spite of the marvels of technology, was ultimately vitiated by an excessively repetitive style.
The Tiger Lillies: Rime of the Ancient Mariner runs at the Southbank Centre until Sunday September 8th 2013.