Exquisite Anarchy

By T. E. Kulem

A LETTER FOR QUEEN VICTORIA

Written and Directed by ROBERT WILSON

Texas-born Robert Wilson, 31, is one of the theater's most lauded aesthetic anarchists -- a modern child of Dada. While his current experiment is called A Letter to Queen Victoria, it has nothing to do with Queen Victoria. She does appear briefly in the person of Wilson's 88-year-old grandmother, Alma Hamilton, who is adorned in a white gown, black sunglasses and a regal red sash. Unlike The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (TIME, Dec. 31, 1973), which lasted twelve hours and centered on painterly images evolving in glacially slow motion and almost total silence, Queen Victoria consists mainly of verbal anarchy. In a typical scene, characters shoutingly reiterate the following word-sounds contrapuntally: "HAP-HATH-HAP-HAP-HATH -- O.K., O.K., A-O-K, O.K., O.K. -- SKY-SKY." This sort of thing is punctuated by screams of primal therapy.

Wilson is skillful in combining 20-20 dream vision with auditory parody. In one scene, the backdrop carries the words CHITTER CHATTER printed several hundred times. Half a dozen or more couples are seated in silence at small cafe tables. Simultaneously, they all begin gesticulating and making high-pitched gibberish conversation. In comedic nonsense, this replicates every cocktail party that anyone has ever attended.

All of this is well and good, as are Wilson's command of visual space and dance consciousness, but in the realm of language he makes Gertrude Stein at her murkiest sound like a paragon of pellucid clarity.

-- T.E.Kalem

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