Sydney, Tuesday 13 August 2024: The Ramsay Centre was proud to present two special showings of an acclaimed and unique stage production of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to packed audiences at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) this month.
The two showings both took place on the same day; first, an exclusive afternoon performance and masterclass for ACU and University of Wollongong (UOW) Western Civilisation students, then an evening performance for approximately 200 members of the public, who filled ACU’s auditorium performance space on a rainy Friday night.
David Pereira and Julian Lamb have been performing The Waste Land for more than a decade, including before packed audiences in Canberra, Adelaide, Wollongong, and Hong Kong. Their performance has received glowing reviews; The Age said, ‘Julian Lamb and David Pereira bring clarity to ‘The Waste Land’, The Riotact Canberra praised ‘an utterly inspiring performance’ while it was lauded as a ‘highly accomplished performance’ by the South China Morning Post.
While the pair had not performed The Waste Land for a couple of years, the Centre persuaded them to do an encore for our scholars and members of the public with an interest in this most influential poem of the twentieth century.
The performance draws out the poem’s vast array of characters as well as its rich lyrical language, all the while complemented by the rich sounds of the cello. The music features passages of improvisation, original composition, and direct quotation from the work of some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, including Sibelius, Shostakovich, and Schoenberg.
Following the afternoon showing, the Centre organised a special masterclass on the poem and performance for students, with Mr Pereira, and Dr Lamb who lectures in the UOW BA in Western Civilisation degree.
In the session, hosted by Centre Academic Director Professor Diana Glenn, the students asked the duo a range of questions about their performance choices, the music, the poem and its modernist genre.
The conversation covered the metre of the poem, its references to Dante and other Great works and how as a modernist poem The Waste Land both rejects strict formal features and structure, as well as finds its own unique structure through interplay with typical poetic features.
Dr Lamb told the students he decided to be the sole person reciting and acting out the whole poem to bring cohesion and focus to the incredibly complex text that jumps rapidly between disparate characters and scenes of desolation.
Achieving cohesion was also his aim in employing the theatrical device of dressing himself into business attire throughout the performance. Dr Lamb slowly dressed into tie and shoes and jacket throughout his recital, joining the beginning of the performance and the poem to its end. The creation of an Everyman figure was loosely inspired by T.S. Eliot himself, who worked as a London banker.
Mr Pereira said he relied on the words and the rhythm of the poem to create the musical landscape for the performance, sometimes ensuring the music and words worked in unison and other times drawing more from the emotion of what was said to create musical connections. Mr Pereira said he was drawn to the collaboration in order to break out of the conformity of his classical training for something more interpretive.
He said he used to, from time to time, think words were ‘…an assault on music’ but now appreciates the potential for their alignment, sometimes finding music benefiting from being ‘explained’ by words and words ‘explained’ by music.
Centre Academic Director Diana Glenn praised the performance saying ‘…the formidable talents of Julian and David brought Eliot’s poem to life and paid a marvellous tribute to a voice of poetic excellence in the modern era’.
Media contact:Sarah Switzer0407 816 098 / sarah.switzer@ramsaycentre.org