The Second Woman

‘A hundred performers playing a man all serve up a different image of masculinity’

interview with Anna Breckon and Nat Randall about The Second Woman

by Dana Linssen

Georgina Verbaan plays the leading role in the theatrical marathon The Second Woman. Over the course of twenty-four hours, she will play the same ten-minute love scene with a hundred different male counterparts. Australian theatre makers Anna Breckon and Nat Randall staged this mix of performance and video art before: ‘But with a livestream to the Tuschinski theatre, we’re adding a 24-hour live film to this.’

Whether you intend to stay the full 24 hours or go home again after 24 minutes, the theatrical marathon The Second Woman promises to be one of the Holland Festival’s most memorable events. And is it even a theatrical marathon? While Georgina Verbaan plays the same ten-minute love scene with a hundred different counterparts at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, her performance will be recorded, edited and shown live on the big screen at Amsterdam’s Tuschinski theatre. Is it then not a film after all? We spoke with Australian video artists and theatre makers Anna Breckon and Nat Randall via Zoom in order to unravel their work, which is at the intersection of film, performance and video art.

The Second Woman defies classification, they immediately say. They themselves call it hypothetical theatre, for instance, or live cinema. They took inspiration from 1950s Hollywood melodramas, but to the extent that there is a plot or action to speak of, it is most of all a homage to John Cassavetes’ classic film-about-theatre Opening Night (1977). This is not the first time Breckon and Randall are staging The Second Woman. The primal version dates from 2016, when Randall played the lead herself and toured the piece throughout Australia. New versions in Taiwan, Canada, New York and London soon followed. But for the Holland Festival, the two thought of something new. Taking their cues from video art, projection screens always play a central role in their theatrical and performative work. Breckon: ‘But seeing Christine Jatahy’s Three Sisters adaptation What If They Went To Moscow? completely changed our ideas on what film, theatre and performance are. In that piece, the audience sees both a theatre performance and a recording of Chekhov’s play edited live one after the other. What do you then see? And what does this say about representation? We wanted to experiment with this ourselves.’

This wealth of forms consequently affects what you will see in Amsterdam. On paper we are presented a scene for a man and woman. But these one hundred performers that Verbaan will find opposite her may be ‘cis-men, trans-men, non-binary persons or people who identify as men’, they explain. It calls to mind the notion of gender performativity and what Judith Butler (an American philosopher and gender theoretician) famously said about gender being “something we do”, rather than “something we are”. Randall: ‘A hundred performers playing a man will all serve up a different image of masculinity’. In each place where we put on the show, we get a glimpse into that country’s population of men. Like a sociological experiment. Or a theatrical dataset. And whoever plays the woman will react to that in turn, or point out certain things. The Second Woman has a number of fixed elements, but mainly lots of variables.’

They are still in the middle of the preparations when we speak. It was clear soon enough that Georgina Verbaan was the perfect person to play the female lead. Breckon: ‘Georgina has played major commercial roles, but she doesn’t shy from experiments. She’s an actress with a certain resilience, power and endurance, but also has a vulnerability and fearlessness that makes her highly suitable. She can go from zero to one hundred in a second or two. She’s comical and dark, dangerous with a languid eroticism about her. On top of that, she easily connects with others.’

How do you prepare for such a demanding performance? Randall played the role hundreds of times, but she’s rather laconic about it. ‘Everyone has a different strategy. But it’s mainly a mental trick. You shouldn’t forget that there’s a short break every two hours. You can squeeze in a power nap then if absolutely necessary. For the rest, it’s the energy of the audience that keeps you awake. And coffee. Or you can fall asleep onstage, and then that becomes the performance. But that never happened to me when I played the part myself. When the sun rises, your body gets back to work again as well.’

The fact that it’s a 24-hour performance does something else, they feel. It turns your body into a clock. They reference traditions in performance art that put the performers’ physical endurance to the test, particularly performance artists like Tehching Hsieh, with his one year-long Time Clock Piece (1980-1981). ‘These are forms of endurance art. It’s about maintaining precision, ending with the same drive with which you started’, Randall feels. ‘It has to do with acting, certainly, but also with other forms of mastery.’

It also brings to mind work that goes on round the clock, the late-capitalist 24/7 economy. Especially “invisible labour” and the mining of time. Breckon: ‘And often this is the labour of women, who are expected to be emotionally available 24/7, for partners, children or relatives. You could compare women’s bodies to a clock that is permanently on snooze. Maybe this isn’t the first major statement we wanted to make, but it’s all in there regardless.’

This brings them to The Second Woman’s other major themes, from gender roles to stereotypes, and how film and theatre amplify these. Randall: ‘We explore heterosexuality and its associated power relations from a queer perspective. The great diversity within the group of people we cast as counterparts means other matters causing and relating to inequality are addressed as well, such as class or ethnicity. I can recall a show in Australia for a predominantly male audience, where people were making quite good-hearted, but still typically male jokes, and how this also affected the people onstage. Other times it was less about power, and more about intimacy and identity. Some evenings were pure behavioural studies. In London we saw it was more about performativity itself, because a lot of queer people were participating and giving a portrayal of masculinity that was almost campy.’

How this will go in Amsterdam is impossible to predict. After the Holland Festival’s opening call earlier this year, essentially anyone could register. This was followed by an online casting procedure, which is nearly complete when we speak. They wanted to find a group of people sufficiently distinct and diverse in order to allow for surprises, but which also would be representative of masculinity in the Netherlands in some way. Breckon explains: ‘They’re given the scene and asked to memorise it. There are no instructions for costumes, and if they forget their lines, Georgina will lead them through the scene. For the rest, there are a few rules to keep it safe for everyone. When you’ve see the scene several times, you’ll automatically notice how the framework behind the performance is also part of what you’re watching.’

‘And you soon know more than the actors,’ Randall adds. As a result of which you also have a certain agency as a spectator. ‘You’ll find out what the good moments are for dipping out and coming back.’Breckon posits yet another characterization. ‘Yes, it’s theatre, performance art and film, but in another way it’s also a time and site-specific artwork. It exists just then and there, by grace of both the actors and the audience.’

Of course they’ve also thought about what remains of the ‘film’, once the live performance is done. Can it exist independently? Does it have value on its own as well? As gender- and genre-bending as both form and content of The Second Woman are, so too are the ontological questions that remain. What is the reality of film? Does what we see on a movie screen exist? And does this change when we know it’s also physically happening a few kilometres away? Anna Breckon and Nat Randall don’t have all the answers, but they hope audiences will come up with still more questions.

This interview took place online on 24 April 2024.

Dana Linssen is a philosopher and writer. She is a film journalist for NRC and teaches film at ArtEZ and Utrecht School of the Arts.