The Nearly Invincible Monkey King

Told by Diane Wolkstein

With musician Jeff Greene

National Gallery of Australia, Wednesday February 2

This show was a story-telling of the first part of the famous Chinese story of the Monkey King, by internationally renowned teller Diane Wolkstein. I went to see it because I am working on a show that is a re-telling of the Inanna myth, working from a translation co-authored by Diane Wolkstein. I had already seen her perform Inanna on a DVD and was curious to see what it was like to see her live.

Diane doesn’t cut an exciting picture when she first enters: an eccentrically dressed old woman with a vague air but bright eyes. Her introduction told us that the monkey king is the greedy part of our personality, and then told us that she wouldn’t interpret the story for us, she would just tell it.

She stood and there was a long dramatic pause and she began.  To my dismay, she began in just the same way she began the Inanna story, in a stilted, artificial voice, with every word over-emphasised and pauses between every phrase and sometimes every word. Jeff Greene, the musician working with her, underscored almost every word with an obvious bang, clack, squeak or tinkle. All this was made worse by the rather muddy sound quality of the mike looped off her ear, unnecessary in a small theatre with passable acoustics. I found it hard to concentrate on the actual story told in this strange way, and started to dread the next fifty minutes.

Luckily, Diane slowly left behind this over-emphasised telling as the pace of the story picked up, and she started to take on the various characters of the story. Like many of my generation, I know the story from the wonderful Japanese TV series Monkey Magic, with its stagey fight sequences, camp costumes, camper acting and smatterings of Buddhist wisdom. The TV series concerned itself only with Monkey’s journey to the west with the monk Tripitaka, the sea monster Sandy and the pig spirit Piggsy. Diane’s story this morning was the fascinating first half of the monkey story, where Monkey grows to become such a powerful being that no-one in Heaven can best him, but fails to grow wisdom or restraint, until Buddha himself imprisons Monkey inside a mountain. The more familiar half of the story was for that evening, which I was unable to attend.

One of the wonderful things about Diane as a story-teller is her use of the original text as much as possible, cut down as necessary to fit the attention spans of contemporary audiences. And the text is wonderful, full of colourful imagery, very human gods and an ambiguous morality.

Diane’s stagecraft, her movement, her use of space and effortless switching between characters was beautiful. But every time the pace of the story slowed, she reverted to an annoyingly stilted style of telling that got in the way of hearing the story itself. With this was a lack of variation in rhythm, continual brief pauses and almost no longer pauses, and a predictable and repetitive use of music. The few longer pauses in the telling when the music went silent were a palpable relief. They gave space for the power of the story to sink in. It would have sunk deeper had there been more of them.

This was a one off performance with an audience of about forty, almost all families with children. For all my criticisms, it is a great pity that the performance did not get a larger crowd, and that the National Gallery did not see fit to advertise the performance more widely. It’s a beautiful tale.