All you have is care

Following on from watching Citizen Kanes Godless excess recently, and having watched the first ten minutes of Rupert Everitts documentary on sexual tyrant Lord Byron last night, I remembered a trip to Battersea Arts Centre, back in April. This was to see a Kneehigh performance of 'Don John' with my sister and her boyfriend. In the past my sister worked at kneehigh, based in Cornwall, on the administration side of things.


We didn't realise beforehand it was a modern reworking of Mozarts Don Giovanni, and the Don Juan stories. There was quite a bit of lurid content on stage with rape, sex and violent scenes where I looked the other way, and which caused my sisters boyfriend who I sat next to and had just met for the first time perhaps a little awkwardness. However, trying to brush this aside, I was blown away by the whole production and the cleverness of the direction, by Anna Rice.


The set was astounding for a start, the live musicians were superb and at the end of the show I was pulled up onto the stage by one of the handsome dancers in the show for a bit of a twirl! Quite an experience.

The most moving scene however was toward the end when the ghost of the 'Commandatore' gives a speech to Don John but faces us the audience. This is a war hero whom Don John had murdered, after raping his daughter who'd been struggling to care for her very ill father.

I cant find the relevant quotes from the script online, but he was talking about the wretchedness of life and then repeating 'all you have is care'.

So then the speech ended 'and you John, you have none' and I think with that line in mind Don John then died.

In my understanding of the word post-modern, I would label it such with this show as a sign of our times in being so over the top and sensational, bandying about references to futile religion with a lovable but mocked priest as one of the main charachters. The directing was so powerful, when the speech came about care, it reminded me of the glorified so called 'good' people, that work in charities or as carers or in the NHS, or social worker friends. Maybe people do want some spiritual direction or to make conclusions about life when they visit a theatre. I felt a bit sad that someone might come out of the show reaffirmed that they can choose to be a good person out of their own strength, by showing care. That they are not the excessive hedonistic Don John portrayed, so everything will be okay.

I had a look at the some clips of the closing scene of Mozarts Don Giovanni online, where the ghost appears to Don and they mostly ended in Don falling to his death into flames. In the opera the commandatore asks Don Giovanni (in Italian) if he will repent. Don refuses and then complains 'who is ripping my soul apart?' before falling into what seems to be a tradition of live flames being used in the theatre.

I wonder if the mixed reviews of Don John, with theatre critics either loving or hating it (I was shocked it could recieve even one bad review) was influenced by a sense of the sacreligious. Maybe those who hated it, loved something about Don Giovanni that had been lost?