Ragnarok, Doom of the Gods (theater review)
Kevin Andrew Murphy September 5th, 2006
I had never before conceived of the Norns as pinheads with topknots. However, as you can see from the attached picture, the maskmaker and costume director for The Shotgun Players in Berkeley did:
This is for their production of Ragnarok, Doom of the Gods which will definitely be playing next weekend (September 9th & 10th) in Berkeley and possibly the weekend thereafter (according to some portions of the website but not others).
The theater space is the old 1908 Â outdoor ampitheatre at John Hinkel Park, and yesterday at 4, the weather for the special Labor Day show was pleasant turning to cool over the two hours of the production.
I went with my friend Yvonne, who knew the playwrights, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, and introduced me to them. Elizabeth was also playing Frigga, Odin’s wife.
The actors ranged from passable to excellent, with the standouts being Ben Dziuba as Loki and Erin Carter as everyone from Helga, the actor’s wife, to Thokk, the woman without tears. Her delivery of Thokk’s soliloquy gave me a frisson, and that’s what good playwrighting and acting are all about.
But the masks. Yvonne said the first time she’d seen the production, they made her think of pig snouts. Myself, I was just wondering why, when Snorri was getting into his father’s medieval Swedish costume trunk, he was somehow pulling things that owed a lot more to Comedia del Arte than to anything Scandinavian. The time shifts to include current day referrences in the script were mild in comparison to the disjoint of the masks. Costuming the jotuns as clowns made a certain amount of sense given their trickster nature, but having the Norns be pinheads with topknots was just bizarre, and not in a good way.
There was a small turnout yesterday, but most of them were part of the Berkeley pagan contingent, so most everyone already knew the stories. Of the gods, Braggi was underused, acting more as spear carrier than poet in most scenes, and Iduna didn’t seem to have a line that wasn’t talking about her apples. But all in all, it was an enjoyable performance, and good to see something in the fantasy vein on stage as a new play.