The Sum of Testament is Love

She She Pop and Their Fathers in the final moments of Testament. Photo: Doro Tuch. © She She Pop.

Through the frame of King Lear, She She Pop’s Testament (2010) invites audiences to consider the meaning of inheritance and the collective human capacity to enact love. Recently performed in the United States for the first time, Testament proposes a shakeup in She She Pop’s working methods, and offers a real-time ode to the performers’ real-life fathers, as well as the Western world’s theatrical forefather. When they started making Testament in 2009, members of the female performance collective She She Pop had started to hit their fortieth birthdays; some were having children, others were making decisions not to have children. Concern surfaced about aging parents. While until 2009 the German company had focused on work of their own devising, in King Lear, they found a play about three daughters, one aging father, retirement, inheritance, responsibility, and love.

These issues propel the structure of Testament, which is divided into a series of scenes that enact parental care and impending loss. Some moments are nearly verbatim Lear, others are song and dance shakeouts set to pop music. On Sandra Fox’s basement rec room set, complete with record player and projection screen set against perforated panels, Testament unfolds as a revelation of both its own creation process, and also of the very real progression of aging that happens onstage in front of the audience. Through fluid scene transitions, inevitability barrels forward in Testament; the production is both an exploration of nostalgia for moments gone, and a eulogy for losses that haven’t happened yet. Both take on particular gravitas because of their exploration of Lear’s themes. She She Pop decided not only to talk about their fathers, but also to bring them on tour and onstage. Testament is billed as a creation of She She Pop and Their Fathers, and in it, three of She She Pop’s septuagenarian fathers perform alongside four company members.

The structure of Testament follows the five acts of King Lear, with sections from all five read during their corresponding Testament acts. When the house lights snap off to signal the show’s beginning, Lisa Lucassen removes the lens cover from a video camera located upstage left; on a portable screen stage left appear the projected words: “WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,” “KÖNIG LEAR,” and “TRAGÖDIE.”¹ Lucassen then declares, “My father is old and frail. He rarely leaves the house.” After Lucas-sen’s opening confession, she, Sebastian Bark (the company’s one male), Mieke Matzke, and Ilia Papatheodorou tell the audience quotidian details about their fathers (Bark’s father, for example, is a fan of Brecht), an echo of Lear’s opening discussion of the King. All wear Lea Søvsø’s costumes of everyday clothing mixed with vests and Shakespearean ruffs. In Sven Nichterlein’s lights, the atmosphere is casual and frank.

Following these revelations, Lucassen returns to the easel and turns through its paper scroll until she reaches the stage direction “The King comes.” An older man, in his seventies at least, enters the stage. He walks awkwardly, weighed down by enormous, black leather boots with protruding toe studs. Trumpet in hand, he pauses once for a rollicking brass salute. A second old man arrives, wearing a bow tie and the same boots. Another salute welcomes the third dad. They are the fathers of Bark, Matzke, and Papatheodorou. All three cross the stage to far right, where they take up residence in worn recliners arranged upstage in a diagonal line. When they sit, three separate cameras, teetering on tripods, focus on the faces of these older men, projecting them on screens upstage. Through these frames, the fathers loom in the background and look down at both offspring and audience. She She Pop has long proclaimed that none of them are actors, directors, or playwrights; this is...