From the Old School Festival

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Old School Festival 3 presented by Mob Hit Productions
Arrata Opera Centre
Friday, June 13 - Friday, June 27

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Arrata Opera Centre

If an 88-year-old film has informed countless films and film movements, its initial relevance as a single piece of expressive artwork has not been underwritten by its status as an artifact. That’s the bold ethos driving Mob Hit’s Old School Festival. As works of art age and their original context passes from memory into history, the culture of the present can either curate the culture of the past, or update the context and try to appreciate it in a similar way to the original audience, albeit through a different lens. Though it doesn’t reject the importance of the former, Mob Hit’s decision to accompany John S. Robertson's classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with live DJ duo Spite Club clearly illustrates the theatre company’s allegiance to the latter school of thought.

“What’s interesting about that is a lot of these scores today can’t be performed in the way they were originally intended,” says Lawrence Leung, artistic producer of Mob Hit Productions. “So you’ll see a lot of people doing reductions or interpretations. As avant garde as it sounds to have a DJ there, it isn’t that much different from what people are doing already.”

The theatrical component of the Old School Festival adopts a similar old-is-new-but-not-really approach as well. The Mobsters’ production of The Duchess of Malfi has John Webster’s classic tale of bloody betrayal and revenge set against a gloomy backdrop inspired by dystopic fiction running the gamut from George Orwell’s 1984, Frank Miller’s Sin City and even 2K Games’ recent Bioshock. Though the Orwellian influence is practically requisite for anything produced in an English-speaking country bearing a “dystopia” label, the acceptance of excellent dystopic fiction from mediums often looked down upon by the mainstream is symptomatic of Mob Hit's approach to the festival as a whole.

“We certainly employ pop culture, but I think we do that because people understand that. They understand the language of pop culture,” says Leung. “The whole point of it is to establish understanding and meaning. We could spend a lot of time trying to make people believe that we’re really smart, and they should appreciate this because we’re so cultured and intelligent. Masturbatory is what it ends up being.”

“Pop culture is a very powerful tool,” says Scott Roberts, director of Malfi and general manager of Mob Hit. “Everything is influenced by everything else. When I researched The Duchess of Malfi, I found that there are two characters said to have influenced Frank Miller in his Sin City. The Cardinal and the Duke of that comic book were said to have been inspired by this particular play. So pop culture was influenced by a much older piece of art.”

While comic books have been slowly recovering literary credibility since Image’s Rob Liefeld almost single-handedly drove the entire industry to its lowest point in the ’90s, acknowledging the influence of video games on film may have all but the most unforgivably nerdy cringing. Like his acknowledgment of Miller’s contribution to the dystopic canon, Roberts insists that his esthetic nod to 2K’s art deco-infused, underwater-city-gone-wrong Bioshock is just that — an acknowledgment.

“When it comes to this show, I love the idea of a society gone awry,” says Roberts. “In Bioshock it’s much more of an Ayn Randian, The Fountainhead, kind of dogma gone wrong. I chose to say, ‘What would a world look like if fascism won, especially in Italy?’ I drew on a lot of images from Bioshock — the idea of fashion staying the same, revolutionary posters on the walls, cameras everywhere. Basically a place where there’s no hope left, and into this world comes this duchess who changes the life of everyone around her and makes them ask themselves questions they haven’t asked in many, many years. Of course, they get upset by that and try to kill her. Bioshock is a very passionate and violent piece of art and so is The Duchess of Malfi, so I thought it fit in very well.”

“I think especially with our reinterpretation of these things — it serves its purpose, but you definitely don’t want to go over the top with it,” says Leung. “You can do an homage to it, but you don’t want to completely immerse it in one pop culture reference.”