Go see this production if you like, enjoy the fin-de-siècle not-quite-decadent if you can, the officer with the handle-bar moustache greedily groping his fiancée’s
servant — a mood of rich silliness only counteracted by Jonathan
Greenman's portrayal of Bluntschli as an obnoxiously reasonable
progressive thinker — but don't expect any new ideas from this staging
of Shaw's clapped out, socialist-snobbish script. War's not glorious,
sermons Shaw — hammering out his message as if afraid the thickies at
the back won't get it — it's a bloody business where underlings take
part in cavalry charges against walls of guns & other such PTSS
inducing activities, for the simple reason that they're scared of
disobeying their officers, because these officers possess a higher
social status. And this — post the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars, post eleven
years of western troops in Afghanistan — is meant to be news? Hands up
all those who've already seen or who intend to see this production, who
have a romantic or glorified picture of war? Even the warmongers in
Germany and abroad no longer sell their violence in places like Libya
& Mali as romantic glory, but rather as sombre & technocratic
endeavour, actually something only really the experts can understand,
but still essential for reducing the terrorist threat (sic) on the streets of our European metropolises.
There
is occasional interesting detail about the world of the 1880s/90s.
Greenman's Bluntschli tells Raina, played upper-middle flauntingly by
Poppy Tirard, that the most common injury sustained in a cavalry charge
are not bullet wounds but broken knees, as the riders, scared shitless,
press their horses too close together in a reflex attempt to avoid
what's going to hit them. Yet these curious little finds should not
excuse the Hamburg Players' decision to work hard on a complacent play
for a complacent audience.
A
disconnect, BBC Radio 3's word of the month, a monstrous series of
disconnects, that's what's going on here, a disconnect between what the
individual actors & directors in the team choose to present on stage
& their real life experience, a disconnect between the Hamburg
Players & their audience, a disconnect between what that audience
thinks it wants to see in the theatre, & the daily life they go out
into the morning after. It's obseqious to give your middle-class
audience — the people in society with just enough education to be able
to begin taking responsibility — another chance to see a play wearing
the 'socially critical' badge. They can see it, then give themselves a
good pat on the back. Didn't just sit on their arses watching Jungle Camp, no, dragged themselves out to watch something ... anti-war ... anti-authoritarian,
even, well, or so it was, back in the 1890s. Before getting up the next
day to lives in which they'll continue either not to vote at all, or
vote for parties who've done nothing to stop the continued involvement
of German troops & weaponry in Afghanistan. More to the point, some
in the audience will get up the next day to go out to work for Airbus,
or any one of Airbus's numerous satellite companies in the greater
Hamburg region.
As
the epitome of Hamburg-disconnect regarding the question of arms and
the man, and as one of the principal reasons why so many English native
speakers from all over the globe come to Hamburg, the Airbus world is a
subject I'd far rather see on a Hamburg Players' stage than this, Shaw's
ignorant & racist fantasy about how Bulgarians, a people whose
language he couldn't even speak, might relate to one another. Airbus
Military is a business unit of Airbus, which produces five different types
of military transport aircraft. None of these planes' final assembly
takes place in Hamburg, and nevertheless Hamburg's 10 000 strong Airbus
workforce play “a decisive role in the development & engineering of
all Airbus aircraft.” i
Is that ethically acceptable: to assist in the production of bizarrely
expensive aeronautic long goods vehicles, ferrying soldiers, guns &
even small fighter aircraft around the globe, so long as you don't make
the bullets & bazookas yourselves? And what about the fact that
Airbus is in the middle of an infinite fusion with EADS, the European
Aeronautic Defence & Space Company, one of the world's biggest arms
manufacturers, & a major backer of the fearless Eurofighter
planes? Something for the Airbus dads — who wear their Airbus T-shirts
to the artistic celebrations of the local Steiner-Waldorf school where
my eldest daughter goes — to be proud or to be ashamed about?
Hamburg
is a city in which the disconnect about militarism is inside all of us.
Why weren't the main actors & directors involved in the production
interested in exploring rather than concealing that disconnect? I'm
party to the disconnect myself: my main income comes from teaching
English in the south of Hamburg, where a sizeable minority of the Airbus
workforce live; the regularity & size of my income depends in part
on a kickback from Airbus's mountainous profits, engineers &
purchasing managers with an overly-comfortable salary in their pockets,
wanting to buy the language-skills edge to the next promotion from yours
truly. Were the Hamburg Players using a strategy similar to the one I
use, when the conversation in my English classes is headed towards the
north German arms industry? — (as a recent Hamburger Abendblatt article
demonstrated, Airbus is just one of many players) — steer clear of the
topic, because it's risky? i.e. stage an anti-war play, but not so that
it can be seriously experienced as an anti-war play, as you don't really
want to trouble your audience?
Isn't
it a far greater risk for Hamburg Players to cling so tightly to their
middle-brow agenda, because by doing so they permanently alienate
younger generations of theatre goers in Hamburg, for whom competent
delivery in period costumes just isn't where it's at? Why don't they
commission new work from English native speakers living in Hamburg who,
for a minimal fee of something like € 100 - 150 would feel privileged to
bring a new piece of art onto the stage? I'm luckily not in a position
to be able to write such work myself, but know of half-a-dozen such
writers with a track record of print publication who'd jump at the
chance of having a proper stage for their ideas. Finally, what's the
story with the younger members of the cast, Eddie Gray, Tamaryn
Sutherland & Poppy Tirard, none of whom look a day over 26: why do
they want to put all that effort & the acting skills they
unequivocably have into such an unambitious project? Is it just for that
warm feeling you get from sitting on one of the higher seats in an
ex-pats' club, or have they at least worked on their own personal
cultural-conservative philsophies to guide such actions? And there I am,
the audience member, “getting angry, getting angry, with so many
questions unanswered.” (Norman MacCaig)
i Quote from Airbus's own website.
