More moustache-wax, sir! The Hamburg Players stage Arms and the Man.

     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.

Graphic Novels! evening, this Sat. 9th Feb, Projektor, Hamburg.

Filmmaker, graphic novelist & storyteller Bernard Caleo

This Saturday, 9th Feb, at 8 pm, is your chance to experience an evening devoted to graphic novels, at a film & discussion evening I'm hosting. The venue? - The Projektor, Sternstr. 4, on the first floor, directly above Cohen + Dobernigg book shop. We'll be showing the documentary film "Graphic Novels! Melbourne!" on a big screen, but before that there's a panel discussion with the filmmakers Bernard Caleo & Dan Hayward, & with satirist, children's book writer / illustrator & poet, Andreas Greve. Entrance for whole evening - discussion + film - costs € 10. Hope to see you there!

Karl Kraus bio-pic set to smash Arendt flick

        In one of the most unlikely cinema stories of the new year, we can exclusively reveal that leading Holywood studios are lining up to scoop the rights for a bio-pic about the life of the early 20th century German intellectual, Karl Kraus. With movie-theatre screens still warm with the release of the Hannah Arendt movie, Holywood bosses, dealing over their decafs, have been saying things like, ''If not now, when?” and ''What is to be done?”, the thought that in so doing they may be quoting Lenin nibbling only at the corners of their minds.
        Karl f *** ing who? I got onto reading Kraus through a sixteen year old series of connected accidents, which I now feel grateful for and flattered by, leading as they did to the Santa Barbara agent phoning me up, asking me if I thought the slim, regional, small-press and German language Kraus biography could work converted for world-wide cinema release. The first accident: Alison, who my sister shares a house with in Oxford, subscribes to the LRB & leaves it in the Oxford loo, where I find it during my visits from ’97 onwards, & get hooked on it. The second accident, also from 97: I fall in love with & pledge allegiance to the woman I’m now married to; she’s German. Over a geologically slow time period  I learn to read enough German to be bothered to confront the middle-class middle-brow German literature that her generation carry with them from their parents: Stefan Zweig, Hesse, Günter Grass (always there on the shelf: do find me someone who’s reading him in bed), a few woman poets like Ingeborg Bachmann, Nelly Sachs & Rose Ausländer thrown in. Before we grew older, happier, wiser, we tried to get each other to read stuff that was important to us, so she tried to get me to read Stefan Zweig. A pressure which I resisted, apart from one lapse on a fearful winter night in 2004, before the morning on which I was due to teach the whole history of the colonisation of South America to a class of badly-educated, undisciplined twelve year olds. (Part of my training in flagellation / Steiner-Waldorf teaching). Genuinely not knowing how to whip the appropriate worksheets out of the net in those days, I thought I’d whip through Zweig’s historical novel about Magellan, the south American explorer, instead: perfect teaching prep. I could still only read German at snail speed in 2004, the heart banging away like the clappers all the while with the thoughts of the kids the next day.

Review: Danton's Death by Georg Büchner. Thalia Theater, Hamburg.

Jette Steckel’s new production of this German classic is a buzz, a rush, a gig; Büchner’s script, one of the most astonishing products of 19th century European theatre, is given a more minor role. Until the performance last night (Dec. 29th 2012), all previous performances of Steckel’s production had been accompanied by English surtitles, in an explicit attempt by the Thalia Theater to reach out to an international audience in Hamburg, who would otherwise not go to a German language play of this complexity. Which was one reason I went to see the play in the first place – to experience how well the surtitles worked, and to see what kind of international audience they are attracting. For unknown reasons, Thalia dropped the surtitles from last night’s performance. So if anyone from Thalia is reading this: would you be so kind as to post a few words, as to why the surtitles were withdrawn?

 

  Set in 1794, five years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the drama develops out of the tension between two of the revolution’s leaders, Maximilien de Robespierre and Georges Danton, the former portrayed as a cold-hearted, dogmatic, puritan, the latter as an empathetic, philosophical, sensualist. Hounded by Robespierre and his close colleague St Just, Danton and three supporters are guillotined in the production’s final scene, corresponding to real events in April 1794. What Büchner chose not to show was that Robespierre was guillotined just three months later in July 1794, together with St Just, and twenty other supporters, as the flame of revolutionary terror, which Robespierre had done so much to feed, turned against him. 

  Steckel sprints through Büchner’s narrative, with an almost ceaseless live soundtrack provided by a keyboardist and electric guitarist. In one key debate scene, Daniel Lommatzch (Robespierre) goes head to head musically with Jörg Pohl (Danton) on the drums, the two of them sat behind full-scale drum kits facing the audience, and smashing out their drum solos, sounding for all the world like professional drummers. The spoken text is mixed in on top of all that, delivered through actors all wearing millimetre thin wireless microphones taped to their cheeks. You can hear some dialogues better than others, depending on how much sonic space the director has allocated to the musicians bigging it up with electronic wa-wowho-wa noises at that particular point in the action. This is reminiscent of how crowds during the French Revolution experienced speeches they heard; many words of speeches must have been lost to open-air acoustics and the jeers and cheers of the mob. Steckel’s decision to soundscape the production in this way certainly captures the hysteria and indecision of the time: which path to believe in, when five different skilled polemicists are all shouting a different message? And, as it sounds to us, the rabble, they’re all shouting at the same time.

   The texts in the print programme for the production mix polemic and philosophy, and invite us to compare attacks on capitalism today, and the attack shaped by the Occupy movement in particular, with the French terror depicted on the stage. If the Thalia seriously wants to attract the English speaking audience in Hamburg who don’t have high-level German skills to this play, then the decision not to include English translations/versions of all three texts is a mistake. It was also a mistake to omit the name of the German language translator of the (originally English language) speech given by Slavoj Žižek to the Occupy movement in New York in October 2011.

  These small objections aside, the programme’s engrossing texts make it top-heavy with an intellectual force which the production itself is disinterested in utilising. How convincing are Jörg Pohl-as-Danton’s arguments, which he uses to defend his “vice-filled” (Robespierre’s term) approach to revolutionary life? Should his silent withdrawal — his refusal to lead — be interpreted as strategy, as the same strategy advocated by Žižek for Occupy? : maintain your silence in the power vacuum you’ve created. It’s your strongest weapon, your equivalent of the French terror. Don’t relinquish this weapon by filling the vacuum with hasty, specific, inadequate demands. Is this the game Pohl’s Danton is playing? Very hard to tell, hearing his statements between one guitar riff and the next, overlapping, exhilarating drum solo. Though neither Pohl’s words, nor Lommatzch’s as Danton, nor those of Karin Neuhäuser playing a marvellously nasty St Just, do drown in this swamp of beautiful din. They gasp for breath instead, shouting of their own worth, shouting of the necessity of reading them, alone, muse-fully, in silence. (Danton’s Death first premièred in 1902, 67 years after it was first published in a heavily censored form. Reading the play as opposed to watching it has pedigree.) Then, if like me you have not already done so, go and read several perspectives on the French Revolution, by contemporary historians. Žižek’s words are just one of many signs that a new terror, of a quite different sort than the French variety, is building in the world again.

Narrowcast the message: speak to the one hundred.

Sudhanva Deshpanda speaks in that lovely, bubbly Indian English which it’s almost impossible not to like. His fellow panel members at the Sprechwerk theatre last night alternated between speaking north German (translated for Sudhanva) – which, in public at least, will tend toward the analytical & the cold – and English. The discussion, under the heading ‘What can theatre in public spaces achieve?’ was followed by a total of thirteen people, including the panel members, so the thing felt like a ritual, where the converted turned-up to validate the preachers. Despite that, Sudhanva conveyed through use of photo-image and the word thought-provoking messages to his little flock.

(Photo of Sudhanva Deshpanda)

            Irregular circles four metres by four metres forming a non-elevated stage, the crowd pushed up within centimetres of the actors faces, others at the back of the audience shimmied up onto a wall, or cycle-rickshaw or each other’s shoulders to get a glimpse: slides of this sort formed the evening’s core. Taken from Mr Deshpanda’s thirty years experience doing street theatre in India, to crowds ranging from a hundred to twenty-thousand. The use of black & white to photograph performances even into the 1990s, perhaps out of choice rather than necessity, accented the ancient, ritualised atmosphere emanating from the images. And all these audience members, and all these performances – nigh on 250 per year – brought to life without one cent of institutional funding.

            Because Mr Deshpanda’s theatre is almost entirely funded from donations that the audience give after the performance; as the audiences are 95 % poor, the average donation given is by western standards tiny. But large audiences, frequent performances & a philosophy of spending very little on play development, costume, stage set & even transport means that the theatre has flourished with these simplest of economics.

            All a very far cry from street theatre in Hamburg. Tom Lanzki, who took part, this year, with his company Bängditos in Altona’s international festival of street arts – STAMP – informed the audience how STAMP 2013 has already been cancelled, as the organisers know in advance they won’t hit their ‘minimum’ budget of € 200 000 – a budget under which, apparently, ‘none of the organisers earn anything.’ This being the budget for a three day street-arts festival. The irony in the room – that Mr Deshpanda & his team have for years produced a torrent of theatre with no institutional nor corporate funding, while the people from STAMP, already institutionally funded by the city of Hamburg & the district of Altona, are making a political show of cancelling because they’re not getting their two hundred grand – was probably just too huge for anybody to find the energy to mention it directly. Perhaps the people from STAMP & all the other ‘nothing under two-hundred-thousand Euro’ lot out there should pay heed to Mr Deshpanda’s closing message from yesterday. In a world where everyone’s dying to broadcast themselves to the maximum possible audience – you’ve gotta have your snazzy website, facebook-fan page, google-ads; then twitter it – the real task in hand is to narrow-cast ourselves. Think not what the phantom ten thousand online might think of you – they are neither listening nor concentrating properly – think what, if anything, you have to say, live, to the ten or the one hundred. Then get into your street-theatre, pulpit, mosque, Buddhist retreat, atheist club, coterie reading audience or sport’s-club board of directors. And go and say it. Heart to heart and intellect to intellect.