Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
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by Marius von Mayenburg, directed by Thomas Ostermeier
Schaubühne an der Lehniner Platz, du Maurier World Stage Festival, Imperial Oil Opera Theatre, Toronto
April 12-16, 2000
“A ‘Tis Pity for Our Time”
One of the many North American premières at the du Maurier World Stage festival is the production of “Fire in the Head” (“Feuergesicht” in German) by the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. It introduces us to two new talents who have already made an impact in German-speaking countries. Marius von Mayenburg, the author, was only 26 when this, his fourth play, won the Kleist Prize for Young Authors. It had its first performance in Munich in 1998 and was taken up the next year by many of the regional theatres in Germany, including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. There, Thomas Ostermeier, the director, then only 30, gave the play such an electrifying production that it became a major hit in Hamburg and was invited to a number of European theatre festivals. It will have its English-language première at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 26.
What struck me most was that in here at the end of the 20th century, years after we have been told that our age is too cynical to create tragedy, a young person comes along, ignores this conventional wisdom and writes one. If John Ford had written his great tragedy “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” in 1997 instead of in the early 1600’s, “Fire in the Head” is what it would look like. In both plays a brother and sister come to have an incestuous relationship and cling to it above all other connections with other people including their parents. In both plays the older generation is so convinced of its own normality that it fails to see abnormality and potential disaster looming under its own roof--something an outsider comes to see quite readily. In both plays the brother comes to form his own philosophy to justify his obsession--Giovanni in “‘Tis Pity” uses medieval logic, Kurt in “Fire in the Head” uses Heraclitus. In both the tone is satirical at the beginning only to plunge into scenes of horror by the end. And in both plays the theme focusses on two young people so alienated by the world around them that they live in virtual isolation and operate according to a self-created code of morality.
What is fundamentally different in “Fire in the Head” is that there is no surrounding religious framework to the play and that the central couple do not wish to preserve their love so much as to prevent themselves from growing into the stasis they see in adulthood. Both Kurt and Olga (Robert Bayer and Judith Engel) are going through puberty and hate the loveless “normality” they see in their parents (Wolf Aniol and Gundi Ellert). This adult world is not actively corrupt as in “‘Tis Pity” but merely dull. The father rejects closeness from his wife to follow newspaper accounts of the deeds of a serial killer. Rather than this sort of vicarious thrill, Kurt and Olga seek a life of sensation or at least of having some kind of feeling about something. This begins with their first exploration of sex. But when Olga finds a greater excitement with another boy, Paul (Mark Waschke) and the freedom of his motorcycle, Kurt finds another source of warmth--fire. At first burns only a dead bird in a newspaper, but gradually moves on to making firebombs and torching buildings at night. In one attack he burns his whole face giving him the “Feuergesicht” of the German title. His bloody and cream-smeared face becomes a kind of mask of unknowability that he wears until the plays cataclysmic conclusion.
Just as a Jacobean tragedy needs a director with a firm grasp of the overall meaning of a text that contains elements as disparate as satire and horror, so it must have been with this play. Ostermeier’s was the fifth production of the play in Germany and it may be that it took five tries to find a director who understood how best to put the play across. (Now Ostermeier plans to direct all Mayenburg’s future work.) In other hands, the play might seem merely a lurid horror story. But Ostermeier brings a whole range of Brechtian techniques to bear to insure that we are evaluating the various disturbing actions and not merely being disturbed. Each of the characters directly addresses the audience with their thoughts from time to time, but instead of changing the lighting or freezing the other characters, as is common on our stages, Ostermeier has the other characters listen intently to these monologues.
At various times characters who are trying to decide what to do will glance directly into the audience as if expecting them to answer. We became so used to this constant breaking of the fourth wall that when Waschke had to ask an audience member to give him the underwear which had accidentally fallen off the stage, it seemed part of the play. This subtle sliding of the actors into and out of acknowledging the audience, so well mastered by all five actors, is something I had never seen before and is obviously the latest refinement of Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt”. All this was particularly unnerving in a play where one would otherwise expect a naturalistic treatment.
Rufus Didwiszus’ set was a long, narrow, raked platform with a double bed in the center, a kitchen table and chairs to house left and a working bathroom sink to house right. The very minimalism of the set shifted the setting from naturalistic to symbolic, the three areas representing three animal functions. The set also gave Ostermeier three acting areas where he would often stage two or even three actions simultaneously where a North American director would freeze actors to have only one action occurring at a time. The effect was to have one action comment upon another, as when the parents continue an argument in mime at the table while Olga and Paul talk together in bed and Kurt looks on from the bathroom.
By all these various techniques, Ostermeier focusses our attention on the meaning of the action. What Olga gets most out of riding with Paul is a sense of warmth and of having some effect on something. What Kurt had with Olga and then with fire itself is exactly the same except that fire is more controllable than another person. In Kurt’s philosophy, life is heat and death is coldness. From his point of view his parents are already dead so that moving from childhood to adulthood is a kind of death. Mayenburg’s play is a tragedy about human existence caught in the unstoppable flow of time. The adults have either grown so used to the idea or have so tried to forget about it that they can no longer understand their children who in going through puberty have a heightened awareness of being caught up in a process of inexorable change. In Beckett’s “Endgame” the symbol for life is an alarm clock gradually running down. In “Fire in the Head” it is a lit match burning. But where Beckett sees humour in this futility of fighting time, Mayenburg’s match is struck to light a room soaked in gasoline.
I would say I hope that we see more of the work of both Mayenburg and Ostermeier, but based on the power of the play and its direction, I’m sure we shall.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Cast of Feuergesicht in Berlin. ©1999 Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.
2000-04-15
Feuergesicht