✭✭✭✩✩

by Lars Norén, translated by Gord Rand, directed by Brendan Healy

Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

September 17-October 4, 2015

Sebastian: “At some point people will have to look at me”

If you accidentally happened upon the blog of an 18-year-old explaining the reasons why he was going to go to his former school and shoot as many of the students and staff as he could before shooting himself, how long would you listen?  For most people the answer would be “Not long”.  Yet, Lars Norén, Sweden’s most prominent living playwright, forces us to listen to just such a person for an hour and 25 minutes without reprieve.  The result is disturbing for many reasons both intended and not.

On the 20th of November, 2006, an 18-year-old boy named Sebastian armed with rifles, pistols, bombs and ammunition went back to his old school in Emsdetten, Germany, and shot and injured 22 people before committing suicide.  Sebastian viewed the perpetrator of the Erfurt school massacre in 2002 and those responsible for the Columbine killings in 1999 as his heroes.  Since Germany currently has what may be the strictest gun control legislation in the world, the outcry after the massacre did not turn to gun control as it does in the US but to the teenager’s motivation.  While the media fixated on Sebastian’s addiction to violent video games, Norén wanted to know what the killer himself had said.  Norén’s work from 2007 is a verbatim play is constructed from passages Norén found in Sebastian’s diaries and blog. 

Norén’s play is thus the opposite of theatre as entertainment.  It is theatre as provocation.  Newcomer Sina Gilani embodies Sebastian with such chilling totality it is frightening.  As the audience of about 80 sits in a circle, Sebastian, sitting among us and, serving as his own stage manager, lectures us about why this is the last hour of his life, what he plans to do and why.  He is eerily calm and matter-of-fact, attitudes that only heighten the air of danger because they seem signs of psychosis not of clear rationality as Sebastian sees it.  Gilani’s masterful performance lets us see that rage lies just beneath Sebastian’s cool façade.

Most of what he says is familiar teenage existentialism.  Life is meaningless.  He didn’t ask to be born.  We all have to die, so why care when or how.  Society and school as an arm of that society trains people to accept what he calls STWRD (school-training-work-retirement-death) as the only acceptable pattern for life.  His life is his own and no one has the right to tell him what to do with it.  Sebastian has clearly not moved beyond the views the alienated Meursault expresses in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), not that he has ever read it, and these views will lead to senseless murder as a symbol of the world’s meaningless just as they do in Camus’s novel. 

Sebastian also views his future action as political, as a rebellion against capitalism and materialism in which people are valued by what products they consume.  He can’t afford and has no desire to be chic or cool but is excluded from school society because of his attitude.  

Mixed in with this pretence of rational philosophy is Sebastian’s desire for revenge against the kind of people, children and teachers, who have bullied him mercilessly since childhood.  He has been typed by everyone as a “loser”.  His massacre will force everyone to pay attention to him for once and will imprint his face on them forever. 

The longer Sebastian speaks to justify himself, the easier it is to pick out the contradictions in his so-called rationality.  He does not believe in God, but he does believe in angels.  He says that he is fighting a war that he didn’t start, but doesn’t see the disproportion between his response and its cause.  He says he is against materialism, yet is happy enough to display the array of arms he has gathered for his assault.  He is angry because other people have ruined his life, but also says that life is pointless anyway.  How then can something pointless be ruined?  He says he has nothing against gays and Turks, but goes on a rant against new immigrants from Poland and the Balkans.  Whether it is Norén’s intention or not, Sebastian begins to repeat himself about halfway through the show and his thoughts go in circles as the self-set deadline for his massacre approaches.  This may reflect the nature of the real Sebastian’s diaries, but it is tedious in performance. 

The play is provocative because we are forced to evaluate everything Sebastian says to search for any possible reason why committing mass murder and suicide is for Sebastian his only option.  Sebastian repeatedly tells us he hates the Nazis, although it’s hard not to think that Norén wants us to see a parallel between one youth mocked as a loser and one country overzealously punished as the loser of World War I.  Sebastian supposedly hates Nazis because he is against order and for total anarchy.  But then Sebastian also says he hates everyone, including himself.

The play is also provocative for a more unsettling reason.  Norén may want to confront us with the thoughts of a mind set on massacre and self-destruction, but in building his play from the real Sebastian’s words Norén actually conspires to grant Sebastian the immortal fame he seeks.  Using Sebastian’s actual words obviously gives the play its authenticity, but it tends to lend Sebastian a halo as a teenaged martyr of an uncaring society that is too difficult to countenance.  It is as if Norén believes Sebastian’s statement that we are all responsible for what Sebastian is and what he does.

Director Brendan Healy’s staging of the play as if Sebastian were part of a large discussion group creates other problems.  Sebastian’s prime designation is as an outsider, yet in Healy’s presentation he seems more like someone who has hijacked a group therapy session for his own purposes.  It appears that Healy actually does want members of the audience to respond when Sebastian asks them pointed questions.  Yet, Healy fails to establish early enough that give and take is desirable.  Not only is the character so aggressive that no one really wants to respond, but Sebastian has a mic and we do not. 

Besides, seated in a circle as we are, thinking that we are meant to be an audience, we expect that the solo character will perform in the centre of the circle.  It takes a very long time to realize that the audience set-up is entirely deceptive and that Gilani will perform almost the entire show from his seat.  The seating is clearly meant to suggest that we are all, literally and figuratively, on an equal plane with Sebastian, but at the same time we know this is all a pretence since Sebastian’s mic, and the unnecessary mic effects, make sure we know he is the speaker and we the listeners.  Healy wants our discomfort in being directly confronted by Gilani-as-Sebastian to represent society’s discomfort at an outsider like Sebastian.  But this is a false parallel since our discomfort comes not from anything we have done but from not knowing what game Healy is playing with us or how far it will go.      

Norén’s play is not an enjoyable evening and is not meant to be one.  Yet, if you and some friends feel up to enduring Sebastian’s harangue and witnessing a powerful, disquieting performance by Gilani, you will find much to discuss.  That is the point of Norén’s provocation.  You may find that in the end, however, you have learned nothing new or useful either about school shooters or about society.

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Sina Gilani as Sebastian; Sina Gilani as Sebastian. ©2015 Jeremy Mimnagh.