Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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written and directed by Valentijn Dhaenens
David Mirvish, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto
January 21-February 7, 2016
Grand Inquisitor: “Speak!”
Valentijn Dhaenens’s Bigmouth is like no other show you ever seen. In this Belgian hit from the Edinburgh Fringe Festivals of 2012 and 2014, Dhaenens effortlessly morphs into more than 19 living and historical characters as they deliver famous or infamous speeches in English, French, German, Dutch and Latin (with English surtitles). Not only that but Dhaenens intersperses the speeches with spot-on impressions of famous people singing famous songs from Frank Sinatra to Kurt Cobain. Dhaenens’s performance is not only a technical tour de force but also an unsettling examination of the nature of public speech since such speech can be used both to express sincere beliefs and to manipulate.
The Canadian whose talent for mimicry is closest to Dhaenens is Rick Miller, whose show BOOM played the Panasonic Theatre just last year. There Miller voiced over 100 figures from 1945 to 1969 to create a portrait of Baby Boomers’ collective memory. Here, Dhaenens’s interest is oratory itself, particularly the use of oratory to justify one’s action or beliefs. Dhaenens sets up this idea with his first excerpt. After singing the Agnus Dei with its prayer “Dona nobis pacem” (“Give us peace”), Dhaenens launches into the middle of the Grand Inquisitor’s speech from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In this famous passage (delivered here in Dutch), the Grand Inquisitor explains to Jesus, who has returned to Earth, that he will have to prosecute him as a heretic because his views will overturn the whole foundation of society. The Inquisitor demands that Jesus defend himself and commands him to speak. But Jesus does not.
After this fictional speech demanding speech in response, comes the rest of the play made up of excerpts of a wide range of speeches as if they were all humanity’s self-justification for its existence. To reinforce this interpretation, Dhaenens’s series of excepts conclude with an echo of the Grand Inquisitor’s command “Spreek!” ( “Speak!”).
Dhaenens has carefully arranged his excerpts in thematic rather than historical order. Behind him is the list of the 19 speakers he has chosen projected as if written on a blackboard. As Dhaenens declaims each speech, the name is erased. The first who seems to answer the Grand Inquisitor’s command to speak is Nicola Sacco who with Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during an armed robbery. Their trial has since been viewed as unfair due to bias against the two for their avowed adherence to anarchism and for being recent Italian immigrants. Sacco’s speech in broken English on being sentenced to death in 1927 has become a classic of oratory pointing his situation as a case of the rich class tyrannizing the oppressed class.
Dhaenens immediately follows this speech with that of Socrates in 399bc, as recorded by his student Plato in his Apology. This is the speech that Socrates gave in his defence when tried for having corrupted the youth of Athens and in not believing in the gods the city believes in. He is condemned to death by drinking hemlock. The juxtaposition shows us how two men of different centuries, backgrounds and oratorical skills both defend themselves in similar ways, pointing to prejudice rather than facts as condemning them yet accepting their deaths as inevitable given the times and situation in which they live.
Dhaenens’s next pairing is even more obvious because Dhaenens switches back and forth between the two to demonstrate their similarities and contrasts. Both speeches are from 1945. One is Hermann Goebbels’ “Totaler Krieg” speech, the other is George S. Patton’s famous “Speech to the Third Army”. Goebbels speaks in a low, suave voice of the need for all Germans, especially women, to give up on everything but the bare necessities so that Germany can wage a total war against the enemy. Intercut with this, is Patton speaking like a Western cowboy, his language profane and vulgar, of the need for soldiers to fight the Germans to the last ounce of their strength, to fight even when dying, and to kill anyone who shows cowardice in the field. Viewed simply from the point of view of language, there’s no doubt that Goebbels calm, subtle speech is more seductive than Patton’s bullying, jingoistic rant. Yet, we have to acknowledge that both speeches have the same intent along with the irony that the quieter speech furthers fascism while the noisier speech furthers democracy.
Dhaenens’s next pairing is of Pericles of Athens in 431bc and King Baudouin of Belgium in 1990. The first “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” as recorded by the historian Thucydides, was given by Pericles, ruler of Athens, at a public funeral for the dead of in the first year of Peloponnesian War against Sparta, in which he exhorts his countrymen to live up to the example set them by the heroism of the dead. The second is the abdication speech of King Baudouin of Belgium, who explains that his conscience as a Catholic will not allow him to sign a bill legalizing abortion passed by the Belgian parliament into law. He, therefore, sees not course but to resign the throne. Dhaenens thus contrasts two leaders – one faced with young lives cut short by war, one faced with the potential of allowing millions of potential lives (as he sees it) to be ended legally – who speak with the same solemnity about the value of live but who personally take entirely different course of action. No matter what you own view is on abortion, Dhaenens’s voice as Baudouin is so filled with remorse and the pain of conscience that it is difficult to say which of the two, the military leader or the hereditary monarch, had taken the more agonizing choice.
King Baudoin’s speech leads to another parallel speech, that of Patrice Lumumba, celebrating in 1960 the Belgian Congo’s independence from Belgium that he his movement fought for. Lumumba hopes that Congo’s independence will spark independence movements in colonies throughout Africa. Lumumba’s jubilant speech ends with Dhaenens making the sound of a gunshot since Lumumba was overthrown and executed twelves months later.
This begins a sequence of speeches by American leaders. Dhaenens sings “I Want to Live in America” from West Side Story, creating a loop that continues to play underneath the entire sequence. He gives snippets of speeches by Robert Kennedy in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, Malcolm X in 1964 and John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1961 – all ending with a gunshot, all orators in the land of guaranteed freedom of speech who were silenced. The irony of the song versus the lists of speakers may be too obvious, but it does suggest that those who speak out, like Socrates before them, may pay the ultimate price.
Dhaenens’s final sequence also has an American slant. The first part begins with Ronald Reagan consoling Americans after the Challenger disaster in 1986 in a similar way to Pericles’ speech consoling the Athenians. This leads to George H. W. Bush’s speech justifying the First Iraq War in 1991. Dhaenens counters this with speeches by two Islamic leaders. The first is American Louis Farrakhan speaking in 2005 at the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March on Washington, DC. The second is none other than Osama bin Laden declaring in 1996 that the United States as the chief sponsor of terrorism in the world. As with Joseph Goebbels’ speech earlier, what makes bin Laden’s speech so chilling is that absolute calmness of its delivery.
The second part of this final sequence could be subtitled the decline of oratory. After hearing from two Muslim speakers, Dhaenens’s next choice is Frank Vanhecke, whom no one will know. Vanhecke, as chairman of the far right Vlaamse Belang, was invited by American Patrick Buchanan to give a speech in February 23, 2007, on the threat of Western civilization in Europe because of the influx and high birth rate of Muslim immigrants. In broken English, comically forgetting his host’s name, Vanhecke in a homey, low key fashions outlines his extreme xenophobia and the need for a strong (i.e. fascist) governments to defend Western Christian values in Europe. While me may shudder at what Vanhecke says, we smile at his ineptitude in saying it.
After an interlude where Dhaenens imitates Kurt Cobain singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (“Hello, hello, hello, how low?”), Dhaenens naturally follows Vanhecke with excerpts from George W. Bush. Dhaenens deliberately mashes up Bush’s speech after 9/11 in 2001 with a speech by Bush in 2005 (Dhaenens has 2006) after Hurricane Katrina. The point is that Bush says virtually the same words about both with “storm” substituted” for “attack” in the later speech.
As an example of speech that is forceful but devoid of oratorical flourish, Dhaenens gives ultraconservative commentator Ann Coulter’s infamous speech after 9/11 advocating the carpet-bombing of all Muslin countries and the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Dhaenens includes this horrendous example doubtless to show that today oratory has descended to hate speech which attempts to galvanize its audience though its outrageousness rather than through rhetorical devices. His final excerpt is from Bush’s speech on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 where the president attempts to relate the touching story of the son of a victim of the Twin Towers collapse but distracts himself into various irrelevancies and even jokes, whereat the stage manager cuts him off.
On the one hand Dhaenens’s remarkable performance celebrates the power of public speaking while ridiculing its demise. On the other hand, given its setup with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor speech, all human efforts to speak to justify its existence seem to pale before Jesus’s beatific silence that drives the Inquisitor to madness. This may be why we hear Dhaenens’s final voice not as an historical character but as himself, not reciting a speech, but sining a song. The song is “Nature Boy” by the proto-hippie eden ahbez from 1948, first recorded by Nat King Cole. In answer to “Dona nobis pacem” that we heard Dhaenens sing at the very beginning, we now hear him sing his as last words, “The greatest thing you'll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return”.
See Bigmouth and be prepared to be amazed by Dhaenens’s unbelievably chameleonic talent. And after the show, be prepared to cast a critical eye on how and why people speak in public from that time on.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Valentijn Dhaenens; Valentijn Dhaenens. ©2014 Mara Wilsens.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2016-01-22
Bigmouth