KARAOKE, Battersea Arts Centre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Try not to think of a stage.

Try not to think of a screen.

Try not to think of a boy and a girl.

Try not to think of a karaoke machine.

Try not to think about the end of the world.

—

To be completely honest, I’m not really sure how to write about KARAOKE. The first time I saw Sleepwalk Collective’s haunting, hallucinatory show was in Edinburgh, where I was emotional and sleep-deprived and found the whole thing quite mind-alteringly trippy. At one point in the show, the karaoke machine at the centre of it all describes the audience as “sort of woozy and credulous and sad”. Seeing it on the Fringe, I thought: yep. Yep, that’s me.

Inevitably, seeing it in the course of life’s more regular rhythms lends the show a different impact. It’s not quite so woozy, but no less strangely compelling. The central conceit is there in the title: performers iara Solano Arana and Sammy Metcalfe read aloud and obey instructions from a karaoke machine, all of whose text is projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage. They remain trapped throughout in some kind of nightmarish limbo, condemned to read from the tyrannical machine until the text stops – if it ever does.

There is, of course, a big old metaphor for text-driven theatre embedded in the form of the show. And at first, with its self-referential nods to audience and performance space, it seems like KARAOKE is just more theatre about theatre (not that I don’t love theatre about theatre). But at some point this meditative, deadpan, stealthily intoxicating show expands into something more. It is also about life and death and meaning and chaos and love and sex and birth and legacy and time and media and screens and pop culture and machines and catastrophe and apocalypse. The future is already written. Everything is inevitable. Read on.

The space that KARAOKE inhabits is somewhere in the join of things, in the cracks between the paving slabs. It highlights the gap between thought and feeling, between imagination and reality, between text and performance, between instruction and action, between the real and the performed. For the length of the performance, we too float somewhere in that space, text and images flashing relentlessly before our eyes. Time twists and warps and meaning feels like quicksand.

There is no singing in KARAOKE. But it shares with the best pieces of music that extraordinary, slippery ability to completely alter the mood of its audience. And as with songs, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what it is that’s so powerful. Somewhere between the deadpan delivery and the low hum of background music, between the coloured lights and the cloud of mist that cloaks the stage, the show takes hold and won’t let go. We, like the performers, are at the mercy of the karaoke machine. Read on.

—

P.S. Meg Vaughan and Mary Halton both played blinders on this one, so go and read their (much more interesting and inventive) responses.

P.P.S (and also *SPOILER ALERT*) Can those of us who have seen the show just pause a moment to appreciate that kiss?

All Change Festival

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Within minutes of arriving at the Lyric Hammersmith, I’m climbing into bed with a stranger. Not quite the start I anticipated my Fun Palaces weekend getting off to, but it’s indicative of the playfulness embedded at the heart of the All Change Festival. As Eve Leigh, one of the directors of the festival, tells me, they are interested in work that acknowledges and plays with its own theatricality, exploring the boundaries between genres and forms.

The bed and the stranger are part of The Sleep Project, a one-on-one performance currently being developed by Theatre Absolute. Within moments of awkwardly sliding under the duvet, my bedfellow begins to talk about his chronic insomnia, a sleeplessness that seems to be symptomatic of a broken world. It begins as a monologue, but the edges of the theatrical contract shift and blur, eventually making space for an airing of my own insomniac tendencies. As we’re already sharing a bed, it seems oddly churlish not to be frank in my replies.

It’s a tiny little sliver of a performance, lasting only a few minutes and imparting the same sort of fleeting yet haunting thoughts that occupy that hallucinatory territory between waking and sleep. Theatre Absolute might not smash down any boundaries when it comes to intimate performance – and the way in which they make space for the responses of their solo audience members could still do with a little work – but it’s a gentle introduction to what can be for many an alien and intimidating form.

The same goes for other offerings at the festival. Taking up the philosophy of Fun Palaces, the programming has set out to appeal to as wide and varied an audience as possible, taking in everything from magic tricks to storytelling to a (sadly soggy, as it turned out) bouncy castle. Often, as with genre-defying late night offerings from Patrick Simkins and MiM and Gideon Reeling, a sense of the event is built into work that is part theatre, part music and lots of other parts besides, with the hope of bringing in and surprising new audiences.

On Friday night, the collaboration between artist Patrick Simkins and music producer MiM attempts to cultivate the atmosphere of a gig or club night, using a thumping and occasionally euphoric soundtrack to underscore a comment on the digital culture of sharing. As projected social media images flash up on a screen of paper, audience members are invited to trace over the outlines, which change faster than we reluctant artists can move our sticks of charcoal across the surface. Our overlapping scrawls create two improvised pieces of art that speak messily but eloquently to the compulsive online documenting of our lives.

Interactivity is also key to Tablesale, Gideon Reeling’s offbeat piece on the second night of the festival. In this case, however, the mashing up of different genres and elements leads to confusion – not least about the role of the audience. There’s plenty of standing up, moving around and cheering, as well as some fun with chocolate mice and shots of unidentified alcohol, but it doesn’t quite add up to the promised immersive experience. The show itself, meanwhile, lampoons too many targets at once, leaving everyone in a bit of a muddle. But at least we all go home with a prize.

—

Back in time to Friday evening, the Lyric cafe. Hastily eating a packet of crisps in lieu of dinner, I watch the space begin to fill up as darkness falls outside. Waiting for the start of Josh Coates’ Particles, it begins to feel for the first time that day that we really are part of a festival, rather than just a clutch of individuals wandering from attraction to attraction around the Lyric. Staging work in the cafe helps too, taking it out of a strictly theatrical space and into a social, informal one.

Particles works perfectly for this setting. Coates’ show is part theatre, part storytelling, part stand-up, all held together by little more than his own ability as a performer. Luckily, Coates is all ease and warmth, lightly switching from careful narration to freewheeling audience address. At the centre of it all is a repeated tale about one man and his seemingly small decisions, opening out into musings on everything from chaos theory to British politics. It feels light while touching on weighty subject matter and somehow, somewhere along the way, it cheerfully battles apathy with optimism.

Given that Particles is all about people and possibilities (and particles, of course), it seems absolutely fitting that it should be performed in these surroundings, where all that is required is speakers and listeners. It follows another storytelling piece, Ingrid Who Quarrelled with Nøkken, with a less successful approach. Storyteller Kristen Blakstad is not short of talent, but her Norwegian folklore inspired tale feels calculated more to showcase her huge range as a performer than to envelope us in the narrative. There’s plenty of physical invention, but to what purpose?

Then again, there doesn’t always need to be a reason for telling stories. On Sunday afternoon, I’m persuaded to join a story making session in a corner of the Lyric cafe, where a small group of us make up ludicrous tales through a process of play. The game involves a title as a starting point and then a free choice of yes or no questions from all participants, yielding increasingly ridiculous narrative twists. It’s like a deliciously silly, extended version of Consequences and has me laughing more than anything else at the festival. It feels like a game Joan Littlewood would approve of. Everyone a storyteller.

—

 

“What’s art without a bit of wank?” quips Hofesh Shechter. The choreographer, who has spent the last 45 minutes or so of this rainy Saturday afternoon talking about the challenges and intricacies of his creative process, also has the good humour to laugh about it. Yes, this is serious, but it’s a little bit wanky too. And that’s OK.

This conversation, which delves into fascinating depth in its discussion of how Shechter works (apparently it’s a lot like being a tennis player – the isolation, the need to motivate oneself without external assistance), represents one end of the wide spectrum that Leigh and fellow organisers Rachel Parish and Cristina Catalina have curated. At the other end, it’s refreshing to see popular forms given a slight twist and, on the most basic of levels, done well. After long hours I’ll never get back watching excruciating improv comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s a delight to see Nelson David and Chris Rowe do improvisation so effortlessly and often hilariously in Unexpected Human in Bagging Area on Friday evening.

Similarly, I’d be unlikely to see an illusionist under normal circumstances, but Philipp Oberlohr completely wins me round on Saturday night. Chatting to Megan Vaughan afterwards, she suggests that Fun Palaces is doing as much to ground and confound art snobs as it is to coax others into new cultural experiences. As for the latter, it’s hard to tell whether All Change succeeds in that aim of the Fun Palaces manifesto. Family oriented events during the day seem to hook in a larger, more varied audience, whether it’s to gasp at giddying Parkour from the Urban Playground Team or lie in a hammock watching the world go by as part of the Institute for Crazy Dancing’s Lifeboat, but in the evening the participation seems to thin, leaving more of the usual suspects.

One event for which the space is bursting at the seams, however, is the Chris Thorpe and Barrel Organ double bill in the rehearsal room on Saturday night. Both prove – more so than Vacuum Theatre’s messy, muddled Something for Nothing the following day – that sometimes you don’t need much more than bodies and voices in a room to make astonishing theatre. Thorpe once again works wonders with just text, voice and microphone, telling a meandering and many layered tale in High Speed Impact. Test Number One. Thoughts and associations fold into one another, making this short piece much more complex and knotty than it might initially seem.

Barrel Organ’s Nothing, meanwhile, encompasses a huge amount while using very little. It’s now the third time I’ve seen this collection of interlaced monologues, but again it offers new facets, new links to trace between the separate speeches. And because the piece is performed from within the audience, with a newly improvised structure each night, there is always an edge of the unexpected. In this setting, it sends tangible ripples through the audience each time a new performer speaks from among the crowd, completely fitting the formally playful bill outlined by All Change.

—

Central to the Fun Palaces ethos is making work with the local community as well as just for them. Daytime workshops aside, All Change is arguably a little light on this, but offerings from Fleur Alexander and Hannah Nicklin put the stories of local people at their centre. Alexander’s Wagging Dog Tales takes us away from the Lyric and out into the surrounding streets of Hammersmith, on a walk punctuated with stories shared by local dog walkers. The concept is simple, but it’s the form that really lifts it. In the same way that dogs act as a connection between people, sparking rare conversations between strangers in a busy, atomised city, all of us on the walk are soon chatting easily between stories. Sometimes all it takes is the invitation.

The invitation to offer stories, however, can be harder to accept. As I talk to Alexander on the way back to the Lyric after Wagging Dog Tales, she tells me that many of the people she met were reluctant to speak to her at first, and when they did they often felt that they had nothing to tell. It reminds me of similar experiences that Nicklin has shared in the past. As she puts it, capitalism has stolen our stories to sell them back to us, leaving us with the sensation of being empty handed. What of worth could we possibly have to say?

Songs for Breaking Britain, the piece that Nicklin closes the festival with, defies the media’s lucrative monopoly on our narratives. This punk storytelling show weaves together stories that Nicklin has collected in Bradford, Stockton, South London and now Hammersmith, putting them to music and demanding that we listen to them. It’s funny, compassionate, heartbreaking and very, very loud. I’m reminded a little of the angry, ear-splitting blast of sound that is #TORYCORE, but here the righteous rage – rather appropriately following an open invitation to rant – is just one layer.

“It’s hard to be human, isn’t it?” That one line, uttered by a woman Nicklin spoke to in Stockton, lodges somewhere in my chest during the show. There is lots that is difficult in the show; the voices that Nicklin has collected speak of unemployment, of despair, of fear and lack of inspiration. But there is also joy and hope and huge generosity. This extends to the gig style performance of the piece, which gathers audience members around Nicklin and her band at the centre of the room. And it feels absolutely in keeping with the spirit of both Fun Palaces and All Change. Yes, it’s hard to be human. But it’s that little bit easier when we try being human together.

Photo: Aenne Pallasca.

The Last Adventures, Warwick Arts Centre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Stories, no matter how jagged, broken or twisted out of shape, have always been at the heart of Forced Entertainment’s work. In The Coming Storm, this preoccupation with storytelling approached something of a climax, as multiple narratives collided in a messy eruption of stage fictions. The Last Adventuresfinds the company playing in the wreckage.

Core company members Richard Lowden, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor are joined on stage by a host of guest performers, swelling the ensemble and preparing the ground for chaos. They begin seated in a classroom set-up, repeating learned knowledge by rote. As so often in Forced Entertainment’s work, the profound mingles with the banal mingles with the ridiculous. “Some people act like animals”. “This writing is not for people”. “Time cannot be saved”.

Where this new piece takes a less familiar turn is through the electronic soundscape created by collaborator Tarek Atoui and supplemented by an onstage improvised contribution from noise artist KK Null. Sound rips through the lesson, drowning out the monotonous repetitions, and performers peel off one by one, collecting cut-out trees from the back of the stage. Suddenly, everything shifts.

For the rest of the show, sound and image replace language. A moving forest of trees sweeps across the stage. Performers don colanders and dressing gowns, running at one another with broom handles. Noises attack with deafening force. A tree is chasing a man with an axe. A voice is trying to speak. A papier-mâché constellation of stars and planets forms and disperses. Princesses and sea monsters run past stricken soldiers. Sounds swell, shudder, jolt.

This is a world of fragments and echoes, of broken off splinters of images and truncated blasts of sound. It invites the eye and ear to dance over it, selecting from its rich, cacophonous overabundance of sensory stimuli. And many of those fragments are from Forced Entertainment’s own 30 year history. Skeleton suits recall Spectacular, while a cardboard crown briefly conjures And on the Thousandth Night. If Forced Entertainment are dancing in the rubble, it is formed from the detritus of their own back catalogue.

Time – as it has a tendency to in the company’s work – does funny things duringThe Last Adventures. At some moments it seems to accelerate to warp speed, while at others it painfully drags its heels. As a viewing experience, the show hovers somewhere between boredom and entrancement, its oddly hypnotic quality encouraging the mind to periodically wander and return. Each time my concentration refocuses, another image jumps out from a different corner of the stage, another story spins itself involuntarily in my mind.

As something of a mental exercise, Forced Entertainment’s multi-layered collage of images demonstrates once again how adept we are at constructing narratives from solitary building blocks. As a new piece of theatre, however, The Last Adventures falls short of the company’s best. In its chaotic exploration of stories it is almost a visual embodiment of The Coming Storm, perhaps best viewed as a companion piece to that earlier show. The usual exquisite silliness is all there, as are many other of the increasingly legible outlines of Forced Entertainment’s performance language.

If The Last Adventures extends the company’s vocabulary at all it is through Atoui and Null’s joyfully disruptive sound design. Sudden beats or new rhythms can distort stage images as soon as they form, contorting meaning and chasing the performers in circles. The theatrical meaning machine that Forced Entertainment have so revelled in tinkering with gains a new lever, perhaps not transforming it but, as the company celebrate their 30th anniversary, putting an interesting new pressure on its now familiar workings.

Engaging with Disappearance

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

So much of theatre is about ephemerality. At least as far back as Peggy Phelan’s famous statements in Unmarked, live performance has been associated with disappearance; it exists just once, in the moment, and then disappears (almost) without a trace. So what happens when you try to recapture that moment?

It’s a question that Chris Goode and Company are currently attempting to answer. Thanks to recommission, an initiative run by touring network house, they are returning to Goode’s 2006 show Longwave and remaking it for a new tour. The same team has been reunited, with the aim of jointly excavating a piece that was last performed seven years ago. There was no script, no available video recording, just a jumble of different notes.

“In a way it’s a process that’s about theatricality,” Goode suggests, explaining that “what we’re engaging with all the time is disappearance, the ways in which certain things leave a trace and others don’t”. It has also been a process of detective work, deciphering notes from various different sources and comparing the memories of those in the rehearsal room. Luckily, the shape of the show has been recovered more easily than Goode anticipated.

“It’s been so interesting feeling our way back into it,” he reflects partway through the process. “What really fascinates me is that there are some things that we just knew straight away back in the room on day one, there were things that we remembered very clearly, and then there were other things that only came out of our heads again on day eight. It’s been really interesting the way that those things re-emerge and how often actually we find ourselves thinking through a problem and then remembering that we made exactly the same decision last time. Just recalling the same bumps in the road. Which is nice because it suggests there’s a certain logic to how it all fits together.”

Goode admits that he would have been unlikely to revisit Longwave without the opportunity presented by recommission, but he believes that this is the right piece to return to. “It was just recent enough to know that it was still part of our current work or our current thinking,” he says. Another reason he was keen to recreate this particular show was because it is completely without dialogue, adding another layer of difficulty to the challenge that he and his collaborators have set for themselves.

In the absence of words, Longwave’s narrative is communicated through the gestures of performers Tom Lyall and Jamie Wood and the broadcasts playing from the radio that is their characters’ only window onto the outside world. Stuck together in a shed and surrounded by a hostile environment, the two men perform experiments, entertain one another and squabble over the radio – which eventually takes on a life of its own.

“One thing that intrigued me was that it’s so much about the relationship between Tom and Jamie,” Goode says, pointing to this as another reason for returning to the show. He describes the “brilliantly exciting dynamic” between the pair and the desire to see what new insights they would bring to the piece after seven years of honing their separate practices as theatre-makers. “There was a sense of us in the present dancing with us in the past a little bit and seeing what that kind of duet was,” Goode explains, quickly adding, “not quite a duet, it’s more complicated than that.”

This process of recovery could have been a laborious one, but instead Goode has been surprised by the pleasures of retracing old paths. “In a pretty narcissistic way I think we’ve been rather delighted by a lot of the choices that we made before and quite pleased with ourselves,” he says. “It’s very difficult to imagine that anything you were doing that long ago can possibly have been any good. We kind of knew it was, but it’s been really nice to meet ourselves coming back and find that we made some really delightful decisions.”

Despite the joys of recreating Longwave, however, Goode remains ambivalent about returning to previous work. “I feel so invested in the idea that theatre disappears and that you make a thing that speaks to its moment, that speaks to a time or a cultural moment, a conversation that seems to be happening, and that it should then disappear,” he says. He suggests that the promise of recovery and recreation contained in printed scripts is “a little bit of a red herring”, but recognises its appeal nonetheless.

“There’s an instinct in us to want to crawl back. I think there’s something really interesting in the challenge that theatre puts to us, which is to continually try to be in dialogue with the present rather than indulging our very human instinct both for nostalgia and for the idea of improvement, the idea of going back and making something better. I’m not sure that either of those things are what I think the live spirit of theatre is about.”

Goode’s answer to this “retrospective impulse” is to put a personal stipulation on returning to old projects: there has to be a conceptual reason for revisiting it. “You want it to be conceptually rich and interesting in itself rather than simply getting something out of the freezer and putting it in the microwave because it’s been successful before,” he insists. “If the original thing was speaking to a particular moment, then maybe a different moment comes along that feels like it can shine a different light on that work.”

Goode is also careful to avoid “over-decorating or over-elaborating” what was a seductively simple show, emphasising the importance of “a real feeling of space” in the piece. Most importantly, the show has to feel as alive to Goode and his team as it will to the new audiences encountering it for the first time. “It has to feel like a task of invention in the room still. It can’t only feel like a historic re-enactment society.”

An Enemy of the People, Barbican

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Anyone eavesdropping on the fourth act of Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People might be forgiven for thinking that a vociferous public debate was taking place in the Barbican’s theatre. The German director’s take on Ibsen does not provoke discussion so much as demand it. For once, the audience – the people – are asked for our opinion. Well, sort of.

From the outset, Ostermeier’s interpretation is a decidedly 21st-century one. Well-intentioned scientist Dr Stockmann, younger than we are used to seeing him, is a leather jacket and jean clad member of the left-leaning intellectual class, with a cover-playing band and the last, frustrated vestiges of radical student politics. In dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer’s streamlined version of the text, a number of periphery characters have been cut, leaving Stockmann with just a young wife and baby son. He is, in other words, the epitome of 30-something reluctant bourgeoisie, struggling to reconcile his political principles with his desire for wealth and stability.

The same goes for many of the other characters, who are invariably caught between radical idealism and murky compromise. The bourgeois subjects of Ibsen’s plays translate remarkably well to a modern setting, delineating all the same middle class anxieties and hypocrisies that get regularly dissected today. When Stockmann discovers that the water feeding his town’s prosperous spa is riddled with disease, it is compromise and hypocrisy that win out, as one by one the local politicians and media agree to a self-serving cover-up. Even hipster journalists and fellow band members Hovstad and Billing relinquish their superficial ideals, which turn out to be just another designer accessory. Only Stockmann holds firm, intending to oust the conspiracy at a public meeting.

And here is where the otherwise familiar route takes its most startling turn. Partway into the scene, Stockmann’s usual rant segues into excerpts of French anarchist call to arms The Coming Insurrection, before the already dissolving fourth wall is entirely dismantled and we are invited to share our own political gripes. On the night I attend, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Scottish independence referendum and media bias are high on the agenda. Another lone, angry cry laments that we can’t put aside our differences and unite against the forces of capital that we have just heard so passionately condemned.

If this open forum elicits anger, then it yields embarrassment in equal measure. Uncomfortable laughs ripple around the audience, as does over-enthusiastic applause in response to statements like “stop tax avoidance” and “get rid of bonuses”. The problem, of course, is that we hear from those – like Stockmann – in the vocal minority. That’s not to mention that Barbican audiences for foreign-language work tend to have a fairly particular class and political make-up. We are no more “the people” than Ibsen’s privileged representatives are.

The other problem is dramaturgical. Unlike the outraged townfolk who usually hound Stockmann off the stage, the Barbican audience is largely in favour of the statements he puts forward. This is partly down to the crude measure of raised hands, which do not really allow for ambivalence. I suspect I was not alone in cheering many of the complaints against capitalism but feeling a whole lot more suspicious about the anti-democratic bent of much of what Stockmann suggests. But largely, the crowd is with him.

Which rather scuppers the rest of the play. The retreat back into Ibsen’s world, while brilliantly signalled by a pelting of paint balloons from the town Mayor and his cronies, feels like a dramatic anti-climax after the heady debate of the public meeting. Ostermeier and his cast keep the play on track, making allowances for the shift in public opinion, but it never regains quite the same tension or resonance that it had previously. Only in the concluding moments, which have been tweaked to offer a bleak final flourish, does something of the earlier boldness and mischief reappear.

There is an implicit question, both in this ending and throughout, over whether it is the blindly self-interested town majority or the political and economic system in which they participate that is Stockmann’s real barrier. Does the problem lie with people or with systems? Here, it seems to me, lies one of the central tensions of Ostermeier and Borchmeyer’s version, tangled up with the question mark raised over democracy. Stockmann might blame the “liberal bloody majority”, but the text that has been spliced into his speech offers an excoriating critique of capitalism and the cult of the individual. So how are we to read it?

While Ibsen’s use of Stockmann as the ultimate individual and The Coming Insurrection’s attack on social atomisation appear to be at complete odds, I wonder if there’s something more interesting going on in this juxtaposition. The contradiction between this anarchist manifesto of sorts and Stockmann’s belief that it is a few righteous individuals like him who should hold the power reflects a similar contradiction among Ostermeier’s intended audience – one that is immediately reinforced by the overwhelming support that Stockmann’s speech gathers in the auditorium. Firm belief in the correctness of one’s personal politics wrestles with the ideals of equality and democracy.

There is also a fascinating way in which the whole production complicates the notion of the individual. One segment of The Coming Insurrection, protesting the appropriation of the phrase “I am what I am” by advertising giants, acts as a sort of gloss for Ostermeier’s interpretation, projected onto a screen that comes down in front of the action. Even the self is not safe. And Stockmann’s own view of himself and his stand against injustice is coloured with personal vanity, a vanity that is present in the self-consciously stylish aesthetic of the production. Jan Pappelbaum’s design is all fashionably minimal furniture and elegantly limited colour palettes, carelessly cluttered with items of expensive technology. Even the music played by Stockmann’s band – reworked versions of David Bowie and Gnarls Barkley – is something of a pose. The blackboard walls, meanwhile, are a blank slate for ideas, but they are just as easily whitewashed by the powers that be.

And then there’s that public debate. Nowhere is Christoph Gawenda’s Stockmann more giddily drunk on his own rhetoric, breaking out of the previously delicate naturalistic acting style of the production and into something far more overtly performative. His speech is as much about him as it is about the ideas he is articulating. The interestingly flawed structure of this open forum, meanwhile, speaks to the limited systems in which both Stockmann and his audience are trapped. Discussion is quickly closed down because the structure cannot hold it, a collapse that feels like as much of a comment as a straightforward theatrical failure. Seen in this light, the problems I held up earlier take on a far more interesting character.

Like Ibsen’s plays, it strikes me that Ostermeier’s production is both about and for the middle classes. The Barbican’s audience might not be “the people” in any representative sense, but it is that audience and its counterparts around the world at whom this version is squarely aimed. Here, hypocrisy penetrates all levels of the drama, as even systemic critiques rest on an unacknowledged belief in the individual – a belief that eventually strangles political conviction. Ultimately, what Ostermeier throws out to us is not a liberating opportunity to speak up, but our own inability to effect the change that we debate so passionately in our nicely appointed living rooms.

Photo: Arno Declair.