Remembered Presences

Alison Croggon

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781760622138
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del teatro

In 2010, the Guardian named Melbourne critic Alison Croggon as a 'must read' critic. She was the first online critic to be awarded the Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year, in 2009. Her blog Theatre Notes was the first theatre blog in Australia and, over its eight years of existence, made Croggon the most influential critical voice in Australian performance, with a wide international readership.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%This long-awaited collection of 25 years of Croggon's writing shows why. Ranging from early reviews to wide-focus essays of cultural criticism, from playful meditations on the critical form to searching interrogations of the role of the critic in the volatile digital age, Theatre Notes demonstrates the evolution of a crucial critical voice. It includes the best of the essays and reviews published in a variety of daily papers and literary magazines, but at its centre is an eye witness account of the 2004-2012 Australian theatre renaissance, written as it occurred. Searching, challenging and always entertaining, Croggon grapples with the contradictions and delights of writing about performance, an ephemeral artform central to our cultural memory.

The Last Days of Mankind

Think of a real work of art: have you never had the feeling that something about it is reminiscent of the smell of burning metal you get from a knife you’re whetting on a grindstone? It’s a cosmic, meteoric, lightning-and-thunder smell, something divinely uncanny!

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Every now and then, it is necessary to be reminded of the true resources and possibilities of art. Sometimes it seems that dullness is all: that we merely consume, like lobotomised laboratory rats, the enforced idiocies of mass culture. A real work of art calls up without shame the seriousness of being, the mind’s restlessness, its functions as critique and rebuke, inspiration and provocation. All fiery discontent, artists are indeed of the devil’s party; but, like Milton, they must sing as if they were angels.

Karl Kraus was such a malcontent. He was one of an extraordinary generation of Austrian artists who emerged after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the catastrophe of World War I, a period which included writers like Robert Musil and Joseph Roth, and the chilling visions of painters like Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. Perhaps it is that time’s unique sense of apocalyptic transformation which makes these artists seem so relevant now, and gives their writings such a bitter air of prophecy.

Kraus, considered one of the great satirists of last century, was arguably the most sophisticated media commentator of his day. He saw before almost anyone else the baleful influence of press-driven propaganda on public life. Ironically, he used the transient forms of journalism to articulate his critique, most notably in his famous journal Die Fackel. The Last Days of Mankind, a sprawling 800-page epic which is still not fully translated into English, is generally acknowledged to be Kraus’ masterpiece.

The play is reportedly a melange of quotes from sources such as Goethe and Shakespeare and the Bible, a mixture of historical and fictional characters, songs, cinematic elements, polyphonic crowd scenes and scenic fragments. Justus Neumann opens with a quote from Kraus’ prologue, in which he says: ‘The events shown in this play, no matter how unlikely, actually took place; the words spoken in this play, no matter how unlikely, are true quotations.’ In a play which features God Himself, this is hardly an appeal to documentary ideas of verity. But there is no doubt that it is an account which is bitterly, blackly true, in the way that only art can be true. And it is deadly funny.

A performance which lasts for just over an hour clearly offers a radically edited version of Kraus’ epic, and I am in no position to judge either the quality of the translation (made for this performance by Neumann and Matthew Lilias) or how the redacted version compares to the original. However, I can say that Neumann’s adaptation makes stunning theatre.

Neumann, an Austrian actor whom I last saw perform almost twenty years ago in a virtuosic one-man piece called Kill Hamlet, is an actor’s actor, a performer of consummate skill who has the strange glamour of invisibility that only the best actors attain. Your attention is so focused on the narrative, the character, the performance, that the actor himself is paradoxically effaced. From the first moment Neumann shows himself, half-lit halfway down La Mama’s stairs, and reads in that bewitching voice from Kraus’ prologue, you know you are in the hands of a master.

The set is self-consciously a stage: a raised dais draped with a black cloth, and a table with a chair, on which lies a book. At the other end of the stage is Julius Schwing – as I found out afterwards, Neumann’s 17-year-old son – who tickles acoustic melodies from an electric guitar, as Neumann walks slowly to the small stage and begins what is effectively a dramatised reading of the play. But what a reading …

To call it a reading, although that it what it is, threatens to undersell its subtleties and power. The Last Days of Mankind is theatre at its simplest, a matter of unadorned words, music, and performance, but the production is, within the rigors of its stern palette, astoundingly full of colour and variousness. Aside from Neumann’s ability to play a cast of at least dozens (he contains multitudes), this is due to the beautiful and precise shifts of Niklas Pajanti’s lighting states, the suggestive placings of Neumann’s body, certain stillnesses and gestures. His performance is counterpointed with the responsive and passionate live music, which varies from gentle arpeggios to the anguished electric scream of Hendrix or Deep Purple, summoning in the tiny space of La Mama the technological apocalypse of modern warfare.

If it is true, as Heiner Müeller says, that the major political function of art today is to mobilise the imagination, then this production of The Last Days of Mankind is profoundly political. Without spectacular sets or casts of thousands, the atrocity and scale of world war is made palpable. The play’s scope ranges from intimacies – a scene, for example, where children play ‘world war’ – to public utterances of all kinds: a teacher to his pupils, a disillusioned God to His creation. The most frightening, perhaps, are where Kraus strips back the rhetoric of war’s glory and exposes its homicidal insanity.

In this most nuanced of writers, no linguistic manipulation is left unexamined: Kraus is alert to all the political dimensions of language, from the most private to the most public. He shows how abuse of language directly creates the realities which permit the human tragedy, the grief and piteousness, of war.

Kraus considered the press one of the driving forces towards war – a major reason his work resonates so uncomfortably in the age of Fox News. The play opens, tellingly, with the news being shouted in Vienna of the assassination of the Prince Franz Josef in Sarajevo. Neumann plays ‘The Crowd’, recreating the whirlpool of nationalism, racism, bellicose excitement, stupidity and bloodthirstiness which accompany a public lust for war. And one of his characters is an actual journalist, Alice Schalek, whose prurient interviews with soldiers and officers reveal an excitement bordering on the obscene.

‘Satisfied?’ she asks rhetorically, in raptures over being on a battlefield. ‘Satisfied is not the word for it! Patriotism, you idealists may call it. Hatred of the enemy, you nationalists. Call it sport, you moderns. Adventure, you romantics. You who know the souls of men call it the joyous thrill of power. I call it humanity liberated!’

It made me go cold, to hear that familiar glorification of mass murder in the name of human freedom. Those words were written almost a century ago, but for all our dazzling technological innovations, for all our trumpetings of progress, how much have things actually changed? We seem to have learned nothing. And as a response – an intelligent, undeceived, conscious response – to a world of increasing fascistic paranoia and irrational passions, it puts most contemporary works to shame. Don’t miss it.

Theatre Notes, September 19 2004

7 Days 10 Years

Flaubert said, in relation to novels, that ‘God is in the details’. And equally, one might say that in speaking about a society in disastrous flux, it’s the details – the ‘opaque areas’ rather than what are noted in conventional histories as significant events – that are most telling. They are certainly most telling in theatre, for human interaction is the life-blood of drama. And in 7 Days 10 Years, presented by Theatre@Risk at Theatre Works, Louis Milutinovic reveals some of the realities of the Balkans wars in the 1990s by following the fortunes of a single family over the decade before the NATO bombing of Serbia.

The Balkan conflict was, for many people in the West, an obscure war of bloody ethnic hatred in a little-known place. By focusing on intimate detail, Milutinovic’s lucid narrative offers another view than the lens of opaque ethnic hatred through which such conflicts are usually reported. It makes what happened in Serbia at once more legible and more alarming: after all, blind self-interest, apathy, corruption and fear-driven nationalism are the currency of our times.

In its structure and approach, this play owes a debt to Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, in which Brecht adopted small-scale, naturalistic forms to demonstrate how fascism impacts on the most ordinary of interactions. Fear and Misery in the Third Reich is a frightening parable which shows how easily extraordinary circumstances became normal, the incremental but deadly adjustments that people make in order to negotiate daily life under a Fascist regime.

Similarly, Milutinovic largely ignores the ethnic arguments – for example, the Serbian narrative of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 – to concentrate on quotidian detail. The rise of Milosevic and Serbian nationalism and the wars with Bosnia and Kosovo are referred to obliquely: their effects are visible in the crippling of a young soldier, the heroin addiction of his sister, the impoverishment of the middle class, the marginalisation and final silencing of dissent, and the banal but terrifying thuggery of a violent kleptocracy.

The play moves swiftly through seven toughly-written scenes, each titled, in another nod to Brecht, by the date of the events. They chart the gradual disenfranchisement of the family; the activist mother Svetlana (Anastasia Malinoff) loses her job as a teacher and is forced to sell cigarettes on the black market; the son Ivan (Steve Mouzakis) is left crippled by the war, and his girlfriend Vesna (Odette Joannides) leaves for a job in Italy and becomes a prostitute. Even Svetlana’s brother Branko (Sergio Tell), a small town official, loses everything he has gained through his petty corruption. The play ends with the arrival of the US war planes, which are greeted by the dissenters as a liberation after years of intimidation under Milosevic. But it is ironically clear in the final moments that this final liberation is only another betrayal.

What also becomes clear is that those who lose most are the small people, the petite bourgeoisie who ignored the larger picture in favour of their narrow self-interest. The middle-class characters who dissent and protest the growing fascism in their community, though scarred in obvious ways, manage to retain their self-respect; those who aggressively grab power and cash, like the captain who is building himself a new house out of war-profiteering, or the amoral folk singer/celebrity Shana (Larissa Gallagher) who switches to whatever bandwagon happens to be winning, also survive. In the bleakly riven society Milutinovic describes, the powerless who assent to fascistic authority with an eye to their own survival emerge as the most lost.

Chris Bendall’s production is a good, honest presentation of the play with a high component of sheer entertainment. It features terrific singing, with a soundtrack by Philip McLeod of some bizarre Eurotrash folk music, in itself a sardonic comment on nationalistic propaganda. The scenes move swiftly and with great energy, capably managing the complex emotional twists of the writing, from comedy to violent tragedy, with no sense of false steps.

The production features an excellent set by Peter Corrigan: three trestles painted red which can be rearranged flexibly and quickly into a series of playing spaces on different levels. The back half of the Theatre Works stage is cut off by a huge black curtain, from which stage hands wearing pig masks – sinister images of the growing anonymous bestiality of society – emerge to rearrange the space. The design and lighting permit a theatrical spareness which focuses on an ensemble of excellent performances: in particular Laura Lattuada as Mila, the flaky but irrepressible aunt; Sergio Tell as Branko, the corrupt town official who betrays his activist sister to the authorities; and Simon Kingsley Hall as Bane, the drug-dealing son who, despite escaping national service, ends up as an emotional cripple.

This is far from didactic theatre, but it is a powerful political work. Milutinovic exposes, without a trace of sentiment but with a great deal of compassion for all the characters he portrays, the predatory nature of a society in which relationships are compromised and destroyed by mutual mistrust and fear. It’s a timely reminder of Primo Levi’s warning that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Theatre Notes, November 17 2004

Hamlet: Brook and Redding

On the face of it, it may seem very unfair to compare these two versions of Hamlet. One is a filmed production by one of the greatest theatre directors of the past century, created in Peter Brook’s gorgeous Paris base, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord; the other an exemplary example of poor theatre, put on by a young Melbourne director in a shopfront in High Street, Northcote.

As it happens, it is not unfair; theatre is a great leveller. Perhaps for similar reasons – a certain straightforwardness in approaching Shakespeare – both are notable for their clarity, and they share a great text and remarkable actors. Where Oscar Redding’s production lacks Brook’s exquisite aesthetic polish, it gains in robust irreverence and visceral power. But what strikes me most is how both these productions spin the focus on this most protean of texts, to reveal a Hamlet in whose body itself turns the sword of politics.

The great Shakespearean critic Jan Kott says of Hamlet that it is a play that absorbs its times. So there are, among many others, the Romantic Hamlet of the nineteenth century, wanly melancholic; the mid-century Hamlet, which Kott particularly documented, in which interpretation leans on the pitiless wheel of power; and now this twenty-first century Hamlet, at once sensuous and full of loathing, raging against the mortal trappings of his flesh.

Part of the reason for these many Hamlets is that the text is seldom performed entirely as written. It means that each production is cut according to the cloth of its interpretation. Both Brook and Redding take a broadly similar approach, removing the cumbersome opening scene with the ghost, and cutting out entirely the complicated narrations of battles and politics. They fillet out a claustrophobic family tragedy of individuals trapped in remorseless passions. In these productions, the personal is most assuredly political.

This approach rejects most modern interpretations of Hamlet, in which the character of Fortinbras is brought to the foreground. Fortinbras – who claims the throne of Denmark after all the corpses stop twitching on the floor – is in some versions an alter ego of Hamlet; in others, the legitimate heir to the throne, the man who restores order to the broken kingdom. ‘If one wishes to place Hamlet’s moral conflicts into a historical context’, says Kott, ‘one cannot ignore the role played by Fortinbras’.

In these versions Fortinbras has disappeared entirely. But I think this is not so much a symptom of ahistorical consciousness, as a lack of belief in the possibility of the restoration of order, or even in the possibility of order itself. No king now comes to make it all right: the plays ends wit...