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Written
by
Max Frisch
Director
Ramin Gray
Designer
Anthony Ward
Lighting
Designer
Johanna Town
New
translation by
Alistair
Beaton
Anna
Zawe Ashton
Chorus
Michael Begley
Schmitz
Paul Chahidi
Eisenring
Benedict
Cumberbatch
Babette
Jacqueline
Defferary
Chorus
David Hinton
Biedermann
Will Keen
Chorus
/Doctor of
Philosophy
Munir Khairdin
Chorus
Claire Prempeh
Chorus
/ Widow
Knechtling
Alwyne Taylor
Chorus
Leader
Graham Turner
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Royal
Court Theatre
Jerwood
Theatre Downstairs
6
Nov - 15 Dec 2007 |
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How rare
to watch a West End play where
the audience is discomforted.
Playwrights have so pelted
us with obscenity, violence
and degradation that we are
inured to it, can laugh without
embarrassment, call their
offerings 'compassionate',
'brave' and 'honest'. But
this production of the Arsonists,
a play almost 50 years old,
really did seem raw and embarrassing.
The Royal Court audience were
at sea, missing the usual
clues to laugh or sneer and
the standard targets for scorn,
all their kitchen-sink and
anti-bourgeois training up
the spout. They were actually
asked to side with the middle-class
characters against the working-class
characters, the domestic homestead
against anarchy and subversion.
Even more confusingly, not
because the middle-class couple
are kind liberals - they are
selfish, ruthless, exploitative
- but because the alternative
is even worse.
And what kept pressing in
uncomfortably upon the audience
was the parallel with today.
A stranger (Paul Chahidi)
gains admittance to a rich
man's house, is fed, then
allowed to stay the night.
Using a sob-story, he persuades
his hosts, the Biedermanns
(Will Keen and Jacqueline
Defferary), to let him stay
on. They have all sorts of
mixed motives - they want
to seem nice, are suckers
for flattery and sob-stories,
feel guilty about their wealth,
are cowards. The newspapers
are crammed with reports of
arson and destruction, and
Biedermann is as indignant
and fearful as any other citizen,
yet he sleepwalks into doom.
Discovering another intruder,
plus cans of petrol, in his
attic, he is convinced that
if only he can make friends
with his unwanted guests,
they will spare him, even
though they assure him of
their incendiary intentions.
We never learn lessons from
history. Having endured genocide
and mass-slaughter, thanks
to failing to preempt the
Nazis, and only just preventing
them from taking over the
world, people have seized
on the idea of Communism as
an antidote to Fascism and
general panacea. In his 1958
play, Max Frisch was presumably
warning his fellow-bourgeois
intellectuals that with a
new sort of smugness they
were letting conflagrations
spring up in their midst,
and actually welcoming them
in Eastern European countries
in which they themselves didn't
have to live. 'It's not our
house', says Biedermann as
he listens to the houses in
other districts exploding
and crashing.
This revival of the Arsonists
rebukes the bien pensants,
who, guilty about our colonial
past, determined to think
the best of themselves and
everyone else, ignore the
stated intentions of Islamicists
to make this country a caliphate.
Unlike so many productions
mystifyingly labelled 'brave',
this one really was - not
least in casting Munir Khairdin,
an Asian actor with Muslim-type
square beard, as the PhD scholar
who finally joins the other
arsonists, not for mere motives
of iconoclasm but out of genuine
conviction that carnage will
lead to redemption. When he
enters the dining-room and
reads out a statement dissociating
himself from his fellow-arsonists,
splinterings, explosions and
screams totally muffle his
inaudible assertions. He rants
and gesticulates inaudibly
while the stage is blasted.
This was genuinely terrifying
theatre - almost too real.
There were things you could
cavil with in Ramin Gray's
production. The scene in which
the two arsonists come to
dinner could have been more
threatening. Biedermann could
have manifested more nervousness
at infringements of etiquette
and when his wife and maid
were being treated familiarly
by the intruders - after all
it is the minutiae of convention
to which he, the prototype
bourgeios, is most sensitive.
Often it was tantalisingly
unclear how much he guessed,
how much he was deceiving
himself, how much he was naive,
but that ambiguity may be
intentional in both production
and script. Paul Chahidi as
the arsonist Schmitz was an
unnerving mixture of brutal,
sentimental, cringing and
cavalier, and Benedict Cumberbatch
was brilliantly tough, shrewd
and faceless as his co-conspirator.
The Arsonists at the Royal
Court is what theatre is meant
to be and so rarely is - it
unsettles us, forcing us to
think and feel differently.
'Woe unto us', as the Chorus
of fire-fighters cry at the
play's end.
Jane O'Grady |
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