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TOM FOOL
By Franz Xaver Kroetz
Translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Production at The Bush Theatre
Shepherd’s Bush Green, London W12 8QD
Directed by Clare Lizzimore
Designed by Paul Burgess
Lighting and Sound Design by Graham Sutherland
Call +44 (0) 20 7610 4224 Tickets £7 - £15
Tues – Sat 8pm; Sat Matinees 3pm
Running time 2 hours 20 mins with intermission
Through 21 April 2007
Everyman, Simply
At the Bush Theatre last night. the producer of the play told me that the touring production of the admirable Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, should not be judged as the work of a Scottish company. This, even though the Scottish actors with their Scottish accents gave what she described as a very good impression of Glasgow working class life. They did, in fact, leave one with that impression. Rather strongly, in fact.
In his nod towards Brecht’s Mann ist Mann, playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’ 1978 play, Mensch Meier is translated here as Tom Fool. Otto Meier, his wife, Martha and their son Ludwig, occupy a working class apartment in the German car-worker-level housing estate. The security of the wage earning labour force is under constant threat by low paid guest workers.
The family’s day to day life in their cramped living quarters is shown us in a fascinating use of episodes of real time, parenthetically inserted into the passage of dramatic time. You might think it bewildering that you are made to watch the protagonists at some length in the minutiae of tidying the tiny apartment, or watching TV together, or simply doing absolutely nothing, and it is bewildering. But it is also surreal and strangely compelling. We wouldn’t stare at a dead cow in a field, or stand looking at an unmade bed at home, but in the Tate Modern or the theatre we pay to do it! Director Clare Lizzimore’s courageous use of silence and stasis invited the experience of alienation dear to Brechtian Theatre.
So we have a company using a daring theatrical device, attempting to capture the special nature of a German family’s life at that socio-economic level, while placing the characters in utterly believable Glaswegian realism. The result was a hit and miss target shoot. It did not seem feasible that a father who would humiliate and come to the brink of assaulting his son over a perceived bit of pocket money theft, would share his wife with her new lover after she had left him. The Glasgow car worker would probably not have left either of them alive, and so the ‘civilised’ continental European sexual culture did not survive being grafted onto the … yes, extremely convincing portrait of Glasgow working class life.
The father also indulged in some heavily symbolic building, and smashing, of a model plane. His apparently trivial obsessions, be they over a pen, or some money overcharged are classified, it seems, by translators, Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, as the silly, trifling actions of the fool in the drama, viz., tomfoolery. The simple man of the playwright has perversely become merely simple in their eyes. Else why the pejorative title?
The three highly talented and committed actors, Liam Brennan, as Otto, Meg Fraser as Martha, and Richard Madden as young Ludwig, gave performances of real depth, impossibly working within inches of scribbling critics in the tiny theatre. The very honesty of their playing, and consequently indelible Scots credibility meant, however, that the tissue typing of the transplant was only partially successful. It was difficult to accept that they were Germans.
But in Scotland they don’t have Scots accents, just regional ones, I was told, which makes all the difference. That the company is in England opens a dimension that the German writer of this intriguing and constantly engaging piece could not have dreamed would happen to his play, which ended as it began, in the middle.
Recommended
Saul Reichlin
London Correspondent
Talk Theatre in Chicago Podcast
Date Reviewed March 30, 2007
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