MARTYR
  Unicorn Theatre, London SE1 and touring

Opened 17 September, 2015
***

Marius von Mayenburg’s most recent plays have examined major social issues directly rather than through semi-detached fables. In Stück Plastik, it was casual middle-class exploitation of domestic labour. Here, in a 2012 piece now given its British première in a co-production between the Unicorn and the Actors Touring Company, the topics are fundamentalism and tolerance.

Both Germany and Britain are experiencing rising levels of anti-Islamism; however, von Mayenburg makes a point of showing our own conduct to us. When Benjamin (whose age is unspecified but apparently in the pubescent mid-teens) refuses to participate in swimming lessons at school, it is because he has embraced a particularly hectoring and authoritarian form of Christian fundamentalism. We see Benjamin’s suppressed issues both hetero- and homosexual (resisting with difficulty the come-ons of a female classmate and failing to spot the subtext of a male one’s attachment to him), but principally he sets himself up (as spokesman for “the Lord”) against school counsellor and biology teacher Erica White: because she teaches sex education and evolution (to which he responds in class by, respectively, stripping naked and wearing a gorilla mask), because the Bible says a woman should not be in authority over a man (such as him) and finally because her name suggests she is a Jew and therefore anti-Christian. (Erica’s actual heritage is, explicitly, neither confirmed nor denied in the play.) She faces further problems of her own in the form of the sleazy, cowardly hypocrisy of the headmaster and the well-meaning incomprehension of her boyfriend, some time before we even get to Benjamin’s plans to murder her.

This, I suspect, is where British and German readings of the play may diverge. Faced as she is with the scowling, klaxoning remorselessness of Daniel O’Keefe’s Benjamin and her own colleagues’ desire for an easy life, it is easy for Britons whose secularism is sometimes more overtly antagonistic to see Erica as a victim, pure and simple. (A note in the playscript observes that in the original German, the title may be either singular or plural.) However, the patience and forbearance of Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s Erica break, too, temporarily at first but in the end definitively, showing us that intolerance of intolerance is still itself intolerant.

Ramin Gray of ATC has demonstrated in his past von Mayenburg productions that he can somehow make manifest the complexity of the material whilst maintaining an unadorned staging. Here, a simple set of plywood flooring unfolds towards the end of the 95-minute piece so that sheets of it form verticals; for the most part, it provides simply delineated playing areas whilst the rest of the company sit upstage reading, texting or picking at a guitar. Perhaps it is precisely this low-key nature of the presentation which militates against the play leaving a lasting mark.
 
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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