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.