This is German company Rimini
Protokoll's first visit to Britain. They ought to be massively
influential here, existing as they do at the confluence of two hot
theatrical trends. On the one hand, there is the multimedia "showing
how it's done" aesthetic being embraced by director Katie Mitchell and
others, with sound and video effects being visibly controlled from
onstage; on the other, the increasingly popular verbatim theatre, in
which real people are depicted in their own words. But Rimini go
further: they use the people themselves. I have previously seen Rimini
shows involving a Korean-born woman adopted by a German couple perform
a piece about her search for a satisfactory identity, and a group of
elderly Swiss model-railway enthusiasts sharing their passion with the
audience. There is little or no artifice in the performance of these
"theatre experts"; the show is built around them, with video and other
technical effects being conspicuously added.
In
Breaking News, a real-life
news video editor sits at a console through which she controls live
satellite feeds and relays them to racks of screens onstage. The
programming is news from a variety of countries, each being translated
onstage by a professional interpreter. We see today's news from Russia,
Iceland, the Indian sub-continent, South America and the Middle East,
together with B.B.C. Worldwide and the German programme
Tagesschau, the last with sardonic
interpretation from a media analyst who notes that the show's viewing
figures peak at the weather forecast and demonstrates how he regains
perspective on news programming by watching it whilst standing on his
head. For this is about the transformation of news into a branch of
entertainment, and the way we watch it critically or uncritically but
seldom with any depth or real engagement. The news feeds are
interspersed with first-person biographical snippets and, in a move of
genius, passages from Aeschylus'
The
Persians, a dramatic tragedy which at the time of writing was
effectively a piece of current-affairs theatre and is sometimes
indistinguishable from 21st-century commentary.
At just over two uninterrupted hours, the work is too long for British
sensibilities; it is also frequently baggy, but then, so is life. By
showing us reality, simultaneously framed on a stage and yet unfiltered
through conventions of dramatic shaping, Rimini Protokoll do what the
best theatre always does: force us to re-examine what it means to be
ourselves.
Written for the Financial
Times.