toy soldiers
by Douglas Messerli
Hotel
Modern and Arthur Sauer The Great War / Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna
Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall / the performance I saw
was on Friday 17, 2015
How
do you talk about World War I in the second decade of the 21st
century, a hundred years after the event, and still depict its horror and the
devastating effects of that war which not only helped to create the
circumstances leading to World War II, but has implications even for today?
Many of us have long ago experienced the
cinematic renderings of that War in Rex Ingram’s 1920 silent epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Lewis
Milestone’s 1930 ground-breaking Erich Maria Remarque-inspired pacifist film All Quiet on the Western Front, and the
numerous others that followed, and some of have read the extensive recountings
of the horror of the War which killed so many men, for so little purpose, in
the trenches of Belgium, France, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Germany was so utterly transformed by its defeat that World War II that can be
said to have been the result of the economic, cultural, and spiritual
transformations that were played out throughout its aftermath in the Weimar
Republic, ending with the National Socialist’s and Hitler’s rise to power.
Almost of its soldiers are now dead, its
horrific battles confined to history books, the absurdity of its politics
satirized in later 20th century works such as Oh! What a Lovely War—a musical play which, strangely enough, I saw
in Norway in 1964 as part of an audience that could not yet quite laugh at
those long ago battles; and which I saw as a very stylish but utterly
cold-blooded film by Richard Attenborough five years later. The documentation
that still exists, seems almost as utterly absurd as the Saturday Night Live
send-up of it battles in its parody sketch “The Walker Brigade,” which featured
disabled soldiers marching off to battle armed only with the lightweight
machines that support their movements forward with rolling casters. Perhaps
only such later films as Bill Condon’s Gods
and Monsters through its psychological asides about the life of its central
figure, James Whale, to convey how utterly devastating the War had been upon
the psyche of those who had survived.
Gertrude Stein, who lived through that
terrible time, insisted—as I quote in an essay in this volume—upon describing
World War I, incredibly and rather shockingly, it was a “nice war” when
compared with World War II. But even the war-enthusiastic F. T. Marinetti would
reveal in his later works such as The
Untameables that the First World War was neither “lovely” nor “nice.” E. E.
Cummings, in The Enormous Room was
able to convey its utter absurdity without diminishing the ways it had changed
generations to come. World War I, after all, was the reason why Hemingway’s and
Fitzgerald’s generation had become “lost.”
Faced with the lunacy of that world-wide confrontation, music, dance,
sex, alcohol and endless storytelling seemed to be the only alternatives. No
one could really go home again, even if they did. And their children would be
inexorably changed by that reality.
So, I repeat, how do you tell this story
to a century of younger individuals whose fathers and grandfathers and
great-grandfathers had been so affected by the destruction of so many millions
of people in so many wars that it might be hard to list them, that World War I
truly meant something, that it changed the entire way which not only people in
the 20the century perceived the world, but how our own time in still
involved in its consequences.
Given the ahistorical nature of American
education, I cannot imagine such as work as that I encountered the other evening
at Los Angeles’ Redcat Theatre being created by a company from the US; but it
makes sense that a Rotterdam-based innovative theatrical troupe might wish to
once again explore that so transformed their own nation. Indeed many of the
great wars throughout time in Europe have somewhat inexplicably been centered
upon the small nation of Belgium, Even today some observers ponder the fact that
this small nation has shockingly produced a large quantity of Islamic Jihadists
fighting for ISIS in countries such as Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Mideast.
Itself a country of two often oppositional cultural values—the Dutch-speaking
Flemish, and the French-speaking Walloons—Belgium continues to be a crossroad
of ideological values as well as the center of the European judiciary and
financial community. In today's cultural mish-mash of ideologies and concepts,
Belgium has become a strange watershed for poetry, film, and performance, works
of which are often supported by its self-conscious governing leaders.
Hotel Modern, a performance group founded
by composer Arthur Sauer along with Arlène Hoornweg, Pauline Kalker, and Herman
Helle, chose to focus on the War in highly theatrical terms, using miniature
sets, figures, and other objects and, through simultaneous video recording,
enlarging them to the screen in order to recreate some of the everyday
struggles. Through letters from Prospert Eyssautier, the artist Max Beckmann,
and author Remarque, the group created scenarios that might almost remind one
of a child playing with tin soldiers. Indeed, at moments, with the group’s hands
marching their soldiers through the muck beside large forests of parsley leaves,
there is often something playful about this work, in the best sense of that
word. It is a self-consciously theatricalized work that delights in its own naiveté.
Yet, if the work begins, as have so many
tellings of the war, with the several attempted and one successful assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, quickly followed by a babel
of talking heads of the representatives of various countries all speaking simultaneously
in different languages, the somewhat Monte Python-like moment of the toy
soldier affair quickly becomes quite poignantly expressive, as mustard gas
lights the sky, bombings torch entire landscapes, and, with the ever-present
help of the Foley-effects and music of Sauer, the thunder of cannons and
explosives crackles across the skies.
As Singapore critic Ang Song Ming perceptively
commented: “The theme of fragmentation (blowing up) extends through Hotel
Modern’s liberal use of explosions in scenes of war. In “The Great War,” “blowing
up” exists not just as explosions, but also as magnification—when the different
animated scenes are projected onto the screen, everything produced on stage is
magnified, blown up by the camera.”
Accordingly, what first might appear as
child’s play gradually becomes a series of serious scenarios and tableaux about
horror and death. The bodies of the soldiers are ground down by human hands
into the mud; rusty nails become markers and borders that threaten the men as
potential Golgothas, a downpour of salt crystals blind the soldiers caught
within snowstorms, a plant-moisturizer showers the men in a torturous rainstorm.
Even the constantly moving hands of the performers as they race from front to front,
soon come to stand-in for the metaphorical hand-of-God, displaying the seeming
randomness and meaninglessness of the warriors’ actions. As we are also
reminded, however, this is not a holy war but one of man’s making, a war
created—just as the company is re-creating this one—by flawed human beings.
If by play’s end there is anything
childlike remaining about this miniaturized, toy soldier world we have
witnessed, it is in the mindset of all the beings of who helped to create the
real war which this event depicts. And after a vigorous applause, the audience
was invited to come upon on the stage to witness the sets in which these “blown-up”
events had taken place, as if to witness the carnage that had just been
depicted.
Los Angeles,
April 19-20, 2015
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April
2015).
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