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No one-way streets
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German theatre director Hans-Werner Kroesinger likes to unsettle his audience
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Hans-Werner Kroesinger: `You can think full of emotion, it's just that you don't have to be overwhelmed by it.' — Photo: Murali Kumar K.
IT'S A play on the war on Iraq. And it brings into play Tony Blair's speeches, British army officer Tim Collin's message to soldiers in Iraq, excerpts from Shakespeare's Henry V, scenes from a love story believed to be written by Saddam Hussein, the ad lines of a company that promises to put your business back on feet in two days flat in case of terrorist attack... Spatially, Road to Baghdad moves from the stage to the reconstruction of an Oriental café bang in the middle of the audience, even as the massive iscreen behind projects images on preparation for war and Laurence Olivier playing Henry V.
Hans-Werner Kroesinger likes to unsettle his audience — by posing questions that confuse and by turning on its head the very notion of what a theatre production ought to be like.
Another of his play, on the experience of solitary confinement (Camera Silence), had the actress in a box. The audience only heard her voice ("actually even her heart beat and breathing") through earphones and saw her image on a screen, but never on stage. "It's as if she is sitting in your ear."
Meticulous research
If that stumps you, the kind of research work that goes into each of the German theatre director's productions will baffle you even more. Road to Baghdad, for instance, meant meticulously tracking Blair's speeches which moved from "the realm of democratic dialogue to that of a king from a Shakespearean play". He studied the practical and linguistic strategies used by the allied forces to make killer machines of their soldiers: by getting them to shoot melons "which explode like heads" for target practice and by dehumanising the man on the other side by calling him a "camel" and not "soldier".
He went through spots on TV which seemed to fool people into thinking "soldiers were going to Hollywood and not to war." He closely looked at media blackouts such as Bush's decision to ban clippings of solders' coffins coming back home.
He read through books that psychoanalysed soldiers on a range of things — from the music they carry when they leave for battle to the "acoustic memory" of the war they bring back home.
If Kroesinger's choice of political themes for most of his play leads you to the straight conclusion that he must be toeing some ideological line, the director surprises you again. "I'm a member of a democratic society and I ask questions about the stuff that's happening." But sorry, he won't serve up any answers on the platter. What's more, he'll make sure your own search for answers is riddled with confusing and contradictory information. "I don't tell the actor playing Blair to play him as a bad guy. He plays him as a guy who believes in what he says. The audience have to make up their own minds."
Kroesinger insists that let alone the audience, he himself has "no standpoint, but only an interest" when he picks up a theme. "Sometimes, I have a more unclear image at the end because I realise that the situation has more perspective than I saw in the beginning." He is uncomfortable with all tags. So much so, he wouldn't even want to call Road to Baghdad an anti-war play. It's more a play on "the strategies of how war is communicated to people".
Does that mean one is neutral? But can there be anything at all called neutrality, especially when one chooses a bomb of a topic like the Iraq war? There is an inbuilt critique already when you choose the subject, admits Kroesinger.
Blair may be convincing as an actor, but there are questions in the way the other material are built around him. "But it's not a propaganda play." Kroesinger is not interested in any "one-way streets". Is there any point, he asks, if you end up saying the director is against the war, the actors are against the war, the guy who makes the masks is against the war, the lighting angles are against the war, I too am against the war... and everyone is right? "Theatre is not an institution that takes the moral responsibility away from the audience. You can't just relax and say, `Now, they are doing an anti-war play.' It's too simple and reality is always more complicated."
But doesn't this constant emphasis on thinking make a play too cerebral, robbing it of the emotional component? "On the other hand, there's always the pleasure of thinking! You can think full of emotion, it's just that you don't have to be overwhelmed by it," says Kroesinger. That's what Bertolt Brecht, one of the most enduring influences on Kroesinger and many more like him, believed. "Brecht is a very passionate playwright. But he is putting his passions and emotions in the deep-freezer. And when you touch something which is deep-frozen, it's as if you've touched something very hot. So, there's a lot of heat inside."
A play here?
So, while in Bangalore for a workshop as Max Mueller Bhavan's guest, would an Indian play "with a lot of heat inside" emerge? Not right away. But in due course, may be. It would have to shape up through workshops.
He can't be choosing the subject, being a foreigner. But being one does help in some ways: he may be able to ask questions that don't occur to you when you've lived here all your life. "The same happens to me when people from elsewhere come to Germany. It opens my mind."
BAGESHREE S.
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