BAAL
BAAL, Malthouse Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1; May 11-June 11, 2011. Photos by Jeff Busby.
BERTOLT BRECHT was just 20 when he wrote this play and when WW1 ended. It was 1918, Germany was in ruins and utterly humiliated; revolution rumbled as imperial rule tottered, eventually falling to the Weimar Republic. At the same time, while Brecht’s personal politics were gradually firming into Marxism, Germany itself stopped well short of all out socialism because of the Social Democrats’ fear of civil war. The frustration of the young was extreme. For Brecht, then a university student, it meant a new kind of theatre as a means of expressing his disgust at Germany’s ruling classes; and Baal was its beginning.
Alienation and distanciation are key elements that Brecht brought to fruition in later work, but they can be seen in this, his first full length play. There is a calculated disregard for bourgeois niceties and deliberate effort is made to ensure that situations and characters are not empathic; and that the viewer is not encouraged, or even permitted, to identify with either – as hitherto had been the case in German popular theatre. Perversely, for some, this proved to be – and still is – very attractive, but it is perverse!
Starting out at Melbourne’s Malthouse last month before transferring to Sydney, there is a spruik on the Malthouse website that is possibly a jest and possibly not intended as prophetic: “The Threepenny Opera had audiences baying for more Bertolt Brecht. Be careful what you wish for.” Indeed. For very obvious reasons, the early play is not in the same league as the story of MacHeath and friends and it’s not surprising that Baal is described as “rarely staged”. Threepenny Opera came nearly a decade later, by which time Brecht had honed his skills on more than a dozen plays.
Baal (Thomas M Wright) was a poet in Brecht’s original, now he’s a rock star whose love for his guitar and booze is equal only to his hatred of pretty much all else, particularly the men and women who fawn over him. His theme song could be “I am an antichrist /I am an anarchist / Don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it,” because Brecht would surely have dreamed up the Sex Pistols, given half a chance. He was as fascinated by nasty, charismatic men as any groupie.
What’s weirdly captivating in this production, however, is how oafishly uncharismatic the antihero actually is and therefore, how irresistible that makes him to the smart young women – and men – who surround him. And the more they adore, the nastier he becomes, naturally. Director Simon Stone and translator/adapter Tom Wright have condensed Brecht’s Baal into 75 alienated and alienating minutes of cold, hard, undramatic drama where murder, sex and alcohol are as matter-of-fact as they often are in “real” life. Like real life, too, the narrative progression is insistently ill constructed in a gloomy beginning that tails off into even more gloom and final doom. It’s enough to make any self-loathing existential angst-artiste jump for joy.
The bleakness is emphasised from the opening moments via the integrated set and lighting (Nick Schlieper) that drenches the empty, two-walled space and variety of partially clad and naked bodies in sulphurous yellow light. An ingenious set change occurs somewhere along the way to perdition that is a startling Buster Keaton moment. The yellow gives way, in an instant, to a dark nowhere of drenching rain whose relentless steadiness would make Queenslanders nervous.
The company works hard in atrocious conditions (the RSPCA probably wouldn’t permit animals to appear in this production!) and give the play far more than it deserves. As Baal himself Wright shouts a lot and seems rather flat and despairing, which isn’t really surprising. The others shout too but that’s largely because the rain is so damned loud. The orgy on the (soggy) mattress is perfunctory and unattractive, but that’s the way of orgies: it’s quite realistic if you’re interested. But if excessive rain and variously saggy or perky body parts bother you, it’s probably not the show for you.
Determined anarchy and misanthropy are attractive only to the very young and silly or those suffering from arrested development. Baal is a curiosity because of its writer’s precocious youth and is actually a reminder of why premature death was such a good career move for Baal, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious et al. They hoped they died before they got old for really good reasons.
