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I got more than I bargained for. While the first half was confusing but did, indeed, show the tensions played out between family and friends as they argue and debate what the best policy is for dealing with the rise of fascistic, authoritarian, and downright cruel regimes, the second half was, to put it quite frankly, utterly fucking bonkers. Men with their cocks out, people being tarred and feathered, buckets of blood lobbed over the stage, and the occasional, completely inappropriate, breaking out into some kind of German drinking song. It made about as much sense as a Boris Johnson interview and in places it was nearly as unpleasant to look at.
If van Hove was hoping to convert Brexiters (Brexiters, not Brexiteers - they're not fucking superheroes, mostly just pricks) to a more rational, considered, and less prejudiced way of thinking it seems inevitable to fail. They're as likely to watch a two hour play about politics and history as they are to read this blog about it. For the most part, their minds are made up - it's an article of faith for them now. They'd rather destroy the union and wreck the economy to get their hands on the precious, non-existent unicorns that Johnson and Farage promised them than admit they've been had.
The fact the play was in French won't help much either. Imagine your average common or garden xenophobe going to see a play that has subtitles? Hell, even a sophisticated internationally minded member of the metropolitan elite* like me found it hard going. I wasn't sure whether to look at the subtitled words high above the stage, the action (often several different actors on different parts of the stage at different times), or the big screen at the back which was relaying close ups of the performers live.
This meant that there was a black clad cameraman wandering around the stage following the actors for much of the play. A little confusing when some of the Nazi officials, who'd occasionally wander on to stage to reprimand somebody or shoot them in the head, were done up in similar garb.
The basic premise centred around the von Essenback family, steel magnates undergoing tough times and colluding with the Third Reich to try and keep out of trouble. Some think, correctly, that every inch they give to the Nazis means they'll be asked to concede more and more until they have nothing left. Others opine that it's best to keep their heads down, wait for this to blow over, and put business first. We know how that panned out.
There are so many characters it's hard to keep on top of who's who but I'll give a shout out to Christophe Montenez, who as Martin seems to be dangerously, and highly dubiously, attracted to an underage girl, to Elsa Lepoivre who plays his mother as a mixture of moll and matriarch, and Denis Podalyes whose Konstantin throws his lot in with Hitler only to find that that'll cut no ice with the regime when they consider him a nuisance.
I was disappointed that it was so difficult to follow because, certainly, there was a hard hitting point to be made that's as relevant now as it's been anytime since World War II and although it's not the job of artists or theatre directors like van Hove to make that point too obviously, I'm starting to think the time for subtlety is through. It's time to throw some bricks, smash some windows, and, if need be, crack some heads**. They'll be coming for us soon enough.
If you're poor, if you're the wrong colour, if you have mental health problems, if you believe in truth then they're already coming for you and I don't mean an amorphous 'they' - I mean, specifically, Nigel Farage and his Brexit party, a Tory party that will probably make Boris Johnson their leader whatever he does and whoever he does it to, and a whipped up crowd of illiterate hate merchants on social media who see the answers in violent misogynistic rape threatening thugs like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (creator of the character Tommy Robinson) and Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad - these bastards are even ruining pseudonyms).
It's obvious right from the start that van Hove's play is meant to shine a light on to these cowards and bullies and make very clear that the scapegoats they're trying to blame for all our woes are just that - scapegoats. Godwin's Law states that the longer an online conversation goes on the more likely it becomes that somebody will call somebody else a Hitler or a Nazi.
But we're past Godwin's Law now. We're in a world of Orwellian speak where asking questions about the policies of leading politicians is an affront and can be booed, where women MPs can be told they're not worth raping, where other women MPs can be shot dead in the street by right wing thugs shouting 'Britain First', and where the likely next PM has threatened to have journalists beaten up.
There's not a lot of laughs to be had with The Damned (although when Lepoivre goes runaround, followed by a camera - naturally, around the backstage and out by the lake of the Barbican it's pretty amusing) and that's quite right. The Nazis, on the whole, weren't a very humorous bunch. In fact, if it wasn't for the concentration camps, over sixty million dead bodies, and a poison unleashed into world politics which will never, and can never, be fully washed away that might be the thing we castigate them most for.
But when you vote for hate you get hate, when you vote for division you get division, and when you vote for evil you get evil. You'd have thought that, in Britain, we'd have realised that by now but over the next month it seems absolutely apparent that, with the election of Britain's worst ever prime minister, it will get much much worse.
After each death in The Damned, the dead character is lead to a grave by the side of the stage, lowered into it, and the case closed upon them. It happens painfully slowly, we can see what's happening very clearly, but we can do nothing to stop it.
After that the camera pans out to the audience. We appear on the large screen staring back at ourselves. As complicit in the atrocity as anyone else. We're not yet at the stage of full on right wing authoritarian rule in this country - but we're not far from it. We can still be better than the von Essenbacks, we don't have to be destroyed by our own prejudices and selfishness. But, we haven't got long. We need to start fighting now. I didn't really need to see this play to know that.
*If, on the off chance any angry Brexit voters are reading this. This is what's known as a joke. You know, like your hero Boris Johnson makes. In fact, like your hero Boris Johnson IS!
**Don't really throw bricks, smash windows, or crack heads. Instead, get out there and educate, agitate, organise!
