Berlin divides Hare and Ravenhill
Mark Ravenhill is the toast of the Berlin theatre while David Hare always gets booed there.
Ravenhill’s new play, Over There, at the Royal Court makes artistic metaphor of the still divided city without its wall. Hare’s new monologue, Berlin, which he’s delivering to packed audiences in the Lyttelton, suggests the city has forgotten its history and is dedicated only to clubbing and lifestyle.
He also says that a Berlin production of a play of his set in Guildford had some inappropriately Gothic lettering smeared all over the signage on the railway platform, while a group of youths in leather played on a pinball machine, drinking schnapps.
I don’t think Edward Fox would have put up with that when he played in the original production of Knuckle.
It’s a fascinating rift in attitude between two major playwrights, one right in the swim of things, the other sceptically swimming against the tide. Ravenhill’s play is co-produced by the Schaubuhne in Berlin, where it will be seen immediately after the run in Sloane Square.
Appearing on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week this morning on BBC Radio Four, Ravenhill eloquently defined East and West differences before cheekily playing up to his “enfant terrible” status by discussing simultaneous orgasms between twins.
What a daredevil! “Start the week,” he chirruped in a way most listeners won’t have considered before.
Instantly the image of David Hare standing on the Lyttelton stage on Friday evening — two hours before Ravenhill’s play opened — came to mind, as he recounted standing outside the Berliner Ensemble and considering Brecht: “It’s hard not to admit, things do seem a very long way from radicalism and outrage and the sensational first night of The Threepenny Opera.”
But then, at the Court, the Treadaway twins in the Ravenhill play toyed with their own private parts, pulled on a pig’s head, covered one another with mayonnaise and ketchup, lamented the lost values of Communism. Was this radical, was this an outrage, was this a sensational first night to compare with Brecht? I don’t think so. It all seemed curiously conventional, slightly old hat.
The poster for the 1928 premiere of The Threepenny Opera was designed by a German artist called David Schneuer, who spent the last fifty years of his life in Tel Aviv where my wife’s cousin did all his screen-printing and publishing.
In 1932, Schneuer was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau as an artistic dissident. When released, he emigrated to Palestine and stayed there until he died in 1988, still developing the same Expressionist style of his days in Berlin.
His art says something vivid and meaningful about the dark days he lived through in a city where, today, artistic action painting of the sort we have in the Ravenhill play is a fashionable diversion from any serious attempt to interpret either the past or the present.
Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, so excoriated by the Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson as revealing an unwittng anti-Semitism, is in fact a theatrical lament for the difficulty of explaining the rights of retaliation to terrorism, the rights of a nation to exist and not be pushed back into the sea even at the cost of innocent life on the aggressor’s side.
Churchill’s ten-minute play is an anguished articulation of a conundrum. How far do you justify your rights without sacrificing the right to have them in the eyes of humanity at large?
The theme is taken up by David Hare himself later this week, when he will deliver the second of his two-part Berlin/Wall piece on the stage of the Royal Court, after they’ve cleaned up the mayonnaise and ketchup.
This second wall is the the fence to keep people out of Israel, whereas the Berlin wall was deigned to keep people in. It’s the same thing really, and Hare quotes the novelist David Grossman on what’s happened in Israel: “Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.”
It’s a chilling epilogue to Hare’s Via Dolorosa. But it’s also further evidence that serious political theatre hasn’t entirely disappeared in the current welter of gestural superficiality and the low risk clamour of childish naughtiness.