No laughing matter

My qualifications to write on the subject of German theatre are immaculate: around forty years ago my wife and I were invited by some friends to a performance of Das Leben ein Traum, 'Life is a Dream', the German version of the Spaniard Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (c.1630). I was familiar with the English version of the play. My wife (also English) and I struggled to keep our composure during the performance, not wanting to upset our host couple, who had paid a mighty sum for our tickets.

A critical moment for keeping composure occurred when a company of Samurai swordsmen turned up. 'What are Japanese warriors doing in 17th century Poland?' I whispered to her. 'It's probably a metaphor for something. Do you think actors will do anything for money?'. 'Probably. Perhaps that's why Plato banned them'. Ever since then I have kept well away from German and Swiss theatres.

The staging, the sets and the acting were all firmly in the long German tradition of cultural hysteria a.k.a. 'LOOK-AT-ME!!!'. Everything I have heard or read about Teutonic theatre from then until now has confirmed my first impression. No member of a German audience should leave the theatre unstartled.

In the meantime, on this website, we have had some occasional entertainment at some hilariously hysterical, 'LOOK-AT-ME!!!' productions (for example here). Now along comes a production that makes us sit up and take notice of the depths of idiocy that have opened up in German theatre culture.

In 2020 Tiago Rodrigues (1977-), the Portuguese actor, director, playwright and producer wrote a play Catarina e a Beleza de Matar Fascistas (2020), which has now turned up in a German translation as Catarina oder Von der Schönheit, Faschisten zu töten, 'Catarina, or the beauty of killing fascists'.

Rodrigues is a crazed Marxist revolutionary who has bubbled up through the Marxist cultural hegemony in France to become the Director of the Festival d'Avignon, the which he has declared to be a centre for the 'resistance' to all things right-wing – Trump (of course), Vance (of course), Le Pen et al. … You get the idea.

German culture long ago fell to the mad cultural Marxists of its own making, the Frankfurt School, so when the theatre in Bochum picks up Rodrigues' piece Catarina, you should be prepared for a rocky ride.

Here's a quick plot outline as given by the Bochum Theatre.

In this Portuguese family, an unusual tradition exists: every year [for the last 70 years ed.] on 19th of May, the anniversary of the murder of the farm worker Catarina Eufémia by henchmen of the dictatorship, a fascist is killed. The day always begins as a cheerful family celebration and ends with the shooting of a delinquent. Here, injustice is apparently avenged. …

English text: Theater Bochum. Catarina Eufémia (1928-1954) was a poor farmworker with three children who was shot by Salazar's National Republican Guard during a worker's strike. She came to be used as a martyr figure by the Portuguese Communist Party.

What? (And you thought Waiting for Godot was a bit odd).

There's a bit of to and fro among the younger generations of the family (one a vegan, the other a pacifist), whether shooting fascists in the head is unseemly, but the family decides to stick to its 70-year tradition.

Throughout this nearly one and a half hour long family yatter the fascist du jour, nattily suited and with a lapel-badge (thus visibly a wrong'un), sits silently with head bowed. Right at the end he gets to say his piece in a long monologue that concludes the play. The monologue, written by the mad Marxist Rodrigues, is the usual confection of far-left dog whistles – go on, guess: Trump, Vance… etc. etc. So far, so dismal.

The audience at the premiere on 15 February had a fun time pondering shooting fascists in the head, that is, until the fascist got up to deliver his monologue. Seemingly disappointed that he was not going to be executed on stage there and then with a good old German Genickschuss, the audience interrupted his speech with boos, even hurling objects at the poor actor declaiming his right-wing lines.

Some German reviewers were surprised that the people of Bochum, mad lefties the lot of them, did not have the intelligence to distinguish between reality, a play, a human actor (who is probably a mad lefty himself) and the words put into his mouth by Rodrigues. The real projectiles hurled by enraged members of the audience were aimed at a real person. One reviewer pointed out that the actor playing the fascist delivered his right-wing monologue in a calm and muted voice instead of a Hitlerian bellow, which affect may have worked as a provocation to the mob in the pits. Perhaps he should have done a Donald impersonation. [For German-speaking readers, a collection of some of the reviews of the play can be found here.]

In the middle of the mayhem the producer rushed on to the stage to address the audience, asking them to stop attacking the actor, who was just doing his job.

Normality

If you think that my remarks about German theatrical hysteria are misplaced, consider the relative normality of the staging in a Portuguese production:

The text may still be beyond demented, but at least we in the audience are not sitting there wondering why everyone looks so weird.

Coda

In Lyon, France, on 14 February, one day before the premiere of Catarina in Bochum, Quentin Deranque, a 23-year-old mathematics student, was involved in a brawl with 'antifascists', who had identified him and his compatriots as 'fascists'. The incident is still under investigation, but it appears that he got separated from his friends and once isolated, was savagely beaten and kicked, resulting in his death two days later from brain damage.

Apart from placing these two events together, collage-like, I draw no conclusion.