Drama is much more suited to interpret history than film. @RvanH writes essay on Hannah and Martin at #TF2010

Hannah and Martin by Mugmetdegoudentand is not only a heartwarming performance, played by one phenomenal actress and one inimitable theatre personality, it is also a brainteaser. Trouw reviewer and theatre scholar Robbert van Heuven felt challenged to write a short essay in response to this performance.

By Robbert van Heuven

Facts determine only a small part of historiography. Much more important is how those facts relate to each other, how they suggest cause and effect, and in what context they stand. Above all, it is the narrator and his underlying interests that determine what history will look like. Not for nothing is it said that victors write history.

And then you can turn that complicated history into fiction. In a film, for instance, or a theatre play. At first glance, film still seems the best medium for that. With large sets, masses of extras, digital techniques and special effects a fictional world can be made almost palpable. You can almost smell the horse figs, almost feel the sharpness of the cleaving sword. But, however overwhelming, the historical picture in a film is rather flat. It provides no more than a particular view of historical events, namely that view that suited director and scriptwriter best. Yet, as a medium, films are so convincing and realistic that, as a viewer, you feel that "this is how it might have been. Telling something about the alternatives, the other possibilities, the relative view of the victor, film does not. Film show one of the ways of looking at historical facts, leaving no room for reflection on the accuracy of that display.

Video: According to Hollywood, the Trojan War was something massive. Others tell us that in real life, only a handful of 'heroes' terrorised a Kleinazi village. Even the writer Homer, however, did not have first-hand knowledge of the story of the fall of Troy.

It is different with drama. That is less suited to the show of history, because on stage with a cardboard castle décor, you fall through mercilessly. Realism is not the stage's strong suit. Film does that better. But theatre, on the other hand, is much more suited to making history indicate than film.

In the show Hannah and Martin mugmetdegoudentand flawlessly demonstrates how well theatre is suited as a form for capturing unstable and fluid historical facts. The performance describes the relationship between the Jewish thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt and the National Socialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, but more importantly what actors Lieneke (Rijxman) and Willem (De Wolf), who want to make a performance about that relationship, think of it.

They are not very united in this. Every time they seem to be on their way to reconstructing the love affair, disagreement seeps into the scene. Lieneke is a supporter of the open and outward-looking thinking of Arendt, while Willem appreciates the more hermetic and introspective thinking of Heidegger. This creates a layered tension that is not just about the actors, but just as much about the relationship between the two philosophers. Or vice versa: it becomes increasingly unclear whose story the actors are now telling: does their relationship now seep into Hannah and Martin's, or does the relationship between Hannah and Martin actually affect the relationship between actors Willem and Lieneke?

The actors create that layered play with fact and fiction by alternately playing themselves, Heidegger and Arendt or Professor Wolf and 18-year-old student Lieneke. The latter wants to know something about the relationship between the thinkers and therefore visits the professor, just as 18-year-old Arendt also visited her much older professor Heidegger. The most interesting moments in the play are those where those layers blend together like watercolour. A remark by Lieneke, that she likes to keep private and public on stage separate, turns into an interview by Willem with Arendt (played by a peerless Rijxman with wig, oversized fake teeth and cigarette). When, during that interview, Arendt remarks that her being Jewish is irrelevant to the conversation, Willem thinks Lieneke and not Arendt is making that remark, making it suddenly about Rijxman's being Jewish. Thus her private life unintentionally becomes public after all, whereas she had deployed the remark about being Jewish as a public figure (after all, as an actress playing Arendt).

Constantly changing perspective in this way creates a deeper way of looking. Present and past, here and now and then and there, slide over each other like two sheets of glass. You cannot look at the then and there without accounting for your own conceptions here and now. In every attempt at reconstruction, the here and now shimmers through the historical characters. It is a form that would have appealed to Arendt, apprehensive as she was about denying the multiplicity of viewpoints that make up human history.

This way of looking at history is ideally suited to the medium of theatre. In film, the spectator uncritically loses himself in a one-dimensional, canned two-hour historical reality. In theatre, by definition, different realities intersect : that of the here and now and the togetherness of audience and players and that of the reality the players want us to imagine. These realities make Hannah and Martin transparent. We look through one to the other and so we become aware of the relativity of history. In which the makers say more about both then and now than any realistically designed historical drama.

This article is an adapted version of a article written for the Corpus of Art Criticism.

Hannah and Martin by Mugmetdedoudentand can still be seen 2 and 3 September at the Dutch Theatre Festival. A few tickets are still available. Tonight, Joan Nederlof addresses the State of Theatre in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, as the opening of the Dutch Theatre Festival

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