Unforgettable stage version of Man Without Qualities gets undeserved dessert from Yves Petry #hf12

Maybe it is also just the wrong choice to see part three immediately after the first two parts. Maybe after a day of you or some settling down you will be able to appreciate Petry's text, on its own merits.

 

Imagine a three-star dinner. A sensuous succession of small and medium-sized dishes, prepared with the utmost care by a renowned top chef, based on a still legendary recipe and served by the best waiters in the world. And that everyone was so busy with the molecular foams and nitrogen preparations that they left the newly appointed sous chef alone with dessert for a while.

And that that was therefore not wise.

So something like this happened to me at the premiere of the full trilogy of Man Without Qualities, Saturday 26 May 2012 in Brussels. Having been immersed between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. in the highest level of modern theatre art, the last hour and a half were a deception. And that's not down to the actors Johan Leysen and Liesa van der Aa, nor to the entire team of designers and technicians who, led by Guy Cassiers, do their stinking best to make it look beautiful. It is entirely down to the acclaimed Flemish author Yves Petry who felt he had to add a piece of superficial, pretentious and ugly prose to Robert Musil's hitherto shimmering and sensual stream of words and images.

The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished work by Austrian writer Robert Musil, who died in 1942. In it, he gives an extremely detailed but also razor-sharp picture of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, which came into being in 1867 and is seen by many as the beta version of what we now know as the European Union. It is this similarity that makes the first two parts of the theatre marathon so frighteningly beautiful.

The play takes us to the years 1913 and 1914, when the empire is preparing to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1917. No one seems aware of the world war that is about to erupt. People would rather occupy themselves with a mysterious diarrhoea epidemic among horses and worry about the rise of populists who do not like a united Central Europe. Basically, you sit and watch the competition between regions vying for the title of European Capital of Culture 2018 in the Netherlands, meanwhile getting annoyed by the Eurovision Song Contest, while the PVV abolishes culture and around the Mediterranean one state after another goes bankrupt.

Does not the same fate await us as those bickering Europeans exactly a hundred years ago?

It is this non-coercive analogy that makes director Guy Cassiers' work so wonderful and meaningful. His adaptation - from the beginning of this century - of Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' was therefore so unforgettable. Even as now in volume two of the Musil trilogy, the focus of the narrative shifts to the personal life of the first-person character, the Man Without Qualities who, thanks to that featurelessness, becomes more and more of a messiah, or rather Nespresso hero the universal character of the evening remains undeniably present. It gets even stronger, as you would want to call out to the characters from the audience to look especially behind them, where the Big Bad War is looming.

So if, according to the programme, the first two parts may be a funnel from the universal to the personal, the spout of that funnel, in part three, is the klismatic anticlimax they cannot possibly be satisfied with as creators. Petry sets aside all the universality of Musil's unfinished masterpiece and lets us witness Johan Leysen, aka Musil, aka the deranged murderer in the novel, doing a round of evaluating and after-dinner chatting with Liesa van der Aa, who represents both that murderer's victim and a childhood sweetheart of Musil's who was infected by him with a venereal disease and died of it. All this provided with beautifully alienating violin sounds by Van der Aa and a less-than-successful playback act by master storyteller Leysen.

That that whole marathon should lead to this dialogue is a disappointment. The practical language of Petry, who has quite a few award-winning novels to his name, comes at you raw after Musil's eight hours of sonic richness. What exactly is Petry's commentary on this? That even the author of a universal masterpiece is only human? That murder stories sell well? It could all be, but what rises above it is that Petry cannot measure up to Musil here in any way, and that even the best directors, designers and performers cannot change that.

But maybe it is also just the wrong choice to see part three immediately after the first two parts. Maybe after a day of you or some settling down you will be able to appreciate Petry's text, on its own merits.

I am curious, though. Let me know if you appreciate the piece separately better than I did, who saw it while attached to the trilogy. You can go test it at the Holland Festival.