In early March, The Great War Machine, the new play by director Joachim Robbrecht, premiered at Theater Frascati. A week earlier, at the Rotterdam Schouwburg Swamp Club to be seen, by French director Philippe Quesne. Both performances address the current political climate. Whereas Swamp Club is explicitly silent about the world it calls into question, The Great War Machine is instead a rhetorical spectacle, constructed from quotes from TEDtalks. Both performances make mechanisms felt, rather than pointing out culprits. Voluntarily withdrawing or being shut out, the neoliberal order does not seem to allow much more choice. There is no question of resistance.
Philippe Quesne is one of the few French theatre-makers who has structurally penetrated the Dutch stage. His work operates delicately on the edge of visual art and theatre. He neglects stage elements such as plot, motoric moment or climax. His work is open in many ways, like an approachable transforming tableau-vivant, but in doing so Quesne does not necessarily make things easy for the theatre-goer. In Swamp Club the time of acting is again concrete and real, not focused on dramatic return. The actors barely play, staying in a setting that, like the spectator, seems to happen to them.
Rhetorical war of attrition
Joachim Robbrecht, who as a writer and director has often cleverly and vehemently adapted other people's drama (Ibsen, Schiller, Coppola, Verdi), has also delivered a rather static work this time. The show's title promises a lot of action, but apart from a triumphant tone, has The Great War Machine little in common with what you expect in a combat machine or a war drama. The Great War turns out to be mostly a rhetorical war of attrition. The performance is more like an installation, a very large film-still talking excitedly. Again, it lacks lived-in acting or meaningful action. An endless stream of neoliberal, futuristic bullshit is talked together extremely superbly by the three actors (Aitana Cordero, Tashi Iwaoka & Louis van der Waal).
The setting of The Great War Machine is a kind of post-punk gaming environment, where people interact with the whole world digitally, from the comfort of their armchairs: buy and play, invest and post, tweet and retweet. There is beer and coke, and challenging opinions are debated in 'international' English. History is tricky, art obsolete, science obsolete. All that matters to the three players is the big 'move forward'. Makeability, speed, expansion, not being among the losers - that is the motto. The audience is involved in everything, but due to the fast pace, the many smoke machines, the bright lights and the mountain of slogans, it is not given the space, not the time, to think for itself.
Lozenge cap
At Swamp Club, which describes in stunning imagery the arrival of some newcomers in an artistic residency resort, on the other hand, there is plenty of time and everything possible. But the 'Swamp Clubbers' appear mostly concerned with finding peace, looking for a place or time not to participate. Swamp Club is threatened by 'something' from outside, heralded by a huge mole that leaves its subterranean cave in times of need. Swamp Club members then gather all nature around them (beautifully lit houseplants and stuffed birds and animals) and put them inside the artist's house, which may now serve as an orangery and Noah's ark. They themselves descend into the cave, where they are provided with all artistic comforts: huge dance studios, libraries, studios and canteens. The explicit artificiality of the setting - an echo on the sound system and a mole costume are enough - leaves the spectator with the feeling of an empty shell. Promises, endless artistic promises lurk in that cave.
At The great War Machine a conflict is also suggested, but the machine stands still in a different way. It spins rethoric circles, like a minimalist dance, carelessly varying on a number of themes, all treated equally: trashy, like disposable ideology, statements and conversation-pieces sloshing against the wall of the black box.
In both performances, there is no drama or even post-drama. There is a situation spinning stationary, where not only is there no way out, but also the need for it seems to have evaporated. In completely different ways, the actors in both performances are beyond disappointment. Robbrecht's witty and virtuosically composed propaganda and Quesne's hushed renunciation lack heroic roles or action. The players are mere side characters, wandering around in their own mush.
Silent witnesses
The 'staging of threat' was the subject of the introduction of Action researcher Renée Frissen at one of the performances of The Great War Machine. A theatre scholar, PhD candidate and figurehead of the Institute for Public Values, she wonders how public affairs can be redesigned, re-enacted. In Swamp Club and The Great War Machine public affairs, however, seems to encourage silent witnessing of perverse incentives and unintended effects in particular.
The Great War Machine is on tour, see the website of Joachim Robbrecht.
Previous review of work by Philippe Quesne at Culture Press: Next Day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrptjR-iQEg
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