THEATRE & PERFORMANCE

By Mark Brown

The Last Days of Mankind

Leith Theatre, Edinburgh

Five stars

It is 35 years since Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre staged The Last Days of Mankind, the great anti-war play written by the Austrian journalist and satirist Karl Kraus. Its return to Scotland, in a new, eight-nation, pan-European co-production starring the famous English cabaret group The Tiger Lillies, is a truly spectacular theatre event.

Kraus’s five-act response to the First World War contains one act for each year of the imperialist bloodbath. A third of it is constructed from documentary sources (which has led to Kraus being credited as the father of docu-drama).

Reflecting upon the impossibility of the human imagination surpassing the barbarism of the War, Kraus wrote: “The most improbable deeds reported here really took place… the most gruesome inventions are quotations.”

However, any theatregoer encountering this play (which has been given a brilliantly robust-yet-supple translation by Patrick Healy) should forget the often dry, worthy naturalism of contemporary British documentary theatre. Kraus’s work confronts the hellish realities of the conflict with the creative anger of theatrical modernism.

An imperfect masterpiece, this sprawling opus is fittingly cracked and jagged. This production (co-directed by John Paul McGroarty of Leith Theatre and Yuri Birte Anderson of German company Theatrelabor) captures this masterfully.

The broken vignettes and tableaus of the play are connected together by a powerful panoply of still and moving projected images and by the Tiger Lillies’ superb suite of original, bleakly comic songs. Indeed, the lynchpin of the show is Tiger Lillies frontman Martyn Jacques, who (with his trademark bowler hat, painted face and exceptional falsetto voice) gives an utterly compelling performance as the kind of sardonic cabaret master of ceremonies one might expect to see in a painting by Georg Grosz.

The production, like the play, is a work of flawed brilliance. The international cast is a little uneven at times, both in its acting and its grasp of the choreography.

Nevertheless, this extraordinary staging of Kraus’s great tragedy feels like a major work of modern theatre. Although this short Leith Theatre run (which opened, appropriately enough, on Armistice weekend) ended on Friday, it must, surely, have a further life, both around Europe and here in Scotland.

Estonia Now: Contemporary Performance Triple Bill

Tramway, Glasgow

Karl Saks – one star; Sigrid Savi – two stars; Mart Kangro – three stars

The week-long Estonia Now festival in Glasgow (which celebrates 100 years since the establishment of the Republic of Estonia) kicked off its performance strand with this triple bill of solo pieces. Sad to say, however, the main impression of the evening was of a performance culture in the grip of a particularly soulless strand of postmodernism.

The chief offender was Karl Saks, who opened proceedings with a wilfully obscure, impenetrable piece entitled State and Design. Combining capable but uninspired physical movement with a meaningless assemblage of images (ranging from the artist submerging his face in a mound of chalk to a pineapple displayed on an illuminated pedestal), it masquerades as a comment on the operation of state power through the judicial system.

The concluding piece of the trio, Sigrid Savi’s Imagine There’s a Fish, is equally and deliberately incomprehensible. Bringing together roller skating, an empty goldfish bowl and cheesy 1970s-style elevator music, it does, at least, have a capacity to laugh at itself.

Thank goodness for the second piece, Mart Kangro’s Start. Based on a True Story. The dancer/choreographer’s satire of the conventions of the dance world, it has moments of nicely observed comedy, some smart choreography and impressive physical endurance.

This triple bill was a precursor to the much anticipated programme by the Estonian National Ballet, which included Echo, a new choreography by Glasgow-based Estonian dance artist (and former principal dancer with Scottish Ballet) Eve Mutso. It seemed bound (like other work in Estonia Now, which ends today) to give a better impression of the nation’s artistic output.