Found in the Ground
“Intimacy
is awesome”. Barker
doesn’t use the word awesome in the American sense. Found In The
Ground, his new play, made for his own production company, the Wrestling School, promises “urinating
nurses, mechanical dogs, fornicating, headless women, burning books and Adolf
Hitler”. It reads a bit like a press release for the Jim Rose Circus’s first
show in Auschwitz and on one level the production does feel designed to shock
at all costs. This can get tiresome. But the relentless barrage of nightmare
images contains flashes of pithy, uncanny emotional honesty, which move this
piece away from prurient Horrorcaust spectacular and towards a scream of
consciousness at the terror of mortality and the terror of the responsibility
of living. It is uncomfortable viewing precisely because the ideas it considers
are big, painful and irresolvable.
A senile
former Nuremberg judge is burning his priceless library and considering the men
he sent to execution as he contemplates his own death. His daughter has an
affair with his young librarian while also living out her compulsion to have
sex with the dying. These and others are visited by a spirit of a
philosophically-minded dead war criminal, are guarded and attacked by three
Cerberus-like dogs and finally granted an audience with a Noel
Coward-accented and disturbingly cogent Hitler. A topless young woman, head
obscured, stalks unacknowledged through the action in high heels and a garter
belt proclaiming that she is the representative of Anne Frank and all the
Holocaust dead. It is openly absurd, but maybe considering the vaster
questions, such as death of European culture and one’s own mortality, is best done
through the absurd.
Of all of
Barker’s recent work, this seems to match most closely his manifesto for a
Theatre of Catastrophe, where audiences are forced to find their own way though
a linked but not literally cogent series of images. Moments, statements and
sounds have fleeting connections here but, more like an installation than a
traditional play, it is up to the individual to formulate their own reality
from a varied smorgasbord of experiences. It is alienating and maddening, in
part because it is not the collective experience we might expect theatre to be
– in fact, the process of watching it is deeply isolating. But because of that
the brief flashes of connection or beauty are the more precious, the more
fragile and the more unsettling. Intimacy is awesome indeed.
– Sarah Chew
