Review Round-up: Court Arsonists Light Critical Fire Date: 7 November 2007
Ramin Gray’s first major revival of German playwright Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, in a new translation by Feelgood’s Alistair Beaton, opened last night (6 November 2007, previews from 1 November) at the Royal Court, where the play (then under the title of The Fire-Raisers) received its UK premiere in 1961.
Though fires are raging all over town, the great philanthrope Biedermann can’t resist giving shelter to two strange new houseguests, an ex-wrestler and a waiter. When they start filling the attic with petrol drums, he’ll even help them wire the fuse.
The Arsonists runs in rep, until 15 December 2007, with Royal Court artistic director Dominic Cooke’s revival of Eugene Ionesco’s 1960 play Rhinoceros (See Review Round-up, 28 Sep 2007). Both are performed by the same 11-strong company of actors, with the exception of Jasper Britton who was replaced by Will Keen as Biedermann in The Arsonists (See News, 16 Oct 2007).
The majority of overnight critics began their reviews by recounting the play’s opening scene in which Keen’s attempt to light a cigarette is thwarted by a brigade of fire-fighters. While some felt the rest of the evening suffered by comparison with this “tremendous start”, most appreciated the powerful and provocative modern parallels – drawn with “witty zest” in Alistair Beaton’s translation - with the play’s theme of appeasement. There were also kudos for the performances of Keen, Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Chahidi as the fire-making houseguests, and Jacqueline Defferary as Biedermann’s wife.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (four stars) – “The social comedy of Biedermann and his bird-brained materialist wife (Jacqueline Defferary) coping with the intrusion and then embracing their guests (and their fate) is sombrely offset against the silent, brooding figure of the widow of an employee Biedermann has callously dismissed … Most strikingly, a chorus of fire-fighters is on permanent alert for a threat they know they can never fully combat … Ramin Gray’s production is a stunning renewal of possibilities in the home of new theatre writing, providing a welcome jolt to the predominant school of dreary sitcom naturalism. It is beautifully performed and inexhaustibly provocative in the best possible way. A famous classic has been restored as though it was a brand new piece of writing. Which, really, in Beaton’s text, it is anyway.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) – “Frisch's dazzling parable, written in 1958, has gained extra resonance in our apprehensive age. Frisch's theme, as Alistair Beaton's sharp new translation makes clear, is bourgeois guilt … The beauty of Frisch's play is that it is compact, well-characterised and easily applicable to today's world … Given the presence of a third arsonist, driven by a belief in the virtue of wholesale destruction, it is impossible not to relate the play to international terrorism … The play works because we recognise part of ourselves in Biedermann: the classic bourgeois trimmer who, though aware of impending disaster, does nothing to prevent it. Will Keen plays him brilliantly … Ramin Gray's production, played on Anthony Ward's immaculate, glass-walled set, boasts first-rate support from Paul Chahidi and Benedict Cumberbatch as the invading arsonists and Jacqueline Defferary as the hero's worried wife … This is less a piece of whimsically jocular absurdism than a timeless political satire.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “When the Royal Court gave the Swiss dramatist's play its British premiere in 1961, director Lindsay Anderson left no doubt that he saw the drama as a fable about the folly of nuclear weapons. In Ramin Gray's elegant staging, it now seems like a parable about the threat from radical Islam … Alistair Beaton's new translation has a witty zest about it, Anthony Ward has come up with a design of minimalist chic, and Ramin Gray's inventive production is excellently acted. Nevertheless, I have serious reservations. The first is that the arsonists both look white rather than Asian, which seems cowardly … My second objection is aesthetic. Absurdist parables such as this always seem strangely bloodless … How much bolder it would have been for the Court to have staged a carefully researched drama about what is actually going on among Britain's Muslim extremists. Such a play is now shamefully overdue on the British stage. Nevertheless, Will Keen memorably captures the shifty moral cowardice of Biedermann, Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Chahidi mingle ingratiation with silky menace as the arsonists and the chorus is well drilled, if surplus to requirements … I hope the Court's artistic director Dominic Cooke now moves on to bigger, bolder plays for today.”
Paul Taylor in the Independent – “No sooner has Will Keen's Biedermann put flame to fag than the parody Greek chorus of loquacious, philosophical firemen slide down poles and swoop on him. There are moments when I would happily have trained one of their own hoses on this group of uniformed wiseacres, who spell out for us the all-too-obvious meaning of Max Frisch's 1958 play. Inspired by the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, this absurdist parable satirises the way that people can be manipulated into accommodating the very thing that will destroy them … Using a sharp, adroitly booby-trapped translation by Alistair Beaton, Gray's production sets the play in the present day. The arsonists, who cheekily revel in their own transparency in the puckish, Pinter-and-water performances of Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Chahidi, sing a catch of ‘London's Burning’ at the climactic dinner party … These touches merely serve to emphasise how this play is the opposite of pertinent to our times. Far from being latter-day Biedermanns, we are, if anything, too prone to paranoia; trigger-happy in a state of fear that may inure us to the steady erosion of our civil liberties … At sketch length, The Arsonists would burn brightly. Labouring through 90 minutes of wearisome black comedy to its glaring, designedly foreseeable conclusion, the play is a damp squib that takes forever to fizzle out.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (four stars) – “The play comes across as an up-to-date attack on the overtolerant, whether they’re confronted with violent neo-Nazis or Islamic extremists trying to bomb their way to the caliphate. Not that there’s anything attractive about Will Keen’s Biedermann, or Everyman. He’s spoilt, selfish and callous, and gives houseroom first to Paul Chahidi’s brutish but sly Schmitz, then to Benedict Cumberbatch’s genially psychopathic Eisenring, because he fears them and hopes that his friendship will tame them … Are we British also underreacting to the potential terrorists in our midst? Are we in effect handing them matches in a futile attempt to ingratiate ourselves with them, as Biedermann ends up doing? I doubt if Gray wishes to push his interpretation that far, but he has certainly ensured that Frisch feels topical and provocative … The supporting performers are excellent, down to the uniformed firefighters who act as a chorus that’s Sophoclean in its passivity.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (four stars) – “Neatly updated to the present in Ramin Gray's production and couched in Alistair Beaton's fresh, felicitous translation, The Arsonists sets its critical sights on people too fearful to face glaring reality … Gray achieves a final, provocative coup when Munir Khairdin's intellectual arsonist, presumably a Muslim terrorist, breaks ranks with Schmidt and Eisenring … Yet Gray's lethargic production played out on Anthony Ward's opulent white and perspex set, needs to convey a far stronger, climactic sense of anxiety, foreboding and panic. Will Keen's phlegmatic Biedermann and Jacqueline Defferary's subdued Babette are comically competent but must operate on a far higher emotional level to make this thrilling classic fully operational.”
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