Synopsis Farce which brought the author international acclaim in 1958. When two suspicious characters insinuate themselves into his house, Gottlieb Biedermann feels unable to turn them out, even as his concerns grow that they are the arsonists who are devastating his community. When they show him their stockpile of petrol, fuses and detonators in his attic, he realises that he really ought to do something...Max Frisch's 1958 play is a modern classic. It is part moral fable, part black farce which examines the relationship between bourgeois complacency and continuing atrocity in modern Europe. Downstairs. International Season
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.”
“It’s not easy these days, lighting a cigarette ... everyone thinks the whole world’s about to go up in flames.”
The first line of Alistair Beaton’s brilliant new translation of The Arsonists by Max Frisch – better known in English as The Fire-Raisers – puts the play in a nutshell. It’s delivered by Will Keen as Gottlieb Biedermann, a highly strung businessman who deals in hair restorers while harbouring the agents of his own destruction.
The arsonists who arrive in his sleek modern house – designed by Anthony Ward as a suburban show-room of glass, white walls, curvilinear furniture and chrome and silver trappings – are as mysterious as Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party.
The first, Schmitz (Paul Chahidi), is an ex-wrestler from a deprived background. The second, Eisenring (Benedict Cumberbatch), is a former head waiter with a taste for the high life. They are connecting up oil drums – these float in to fill the upper level of the set – and are disowned by the third conspirator (Munir Khairdin), a philosopher who may be a Muslim fundamentalist, as irresponsible: “They do it because they like doing it.”
The enemy within, the tiger at the gates; Frisch’s 1958 play has a resonant metaphorical richness that was first taken to reflect the dangers of political infiltration by Communists in Czechoslovakia, or Hitler’s inflammatory bluffing in Germany, as well as the nuclear threat in our midst. Lindsay Anderson’s Royal Court premiere in 1961 (the play was seen on a double bill with a Victorian farce, and featured Colin Blakely, Alfred Marks and John Thaw in the cast) ended with a film of an atomic bomb explosion.
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; this skilled colleague, an inventor, has killed himself.
Most strikingly, a chorus of fire-fighters is on permanent alert for a threat they know they can never fully combat. The recent tragedy in a Warwickshire warehouse gives their presence a grim immediacy. As somebody says, “These days, most people don’t believe in God but they believe in the fire brigade.”
Ramin Gray’s production – a companion to Dominic Cooke’s of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and performed by the same company in repertoire – 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.
Whilst obviously absurd, The Arsonists feels very relevant with it's rather un-PC message about the dangers of accommodation and appeasement of the threat from within our own society. Even at 95 minutes though the play is too long and repetitive as it labours to hammer home its' single point. I would also have happily turned their hose on the deeply irritating Greek chorus of firefighters. What makes this a 4-star show are the central performances, particularly the wonderful Will Keen, complete with an alarming wig, as Biedermann or Everyman or even Liberty, although it comes as a surprise to find that his camp voice from Kiss of the Spider Woman is actually his own. Finally a plea to Artistic Director Dominic Cooke: if you really want to broaden the appeal of the Royal Court try offering midweek matinees more often - there are none scheduled for the next season, which seriously reduces the opportunities for non-Londoners. - David Baxter
13 Dec 07
SUPERB. Something that requires a little thought and more than a flea's brain concentration span. The production, acting and adaptation were fantastic. More please! (Perhaps the morons who can't sit still for an hour should stick to the West-End) - Joesmith
10 Dec 07
That should have been one star! - Gareth James
28 Nov 07
I resent every one of the 100 minutes of my life I wasted on this tosh. - Gareth James
28 Nov 07
I have to agree with everything Fred has said. It is a piece typical of its period and origins. Have we moved on since then? I bloody well hope so. It's the sort of theatre that puts people off theatre. The RC should not have bothered reviving it in the first place and instead of wasting time doing so have tried out another new writer instead - which is their forte. An extra star given for the set - LOL! - rds
22 Nov 07
This is a dredful play in which the audience is battered over the head with just oneidea. There is no drama, no conflict and no enjoyment. I found nothing in the new translation or in the production which made this tedious piece interesting with the exception of the always fascinating Benedict Cumberbatch. - Fred
The first theatre opened as The New Chelsea on 16 Apr 1870. Changed name to Belgravia. Re-opened as Royal Court 25 Jan 1871. Demolished in 1887. New theatre opened (current, slightly different site) 24 Sep 1888. Famous for supporting and commissioning new writing. Probably the first UK Theatre to regularly include their URL in advertising. Member of the Society of London Theatre. In 1996 the theatre closed for redevelopment, funded by the National Lottery. The refurbished theatre at Sloane Square re-opened in February 2000 including two theatres the 389 seat Jerwood Theatre Downstairs and the studio style Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.
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