History's sad chapter etched on their faces
Auschwitz looms large in our big-picture history of the 20th century ’til today and forever. Perhaps too large for many people to genuinely grasp the infinite realities of what went on inside the concentration camp that epitomises Germany’s most abonimable World War II atrocities. It also has loomed far greater in millions of personal histories – mine for one, as the place where a mother’s parents, brother and many other family and her friends perished at the hands of the nazi regime’s war criminals. We could use a whole other rightfully angry vocabulary to describe what went on 70 yeras ago and the impact the concentration camps and entwined racial and cultural brutalities had on millions around the world since. But like the Dutch members of the Hotel Modern theatre group, who have created and perform Kamp at this year’s Adelaide Festival, each finds their own way of dealing with such horrors.
To build a miniature (1:20 scale) Auschwitz and Birkenau, the base and labour camp plus accompanying extermination camp, and populate it with thousands of tiny puppets is an act of artistic courage and irreversible truth. There is no personal narrative in the staging of Kamp. Individual suffering is transformed to the communal by theatrical downscaling. Ironic, perhaps. Mesmerising – most certainly. But then there’s the genius projection of Lilliputian horrors from small set to large-screen nightmare underneath a bleak, wintry soundscape. The unanimated, methodical movement of all those puppet prisoners and eventual corpses across the set by three grey automation-like performers mirrors the diabolical heartlessness of the real camp staffers at the height of Germany’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ to rid its world of millions of Jewish people. And most powerfully the unrelenting distorted, minimalist faces of the puppet cast are more than enough to call from a not-too-distant past the great suffering that for many is now simply a textbook chapter or Hollywood film concept.
It is those miniature puppet faces in all their abominable hunger, their desperate confusion as it turns to unbelievable fear, and their eventual steps into the hell of the gas chambers, all acted out in extraordinary miniature, that tells the mind-boggling story for those looking in as a theatrical experience. For someone personally connected to the larger story, that same artistic fascination soon transforms into a forever sad chapter of history that has never drifted far from the surface of daily life. Three of those inanimate puppet faces were indeed the most human ever imaginable – my grandparents and uncle. In terms of their performance in Kamp, my own critical rating is: truly unforgettable.
14-03-2013
