A disturbing and challenging performance

Toys: a train, houses, puppets. You see it with your own eyes yet you do not want to believe it. Your first reaction is denial: this is not a concentration camp. But it is. There is no avoiding the fact. The entire stage of the theater is covered with barracks, watchtowers, barbed wire and searchlights. The end of a railway line, a gateway with the words ‘Arbeit macht frei’ in illuminated letters, and loudspeakers blaring out ‘Die Fahne hoch’. Hotel Modern act out a day in the camp.

Logistically and technically this is a hugely complex performance; Hotel Modern do not merely sketch, they meticulously describe in detail. Thousands of puppets must be moved hither and thither: from the trains, to work, to rollcall and to the barracks. And along the way, tiny cameras zoom in to show daily life in hell.

The result is bewildering, almost perversely so. As long as one views this swarming from a distance, the illusion can be maintained that this is merely some kind of children’s game. But when images of these tiny puppets are projected lifesize onscreen, their faces twisted in fearful grimaces, it becomes horrifyingly real.

The only thing it lacks, thank God, is the infernal racket – the screaming, the barking, the cacophonies in the barracks. Hotel Modern spare us that oppression: the ultimate sense of being hounded and having no refuge. Instead they let us hear mechanical sounds such as the piercing metal-on-metal squeak made by the carts used to load the ovens, accenting the loneliness of all those de-individualised puppets.

An execution: first the area around the gallows is swept, then the unwilling spectators arrive, followed by the condemned. And then, as witnessed by the camera, the hanging itself. The stage set, the toy barbed wire and the tiny buildings, grow to terrifying proportions and the lighting makes the dangling puppets even more disquieting.

The train arrives. We see a flat roof on which stand drums with skulls on their labels. A puppet empties them through a hole. Puppets pick out clothing. Puppets carrying off other puppets. And so on.

This is a disturbing and challenging performance, and not only because of the subject matter. It is all but impossible to reconcile such a dark and weighty theme with the obviously immense devotion that drove the creation and detailing of these handmade puppets. There is also the impassiveness that characterises the three performers’ silent and determined efforts to bring the events to life. This is alienating and sinister. In its efficiency it recalls the way in which a concentration camp was run. But it results in a cruelly beautiful performance that clamps itself to the memory.

01-02-2006