Don’t shoot the actor
A theatre audience in Germany has rushed the stage to silence a villain’s ‘far right’ rhetoric.
As a child, my favourite character from Neighbours was the villainous Mrs Mangel played by Vivean Gray. Her performance was far better than it needed to be for a soap opera; she was waspish and priggish and cruel, and yet you could tell that beneath all the bitterness there was a human heart that yearned for affection.
So impressive was Gray’s acting that fans of the show would shout angrily at her on the street. In a 1989 interview, she explained that all this negative attention meant that she eventually felt compelled to quit:
‘I loved Neighbours and the rest of the cast were marvellous. But because it was so successful, I could barely set foot outside my own door without someone screaming abuse at horrid old Mrs Mangel. People didn’t seem to appreciate it was acting. So I decided to take a break.’
Gray’s experiences with literal-minded audiences came to my mind the other day as I was reading about a recent production at a theatre in Bochum, Germany. The play’s provocative title is Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, and it has caused quite a stir. This week it was reported that Ole Lagerpusch, who is playing a far-right villain in the piece, was attacked by audience members during his performance. So outraged were they at the character’s political views that he was aggressively heckled. Someone threw an orange and, eventually, people rushed the stage and tried to drag him off.
The premise of the play is an interesting one. It concerns a family who each year kidnap a well-known far-right figure and execute him at their home. The writer is exploring the extent to which some people are willing to suspend the principles of democracy in the belief that they are defending it. Given the recent rise of political violence, and the disturbing mania for falsely branding people ‘far right’ in order to justify assaulting them, the play could not be more timely. I haven’t seen it, so I cannot say whether it falls into the trap of sermonising, which is the default failing of most new theatrical writing.
Still, it isn’t real life. And the fact that some people were so angered by this make-believe scenario that they felt it had to be stopped is deeply troubling. We could speculate endlessly about their motives. Perhaps they genuinely forgot that the actor was merely reciting a script. Or perhaps they believed that the writer was using the play as a vehicle to promote his character’s views. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Scottish government introduced a hate speech law to crack down on the ‘public performance of a play’ if it was ‘intended to stir up hatred’.
As for Ole Lagerpusch, were he not so traumatised by the attack this would perhaps be the best review that he could hope for. After all, his performance must be highly accomplished if he is able to provoke this kind of response. The melee kicked off during a long monologue in which, presumably, the character verbalises his apparently offensive worldview. I do hope this audience doesn’t attend a production of Macbeth any time soon; they’d be rushing the stage to rescue Duncan and beating his assassin to a bloody pulp.
In recent years, many of us have noticed an escalation of literal-mindedness…
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