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Kaspar

Southwark Playhouse Off-Site

‘I can’t accept the theatre as a moral institution when it criticizes individuals on the theory that an additive improvement of individuals might achieve a qualitative improvement on the whole’ Peter Handke[1]

Kaspar has been living in a dark room for sixteen years. He doesn’t know how to wear himself. He has no ability to communicate externally apart from one sentence. ‘I want to be someone like somebody else was once’. He is unable to distinguish space from time. Pain from sadness. The first time he sees snow it melts in his hands and ‘burns’ him. Then everything white he sees becomes snow, because everything that is white pains him.

Peter Handke’s play is inspired by the real story of Kaspar Hauser who was found, emaciated and silent, in a town square in Nurenberg in 1828. Constructed around linguistic play, in sentence games and models, the play loosely follows Kaspar’s journey from figure to man. Guided by two Prompters, he learns how to communicate, sentence by sentence. However the violence of his isolation is turned into brutal alienation until finally Kaspar is ‘sentenced to reality’.

Aya Theatre Productions in collaboration with physical theatre company Dreckly have stayed true to the text’s literal demands. Kaspar wakes up in a nondescript room with beige carpets and light wood furniture. The Prompters are guiding him from desks onstage, and two monitors line the downstage area reminding us we are, after all, in a play. There are sound effects that add power to the more intimate moments, and movement fleshes out Kaspar’s character. Doppelgangers are introduced to express the chracter’s inner contradictions. Ryan Kygell performs the text with confidence and skill, and this often permits the play’s divergent meanings to co-exist.

It would be an error to confuse Handke’s play with a theatrical mediation on language, which, in part, Aya Theatre have done through their literary focus. Handke’s play is subversive and tragi-comic, confronting the consequences of our social construction of language through a powerful game of isolation. Yet amongst the games there are sentences that reveal backstories which the performance fails to enunciate. The production does not capitalize on the theatrical nuances of Kaspar’s human conversion,and fails to articulate the sheer brutality and violence inherent in the play.

Aya Theatre have chosen an extremely challenging text. Handke never allowed the audience to rest in a frame of reference, constantly playing the theatrical form of his own construction. In Aya Theatre’s adaptation, this becomes secondary, lost in the challenge of weaving meaning in and out of Kaspar’s monologue.

Yet the production’s concern with the poetic qualities of the text makes for an intriguing and often gripping evening. There are references to poets such as Gertrude Stein in the performance style, and an interest in existentialism as its manifests itself through Kaspar’s story. What is left behind in this production is the theatrical potential of Handke’s play to come alive with brevity and elegance, moving beyond the linguistic and social commentary in a portrait of how we allow consciousness to slip by.

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[1] Handke, Peter in ‘Nauseated by Language: From an Interview with Peter Handke’, Joseph, Arthur, Ashton, EB, The Drama Review: TDR, Vol 15, No 1(Autumn, 1970), pp 56-61

Tagged: Peter Handke, Southwark Playhouse