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theatre

Kaspar

Southwark Playhouse at Arch 6, London, 12 January - 11 February 2011

cast list
Ryan Kiggell, Elisa Terren, Duncan Thomas, Kat Cooley, Marc Dodi, Genvieve Giron, Jo Leahy, Kassie Starkey, Lexi Bradburn

dramaturgy
Alexander Medem

Anyone going to Peter Handke’s Kaspar expecting a biographical study of Kaspar Hauser, as portrayed so endearingly in Werner Herzog’s film, is likely to be disappointed.

Handke wrote the play, his first full-length theatre work, in 1968 and there’s more than a whiff of theatrical experimentation about it.

He dispenses with plot, characterisation and dramatic logic as we know it, taking the real Kaspar’s one line “I want to be a horseman like my father,” rendered by Handke (in Michael Roloff’s translation) as “I want to be someone like someone else was once,” and uses it as the starting point for a meditation on the tyranny of language and the socialisation of the individual.

In fact, more of Kaspar Hauser’s character comes across in performance than the bare text suggests. He was a 16 year old enfant sauvage, found wandering in the town square in Nuremberg in 1828. He’d apparently been living in a cellar, with no knowledge of language other than that one sentence. Handke uses the story as an exploration of how we are all moulded and prodded into an expected normality, largely through the use of language.

We can’t feel pain unless we name it and all our experiences are a strung together collection of received notions and mental constructions, foisted on us indiscriminately . He seems to be saying all of our journies towards becoming a normally functioning member of society is something of a sentence.

Southwark Playhouse has teamed up with Aya Theatre Company to present the play, in a location away from its usual London Bridge venue, an empty office suite under railway arches some way along the river towards Southwark. It proves a fine space for the venture. A third collaborator is dance/music company Dreckly Productions, under the guidance of its founder Jennifer Fletcher, although physicalisation is on the light side with a greater emphasis on the verbal elements.

Ryan Kiggell does wonders with Handke’s difficult text, developing from a gauche robotism, turning over the one phrase continually, through an introduction to logic and construction and a discovery of the physical world, to a smooth, almost urbane oration at the microphone.

Handke calls for the other Kaspars who join him later in the play to be doppelgangers (emphasised by the use of masks in the stage directions) and it’s maybe a weakness of the production that they are clearly distinguishable from Kiggell’s more mature incarnation. Other than that, this is a splendid realisation of the writer’s intentions, with an impressive degree of the necessary precision.

In his journey to normalcy, Kaspar is cajoled, urged and pestered by off-stage amplified prompters, who flood him with instructions, maxims and linguistic clichés. Elisa Terren and Duncan Thomas do a great job of this, from dimly-lit desks just in view, aided by a third recorded layer from Anastasia Hille.

Handke is one of the most striking of contemporary writers. His later career has been dominated by fiction, with plays becoming fewer and all-too rarely performed in this country. Kaspar is a great introduction to his work and this opportunity to see it shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in the possibilities of a drama that transcends naturalistic boundaries.

- Simon Thomas