Oleh : Josh Stenberg, Culture Writer [Dharmasiswa STSI Bandung] dari China Kelahiran Canada
First
arriving in Bandung in September of this year, I found the senior students of
the theatre department in the process of rehearsing various plays for their
final exams. Some script choices did not surprise me particularly, being taken
from the Indonesian modern repertoire of classics, such as Riantiarno’s Rainbow. Other scripts were by
acknowledged masters of European theatre, in this case Genet and Ibsen. I am a
PhD student in a theatre department in China, and this dual concern with
honouring the international (Eurocentric) canon and valorising the independent
national tradition is familiar. There was, however, one choice that came as a
particular surprise—Peter Karvaš 1964 play The
Big Wig (Veľká parochňa), translated here as Rambut Palsu.
Several factors contributed made
this script seemingly unlikely. First, Karvaš, while frequently produced in
middle Europe—that is to say, in the German- and Western Slavic worlds—his
impact on the Anglophone or Francophone theatre world has been modest. Secondly,
it would seem that Karvaš’s work, written during a time of Communist control of
literary production in Czechoslovakia, and thematically deeply concerned with
the trauma of the Second World War—would be of little interest to young
Indonesians, born not only forty years after the end of the war, but many of
them after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Intrigued, I began to
follow rehearsals, continuing my attendance to the end.
Under the direction of Wanggi Hoediyatno,
the cast and musicians developed a fast-paced, tragicomic rendering of the
script, accented, though never interfered with, by a small cabaret-style
ensemble. The madcap, slapstick elements
brought to mind the antics of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and the clownish make-up invoked both pantomime
and (for a viewer like me) the strange history of minstrel shows. Another
resonance was the uncomfortable humour of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful or even of older
American comic shows like the POW-camp-set Hogan’s
Heroes.
Watching such cultural products, the question has always been, where, and how far, is humour
allowed? If Theodor Adorno claimed that poetry was dead after Auschwitz, how is
it that we have not only poetry of the Holocaust, but comedies thereof? Why is
Edgar Hilsenrath’s Holocaust satire The
Nazi and the Barber more effective than most straight-faced, moralistic
accounts? In general, we don’t seem to have a great handle on the functions of
humour—are we covering embarrassment, approaching otherwise taboo themes,
reacting to incongruity?
STSI’s Rambut
Palsu is an incongruous world for me. The Hairy ones—here by their costumes
and insignia unequivocally identified as Nazis, historically so devoted to
racial prejudice—are white-face Southeast Asians. The language—already in Karvaš
divorced from its historical German—is naturally taken into a third language. The
set is claustrophobic and always in danger of crushing the actors, seems places
the general himself in a prison (appropriate, since he is oppressed by the need
for new victims). And there is that uncomfortable sympathy one feels for the
General—who is never off-stage, and crushed by a succession of failed
interactions. The play is not set up to allow easy distributions of
guilt—terrible things must occur because of an incomprehensible system which
incorporates the general, the adjutant and Norbert as much as the victims, and
the cause of which is observing at a safe distance (the audience?). Karvaš’s
plot might be using absurdity to illustrate the Third Reich’s real bizarreness
(perhaps the inverse of Hannah Arendt’s The
Banality of Evil), or even allude to the witch-hunts of Stalinist
Czechoslovakia—which also needed an unending supply of enemies. The Slovak
press found the original “a tragicomedy
rather than a comedy because there were too many
topical references
in the conflict between the bald ones and the hairy ones and the spectator sensed many associations with the present. (The New Czech Dramatic Avant-Garde, 7.)
… But what does it mean when performed in Indonesia?
Surely, we aren’t talking about Slovakia anymore? Do we direct ourselves
towards Kafka, and see it as a comment on nightmarishness of all institutions?
Is it (still) about the absurdity of prejudice?
Perhaps it is a little cheap to fall
back on universal themes. As a foreigner and a newcomer to Indonesia, I am not
able to do more than guess how these resonances work for an Indonesian
audience. For me, I watch this production—and think, which imprisonment is this?
Europe is not the only region to have produced traumatic histories, and
Europe’s not the only literature to try and come to terms with it—sometimes,
like the Enlightenment Europeans writing dramas set in India and China—one can
borrow very far afield to talk about home. Perhaps that which never resonated
in the Anglophone and Francophone West—never having experienced bureaucratic
dictatorships—fits well into Indonesian narratives of historical trauma?
A theatre performance is embedded in
the society of its practitioners and its audience. My references for
understanding such a show, implicit and explicit, are Western. Yet the meaning
of scripts alters according to its environment and no amount of exchange will
produce the same expectations in diverse audiences. And so watching this
play—entertaining, tightly plotted, brilliantly acted by inexhaustible talents—
my experience is indirect but very rich, as I sit wondering, exploring,
guessing what new meanings this story is accruing in its transplanted context,
in the expert hands of young people three generations and fifty countries away.
As often with
theatre, one finds oneself baffled and deeply impressed, and knows that the
show is making sense, but not knowing why, or in which part of oneself…and
remembering that the sense it will make will be different for everyone else—a
reminder, for me, that the observer is always missing things, but only rarely
lucky enough to be conscious of it.
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