The best I can say about Peter Handke’s play Kaspar is to thank god I didn’t get stuck seeing it performed live. True, one of Handke’s objectives is to attack his audience, which can be a wonderful aim, and I’m often willing to put my money where my mouth is and get punished by an artwork. Still, I feel Handke’s success in assaulting the audience is accidental. That is, rather than challenging our psychological foundations, he is merely annoying us with bullshit.
To synopsize, a guy (Kaspar Hauser) shambles onstage. There’s a lot of scripted instruction about how he should take a long time getting snarled in the curtain on the way in. Kaspar then dithers, and mumbles nonsense, and has trifling stage business: all of it crafted I guess to goose us up with the expectation that he’ll eventually do something. The stage directions themselves are broadcast over the theater’s PA along with auxiliary bits of babble, while nothing in particular continues to develop onstage during the next 30 or 45 minutes. Then, in a turn that would at least briefly be amusing, Hauser's joined by as many as five dithering dopplegangers: half a dozen Kaspars in all, banging off of each other, knocking about the stage, murmuring repetitively, killing time.
There is something suggested throughout all of this about language. And there is something here about self-construction ex nihilo. I stand unconvinced of any profundity in either of those themes. Herzog got more insight into the opening credits of Every Man For Himself and God Against All than are going to be found in this whole production. Nope. Fuck all of this, and fuck Peter Handke. We human beings have lives, after all, damnit, and they warrant being spent on something more dignified than this play.
That is at least how I feel about the man Peter Handke and his work before reflecting on his later career as a Serbian-genocide denialist.
But we are not done. Kaspar was one of the plays in this volume, but are two more. Another is Offending the Audience. You can see already that this is in the same line as Kaspar. But the title makes too much of itself, since again, the highest attainment here falls short of offense and more around the level of boredom /irritation.
To be charitable, I'm sure in the context of the time (1966), Handke’s self-conscious theatrical “provocations” may have seemed challenging, or fresh, or original? As against achingly tiresome. I mean, "Offending the Audience" consists in a clutch of blokes standing onstage for 20 minutes literally declaiming shit like, “You are an audience. You all put on nice clothes and came here tonight. Now you are sitting in seats, in rows, and are expecting something to happen. Us saying this, is something which is happening. Time is passing, and we are all here right now, and this time will never be reclaimed or repeated.” But it's far more verbose, filling page after page after page after page.
Somehow I’m put in mind of Mike Myers’ SNL sketch of a German program called “Sprockets”? That, crossed with the Baader-Meinhof faction.
Self-Accusation. This play was the best of the three in the volume, though clearly that is not saying anything at all. But this time around, within Handke’s Wittgensteinian language-game blather, there crops up a tantalizing hint now and then of almost human detail. For instance, in the middle of many pages of automatic, deductively-driven mechanistic language, there’s a phrase about “lying down with R during her period”. And, “I failed to turn in leaflets dropped by enemy airplanes.” I am so starved for anything interesting by these idiotic plays of Handke’s that these glimmers of potential biography actually sparked my interest.
Also: absent in "Self-Accusation" is the constant presumption we were clobbered over the head with in "Offending the Audience" that - dudes!, your minds are soooo blown by my transgressive play, man! I Mean, "Offending the Audience" contained actual lines like, “Your expectations are being foiled. Your anxiety is increasing.” Etc., etc. (which I guess may have qualified as offensive, after all? I did not like being repeatedly told what I think. Least so when it was nothing close to what I was actually thinking.)
In sum, this offering of three pieces of shit by Peter Handke seems grounded in the belief that it is virtuosic to work without content: to deduce some simulation of theater out of the empty set. Yet this is, uh, just wrong. The result's tedious, and is (in a wearied, not-getting-too-worked-up-about-it kind of way) contemptible.
Post-scriptum: I hated Wings of Desire. I mean HATED HATED HATED that movie. “Leaving the theater in a shaking rage for having my time so wasted” kind of hated. (Handke did the screenplay). My feelings about the movie were even - disorienting, since Wings is such a universally-beloved film.... So I guess my sensibilities and instincts diverge somewhat from Handke's, and I will not be going on to read his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (more famous/representative than Kaspar), nor Repetition (though it seems with a title like that, Handke would be playing to his strengths). Nor will I read his book-length apologia for systemic rape and genocide (A Journey to the Rivers).
In sum, this offering of three pieces of shit by Peter Handke seems grounded in the belief that it is virtuosic to work without content: to deduce some simulation of theater out of the empty set. Yet this is, uh, just wrong. The result's tedious, and is (in a wearied, not-getting-too-worked-up-about-it kind of way) contemptible.
Post-scriptum: I hated Wings of Desire. I mean HATED HATED HATED that movie. “Leaving the theater in a shaking rage for having my time so wasted” kind of hated. (Handke did the screenplay). My feelings about the movie were even - disorienting, since Wings is such a universally-beloved film.... So I guess my sensibilities and instincts diverge somewhat from Handke's, and I will not be going on to read his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (more famous/representative than Kaspar), nor Repetition (though it seems with a title like that, Handke would be playing to his strengths). Nor will I read his book-length apologia for systemic rape and genocide (A Journey to the Rivers).
(12/10/2019)
No comments:
Post a Comment