Another day, another play, another disused railway arch. This large, clean space, loaned to Aya Theatre Company by Network Rail, hosts Kaspar (1968), the punishingly post-modern first full-length work from Austrian experimentalist Peter Handke, who is much performed on the Continent but rarely heard of here. It’s not hard to see why, although all credit to Aya for giving it a go.
Handke takes as his starting point the strange case of Kaspar Hauser, discovered in a German square in 1828 unable to say anything but "I want to be a horseman like my father". Handke’s Kaspar (valiant Ryan Kiggell) is a contemporary young man surrounded by nondescript pine furniture and able to speak only in fractured, platitudinous sentences. Handke’s theme is the degradation and banality of everyday language and the inability of words adequately to convey the profundity of our feelings.
This is all very well in theory but undiluted theory doesn’t make for a jolly 90 minutes’ viewing. I feared at first that Kiggell might never stop saying "I want to be someone like somebody else was once". He does, eventually, and two on-stage "prompters" and a recorded voiceover join in with the meaning-bleached lines. This would work far better filmed as a video installation for the Turner Prize, where viewers could be free to wander in and out at will. The final line is, of course, "Goats and monkeys" . As an earlier refrain had it, "You’re not here to have fun." Well, quite.
Until Feb 6. Info: 020 7407 0234. southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Kaspar
Arch 6
Burrell Street, SE1 0UN
Read More
MORE ABOUT