Hitler And Blondi: The Fuhrer's Relationship With His Pet Dog
Michael Baran's Odd Drama For The Finnish National Theatre Reminds Us Of A Dark Episode From Finland's Past
Well, someone had to do it, I suppose. Finnish playwright Michael Baran’s Hitler ja Blondi (2020) was written for the Finnish National Theatre and is the kind of avant garde European theatrical production that rarely makes it to British shores.
Last weekend I schlepped down to London to watch an extract being performed at the Bush Theatre Studio. This was not the fabled West End. The down-at-heel Bush is located in West London, near the BBC’s now mostly vacated Television Centre.
I was there at the request of my friend, Prof Adrian Goldman, who last year swapped his role as Visiting Professor of Membrane Biology at the University of Leeds for a one-year MA course in Theatre Directing at Royal Holloway College under the tutelage of the distinguished and groundbreaking Katie Mitchell.
Adrian and his various international teams in places as far apart as Helsinki and China have made significant contributions to understanding the structure and mechanisms of molecules that compose the membranes of humanity-cursing diseases such as malaria.
But now he has exchanged a distinguished life in biological science for asking people to pretend to be dogs.
The end-of-year directors’ showcase I’d travelled to watch consisted of two performances. The first, Enemy of the People, was Surrey-based director Karen Holley’s updating of Ibsen’s botched 1882 drama set in a poor spa town. The already beleaguered community is threatened by a scientist’s discovery that the water supply is contaminated.
Holley’s was a largely faithful and naturalistic version though inevitably abbreviated. But instead of interrogating Ibsen’s anti-populist theme — that democracy is too good for ordinary people because they are always blinded by personal self-interest — it ended with a narrow political rant which was remarkably similar to the one that marred Sinfonia, the last thing I went to see.
It was the kind of show, taking place in the Bush’s scruffy black-box studio space, whose audience consists entirely of people connected to people connected to the production. Usually, I love that but on this occasion I felt I was in the belly of the beast.
“Very powerful,” smiled an elderly man sitting near me in reference to the anti-Boris Johnson diatribe that concluded Holley’s directorial effort.
“Well, I live in Reform territory — the Red Wall — so I don’t exactly see it like that,” I replied.
Ibsen, whose privileged family background placed him in the Norwegian elite, gives voice in this play to a distinctly Ayn Rand-style sentiment — that human progress depends not on the mass of defective, self-deluding, little people pursing their own interests and values but on the visions of strong men. I guess that hits the spot if your Remainer world view tends to the “Brexiteers are just thick Northerners raised on meat pies” school of political argument. Well, I was a Remainer too in 2016 but since then I’ve made it my business to find out what underpins the Europe-wide resurgence of right-wing populism, which is usually sparked into life by a charismatic individual.
So, as a playmaker, you have a choice: you can rant against the stupidity of the masses or you can ask yourself why. It’s surely the duty of any playwright of real merit to tell the story of Brexit from the Brexiteer’s point of view. That character doesn’t have to be right, you don’t have to agree with them, but you must extend the gift of imaginative sympathy because that is what playwrights do.
Or don’t, if you survey the British playwriting scene and its ever narrowing Overton window of acceptable sentiment in 2024.
So we never get to hear the argument that low-information voters (extremely well informed about the realities of their own lives) identify a particular kind of elite baffoonery and its associated bad behaviour, with authenticity.
Great writers are allowed to have off-days, and Ibsen himself seems to have felt that Enemy Of The People wasn’t as fully realised as it might have been. (He’s on record as saying he was never sure if it was a tragedy or a comedy.) So if Holley’s directorship was in the service of Ibsen’s actual text, rather than the text as we Churchillian democrats (“least bad of all possible systems of government etc”) would like it to be, then her choices were, I suppose, limited.
My friend’s play was after the interval. There was nothing naturalistic here. It contained, to quote the programme blurb, “Brechtian distancing, documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, cabaret and Grotowiski’s ‘Poor Theatre’, at least in the version you will see today.” It was also cropped to 35 minutes.
Me and Blondi got off to a bad start. The piece began with a provocation: “If you are a Nazi, a neo-Nazi or an ironical Farage sympathizer, please raise your hand.” Having settled on Reform as the least-worst option in the 2024 British election, I am ‘literally’ one of the three so I obediently raised my hand. It was noticeable that the only other audience member who did so was of Middle Eastern appearance. He was either a raging anti-semite raised on the virulent Elders of Zion propaganda that passes freely in the Arab world, or he grew up in Damascus/Ramallah/Tripoli and was as pissed off as I am with the stupidity of the question. Who can say.
Because, in the 21st century, nobody is ever a Nazi themselves. It’s always those other people, over there. It’s a label.
This was ‘directors’ theatre’ with a vengeance — packed with ideas. So much so that the writer’s original text became submerged and Baran was not even credited in the programme. But, by giving his actors lots to do — from tuneless singing to pretending to be a dog, Goldman coaxed stylish performances from Susana Millan (Blondi) and Ewan Strangeways (a plump and gender-indeterminate Furher who reminded me of Gruber in the 1980s sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo).
Having speed-read Alan Bullock’s doorstopper of a biography Hitler: A Study In Tyranny whilst studying the rise of fascism at University, I was already familiar with some details of the dictator’s wierd personal life. But I’d half-forgotten the incidental story of his relationship with his neice Geli, who found herself thwarted at every turn and in 1931 committed suicide at the Munich flat they shared together.
The son of dissident Jewish doctors who fled apartheid South Africa when he was a child, Goldman is entitled to his Nazi obsession. ‘Cabaret’ this production was not. It contained some pleasures and some humour but also too much Stockhausen. This composer (1928-2007) grew up under the Nazis and his mother, who had mental health issues, was murdered by them as a “useless eater” — recent research concluding that it was probably in the gas chamber at Hadamar Killing Centre. The orphaned Stockhausen — he was told she’d died of cancer — eschewed any music with a marching beat as it reminded him of Nazi troop mobilisations he witnessed as a child.
But, really, we are not responsible for the crimes of others, and life is too brief and precious for the collective punishment of arrhymic atonality.
Nevertheless it was a horrifying snapshot of the Continent-wide wretchedness inflicted by the Nazis. Misery seems to have been the fate of anybody whose life Hitler touched — including people forced to listen to Stockhausen.
The performance ended with Millan stumbling over a list of the different peoples genocided by the regime and the likely numbers of victims in each category.
Putting people into categories is such a Nazis thing… And we never really had a payoff in this production, at least, for the challenging question: Are you a Nazi?
Well, are you? Or is it those people over there? It is a question with resonance for Finnish history as during World War II the nascent Finnish state allied itself with Germany in response to the threat offered by the Soviets who had already grabbed a piece of their country.
They still have it as part of Russia now and I know this because in 1993, at the height of the Wild East, I was driven through the lawless, hijack-prone region of Russian Karelia at high speed in a locked bus.
Nor have the Finns been exemplary in their treatment of Finland’s ethnic Russian population.
Whether Hitler Ja Blondi lands the same in Helsinki as it does amongst ill-informed arts mavens in West London is therefore a moot point. The gulf between those of us who think our nations, borders and cultural values are worth defending, and those who think such questions are so far beyond the pale that even asking them feels viscerally uncomfortable, seems ever widening.
Taken as a whole — Stockhausen’s mother aside — the piece was thinky but not moving. Its relentless avant-gardeism was a conscious rejection of the sentimentalities of bourgeous culture and the grotesqueries that can result when it encounters the reality of mass extermination.
That’s a good thing. But at the same time it limits its audience.
And I would have liked to have found out more about the dog, whose affectionate and uncomprehending loyalty was rewarded with a cyanide tablet in the bunker.
More information about the Royal Holloway University Of London Theatre Directing MA can be found here
Postscript
It’s been a disrupted few months. I went to the Isle of Man, came home meaning to write about it but then my Mum had another TIA and ended up briefly in the stroke ward at York District Hospital. Unfortunately, I picked up a respiratory bug, probably in the hospital, which zonked me out for a few weeks until it was time for the chaos of a major kitchen refurbishment. This coincided by the forces of Titanic-iceberg inevitability with the arrival of some foreign guests. And then there were issues involving my day job and a change of role that didn’t work out.
It’s time to pick up the thread. But I can’t do it by myself. I NEED YOUR FEEDBACK. My open rates are respectable, and I know from my stats I have many committed readers.
But I don’t know why. I’m firing blind.
If you’re a fan of Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter then a few words, either by replying to this email or in the comments section, about why you read my newsletter, and what you’d like to see more of, would help me more than you can imagine. I’ll always be me and do me but there are still choices to be made within that.
Meanwhile, don’t neglect my Green Room section. This is where I post random stuff online that I consider amusing but don’t have the gall to distribute as part of the main email. Most recently, I posted a short story, When Kevin Decided To Run With The Bulls. Enjoy!