Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin
****
Do you understand what’s going on? Can you tell the difference between fiction and reality? These questions flutter through Back to Back Theatre’s artful and stimulating work without landing on an easy answer. While making a piece of theatre about the Hindu god Ganesh travelling to Nazi Germany to reclaim the Sanskrit symbol of the swastika, a company of performers with intellectual disabilities are confronted by doubts, distortions and prejudice. Through an artful layering of narrative, design and ethical considerations, so is their audience.
"It's a story about power," explains Brian Tilley, the writer of the play within the play, and the same is true of Back to Back's production. This power play – in its shift, abuse and struggle – becomes more fraught as the story and the company's process overlap. Donning an elephantine head, Tilley plays Ganesh, the god of overcoming obstacles, his impressive presence underscored by Jóhann Jóhannsson's awesome orchestral swell. But the scene dissolves to find a director (Luke Ryan), dripping with comical insincerity and ready to wrest control: "I can make this."
But what are they making with this politically loaded fable? Mark Cuthbertson’s set, a wilderness of translucent curtains that bear scenographic silhouettes and enveloping video projections, suggests careful transparency, but the gathering layers of artifice and actuality become fascinatingly, sometimes unsettlingly, blurred. A stunning sequence on a train to Berlin, freighted with tension, has Simon Laverty’s performer as a disguised Jew subjected to sly undermining questioning. It’s a lucid performance on at least three levels.
That allows director Bruce Gladwin to pursue a rare kind of self-reflexivity, less clever-clever metatheatrical device than an honest attempt to frame a moral conundrum. In the costume of an SS guard, Scott Price becomes an agitator, questioning their right – and even an actor's mental facility – to represent Hinduism or the Holocaust. In a chilling moment, such accusations are levelled directly at the audience, too, cast as voyeurs at a "freak show". It exposes (and plays on) various sensitivities, from the right of actors with ID to portray more than their condition, to the threat of authoritarian manipulation and exploitation, making an aggressive break down in the production all the more shocking.
A final image, perhaps the most simple and heartrending in this latticed production, fuses those ideas together without seeking a neat resolution. A vulnerable individual, watched over by the head of Ganesh, becomes another contested symbol, of obstacles to come and to overcome.
Ends Saturday
