I keep hearing, here and there, that these days "text-based theatre" (to you and me, "plays") is out of fashion. The contemporary stage, the whisper goes, is hostile to the writer: in these post-dramatic, post-structural, post-everything times, the director has seized the crown in the theatrical hierarchy and the playwright is out in the cold, shivering in his underpants.

The truth is, just as the masculine pronoun is no longer a default grammatical device, so theatre's practice has shifted to a broader consideration of the semiotics of the stage: meaning is expressed through movement, design, music and performance as much as through words. On the other hand, is that emphasis really new? Meaning is an unstable quiddity, sure, but it's been unstable since modernity began to erase the certainties of church and state (and reading Lucan can make you realise that such instabilities are about as ancient as human civilisation). And after all these years, I'm still not sure what a "linear narrative" really is: I'm not sure I've ever met one.


In any case, I see text everywhere. Even an exploration like 3xSisters (which must by now have generated the longest ever discussion on this blog) depends on a source text, however it spirals around it. And that old-fashioned concept, the play, is a hardy one. People keep writing them, and people keep putting them on stage. I saw two last weekend. They were definitely plays, done in the old-fashioned way of getting actors to remember the words and enact them on stage. They were even, in very different ways, naturalistic plays.

In fact, I think that the diversity of contemporary practice means that the grim days of default naturalism - the idea that theatre is divided into "accessible" (meaning televisual) "naturalism" and weird "non-naturalistic" experiment - are well and truly over. Instead, naturalism as a formal device has been injected with something like its original energy and urgency. Recently there have been some vivid reminders of how powerful - and how poetic - naturalism can be in the theatre - Peter Evans' brilliant production of David Harrower's Blackbird for the MTC, for example, or Duncan Graham's Ollie and the Minotaur.

Perhaps this is why Hoy Polloy's production of Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz seems so timely: Kroetz is one of the major invigorators of naturalism in post-war theatre. Although there are more obvious reasons for its aptness: Kroetz's portrayal of the alienating mechanisms of capitalism, of how human beings are reduced to disposable cogs in a gigantic economic machine, is as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1977, when it was first written. Beng Oh's exemplary production, directed with a profound and compassionate clarity, brings this home with devastating, painful emotional force.

Tom Fool (a loose and perhaps slightly judgmental translation of the more neutral Mensch Meier, which means, more or less, "Everyman Meier") is a fable of late 20th century capitalism. It's the story of Otto Meier (Chris Bunworth), a semi-skilled factory worker who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, Martha (Liz McColl) and son Ludwig (Glenn van Oosterom), and is written in a series of short, titled scenes that focus on the banal domestic minutae of their lives. Kroetz is a master at digging the tragic meaning out of moments that appear on the surface to be trivial, and this production meets his demanding poetic with an admirable honesty.

Tom Fool would be very easy to get very wrong; so much depends on the play of the emotional subtext of each moment, and that in turn depends on a larger wisdom about human behaviour that must meet the playwright's. Every decision in this production hits the right note, neither overdone nor glossed. Beng Oh hasn't attempted to update or Australianise it: Chris Molyneux's stylisedly naturalistic set is a perfect simulacrum of late 70s decor, and the actors, speaking an unobtrusive lower-middle-class Australian, refer to German currency and social conditions.

The scenes are punctuated with a sure rhythmic hand: as the scene title is projected onto the wall, the actors and a couple of stage hands arrange the props, which becomes in itself part of the texture of domestic routine. Then there is a snap, the lights come up and the scene begins. (Tim Bright's sound design and Ben Morris's lighting find a brilliant variousness in this stern aesthetic.) These structural decisions create a solid frame for the actors, which permits them to explore the emotional nakedness of the play. Bunworth, McColl and van Oosterom generate their characters with deft, accumulating touches, gradually excavating their extreme loneliness. This production is notable for its precise detail, which is particularly noticeable in Kroetz's long silent scenes - here the smallest gesture, a shrug, a glance, becomes pregnant with meaning.

They create unforgettable portraits of the fragmentation of the self in contemporary capitalist society. Otto Meier, the "human screw-driver", a "car-screw in-screwer, a screwologist", knows he is dehumanised by his work, but the knowledge doesn't help, as he sees no way out: it emerges in violent rages of frustration that only serve to further alienate his family. Each character becomes more alone, more isolated, although each deals with their alienation in a different way. What makes this play so painful is that their recognition of their isolation, their abandonment of their various dreams in the face of obdurate reality, collides with a heightened realisation of their yearning: the further the dream retreats, the more they desire. It is all the more painful for their inability to communicate their longings to each other.

It's a beautifully performed, tactfully produced realisation of a play that is, for all its apparent banality, a work of great poetic delicacy. The evening passes with astounding swiftness; for all its grim concerns, this production has a nicely judged lightness of touch, and is infused with moments of surprising comedy. It's a rare chance to see Kroetz done as he ought to be. Don't miss this one.

Inevitably, Philip Ridley's Leaves of Glass suffers by comparison to Tom Fool. It's another family drama, and again written in a series of naturalist scenes. Although it features some astounding writing, especially in the monologues, it's doesn't have anything like the imaginative sweep of Ridley's Mercury Fur, a dark fantasia about snuff parties which also centred on the relationship between two brothers. Put next to Kroetz's sparely judged writing it seems fussy and melodramatic, and its social commentary - an exploration of the human capacity for denial, of how we can erase reality with language - not nearly as deeply thought.

I suppose the title, Leaves of Glass, is an elliptical nod to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, though it's difficult to make the connection. There are certainly touches of Tenessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in its exploration of human fragility and damage. It's a family drama with all the expected Ibsenite elements - dark secrets, deaths, dramatic revelations, murderous sibling rivalry - given a 21st century twist. Steve (Dan Frederiksen) is a picture of materialist Britain, a successful, emotionally stunted businessman married to a WAG-style shopaholic wife (Amelia Best). His younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) is an artist, traumatically scarred by the suicide of his father, and both still live in the shadow of their mother, Liz (Jillian Murray). What makes it interesting how the writing turns on its cliches, especially in the climactic scene where language itself becomes a means for murder.

Simon Stone gives it a spare and well-judged production, with a design by Peter Mumford in which the stage is divided into parallel sections by clear plastic curtains, which are drawn back or closed to reflect the degrees of separation between the different characters. The performances are excellent; I especially liked Johnny Carr and Daniel Frederiksen as the two brothers. Although it's a bit of a disappointment after Mercury Fur, it's well worth seeing all the same. And certainly the best production at Red Stitch since Tom Holloway's Red Sky Morning.

Post script: my opening speculations are further illuminated by David Williamson's attack on "capital-T theatre" in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Picture: Chris Bunworth as Otto in Tom Fool. Photo: Tim Williamson

Tom Fool by Franz Xaver Kroetz, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, directed by Beng Oh. Design by Chris Molyneux, lighting design by Ben Morris, sound design by Tim Bright. With Chris Bunworth, Liz McColl and Glenn van Oosterom. Hoy Polloy, Brunswick Mechanics Institute until May 23.

Leaves of Glass by Philip Ridley, directed by Simon Stone. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Kimberley Kaw. With Dan Frederiksen, Johnny Carr, Jillian Murray and Amelia Best. Red Stitch, until May 30.

On Saturday evening, Hoy Polloy Theatre is presenting what is, unbelievably, the Australian premiere of Franz Xaver Kroetz's 1978 play, Tom Fool (Mensch Meier). Not that Ms TN needs any excuse to leap at the chance of an interview with Kroetz, whose extraordinary hyper-realist plays exerted a profound influence on post-war theatre. He created, as the critic Richard Gilman said, "a theatre of the inarticulate", a profoundly political drama that perhaps has new purchase now, as the excesses of capitalism fall about our ears.


First, a brief introduction. Kroetz was born in Munich in 1946. He first attracted public attention in 1970, when two one-act plays premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele. Their subject matter - masturbation, abortion, child murder - aroused such a violent public response from extremist Catholic groups and others that the theatre had to be put under police protection. This didn't stop the theatre journal Theater Heute claiming that Homeworker was the "most important new play of 1971". Subsequently Kroetz wrote a number of one-act, super-naturalist plays, of which the best known is probably Farmyard, the story of a love affair between a retarded teenage girl and a farm worker four times her age.

Kroetz joined the German Communist Party in 1972 and remained a member until he quit in 1980. Tom Fool (Mensch Meier) is a family drama written shortly before he broke with the Party. It was his first popular and financial success when it premiered in 1978, and marked a return to the techniques of his earlier plays, with brutally frank depictions of sex, nudity and violence. In 1988 Kroetz, who has also worked as an actor all his life, was cast as the sleazy gossip columnist Baby Schimmerlos in the popular television mini-series, Kir Royale (which was shown on SBS), and became a media celebrity.

In Melbourne, La Mama has been a champion of Kroetz's work: Farmyard was produced by La Mama in a memorable production directed by Ariette Taylor in the late 90s, and Kroetz's Request Concert was also given a beautiful production by Wendy Joseph. But until now, we haven't had a chance to see Mensch Meier, which is arguably his most significant play.

And now followeth the interview:

The conversation took place in Franz Xaver Kroetz' parental home in the rather petty bourgeois, quiet suburb of Obermenzing in Munich. He calls it "the innermost of the Kroetz dramatics".

TN: It's a long time since you wrote Mensch Meier. What do you think of that play now?

FXK: I think the whole trilogy, consisting of Upper Austria, The Nest and Mensch Meier, could have a chance at survival, despite the usual passing of contemporary art; I can tell from teaching materials and the replies from schools. The trilogy paints a reliable image of this anxious German post-war period into which I was born in 1946, of its fears, its worries and its hopes which might not be as clear in other literary forms. It is a petty bourgeois proletarian description by someone who knew it very well. I have also acted in Mensch Meier myself and produced it for Hessian Radio. I believe it is one my most beautiful and best plays, with this utopia of gliding, all those desires and this broken marriage. It describes a series of frail, poetic beginnings. It was in this house, my parents' house, that the words were spoken: "You cannot become a bricklayer! The neighbour has attended university, he's becoming a judge!" That was because I had a job in construction when I was 15. I have experienced, suffered, desired everything that is in these characters. It is at the centre of my writing.

Relatively few of your plays are translated into English, but I read that you've written about 50. This must give English speakers a skewed view of your work. What are we missing?

I don't think that there are few English translations. As far as I know, a little over half of my 60 works have been translated; only recently another volume containing about 10 plays was published. Since the 70s, the Rosica Colin Ltd agency in London has taken care of this very well, I feel I am in very good hands there. Of course I am happy if my plays are produced in foreign countries. And considering my small circumstances and that I am a German author it is actually quite a lot. The interest in my later work is generally rather low, it therefore receives little advertising and thus reaches foreign countries less often. On the other hand, my early work is probably more significant.

Plays like Mensch Meier or Michi’s Blood are powerful demonstrations of the power of silence, and seem driven by the desire to give voice to those people silenced or erased by articulate culture. What is the place of silence in writing? Did that desire to give voice to the voiceless stem from a personal sense of inarticulacy or disempowerment, or was it primarily fuelled by social anger?

In my petty bourgeois parental home there was a lot of talking, because my mother was an eloquent Tyrolean. I would almost say: Silence is the death of poetry. Apart from that, I went to drama school when I was 15. It is therefore not my own inarticulacy. But apparently I am the inventor of inarticulacy on stage; this stems from a kind of proletarian precision, because until I was 25, I worked in all sorts of jobs, as a gardener etc... Naturally, a divide opened up between the eloquence required for a highly intelligent Brecht text and the inarticulacy of real life. This stirred up a social anger inside me and I joined the Communist Party. Well, I was an active young man who wanted to change the world. And that is why I wanted to grab this bourgeois theatre by the head and dunk it into this wordless sauce, to make anti theatre. Even if Request Concert is a play without words, Michi's Blood is actually my most silent play. In it, inarticulacy is the social outcry of those to whom even language is denied. By the way, I have noticed self-critically that I have become more and more chatty over the years... But I am proud of my radical beginnings.

Language is obviously a deeply political phenomenon, but your plays have been more closely concerned with what happens beneath language in human consciousness. Is silence a political question for you? Or does it exist beneath/beyond politics?

Much has changed because of the new media, and all these possibilities like mobile phones probably achieve the opposite. In Bavaria, there is a beautiful saying: The most eloquent language of friendship is silence. This attitude no longer exists today, I believe it has volatilised. We have a conversational lower class culture today which I also notice in my children: Before they can find an attitude towards themselves, they are already being manipulated. In this regard, we shouldn't underestimate those casting shows. I like to travel on the S-Bahn and I observe a mashing up of public and private role model functions. These days, people are being language-cloned before they have found an original language.

That is pure politics: The individual is expected to be reachable at any time, to be disturbed in their own thoughts, to be a 100 per cent manipulable, controllable mass. Capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive anyway. Capitalism is a dogmatic and totalitarian ideology. This system is broken, that's how I see it. You see pathetic little humans wandering through department stores - I feel sorry for all of them, it cuts me to the quick. They have long since been cut off, from freedom for example - freedom begins with resistance. This destruction is deliberate and conscious. How to improve private television? Simple: Forbid any advertising on TV. If inarticulacy has become pointless garrulity today, this is the same or actually a worse form of paternalism. Recently, I saw a real-people format in which a female messie was asked to finally face up to the truth. And she asked: "Is what is true also important?" That could be a Kroetz sentence. Then again, I'm not that good.


What role does compassion play in your work?

Compassion is essentially unproductive, you cannot write with it. However, you can with empathy. And looking back, I had that to an almost pathological degree. This empathy, this putting yourself in someone else's shoes was the cornerstone of this writing. The empathic is something productive, is more than compassion. After all, I also acted in my own plays. I have killed, loved, impregnated in them. So Kroetz the actor was always used by Kroetz the playwright.

People have often said that your plays are too extreme to really reflect reality. Is this true? Or is life really that extreme?

It is the other way around: Reality is so perverted in its unbelievable mercilessness that I as a poet become silent. You cannot top reality anymore. You cannot exaggerate your point to such an extent that you won't lag behind reality. Shakespeare's most cruel plays are lame ducks when you listen to people who were traumatised during the Vietnam War or in Chechnya. I am a fan of the extreme. The more I have succeeded in pointed exaggerations, the larger the probability that there is some truth in them. It is the other way around: Reality is filthy, not us. And it is increasingly difficult for me to counter this or to add something to reality. I am glad that I have not stopped writing with implants and false teeth, but with a TV massacre, with lonely men masturbating in front of their TVs. No art without the extreme. It is the salt in the soup, especially for a playwright.

How has your politics changed over the years? What is your view now of your time as a member of the Communist Party in the 1970s, and how do you view the plays you wrote then? What about those notorious rewrites? How did/do you negotiate your political and literary selves? Are they different or contradictory beings?

(Note from the interviewer: Mr Kroetz wasn't sure what "famous adaptations" meant... Neither was I. – Translator's note: I suspect "notorious rewrites", which I translated literally, must have been changed afterwards (not sure by whom) into "famous adaptations" which of course was in no way part of the original question. TN's note: After he joined the Communist Party, Kroetz controversially rewrote an earlier play, Men's Business, to conform to his ideology and, as Richard Gilman claimed, his writing "changed radically". This was perhaps a rather sensitive question, and maybe it's not surprising it was lost in translation.)

I would need to answer this in an essay, the topic is too complex. As a matter of principle, I no longer comment on political events. In 1968, I was simply on the side of art, loved Mauricio Kagel, John Cage, György Ligeti. Back then, I was prepared for any change and any consequence of it. Even today, I prefer Ulrike Meinhof's backside to Angela Merkel's face. I thought the RAF was a grandiose, insane business, resistance was the order of the day, not just idle talk. I am still just as leftist as I was back then, perhaps even more radical, I have only grown older and more tired.

Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth about the Algerian War is my favourite book, with its famous preface by Sartre. After all, it was he who said that it is resistance which makes one a fully-fledged human being in the first place. These days, that is closer to my heart than anything else, because I am quite without illusions and worn out from growing old and used up. I have a lot of sympathy for everyone who moves. The way the world is today, it is – as far as progress is concerned - in the worst state imaginable, it is developing into the wrongest direction. People must be stirred up to disobedience. Unfortunately, I have never managed to do that. I was basically in the totally wrong party back then, because the Communist Party was already dead when I joined it.

Can you tell us a little about your writing for television and film? How does it differ from theatre? Do you prefer working for either, or is it a question of the interest of a particular project?

I do not write screenplays as a matter of principle, because I don't think they are literature. For the film version of "Brandner Kaspar", I changed some of the text for my role, or back when I made "Mensch Meier" into a movie, I edited the play. Maybe I wrote one or two screenplays right at the beginning. I regard it as an activity that does not befit my status. (Laughs heartily).

Could you briefly describe the literary and political context that prompted your early plays? How important were writers like Fassbinder and Ödön von Horvath to the development of your work? What was it like to work with Fassbinder?

I was not influenced by Fassbinder, he was working on other construction sites, was already making films back then which was something I was never interested in. Once, Fassbinder was allowed to do a production at a free theatre at which I was an actor because he and his troupe had been kicked out of another theatre. He didn't have enough actors and that's how I ended up playing a role in a play by Marieluise Fleißer. The critics treated me pretty well and Fassbinder berated me for that. I hadn't played the role the way he wanted me to. There was no further collaboration with him. Marieluise Fleißer, Horváth, the early Brecht, of course they were formative, but I cannot describe the literary context here. It would take too long.

Do you see your work as part of a wider German tradition, or as a reaction against German culture? Or perhaps both things?

Starting with drama school, I was innately interested in the whole Southern German popular theatre. From Ludwig Anzengruber to Felix Mitterer, that is my literary home. Among these I also count Brecht's early plays.

Is it possible to translate the implications of using Bavarian dialect into English? What is the cultural significance of using that speech in a play?

We were in Belgium recently for a theatre festival where I staged my very first play, Negress, in French. We spent the first four days revising the publisher's translation. Even though I hardly speak any French, my presence was very important, because there were a lot of Bavarian expressions that nobody understands and that keep being translated completely wrongly. It's not so much the translators' fault, it's more a matter of cultural policy. Coming back to the question: I believe it is difficult, almost impossible. There are things which already won't be understood in Berlin. I find an incredible delight in language, and for me that has always been dialect, patois, never anything else. I have therefore gladly relinquished general intelligibility in favour of my own pleasure. Oh, that is something glorious!

How important is it to your writing that you are also an actor?

Writing is completely under the influence of acting. I act out everything for myself, try it out. I have always needed the actor, it wouldn't have possible otherwise, I don't think. When staging a play, I also read or acted out some scenes at home with assigned roles, tried it out in my mind. After all, the mind is the most beautiful place for theatre.

Translated from German by Elisabeth Meister

To bring this interview to TN readers has been a major international operation, and here I wish to thank several people for their invaluable help: Ben Starick, who co-ordinated the exercise; Wolf Heidecker (Australian end); Christine Diller (Germany); Elizabeth Meister and the Goethe Institute.

Pictures: Top: Franz Xaver Kroetz. Bottom: Publicity shot for the Hoy Polloy production of Tom Fool, with Chris Bunworth, Liz McColl and Glenn van Oosterom.

Tom Fool premieres at the Brunswick Mechanic's Institute, Brunswick, this Saturday, translated by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis, and directed by Beng Oh until May 23.