Entertainment

Belfast Festival review: Compassion. The History Of The Machine Gun

Ursina Lardi gave an outstanding performance in Milo Rau's Compassion. The History Of The Machine Gun
Ursina Lardi gave an outstanding performance in Milo Rau's Compassion. The History Of The Machine Gun Ursina Lardi gave an outstanding performance in Milo Rau's Compassion. The History Of The Machine Gun

REVIEW

Compassion. The History Of The Machine Gun

Lyric Theatre, October 6 and 7

THE Belfast International Arts Festival opened with a UK and Irish premiere piece of European theatre that confounded all kinds of expectations. Titled Compassion. The History of the Machine Gun by Milo Rau, the Schaubuhne Theatre's take on the refugee crisis facing Europe avoided obvious sensationalism yet didn't go for straightforward context either.

We began with a witness monologue in French from Consolate Siperius, a 20-something woman who escaped massacre in Burundi and ended up in Belgium. As she told us, she'd moved from one small, insignificant town to another. There were touches of humour as she displayed her Sunday best African outfit, her only possession from her homeland.

As we moved on to the second, much longer dramatic monologue in German from Ursina Lardi's compelling Aryan Westerner, the term of reference was surely Conrad's Heart of Darkness, set in the Congo.

The Swiss woman started off exhibiting the kind of easy sympathy we've all felt seeing images like the photo of the Syrian baby, Alan Kurdi, who died on a Turkish beach. The sense of the end of innocence, indicated in his attractive, hopeful clothes and red boots, came across as the image was projected.

Over a period of three quarters of an hour, the unnamed wife, mother, aid worker morphed into Kurtz. What was interesting was the way director and writer Rau used words, not sensational images, to convey the horrors of Rwanda, the People's Republic of Congo, Burundi. Questioning the way in which the Western media, and by implication us, its consumers, gorge on distant disasters, the monologue itself simply quoted figures, some facts. This was enough.

Video technology beamed the faces of our narrators on to the back of the stage, but the pictures of the atrocities came via the words.

What was utterly compelling, thanks to an outstanding performance from Ms Landi, was the woman's shifts in attitude. Her character is a composite, built up from the stories of many NGOs and African aid workers. She seemed religious at times, sympathetic until she emphatically wasn't, slightly neurotic as she strode across a chaotic set by Anton Lukas.

There were moments of humour, when the audience laughed as she talked about trite workshops and referred to the Almighty, and of psychological horror as her heart of darkness emerged and she envisaged more dramatic solutions to the problems of the individual and the group, referring to Lars von Triers' Dogville.

"Shoot them all?" beamed up in the subtitles.

As festival director Richard Wakeley notes: "Rau's new play is primarily concerned with laying bare the morally dubious roles compassion and empathy play in our evolving European identity."

Although possibly Ms Landi's monologue contained too many twists and turns, it was a tour de force. We ended with the witness's tale, as Consolate held up a sign reading Fin or Ending but there is no ending to the displacement.