I seem to be alone in this: I had a few issues with Hotel Modern's Kamp.
The audience was moved the night I saw Kamp; the panellists on RTÉ's 'The View' agreed they had been deeply moved; the DTF programme itself had promised we would be moved. I harassed anyone who would listen to me at ITM's (excellent, incisive, fascinating) International Critics Forum, and scoured print reviews for signs of dissent, but in the main I seem to be one of very few who was, on the whole, unmoved.
There is no question that Kamp was a technically brilliant show, expertly delivered – but how is it possible that we all reached a consensus opinion so easily? Weren't there a few obvious questions to be asked?
Such as, is it actually ok to reduce 3,000 individuals (Jews, gays, gypsies, dissidents, people who didn't fit in) to nameless, faceless puppets? One critic mentioned the "raw naivety" of the puppets – this was most likely intended in the purely artistic sense, but made me uncomfortable nevertheless. But ok, divesting individuals of their humanity was the modus operandi of the killing machine, so this can be seen as integral to the re-presentation.
Next, why Auschwitz? The Irish Times ran the review under the headline “The greatest stories ever, retold” - can the holocaust really be described in this way? (The Hotel Modern site also refers to a “mythical catastrophe, almost a fairytale” - but I am gleefully taking the lines out of context here.) I am not asking about “ethical” considerations (as raised on ‘The View’) so much as asking whether taking up this particular 'story' wasn't easy on some level, given that - in Europe at least - we have an established position on this.
(I do not wish to belittle the family connection between one of the artists and the death camp here.)
What happened in the theatre was certainly a chilling, frighteningly real, re-presentation of this horror – but is that enough? Setting aside those insights gained by the creators along their journey in refining and improving upon a murderous system (related in the post-show conversation with the artists), the production itself offered me little in terms of a deeper understanding of how this horror could have come about.*
Worse: placing the audience as observers - whether on a hill overlooking the camp, or watching cinematic newsreels - merely served to reinforce our (safe, not reprehensible) position in all this: neither victims, nor perpetrators. Exactly where we were already, then. (One critic suggested we might be indifferent gods looking down on the brutality of humanity. Is this good enough?)
Strangest of all was the audience gathering in front of the stage afterwards to take photo's of the miniature set. What gave people permission to photograph this set; and how were they going to present the snapshots of the teeny concentration camp to their friends? ("Look, these are the gas chambers, and - oh look - this is the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign. Cool, no?") What was that all about?
Judging by how quickly audience members flocked to the set - site of mass genocide mere minutes before - at lights down, the emotional impact of the production was short-lived.
Kamp was neither sentimental nor sensationalist, and certainly served as a harrowing reminder of the horrors we humans have committed on our fellow humans – the extraordinary soundscape deserves particular mention – but I am still wondering about any production that trades on well-established consensus rather than attempting to provide a new insight, apart being technically clever and ‘just like the real thing’.
But I think it's just me.
Fíona
*Read Imre Kertész's Fatelessness for this.