Deadpan swipe at the hypocrisy of the Left
Returning To Reims Home, Manchester
In a double coup for the Manchester International Festival, not only is this show a world premiere from German auteur Thomas Ostermeier, head of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, but it stars Nina Hoss, best known as intelligence agent Astrid in Homeland.
Ostermeier is revered for his radical remixes of classic plays, including his production of Hamlet. This show is pointedly contemporary, based on the 2009 memoir by the French social theorist Didier Eribon. Hoss plays Katy, an actress who is recording the voice-over for a documentary adaptation of that very same book.
Many people in the UK won’t have heard of Returning to Reims, but it’s a gripping read: a calmly anguished analysis of the rise in support among the French working class for Marine Le Pen. Eribon, who is gay, uses his self engineered estrangement from his homophobic working class father as a personally candid analogy for the current pan-europe crisis on the left, a movement he argues now speaks the language of those who govern rather than those who are governed. That said, such is the speed of politics these days that the success of Emmanuel Macron and Jeremy Corbyn risk making parts of this story already feel a bit overshadowed by events.
Yet in this wittily deadpan production – in which Hoss keeps breaking away from narrating to argue with the filmmaker, Bush Moukarzel, over his editing decisions – Ostermeier’s real target is liberal hypocrisies, the politicians and pundits who proclaim solidarity with progressive ideologies but resist any meaningful engagement with the reality of working class lives.
So the film footage includes a clip of Gordon Brown’s excruciating moment on the 2010 campaign trail when he dismissed a Labour pensioner as bigoted for airing her concerns over immigration. Meanwhile Bush is presented as a right-on liberal, yet is a closet chauvinist and has yet to pay any money to his sound technician.
It’s all very self consciously untheatrical: the first third consists simply of Hoss narrating extracts. It is at its best when it disrupts itself. Hoss’s real life late father was a working class hero who created a trade union for immigrants in Germany and went to Brazil to establish environmental farming policies for an Amazon village. His story forms the final third of the show. Hoss calls him a “rock in the storm”, an idealist who believed in action than words. In pointed contrast then to modern politicians or even, as this show tacitly acknowledges, right-on theatre makers.