Theatrical genius makes a disappointing muddle of modern history
Everything That Happened and Would Happen Mayfield, Manchester
★★★★★
Heiner Goebbels, composer, director and visionary creator of spectacular installations, says he aims at a kind of theatre that doesn’t tell us what to think. He leaves us free to make our own connections, out of mysterious, random conjunctions of sound, movement, text and image. But is that really the effect, or is Goebbels actually a propagandist in disguise?
That question forced itself on me more than once during Goebbels’s latest attempt to set our imaginations free. Everything That Happened and Would Happen is now showing at Mayfield, an enormous disused factory next to Manchester Piccadilly station. It is a meditation on the unfolding of history since the First World War, on a scale so big it’s required the combined resources of four organisations in three countries. Given that one is 14-18 NOW, set up to mark the centenary of the First World War, one might have expected war imagery of some kind. But Goebbels never does the expected. The raw material was random recent news footage taken from Euronews’s No Comment, caustic observations on world events culled from Patrik Ouředník’s 2001 book Europeana, and a few pre-existing pieces of music.
These elements are dropped into a shadowy choreography of 12 actor/ dancers, who create mysterious scenarios using a variety of props. Often these took on a sinister resonance, such as the moment when huge black shapes like First World War guns advanced towards us down a swirling tunnel of dry-ice mist, accompanied by sounds from the five improvising musicians that imitated the rending of metal.
Goebbels has a genius for creating arresting theatrical images, and there were a few here. Take the moment when a collection of boulders rolled down a ramp – a metaphor for unforeseen catastrophes of history perhaps? Occasionally there were humorous incidents, as when the Euronews channel offered us footage of a canine beauty contest in Manila.
One has to salute the incredible fortitude and precision of the performers, and the technical wizardry. The problem with the show is that Goebbels wants to have it both ways. He wants to point out the racism and violence that disfigures the world, while constantly undercutting it by a Dadaist message of: “Never mind, it’s all random anyway.” Despite his protestations, Goebbels is suggesting how we should think; the trouble is he’s not sure what he thinks himself.