War and Peace

YOU JUST HAVE to glance at Gob Squad’s performance history to sense how dangerous and provocative their journey to mainstream acceptance has been. One of their installations was shut down by organisers who feared “bad publicity after a member of the public falls to his death”. Another show involving audience and cast members wearing gorilla costumes received complaints when a tenyear-old boy took part in a simulated sex scene. One of the troupe responded that “I thought he was a short adult.” But any suggestion that they’ve mellowed over their more than 20 years together is quickly scuttled by performer Sharon Smith. “If anything, I think we’ve become more overtly political,” she says. “We take positions on things more now because the world we live and make work in demands it.” Gob Squad is an English/german theatre company based in Berlin. Their debut work for Melbourne Festival is

War and Peace, a response to Tolstoy’s classic novel set during Napoleon’s war with Russia. “We use the novel as a departure point to talk about us, now. Even the words war and peace seem, in our current time, to cover everything.” The show also draws heavily on the concept of the salon, that highly codified form of artistic and intellectual discussion that swept the boudoirs of 17th and 18th century Europe. “We thought there was a connection between the idea of the salon and the way we view and talk about war in countries like ours. It’s from a distance.” Smith sees the show as “trying to aggravate something that Tolstoy also asks: how do we live a moral life amongst all this devastation?” Gob Squad have already attempted to answer this in a show called They’d go out in the middle of the performance and try to convince a stranger to return with them to the theatre. “We’d say, don’t go to the cinema to meet your girlfriend. There’s 200 people in the theatre who need to believe in change. If you can change your direction tonight, then we can go out into the world and do it.”