The play to see if you want to feel bullied at the theatre
The 20th of November is a bit of a bully itself ‘You’ve made fun of me, but now you will pay’
Acouple of weeks ago, reviewing the circus show Empire, I wrote that I longed to see somebody in a theatre audience refuse, as emphatically as possible, to become part of the show. Last week I almost got my wish. The show in question could not, on its face, have been less like a circus. It’s a monologue, spoken by a would-be mass murderer, and entitled The 20th of November. On that date in 2006 a German man, aged 18, returned to his old school, intent on shooting as many of its staff and students as possible. He then committed suicide, leaving behind videos and blog entries justifying his actions. Lars Noren, described as Sweden’s leading playwright (I’ll take that on trust), parsed the killer’s words, which, shuffled and selected, make up the script of the play.
In one way it is like a circus, at least in Brendan Healy’s production at Buddies in Bad Times. As at a circus, the audience sits in a ring around the auditorium. The actor, Sina Gilani, only enters it once when, hoarse from all his talking, he crosses it to get himself a drink of water, thus removing himself from most of our sights. This takes a long time, during which nothing happens. Though on the first night something did: two separate members of the audience, bored or exasperated or both, got up and left the building, the ultimate act of audience participation.
Both before and after this come more conventional attempts to involve the spectators. The actor sits among us, separated only by his intense look, his intense clothes, and the fact that he talks into a microphone while we don’t talk at all. Not that he doesn’t want us to; from time to time he looks at individ- ual members of the audience and asks them to validate his thoughts or supply their own, getting only embarrassed silence in return. At the very end he seems ready to inaugurate a Q&A session: again, no takers. Which is hardly surprising; he’s an actor, playing a rehearsed role, we’re there as ourselves. There is no common ground.
Before I expand on the futility and dishonesty of this, I should acknowledge that the production, the performance, and even the text have considerable grip. This is Healy’s outgoing production as artistic director of Buddies. Like all his work there, it’s tense, thoughtful, and technically brilliant, even with the technology kept minimal. Gilani’s vocal palette is kept minimal too, though he proves capable of modulating into a scary baby voice, making it eerily hard to tell whether he’s laughing or crying. His phrasing is lucid even if the phrases themselves aren’t. He also has a scary way of fluttering his eyebrows.
His character, whose name is Sebastian, does have some good points to make, though as you’d expect they tend to contradict one another. His speech is an oxymoron in itself: an aggressive apologia. He rails against the path that society wants him, and everybody else, to follow: what he calls STWRD (School, Training, Work, Retirement, Death). At the same time he seems to resent his own inability to follow it. He claims, accurately, to be one of a whole “army of losers.” “Hitler,” he says, “he was one of us.” But he also says he hates Nazis. He also hates Tupperware, cats, and David Beckham: everything and everyone really. He seems to be making his best point when he says that he, like everyone, is going to die anyway, so why shouldn’t he get it over with? It’s hard to dispute that one, but it doesn’t account for his desire to take as many other people as possible with him.
That all comes down to his having had a terrible time at school. The cool kids tormented him, girls wanted nothing to do with him, and everyone called him a geek. These are the grievances he keeps coming back to, obsessively. I can believe that in this respect the play faithfully mir- rors its source material. I also believe that these could indeed be the makings of a psychopath. “Since I was six years old”, he says, “you’ve made fun of me, but now you will pay.” But who is this “you”? Are the audience meant to be stand-ins for his actual intended victims? Or are we just there to bear witness, as members of society?
That Sebastian’s repetitions become agonizingly boring is perhaps the point; the production’s message, unstated but unmistakable, is that we aren’t there to be entertained. “Lars Noren,” says the publicity “dares us to listen to the very things we try to ignore.” But the apparent belief that we’re all just too smug and sheltered to have thought about the alienation of people like Sebastian, what causes it and what it may lead to, just isn’t true.
At the risk of sounding callous: Sebastian might be a more interesting dramatic subject if he had been a more efficient murderer. In fact, though he managed to wound 30 people, the only person he succeeded in killing was himself.
The 20th of November is a play that bullies its audience. The relationship between stage and auditorium is a power relationship. And though it may not always feel that way to actors sick with nerves, the power lies with the performers. So it shouldn’t be abused. This play does abuse it: not outrageously but significantly. When people who’ve rehearsed and who have skills demand the participation of people who haven’t and don’t, that’s bullying. That’s the case even when, as here, the audience refuses to play. The implication is that it’s being done for our own good; that Lars Noren and his interpreters (including his translator, Gord Rand, who seems to have done a good job) have earned the right to lecture us, just by being artists. I don’t think they have.