By Terry Grimley
Now in its fifth year, Birmingham’s two week festival of European theatre, BE Festival, has so far had a rather discreet profile.
Hopefully this will change with its move to the Rep, and there was an encouragingly large audience for Wednesday’s opening night.
Next week will see an astonishing 23 performances from 15 different countries crammed into five nights. Before that, last year’s festival winners, Denmark’s Out of Balanz, return in a double bill with a new show written for Birmingham’s Stan’s Cafe by Serbian theatre director, writer and politician Nenad Prokic.
Finger, Trigger, Bullet, Gun examines the events leading up to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in a series of imagined meetings between key players in Berlin, Vienna and Belgrade. Stan’s Cafe always have a sharp eye for a theatrical metaphor, and here it takes the form of a giant floor map of Europe made up of dominoes which, set up in rigid lines, also evoke First World War cemeteries.
We know that at some point the dominoes will be knocked over. But when the moment comes it seems oddly anticlimactic, and the documentary literalness of Prokic’s text seems a slightly awkward fit for this company. There is an inevitable stiltedness in the device of having protagonists talk to each other while simultaneously explaining themselves to the audience.
But the subject, over which historians continue to argue 100 years on, never fails to fascinate. One ear catching detail is the suggestion that the Austrian emperor was effectively an accomplice, albeit a reluctant one, in the murder of his cousin and heir. Franz Josef certainly didn’t care much for Franz Ferdinand: he didn’t even go to his funeral.
Out of Balanz’s Next Door begins, in effect, with a funeral. But this physical tour de force by Ivan Hansen and his Finnish colleague Pekka Raikkonen is a light and comic piece with a gentle message about making friends across borders.
Hansen, an engaging character with a ready made clown’s hairstyle, sets out to tell us the shocking story of how his next door neighbour, whom he had lived a few feet from for years without properly meeting, had suddenly been found dead.
But he is soon sidetracked into telling us his about his childhood growing up in Copenhagen, with various adventures, including a fishing trip which almost ended in disaster, energetically recreated by the two performers. Some of these episodes go on a bit too long, but the charm and the precision of the staging prevent this becoming too much of a problem.
And with a final twist bringing the rambling narrative back to the point, and the audience invited on stage for a warming glass of Gammel Dansk, noone is going to leave the theatre in a bad mood.
Running time: Two hours, 40 minutes. Ends Friday. Next Door is also included in the official opening night programme on Tuesday.
