Stage struck

You couldn't make it up, admits PETER CRAWLEY

Most of the time it’s easy enough to keep pace with a theatre maker’s work – the rate of production is slow and an interested audience can stay abreast of developments with a few free evenings and a decent supply of Red Bull. But the remarkable German director Stefan Kaegi doesn’t make it easy. He seems to be everywhere.

A couple of weeks ago Kaegi co-curated Ciudades Paralelas with Lola Arias in Cork, a series of performances in civic spaces (a court, a factory, a hotel) which cast ordinary people in playful pieces of documentary theatre. The following weekend his influential company, Rimini Protokoll, opened 100% London in England’s capital, casting 100 citizens in a playful piece of documentary theatre. Last week he curated Asian Investments, a programme for Poznan’s Malta Festival that concentrated on works casting ordinary people in playful pieces of documentary theatre.

There’s a reason Kaegi and this artful form are in such high demand. Whether it involves information about coming superpowers, the hidden effects of globalisation or private concerns in our own neighbourhood, we all have a need to know.

With documentary theatre there’s a certain suspicion that the medium is the message: Irish audiences who encountered Rimini Protokoll’s “everyday experts” in Cargo Sofia (Bulgarian truck drivers), Call Cutta in a Box (Indian call centre operators) or Radio Muezzin (Egyptian prayer callers), will spot similar devices in the new work, Soil Sample Kazachstan.

Kaegi, though, knows a riveting subject when he finds one. Tracing the migration of oil and people from Kazachstan through the experiences of onstage truckers, drillers, airline workers and dancers, he combines personal and political information, leaving ample room for digressions, party-pieces, provocations, jokes. For those who thinks that the sole province of theatre is make- believe, it’s a reminder that you don’t need fiction to be creative.

Still, Irish theatre has tended to treat the medium as a mirror to society, rather than a lens directly into it. Dismissing the political relevance of experimental theatre in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Brian Friel wrote, “Matter is our concern, not form.”

That position has defined Irish theatre for decades. But an Irish culture is consolidating, fusing documentary with playfulness and poetry in works from Brokentalkers, Anu Productions, Dylan Tighe, THEATREclub, Una McKevitt and The Company, to name just a few. Matter and form can be compellingly entwined.

The most encouraging lesson from Poznan, where Ant Hampton’s Elsewhere Offshore also took a reflective and poetically documentarian approach towards Chinese workers harmed by making components for Apple products (an antidote, perhaps, to American monologuist Mike Daisy’s recently discredited reports), is that documentary theatre is not busy justifying itself. Instead it’s pushing the form.

Theatre can drill deeper than journalism and create live encounters that film cannot, and in the process involving the audience directly in its discoveries. It will remain hard to keep up with its documentary makers, moving at hummingbird speed through a world ravenous for information and a theatre that is quickly getting real.