>>REVIEW
THE BLUE LIGHT
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Written by Mieko Ouchi
Runs until March 4
Martha Cohen Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
Mieko Ouchi is clearly fascinated by artists who sell out. Her first playRites play, 2003’s The Red Priest, concerned the latter days of the composer Vivaldi, when he was forced to suck up to wealthy patrons and give their wives violin lessons. But that’s nothing next to Leni Riefenstahl, the subject of her new drama, The Blue Light. The groundbreaking German filmmaker didn’t merely sell out – she sold her considerable talents to the devil.
At least, that’s how Ouchi views it. Her Leni is a gifted woman in a male-dominated profession who agrees to make propaganda for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in return for the power and autonomy of being able to produce and direct her own movies. As envisioned by Ouchi and portrayed by actor Kate Hennig, Leni is both a driven and incredibly naive young woman, whose later defence for her celluloid glorifications of Nazism, Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will – "I just made films" – rings as hollow as Adolf Eichmann’s infamous "I was just following orders."
Of course, there’s another angle, suggested but not fully explored in the play – that Riefenstahl was in awe, perhaps even in love, with Hitler and his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. "Every woman adores a Fascist," wrote Sylvia Plath (speaking rhetorically, not literally) and Riefenstahl wasn’t the only person, woman or man, who fell under the spell of the Nazi charisma. Caught in her camera lens in Triumph of the Will is not the screaming lunatic Hitler most of us know, but the robust, smiling, benevolent German hero who won hearts and minds, an image she helped propagate and also likely succumbed to.
Perhaps a closer identification of Riefenstahl’s adored father with Hitler, or a portrayal of a Hitler who, when she first meets him, isn’t merely amiable, but outright attractive, might’ve made her selling-out a little more complex. But then Ouchi’s ambitious play sacrifices some depth and complexity to its own clever cinematic structure, which uses so many brief flashbacks (and at one point, during Riefenstahl’s de-nazification trials, flashbacks within flashbacks) that it doesn’t always give characters and relationships time to fully reveal themselves.
Certainly, trying to squeeze Riefenstahl’s life into a two-act play is a daunting task, and Ouchi succeeds in touching upon all its major events, while giving it a contemporary resonance as the elderly, ailing Leni, still trying to pitch one of her projects, jousts with a young Hollywood executive (Natascha Girgis) over the nature of propaganda and the responsibilities of filmmakers. At one point, the exec suggests that Leni sell her own story as a movie – not because of its powerful themes and conundrums, but because it’s the perfect Hollywood vehicle, "a tour de force role for an older woman."
It is, indeed, a tour de force role and one that Hennig, with her Germanic looks and forceful, at times coarse, presence, was born to play. A younger, not older, woman, she moves easily and simply from the scenes of the neophyte Leni, athletic star of German mountain romances, to those of the frail but still feisty centenarian. For much of the play Leni is either obsessive or defensive, but Ouchi gives her a vivid final speech in which she steps outside herself and "directs" her own legacy, and Hennig delivers it with slow, stunning impact, the iron-willed filmmaker’s eyes finally gleaming with tears.
Her character-juggling co-stars include, along with Girgis, Rylan Wilkie as Leni’s soldier brother and cinematographer lover; Duval Lang, whose deliberately underplayed Hitler, as mentioned, lacks charisma (he’s better as Leni’s fellow film visionary, the avuncular Walt Disney); and Trevor Leigh, in a neat swapping of stereotypes, as a loud, tyrannical Arnold Fanck, Leni’s director mentor, and a genteel, silky-voiced Goebbels, who comports himself like an amateur esthete.
That excellent director Ron Jenkins (who also oversaw The Red Priest, not to mention last season’s The Black Rider) has crafted a movie- and memory-themed staging. Scott Reid’s set is dominated by a neo-classical Nazi archway out of Triumph of the Will, backed by gently stirring draperies. David Fraser paints it with the crystalline-blue hue of the play’s title. And Jenifer Darbellay continues the militaristic note with her costumes.
In the end, how do we feel about the Leni that Ouchi presents? Perhaps the same way we feel about Riefenstahl’s propaganda films – a cold admiration mixed with disgust, but also a sense that there is something fundamental here – the power of art to do bad – that must be confronted, not ignored. |
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