>>PREVIEW
TAKING SIDES
Workshop Theatre
Runs until July 1
Pumphouse Theatres
As Workshop Theatre brings the curtain up on a remount of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides, it isn’t difficult to recall that scarcely four months ago, Calgary audiences watched the premier of Mieko Ouchi’s The Blue Light at the playRites Festival. Both plays, after all, deal with an artist continuing to work under the Nazi regime, with Ouchi’s work examining filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and Harwood’s following Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Willhelm Furtwängler. Both embody a fascination that has inspired whole branches of academic thought and more than six decades of art all focused exclusively on a single question: How could they?
Most famously asked in the postwar de-Nazification tribunals, whose investigation of Furtwängler (Bill Baska) serves as Taking Sides’ central premise, the question of why anyone would collude with the Nazis is a difficult one. Explored through the cynical Major Steve Arnold’s (Brian Doyle) investigation of Furtwängler’s former colleagues, the play explores the motivations behind an artist who chooses his art over outright dissension, and an investigator whose memory of the war was immediate.
"(Harwood) is an artist himself, he defends and firmly believes in the role of art in our lives and the ability of art to enrich us," says director Alana Gowdy. "But he is also a realist with a nicely balanced touch, and both in The Pianist (adapted for the screen by Harwood in 2002) and in Taking Sides, he is able to portray both sides of the story."
Without a doubt, the German government benefited from the contributions of artists like Riefenstahl and Furtwängler, employing their artistic expertise to laud the superiority of the German people as they did during the 1936 Summer Olympic Games (during which Riefenstahl filmed her famous Olympia). Even classic German composers like Richard Wagner, whose public anti-Semitic views made his music a perfect fit for the Nazi party, were employed to draw attention to Germany’s illustrious past. It’s a fit between art and politics that Harwood is wholly conscious of, as his play explores the life of a man devoted single-mindedly to the preservation of a culture that simultaneously benefited a cause he didn’t support.
"I think that it’s impossible to separate art and politics, because it is often the artist of a society that will stand up to the politics of that society," says Gowdy. "Certainly, the Nazi government worked hard to use Furtwängler as a poster boy for the Nazi party, and he remained a conductor of the philharmonic as an independent conductor (he resigned as the official conductor). He wrote many letters objecting to the policies of the government, and he saved the lives of many Jewish musicians, But, he was undoubtedly used by them as a figurehead to show what a wonderful culture they had under their regime."
Gowdy herself came to the production because of her own experiences of the U.K.’s long memory over its involvement in the Second World War. Trained in theatre in Northern Ireland and The Guildhall of Music and Drama in London, she recalls a fundamental disparity between the memories of former-allied nations and young Germans, an ambiguity that speaks directly to a play whose name explicitly references the dual perspectives of any war.
"I was brought up in postwar U.K. and one therefore became very aware of things like concentration camps. As a child, parents had lived through the war and would tell stories about the war," she says. "The war was very much a part of our upbringing, much more so than the young Germans of my generation who I would meet, who knew very little about it."
Art and politics, collusion and passive resistance – duality is central to Harwood’s play, and to the very notion of living and working under a vilified regime. Just as Ouchi’s examination of the Nazis’ most famous filmmaker leaves its audience to examine the human being exposed onstage, Taking Sides concludes with the weight of its decision in the audience’s hands. |
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