Found in the Ground by Howard Barker. Directed by the author. Set design: Tomas Leipzig. Costume design: Billie Kaiser. Lighting design: Helen Morley. Sound design: Paula Sezno. Dog automata maker: Keith Newstead. With Vanessa Faye-Stanley (Macedonia), Gerrard McArthur (Toonelhuis), Suzy Cooper (Burgteata), Kyle Soller (Denmark), Nigel Hastings (Workman), Julia Tarnoky (Knox), Michael Vaughan (Lobe), Alan Cox (Hitler), and Georgie Alexander, Megan Hall, Charlotte More and Leah Whitaker (the Nurses). Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. A Wrestling School production. At Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London. Reviewed at the 3 October performance. Runs 30 September-11 October.

Howard Barker’s play set in a torn and bloodied landscape of 20th century justice

Irony, that facile and usually unhelpful trickster, had me reading Edward Bond’s The Hidden Plot the afternoon before I saw Howard Barker’s Found at the Ground, the Wrestling School’s 21st production, this past weekend. In “Language,” one of the early essays in the book, Bond takes up the idea of justice. “Theatre has only one subject,” Bond writes: “justice. Our minds are the site of imagination because we listen as well as speak. Imagination creates our world. It is as if each of us were a sculptor who created an image out of the raw stone of the world. The image is either just or corrupt. Theatres are the site of public imagination where the distinction between speaking and listening is dissolved. Neither love nor religion can do that. Yet it is essential to our shared humanity, for how else shall we learn to live justly? But now our alchemy corrupts our imagination, and if it succeeds in this we will lose our human language. No previous culture has achieved that extreme of nihilism.”

Ironic because the idea of justice in the post-Auschwitz post-Hiroshima world is precisely the subject of Found in the Ground, a play which whispers, in contradistinction to Bond, that “the image is neither just nor corrupt,” renouncing such moral definitions in a considered musical meditation of imagination and justice. And it is a multidimensional image of considerable depth, one of Barker’s “more ‘musical’ plays in which elements of expressionism and surrealism contribute to linguistically and pictorially poetic forms,” as David Ian Rabey defined one stream of Barker’s work in his recent book on the dramatist.

A landscape-with-figures play like Found in the Ground doesn’t offer a plot or narrative as such, but a situation to be excavated. In this case, the situation is centered on Toonelhuis (Gerrard McArthur), a judge at Nuremburg now retired to some distant retreat and cared for (if these are the words for such ambivalent casual dismissal) by his intensely loyal and ancient servant Lobe (the caustically disdainful Michael Vaughan) and four bitterly uncaring nurses. He also retains a naive young librarian, Denmark (Kyle Soller), to oversee the burning of his large library, a burning that the idealist librarian despises. Toonelhuis’ expansively sexual daughter Burgteata (Suzy Cooper) teases Denmark, who nonetheless remains impotent and is prone to sexual degradation. Meanwhile, in his memory, Toonelhuis is haunted by the spirits of the Nazi leaders whom he sentenced to death at Nuremburg, spirits personified by Knox (“the spirit of a war criminal,” according to the text), who here is lithely and darkly performed by Julia Tarnoky in a bizarre black-and-white outfit and makeup: a nightmare Harlequin. Knox is finally able to summon Hitler (Alan Cox), a melancholic now given to disquisitions on art, continually fascinated by the spectacle of death.

Toonelhuis spends his last days on earth ingesting the remains of his, and of justice’s, victims – mud and ashes now, as much mud and ashes as the remains of the Nazis’ victims at Auschwitz or the atomic bomb’s victims at Hiroshima, his fingers playing in the flesh of the corpses. He is as much a victim of the conflicting claims of justice as the three dogs that he keeps, vicious mechanical creatures that once served as fearsome guards (in the camps) and now as fearsome protectors (surrounding the judges) – and in this production they are marvellous mechanical creations by Keith Newstead. Their ominous barking constitutes one of the motifs of the play’s soundscape; at the end of the play, as Lobe gently cuts their throats, they are released from the bizarre uses to which humankind has put them, as death releases Toonelhuis also from his tortured physical self-awareness.

But this is a 21st century play – “new writing,” as Aleks Sierz might put it – and in the contemporary scenes the relationship of idealism to tragic history, and especially idealism that leads to such tragic history, forms much of the foreground to this landscape. Denmark may well be a Toonelhuis-in-training, which may explain his employment by the judge: an idealist who finds more significance in books than in body, as human justice finds more significance in law than in landscape; it was, after all, justice in the name of idealism that led the Nuremburg court to pass sentences of death on the Nazi war criminals. This idealism leads Denmark to toss himself on top of the pyre of burning books, sacrificing his body to his ideals; but again, irony, our facile and unhelpful trickster, makes this a failed suicide. It is his denial of desire, Hamletesque trepidation in the face of a proferred ecstasy, that leads to his pain: his sexual prostration between the legs of his female lovers, his degredation, is of his own making. In his naivete, Denmark stands in for 21st century culture, unwilling to absorb and accept its responsibility in tragic history and therefore quite ready to repeat its horrors once again, and willing to deny the fulfillment of the body’s significance, condemning it to ashes and mud rather than life. (For it must be remembered that the Nazis, those promulgators of racial purity and a utopian Thousand Year Reich, were idealists too.)

This was the first time I’ve seen one of Barker’s own productions. It was not surprising to find the extraordinary precision of his texts reflected in the precision of his scenography: this is a production with sharp, piercing edges that wound, from the metal teeth of the mechanical dogs to the clarity of the costume and set design (and long-time Wrestling School designers Billie Kaiser and Tomas Leipzig are joined for the first time by sound designer Paula Sezno, a graduate of the Sopron Academy of Theatre Arts; her “favourite sound sources are industrial processes, a taste she describes as ‘pure nostalgia,’” her program biography says; her sounds, too, like Kaiser’s exquisitely sensual dresses and Leipzig’s uncompromisingly hard and cold sets and props, pierce the invisible scrim between performer and auditor. Needless to add, Helen Morley’s light design sculpts the dark beautifully). It was surprising, however, to see just how … well, the comic, for want of a better word, abuts the tragic in the stage production, for much of this is light and fast; the bitter dogs appeal in their toy-like qualities; Gerrard McArthur’s Toonelhuis is particularly wry; and there’s Alan Cox’s Hitler, who seems uncomfortable in being called back from the dead in a nuanced and quiet performance; if anything, he is slightly embarrassed, and those who surround him treat him with a casual and amusing contempt (one of the Nurses thrusts an unneeded tray into his arms as she hurries out to catch a bus, leaving poor Hitler slightly bereft and comically burdened). He is only transfixed by projected images of the concentration camps – as transfixed like many others before repeated images of the events of 9/11 and other contemporary disasters.

If the audience is held complicit through holding onto its last shreds of idealism, so is the artist. “Critical moments in the history of a culture,” Hitler prosaically muses (and in the text Hitler is the only character to speak in prose; the others speak almost exclusively in verse), “frequently require swift and violent actions the elimination of old values the fall of monasteries the tidal rush of some purifying river naturally this wounds us in some obscure place some spiritual cul-de-sac but all the same this gnawing pain should not be interpreted as a reason for inaction on the contrary we take pride in conquering this pain in rendering it the melancholy music which accompanies all.” Denmark interrupts him with, “I like melancholia.” Responds Hitler (now in verse):

Do you?
Me too
It is the temperament of artists
Rembrandt
And the nameless students who deface his works
Melancholy
All
[he looks around him, the tray still in his arms]
I’ll put it down shall I

Not the same as pessimism, this melancholia, and for its humor Found in the Ground, the play and production, is melancholic, and a challenge to the audience to seek a perhaps impossible redemption in their own bodies, and in love and imaginative desire: to avoid the prostration and sexual self-degradation of idealists like Hitler and Denmark, to consider even the justice of a Toonelhuis as provisional, as the judge himself finds it at the end of his life. It is the melancholia of complicity in a bizarre human justice, a parody of the justice found, perhaps, only in the dead – in the “ground” of the title of the play.