Learning to live with horrors

There are two ways of making theatre a distinctive art form in the age of TV and film. One is to make it more elaborate, to exploit its capacity for causing a number of things to happen at the same time. The other is to make it simpler, to pare it back to the core of the essential, almost confrontational core of actors and audience. Fintan O'Toole reviews The Notebook/The Proof at the Samuel Beckett Theatre 

The Dublin Theatre Festival is usually at best when it pushes Irish audiences into this kind of stark confrontation. Our own theatre is in general so charming, so seductive, so slyly humorous that we need the challenge of cold, bracing simplicity.

And with the brief visit of the superb Belgian group De Onderneming, we got exactly that.

De Onderneming bears the imprints of the Polish groundbreaker, Jerzy Grotowski and his insistence that the answer to the question: "What is theatre?" could only be found by stripping away all that was not entirely necessary. This, he found, included everything except the actor and the spectator.

De Onderneming follows this basic insight. It has no artistic director, just a core group of actors. Its adaptation of The Notebook and The Proof by the Hungarian novelist Agota Kristof is not mediated through the thoughts of a director. Set and lighting are stark and minimal: a table, some chairs, some props.

Stylistic realism is also jettisoned. An old woman is played by a middle-aged man. Two nine-year-old boys are played by men who look like they are in their 30s. Changes of character are indicated by small, emblematic additions to the costumes.

And yet the effect is not at all basic. On the contrary, the narrative that unfolds over two interlocking shows is astonishingly complex.

The first part, The Notebook, is an enactment of the story supposedly written in a journal by twin boys sent from the big city to live with their grandmother and survive the second World War. The Proof is a playing out of the reality that seems to lie behind the story in the notebook.

This then is a typical central European epic of disruption, exile, false identity, invented history and existential dislocation. Between them, the two pieces cover a time span of half a century and involve dozens of characters. The historical background of both the war and the Warsaw Pact era emerges with great emotional clarity. Yet the total playing time is less than three hours.

This kind of concentration is possible because of two remarkable achievements. One is the absolute clarity of purpose with which the actors - Ryszard Turbiasz, Gunther Lesage, Robby Clieren and Carly Wijs - hone in on essentials and present the fragment that stands for the whole. The other is the way they manage not to talk about the psychic cost of surviving historic trauma, but to enact it.

The material they are dealing with is not history itself, but the way people caught up in its horrors have to make themselves less than fully human if they are bear the unbearable pain of violence, loss, cruelty and collective madness. The content of the notebook in which Lucas and Claus record their deliberate attempts to turn themselves into automatons without emotion may not be literally true. But the story is at a deeper level entirely truthful. It describes a process that has happened and continues to happen.

The performance itself is exactly this kind of story. We are not asked to believe in Lucas, Claus or the array of other characters.

Indeed, we are deliberately prevented from believing in them by the alienating effects of the style. Yet the strange, stark narrative forces us to look the actors in the eye and in doing so to see the bigger truth of what survival has cost the modern world. It is the kind of seamless intertwining of text and performance, of lies and truth, that makes theatre, every now and then, great.