Hotel Eden
Cube, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
During an uprising by the Communist Party of Germany in 1919, a cunning agent went undetected. This trusted confidante of senior revolutionaries was a skilled manipulator. (Lenin said she flirted with him before she whacked him on the head.) She’d only be more agile and liquid-like if she were a cat. Which, as the house pet of the communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, she was.
The cat, Mimi, has a few standout cameos in Luxemburg’s surviving letters. Her presence is announced in Emilie Hetland’s intriguing historical play for Volya Theatre by a sequence of lamps strewn across the floor of a gloomy Berlin hideout, signalling a cat jolting across the room. She is one of the rebels keeping a low profile in the confusing days after a failed uprising – and Luxemburg’s murder at the city’s Hotel Eden.
In this austere apartment we find Hetland playing Mathilde Jacob, or “Tilly”, a typist and ally of Luxemburg’s. Still spurred by the revolution, she passes details of safe houses to members of the Communist Party – one of whom, the leader Leo Jogiches (Ruairí Lenaghan), gets his wires crossed and shows up at Tilly’s hideout by accident. They’re forced to wait out the night together.
Where Hetland’s chatty Tilly overshares (“You look terrible”), Lenaghan’s surly Leo often groans (“Thanks”). The play shunts this dynamic into a conversation about Luxemburg, a revolutionary who can sound more like an icon than a person.
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Tilly is preoccupied with protecting her hero’s letters, preserving her story and fishing around Leon’s personal past for further information: “What was she like when you were younger?”
As Luxemburg’s former lover, and still stung after a decade-long relationship, he’s in no mood to go there: “I didn’t come here to reminisce.”
Those opposing points of view are intriguing. It’s surprising, then, that Leo’s strongly withheld feelings are easily surrendered. For no easily obvious reason he lets his guard down, the moody revolutionary relaxing into a smile: “She was fun. There was always a party, always a cause. Then the party stopped and the cause took over.”
That suggests a relationship consumed by a revolution. Tilly also insists on a closeness to Luxemburg – an eternal comradeship, looking up to the communist leader more as an inspiration than someone known intimately. She responds with a breathless lack of tact when a misty-eyed Leo uncovers an unread letter from Luxemburg revealing that she could have had children with him. “That was before she was busy,” Tilly says disapprovingly.
The play’s greatest interpretation is of the revolutionary’s noted love of animals, and the way she compared their suffering and empathy to that of humans. In Katie O’Halloran’s exposed staging, we don’t quite get a cat clowder in electric lights. We do see Tilly writing protest songs for Mimi: “Your enemy wants night / So speak up with all your might!”
In a spring when we’ve already had Animal Farm, social justice and animal rights are seen aligned. Perhaps what every revolution has been missing is a cat.
Hotel Eden is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 28th
