Just Call Me God – Barbican/Union Chapel/Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, London
“That was wackadoodle.” – Me, directly after seeing it.
“Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich?” – My SO, requesting a guest blogging spot.
Wackadoodle in a good way? Partly. This collaboration between theatre and music, commissioned from Michael Sturminger by the Philharmonie Hamburg is currently touring an interesting variety of locations (London, Birmingham, Groningen), as necessitated by the requirement for a church organ. The location also becomes part of the set, as a military unit moves in, sweeping the space (recast as an underground vanity project) for a deposed dictator, and paying the price when he turns out not to be so deposed after all.
A confrontation ensues: between Satur Diman Cha and a journalist trying to claw something back from a terrible situation, between Western and non-Western values, and between good and evil (or, rather, what these ideas can represent, and how they intersect with power). Diman Cha takes elements from real dictators and is the poorer for it, with little that is distinguishable as an independent character, but still manages to talk sense during his big speech. Will Western countries be confronted with the extent to which their comfortable lives are the result of a global power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Did the speech end at a point that was so loud it hurt my ears? Unfortunately yes.
The organ which occasioned this autitory discomfort was an interesting element in this work. I can’t say I’ve heard a lot of church organs in my time, and when I have they have mostly been playing fairly traditional fare, but I wasn’t sure in Just Call Me God the extent to which the music sounded dischordant to me because it was meant to, rather than because I wasn’t parsing it properly. Actually watching Martin Haselböck play on a screen was fascinating, and the range of styles he encompassed was impressive. I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy tickets to church organ concerts, but as a one-off and an integral part of the work it pushed me out of my musical/theatrical comfort zone.
Malkovich is in his element, and carries what would otherwise be a slim concept and fairly weak production. He treads the line between comedy and tragedy, farce and cutting a bit close to the bone, and introduces elements of doubt with skill. The other actors mostly being Germans playing Americans was slightly problematic, in that the acoustics plus their accents meant I didn’t catch all of the dialogue. The audience as a whole seemed to share my internalised whackadoodle vs. worthy debate, in that equal numbers seemed to walk out as stayed to gush about it afterwards.
If you have a chance to see it I would recommend it as a one-off and interesting evening’s entertainment, so long as you have read all of the above and/or really like organ music.