A play written during the Nazi Holocaust is finally having its premiere half a century late in Cape Town this weekend
Guy Willoughby
Puppetry is a neglected activity in South Africa. ”Is it for kids?” is the invariable response when a new show is mounted, but internationally it’s an art form of vast expressive possibility.
One well-travelled local puppeteer keenly aware of what can be achieved is Gary Friedman, who opens in his challenging and ambitious new multi-media theatre piece, Looking for a Monster, at the South African Jewish Museum this week.
Last year I directed Friedman in a comic shadow-and-glove puppet play called The Losh ‘n Horror Show and that success prompted him to approach me in June this year to help him script, and then to direct, a much more demanding stage idea. This world-travelled practitioner wanted to reflect on a varied career in puppetry and somehow to intertwine it with his sense of himself as a Jewish South African. Friedman wanted to explore as wide a range of puppetry’s resources as possible. How to proceed?
With the assistance of a talented young trainee puppeteer from Jo’burg, Aja Marneweck and the warm encouragement of the Handspring Puppet Company’s Adrian Kohler Friedman and I began in deep midwinter to pool ideas at his African Puppet Television studios, swopping anecdotes, snippets, stories and endlessly scratching away at a labyrinthine storyboard mounted on a big piece of paper on the wall.
Playing through Friedman’s busy mind were images and ideas culled from a climactic trip to Eastern Europe in 1999, in which he’d visited some of the inspirational teachers he’d met 20 years before as a young trainee studying in Charleville-Mzires, France. Puppetry in the Czech Republic and Poland, I discovered, were venerable traditions, deeply engaged in the continuing struggle between freedom and oppression played out for so long in those countries.
Two events, and images, keep recurring in our discussions. First, Friedman’s bizarre experience while visiting Auschwitz the notorious Nazi concentration camp in Poland of being accidentally locked in after dark and experiencing with palpable force the terrible events played out there during World War II. ”It was as if the past rolled back and I was reliving the pain of the prisoners Jews and non-Jews,” Friedman attests now.
The second factor in our quest was cheerier, but as mysterious: on the same visit to Eastern Europe Friedman had looked up his former teacher, puppet master Jan Dvorak, who’d presented him with an old puppet head ”’A head from the war,’ he told me. It’s puzzled and intrigued me ever since.”
Well, out came the curious puppet head of a wide-smiling old man and we began to weave connections. One of Friedman’s chief discoveries while in the Czech Republic was the existence of a ghetto-cum-concentration camp, Terezin, set up deliberately by the Nazis for Jewish intellectuals and artists, a short distance from Prague.
As Friedman and Marneweck dug into the fascinating history of this curious powerhouse of creative talent going on under the Nazis’ noses, we came up against a further discovery: Hanush Hachenburg. And then we had our story.
Hachenburg was a precociously brilliant boy puppeteer, a 13-year-old writer, who was sent to Terezin where he co-produced a journal. More astonishingly, he wrote a puppet play called We’re Looking for a Monster!, which turned out to be a powerful commentary, through mangled fairy-tale conventions, on the events unfolding around him.
What happened to Hachenburg? And what happened to his play?
The play gave us what we needed a platform to comment on how the artist’s voice always engages in resistance to oppression, always seeking human liberation. Hachenburg did not live to see his play performed but in attempting to express himself and his sense of outrage through the many voices of his puppets, he gave Friedman the metaphor he needed for the artist’s quest.
Friedman says: ”After my 25 years in puppetry, Hanush’s history and his play have enabled me to realise that creativity turns on identity, on expressing yourself and expressing yourself for others. I feel that in giving Hanush’s play its world premiere, I’m fulfilling a pact between us artist to artist and I am meeting my mature creative self at long last.”
With Kohler’s invaluable creative consultancy, Friedman and the team began to call up the amazing range of expression available with puppets: shadow puppets, evoking panoramic scenes of life in Terezin and Auschwitz; marionettes, bringing a host of crazy characters to life; and, most moving of all, Friedman’s ability to create a living, breathing boy puppeteer from another time and place out of merest, wispiest brown paper.
After a return trip to Eastern Europe that enabled Friedman to shoot powerful video footage in Terezin and Auschwitz, he, Marneweck and another talented young practitioner, Luigi Preite, have pulled together a wealth of elements to tell a timeous story: live performers, diverse puppets, video, music and the shade of a child-creator who lived and died at an extraordinary time.
Looking for a Monster should prove that puppets are for grown-ups as well as kids in fact, they’re for human beings. It’s as simple and as complex as that.
The details
Looking for a Monster runs at the SA Jewish Museum, Hatfield Street, Gardens, from November 11 to January 17. To book contact Tel: (021) 465 5983. The play moves to the International Festival of Puppetry, Nairobi, from February 13 to 21 2002, and runs at the Agfa Theatre on the Square, Sandton, from mid-March to mid-April.