(photo by Robin Junicke)
Story of HatredLove yourself – stay away!
by Jason Booker
This is a three-hour, intermission-less film plopped onto a stage – not theatre. Allegedly the play is about Fritzl and his house, where he lives upstairs with a family of life-sized cloth dolls which he feeds by crumbling potato chips into their glossy magazine page faces. It’s a highly amusing, if perverse, opening scene that lasts less than ten minutes. However, that is almost the only live action in the piece (at least as much of the piece as I saw, but I’ll get to that), before Fritzl disappears behind the white drywall of his home through a hole in the cupboard. He descends into the darkness below his living room floor, a constructed box with plywood walls on three sides and a translucent plastic wall facing the audience. Inside this rec-room basement live three people. The program informs me that the man in drag is his daughter, who resembles a badly feminized Daniel Craig and mumbling into his hand-mic songs like Love Will Tear Us Apart – a darkly amusing but overly long English commentary on this German-based show. The daughter takes care of their two sons in this dark playroom, all of whom are played by men in their mid-thirties. Everything that occurs in the basement is filmed and displayed live by two cameras – one hand-held and one mounted in the upper corner near the audience, akin to a security camera – projected onto the drywall.
Why do I need to state that the program tells me? Because it isn’t at all clear from the show. Conte d’amour isn’t meant for audiences to understand or participate in – simply to watch in awe. And for them to walk out.
