Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum begins with the words: “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital.” It’s hard to know what we’re meant to make of what follows. Should we put narrative faith in this strange autobiography of a boy who never grew up? Or is it all to be taken with a large helping of salt?
There’s a similarly surreal quality to Kneehigh’s new adaptation, written by Carl Grose with a chaotic, genre-mashing score by Charles Hazlewood. Oskar’s experiences in turbulent mid 20th-century Europe are divided up among an ensemble of 10. First-person narration becomes a multi-vocal cacophony – a riot of musical storytelling.
In Grass’s bizarre fable, Oskar is born with solemn, precocious wisdom. He emerges from the womb already weary of humankind’s folly and greed. By the age of three, fed up with the games of adults, he decides to remain a child for ever. Banging on the tin drum given to him by his mother or smashing windows with his ear-shredding screams, the diminutive Oskar attempts to make himself heard in a world being rapidly swallowed by darkness.
Kneehigh seize on the novel’s folk-tale qualities, making its account of life in Danzig (now Gdańsk in Poland) before, during and after the second world war a sort of allegory for conflict. The show begins “once upon a war” – which war doesn’t really matter, the performers tell us – in a bombed-out ballroom. The Nazi party has become the shady, non-specific “Order”, led by an alluring rock-star figure. The prescient suggestion is that anyone, at any time, can fall under the spell of fascism.
This being a Kneehigh show, there’s gleeful invention, the spirit of children’s make-believe and mischievous comedy buried amid the rubble of war. Performers don comedy noses and moustaches or chase one another around the stage. At other moments, the disorder is that of adult, Schnapps-fuelled merriment; one long party in the ruins of civilisation. Rina Fatania is particularly entertaining as Oskar’s life-loving grandmother, forever producing things – vodka, guns, men – from beneath her voluminous skirts.
Ever-youthful Oskar takes the form of a pale, grave puppet (delicately operated by Sarah Wright), his implacable expression casting quiet judgment over everything else on stage. The austerity of his appearance is at sharp odds with the colour and chaos elsewhere: a single point of unchanging focus in a fast-swirling world. He’s an odd, unsettling figure, childishly petulant in some ways yet disturbingly mature in others. As so often with puppets, it’s astonishing how much can be read upon his fixed wooden features.
It’s as hard to pin down Mike Shepherd’s shape-shifting production as it is to pigeonhole Grass’s novel. It’s not quite musical, not quite opera, not quite play. At times it has the feel of a cabaret, skipping restlessly from sketch to musical sketch. Hazlewood’s soundtrack has the same distracted, undecided quality, as it shuffles from aria to electronica, ballad to banger.
Naomi Dawson’s gorgeously dilapidated design is just as chameleonic, whisking us from house to toy shop to beach. Stunningly sculpted by Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting, its faded walls, decaying grandeur and scattered rubble are an ever-present reminder of the destruction human beings are capable of wreaking on one another, as well as of the beauty we have created in the world.
There lies the ambivalence of both Grass’s novel and Kneehigh’s dramatisation. Both horror and beauty are here, as well as an uneasy awareness of how easily people can slide from tenderness to atrocity. As Oskar’s father, Alfred, Les Bubb is a well-meaning buffoon, a harmless figure of fun – until he joins the fascists and starts rounding up “ethnic sub-groups”. Without making any crude comparisons, Kneehigh suggest that this lesson is just as urgent today as it was in the 1930s.
What’s lacking, though, is clarity. While the onstage anarchy may be apt, evoking both the mess of war and the narrative tangle of Grass’s text, it can be overwhelming. Even with the postwar episodes of the novel stripped away, Grose’s adaptation squeezes a huge amount of plot into the two-and-a-half-hour running time, often skimming too fast over names and details. Add to that lyrics that are frequently hard to hear and it’s easy to get lost.
Some degree of confusion is only right for a story about the perplexing things that people do to one another. As The Tin Drum shows, it’s all too easy to sleepwalk into evil, or get swept away by rhetoric. A few more moments of quiet within the chaos, though, might offer pause for reflection, allowing Oskar’s tale to make the same impact as his incessant, rage-filled drum beats.
- At Everyman, Liverpool, until 14 October. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then touring.
