There ain't nothing quite like a good, radical unleashing of indigenous German-language modernism. This is a howling, raggedly athletic, young-minded assault on Bertolt Brecht's 1926 folk allegory centring on a footsoldier's anonymity, from the Baracke am Deutschen Theatre, Berlin. This version sets the play in a fanciful 1920s India under British military occupation, where the soldiers ransack temples before pushing north into Tibet. A local 'porter', Galy Gay, is press-ganged into a machine-gunner's squadron. Faced with execution, he sacrifices his identity for that of killer-soldier 'Jeriah Jip aus Tipperary'.
Such pandering to the Irish crowd is part and parcel of the audience participation angle of director Thomas Ostermeier's production. Tilo Werner plays a haplessly distraught Galy Gay, who set out one morning to buy his wife a fish but somehow fell into the louche horrors of soldiery. Also Falk Rockstroh's self-appalled, raucously militaristic Sergeant 'Bloody Five' Fairchild is a horrid sweetmeat. His genocidal desires at the whore-widow's feet lead him to shoot off his manhood in a Hitler approximation that, thankfully, never plumbs the depths of a Nazi armband.
But this is really an ensemble production, the soldiers relentlessly thrashing themselves against the portmanteau railway track set in some demented version of Meyerhold's bio-mechanics.
A live band provide sound effects, while savagely refracting classic Kurt Weill numbers such as Moon of Alabama through a post-punkish, Birthday Party/ Captain Beefheart garage aesthetic. The cult of physical - if not always imagistic - expressionism will intoxicate some, while others may find it far from Brecht's notion of alienation.
Meanwhile, from a contemporary perspective, the tit-swaggering Widow Bigbeck is less offensive than the caricature of the inscrutable Oriental mandarin Mr Wang, dinging his bell and wittering like a loveable pantomime villain. The lowest-common-denominator tone of the humour sends uneven ripples of laughter through the audience. Some of the characterisations are sickening, like some Germanische stage-idiocy gone mad. But, hey, this is wild-minded stuff - bludgeoning home, in its blurred contemporary revisionism, some of Brecht's prophetic signalling of the seeds of fascism.
The production finally revels in a repeated militaristic thrust at a mountain fortress. Searchlights strafe the audience's eyeballs in darkness, while the reinvented Galy Gay rests his penile cannon between the legs of the Widow Bigbeck. Typically, Ostermeier absolutely trashes all sense-making in this latest attempt to excavate the Germanic warrior psyche.
Ends tonight. Box office: 00-353-1-878 7222.
