‘How shall I begin?” asks Nico Holonics in this surreal adaptation of Günter Grass’s sweeping story about nazism, postwar guilt and the German psyche. Produced by the Berliner Ensemble and directed by Oliver Reese, this drama is as much concerned with storytelling as it is with the life of its central stunted character, Oskar Matzerath.
It is solely performed by Holonics as Oskar, the child who refuses to grow beyond the age of three, is cast as a freak in society and who tells us of the deaths of his mother and the two men he calls his “presumptive fathers”.
The production skips the starting point Grass uses in the novel, of Oskar as an “inmate in a mental institution”, but Holonics endows his character with an arch sense of the disturbed. He is part clown and part monster, dressed in short trousers and alternately appearing like a powerless child caught in the net of larger political forces and a complicit young tyrant who bangs his martial drum deafeningly.
Holonics is a powerful presence with a keen and at times obscene physicality. “The Tin Drum knows no taboos,” wrote the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1959 and this production encapsulates that irreverent spirit. “Fuck you, Jesus,” spits Holonics at one point. At others he wags his tongue lasciviously and froths with fervour as he tells of dead horses’ heads dragged out of the sea and of jumping on his father’s back after catching him having sex.
Occasionally his performance veers into camp over-acting but he flips the tone to light relief in moments when he climbs out of the drama. Daniel Wollenzin’s set is bare but for an oversized chair and a grave-shaped hole in the ground, which adds to the play’s emphatic non-naturalism.
His breaking of the fourth wall is laced with danger as well as wit. “Once upon a time,” he says several times and mischievously reads out the English surtitles, asking the audience “Do you like it so far?” or more unsettlingly: “Tell me your name.” As he describes a moment of sexual passion involving sherbet being poured into his lover’s navel, he cajoles audience members to suck their fingers and dip them into his bag of sherbet. They duly oblige and there is a horrid glee as he watches them squirm.
What lets down this sensational production is the technicalities around translation. The surtitles, which are at eye level, are at some moments obscured from view and at others either too quick or slow to change. Holonics’s monologue is novelistic, with long and complex clauses, so that the sense of a sentence is easily lost. It is frustrating yet forgivable: The Tin Drum is worth seeing for Holonics’s performance, in any language.
The Tin Drum is at the Coronet, London, until 29 February.
