Theater: War of words

With her play ‘An Unfortunate Man,’ director Emilia Ruth Cohen hopes to make us take note of the lessons of history – and the perils of war.

By BARRY DAVIS
With her play ‘An Unfortunate Man,’ director Emilia Ruth Cohen hopes to make us take note of the lessons of history – and the perils of war. (photo credit: MIKA KUSHELEVITCH)
With her play ‘An Unfortunate Man,’ director Emilia Ruth Cohen hopes to make us take note of the lessons of history – and the perils of war.
(photo credit: MIKA KUSHELEVITCH)
Shakespeare famously suggested that all the world’s a stage and, throughout the centuries, global leaders have taken that idea and run with it, often to great effect.
While Emilia Ruth Cohen said that just as political posturing has inflicted disastrous conditions on millions of people, it has also provided the theater director with the raw material for her compelling play An Unfortunate Man. The work (in Hebrew) will be performed at the Notzar Theater in Bat Yam at 8:30 p.m. on April 18, as part of Festival Al Ha’esh (Barbecue Festival).
Cohen should know. The paternal side of her antecedents hailed from Italy where, 70 or 80 years ago, dictator Benito Mussolini took hegemonic hamming to new heights, or depths. The Italian leader was not alone in employing staged acrobatics to appeal to the masses, and Cohen’s work features an A-grade list of orators from yesteryear, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
It is said that Hitler even took acting lessons before he making his demonic deliveries to the public.
“He was taught what movements to make when he spoke,” says Cohen.
She may have also noted that little has changed in the tailored soapbox business.
Today, no political leader, or aspiring politician, worth his or her salt does anything without consulting their image adviser, PR person or personal spin doctor.
Cohen is, in fact, fully aware of how things in the political playacting arena have, or have not, evolved.
“Recently, they showed a comparison of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad making speeches at the United Nations General Assembly,” she says. “It was really funny, how similar they were.”
It is, of course, always good to have a laugh, but more important to be aware of the messages leaders convey, and how damaging they can sometimes be, theatrics notwithstanding.
“People don’t learn from history,” says Cohen, in explaining how the notion for An Unfortunate Man was born. “The process of war is something that repeats itself time and time again, and we don’t pay attention to that. We have to take on board the lessons of history, but we tend to ignore that aspect. Maybe we operate some kind of survival mechanism – that we prefer to ignore things which threaten us, hoping they will go away.”
Cohen, who recently completed a master’s degree in theater at Tel Aviv University – in fact, An Unfortunate Man was her final project on the course – is keenly cognizant of the fact that the dangers of dictatorship, or just plain old political pontificating, do not simply go away.
She wants us sit up and take note of what our elected leaders are saying to us and, if something about what they say bothers us, to voice our concerns.
She wants to alert us to the perils of mental massaging in as palatable a manner as possible.
“I don’t want people to look at my play and say something like ‘that’s fringe, I don’t understand that.’ So I put together a story that developed over time.”
If one takes as dispassionate a look as possible at Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin protégé Vyacheslav Molotov in action the theatrical possibilities become immediately apparent. Surely, then, Cohen did not need to work too hard to create the dramatic dynamics of her play.
“I was less interested in taking these leaders’ rhetoric, and their rhetorical style, as is. I was more interested in achieving my own manipulation of the raw material,” she explains. “I wanted to introduce more and more layers.”
In additional to the painful lessons of history, Cohen says she wanted to offer us a bona fide work of art.
“I went for the concept of the cabaret.
For me, cabaret shows us how much we make a sort of celebration out of war, and there is also something grotesque about cabaret and war. For me, the speeches are a call to arms.”
There is a carefully crafted oratory continuum to the play.
“The order of the speeches is based on the dynamics of a call to arms, explanations of why war is inevitable, defending the homeland and that kind of thing.
Then you get speeches aimed at boosting the national morale during the course of the war.”
Much of that fervor, says Cohen, dissipates as the fighting wanes.
“You get very few speeches like that towards the end of a war,” she says. “I have researched all of this, and this is a recurring phenomenon.”
The thematic thread of An Unfortunate Man comprises a diametric counterbalance between the rousing speeches of the leaders and the lives of people just trying to get by in Bologna, in northern Italy.
Much of the pathos the play arouses feeds off an oxymoronic element generated by, for example, a circus magician delivering a famous speech originally made by Stalin, or the absurd ambience spawned by citations from Dante’s Divine Comedy while the town is in the process of being blown to smithereens by enemy warplanes.
The conciliatory-polemic pingpong aspect is gradually heightened, and the speeches become ever more emotive and bellicose.
While Cohen wants her audience to go home with food for thought, An Unfortunate Man is above all a personal work. It is no coincidence that the play is set in Bologna, where the director’s great-uncle Romano lived, along with the rest of the Tognetti family. Romano, who was not Jewish, was a soldier in the Italian army during World War II and was taken captive by the Germans after Italy switched sides. During the play we get to know the townsfolk, which, in itself, is something of an antiwar approach. It has been posited many times in the past that it is far more difficult to shoot someone you know rather than firing at a nameless, anonymous enemy.
Romano returned from captivity and, over the years, told his family about his wartime experiences. His recollections are, basically, the bedrock of the play.
Cohen says she does not exactly expect An Unfortunate Man to change us overnight, but she would be happy enough if we were to take her peace-oriented message on board and give it due consideration.
The last speech in the play is, fittingly, the cinematic one made by Charlie Chaplin’s charming character in The Great Dictator, a Jewish barber who is mistaken for fascist dictator Adenoid Hynkel.
Cohen, naturally, applauds Chaplin’s call to lay down our arms, but is at odds with some of the verbiage employed.
“In that speech – and other orators do that too – Chaplin’s character uses military expressions to try to achieve peace,” she says.
Indeed, Hynkel entreats the assembled thousands to “fight for liberty.”
“We shouldn’t be fighting to peace,” says Cohen. “We should be striving for peace through peaceful means.”
Cohen believes that, in essence, war is a political strategy designed to keep leaders in power.
“For me, the most significant speech in the play is the one Stalin makes before the Soviets join Germany in the war.
Stalin basically elucidates all the reasons why war is good for the country, and he tries to keep the war going for as long as possible, regardless of the cost in human life.”
It is the latter element that Cohen wants us to preserve – humaneness.
“My great-uncle died a couple of years ago at the age of 95. I was very close to him and I want to keep his story alive, the story of what he went through in the war.
We need to be humane.”
For tickets: (03) 635-0772