Theatre review: Wolpe!

Published on 31/08/2008 20:07

THE HUB

HOW much you enjoy this magnificently ragged cabaret piece from Muziektheater Transparant of Ghent will depend on how much you care about the tremendous, swirling tide of utopian hope and totalitarian disaster that was the European politics of the 20th century.

Born in Berlin in 1902, Stefan Wolpe was a musician, composer and idealistic Marxist whose early life was entirely bound up with radical movements in politics and the arts. In this cabaret, the magnificent Belgian actress Viviane De Muynck – with tenor Gunnar Brandt – not only sings his fierce songs of working-class revolt, but also reflects, in her own improvisatory style, on what the death of so much intelligent hope and idealism means for our society today; while Johan Bossers at the piano offers a glimpse of Wolpe's later modernist piano music, still full of the same bold, unyielding radicalism that shaped his early life in 1920s Berlin.

The result is a profoundly rewarding and unsettling 90 minutes of theatre, startlingly transgressive in its willingness to name and explore the importance of a revolutionary radicalism now so suppressed and forgotten. It is richly entertaining in its wise, world-weary view of the strange combination of "agitation and sterility" that characterises our world today, with so much frenzied activity, and so little hope of real political change.