ON Sunday November 11, the centenary of the Armistice which ended the First World War, Leith Theatre will reopen with The Last Days Of Mankind, a satirical anti-war epic by Viennese writer Karl Kraus.
Leith Theatre’s first professional production for 30 years, The Last Days Of Mankind is an ambitious, five-act work featuring performers from Scotland, Germany, Poland, Serbia, France, Ukraine, Poland, Ireland and England.
Adapted specifically for Leith Theatre, the big-scale production will see the auditorium transformed into a Viennese cafe with elegant, hand-drawn visuals by New York artist-designer Mark Holthusen and music performed live by cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies.
The play is co-directed by Leith-based director John Paul McGroarty and Yuri Birte Anderson from Theaterlabor. McGroarty’s collaboration with the German company began five years ago, when he met Theaterlabor’s artistic director Siegmar Schroeder at at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, where McGroarty was a residential artist.
Alongside the production’s run will be Cafe Europa, a series of performances, talks and demonstrations exploring European conflict hosted by Schroeder. Cafe Europa is open to actors, young people and community groups from the surrounding Leith area.
McGroarty hopes Cafe Europa may inspire other theatre-makers to consider collaborating with practioners from across Europe.
He and co-director Anderson have developed a “nice balance in the rehearsal room”, he says, with the latter’s more physical, movement-based morning work with the 30-odd performers creating an ensemble feel among the different nationalities.
In the afternoon rehearsals, McGroarty’s text-based work with the cast has used a new translation by Irish poet and philosopher Patrick Healy.
Though McGroarty had been aware of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre presenting a production of The Last Days Of Mankind back in 1993, it was using the only translation then available, which was an incomplete work which didn’t appeal to him.
Finding Healy’s complete translation when it was published a couple of years ago was a godsend for McGroarty, who wanted to mark the centenary of the First World War with a piece focusing on what was happening in Europe.
“This isn’t a typical British war Remembrance play,” McGroarty says. “It’s seen through the eyes of someone in Vienna, technically the enemy, and through the eyes of a nation which lost the war and lost its empire.”
With Kraus’ original 200 scenes carefully pared down to 35, each of the play’s five acts represents one year of the war. One of the few artists who kept working through the war, Kraus collected newspaper clippings and wrote about events as they happened. Nearly all of the action in The Last Days Of Mankind is based on conversations that Kraus overheard, or makes direct reference to press articles published as the war unfolded.
“He made a docudrama 100 years before anyone had a thought of a docudrama,” says McGroarty. “He is telling a story of one man’s view of an unfolding, apocalyptic scenario. Each act of the play is almost like a different play, as things got started, then began to change, and then got worse.
“By the end of the play it’s very apocalyptic, very anti-war.”
It’s fitting that the play is the first professional production to be presented at the theatre since it closed its doors in 1988. In 2004 Leith Theatre Action Group stopped the sale of the theatre – also Leith’s town hall – for residential development. Now called Leith Theatre Trust, the community organisation’s work to preserve the building paid off in 2017 with the Hidden Door festival presenting performances there.
An older part of the building’s history was that it suffered bomb damage in the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe was flying back from an attack on the Clyde.
“It was almost destroyed,” says McGroarty. “So you’re going to a place that almost didn’t exist because of war to see a piece that’s anti-war.”
McGroarty adds: “It is very deliberate that we open on Armistice Day. This is an act of remembrance. Though it’s different to the more traditional ‘red poppy’ shows and is satirical, it’s respectful too. Through satire and humour, it helps to convey the tragic loss that took place and which may have been preventable.”
November 11-16 (preview Nov 10), Leith Theatre, Ferry Road, Leith, 7.30pm (Nov 11 6.30pm), £14 to £25. www.leiththeatretrust.org
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