Henry Nixon, Megan O’Connell and Guy Edmonds.Photo: John Marmaras
A group of blokes in dark suits sit around discussing art. They look ordinary enough. You might overhear them talking in a café. To varying degrees they have some knowledge, although it becomes clear they don’t like cubism, surrealism – all modern art in fact. They call it degenerate. OK, free speech. Except that it’s not, and that’s the point. Not when the blokes in question are Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and the rest of the gang.
Herr Hitler, a thwarted artist himself (he was twice rejected by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts), set himself up as the ultimate arbiter and art critic (if only he had confined himself to arts criticism, but of course we know that didn’t happen). One of the things that writer, director and actor Toby Schmitz wants to get across in the wonderfully wordy, often poetic, Degenerate Art is that Hitler (and his cohorts) were capable of seeming quite sane and normal, while all the while being sadistic monsters. And that very ‘ordinariness’ encourages people just like us (and just like many people in 1930s Germany) to sit back and do nothing. And, it’s not even as if Hitler had orange hair!
Henry Nixon with Rupert Reid (left) and Toby Schmitz (right). Photo: John Marmaras
Every time there is an awful, cataclysmic event that could have been prevented, humans tell themselves that this could never happen again (the Great War ‘to end all wars’; refugees in modern concentration camps) and then there’s the insidious rise of Fascism, ever-present, ever-burgeoning racism, abrogation of human rights (and women’s rights), fear of ‘otherness’ – all perpetrated by ordinary-seeming people. Schmitz doesn’t like this. He especially doesn’t like reading in Hitler’s latest, lauded biography by Volker Ullrich that Hitler was an actor.
So he has hit back with this play that reminds us of Hitler’s rise to power, laced through with his obsessions of art, architecture, music (Wagner was great; jazz was abhorrent) and grandeur. In the intimate confines of a blackly lit set (set and costume design: Maya Keys; lighting design: Alexander Berlage), Hitler (Henry Nixon), Goering (Giles Gartrell-Mills), Goebbels (Schmitz), Himmler (Guy Edmonds), Speer (Septimus Caton) and Heydrich (Rupert Reid) get together to discuss what’s wrong with the world, their vision to put it right, and also how to do some wholesale looting of art treasures (the ones Hitler does like). Narrator Megan O’Connell intermingles with them, and the audience.
It’s all very chatty, almost ordinary, very fast-paced and very clever. Just don’t forget that these blokes were actually monsters.
Degenerate Art is at the Old Fitz, Woolloomooloo, until November 4.
