REVIEW
Bauernhof by Kate Herbert
The Age Monday August 9,1999 Reviewer: Helen Thomson
A vision of warped lives
What a pleasure it is to discover such a gem of a play as Bauernhof. It is a subtle, haunting and satisfying play that cleverly weaves a pattern of significances out of seemingly random events. It is also a thriller, carefully plotted to tease and alarm.
The playwright, Kate Herbert, has indeed been fortunate to secure Julia Blake to play the part of the woman in Bauernhof. Her carefully nuanced performance is crucial to the production’s success. She creates a character who is at peace with herself, and it is only slowly that we comprehend how hard won that peace must be.
An old woman smilingly leafs through old photographs, and the transparencies that form part of the designer, Meg white’s stylish set provide clues to what she is looking at. They are faces from the Second World War, as their clothing reveals: Lederhosen and army uniforms define their German identity.
The woman has two visitors, a young girl who lives nearby, Anne Maloney, and a stranger, an Australian, lost in the bitterly cold winter weather. She invites the man into her house, and he tells her of his German birth and his post-war Australian upbringing.
David Wicks as the man, projects a stolid, recognisable ordinariness, a
businessman simply revisiting his past, it seems. It comes as shock, in the
second half, when the lights reveal him standing over the woman, who is tied
up.
It is revenge he seeks, and he tells a hitherto hidden story to his frightened listener, who he takes to be the aunt who betrayed parents, caused their deaths, and abandoned him at the war’s end.
The play draws us into judgement, and we discover the clue to the mystery from the tiniest details. It cleverly evokes a complex sympathy as the woman’s past reveals how intimately the horrors of war have an impact on individuals.
The woman never openly reveals her true identity. And because she cannot do so, she also cannot atone or obtain forgiveness. She stands at the end of the play – a silent and tragic figure.
Bauernhof has many layers, music being one of them. The singer, Helen Saifert, provides emotionally haunting interventions that contrast to the moral ugliness of war.
The play is a quiet one, a few hours in the farmhouse of an old woman whose companions are the horses she also stables in the house. At its end we are moved, and have been drawn into a sympathetic vision of lives warped by historical catastrophe.
Bauernhof is a new La Mama work that deserves to go on to a larger-scale production but the intimacy is a major strength.
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REVIEW
Bauernhof by Kate HerbertHerald Sun Monday August 9, 1999
Snowed-in writer melts hearts
Reveiwer: Zelda Cawthorne
Kate Herbert doesn’t explain what propelled her to the village of gedelitz , just west of what used to be the Berlin Wall, early in 1997.
Whether by chance or design, she took refuge in a 300 year old Bauernhof ( farmhouse) while Germany froze in its harshest winter for half a century and rarely has an Australian playwright made more profitable use of a trip abroad.
The 90 minute play which germinated in the Bauernhof was first given reading at La Mama and the Melbourne Theatre Company.
Now, fully fleshed out, it is back, though Gedelitz remains omnipresent.
With its intimate atmosphere and rustic trappings including an open fireplace, La Mama is ideal for designer, Meg White’s evocative set.
La Mama also resonates with ghosts. They are made visible through White’s clever photographic displays and they echo right throughout this gripping drama about an elderly German woman whose wartime traumas and secrets lie hidden – until the arrival of an Aussie.
Herbert has a brilliant ear for language. Time and again you marvel as her two German characters switch from normal conversation to the stilted, convolute speech patterns of the occasionally English-speaking.
She also has an acute understanding of the bitter disaffection which fuelled the Third Reich and which has festered anew since reunification, though Bauernhof is no thinly disguised history or social lesson.
As the layers are peeled away, this densely constructed piece evolves into a tense thriller.
Julia Blake is superb in the central role and is well supported by David Wicks.
Anne Maloney is refreshing as the young Mareike, though director David Latham needs to work with her on her entrances which are almost identical and her boisterous ingenue is predictable.
Adding to Bauernhof’s appeal are the musical elements – especially soprano Helen Saifert – though the play easily triumphs on script alone.
It deserves international exposure.
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REVIEW
Bauernhof by Kate Herbert
Sunday Age Sunday August 15, 1999
Reviewer: Steven Carroll
Kate Herbert’s latest play, after the hit of triptych and Hit and Run, is set in Gemany at the time of reunification. And reunification, past and present catching up with each other again, is the theme of the play.
I as in Germany when the Wall was kicked over. The phrase “reunification” made no sense to the younger people I spoke to because they’d grown up in post-war west Germany and had no memories, and no nostalgia for united Germany of the old days.
It is appropriate then that the two main characters in Bauernhof are older people. An elderly woman ( Julia Blake) – who has no name other than “Woman” – lives next to a property up for sale. She lived through the war and her house, to an extent, is a museum of her life. She flicks through old photography albums and reads old letters.
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