★★★☆☆
Three Stars

In the years after the Second World War, the globe was crossed with ‘ratlines’: a series of escape routes that allowed European fascists to flee to South America. Many were eventually captured and convicted. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was caught in Argentina by the Israeli intelligence service and hanged in Israel two years later. In 1967, Franz Stangl was arrested in Brazil and extradited to West Germany, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious ‘Angel of Death’, evaded authorities for more than three decades.

Mengele is the subject of Wakolda (The German Doctor), the latest offering from Argentinian director Lucía Puenzo, adapted from her own novel of the same name. It is 1960, and Eva (Natalia Oriero) and Enzo (Diego Peretti) are taking their children to the small Patagonian town of Bariloche to revive Eva’s family hotel.

En route, they encounter a dapper stranger who calls himself Helmut Gregor (Àlex Brendemühl), a doctor from Germany. He takes a great interest in Eva, who is pregnant with twins, and in her underdeveloped daughter, Lilith (Florencia Bado), beginning hormone treatments on her to improve her growth. As the film progresses, the characters are made aware of the doctor’s true identity due to the work of a discerning archivist (the wonderful Elena Roger).

Nazis make great material for cinema, and Nazis on the run even more so. Wakolda is by no means the first time Mengele has been depicted on screen. In 1978, a year before Mengele’s death, Gregory Peck played the doctor in The Boys from Brazil, complete with Laurence Olivier as a Nazi hunter. 2010’s The Debt (starring Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren) is about Mossad agents hunting ‘The Surgeon of Birkenau’, a character clearly modeled on Mengele.

The story of Mengele has been told and retold, and mythologized so that it is now part of our collective consciousness as a synonym for evil and a marker of the point where scientific ambition leaves nature and morality behind.

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Where Wakolda differs from its Nazi thriller predecessors, and where it succeeds most, is its exploration of a young girl’s sexual and emotional development. Twelve-year-old Lilith is the film’s most complex and captivating character.

Beginning at her new school, Lilith, who is on the brink of adolescence but is alarmingly undersized, is teased for her diminutive figure and called a ‘dwarf’. As she lines up in her swimsuit with her schoolmates before swim class, Lilith is subject to a game in which the boys rate the girls’ bodies. The already shapely and flirtatious girls receive nine or ten; Lilith receives a zero. 

Mengele convinces Lilith’s mother that the girl must have hormone treatment as soon as possible because she will soon hit puberty and the hormones will no longer be effective. Soon after beginning her treatment, Lilith menstruates for the first time, and we are shown her bloodstained underwear and her makeshift sanitary pad from toilet paper.

She is fascinated and flattered by the handsome, mysterious doctor, and has her first experiences of desire and sexual contact with a young boy, Otto. At times, we get the impression that the familiar, oft-told story of Mengele is an excuse to explore much more intimate subject matter.

Filmed in the snow-capped Patagonian mountains, the film’s other great strength is its sublime scenery, and its sheer visual magnificence. This landscape is contrasted with the unnatural activity of its inhabitants: Mengele’s monstrous experiments and Enzo’s eerie doll-making business. But this is not a simple dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the immorality of human ambitions.

The natural world is never kind or compassionate in this film. In one of the first scenes, the family and the doctor are forced to seek shelter from a storm. Later, when Eva gives birth prematurely to her twins, no medical help is available because of a blizzard. Rather than simply underscoring Mengele’s evil, or suggesting that human cruelty is an aberration, the film reminds us that nature itself can be indifferent, or worse, cruel and hostile.

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At times Puenzo can be heavy-handed. Mengele’s speech about the Sonnenmenschen, for example, is a transparent reminder that he was a bad guy with bad aspirations, as if we didn’t know that already. The close-ups of Mengele’s journal, complete with Lilith’s voiceover narrating the events, sometimes feel clumsy and obvious. Lilith’s father makes dolls with artificially beating hearts for a living—an occupation which is far too neat and cute a rhyme with Nazi racial aspirations.

Still, even the father’s occupation is redeemed by a genuinely unnerving scene in a doll factory, where rows of workers produce identical figures, crafting their artificial lips, eyes, and hair: an army of flawlessly constructed girls at odds with Enzo’s own underdeveloped daughter.

Aside from these touches, for the most part the film is understated, rarely ostentatious, and far too cold and detached to descend into Nazi-hunter type theatrics. Brendemühl is a chilling Mengele, but he does relatively little besides glower: he is more of a threatening presence than an actual character. The film is altogether less interested in the German doctor than in the experiences of its girls and women, and at times Mengele feels almost like an unnecessary addition. As a Nazi thriller Wakolda doesn’t quite get there, but as a portrayal of the strange, distressing experiences of growing up, it is uncomfortably accurate.

When it was originally performed at The National in 2003, Martin McDonagh’s Olivier award-winning The Pillowman only received lukewarm praise from critics. It was lauded for its combination of obsidian-black humour and engagingly naturalistic dialogue, but predictably criticised for its stomach-churning moments of child-abuse.

It centres on the interrogation of Katurian, a writer, whose grisly, murder-filled quasi-parables are being re-enacted by a sadistic serial-killer on the streets of an unidentified totalitarian city-state.

Director Tom Bailey, together with a core cast of four and his assistant director Miles Guilford, is preparing to stage a gender-blind interpretation of the cult classic at the Oxford Playhouse in 4th week. When I attended an early rehearsal in Oriel’s cluttered JCR annex, I was curious as to how Bailey viewed the play’s juxtaposition of humour and horror.

“I think it’s a masterful balance”, he tells me, “It’s the most striking thing about a lot of McDonagh’s work. I’ve realised that the play, like some of its characters, dishes out horrible cruelty and deprivation on the one hand, but brilliance and generosity in terms of humour on the other.”

When I ask afterwards about their collective approach to the performance, inter-character communication is evidently a major concern. Even as I watch the same scene again I realise that the cast’s positions, and their delivery, are both markedly different each time.

“The where, the who, and the what are all being prepared, but how the lines will be delivered is not going to be set”, Bailey reveals. “Throughout the entire process we’ve focussed on listening and communication so that what the audience sees is actually alive.”

“If people came to see it five times, they would see five different versions because [the cast] will be listening to each other and one tiny change from one person can set off a whole chain of reactions. It’s genuine communication on stage and that makes better theatre. I’m sure of it.”

Dominic Applewhite, who plays ‘good cop’ Tupolski, is quick to praise McDonagh’s script in helping them adopt this style.

“The script lends itself really well to our approach because it’s so natural and the dialogue is so conversational,” he gushes. “If you try to meticulously plan out at what point I’m going to think such and such, everything becomes dead. It’s all about communication.”

This somewhat daring approach, of allowing the actors to perform instinctively with the minimum of directorial imposition, also requires a deep understanding of the play. The cast have been preparing for this, I am told, by taking their characters out of context and improvising their interactions in different scenarios, imagining back-stories and “seeing what happens”.

Everyone chuckles when they recall Applewhite and Jonathan Purkiss, who plays Tupolski’s colleague Ariel, improvising their characters dining in the police canteen.

One unique feature of Bailey’s production is the casting of Claire Bowman and Emma D’Arcy as the anti-hero Katurian and his mentally disabled brother Michal, roles written for male actors. I ask Bailey whether this was a decision taken out of necessity or a device he planned from the outset.

“It was something I wanted from the start,” he confesses. “I felt uncomfortable with the idea of an all-male cast and I wanted to represent the wealth of female acting talent in Oxford.

“I also think that it gives the oppressive, totalitarian violence [that Katurian experiences at the hands of Tupolski and Ariel] another level of cruelty. It becomes a male oppression of female artistic expression. It’s a re-imagining of McDonagh’s play that is a lot harder to watch.”

It is impossible to disagree as I see Purkiss and Bowman practice a scene in which the latter’s eyes are viciously gouged out with very little provocation. This gender-blind approach understandably provides a challenge for Bowman but it is one she relishes. She tells me, “it is the most refreshing thing to play a part that isn’t a stereotypical female role. We discussed whether I was going to play it as a man, but decided that it was way more interesting if I was a woman.”

The rehearsals are only in their second week, but already the cast feel confident that the play is progressing well, both dramatically and stylistically. I am shown a cardboard model of the set, designed by Joel Scott-Halkes; the exact details of the design are being kept secret until opening night but rest assured, it will be jaw-droppingly impressive, mainly due to the scope the Playhouse stage provides for ambitious aesthetics.

I ask Bailey and his team if they are nervous about staging their work in the city’s premier theatre and they reassure me that anxiety is yet to rear its debilitating head. I almost believe them.

“There’s basically just the four of us,” says Applewhite, “and it is exhilarating to be doing something simultaneously so intimate and yet so epic.”

The enthusiasm and commitment Bailey shares with his cast and crew is thoroughly engaging. From the rehearsal I have seen, and from the revealing comments of both director and cast, The Pillowman seems on track to fulfil Bailey’s clear-sighted ambition.

“It’s unlike a lot of stuff that gets put on at the Playhouse”, Bailey tells me. “I think it’s the first show to be rated 18+. It’s definitely the smallest speaking cast that has been there in a long, long time. Essentially, we want to inject something into the arm of Oxford’s theatre-scene.”

Visibly excited, he breathlessly concludes, “It’s going to be a fucking rollercoaster.”

In 2011, Lady Gaga was voted Time magazine’s second most influential person of the noughties, losing out only to Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Last year, Jeff Koons’ sculpture, “Balloon Dog” was sold at an auction for $58.4 million, an unprecedentedly high sum for a work of art. And this year, New York fashion designer Michael Kors joined the ranks of businessmen and entrepreneurs on Forbes’ ‘Billionaire List’.

It cannot be denied that we live in a time when artists, whether in the visual or performance arts, are some of the most influential people in the world, placed on a towering pedestal. The cult of the artist and the cult of the celebrity often overlap to the point of inseparability; that is not to say that all celebrities are artists, but many artists are celebrities.

Did artists always enjoy such high prestige in society? The short answer: certainly not. In Ancient Greece, visual artists were looked down on as manual labourers and up until the 17th century in Europe actresses were dismissed as prostitutes (sometimes because they did indeed sell their bodies to get a bit of extra cash). So when did The Artist go from being a low life to living the high life?

The ancients had a complicated relationship with their artists. The Greeks and Romans treated their sculptors with such disdain that the philosopher, Seneca, once said, “One venerates the divine images, one may pray and sacrifice to them, yet one despises the sculptors who made them.” And yet they had great respect for non-visual art, such as music and drama. The hugely popular annual ‘Dionysian’ festival included the productions of playwrights such as Sophocles, who was of high birth and status.

The representation of artists in Greek mythology, as passed down by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, gives no single homogeneous view of The Artist. On the one hand, there is the musician, Orpheus, who descended to the Underworld in pursuit of his love, as well as Eurydice, who is presented as a civilising force.

But on the other hand, other mythological maestros are accused of the ultimate sin in the Ancient World – challenging the role of the gods. For example, Prometheus by fashioning humans out of clay and stealing fire in order to bring them to life, and Arachne by boasting about being a better weaver than the goddess Athena.

This idea of the irreligiosity of the Artist was also what perturbed the Plato, who believed hat all poets should be thrown out of his ideal Republic because they were subversive to the state. The Romans, however, were more forgiving towards their writers, for example, highly revering Virgil. In his magnum opus, the Aeneid, he presented a vision of Roman identity based on civic duty.

He was admired not just for his role as propagandist for his patron, Augustus, but also for his poetic skill and execution. In terms of visual arts, Pliny’s Natural History was a very early prototype of art criticism, celebrating individual artists and elevating creativity to a level of prestige.

Despite this, for centuries, the concept of the Artist all but disappeared. During the Middle Ages, those who created artefacts were considered to be divinely inspired, but were largely anonymous. The monks who illustrated the Book of Kells were using their skills in the service of God, rather than self- consciously creating art. Their names will never be known. Compare this attitude with our obsession with the exact identity of Banksy.

It was only during the Renaissance that the role of the artist dramatically changed: the deifier became the deified. Artists were now regarded as learned and cultivated people, serving a moral and political purpose in society. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) helped to reintroduce the notion of individual artists with their own distinctive style. Not only did society’s view of The Artist alter, so did his view of himself: Michelangelo, nicknamed the ‘divine’, openly considered himself a genius.

In the Romantic period, the Artist’s sense of self-importance increased, along with public perception. Artists were motivated by material reward, elevated status and high patronage. Until the celebrity of the artists sometimes overtook that of their patrons: at first Haydn was famous for being the composer of Prince Estarházy; thirty years later Prince Estarházy was famous for being the patron of Haydn. Creative talent increasingly became associated with mental torment (for example, in the work of literally any French poet), although the actual term ‘tortured artist’ was a retrospective post-Romantic invention.

Nowadays, artists have a higher status than ever before. The public is fascinated and seduced by the romance of the ‘Great Artist’, who has creative license in life as well as art. We have come full circle from ancient times when art was about skill and not originality. Now art may require no skill, but must be original. Lady Gaga does not write all her songs. Jeff Koons has over 120 people in his studio helping him build his gigantic sculptures. And long gone are the days when Michael Kors had any role in making the clothes and shoes that bear his name. But they definitely are original.

As the personalities of artists become ever more dominant, it becomes more difficult to separate them from their art. Do we know Yoko Ono for her art, or because she was married to the musician John Lennon and has a penchant for idiosyncratic hats? The high status of artists in society such as ours may not be a bad thing, but we mustn’t allow the celebrity of an artist to eclipse what we think of their art.

The artist. A brilliant, impractical eccentric; unable to make money, or look after it when they do, and, of course, if truly great, never to be appreciated in their own lifetime. What absolute rubbish.

The idea that true artists only come to be fully acknowledged once they are no longer around is, of course, a myth — the Bohemian myth, as it is known, sprang up in Paris in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and is often quoted as criticism of some of the more laughable creations that pass for art today.

But just when has this been true? Indeed, just when have any of the stereotypes that make up an artist been true? With notable exceptions, the professional artist has, throughout time, been just as much a professional as anyone else. For example, the Bellinis of Venice were all artists by trade, a trade passed from father to son just as with any other at that time.

Perhaps, you might say, the problem comes later, at a time when people are trying to make their way as an artist in life and finding no success. It is still hard to think of anyone (excluding van Gogh) who is now appreciated but was not welcomed by critics during their life. William Blake maybe? Yet he sold well in his own lifetime, even if he did not achieve the ‘national treasure’ status endowed upon him today.

And then we have the modern day; it is perhaps most odd that this myth prevails when, now more than ever, artists are a part of the establishment and often an entirely commercial commodity. The idea that modern art is somehow avant garde when Tracy Emin was selected to represent Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, is clearly preposterous. These figures are well and truly within the establishment and, of course, making a tidy profit out of it.

But where did this quite evident myth actually stem from? The answer surely lies in the publication of Henri Murger’s 1851 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, a collection of stories romanticising the ‘bohemian’ lifestyle, with a semi-autobiographical thrust.

Murger perhaps encapsulated the word bohemian: a poverty-stricken writer, living in a garret room in Paris. Of course, to appear to be living this lifestyle became fashionable. But the stories proved incredibly popular and Murger received the Légion d’honneur, the highest decoration in France. The theme of la bohème has gone on to inspire operas, plays and a whole host of other works, and has planted itself firmly in the public psyche.

Of course, many great artists go undiscovered, but the idea that a life lived unnoticed and in poverty is itself a necessity or qualifier for a great artist profile is one that traces itself easily to the back streets of 19th Century Paris and a highly romanticised – and one must admit, appealing – idea of the true bohemian genius.