Unlocking the Story
For all that the history and the first hand material we have been looking at is utterly fascinating, it felt like just dramatizing the material wasn’t going to be quite enough. That we were missing a key. Something, somehow would open the door to it and connect us to it, give us a way in. An angle. A story to be telling that is a story in itself and not just relaying somebody else’s history.
The answer to this has begun to form, we’ve been looking at the one play there has been about the Kiel Uprising: ‘Draw The Fires’ (1930) by Ernst Toller, the leader of the Munich Soviet during revolution of 1918/19 – for which he was subsequently jailed. Toller was for a while at the very forefront of German theatre and politics, celebrated on Socialist left as the ‘poet of the proletariat’, and hated by the nationalist right as the incarnation of ‘Jewish Cultural Bolshevism’.
Interestingly ‘Draw The Fires’ received its first ever production not in Germany but Manchester, produced by legendary firebrand and upstart, Joan Littlewood. But the production was fraught with problems, Joan didn’t seem to really like the play, she doesn’t really say why. What’s more the actors of the Manchester Rep Theatre didn’t get it at all. She accused some within the company of actively sabotaging it!
'Draw The Fires' is dated, it has one female character, and she’s the whore with heart of gold! But through this Manchester production of Toller’s play, we find and feel our way towards this story, and we see our place in it. Now we have a link from the working class north of England, to the working class north Germany port city of Kiel where the uprising began.
Our thinking began to wonder, what if the arguments that raged in the production (Joan sacked the actors and brought in some more authentic ones who looked like they might have shovelled coal into a ships engines!) what if they also ran to gender issues? What if Joan’s issue with the play revolves around the lack of women, of female voices?
Gradually, a way in to the story and a vehicle for telling it emerged. We want to dramatically re-imagine Joan’s relationship with Toller, and Draw the Fires. Through this fraught production, of this male centric view of the Kiel Uprising and the German revolution as a whole, we begin to delve into questions of who is telling history? And from what point of view? Joan demands to know where are the women and Toller says there were none! But it isn’t true. Slowly other voices emerge, female voices from history, to dispel the common myth that there were no women, they played no part. So, now we are ready to set forth and explore this history anew, from a female perspective.
By Mick Martin