Theatre

In a damp, dark-brick factory building on the unfashionable outskirts of Valencia, something curious is happening. A performance has just finished but there isn’t a single performer taking a bow. And the audience is doing none of the usual sharp-elbowed dash for the nearest bar or taxi, either. Instead, this hip young crowd is milling around the set like it’s a weird mechanical zoo: bending double to peer at the strange moving contraptions which have entertained them for the last 90 minutes.

A work-in-progress by Heiner Goebbels isn’t your average night out. The German composer-director – whose name rings appreciative bells in contemporary classical music circles, despite its alarming connotations elsewhere (he’s no relation to Hitler’s propaganda minister) – has spent the past three decades on a genre-crossing experimental path; it’s easy to see why classy boundary-pushing London-based producers Artangel (who brought us Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ and Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster 4’) have wanted to work with him for years.
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The result is ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, a theatre installation which creates an unnatural indoor landscape out of five player pianos, three ponds, several step-motor robots, a millstone strung on high-tension wires and two huge bass pipes struck by bubble-wrapped clappers. The ensemble is reminiscent of a Heath Robinson diagram – albeit with less elongated whimsy and lots more vorsprung durch technik.

© Mario Del Curto / Artangel

In performance, the diagram whirrs, plinks and jangles into life. There are recorded words, including the voices of Malcolm X, William S Burroughs and Claude Lévi-Strauss; a passage from one of Austrian Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter’s novels is also read out. But Goebbels’ technicians at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne have put in long nights of work to ensure all other sounds are produced live – by the step-motor robots which are controlled by the mixing deck, by the instruments they have invented, and by the player pianos which are programmed with Goebbels’ haunting, anxiously chromatic score.

Back in London, I ask Goebbels if the absence of performers and instrumentalists means that he has created a machine for producing theatre? ‘I wanted to try out how far I can go from what we expect of a performance,’ he says. ‘And I was very interested to see if you can create a space which invites you in like an installation in a museum, but offers you a dramatic structure like a theatre.’

Apparently, a group of Brazilian policemen ‘said it was clearly all about the poisoning of the Amazon’. The urgent political question about the ‘destruction of nature’ is ‘one theme’ he allows, but it’s not at all didactic to watch. In fact, the whole installation functions dramatically as a moving, musical landscape. The pianos, stacked up with tall branches over the water, look like a derelict island.

And it even has its own microclimate: ‘There’s rain, fog, wind, ice, water, reflections,’ says Goebbels. ‘And I couldn’t judge which was more important: the sounds, the voices, the visuals. I composed it in the actual space, not on paper: we had to design an interface to control all these little engines which scratch and pluck inside the pianos. And so in the end I had a keyboard in rehearsals where I could press one key to move a stone, another to make light, others to play the piano.’

The little robots’ scratchy sounds remind you of the wood and guts that the instruments are made out of: it may be postmodern musical collage but it feels melancholy, post-industrial and stirringly imaginative. The lighting alters subtly from the green shade of a pool to the coppery bruise of a chemical spill.

And even the pianos’ frantically arrhythmic arpeggios seem to pick up on the pit-pat of the rain that falls, echoing nature rather than trying to play with musical conventions. It is, says Goebbels, a piece that is anti-spectacle, opposing the crowded, instantly gratifying product offered by much of the mass media. ‘Maybe theatre can be a museum for perceptions or languages which you don’t have time to experience in the mass media or in real life,’ he muses. ‘Unlike TV or movies this slows you down completely. For me, it is wonderful to notice how people take their time and watch the raindrops without being bored.’

‘Stifter’s Dinge’ is at P3, Marylebone Rd, from Apr 15-27.