It has been a whirlwind opening weekend of shows at the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). It has also been great catching up with the friends who have flown in for the festival. I’ve watched a number of performances; a 2.5-hour play adapted from Stefan Zweig’s eponymous 1939 novel ‘Beware of Pity’ stayed with me.
Directed by the artistic director of Complicité, Simon McBurney, the co-production with Schaubühne Berlin was performed in German with English surtitles. In an article about the play titled ‘Beware of Pity is chillingly resonant in the Trump Era’ written for The Guardian published on 3 February 2017, Simon McBurney said,
Set in 1914, we follow the blunders and etiquette of the era, of how young Austrian soldier’s mortification and pity at embarrassing the paralyzed daughter of the local baron led to a friendship that was mistaken as courtship. Anton Hofmiller and Edith Kekesfalva. There’re other characters fleshed out in this play- Dr Condor, Edith’s attending physician, and Edith’s father Lajos, who also had his secrets. I haven’t read the book, but the play held a solid adaption of the book’s plot development and fared coherently on stage. The play is narrated from Anton’s perspective and we see how his very human pity and acts of kindness became a failing. Could he have known? His public denial of an engagement to Edith ultimately led to her suicide. Not all good deeds and acts of compassion end well.
Directed by the artistic director of Complicité, Simon McBurney, the co-production with Schaubühne Berlin was performed in German with English surtitles. In an article about the play titled ‘Beware of Pity is chillingly resonant in the Trump Era’ written for The Guardian published on 3 February 2017, Simon McBurney said,
Hofmiller behaves as he does because he believes he is doing the right thing. His uncontrollable “pity” draws him into a paralysis of his own, a paralysis of inaction from which he cannot flee. But in truth, it is his own self he cannot escape. Peering within, he recognises that what is inside him is a mirror image of his own society. What he sees he finds monstrous; but the monstrous makes for compulsive viewing. Just as we can’t stop ourselves gazing at the next horror emanating from the new elected president of the United States, our inability to look away, curiously, also results in a kind of paralysis.
Set in 1914, we follow the blunders and etiquette of the era, of how young Austrian soldier’s mortification and pity at embarrassing the paralyzed daughter of the local baron led to a friendship that was mistaken as courtship. Anton Hofmiller and Edith Kekesfalva. There’re other characters fleshed out in this play- Dr Condor, Edith’s attending physician, and Edith’s father Lajos, who also had his secrets. I haven’t read the book, but the play held a solid adaption of the book’s plot development and fared coherently on stage. The play is narrated from Anton’s perspective and we see how his very human pity and acts of kindness became a failing. Could he have known? His public denial of an engagement to Edith ultimately led to her suicide. Not all good deeds and acts of compassion end well.
As the good doctor puts it: “There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to harden yourself against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, is to truly place yourself in the position of the victim. This pity knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”
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