AMONG THE many outstanding companies gathering in Galway for Baboró are the multi-national New International Encounter who are bringing a trilogy of plays inspired by the seismic upheavals of European history over the past century.
New International Encounter
The plays in question are My Long Journey Home, Past Half Remembered, and The End of Everything Ever.
My Long Journey Home relates the true story of Hungarian youth Andras Tomas who was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1942 and was taken prisoner in Russia where he was kept for 53 years, only returning home in 1999.
Past Half Remembered tells the extraordinary story of Russian centenarian Maria Michaliovna who lived through all the turmoil and convulsions of the bloody Soviet century.
The End of Everything Ever recreates the moving human drama of the ‘Kindertransport’, the huge pre-WWII rescue mission which saved thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe by repatriating them in Britain.
The plays have toured widely throughout Europe to immense acclaim and their visit to Galway promises to be a highlight of this year’s Baboró programme. Ahead of NIE’s visit to the festival, company co-founder Kjell Moberg talked about the group’s origins and their inspirational trilogy.
Kjell, who is Norwegian, began by explaining how NIE first came into being.
“Some of us, including myself and Alex Byrne – our artistic director - had worked together on a Czech production of Woyzeck using a multi-lingual cast,” he says. “It was very successful but the theatre where we were doing it didn’t want to tour it.
“That gave me the idea to set up our own company with Alex and my wife Iva that would enable us to stay working together. So we rented a small theatre set to work. Both Alex and myself had worked with multi-lingual casts and were keen to investigate that further and also to bring together people from eastern and western Europe.
“At that time, when we were starting, those borders were more distinct than they are now. We wanted to look at the different educational and historical backgrounds of the different nationalities represented in the company and to create a dialogue between them.
“We made our own company dogma, or core aesthetic principles; everyone should be able to use their own language, our shows would use live music, there would be no special technological effects, all props used in the show would be found rather than made specially. The very first show we created was Long Journey Home which has since gone on to be seen in over 20 countries.”
Would Kjell say the company has managed to forge its own artistic synthesis from the disparate backgrounds and traditions of its members?
“I think so,” he responds. “People who watch our shows say we have our own special signature. We all like the physical theatre of Jacques LeCoq – even though none of us actually trained under him.
“Even though we have people from eight countries we have created one theatrical language. I wanted to do something that reflected the new Europe. Very few of us now live in the countries where we were born – I’m Norwegian but live in the Czech Republic, we can settle down wherever we wish. We’re foreigners and yet we’re not foreigners.”
The trilogy
Kjell goes on to explain the origin of the company’s first show Long Journey Home.
“It was a story with perfect timing for us,” he says. “There are so many stories down the years from central Europe about people who were displaced by war and political upheaval. As a company we wanted to work with true stories.
“We initially found the story of Andras Tomas in a short article in The Guardian which recounted how this 73-year-old Hungarian man, Andras Tomas, had been discovered in a Russian mental hospital and was going to be brought home. We had done Woyzeck in Bosnia just after the Balkan war ended which made us very aware that you can still have wars in Europe and we wanted to explore that.
“In Brechtian style we didn’t want to comment on it by doing a play about the Yugoslav war itself but taking a story from history that resonated with the present and we felt Andras’s story did that.
“He was 17 when he was conscripted. He then was shell shocked and captured and ended up in a Russian mental hospital where he remained for over 50 years before being found and brought home. These kind of stories are still very present in central Europe.”
The second show in the trilogy is Past Half Remembered, a madcap journey through the epic sweep of Russian history. “One of the main points the trilogy makes is that it can be sheer luck or coincidence that things turn out well for you in life,” Kjell asserts. “If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time things can go terribly wrong.
“Maria Michaliovna, whose life story inspired the play, grew up near the Black Sea. Her lover was a White Guard officer in the Russian civil war and he ended up in prison. When he was released they decided to make a new life for themselves so they moved to Leningrad - and they arrived there just two days before the Germans besieged the city!
“They somehow managed to survive. Even though Maria lived through terrible calamities her story is one of hope and endurance.”
While the other plays have had great acclaim and garnered many awards, The End of Everything Ever had a particularly forceful impact on audiences in Germany, as Kjell explains.
“People in Germany still hadn’t really begun talking about many aspects of their country’s past during WWII so this play really shocked a lot of people because they knew nothing about the story,” he said. “Now in Germany there is more of an interest in delving into their past – as can be seen in the film about Hitler’s last days, Downfall for example, and we felt that when we were performing The End of Everything Ever, it got a huge response.
“Whereas the other two plays tell one person’s story, in this one we combined two different children’s experiences of the Kindertransport to create the play’s central character, the young girl Agata.”
These stories relate some of the darkest events from European history – how does NIE make them palatable for a young audience?
“The plays do tell dark stories but they also use a lot of comedy, that’s an important element in all of them,” Kjell says. “There’s a lot of clowning and we use stereotypes a lot to generate laughter. Then there’s puppetry and music also so they entertain as well as enlighten. We’ve always found that our young audiences do have the appetite for the serious aspects of the stories we tell.”
My Long Journey Home is at the Town Hall on Thursday October 16 at 7pm. Past Half Remembered is on Friday 17 at 7pm. The End of Everything Ever is on Saturday 18 at 2pm and 7pm. For tickets contact the Town Hall on
091 - 569777. A ticket to see all three shows costs €20.
