Yesterday evening I went to the Magnetic North showing of “The Danish Play”. I wasn’t that interested in seeing it, but I felt obligated, being of Danish heritage.
It wasn’t a comedy.
It was more of a tragedy. It was one of those shows where they give the life story of a real person, and show how everything conspired to make them miserable. But through that misery, they created art that will last for blah blah blah.
Frequently, my opinion of these styles of play are that the protagonist made their own bed. In says to me that there are certain people, who although they may be great artists, cannot function in the real world. Just because you want something to be true, doesn’t make it so.
In this case, Agnete Ottosen was part of the Danish resistance. She was captured by the Nazis and experimented on. That was the first act, and I was fine up to then. The protagonist was actually someone I could care about.
In the second act though, she had lost her grip on reality after the war. She wanted to have a child and did so. The father was unknown and she didn’t want to say who he was. Then the nice bureaucracy had trouble with that, even though they gave her many options that would have let her go on. But she had to raise a stink over everything. Attacking German tourists didn’t help either. So the son, Soren, was taken away.
I can see where Agnete was coming from. The bureaucracy was reminiscent of the horrors of the work camps. But she had friends who tried to help her. They told her what she had to do to keep her son. But she refused them all, and had to do things her own way. In the end, her son died an hour after he was returned to her (at age of maturity) in a scooter accident. She committed suicide soon after.
Oh, and through this all she was writing poetry.
If some Danish nationalist reads this review they will probably despise me. I don’t know what kind of hero Agnete Ottosen is to Danish culture (I suppose I should, but I’m more Canadian than Danish), and I’ve never read any of her poems, but this is the impression I got from watching the play.
To give myself some credibility in this, I saw a play about Emily Carr at last year’s fringe festival (I think the title was “Talking to Trees”). I think she is the Canadian cultural equivalent to Miss Ottosen. My opinion of Emily Carr is equally bad after seeing that play. Ms. Carr should never have been let out in public and seemed to determined to make her life as miserable as possible. Just because you talk to trees and keep a lot of animals doesn’t mean you can take care of yourself.
Art is all well and good, but don’t needlessly suffer for it. I have no sympathy for the starving artist. Art is not a substitute for life; Don’t sacrifice yourself for it.