Tom Fool at the Orange Tree Theatre
(Picture: Richard Davenport)There’s nothing so phoney in theatre as extreme realism, as this revival of German author Franz Xaver Kroetz’s grim 1978 play shows. Tom Fool is an anti-capitalist domestic drama, where drudgery and penny-pinching drive a husband, wife and teenage son apart in suburban Munich. It’s exactly as much fun as it sounds, though Diyan Zora’s production is not without merit.
Kroetz aims to capture the banality of working-class life. So Otto (Michael Shaeffer), a fitter on BMW’s factory line, Martha (Anna Francolini), a housewife, and son Ludwig (Jonah Rzeskiewicz), a layabout, watch telly, peel potatoes and bicker in clichés. The parents have aspirations for Ludwig but hector and humiliate him until he leaves.
Kroetz’s political point also requires a melodramatic flashpoint where Otto smashes up their flat and suddenly sees the mechanism of his exploitation as clearly as if he were a Heidelberg economics professor. Though this scene is performed with impressive abandon in the Orange Tree’s confined space, it feels manufactured, as does the studied tedium of the dialogue. There’s something doubly awful about fake emotion in translation, northern British accents substituted for southern, Bavarian ones.
The script does have a remorseless logic to it, and you can admire Kroetz’s boldness. Otto cranking - crying and masturbating - onstage would have been controversial in 1978. Personally, I think the inclusion of a silent, five-minute scene in which Otto and Martha tidy up their trashed abode, concluded with the words “well, that was a job that needed doing”, looks more audacious today.
It’s all a bit clunky. Otto accounts for every last Deutschmark, obsesses over a lost Parker pen, is a domineering but inadequate husband, and finds escape through flying model gliders. Symbolism, anyone? Martha is hypnotized by the German commoner who married the King of Sweden. Ludwig is a sketch of disaffected, shruggy, bell-bottomed youth, though the scene where Otto - looking for a missing banknote - forces him to strip is powerful and unsettling.
Shaeffer gives a boilerplate performance of terse, thwarted masculinity as Otto, while Francolini is harried and pragmatic as Martha. Relative newcomer Rzeskiewicz is impressive in Ludwig’s brief moments in the spotlight. Zora’s direction is able, the design by Zoe Hurwitz pragmatic, given how much of it gets destroyed.
The play’s the problem. Tom Fool is meant to be a discomfiting watch but it’s also a boring one. If you put the tedium of life on stage, it’s tedious. And if you then have to engineer drama to liven up the situation, it feels inauthentic. Ersatz, as they say in Germany. Alles klar?
