Play: Hannah's Turn

Hannah's Turn (Snap Productions, Dir: Mary Francis Moore)

SummerWorks Festival (Lower Ossington Theatre). Tuesday, August 9, 2011.

Sometimes the personal is political. Think, for a moment, on the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Amongst her many achievements, Arendt is known as one of the most astute thinkers on a central dilemma of the 20th century: how did the educated and prosperous citizens of Germany turn so wholeheartedly to support the Nazi regime?¹ But how does the analysis change when it's turned to the specific case of a mentor and former lover? Heidegger, a foundational existentialist thinker, provided intellectual ballast for the Nazis in his open and public support for the party: in the whole of his life and achievements, should this be seen only as an "escapade", or possibly an "error"?

There are many suggestive layers here, both in the highfalutin' interplay of ideas all the way down to the more earthly realms of gossip and sex. Fertile ground from which to develop a dramatic scenario, and this play is generally successful in condensing a lot of ideas, personalities and history into a single hour. The minimalist stage design is nicely done, with just a pair of wooden chairs and an office desk, flanked by several pillars of half-burned books at the murky edges of the stage.

With three characters, the play essentially unfolds as a series of alternating scenes between Arendt and Heidegger (in various stages of their relationship) and Arendt with a student who is, many years later, trying to get Arendt to clarify her opinions of Heidegger's actions.

Both in those scenes as well in a few direct asides, the actors quote verbatim from the letters Arendt and Heidegger exchanged. While that could come off as flat or overly affected, the Arendt/Heidegger scenes actually play more like real conversations than the somewhat-stilted segments between Arendt and Anna Hitschmanova. It doesn't help that the latter feels more like a stock-character composite next to the other larger-than-life personas, but actor Leora Morris doesn't do much to animate her inquisitive student.

Severn Thomson (as Arendt) and Richard Clerkin (as Heidegger) are more successful in their roles. Thomson does well as the pivot in scenes that shift from one timeframe to the other, her body language creating a contrast between the timid young student and the seen-it-all elder celebrity/intellectual.² Clerkin, meanwhile, presents Heidegger as a man of action, ready to ski down a mountain or hop into the sack at a moment's notice — and manages to subtly suggest that that his vivid being here-ness might explain how he could fall into his "error".

It's not a flawless piece, but there's a lot to reflect on when the lights go up, even for those who don't care too much about the hermeneutics of dasein. There's a running subtext, lingering in the background throughout, musing upon language itself, how words obscure and stand in front of our relationship to the world. And, of course, that thorny "problem of evil", and how love (even distant and faded love) can colour our perception of others' actions.

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¹ Every time someone invokes the "banality of evil", they are paraphrasing Arendt's analysis in a work that remains to this day a crucial read.

² Given that these changes are so clearly defined, however, throwing in a somewhat-indistinct accent for the elder, English-speaking Arendt is mostly superfluous.