THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE / MURDERER HOPE OF WOMEN
Premiered University Theatre, December 1998
Production Credits

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How can a murderer be the hope of women - or of men, for that matter? And what have hope and murder of women to do with art? In his memoir Oskar Kokoschka, who was known more for his visual art than for his theatrical experiments, tells us that "art gives renewed hope as often as the world fails" and insists that the answer is not in words per se but in the experience of the performance. Originally staged in Vienna in 1909, Murderer Hope of Women is generally regarded as the first Expressionist play. Its obsession with sex and death is expressed in grand gestures and archaic language, while its physical risks, and its chants and screams, so vividly presaged the theories and plays of Antonin Artaud that it could almost be called a paradigm of the Theatre of Cruelty.

Balanced on the knife's edge between Eros and Thanatos, love and death, Murderer Hope of Women embodies Kokoschka's fear of, and desire for, what he called 'the female principle' whose erotic advance causes the breakdown of rational control and patriarchal order. According to theatre critic Christopher Innes: "The play's aim is to open the spectator's subconscious ... by presenting archetypal sexual patterns of domination and destruction." Like the later work of Artaud, the point of Kokoschka's play is "to open the spectators' minds by breaking down conventional responses through outrage."

Kokoschka's 1909 production was intended as blasphemy; he called it a "gesture of defiance" against the bourgeois audiences of his time. For the performance, he shaved his head, and his actors "hurled themselves into their parts, as if acting for dear life" emerging from their ordeal "bloodied and bruised." The audience responded with a chorus of catcalls throughout, stomping their feet, scuffling with each other and brandishing chairs. Order had to be restored by the police, and Kokoschka and his company barely escaped being arrested for breaching the peace. Subsequent reviews called Kokoschka a 'criminal', a 'degenerate' and a 'corrupter of youth.'

Following two decades after Murderer premiered, Antonin Artaud proposed a theatre which would be, like the plague, "a crisis which is resolved by death or cure." The Philosopher's Stone is both a dream play and a harlequinade, a pantomime in the tradition of Commedia dell'arte. As in the Kokoschka play, in the end, love is murder.




Reviews

The Philosopher's Stone / Murderer Hope of Women
Reviewed by Ron Rodger, Theatre News, February 1999

Kokoschka, Artaud plays presented by the Free Theatre
Reviewed by Michele Burstein, The Press, December 1998

Grotesquely Funny
Article, by Anna Dunbar, The Press​