1-5 December 1998, University Theatre, The Arts Centre
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.
A full recording of the project exists in the Free Theatre archive.

Research

Haydn Kerr, used The Philosopher's Stone as material for his MA research Clowning in the Avant-garde: Antonin Artaud's The Philosopher's Stone and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, University of Canterbury, 2008

Media

Both are centred on the primal struggle for supremacy and survival between men and woman. In this age of equality and political correctness, the plays represent the passion of the exaggerated opposite, where passion becomes murder and the idea of sadism and masochism is rife.

Grotesquely Funny
Peter Falkenberg quoted in article by Anna Dunbar, The Press
Image courtesy of Fairfax Media

Reviews

Was it good theatre? For a night in Christchurch, none better.... Both productions were performed with passion and commitment. Explorative theatre means taking risks exploring new forms, engaging audiences beyond intellect and reason. In this domain, Free Theatre and Peter Falkenberg made extraordinary vocal and physical demands on the cast and production crew. They came a long way down an uncharted path and though they may have lost their audience along the way - we regrouped, we were not injured and we'll take the journey with them again because we too are theatrical explorers.

The Philosopher's Stone / Murderer Hope of Women
Ron Rodger, Theatre News, February 1999
Simply, there is too much grunting, heavy breathing, screaming, and noise for the average spectator to have a chance to focus, much less experience an "opening of consciousness", the professed aim of the play.

Kokoschka, Artaud plays presented by the Free Theatre
Michele Burstein, The Press, December 1998
So what's the go in the flat city? Well really it's the same old, same old.... More recently Christchurch theatre mavens witnessed the Robinson Temple of Flagellation and Fornication. The artist teamed up with university drama sicko Peter Falkenberg in an Artaud/Kokoshka extravaganza plumbing the depths of the steamy B&D fetishism industry. Got to love living in such a disproportionately sleazy town.

Christchurch Round-up
Nik Wright, Log Illustrated Archives (published by The Physics Room), Issue 6, Summer, 1999​