If contemporary artists are going to be arrested for swindling the public by passing off cheap rubbish as art, not many of them are likely to be left at liberty to walk the streets. But luckily for the art world, it's only in China where the authorities have the guts to take a firm line against the rising tide of conceptualism. Hence the arrest and incarceration in 2011 for nearly three months of the artist Ai Weiwei.
Compared to the Pussy Riot trio in Russia, Ai Weiwei seems to have got off lightly, though his experience was unpleasant and at times surreal. 'You are a conman!' a policeman yells into the ear of the artist, manacled to a chair. I have to confess this is a scene I have often wanted to act out, with me as the policeman and Damien Hirst as the artist.
Ai Weiwei's experience, which he described after his release to the writer Barnaby Martin, has been dramatised at the Hampstead Theatre by Howard Brenton, one of the original comrades-in-arms of Chairman David Hare during British theatre's legendary socialist Long March in the 1960s. Brenton is an engaging and audience-friendly dramatist, but here the absurdity of the story draws him into unfamiliar territory. The lack of communication between the artist and his jailers leads to the kind of long pauses that would have turned Harold Pinter green with envy; the scenes on stage have a whiff of Beckett or Caryl Churchill in their sparse bleakness. Like Beckett and Pinter (but unlike Churchill) Brenton has a keen sense of comedy, which he uses to great effect. I was strongly reminded of Vaclav Havel's plays about his own dissident experiences in communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.
Benedict Wong gives a splendid performance as the artist, hesitating between futile resistance and pragmatic compromise as his jailers try to humiliate him. 'Who did you kill? Who are you?' his first duo of police interrogators ask. It turns out they are from the murder squad, and not much used to questioning artists.
Brenton's dramatisation of the story, pauses and all, is cleverly done, though he loses his way a bit in two invented scenes in which high communist party officials discuss the case. 'He's only an artist. Why can't he paint leaves and pagodas?' one asks the other. The problem is that although these characters are shown as subtle and intelligent, even cultured (one likes Mozart, the other doesn't), neither deploys any really powerful arguments. Didn't George Bernard Shaw talk about giving the devil the best tunes? I'm sure there is a real political argument going on in China behind the scenes about the most useful balance between repression and tolerance towards troublemakers like Ai Weiwei, but this play delivers only a pale reflection of it. There are, however, useful hints about the fragility of communist authority, which has completely lost its original ideological underpinnings. The robotic guards in the police station get bored and start playing games on their mobile phones, while the interrogators drop their guard and start discussing noodle recipes with their prisoner. When Ai Weiwei is moved to an army camp, the soldiers guarding him, who know they are being watched but not listened to, start talking with him without moving their lips, and teach him to do the same.
Brenton's play doesn't have much to say about Ai Weiwei as an artist, though in a programme interview the playwright makes clear he is a big admirer. This is a play not about art, but about the treatment of an artist. The real strengths of this production lie in the direction by James Macdonald, whose work I have admired ever since I saw his thrilling production of James Joyce's Exiles at the National a few years ago, and in the design by Ashley Martin Davis.
The play takes place in what appears to be an art gallery 'white cube', with a large rectangular crate in the middle and a row of chairs placed on either side. It looks and feels like the eve of a major exhibition, with an artwork about to be unpacked and put on show. Hangers-on take pictures with their mobile phones. The action starts when Ai Weiwei marches on stage carrying hand luggage, and suddenly we're in the passport queue at Beijing airport. The artist is told his trip to Hong Kong may endanger state security, and he's bundled off. The crate opens up into an interrogation room in a police station where the hooded figure of the artist is handcuffed to a chair. In the second half, set in the army base, the room is a white padded cell, swathed in strips of white tape which provide a visual echo of the artist's best known work, the Beijing 'bird's nest' Olympic stadium.
Macdonald and his designer have together given the play using a spare, Brechtian look that finds extra layers of meaning. Ai Weiwei at times makes brief asides to the audience, creating a complicity from the start. At the end of the play a Chinese vase which has been lurking at the back of the stage on a table is suddenly smashed. But the speech the artist makes just before this final incident isn't quite powerful enough to hold the attention. Ai Weiwei is an elliptical artist whose meaning remains wrapped in ambiguity, a bit like his politics.
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