Rosa Luxembourg, along with Karl Leibnicht, were the executed leaders of an abortive workers rising, a German revolution of the 1920's which was cut off in its prime when the people failed to rise and rally sufficient support.
The Volksbuhne Theatre stands on Rosa Luxembourg Plaza in Berlin, a prestigious house theatre for experiment where the Gob Squad, a band of live art performers from Germany and the UK, have based themselves these last few years. Rather than performing in the smaller laboratory theatre of the Prater, the Gob Squad are now premiering in the large 300 seat main house -and, as always in their work, the venue becomes a major player.
After locking the audience in the theatre (with disturbing echos of the Moscow theatre hostages of 2002)-a theatre from which all the seats had been removed and replaced by white plastic bean bags and the elaborate walls draped with black plastic bin liner fabric- they then undertook a series of actions explicitly designed to get us in the psychological position to be ready to bring about a change. Luxembourg and Liebnitz were theorists of workers power schooled in the debates of marxism. The Gob Squad owe more to the school of theatrical power, lying somewhere between Living Theatre and Simon Cowell.
Having got all wound up and ready to go they dispatched one of their number , in a now familar pattern, on a video accompanied extra-theatrical walk in the Rosa Luxembourg Plaza. As we watched on large screens the company attempted to persuade or cajoule members of the Volk to join us in leading "the change." The show derived its dynamic from a theatrical conceit which Gob Squad have now become masters of manipulating.
As the public traversed the snowy waste of the Plaza on a particularly cold and miserable night an audience urged on the pantomimed activists of the Gob Squad to persuade one of the Volk to allow their lives to be transformed by theatre for one night.
As Rosa Luxembourg might well have said, the struggle is never easy and you are going to encounter some difficulties on the way. With their sheer nerve and skill at the manipulation of situations and theatrical resources the squad handled a series of extra theatrical encounters which teetered on the edge of failure, embarrassment or worse whilst characteristically engaging with a number of extraordinary citizens who you found it astonishing to believe were not "set-up" as part of the show.
It was becoming fraught when one of the Volk, I think it was "Claire", finally succumbed to the call of the people and agreed to lead them in revolution by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the wall of the theatre.
Did their struggle paralleled or illuminated the struggle of Leibnicht and Luxembourg?"Claire" entered the building waving the gold flag of theatre and was toasted in vodka after being serenaded by 12 riffing guitar heroes chosen at random from the audience.
The show perhaps celebrated a later call to revolution - a call from the other end of the twentieth century -"fight for the right to party".
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