Red Shed's final flight
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The Forester could speak to the dead
woman and she could answer him I am Magarete I am Shulamith the dead woman could say He could ask her where she came from
The Architect's Walk, Daniel Keene The Architect's Walk is a work of theatre infused with iconography and ideas drawn from the visual art of Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer's preoccupation with the poems of Paul Celan, his obsession with the mythography of German forests, his paradoxical images of flight, the textures of his paintings, and perhaps most profoundly the dilemmas and anguish within Western culture that his work delineates, informed the writing, design and direction.Perhaps the production of The Architect's Walk is, primarily, a cry of grief, a horrified expression of indissoluble contradictions in a universe to which God has abdicated responsibility. In this sense, it is a kind of ritual, a khaddish for the dead. The text uses the character of Hitler's architect and minister for armaments, Albert Speer, to focus some moral questions that have become critical towards this end of the century. After World War 2, the cry Never again! was an expression of hope extracted from the horrors of a destroyed Europe. But the conflicts of the past 50 years, and most recently the massacres of the Balkans war and in Africa, show the hope was, if not misplaced, a fragile one, the expression of a desire that in itself will never overcome the realpolitik that determines history. The work was in part inspired by Gitta Sereny's book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, and some of the text was based on the diaries Speer wrote in Spandua Prison, where he was imprisoned for 20 years. Speer was the only Nazi war criminal to plead guilty at the Nuremberg trials. As Speer argues quite accurately, he didn't literally kill anyone. His complex evasions of responsibility resonate uneasily with contemporary defences of corporate executives after environmental or medical disasters caused by their companies. The problem of his culpability - and, by extension, our own moral responsibility to the world in which we live, which has been so shaped by the events in the middle of this century - is placed against the anguish of Celan's poetry, and also a poetic narrative, a fable that wrestles with human grief, human innocence and the transience of human meaning. The imaginative space of the stage becomes an arena for the playing out of these human and inhumane forces. The Architect's Walk, with music by Michael Smetanin, premiered at the 1998 Adelaide Festival with Ralph Cotterill, Edwin Hodgman, Michael Gaweda, Robert Meldrum and Ali Farr. It was the final production of the Red Shed Company, which was forced to close after 12 years when the Australia Council for the Arts removed its funding. Tim Maddock, director The Architect's Walk doesn't seek to chase down Speer or sanitise him. The piece tackles not the action but the aftermath, the cataclysmic end that wasn't the end, the burden of the unresolved. It is a black mirror showing what is us and not us simultaneously, a work fragmentary and complete at once. The weight of the work lies beneath and between the words. It aims for the purity of a resounding bell and the still profundity of a deep well. Somewhere between fact and fiction, story and history, The Architect's Walk looks at the power of words, not to resurrect, but perhaps to lay to rest. Imogen Thomas, designer My design for The Architect's Walk is a chamber of memory which is a prison, forest, garden and ghost landscape. Spandau Prison is a vast, barren chamber that dwarfs the characters who inhabit it. They are cut off from the outside world and locked in with the burden of their own histories. Speer occupies himself by walking through imaginary landscapes. The space becomes a graveyard where the living speak to the dead.
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