Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity: What we might become

A nuclear mushroom cloud blooms before us. Faces contort in suffering. Cities lie in ruins.

Human beings did this.

Nadia Tass’s production of Heather McDonald’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (Theatre Works) begins at the scale of catastrophe, confronting us with images of war and human suffering. McDonald’s writing does something perhaps more unsettling. It makes the scale smaller.

An art restorer stands captive, arms outstretched and shackled. A soldier interrogates her. A third woman stands nearby, apparently a nurse. Around them, Ishan Vivekanantham’s set bears the scars of war: rubble, grubby walls, classical statues among the wreckage, a great jagged hole torn through the roof, occasionally surrendering more fragments to the rubble below.

Here, violence has hands.

But so does beauty.

The contradiction aches through Masterpieces, never quite healing. Human beings destroy cities and paint Rembrandts. They torture and tell stories. They break bodies and tend to them. McDonald offers no comforting division between the kinds of people capable of one and the kinds capable of the other.

That makes for an extraordinarily dense evening. Masterpieces moves initially between fragments of film, relational drama and direct-address lecture, and it takes a little time to learn its grammar. One moment Montgomery-Griffiths is the captive, her cream silk shirt stained, over a long charcoal skirt; the next she pulls on a tweed jacket:

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

The house lights rise. She speaks of masterpieces: in the face of profound destruction, what does a society choose to preserve? Then the question becomes personal. Imagine a fire: if everything we could save had to fit inside a shoebox, what would we choose in the moments before catastrophe?

We had each been handed a small bag on entry containing a pencil, a tiny piece of paper and a stone. We scribble our answers while Montgomery-Griffiths continues speaking.

"McDonald’s poetry spills out quickly, one exquisite morsel following another before there is enough time to digest the last."

I miss some of what she says.

There is something fitting about this. McDonald’s poetry spills out quickly, one exquisite morsel following another before there is enough time to digest the last. Trying to hold onto it is like putting your hand into a river and expecting to possess the water. Stay too long with one image and another has already flowed by.

Some remain: six headless horses encountered on a walk. A bicycle for two. A professor buried to the waist and stoned to death with books. Rembrandt confronting mortality in his own sagging flesh. A mother drowned. Stones saved from journeys in more peaceful times. Roses grown from the ashes, now fed with blood. A butcher of smiles, with a love of opera.

There is something extraordinary in the accumulation: Masterpieces is brutal and delicate, intellectually restless and deeply affecting. As its formal shifts become less insistent, the relationships among its three women take over. The abstractions of war contract into bodies, objects and story.

Montgomery-Griffiths is extraordinary as the captive art restorer. Violence remains in her body, well after the moments that inflict it have passed: a convincing limp, the painful wince that seems to arrive before thought can mediate it. She moves between defiance, rage, callousness, tenderness, grief and black humour with such fluidity that the seams between performer and character are impossible to see.

Kate Cole’s soldier takes longer to settle. Her accent is a little difficult to place and, to my ear, remains unresolved. Nor does she quite summon the early ferocity needed to spar with Montgomery-Griffiths’ roar. But as the plot turns and certainty gives way to vulnerability, Cole finds something much more powerful. Fear, bitterness, grief and dependence seem to draw the performance more deeply into the body; the soldier becomes more complex, more exposed and, for me, considerably more convincing.

The expansive set creates an interesting tension with this increasingly intimate drama. For much of the conflict, Tass keeps the three women largely within its centre, and I found myself wondering what greater spatial compression might have done: how a smaller playing space might have usefully suffocated their dynamic, forcing bodies already caught in relationships of captivity, coercion and dependence into still more uncomfortable proximity. Vivekanantham gives them a compelling ruined world; at times, I wanted that world to close in until the tension had nowhere else to go.

Laila Thaker is superb, bringing a different kind of force. Her guise as nurse is playful, reverent, pragmatic and capable of sudden ferocity. Thaker’s gesture work is particularly lovely: the subtle physicality accompanying a recitation from the Qur’an; an exasperated flick of the wrists — I give up — in the middle of heated debate; water spun from an umbrella to conjure remembered rain.

“Abstracted hatred becomes harder once suffering has a face you recognise.”

Her storytelling is equally deft. One account moves from the ordinary remnants of family life to almost unbearable violence, and in telling it she changes the moral pressure in the room. An accomplice acquires parents, a kitchen, a daughter who has witnessed too much and no longer speaks.

Abstracted hatred becomes harder once suffering has a face you recognise.

Objects carry similar weight throughout Masterpieces. Books. Paintings. Stones. Uniforms. Small things asked to hold histories much larger than themselves.

A uniform carries authority, belonging and dignity, but also violence. When it leaves one body and appears on another, its symbolic weight survives the transfer. So does the expectation that the person inside it must rise to deserve what it represents: “Stand taller” — an appeal still made, even when the uniform is stolen and worn by the enemy.

Hands become particularly charged. They create and restore. They hurt and can be hurt. They can refuse. They can fail. The body you damage may contain precisely the capacity on which you depend.

"Go figure."

Montgomery-Griffiths returns to this phrase throughout the production, a bleak little shrug at the absurdity of human behaviour. Masterpieces contains humour, but almost no comic release. A few people laughed intermittently at the performance I attended; more often its black jokes produced rueful recognition. This is humour from somewhere near the point where the alternatives are to cry or scream.

“A Rembrandt does not compensate for the dead. A beautiful sentence cannot restore a family.”

Joy does not have much purchase here.

And yet beauty does.

The art restorer remembers her father, who looked at a world of extraordinary horror, cruelty and suffering and asked a question that lodges somewhere inside the production: given all this, why is there so much beauty?

Not despite the horror, exactly. That would make beauty its consolation.

The question is stranger than that.

Why are creatures capable of one also capable of the other?

A Rembrandt does not compensate for the dead. A beautiful sentence cannot restore a family. The little shower of umbrella rain alters no material fact. Yet McDonald keeps placing acts of destruction beside acts of making, remembering and tending without allowing either to cancel the other.

And then comes a small correction, quietly folded into the text:

"No, not love."

"Duty."

The distinction landed heavily for me.

Love is feeling. Duty can survive its absence. It does not require that another person deserve our care, or that our actions succeed, or even that there be much future left in which their consequences can matter.

It simply asks: what is required of me now?

For a moment, duty seems to offer something firmer than the unstable categories surrounding these women. Not redemption. Not the promise that beauty will triumph over horror. Something more austere: a reason to tend to what remains, even when tending may change nothing.

Masterpieces does not let even that become comfortable.

The same person who tends can destroy. Stories can preserve the dead and persuade the living towards violence. Books can embody culture and become instruments of murder. A uniform can carry honour and authorise brutality. Tenderness offers no guarantee of goodness.

Even beauty is implicated. Human beings make it, preserve it, destroy it, and sometimes continue attending to it when doing so appears almost absurdly futile.

"Go figure."

Tass’s production finds its greatest force in these contradictions, and occasionally in images so quiet they need little explanation. In its closing movement, one such image seems capable of holding almost everything that has come before it. I wished the production had trusted it to remain: a final absurdist callback completes a recurring motif but, for me, breaks a spell that did not need breaking.

The more important disturbance has already occurred.

Thaker’s character can be playful, kind and reverent, and still ask another person to kill. Montgomery-Griffiths’ restorer can insist upon an ethical boundary and find that boundary shifting when confronted with another person’s suffering.

These are not revelations of some hidden self underneath the roles of civilian, captive or enemy. Nor does war simply strip away civilisation to reveal what human beings essentially are.

The possibilities multiply instead.

I left Masterpieces sobered. Quiet, perhaps even a little meek.

The play does not strip these women back to reveal who they really are.

It keeps asking what they might become next.

That is considerably more disturbing. And more hopeful.