Otto Meier, the central protagonist in Franz Xavier Kroetz's play Tom Fool, has a fear of flying. A slave to the paralysis invoked by an involuntary commitment to industrialised domesticity, he tempts freedom in a workshop situated beneath the stairs of his aspirational home. While tampering with his one true love in life, a model airplane, Otto interviews himself and subsequently fantasizes about becoming a world champion pilot; a tragic hobby that will never be realised. Desperate for release from his semi-skilled employment at a BMW plant, he makes the best of a deteriorating domestic situation while longing for the stratosphere. Taking great pride in his beautifully crafted flying machine, he dabs at it with a paint brush in order to accentuate its meticulous red and yellow colour scheme. But his model plane will never get off the ground and even if it does, Otto himself is forever condemned to an earth bound existence among car parts and dysfunctional sex with his caring wife, Martha. Add to this domestic bliss an unemployed teenage son of ambiguous sexuality and this family is primed for loving itself to death; one essential requirement for the beginning of a tumultuous decline into a landscape of tough love.
The Meiers exist within the same problematic familial structure that many families do: money is tight, employment is uncertain, there is too much television and social and personal rivalries are prevalent. Drawing on Brecht, while in no way imitating that playwright's desire for an alienating device, Kroetz's script skillfully elucidates the social circumstances resulting in the annihilation of the Meier family unit. As sole breadwinner, Otto must continue to work in an unsatisfying job in order to maintain the family's aspirational lifestyle. He cannot escape the production line, so his wife Martha is similarly entrapped by the business of living. Without any choice but to support the sole breadwinner, Martha's confinement occurs in the home. She cleans and cooks and provides the required sexual relief while all the time dreaming of unsurpassed royal weddings and other delusions. Besieged by parents enslaved by a system of work that is selective if not unequal, son Ludwig is systematically subjected to an implicit demand to join the ranks of the suppressed. Of course, the reverberating insight that is an important yet often stultified characteristic of adolescence allows for Ludwig to see the tragic monsters his parents are becoming. Consequently, he resists demands to get a job and steals fifty marks from the family budget to attend a rock concert. However, what Ludwig is really looking for is admiration from his father; which he will achieve in the most undignified manner. But only after Otto is retrenched from his position at the BMW plant and the family's reliance on an arbitrary system of productivity is exposed.
Kroetz's script does not look for easy scapegoats. It does however illuminate the destructive tendency permeating all families and how this tendency is accentuated by difficult economic circumstances. Sexual dysfunction, unfulfilled dreams, involuntary entrapment, and an inability to articulate feelings of loss and disappointment are forever waiting to germinate and breed. In 2009, the relevance of this play should not be lost upon lower middle class Australian families subjected to a global economic downturn. Just like the Meiers, we ourselves will have to confront the hot rasp of ghosts licking at our feet.
Hoy Polloy's Tom Fool is a fine production of a timely play that is essential viewing for all those people who continue to believe that a consumer society will care and support families when they most need it. Meticulously designed, great care has been taken in using simple theatrical devices to elicit from Kroetz's script the damning interplay between social disadvantage and personal psychosis. All three performers smoking at the kitchen table prior to an explosion of violence, or the subtle shifts in temporal exposition expressed by the many costume changes in the play, are two examples. However, there are some problems with the second act. Kroetz himself appears to have written a play about economic damnation, while wishing to fulfill a desire by mainstream theaters for overlong productions that must have an interval. Plays with episodic structures are always in danger of becoming a sequence of vaguely connected episodes, and Tom Fool's second act lacks the impact of its first. Even so, I would like to be in the audience two or three shows into this production's season. As a harrowing tale of social disadvantage prompting personal disintegration, in my experience Tom Fool is without peer.
Tom Fool
Writer: Franz Xavier Kroetz
Director: Beng Oh
Performers: Chris Bunworth,
Liz McColl & Glenn Van Oosterom
Design: Chris Molyneux
Light: Ben Morris
Sound: Tim Bright
Costume: Mark Young
Stage Manager: Ness Harwood
Mechanics Institute, May 1- 23,
Melbourne
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