From this point on, there are probably going to be some fairly crucial spoilers.
The recurring accusation of ‘self-indulgence’ thrown at Three Kingdoms continues to rile me up. Watching the production for a second time only underlined how wrongheaded the notion is. Everything in Sebastian Nübling’s production is born out of Simon Stephens’s text. It may not always correspond directly or even obviously to it, but every decision resonates with it. At the very least it poses a challenge. The viewer must attempt to reconcile everything he or she sees into some coherent whole. Given how much Nübling packs into the production, the challenge is rather to find a route through, to connect individual elements and make your own personal sense, even if its not as singular as the sentence above suggests.
While I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things after one viewing, my thoughts were pretty blurry. After a second shot they are far, far crisper and, quite often, confound everything I got from the first time.
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First, though a separate note or two about structure.
The moment that has come to stand for the indulgence is Steffen Dresner’s rendition of The Beatles song Rocky Raccoon, which goes on for ages in a rather dreadful tone. Its detractors say that it’s unnecessary. Actually, I realised second time around that it’s rather key to the production’s overall structure.
It’s quite easy to grasp that each act is an echo of the others. However, it’s less obvious at first how strict and far reaching the reflections are. Not only do the same actors play the same role within the narrative of each act (wife, witness, hunted etc), they take the same positions onstage and, moreover, continually, repeat the same dynamics. Rocky Raccoon comes early on in the second act, in Germany. It corresponds almost exactly with the translator in Act One, where he and Stone say ‘OK’ back and forth. In the third act, the equivalent is Stone and Pieker’s exchange over the pronunciation of Rebane (or rather Rrrrebaneh).
Stephens is a notorious planner – he says so himself in this video about Robert Holman – and one can often spot the key to his plays in the repetitions that run through them, whether they be words or images. Here, however, pretty much everything recurs, albeit loosely and discreetly, as form rather than content. The structure of each act is pretty rigid; it needs filling in with content and its gaps need bridging. Three Kingdoms, then, is kind of like Oulipo Literature, in that it sets itself constraints and abides by them.
I only realised halfway through the second run that the white-suited figure played by Risto Kübar, and referred to in the programme as Trickster isn’t actually a part of the play that Stephens has written. At no point does he say anything in relation to the plot. In fact, his only verbal interaction comes in Act Three, when Stone turns to him and says, “Do you have a nickname?” and he replies, “No.” Sure enough, in the script, Eleanor – the prostitute Rübar also plays – is only mentioned as an incidental, offstage character.
The Trickster is there purely as a decoy. He disrupts the clear lines of the detective thriller and fucks with the production’s dramaturgical clarity. He is dummy coding, designed to throw you off on the wrong scent. He looks like he might be The White Bird and he behaves like The White Bird might, but – as we discover at the end – there is no White Bird beyond Stone himself, and by implication, us. He even tells us as much: “Do you have a nickname?” “No.”
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Second-time around, in an emptier theatre, I wasn’t quite so blasted by the physical impact of Nübling’s production. That meant I could read both Stephens’s text and the production a bit clearer. As a result, it finally fell into place.
One thing you can’t miss are the deer and the wolves. The prostitutes, wide-eyed, demure and vulnerable, are the deer; the pimps and traffickers, predatory and ravenous, are the wolves. Both images – as well as that of detectives on the trail of criminals – fit with Stephens’s insistence on the importance of smell.
What’s less obvious as a symbol is the grass being eaten. You know it’s there, and you can’t miss it in the third act, when it escalates to the point where everyone’s binging on it and Stone becomes a bail of hay. However, I realised second time around that this is absolutely key. It’s all there in the text: Stone was a botanist and the whole investigation relies on witnesses “grassing.” There’s another line: “The human race is like weed.”
The play’s not just about predators and their prey, but the entire food cycle. It’s the ecology, stupid.
We know, by the end, that Stone proves the very thing he’s hunting. In fact, we’re all every part of that cycle simultaneously: wolves, deer and grass.
Fast-forward to Estonia and the third act. The first scene shows a trafficking gang keeping a woman captive. One of them, Rudie Pieker nicknamed Fredo, is an undercover cop. Like Fredo Corleone, Pieker betrays the rest of the gang. He’s working with Steffen Dresner, the German detective who we discover is a corrupt cop. Pieker is a corrupt cop as well. They both entrap Stone together at the end.
When the three policemen set a sting for Andres Rebane in an empty flat, he asks: “Are you fucking police, Fredo? Fredo, are you fucking police, man?” There is enough ambiguity here to suggest that he could be asking one of two things: a) are you an undercover cop? or b) are you a corrupt cop? We’ve got to look at that first gang again: what if, rather than traffickers, they were the police? Certainly, as Stone disintegrates, the same actors in the same costumes (sheeny suits all round) are the men that interrogate Stone in exactly the same way he and his partner interrogated Tommy White.
What was it Lee and Stone say in the first act? “We’re the biggest gang in London.” / “We’re the biggest gang in Europe.”
By the time, we reach Estonia, there’s no distinction between the two. The whole country is so corrupt that they two are equivalent. Stone has, the whole way through believed in heroes and villains. It’s a peculiarly British way of looking at the world and it seems naïve. Stone, after all, is portrayed as a child – it’s even said outright at the end – he sits on tiny suitcases and looks small; he sits behind a desk and raises his hand to ask a question.
This is Stone’s realisation: there are no cops and no robbers; no good guys and bad guys; no good-cop, bad-cop; no right, no wrong; no good, no bad. There are only people and, in the free market, they are wolves, deer and grass at once.
P.S. Looking back, almost everything in Nübling’s production conforms to this. Characters say one thing, as if they’re saying the opposite. Tommy almost shouts in frustration: “I quite like the Beatles.” Then, when he’s shown the photograph of the decapitated head, he’s calmly matter of fact: “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. No. No. No. No. No. You’re lying. You’re fucking. That’s sick. That’s horrible. That’s. Please fuck. No. No. no.”
I can’t help but thing that Germany comes out of this best. Yes, there people make porn on an industrial scale and slide baseball bats in and out of their anuses, but at least, they make no bones about it.
P.P.S. There’s another image that takes place in Germany that relates to this, but differs slightly. Dresner has stuffed his pockets with crossaint. One is in the right breast pocket of his leather jacket. When he eats it, he does so in a way that looks like a bird feeding its infant, vomiting up food for its child to digest. Dresner, at this point, is feeding and eating the crossaint. Moments later, the prostitue witness – Christina – produces an egg (hard-boiled) and eats the yoke. She births it and destroys it. Isn’t eating one’s own children the ultimate in consumerism?
Photograph: Ene-Liis Semper
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