Zinc
O’Reilly Theatre
★★★★☆
Neutral Moresnet was a geopolitical oddity located along the Dutch-Prussian border that emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815. A sliver of territory containing valuable zinc deposits, it was subject to rival territorial claims and existed as an international condominium for more than a century.
That piece of historical trivia is the starting point for this new play from the Dublin-based company Dead Centre, staged at the O’Reilly Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. Adapted by its directors, Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, from a book by David Van Reybrouck, Zinc focuses on the case of Joseph Rixen, born in Moresnet in 1903, whose nationality repeatedly changed as the territory traded hands.
His story here frames a left-field meditation on identity, language and national boundaries performed by a multinational and plurilingual cast of five.
Cathy Min Jung sets the tone when introducing Rixen’s anomalous identity in a French monologue, which is translated into all of the 23 other official languages of the European Union on the rear screen.
Over 80 minutes we hear passages in German, Luxembourgish, Flemish, Irish, Farsi, Korean and, most surprisingly, Esperanto (whose enthusiasts were drawn to Moresnet by the potential for international fraternity suggested by the territory’s neutral status).
The would-be “international language” has long been treated as a punchline. A delightful Esperantist version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity that closes the play should help to dispel such condescension.
English features too, of course, but it here embodies a different kind of bland and enforced “neutrality” because of its status as the global language of last resort.
The cast of the play, a coproduction with Théâtre de Liège, in Belgium, take turns relating episodes in Rixen’s life, which are interspersed with their own personal stories and reflections. Having lived through Moresnet’s annexation by Germany during the first World War, he was conscripted into the Belgian army once his homeland had been awarded to Belgium under the Treaty of Versailles.
Rixen then found himself conscripted again into the German army during the second World War. Many of the details are in themselves unexceptional. But they aptly illustrate Zinc’s central idea that powerless individuals can end up being “crossed” by borders.
That theme resonates within Mila Moinzadeh’s cerebral account of their struggle to find their place as an Iranian exile brought to Germany in childhood. In a similar vein, Timmy Creed laments that history compels him to communicate in a language, English, that is not his own, while wryly conceding that few will ever come to see him perform in Irish.
The Luxembourger Fábio Godinho has a lot of fun at once demonstrating total fluency in several languages and noting how that facility means that he, like his trilingual country, never really seems to fit in.
The stylish minimalism of Nina Wetzel’s spacious set gives suitably ambiguous visual form to these ruminations on the need to make room for variegated identities. A late paean to the EU as “a continent without borders” elides a few current political controversies. But Zinc nimbly suggests that shared differences can be the most authentic form of unity.
Zinc is at the O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 4th