Laurenz Laufenberg and Johannes Flaschberger in Beware of Pity (photograph by Jamie Williams)

The plot arc moves back and forth through time and memory, following a younger Hofmiller – sympathetically played by Laurenz Laufenberg – as he becomes entangled in the affairs of the wealthy Kekesfalva family. Nervous and conscious of his lowly status, Hofmiller charms the Baron (Robert Beya) and his family. In a poignant scene, he notices the Baron’s daughter Edith (Marie Burchard) sitting alone and invites her to dance, not realising that she is partly paralysed. Embarrassed and panicking over his social prospects, he sends her roses the next day, and is welcomed into the Kekesfalva fold. Over time, Edith misreads Hofmiller’s pity and comes to love him with an obsessive, manipulative ardour.

This misunderstanding is the production’s primary concern. Hofmiller veers from pity to repulsion to an anxious sense of responsibility. He seems to feel genuine affection for Edith and her family, at others he’s clearly captivated by a lifestyle far beyond his means. One of McBurney’s major achievements here is the way in which this private moral drama resonates with wider social problems. The narrative simmers with the social tensions and racial prejudices that erupted during the wars; at times it’s unclear how much they influence Hofmiller’s thought. We learn that the august Hungarian nobleman Kefesfalva is in fact a self-made Jewish merchant, unworthy, in the eyes of Anton’s anti-Semitic fellow officers, of his position. These prejudices complicate the production’s sense of reality, undermining Anton’s – and by implication the narrator’s – reliability as an authority on his own motivations.

Anna Fleische’s set has stark industrial beauty, with clusters of furniture denoting particular domesticities and a mobile glass cubicle operating as the focus of narrative tension. Paul Anderson’s lighting design is particularly effective, bathing the skeletal set with silhouettes and after-images of historical footage – ruins and blasted landscapes.

Laurenz Laufenberg in Beware of Pity (photograph by Jamie Williams)

Performatively, the narrator and the protagonist are the only constants, as the ensemble actors weave physically and vocally through different characters like a Greek chorus, at times combining to evoke images or sensations. In one masterful sequence they clutch at the tormented narrator’s face over a single flicker of light as a symbolic exploration of regret.

Schaubühne is one of the most prestigious theatre companies in the world. Thomas Ostermeier’s virtuosic production of Hamlet toured here in 2010. In keeping with that reputation, there’s a sense in which Beware of Pity is seductive through sheer technical skill. A perfectly polished operatic soliloquy in six voices, it hurtles through three hours of complexity without missing a beat. The production’s aesthetic philosophy blends Brecht with Artaud – the cast openly acknowledges the audience with the houselights up; the older Hofmiller gleefully breaks the fourth wall; actors change costume and manipulate props for visual and aural effect openly – and yet the play’s emotional timbre is relentlessly visceral. Beware of Pity is ironic about its means but deeply sincere about its critique.

Perhaps the production’s signal achievement is that it enacts the complexity of ethics without pretending to resolve it. Touch, the grip or stroke of hands on shoulder or face, forms a fluid motif throughout the drama, as a caress, a caution, a symbol of the way moral failures can haunt memory. Each scene is concerned with what we owe one another and how we can navigate conflicting ethical demands. The gravity of these problems is punctuated by the world wars that bookend the plot, failures of social ethics on the largest scale.

And yet, as the title says, all-encompassing moralism is dangerous. In a pivotal scene, Anton decides to marry Edith out of pity; in doing so he will inherit her father’s wealth. His new family circle him in a rapturous celebration, and he films his beaming face with an iPhone, which is then projected onto the theatre’s cavernous back wall. He cries ‘I feel like God’, as his face revolves against a chasm of floral stars – the classical gesture of hubris and hamartia. There is, after all, something precarious about the project of ethics, the project of philosophy itself: for one human mind to determine how another should live.

In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that tragedy is about pity and terror, both emotions stemming from identification with those who suffer, in that sense, tragedy is egalitarian. But the English word ‘pity’ comes from the Latin pietas; it is anchored in the Judeo-Christian universe where an omnipotent creator pities feckless humanity. In the first model, one imagines sharing the fate of the unfortunate, in another, one pities precisely what cannot be imagined. Perhaps Anton’s error is to mistake the latter for the former.

Beware of Pity was performed at the Sydney Festival 23–27 January 2019.

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons.