The Most Dangerous Toy

121329 original

Working from original texts, Playades theatre company has devised this interesting piece exploring the events of 1882, the year Friedrich Nietzsche spent with Lou Salomé, an intellectual and fiercely independent woman. Interesting in the sense that it grapples with the legacy of one of the most complex thinkers of Western thought. But in the end, the piece can't support the gravity of the task it undertakes, sinking under the weight of intellectual simplification and dramatic shortcuts.

To take the first point, The Most Dangerous Toy seeks to make the case that the events of 1882 directly led to the production of Also Spracht Zarathustra. But, in fact, between 1882 and his death in 1889, Nietzsche completed eight books touching on a range of interests so broad that to draw a straight line from 1882 to his madness and death seems careless. Nor can the philosopher's rejection by Salomé be used to account for his misogyny – a strain demonstrated throughout his life's work, just as it was in that of one of his earliest influences, Arthur Schopenhauer.

The second issue concerns the characterisation of Nietzsche himself, a man whom Freud said had "a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who lived or was ever likely to live." The Most Dangerous Toy tries to grapple with the man as a shorthand philosophical concept, a dialectic between passionate, Dionysian impulses and the clearer calmer Appolonian intellect. Jamie Laird performs the character with commitment (as does Maria Alexe playing Salomé). But the result is an infuriating, somewhat pathetic fool – the mesmerising teacher Lou Salomé travelled to Germany to share a flat with remains largely hidden.