“The Way Dogs Do” ... One-Man Show by Christoph Dostal
Embassy of Austria
Washington, DC
November 21, 2008
by George Jackson
copyright 2008 by George Jackson
Christoph Dostal is a handsome man. Looks are not normally the thing I mention first in a review. In this instance, though, Dostal’s appearance is central to his art of clowning. He’s a sad clown, eliciting our pity by distorting the classical features of his face and the uprightness of his bearing to narrate a goofy story and play grotesque characters. Each of his forays into an incident or personality is like an insult to the beauty and dignity of the human form. When Dostal disengages from his storytelling and acting tasks and resumes his “own” guise, it is a surprise to find that all the make believe hasn’t left irreversible traces behind. He emerges as fine a specimen as he was at the start, and that is the real drama of this one-man show.
There are three streams of action. One is that odd story about strange characters. It tells of a detective investigating a series of crimes. The victims are mankind’s best friends – dogs. Satirical in intent, yet also celebrating oddity and diversity, the yarn plays against the Platonic idea of beauty and seems very much in the Austrian comic tradition. However, this specimen – unlike the vein’s best examples from old folk farces to modern cabaret – didn’t hold my interest all the way to the end. I have not read the Wolf Haas novel on which Dostal’s text is based, so can’t say whether the original is at fault or the adaptation. Dostal, nevertheless, seemed to treasure the absurdities of “Dogs Do” and stuck with them in great detail. Thankfully, other things were going on.
The second stream was that of Dostal the actor-dancer-director struggling to get this performance right. Some of it was planned, some improvised in response to unforeseen happenings such as technical glitches, latecomers arriving or, after a while, audience members defecting. Dostal handled these occurrences with wit and aplomb. The third stream or, actually, state (since it is a constant) is that of the handsome, humane Dostal from which the other existences emanate. We saw this “ideal/real” source figure at the beginning and throughout, but just in flashes – vivid though they were – until the end when he took time for a summing up.
Dostal advertises himself as an actor (a student of the Vienna Conservatory) and dancer (trained at the London Contemporary Dance School). His voice technique is excellent. Clarity of enunciation and projection volume became essential after he had to abandon a malfunctioning microphone. Unaccented or diversely accented English are at his command. He moves well in character, as narrator and in-and-out of characters (there are about a dozen) and does it in a flash. I was reminded of other clowns – Chaplin, Baryshnikov (doing his Chaplin imitation in “The Turning Point”) and Edwin Denby (in Rudy Burckhardt films).
Dostal did two all-out dances, one an ironic “La Rose malade” and the other an angry fling with a couple of postal cartons and his chest bared. Both numbers seemed trivial. Credited as director for the show is Petra Dobetsberger, though I suspect that codirector with Dostal would be the more accurate designation. This performer’s strengths are his appearance and agility in transforming his appearance – the effects of which worked in the evening’s live scenes as well as the ones on screen. With his chiseled features and light skin offset by a shock of black hair and expressive brows, Dostal should stand a good chance of making it in Hollywood where he now works. He is also directing a documentary on African American dancer Bob Curtis, who is in his 80s and resides in Vienna.
