The Arsonists, a play written in 1953 by Max Frisch, is now showing at the Royal Court Theatre, London. I haven't seen it, but many years ago I saw it in German. Biedermann und die Brandstifter is normally rendered as The Fireraisers. I think this is better than The Arsonists because of the brazen and systematic nature of the crimes. Still, let's not quibble. The play is doing what art ought to do - disturbing the smug Biedermann in the audience, but not in the way he wants to be disturbed. Royal Court Theatre audiences want to be "disturbed" by My Name is Rachel Corrie, or some "daring" piece of Bush-bashing, but this production doesn't oblige. One reviewer explains why she likes it (h/t Alan):

How rare to watch a West End play where the audience is discomforted. Playwrights have so pelted us with obscenity, violence and degradation that we are inured to it, can laugh without embarrassment, call their offerings 'compassionate', 'brave' and 'honest'. But this production of the Arsonists, a play almost 50 years old, really did seem raw and embarrassing. The Royal Court audience were at sea, missing the usual clues to laugh or sneer and the standard targets for scorn, all their kitchen-sink and anti-bourgeois training up the spout. They were actually asked to side with the middle-class characters against the working-class characters, the domestic homestead against anarchy and subversion. Even more confusingly, not because the middle-class couple are kind liberals - they are selfish, ruthless, exploitative - but because the alternative is even worse.

      And what kept pressing in uncomfortably upon the audience was the parallel with today. A stranger (Paul Chahidi) gains admittance to a rich man's house, is fed, then allowed to stay the night. Using a sob-story, he persuades his hosts, the Biedermanns (Will Keen and Jacqueline Defferary), to let him stay on. They have all sorts of mixed motives - they want to seem nice, are suckers for flattery and sob-stories, feel guilty about their wealth, are cowards. The newspapers are crammed with reports of arson and destruction, and Biedermann is as indignant and fearful as any other citizen, yet he sleepwalks into doom. Discovering another intruder, plus cans of petrol, in his attic, he is convinced that if only he can make friends with his unwanted guests, they will spare him, even though they assure him of their incendiary intentions.

      We never learn lessons from history. Having endured genocide and mass-slaughter, thanks to failing to preempt the Nazis, and only just preventing them from taking over the world, people have seized on the idea of Communism as an antidote to Fascism and general panacea. In his 1958 play, Max Frisch was presumably warning his fellow-bourgeois intellectuals that with a new sort of smugness they were letting conflagrations spring up in their midst, and actually welcoming them in Eastern European countries in which they themselves didn't have to live. 'It's not our house', says Biedermann as he listens to the houses in other districts exploding and crashing.

      This revival of the Arsonists rebukes the bien pensants, who, guilty about our colonial past, determined to think the best of themselves and everyone else, ignore the stated intentions of Islamicists to make this country a caliphate. Unlike so many productions mystifyingly labelled 'brave', this one really was - not least in casting Munir Khairdin, an Asian actor with Muslim-type square beard, as the PhD scholar who finally joins the other arsonists, not for mere motives of iconoclasm but out of genuine conviction that carnage will lead to redemption. When he enters the dining-room and reads out a statement dissociating himself from his fellow-arsonists, splinterings, explosions and screams totally muffle his inaudible assertions. He rants and gesticulates inaudibly while the stage is blasted. This was genuinely terrifying theatre - almost too real.

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The Arsonists at the Royal Court is what theatre is meant to be and so rarely is - it unsettles us, forcing us to think and feel differently. 'Woe unto us', as the Chorus of fire-fighters cry at the play's end.