For the past eight years, the greatest demand on Ralf Wetzel’s performance skills has been to engage the minds of postgraduate students in MBA classes at Belgium’s Vlerick Business School.
This month, however, the associate professor of organisation and applied arts has swapped the shirt and trousers he wears when lecturing on Vlerick’s Ghent campus for a pink wig and a goofy-toothed mask. He is performing for a more challenging audience at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in his one-man “solo mask show”, Absolutely Reliable!.
His masked character, George, is a version of a prototypical western man based on Prof Wetzel’s perceptions of the traumas that alpha males face in a business world now shaped by the need to diversify workforces and for managers to be more empathetic.
He also includes his personal experiences of the repression he experienced growing up in communist East Germany, then trying and failing to build a career as a business executive in Switzerland before retraining as a business professor.
But he says his desire to stage a production has also been driven by his academic career, and seeking to make MBA teaching more engaging. “I want to get business education out of the sterile and polished business school classroom,” Prof Wetzel says. “We need to make our hands dirty.”
The Edinburgh show is a first step towards exploring how he might introduce elements of improvisation and theatre to the lecture hall. “It is important that we find new ways of expressing ourselves,” he says. He has had an interest in improvised theatre for several years, and met the director of Absolutely Reliable!, Lee Delong, through a clowning workshop he attends near Vlerick’s campus.
“There are not many business schools that would tolerate this,” Prof Wetzel adds. He might not have embarked on the production without the enthusiastic support of his employer — and students. “Vlerick’s view was that as long as their clients did not have a problem with me doing something like this then I could give it a go.”
Prof Wetzel’s hope is that he can use the show to develop a style of leadership training he calls “sensual learning”, using techniques and exercises traditionally associated with applied arts, such as improv and mask work, to train students to follow the impulses from the body rather than the brain.
When one audience member was told of Prof Wetzel's day job, she replied: 'That’s great. Could he teach me some economics?' © Robert Ormerod/FT
“There are strong links between the applied arts world and becoming a great leader,” Prof Wetzel says.
“Improv theatre, social dance, clowning and many other fields are all focused around having to act competently in the moment, using your emotional and social intelligence and a strong connection, being comfortable in uncomfortable situations, not being afraid of failure.”
The Fringe offers a choice of more than 3,500 shows, ranging from touring West End productions to those just starting out in the industry, and is itself a lesson in developing your entrepreneurial skills in order to get bums on seats each evening.
“Each day here teaches me more about competition, guerrilla marketing, mass customisation than [I get] at home,” Prof Wetzel says.
Absolutely Reliable! is about as far away from the MBA case study method of teaching management as it is possible to be.
In the show (tagline: “Visiting the abyss of modern men: dark, sinister, rollicking!”), Prof Wetzel takes on the character of George, a white, middle-aged, middle-class, middle manager desperate for both promotion in his company and for a relationship in his personal life.
As he gets closer to achieving these goals, George’s inner demons of insecurity, anger and denial get the better of him, to tragic effect.
“I feel a mixture between being excited and terrified,” Prof Wetzel admits as he gets ready for his first performance, a process that involves locking himself in a room for an hour to get into the character of George.
'There are strong links between the applied arts world and becoming a great leader,' according to Prof Wetzel © Robert Ormerod/FT
There are 11 people in line to see the inaugural 10 o’clock show, enough to fill about a third of the seats in the tiny theatre space above a café on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.
The turnout is also better than the previous act, “Britain’s funniest blind theoretical physicist” Richard Wheatley, who had just one person in his audience, a Fringe official who had come to assess his stand-up performance for the Edinburgh Festival’s annual comedy prize.
Those who have paid £11.50 to see Prof Wetzel’s show include a couple on holiday from Leipzig, who explain that they were sold on the show by a man handing out flyers in the street by the fact that the star is German.
Isabel, an Australian on a month-long tour of Europe, is the one person in the line apparently excited by Prof Wetzel’s academic credentials. “That’s great,” she enthuses. “Could he teach me some economics?”
Ralf Wetzel offstage: 'Each day [in Edinburgh] teaches me more about competition, guerrilla marketing, mass customisation than [I get] at home' © Robert Ormerod/FT
As the lights dim and Prof Wetzel enters the room in his odd stage costume, someone here is clearly concerned about what they have agreed to watch. “He’s hideous!” they shout.
It is not certain that anyone else in the audience knows what to make of the production from the silence that follows. About 20 minutes in people seem to warm up. “That’s weird,” someone cries out from the back of the room. Later there is laughter and towards the end the audience has relaxed enough to join George as he leads them in a chorus of “Happy Birthday” to him.
As we file out of the room into the Royal Mile, mingling with tourists exiting the military tattoo at Edinburgh Castle, everyone I ask says they enjoyed the performance.
Prof Wetzel bounds out of his changing room after the show. “That was incredible,” he says. “What I am trying to do is to explore the struggles of modern masculinity created by things like the #MeToo movement and men being unable to explain themselves.
“I think what we have created here is on to something.”
*Absolutely Reliable! plays until August 25, www.clownforlife.com
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