Understudy for 'The Deputy'

...If it is to be an overpowering experience and not a titillating knock at big names...

...In the Winstons' translation the play does not by any means shape up as a triumph of style...

...Max Frisch's The Firebugs and Brecht's Arturo Uì have to dip into hysteria to counteract the sloppiness of their metaphors...

...And Riccardo talks about "a poor priest like you or I." The staging offers no help to the ineptitudes of the script...

...The balance of the Continent is more important/than its unity which hardly corresponds/to Europe's national traditions...

...It is the center of Hochhuth's scale, however, that has provoked the public outcries against him...

...Gerstein makes contact with Riccardo Fontana, an Italian priest from an artistocratic, undemanding background...

...he objects to the Pontiff's remoteness and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility alike...

...as a slab of latterday Schilleriana...

...In other words, this is a play by design and craftsmanship, not by accident...

...And Fred Stewart, a rouged and rotund Cardinal, is forced by his narrowed role into skilled embroidery...

...de Staël's precept that intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power, Hochhuth has mounted an all-out assault on indifference and inaction in high places...

...Advance reviews out of Berlin, Paris and London, and recent criticism in New York describe Rolf Hochhuth's drama as a social document rather than theater...

...His theme—that Pius XII should have condemned the persecution of European Jewry— is reiterated in every scene, not simply as repetition but from different vantage points that give a freshly illuminating emphasis each time...

...He made a strong protest...

...At one end of the scale is Kurt Gerstein, drawn from a real-life figure of the same name, a pacifist who has insinuated himself into the SS and the concentration-camp program in the belief that "dictatorships can be abolished only from within...

...Farther on, a high-ranking layman in the service of the Holy See asks his son whether the Pope could bear to see even a single man hungry and in pain: "His heart is with the victims.' The son, a priest, retorts bitterly: "But his voice...

...like classically tragic figures they are thinking and talking, toward the end of the play, in ethical absolutes...

...Moving down the scale one encounters a succession of secondary characters—clerics and laymen, Jewish prisoners and Jewish-Catholic converts—until at the nether extreme are the German officials, including Salzer, a police captain, Adolf Eichmann, August Hirt ("an anatomist and collector of skulls at the University of Strassburg") and, at the nadir, a man known only as The Doctor...

...And later still, when a Cardinal argues that a statement from the Pope will be construed by Hitler as a threat that is bound to aggravate the situation— and this is the crux of the play— the young priest replies that 100,000 Jewish families in Europe face certain murder: the situation "could not possibly be worse...

...Hochhuth has taken this "cool and cheery handsome and likable" incarnation from his researches into the person who was in charge of "medical" operations at Auschwitz, but he seems equally to have delved into the Mephistopheles of Faust...

...The lighting faltered more than once on the night I attended...

...Putting aside academic considerations, I think that Hochhuth has achieved an authentic, artistic tragedy by the sheer disposition of his facts and eloquence and the crushing logic of his story...

...The Deputy is concerned with its subject matter, not with its author...

...The Shumlin production represents about one-third of the total playing time, and it has been suggested that bringing the script into line with Broadway dictates has strengthened its impact by deleting the undramatic frippery...

...Where is his voice...

...The drama, then, is not overtly poetry...

...The answer is another question: Why indeed...

...It has richness of literary and political reference, but it rises to a fervor of which most dramatists today seem incapable...

...Germany must remain viable," says Pius, "not only to hold the frontiers against the East, -but also to hold the balance of power...

...or rather, not a man but the devil, "only playing the part of a human being...

...the others—Gerstein, Riccardo, the Pope, the Cardinal, the Doctor—have been so levelled off by gross editing that they are now mere silhouettes...

...As for the decor, tubular hangings, looped cords and oversized doorbell chimes designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian hang and wave distractedly above the realistic props...

...Even so, in the speeches Hochhuth gives the Pontiff he strives to be just to the historical characters intelligence and persuasiveness, as a careful study of those speeches reveals...

...It is a cry from the mind as well as the heart, for it is not, in fact, dominated by its content...

...For example, the Nuncio in Berlin says to Riccardo, "Father, stay out of this...

...I suspect that the pressure to get it on the boards this season, come what may, for the sake of its implications as historical evidence, simply pushed it into the wrong hands...

...and he has not been able to resist undercutting the Cardinal by making him slightly comical and the Pope by making him slightly prissy...

...He has done nothing of the sort...

...The production, a heap of disconnected fragments, is a reduction in every sense of what Hochhuth has written...

...If it be argued that spectators in other cities also saw a foreshortened adaptation, I can only reply: so much the worse for them...

...as a diatribe against Pius XII, if not against the Church itself, cast arbitrarily into the shape of a five-act play and supporting an overload of factual material...

...The other acting ranges downward from inadequate, the director for the most part keeping the cast on their feet when they should be on their toes...

...A dramatist has the right to make of his characters what he can, but Hochhuth owes his audiences a "bigger" Pius, if only as a worthy adversary for Riccardo...

...As is indicated, the play is written in free verse which transposes from conversational realism to intricate dialectic, to polished aphorisms, to rhetorical storming...

...Near the opening, for instance, the Papal Nuncio in Berlin wishes that the Pope would authorize him "to take a stand/the way my brother Nuncio in Slovakia/did two weeks ago when he spoke up/against the wholesale killing of Jews from Bratislava...

...and the Cardinal, like the Pope, is a sophisticated man who uses the language of Realpolitik as adeptly as that of religion...

...And strangely worded discussion at that...

...To start with, it is an example of classical theater, and that comes as a shock and a relief after the avalanche of romanticism that has been tipped on to American and European stages in recent years: the self-defensive pleas of the playwright as hero, the tiger-biting-hisown-tail searches for identity, the case histories, the fluting social tracts, the poky and impoverished one-acts in double bills...

...On those rare occasions when a drama as bold as The Deputy reaches us, Broadway conventions ought to bend to it, if not break...

...if it is to register anything like its full meaning...

...But that is not enough...

...As Gerstein, Philip Burns plays his two scenes with frantic sincerity, as if to make up for his absence from the three other scenes in which Gerstein appears in the full play...

...for him they "screen the infernal cynicism of what really took place...

...Hochhuth knows that naturalistic dialogue is out of fashion, but he deliberately shuns metaphors...

...And Herman Shumlin has co-produced and directed a condensation, adapted by Jerome Rothenberg and placed on show at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre...

...Emlyn Williams presents a startling physical likeness to Pius XII, but is restrained by the cutting of the text from showing his capacity as an actor...

...Some plaintiffs swear that Hochhuth has turned Pacelli into a malefactor and fool...

...as a setback to the 20th-century schools of symbolic, psychological and absurdist playmaking...

...In contrast with, say, Ben-Zion Tomer's Children of the Shadows (which arrived in New York at about the same time, courtesy of Habimah), The Deputy is not choked up by guilt but propelled by indignation...

...The characters in the play may be graduated by moral arithmetic from near good to outright evil...

...With the excision of so much drama, the production becomes a static exposition running into discussion...

...The question is: Why do the play at all in this crippled form...

...Gerstein is trying to bring to the outside world an accounting of the exterminations at Auschwitz: "Seven hundred and fifty persons/in each of four chambers—/ each room with a volume of sixty cubic yards—/three thousand human beings...

...But before saying what the production is not, I should try to outline what the full play is...

...if the performance is to be the play and not a feeble understudy for it, a large work like this must be given complete, or as nearly complete as possible...

...On the contrary, Hochhuth has imposed a severe discipline on himself, and the dramatic progression controls the flow of information at all points...

...The complexity of the plotting and sub-plotting, a subtle reticulation of happenings and people, has given way to a harsh, simple-minded story line...

...Any attempt to define tragedy is liable to touch off a critical brawl...

...I have not read the original text and am told that, like Brecht's (or, come to that, Goethe's) German, it is not easily brought into an English of comparable quality...

...By negative definition, if this play is not a tragedy neither is Goethe's Egmont, which also tells of a hero's self-sacrifice...

...And that has cost The Deputy dear as a work of art...

...Its ambition is deeper, its scope wider, its ferocity more sustained than those of any other play written since the War, with the possible exception of Sartre's Lucifer and the Good Lord...

...It is Riccardo who, haunted by Gerstein's descriptions, tries to persuade the Pope to "raise a hue and cry/to stir the world to pity,/to outrage and to action...

...As it happens, the exact opposite is true...

...The ShumlinRothenberg version is, to use a heavy word, a disgrace...

...Its one exemplary feature is the costuming by Edith Lutyens Bel Geddes...

...If I have dwelt on the play rather than on the New York production, it is because I hope that Hochhuth's work will survive for what it is, rather than what has emerged from it...

...Grove Press has issued an American edition of the entire play and a compendious essay to go with it, translated by Richard and Clara Winston...

...Like marble columns the naked corpses stand with hooks they're pulled apart...

...It may have to run on two successive nights, or it may have to begin early or end late...

...The Doctor's relishing of his victims' spiritual and bodily torments leads to some of the most passionately defined and gruesome moments in the play...

...It is resolutely flat in language...

...watching him, you are never aware of the steel spine of the role...

...In the next scene, one German tells another that the Concordat drawn up between the Vatican and Hitler was "a stroke of luck...

...In his picture of Pius he does not, and this failure is the outstanding weakness of Hochhuth's play...

...In addition, he has restricted Pius to one appearance, holding him back until act four in an endeavor to forge awe out of expectation...

...The gassing operation takes twenty-five minutes./Now they want to speed it up...

...Finally, we can see for ourselves...

...Jews have to do that job./Ukrainians lash them on with whips...

...and as a sprawling, immature first effort...

...There he situates Pius XII and a certain unnamed Cardinal, and this act looks like a profanation to people who cannot imagine them placed any lower than the top...

...Jeremy Brett uncovers some of the heroism and goodness of Riccardo, although not the fanaticism...

...Nevertheless, it is worth noting Lope de Vega's comment that "tragedy has as its argument history," and remembering that Hochhuth can footnote almost every line of his work to the events themselves, which constitute an unsurpassed disaster...

...True, he admits some rancor into his portrait...

...Is it tragedy...

...Important episodes, such as the Pope's washing his inkstained hands, the seizing and deporting of prisoners, the bowling party attended by a group of upperechelon Germans, and the very climax of the plot have vanished...

...Two other European plays, raised on topics similar to that of The Deputy but treated in unrelenting symbols, happen to bear witness to Hochhuth's claim...

...Since the characters have been snipped down by the adapter, the director has presumably tried to compensate for their diminution by having them roar like wind tunnels...

...The actors tripped and hesitated...

...The Deputy comes to us in two English versions...

...Three entire scenes have been lopped off, and the remaining ones have been cut down to Broadway measurements...

...In this he succeeds...

...Observing Mme...

...As things stand, Hochhuth is justified in asking with Dryden, Who would excel, when few can make a test/Betwixt indiffrent writing and the rest...

...A monk mutters, "People are crazy is what I say...

...Once again one may hark back to Goethe...

...Gerstein and Fontana are the twin subjects of the tragedy...

...Some of the central characters have gone altogether...