Eight German Productions

...With an exception to be noted in a moment, he accepted the play on its own terms, a Spanish genre painting, and worked out the lyrical values of the scenes, instead of trying to force dramatic values upon them...

...What was gained in sympathy for each character was lost in sharpness of outline...

...That is not Chekhov...

...And so forth...

...Roswitha Rieger in the leading role began to shed real tears and ask that we do likewise...

...And the evening ended on a note of uncertainty...

...His T V pronouncements, like any prefatorial ones, can be ignored...

...The Heyme production is either very sly or very naive...

...Though the choruses were not really more distinct in the Heyme production, here they were part of a general and— one might charitably judge—intentional indistinctness, the indistinctness of the revel and the orgy...

...There is, for example, a scene in which lunatics perform a sort of combined Mousetrap and Walpurgisnacht...

...the directing is the best thing about it, in conjunction, that is, with the designs of Gerd Richter...

...Given a great actor, all Hamlets seem to be equally valid, but Claudius is one and indivisible and must be cast and played "right...

...The second question is made all the more difficult because this is an author who talks out of both sides of his mouth...

...He consistently denied his actors "self-expression" in outbursts of temperament, but by the end of the evening each had been enabled to express himself as fully as he could ever expect to...

...Both these plays have been causes celebres this season in a way that is possibly novel and certainly bizarre...

...He is the kind of director who won't let you forget his presence for a moment...

...That is not Russian realism...

...The ultimate defense of Swinarski's view would be that the play could hardly be put across at all if the director took another view...

...And talk of "ensemble playing...

...If much is lost by the exclusions, something also is gained by the very separation of elements: We see certain of the ingredients in a chemically pure state...

...Hamlet (Harry Buckwitz: Frankfurt): There were possibilities...

...He even had the audacity to tamper with the script of Chekhov's Three Sisters...

...The idea was not to present a static portrait of a dreamer prince, illustrated with melodious poetic arias, but to tell a story, a rather barbaric story...

...The present is not offering very much...

...Or, if you prefer, so flexible...

...In his desire to innovate, Noelte introduced more beds than Sternheim ever thought of...

...He eliminated all changes of scene...

...Music, by Frank Wedekind, though German to the core, is also hard to salvage, and I got the impression that possibly the Bochum theater didn't have the human resources of most of those that contributed to the Festival...

...He presents below his observations on eight productions staged there during the past spring, in a special festival devoted to German productions of dramatic works...

...Having stated what is un-Chekhovian about Noelte's work, one should in fairness give him credit for fidelity to one of the most Chekhovian "principles": that the dramatic in this material will also best release itself through what seems most undramatic, the quietest will in the end prove loudest, the gentlest approach will have the most violent effect...

...This was a vague interpretation, and in the end what really succeeded was not the new "realism" of the theory but the most farcical element in the script...

...Though everyone used to see Chekhov in the same terms as Noelte still sees him, no one till him ever dared to stick to those terms in actual performance...

...Here an effect of the claustrophobic was achieved on a huge, open stage, by the device of outlining a little room with floor and ceiling only...

...A certain febrile energy on the periphery is used to hide a lack of energy at the center—which also is legitimate when a play does lack energy at the center...

...Just a little, it may have been the fault of Wedekind too, since there seems to be a degree of uncertainty of direction and convention in the script itself...

...someone asked me when I mentioned this...

...Though Noelte leaves a lot of Chekhov out, what he presents is in Chekhov...

...For this (to him) basic idea of the essentially Chekhovian, Noelte has recourse to the hoariest of exploded fallacies: that Chekhov's plays are nothing but vignettes of depression and defeat...

...The "charge" (that would be the word) against Swinarski is that he sympathizes with the petty bourgeois enemy in the latter's two classic forms, that of the Spiessburger in Mayakovsky and that of the decadent, overindividualistic intellectual in Weiss...

...Why was his government—strict in such matters—interested in having him accept...

...This bankrupt Modernismus is characterized by pointlessness: Its very functionalism is all show, though ugly show...

...He cut out the repeated singing and, in one place, inserted instead the chimes of a delicate little watch...

...Theobald and Luise Maske are no longer idiots but have a point of view...

...So it is, for example, with the Masha-Kulygin- Vershinin relationship...

...Even in the original the question suggests itself as to whether Federico Garcia Lorca didn't lay on the local color too thick, didn't draw too exclusively on the charms of local tradition both in language and mores—a question suggested also by the Irish writers from Synge on, with whom Garcia Lorca has rightly enough been compared...

...The Nazi period, within Germany at least, offers nothing...

...So, what may have been intended to make Moliere of Sternheim ends making him a Feydeau...

...And he told an American interviewer (Henry Popkin) that the play is Marxist...

...There was a theory behind this: Christian's road is through the bed...

...Maybe Noelte saw it too, for the single room has taken over the Three Sisters...

...That is why it is so heartening to find a designer like Richter doing something "modern,' "experimental,' for a reason...

...Did Swinarski champion De Sade against Marat...

...One can fell sorry for them at times...

...The name of each director, and the city where the production originated, are in parentheses...

...But all these questions lead away from the theatrical arena into that of world politics...

...It reminds me, as did the rest of this Three Sisters, of A Month in the Country as I once saw it at the Comedie Francaise, thoroughly Frenchified, with all the unclassic "irrelevancies" and "digressions" eliminated, until it became neat and well-scrubbed and of a (small) piece: All that has stayed distinctly in memory is the image of a single room, white and very symmetrical...

...The Doctor sings a banal little song of the time...

...One of the classical unities can be imposed on Chekhov, he seems to say, even if the others have to be foregone...

...One can feel that Theobald has a lot of right on his side when he protests at what Christian is doing to him...

...Other questions arise: Why did the Schiller Theater want a director from Warsaw for its West Berlin showcase...

...But partly it was the fault of the folk on stage who did not do everything possible to put us in the right frame of mind...

...He holds, I would guess, that stylization is successful when it is not stylization at all...

...Unless one is further gone than I am in the neurosis of voyeurism, the orgiastic is quite boring to look at: for the eyes and ears, nothing but repetitious bustle, priority always given to quantity over quality...

...The small platform forced the actors to be "falling over each other," and falling over the furniture...

...Yet in May, he appeared before the East German TV cameras to endorse (if not in exclusive or conclusive terms) the Rostock production...

...The invitation was rejected— with embarrassment...

...What Heyse offered in his production of Music was a burlesque of melodrama: a formula that has often yielded laughs, heaven knows, but which was not adequate to the present occasion, at least as applied by less than brilliant performers...

...There was a praiseworthy effort to show him and his two children as a family, contrasted with the Hamlet family much as Gloster's family is with Lear's...

...To sympathize with the bourgeoisie in West Berlin is the reverse of a daring act: The place is dominated by them...

...Are either Poland or Swinarski going all the way to "Formalism" in their efforts at de-Stalinization...

...but Sternheim should be Sternheim...

...Did the disapproval of East Berlin come as a surprise or was it part of the calculation...

...Was De Sade "championed" in Swinarski's production...

...Feydeau was also a great writer in his way...

...The bedbug (Konrad Swinarski: Berlin) and MARAT/ SADE (Hansguenther Heyme: Wiesbaden...

...Usually she is all sweetness and light, and he, rather a jackass...

...But Noelte isn't Brecht, and in any case this Three Sisters was not offered as a new play based on Chekhov, or even an adaptation, but as Chekhov pur sang...

...In the middle of the current dust-storm is the young Polish director Konrad Swinarski...

...What did Noelte do...

...Renate Schroeter, one felt, was capable of a good Ophelia, but "no man is an island," one cannot play without a partner...

...This production should be kept in the repertoire as long as may be possible, so that the lesson can be learned by many...

...Well, to this I owe the one realization this production brought me: The play of Hamlet hinges on Claudius, in the sense that unless he has the prominence Shakespeare gave him, and unless he is exactly the kind of man Shakespeare made him, the whole action crumbles...

...Understandably, then, a haze of dullness hung over the proceedings at the Schiller...

...For instance, no one laughed when Kulygin put on the false moustache...

...No story tells itself, least of all this one...

...A nice quietness hovered over the scene, if not quite the breathless hush which Juergen Fehling contrived to get (in an exquisite production of this play in Munich about 15 years ago...

...Presumably because he committed suicide, possibly from dissatisfaction with Stalinist Russia...

...He brought Sternheim's figures in The Snob out of that realm of almost surrealistic fantasy in which many previous directors had placed them and made it clear that the painting was from life: This was Wilhelminian Germany...

...In this case, it is not legitimate to cut anything out, let alone such a splendid passage as Olga's final speech...

...But it wasn't...

...There was a faintly collegiate air to some of the jesting...

...Dona Rosita (Hans Bauer: Darmstadt), MUSIC (Hans Joachim Heyse: Bochum), THE SNOB (Rudolf Noelte: Berlin), THREE SISTERS (Noelte: Stuttgart...

...There is nothing new about a political play causing a flurry...

...The final blow was dealt this production when Siegfried Wischnewski as the King had to be replaced at the last moment...

...These are very straightforward, unconfusing errors, of course, and offer a solid base for a production, good or bad...

...But this directing is not of the kind that makes second-rate writing seem first-rate, and so one has to hope that Palitzsch will get some better plays to work on than The Black Swan...

...Swinarski seemed to know that it might...

...Palitzsch has undercut criticism of his directing of this play by explaining in a public discussion that the author (Martin Walser) collaborated with him and (apparently) gave him all needed directives...

...As to the problem of who is right about this play, it can never be solved till Herr Weiss comes clean and publishes all variants of his script...

...There is a gain in humanity...

...He is presumed to be a Communist because a Communist regime lets him travel around and bring glory to it, yet in the Communist press of Germany (see Theater der Zeit) he is presented as the Communist press presents its enemies a few months before the axe falls...

...This question is really two questions...

...I should hate to see what Heyme's young Dionysians would do with it, but Palitzsch reduces both sound and movement to a minimum, thus increasing, instead of dissipating, the gruesomeness...

...It is, of course, hard to sort out the elements that went into the making of the Bedbug production at the Schiller Theater...

...That Heyme did not have actors of the first rank to play De Sade or Marat also had a result not entirely negative...

...The ceiling hung from the flies, the floor consisted of a platform about a foot high...

...The early 20th century was the Festival's "special period.' That, perhaps, is hardly an accident...

...The moment where, in my judgment, it broke through the frame of Garcia Lorca's convention was the moment near the end when Rosita realizes she will never marry...

...If the idea is isolation and talking-past-each-other, then he puts his actors as far apart as his spacious set allows, and they talk past each other...

...Why did the director wish to accept the invitation...

...It contradicts and corrects and puts in the right perspective the immense sadness of the sisters...

...In the Hebbel Theater, this sometimes means totally inaudible: The seats creak as the people at the sides strain to see better...

...And it was the cliche of the dramatic mode, according to which incoherence and blur are permitted to the performer, if only he shake and sob enough...

...For it either slyly bypasses all this Problematik in the hope that a synthesis of interpretations may result, or it naively ignores the Problematik and fares blithely forward just hoping for the best that youthful enthusiasm without intellectual grasp might achieve...

...I don't know if others do...

...Dona Rosita is perhaps too hard to get at...

...For he took the acknowledged master of stylized comic theatre in German, Carl Sternheim, and de-stylized him...

...Notably, actors, those arch-individualists, were always allowed their outbursts of temperament, and these broke the notorious mood...

...One saw a Claudius whom one couldn't imagine doing any of the things he does—even drinking too much, or making love too cloyingly, let alone committing murder and being a "cutpurse of the empire...

...Weiss' play presents the contrast of the social revolutionary (Marat) and the individualistic intellectual (De Sade...

...They consisted of little huts and stairways and turrets half-made with a giant meccano set and never finished...

...Heyme's, I suppose, was an attempt at theater of cruelty...

...Whatever the character of Hamlet is (and on this there will never be agreement), the role of Hamlet makes one very clear demand on the actor: variety...

...The Wedekindian world is still fascinating to enter, and this production was good enough to permit us to enter it...

...They hobbled the play...

...The play was done with taste and con amore...

...Excitation can be very unexciting...

...An example is in the Irian-Tusenbach relation...

...And if so, was Swinarski responsible for this, or can the responsibility be pinned on the author, Peter Weiss...

...The Swinarski production grew out of an intimate collaboration of author and director...

...This position is also defensible...

...I read in his program of "new ideas,' but I was not convinced that what I read is valid, nor did I perceive that it was communicated by what I saw on stage...

...But meanwhile the gifted Rudolf Noelte should attempt to do a Chekhov production in which he not only includes every line but accepts the vision which made every line and every stage direction so vitally necessary...

...Such things are impermissible, not merely because one reveres Chekhov, and would always want him to have his own way, but even more because all passages in a Chekhov script are absolutely necessary to the total structure and vision...

...Most of Music is parodistic, and was played as such, but occasionally Wedekind seems to think he can make the jump into the real thing and take us with him...

...In several decades of playgoing, I have never seen more sensitive exchanges between actors...

...Sometimes there is a stylistic leap within the very same scene— as from elegiac prose in the Yorick speeches to the extravagant rhetorical verse outburst in the grave...

...And indeed the hand of the director is seen much less in the politics of the piece than in the effort to make it entertaining in spite of itself, an effort that at times seemed based on the formula: When in doubt bring on the corps de ballet...

...That has immense value, not just as characterizing him and his insensibility, but as belonging to an intricate pattern of composition...

...Anyhow, the production is very well directed...

...Marat/Sade was presented at the festival, not in Swinarski's Schiller Theater production, but in a Wiesbaden production directed by Hansguenther Heyme...

...for so often an author says his play says what in fact it does not say...

...Or perhaps a German rendering of something so extremely Spanish is only tolerable to a German spectator...

...So why does it announce a play by Stalin's favorite poet...

...the actors were tempted to giggle, it would seem, but we were not...

...Noelte's approach was far more sophisticated...

...Often Noelte disclosed an underlying doubleness or dialectic where most directors have only found a single thread...

...There was always a lot of cheating...

...How much more obtrusive, then, the effort to be ultra- Spanish, when it is an effort made against the grain, an effort made in despite of a language with another grammar, another rhythm, another prosody, and in despite of bodies that look and move differently...

...The audience's sympathy can go to the one or to the other...

...I think Miss Mikulicz (Rosita) hoped the play was by Tennessee Williams after all...

...I have been hearing for years of his achievements in Frankfurt, and looked forward to seeing him let loose with this director's dream of a play...

...Had Three Sisters actually been this kind of a play, this would have been the definitive production, and one would never have dared to look at another for fear of disappointment...

...Here the actress suddenly made a leap from the lyric to the dramatic mode and sobbed and yowled like the pathetic women of other authors...

...Modern design in general has been going nowhere for so long...

...It is "in politics" even when it does unpolitical plays—perhaps most of all then, as giving its own definition of cultural freedom...

...Bauer made a gallant effort to solve the problem, and seemed to be succeeding better with most of the audience at the Freie Volksbuehne than with me...

...I'm thinking of the room without any walls in which the Swan opens...

...Another radical mistake had been made much earlier: to accept the designs of Michel Raffaelli which were not only bad in themselves but, to paraphrase Falstaff, the cause that badness is in other men...

...Didn't Brecht tamper with Shakespeare...

...Frank Kutschera as Polonius seemed to have been told not to be funny: He reduced the old man to nullity...

...Seldom have any designs influenced any play for the better as much as these influenced Hamlet for the worse...

...If a certain awkwardness characterized the evening at the Theater am Kurfuerstendamm, I think this was partly the fault of us, the audience: We lacked the imagination which Wedekind asked from us...

...It is not a good play...

...One sees that Palitzsch's Brechtian training does after all prove of use outside the Brechtian oeuvre, and also that it need not have the result of converting all plays into Brecht plays...

...Noelte's production is better than good: it is astonishing in its goodness, and the astonishments, instead of exhausting themselves, like most theatrical astonishments, in the first few minutes, keep happening right up to the final curtain...

...A meaningful contrast of indoors and outdoors was also possible within this scheme: Photographs of the surroundings were hung in front of the cyclorama, and it helped greatly that they hung in a curve, not in the usual movie-screen format...

...A little, dried-up, post-office official with a grey crew-cut...

...Behind the Swinarski lay the theater of Sartre and even, maybe, of Shaw...

...The reviewers, I gather, mostly went home and wrote that it was terrible...

...That is one detail, or group of details, which made this production a very distinguished one...

...They prevented each scene from looking like itself...

...Degen reduced all styles to one, which thereby after a while became no style at all but an amorphous outpouring...

...And certainly Degen's acting was the best we saw...

...it is meant to...

...Pathos and sentiment, or parody of pathos and sentiment...

...He made a mistake in allowing such a lapsus to be seen in a national theater contest...

...But then I think the German stage has to learn that Shakespeare plays should not be presented as a sequence of half a dozen tableaux but in a single setting: Only then will the action be articulated properly and the total structure be revealed...

...But what the theater audience, says to itself is: Hooray, lots of bedroom scenes...

...By consequence, was the Warsaw government gratified by the acclaim the show got in the West or upset by the criticism it received in the East...

...Such dissatisfaction —broadening out into a dissatisfaction with modern society generally —is present in the play to such an extent that one would not produce the play at all if one did not wish such dissatisfaction to be spread...

...The place is West Berlin's (generally most inadequate) rejoinder to Helene Weigel's remarkable outfit in East Berlin...

...Noelte doesn't cheat...

...This play is pre-Aeschylean in the sense that the choruses carry more weight than the principals...

...If they should be almost inaudible, then they are almost inaudible...

...And one saw the results out front...

...Did he have to be replaced by an actor who not only couldn't act the part but couldn't even look it—was wrong even as to type...

...Let certain negative signs show in her, let her be not quite so pretty, not quite so Christian, and let Tusenbach be equal to his own lines and actions, instead of a little beneath them, and the scales are evened up, and a bigger drama is under way...

...The bankruptcy of modernist stage design is to be seen in a catastrophe like the Raffaelli Hamlet designs as infallibly as the bankruptcy of modernist architecture is exhibited in the ugliness of rebuilt Berlin...

...That, so close together physically, they failed to communicate was thereby dramatized...

...Now how could all this happen to Harry Buckwitz...

...I can't say I respond to it particularly...

...But the flurries caused by Vladimir Mayakovsky's The Bedbug and Peter Weiss' Marat/ Sade have to do, in both cases, with their politics being so unclear...

...Weiss could hardly not be behind it...

...To cut, as Noelte did, the Doctor's singing in the final scene is like cutting the bits of low-life in Shakespeare's tragedies, as used to be done in the 18th century...

...When the Communists do the play—and in Rostock they have—they will obviously champion Marat against De Sade...

...One hesitates to say which production comes closest to Weiss' intentions—since it is not clear that his intentions are clear—but it is possible that Heyme's show is the most Weissian precisely in its lack of clarity, precisely in the fact that it forges ferociously forward, looking neither to Right (De Sade) nor to Lett (Marat...

...And I suppose his enemies don't want the play produced at all...

...The search for roots leads back to the grandparents...

...This article appears by arrangement with Theater Heute...

...That is something more refined, more confined...

...The black swan (Peter Palitzsch: Stuttgart...

...Noelte obtrudes too much...

...The play is weak, and one wouldn't be able to sit through it if the director did not exercise considerable discretion and skill...

...In the Swinarski production, De Sade got more weight because the part was played by the leading actor of the company (Ernst Schroeder), while the choruses were indistinct, both literally and figuratively...

...thus certain Chekhovian values are realized as perhaps never before...

...They responded to each other like animals with sensory equipment far better than that of mere homo sapiens...

...For one thing, it is written in half a dozen different styles, from the elegant, balanced prose of "What a piece of work " to the syncopated verses of "Oh what a rogue...

...At first glimpse of the leather raincoats (on soldiers), and of Michael Degen's Prince, this seemed to be working, and one's appetite for the great enigmatic masterpiece was aroused all over again...

...But, alas, not satisfied...

...Yet Swinarski is at the center of this storm too since, once again, his production has been attacked as one-sided, incorrect, and anti-Communist...

...At present, he is always pulling unpublished bits out of his back pocket and saying that such and such a director didn't use them...

...This effort was thwarted by lack of characterization—lack of acting—in all three parties...

...And, even if the others have to be foregone, there is a fourth unity that can be added: unity of mood...

...If a driving, male energy, a feeling for the emotionally substantial and active, is enough to carry Degen through a scene or two, we soon begin to ask for more...

...They made odd irrelevant noises, and failed to function (the doors didn't close, and so on...

...and, seconds later, when he took it off, he was able to make a big effect (if this isn't too vulgar a way to put it) with what had happened to his face during the "comic" incident: It had turned from merely confused to absolutely devastated...

...Each of the three gave more sides to their "problem" than I have ever seen given before...

...Yet, on the basis of The Snob, I cannot say that Noelte's work represents a net gain on the productions I used to see years ago, such as The Strongbox in East Berlin in 1949...

...What is stylization and when is it successful...