Surprises from Berlin

...And the Ensemble has grafted on to his text the most spectacular stagecraft I have ever seen...

...And the borrowings from and imitations of the Ensemble by British directors-William Gaskill's Mother Courage at the National Theatre and Tony Richardson's Arturo Vi on Broadway-did little to unsettle the impressions...

...He contrives to talk in two voices simultaneously...

...As though to demonstrate that farce is only one card in his four-ace hand, Schall also plays Coriolanus...

...He left the script unfinished but explained that it is a portrait of "Paris working, thinking, fighting, bleeding-in its struggle to prepare for a new society " Whatever its ambitions, the play adds no luster to his name...

...Brecht was not the man to improve on Shakespeare but he was certainly his own man...

...At the end, as the city falls to the Prussians and the last embattled workers are picked off by bullets, the map shudders under red flames and Paris is consumed...

...its costumes and sets are sumptuous, its performances as fleshly as intellectual...

...He takes strides that are slightly longer than is safe for him...

...When a Roman menial in Coriolanus reaches up with a stick to hang some bloody helmets out to dry on poles some 15 feet from the ground, he does it as casually as a professional lamplighter wielding an overgrown spill and never breaks the flow of his conversation with a companion...

...In swift succession, he employs an armchair as a trampoline, a diving board, a crib, a hurdle, a rostrum...

...Will somebody please bring the Ensemble to New York and points west...

...He bends forward timidly to pick up his hat with one hand just as his foot kicks it slightly out of reach...

...Yet the play does exert a fresh spell in this distorted form...

...Not as a tragic figure -the author has seen to that-but as a petulant, youthful, blond Siegfried...

...One need not be a purist to see that Coriolanus is much shrunken in this guise...

...But the atmosphere of rah-rah-revolution moderates the bitterness of the closing scenes...

...The Ensemble takes its time to test, reject, rejuvenate and perfect...

...The characters are sloppily conceived: merry, great-hearted peasants of the streets on the one side and, on the other, an effete aristocracy, caricatures out of Daumier or Restoration comedy...

...Wolf Kaiser, one of the Ensemble's most forceful actors, does a rousing take-off of Bismarck, smoking a baguette for a cigar...

...When Ekkehard Schall flings down a pencil in disgust, at the same time spinning his head away, he obviously knows to the inch where it will land and come to rest...

...But whatever the merits of this middling-to-good farce, one can have no reservation about the performances of Ekkehard Schall as Ui and Hilmar Thate as Givola the florist (Gobbels ): Thate in black kid gloves and immaculate blackand- white garb scampers along before Vi to make his way plain, doing everything but brushing the ground with his handkerchief...

...it occupies a stage with the recklessness of an invading army...

...Their reports, tinctured with awe, suggested a troupe of fierce artisans dutifully extending the life of Brecht's methods beyond the master's death in 1956: uncompromising realism, exhortation, stiffness, tuckets of morality, flatly blinding lights, barked-out dialogue, standoffishness-in a word, frigidity...

...Schall's Ui is Groucho Marx playing Chaplin playing a clockwork Hitler...

...One of the directors, Wekwerth, disarmingly admitted to a journalist that it is "more pious than realistic...

...Shakespeare's power struggle is finely balanced...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Surprises from Berlin LONDON The three-week visit to London of the Berliner Ensemble has been an event, but evidently few theatergoers here expected it to be quite so surprising an event, especially those with little German and less Brecht...

...a small tilt can radically alter the interpretation of any performance...

...the workers and some of the lower-rank military, the Garde Nationale, have made up their minds to resist...

...Even in the weakest of the three plays I saw, The Days of the Commune, the banal proletarian figures acquire a stage life of a sort as Frenchmen, partly owing to the actors' psychological working-up of their roles, partly from a sense of relieving mischief that enters the most solemn moments...

...It is the thoroughgoing interpretations of the Ensemble players that command attention, not merely their deft touches...

...Before the backdrop, an enlarged engraving of old Paris, an ouvrier stacks chairs in an impossibly balanced pyramid...

...the two lines of leather shields clash, swords bite, the stage swings back, and the soldiers drop in ceremonious patterns...

...The government of Adolphe Thiers wants to negotiate with Bismarck...

...made Menenius a serious representative of the patricians, rather than a figure of fun...

...Brecht's Coriolanus spares Rome not because of his mother's plea but because he realizes that the city can do without heroes...

...His face is twitched-up into that famous toothy snarl of Gobbels, his lips are black and the rest of his face is made up, surely, with pea soup...

...But such details of physical activity are no more than varnish...

...If its astonishing multiplicity of styles comes directly from Brecht's vision and supervision, an old suspicion of mine, based on his writings, seems to be confirmed: that he was more important and original as a director and theoretician than as a playwright...

...Hence the reduction of Hitler's personality to Arturo Ui...

...In adapting Shakespeare Brecht has cleared up many of the dubious motives of the main characters...

...The turntable whips dizzily around with the Romans and Volscians in stationary confrontation...

...Brecht is saying that, when necessary, force must be used in reply to force...

...Ui woos Betty Dullfeet, the widow of a newspaper owner (Dollfuss of Austria) at her husband's funeral, much as Richard III pays court to Anne after he has murdered her husband and brother...

...From this text with its gawky Gorky-ish naturalism the Ensemble takes a broad jump into the clowning and inanities of Arturo Ui, which shows a portion of a circus tent behind every scene...

...The government is ousted in Paris and replaced by an elected people's assembly, the Commune...

...When he shouts his rising tones keep lifting him on to his toes...

...Commune is set in 1871 during the Prussian attack on Paris...

...The story of the rise of Hitler and his fellow-comedians related in terms of Chicago gangsterdom has little to do with recent history, despite the placards that float down from the flies bearing earnest inscriptions...

...The Ensemble had been frequently and fervently described by British disciples who had ventured into East Berlin...

...After several months of havering the Commune is destroyed because of its reluctance to quash opposition...

...it puts on display at least eight principals who can stand with the finest actors in the world...

...And further, individuals are to be measured by their deeds not by their personal characteristics...

...An actor is judged by his understanding and communication of character...

...At all events, the Ensemble's current directors, Manfred Wekwerth, Joachim Tenschert, and Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, are conducting an enterprise that now sets vertiginously high standards...

...Nevertheless, the staging throws off one felicity after another, more than would be called for, perhaps, if the play itself were stronger-sinewed...

...and "Cai-us-Mar-cius...

...and Martin Florchinger plays both Thiers and Bismarck with what looks like painful accuracy...

...The new ending brought some indignation from London's drama critics...

...On the other hand, the adaptation makes more sense than the original as a Socialist document...

...placed speeches in more appropriate mouths (the discussion of the benefits of war is now a colloquy between two soldiers and not between inconsequential servants...

...This is a gloriously energetic company...

...For example, in the recent production in Central Park Robert Burr's genial, backslapping manner took the sting out of the citizens' grievances against him...

...Another struts about on a stepladder, using it as a pair of stilts...

...At the close of the play, with Coriolanus' murder, the action reverts from oriental dance to the ring of the Nibelungen and Schall submerges under a crush of Volscians, laughing, presumably going first-class to Valhalla...

...and there is another scene (inexplicably omitted from this production) in which Ui as Macbeth is haunted by the blood-flecked ghost of Roma-Roehm-Banquo...

...When Coriolanus and Aufidius (Hilmar Thate) meet in single combat they cannot reach each other with their short swords and finally collapse from exhaustion after a bout of Samurai leaps, grunts, and feints...

...One should not, Brecht said elsewhere, pity the state that has no heroes, but rather envy the state that doesn't need heroes...

...They rehearse each play for from two to seven months, in contrast with the usual period of four weeks (Equity willing) on Broadway and in the West End...

...and otherwise diminished the play's wit and stature...

...To a rising chant of "Au-fid-ius...

...As the hoodlum Roma is gunned down in a garage by Ui, the placard reads, "On the night of June 30th, 1934, Hitler murders his friend Roehm at an inn In addition to the mobster and circus motifs, the play contains certain Shakespearean references...

...President Hindenburg, known as Mayor Dogsborough, serves as Brutus to Ui's demagogic Mark Antony...

...The appearance of the Ensemble at the playhouse that used to be the Old Vic with four productions (The Threepenny Opera, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Vi, The Days of the Commune, and Brecht's adaptation of Coriolanus) has turned the expectations upside-down...

...it ranges from violence and thumping forensics to the niceness of choreography and the limits of farcical abandon...

...The injunction matches the pragmatic messages of his other plays...