Sartre's Frantz and Germany
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Sartre's Frantz and Germany The French title of Sartre's drama Les S?©questr?©s d'Altona conveys more graphically than does its English translation, The Condemned...
...and the hints of a peculiar relationship between father and son are left unresolved by a death pact reminiscent of that of Rosmer and Rebecca West...
...But his motives are less interesting than the astonishing, inexplicable fact that he did go into the room and stay there for 13 years...
...It hardly seems to matter by the close of the third act that Frantz, as he says, "longed for the death of my country and I locked myself up so as not to witness its resurrection," when he has told us earlier that he had locked himself up because he did not wish to witness Germany's destruction...
...his concern is with the effects of the historic "recovery" on the German conscience...
...People picked their way across the debris that had replaced front gardens and sidewalks...
...Sartre slackens his grip both on the father and on Frantz...
...The production staff credits in the program are replete with assistants and consultants, but do not include a Casting Director-not even an Assistant Casting Director...
...The focal character of Altona is Frantz, the 37-year-old heir to the Gerlach shipbuilding empire, fortune, and estate...
...The second son, Werner, is the least rewarding role in the play, but Edward Winter manages to lend it passion as well as substance...
...And he has developed the mannerism of constantly pointing away from himself as though to fix an unnamed blame elsewhere...
...Above ground level, most buildings were damaged, if they were not destroyed altogether...
...But instead of saying "This is how it was" to whatever instrument exists in 10 centuries to convert his tapes into sounds and meanings, Frantz is actually saying to us, "This is how it had to be because of the sort of defective people we were...
...Sartre's characters, though, fabricate their emotions in order to describe them: They make their emotions conform to their wills...
...His sister, Leni, echoing Frantz at the end of the play, makes her choice by taking up his vigil in the room after he has made his third choice, a negative one: He opts out of life by driving off with his father to commit suicide in a sports car...
...Carolyn Coates as Johanna has more the air of a condescending dowager than of a beguiling former movie star...
...Sartre, however, was not turning his whole attention from France to Germany...
...Hamburg at both ends of that decade is the symbol of Sartre's play...
...His disposition and composition of the actors, his use of Martin Aronstein's lighting and Robin Wagner's two sets-a decorous living room with muted suggestions of gold in the furniture, and a platform on stilts with claw-like beams for the upstairs room-are all impeccable...
...BLAU'S PHYSICAL SHAPING of the play is selfless...
...They construct themselves out of ideas, even if they do it rather well...
...When a man does nothing he always thinks he's responsible for everything...
...It is also a prophetic prelude to the plays being written today about guilt, and lesser misgivings, by a new generation of German dramatists...
...He has shut himself off from his family and the world in an upstairs room where, for 13 years, he has declaimed oracularly, or perhaps only insanely, into a tape recorder in order to bear witness for the 20th Century...
...it plays tedious games with the crab metaphor too many times, and it frequently shades off into stubbornly hidden meanings...
...the play's manner-but never its matter -strikes us as dated coming at a time when motivation in the drama seems cheap, if not futile, unless it has ironic undertones...
...but in an essay written in 1946 Sartre saw as his literary forebear Corneille, who "shows will at the very core of passion" and "gives us back man in all his complexity, in his complete reality...
...For anyone who remembers Hamburg and its environs after World War II the play has poignant associations...
...To the father George Coulouris brings clear diction and cooperative playing, but he is temperamentally unable to suggest the unsettled, nearly unbalanced, grandeur that Frantz has inherited from him, nor to match the Teutonic, monarchic interpretation given in the original French production by Fernand Ledoux...
...When I saw Altona in Paris in 1959 the critics and the audience immediately spotted both its bearing upon the Algerian torture scandals (inflamed by the publication of Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber's Lieutenant in Algeria and Henri Alleg's The Question) and the play's derivation from Sartre's earlier work, Morts Sans Sepulture, which was about the French Resistance and had first been performed in 1946...
...The Cornelian nature of the dialogue becomes more evident as one listens to the characters coming to various conclusions about the sort of people they are...
...Altona, nevertheless, is a large play with glaring faults and manifest virtues...
...Thus, the middle and the end of the play are the disentangling of Frantz's motives for sequestering himself in the room...
...In Sartre, as in Corneille, the hero can release himself from fate by making choices that Sartre calls "existential,' choices that enable him to assert his freedom, if only temporarily...
...I shall give up my illusions, when I love you more than my lies, and when you love me in spite of my truth...
...they opened doors into living rooms that looked like brick-fallen caves...
...I'm afraid of despising you...
...He addresses himself to the 30th Century and its inhabitants, whom he sees as an audience of crabs (man's successors) lying in wait above his ceiling...
...The explanations of Frantz's act, the good and bad reasons alike, diminish the act itself...
...They talk about their loves and hates at great length...
...But these are relatively unimportant...
...He has a febrile presence, a tenseness of stance and startled, hunted swiftness of movement that compellingly fit the role of a man who is trying to talk himself into either a state of madness or a set of convictions...
...Altona is a postlude to those plays by Sartre, Camus, and others that kept fingering the wounds inflicted on French pride by The Fall in 1940...
...he never tries to steal it from the author...
...He can crumple to the floor or fling to his feet in an instant, strut out a convincing goose step, sweep his arms about with a theatrical verve that never seems unduly calculated, but is always calculated enough to be in character...
...In Greek drama man is doomed to resist the gods unavailingly, and to salvage some tatter of nobility from the force of the struggle itself...
...If the stage rights had not been sewn up (and traduced) by Hollywood we might have seen it six years ago when we could have applauded its virtues and what were then novelties more freely...
...we brought horror on ourselves, and perhaps worse-total extinction, even-is in store for us.' The fatalistic tone is ostensibly Greek...
...Corneille's characters behave under the pressure of their feelings, in accordance with what they inevitably are...
...From this ruin Hamburg grew back within a decade into Germany's leading port and West Germany into the most prosperous country in Europe...
...Fortunately, the production at the Vivian Beaumont (Lincoln Center) is a sincere gesture of devotion and partial restoration by the director, Herbert Blau...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Sartre's Frantz and Germany The French title of Sartre's drama Les S?©questr?©s d'Altona conveys more graphically than does its English translation, The Condemned of Altona, the isolation of the rich and aristocratic-one might say, imperial-Von Gerlach family in their mansion on the outskirts of Hamburg...
...At the same time, they broaden the play's scope by illustrating Sartre's sub-thesis that postwar Germany is a classic example of the loser who wins...
...these confusions of love and hatred have to be mentioned repeatedly because they are never satisfactorily demonstrated...
...The cityscape was all rubble...
...The dialogue, too, willfully refuses to follow through on its argument in places...
...But in making this statement the play becomes plotty...
...In Altona Frantz has made one choice while with the German Army in Russia...
...He felt then that his mind was under the dominion of his father's and he found his moment of independence by torturing two Russian prisoners and so taking a measure of power into his own hands...
...Approaching it in the summer, one could smell the unburied bodies beneath the wreckage...
...If they had not existed, one suspects, it would have been necessary for them to invent themselves...
...It is in the casting of the two women, Frantz's sister-in-law, Johanna, who loves him, and his sister, Leni, who loves him incestuously, that Blau has most gravely limited himself...
...For the part of Frantz he has picked Tom Rosqui, who distinguished himself as Barere in Danton's Death...
...Priscilla Pointer's voice and walk might qualify her for presenting the intellectual girl who has once and for all taken off her glasses, but she cannot produce, much less seem to contain, the selfinjurious anger of Leni-the role itself is, I admit, bewildering to read even in the different, but not dramatically different, translation (Vintage, $1.45) by Sylvia and George Leeson...
...The art of a director depends almost entirely on his skill in casting, and in this production Blau is accountable for a very mixed bag of performances...
...At this point Sartre has, I think, misconstrued Corneille or, at least, failed to pursue him...
...And it is not exactly enlivened by the stage Irish in the translation by Justin O'Brien (I'll not and you'll not for I won't and you won't), nor by such grammatical exercises as "On whom were you spying...
...Like the other plays given so far this season at Lincoln Center, Altona will require some drastic revision in the casting if it is to remain in the repertory as it should...
...He made his second choice when he elected to live in that single room...
...In much the same way the father, who appears in the first act to be a man of some magnitude, an empire-builder who has collaborated with the Nazis because he doesn't give a damn for the world, dwindles into a plot wheel...
...Rosqui makes a strong centerpiece for the play...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
