On Stage

...Moved by Homiburg's magnanimity, Natalie conspires with old Colonel Kottwitz and Count Hohenzollern, the Prince's friends and brothers-at-arms, to save him...

...And Kirkup either misunderstands or simply takes the poignancy and bite out of Kleist's audacious imagery...

...Not since the Garden of Eden has an apple so betrayed an author's purpose...

...Will he perhaps even get Tatyana, who seems to undergo a reversal...

...His diction is sloppy as well: "Golz, you are the captain of the guard" emerges as "Goat, you are the captain of the herd...

...Recognition and remuneration might have helped...

...And that it was Goethe who misproduced or refused to produce the plays submitted to him "on the knees of my heart," as Kleist put it, seems to me one of those monstrous injustices genius is so good at meting out to fellow genius...

...The supporting cast is feeble or weaker: George Morfogen turns Count Hohenzollern into a little Bronx tailor, and Roger DeKoven's Colonel Kottwitz is indistinguishable from the old bum he played in his last Chelsea appearance...

...Whatever the case, the Duke-Claudio relationship strikes me as markedly similar to the Elector-Homburg one, and both plays, equally dark in tone, concern salvation worked out partly through resignation, partly through determination to do right were one given a second chance, and partly through the law's recognition of its own arbitrariness...

...On a small stage, with a decimated cast, modest costumes and sets that are merely suggestive slide projections, the Prince looks too big and what he is up against too small...

...then he proceeded, on his own, to study philosophy and literature, and to write in one short decade some of Germany's most remarkable plays, novellas and essays...

...thus the imprisoned Prince plays ball with an apple and, when Hohenzollern visits, indulges in a bit of baseball practice...

...in Dresden, for a while, he seemed to be headed for dramatic recognition...

...Kalfin also feels obliged to invent business for his actors...

...at Wannsee near Potsdam, on November 21, 1811, Kleist first shot Henriette Vogel, then himself...

...The Elector, apparently moved, tears up the death warrant...

...Larry Gates makes an acceptable alienist, but the others are either wan or, like Ruth Ford, Felicia Montealegre and especially Paul Suarer, pure ham...

...Armed rebellion is threatened...

...The highly dramatic three-part progression has been reduced to two, the second line is a clumsy hexameter, "proudly" is a platitude, and the contraction "it's" is inappropriate...

...Kleist made a suicide pact with an incurably ill and romantically overheated young matron...

...Thus (I translate literally), "Who this day bears his head still on his shoulders,/By tomorrow hangs it trembling on his body,/And the day after it lies beside his heels" becomes in Kirku-pese, "One day/A man can bear his head up proudly on his should-ers:/And the next day it's lying at his feet...

...At the time, Kerzhentsev was playing Hamlet...

...Much interpretation and reinter-pretation has been lavished on this play that, unlike other Kleistian works, leads not to tragedy but to reconciliation...

...Tatyana, the woman in the case, was Gertrude...

...He is allowed to stage and perform in an autobiographical play there in the hope that this will help him comprehend the events surrounding what he believes to have been his fatal stabbing of a fellow actor and successful rival in love...

...Kevin McCarthy is a rather too amiable and lackluster Savelyov, while Maria Schell as Tatyana, though a competent actress, keeps making love to the audience: She laughs too much, suffers too glibly, smiles too adorably, and becomes a veritable Teutonic Helen Hayes...

...her advice must have been unpersuasive for the movement is pretty unstylish...

...Instead it is a re-enactment of the opening vision: The laurel wreath Homburg dreamily wound for himself is intertwined with the Elector's gold chain and, symbolically, with Natalie's hand in marriage...

...Patricia Elliott, an agreeable actress in undemanding roles, is no Natalie...

...Petersburg...

...she is neither young and beautiful enough, nor endowed with nobility of bearing and emotional depth...

...Actually, it is no dream but a little game his uncle, the Elector of Brandenburg, and Princess Natalie, the titular head of his regiment, are playing with him...

...The game seems to be played for puny stakes...

...Bad enough to be physically restrained in Czechoslovakia by refusal of a travel visa...

...Chihuahua would have looked bad in the calendar...

...and the stage sword that killed Polonius was, it seems, a real sword...

...K. Lype O'Dell, who comes nearer the mark as the Elector, conveying some force as well as thoughtfulness...

...as it is, Kleist, like Biichner, died without ever seeing one of his plays performed...

...It is, to begin with, a shoestring production of a play that calls for courtly ceremonial and military panoply: All those minor characters and extras, those costumes and trappings, are needed to convey the awesome power of state, law, hierarchic order-and, conversely, the fragility of the individual pitting himself against them...

...We are also meant to be in suspense about the outcome: Will the hero be declared sane and have to face another trial...

...Because a dream, or quasi-dream, figures importantly in the action, he asked a Jungian analyst, Erlo Van Wavcren, to serve as special consultant to the production...

...In one scene that requires her to cry and rejoice in rapid succession, her anguished weeping is a ludicrous grimace and her jubilation a simpleton's flaccid grin...

...In the Chelsea production, the Prince is Frank Langella...

...These, however, are somewhat contradictory, and certainly susceptible of divergent interpretations...

...exclaims the Prince about the past turbulence-and, fortified, he calls on one and all to follow him in tomorrow's renewed attack on the Swedes...

...but then there are things in the play that contradict even this -rather boring-possibility...

...Distracted by his new-found love for Natalie, he does not listen carefully to the Elector's battle plan for a forthcoming engagement with the Swedish invaders...

...The Chelsea rendition, alas, besides opting for a relatively narrow and eccentric reading, is generally unfortunate...

...There was a reprieve...

...how much worse to be intellectually sequestered from what goes on in the free world, so that you write as if Pirandello, Giraudoux and Anouilh were the reigning dramatists and concoct a pale pastiche of their manner...

...Unlike the romantics, he stood for measure, clarity, order...

...Laurence Luckinbill, as Kerzhentsev, mostly blinks a lot and looks like a smug baby...

...But the defeat of Wagram, following upon the failure of Kleist's last publishing venture, the dispersal of his Dresden circle of friends and an ultimate rejection by his family -including his devoted stepsister Ulrike-proved too much...

...Savelyov, his friend and rival, was Polonius...

...but he could not accept rationalistic ultilitarianistn or idealistic self-denial either...

...The play (based on a story by the now passe Leonid Andreyev) concerns Kerzhentsev, an actor confined to a mental institution in turn-of-the-century St...

...The strict Kleistian pentameter is allowed to sprawl into something bordering on free verse...

...that his finest play, The Prince of Homburg, should have been written in his last year, promising even greater things to come, hurts me almost physically...

...Though this insubordinate premature intercession may have been the very thing that won the battle, the Elector's war tribunal condemns the incredulous Prince to death...

...But Herbert Berghofs direction lacks excitement and inventiveness, and his casting is worse...

...Unsuccessful as an editor-journalist, he kept moving from country to country, city to city, driven by poverty and disenchantment...

...That in 1811, at age 34, Kleist should have put a bullet through his head strikes me as an affront...

...he also wildly and aimlessly varies the speed of his speech, often becoming incomprehensible...

...Homburg is, to put it bluntly, redolent with the enigma of human existence, without ever losing the odor and taste of truth and reality...

...Lastly, Robert Kalfin, a generally worthy director, fails here to convey the etiquette-laden compulsions, the epic urgency...

...Robert Kalfin, who has now mounted for his Chelsea Theater Center what is, incredibly, the first professional American production of the work, takes yet another tack...

...And much more is subtracted by the bad acting...

...In his writing, Kleist was always at war with himself...

...Even an autobiographical interpretation has merit: This is a wish-fulfillment in which the spurned but gifted son, Hein-rich von Kleist, gets final recognition from a severe but loving father figure...

...As for the romantic triangle underlying the tale, it is so limply passionless as to make it sublimely unimportant who ends up with whom...

...The crucial mystery is supposed to be whether Kerzhentsev actually killed Savelyov, but-since it soon becomes apparent that Savelyov is right there participating-this seems to be, to put it mildly, unlikely...

...Or insane, and remain confined to the asylum...

...Of course, it is also possible that the whole thing takes place in the hero's mind, that the entire thing is just a piece of phantasmagoria...

...But the Prince himself comes to demand his own execution, asking only that Natalie not be given as a political pawn in marriage to the Swedish king...

...dreams matter, often profoundly, in virtually every work of the romantic imagination...

...The pursuit of glory, and perhaps the desire to impress Natalie, make him lead his cavalry in a charge without awaiting the Elector's orders...

...His works, indeed his very sentences in their often straining syntax, betray a constant combat between classicism and romanticism, between rejection of Kantian idealism for the sake of romantic self-assertion and forswearing such self-indulgence for the sake of some hard-won, self-imposed discipline...

...the dream scene serves, too, to mitigate what would have otherwise been sheer head-strong arbitrariness on Homburg's part, just as the witches' prophecies give some sanction to Macbeth's subsequent bloody actions...

...I AM NOT sufficiently conversant with the state of Kleist criticism to know whether a suggestive rapprochement between Homburg and Measure for Measure has yet been made...

...It is still not enough to add that the play is also a metaphor for the relationship of God and man, because the Elector's mercy remains, in the end, divinely inscrutable...

...Kleist had been a Prussian officer at parental behest...

...This, though, is not a Calderonian life-is-a-dream play...

...There was no helping me on earth,' he wrote Ulrike in a letter dated "on the morning of my death,' and wished her a demise only half as happy as his was about to be...

...James Kirkup's translation, even as revised by Kalfin, won't wash...

...The first consequence of this is a program note by Van Waveren telling us, among other useful things, that having dreamed she would give birth to a large dog, Saint Bernard's mother was delivered of the future saint...

...lacks aristocratic hauteur...

...The young hero sadly loses his nerve and grovels before the Elector's wife and Natalie...

...The Elector, firmly believing law is above the noblest personal impulse, outargues them...

...Good thing she did not dream she would bear a small dog...

...Pleading passionately, Natalie obtains a letter of pardon from the Elector, but it contains a double-edged clause: The Prince must himself declare the verdict unjust for it to be revoked...

...No doubt, the simplistic explication that in the conflict between the state and the individual each must learn to respect the other's needs is insufficient here...

...PAVEL KOHOUT'S Poor Murderer makes me doubly sorry for its author...

...A blind-folded Prince is led to what he thinks is the end...

...Well, yes, the dream matters in the play...

...I almost think Kleist's ultimate purpose was to show on what slender threads hang happy resolutions, how unsoundable are the depths of life...

...A petition is submitted to the Elector and fellow officers, appearing in person, plead eloquently and shrewdly for a pardon...

...playing with a near-total lack of manliness in a performance all popping of eyes and Hopping of the body in boneless curlicues...

...The second consequence is that Kalfin has directed the play so that the dream aspect becomes primary...

...Was it a dream...

...But Kleist was here expressing his hope that life can rise to our visions and expectations, not developing a Jungian theory of dreams...

...Howard Bay's scenery does convey something of Slavic institutional architecture, and Patricia Zipprodt's costumes are nicely tongue-in-cheek...

...When this miscarried, Kleist threw himself passionately into the anti-Napoleonic cause, trying even to reenlist...

...Given the flabbiness of the language, psychology and invention, I wouldn't give a kopek to know, even if the playwright had deigned to shed some of that ambiguity he wraps himself in...

...Worse yet, Kirkup translates the Prince's Lieber to a male friend as a misleading "my love," rather than as the harmless and correct "dear heart" or "my friend...

...What a cast...

...Or somehow be set free...

...Heinrich von Kleist, like Georg Biichner after him, has always been among my greatest loves and losses...

...Indeed, what makes the play so profoundly fascinating is that it refuses to yield up the last mystery of motivation, despite the fact that it supplies absorbing and believable action and a scrupulous accumulation of clues...

...The stage audience, taking turns acting in this confessional exercise, consists of actors from our hero's company who sometimes play themselves and of the doctor who heads the asylum...

...if anything, it is a dream-can-become-life play...

...Jane Staab, as the Elector's wife, holds herself like any contemporary shopgirl...

...granted that English blank verse thrives on a certain looseness, this is downright slatternliness...

...The program lists a Cindia Hupperer as "period movement advisor...

...Even to point out that the Prince must achieve self-recognition, come to terms with his guilt and punishment before he can be reprieved, does not go far enough...

...The Prince of Homburg has the young hero, a somnambulist, perceive as in a dream military glory and the woman he must love...

...the ending is a splendid but gratuitous coup de theatre with an image of the Prince hoisted on the Army's shoulders in triumph, another image of the Prince (a second double) somnam-bulisticailly winding the laurel wreath, and the actor who played Homburg standing stage center thoughtfully taking it all in...

...Natalie's appeals notwithstanding, the Prince's awakened sense of honor forces him to accept the verdict as just...

...We next are meant to wonder whether he is really mad, or merely, like Hamlet, feigning madness, but- since he is a garrulous, self-important dullard-it is unfortunately rather hard to care...

...In what remains the most famous and successful production of the play anywhere, Jean Vilar's for the Theatre National Populaire-first al fresco in Avignon, then in the huge Palais de Chaillot-the principal interpreters were Gerard Philipe, Jeanne Moreau and Vilar himself...