"Kings are not born: they are made by artificial
hallucination," wrote Bernard Shaw. He might have added that the
public needs this hallucination. If government won't provide royalty,
we invent it ourselves in the arena of show business. Show-biz
dynasties are especially useful in the consumerist era because
they foster endlessly diverting pseudo-debates about privileged
position versus real ability, and they generate vital feelings
of communal connection to temper those lonely acts of purchasing
tickets, videos and CDs. Then of course there's the benefit to
the stars: where would Sophia Coppola, Liza Minelli, Michael Douglas
and hundreds of others be today without the public fascination
with dynastic continuance?
In Germany, as I was poignantly reminded
during a recent trip to Berlin, the situation is exactly the same
with one interesting twist: show-biz dynasties flourish there
in an environment where theater is taken much more seriously than
in America. Thus, talent aside, the perception of legitimate inheritance
depends not only on razzle-dazzle and clever PR but also on the
demonstration of at least a few intellectual bona fides. As in
America, German stars tend to work in all media, but the average
German fan possesses a comparatively shocking store of knowledge
about drama--theatrical connoisseurship there is like sports connoisseurship
in America. Thespian claimants therefore face different scrutiny
on the path to coronation.
Johanna Schall's production of Brecht and
Weill's Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera)
at the Gorki Theater is a fascinating case study. Schall is the
granddaughter of Brecht and the daughter of Barbara Brecht-Schall,
who tightly controls the rights to her father's plays in Germany
and who wielded extraordinary control over the Berliner Ensemble
during the last two decades of the GDR. Rumor has it that Johanna
Schall--a good actress who switched to full-time directing in
the mid 1990s--has been positioning herself to take over leadership
of the BE after Claus Peymann, the current Intendant, leaves.
In recent years she has smartly distanced herself from her family,
earning wide critical respect for directing work in Rostock and
elsewhere. Most savvy observers assume that performance rights
for Threepenny (a box office plum for any theater) were
given to the Gorki so that Schall could mount a high-profile Berlin
tryout for the job she really wants. This time it would be hard
to imagine her sticking closer to her family.
The costume designer is her sister, Jenny
Schall. The role of Macheath is played by Pierre Besson, son of
the famous Swiss director Benno Besson, who led the East Berlin
Volksbühne during the 1970s. In the mid 1950s, Benno Besson had
another child with the Berliner Ensemble actress Sabine Thalbach
(the original Katrin in Mother Courage), Katharina Thalbach,
who after her mother's death at age 34 (from a thrombosis) became
a sort of house orphan at the BE under Helene Weigel's tutelage.
In the Gorki Threepenny, Katharina's granddaughter, Nelly
Thalbach, who looks about five, plays "Die kleine Polly." Papa
Peachum (played by Jörg Schüttauf), profiteer of pauperism,
sings the cynical opening "Moritat" number to his sleepy little
girl like a reassuring bedtime story. This child role is Schall's
invention; she thus embellishes the play's theme of venal power
relations with a self-conscious reference to her own circle. She
also quickly advertises her freedom to make the sort of scriptural
changes notoriously forbidden to all other directors.
If this production is indeed a tryout for
the politically sensitive BE job, however, it's an exceedingly
strange one. Schall was evidently determined to give Threepenny
the flavor of biting social criticism but nothing more.
The program contains an intelligent (unsigned) article on celebrity
culture, and the first spoken scene features a droll multi-media
fillip at stardom: as Peachum explains the business of begging
to Filch, a silent-movie-style clip is shown with the adult Polly
(Maria Simon) waving from the center of a vintage movie-studio
logo that reads "J.J. Peachum & Co." The show is replete with
such fleeting diversions: rubber bars on Macheath's jail cell
so he can walk in and out as needed; an undersized sofa that forces
the Peachum family's tensions to a head. Schall has an eye for
the casually ridiculous, and that's just the point. The dominant
flavor of the evening is opera bouffe. The whole thing is crushingly
lighthearted, as if the very idea of taking Brecht's satire of
capitalist greed and corruption more seriously than a cartoon
were beneath consideration.
The sets and costumes are all art-historical
eye-candy from the period of Threepenny's origin. The
furniture, doors, windows, walls and wings are framed in crazy
expressionist diagonals and tastefully distressed to read "underworld,"
in a muted browns, beiges and white (set by Horst Vogelgesang).
The actors wear heavy melodramatic makeup and stylish 1920s period
outfits, also in muted colors but tricked up with silly touches
like a rabbit-eared hat for Mrs. Peachum and a white pith helmet
for Brown. There's a momentary burst of deeper design significance
in the final scene, when the whole cast shows up for Macheath's
hanging in loudly colorful outfits (get it? they wear their bloodthirstiness
proudly, like party clothes), but this irony too is quickly blended
into decidedly unironic razzle-dazzle as Macheath, not to be outdone,
runs off to change into a bright red coat and steals the final
chorus (written for "All") for himself. Grabbing a mic, he sings
"Verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr" like a rock star while a
giant live video of him is projected upstage. The ending is incomprehensible.
Who or what confers his stardom? What happened to the Royal Messenger?
And what does any of it have to do with the prosecution of crimes
("Unrecht") big or small? Most of the audience obviously didn't
care, though. The party was a blast.
Thomas Langhoff's production of Ibsen's
Die Wildente (The Wild Duck) at the Berliner
Ensemble offered what might be regarded as the opposite snapshot
of a dynastic scion in decline rather than on the rise. During
most of the post-Wall period until his dismissal in 2000, Langhoff
was the Intendant of the Deutsches Theater, the classically oriented
jewel among the former GDR's theaters. Thomas's father, Wolfgang
Langhoff, established that theater's reputation during his tenure
as Intendant from 1946-63, promoting Stanislavskian realism against
Brechtian theory and practice. Interestingly enough, Thomas's
brother, Matthias Langhoff, is also a prominent director who built
his early reputation at the Berliner Ensemble in the 1960s. Thomas
Langhoff's prime task as DT Intendant was to define aesthetically
what that theater ought to be in the capital of newly unified
Germany. The half-dozen productions by him that I saw in the 1980s
and 90s were remarkable for their cleverness in turning superb
realistic effects to subtle political uses. (Volker Braun's Übergangsgesellschaft
in 1988 and Hofmannsthal's Der Turm in 1993 come
particularly to mind.) His tenure was contentious, particularly
toward the end, but I appreciated the way he negotiated the disparities
between Western and Eastern taste by investing in honest acting
and intelligent exploration of great texts rather than conceptual
ingenuity.
His production of The Wild Duck,
however, is a textbook example of a still vigorous classic vitiated
by an imposed concept. Langhoff apparently convinced himself that
the concept was mild and therefore harmless: the action is transported
from the 1880s to the present day. The Ekdal home is a low-rent,
student-style loft with unremarkable modern furnishings that look
scavenged or handed down (the dull and inefficient set design
is by Peter Schubert). The characters all dress and speak like
ordinary Germans one might meet on the street, and the photography
equipment the Ekdals use is conspicuously contemporary. The neighbors
Relling and Molvik barge in and out without knocking throughout,
like Fred and Ethel, or Elaine and Kramer; no quaint 19th-century
manners for this crowd. And characters variously amuse themselves
with muzak and pop R&B from a boom box.
The
trouble with all this contemporaneity is that the servile character
of Gina--whose behavior is central to the plot--makes absolutely
no sense as a modern woman. As played here by Ulrike Krumbiegel,
Gina is pretty, poised and clearly predisposed to rise to an indignation
that is unthinkable apart from the legacy of feminism. The very
idea of her putting up with Hjalmar's idiotic paternalistic blustering
and bossing is absurd. Ditto the way she dutifully clears out
of the room with Hedvig, her daughter, whenever the men need to
talk, or cheerfully wipes up Molving's vomit as Hjalmar sits on
his rump. No theory about the comedy or tragicomedy in this play
can paper over this basic contradiction. Any self-respecting woman
like this Gina today--who runs the family business essentially
alone in order to underwrite her muddled husband's daydreams--would
bash Gregers Werle with a tripod if he invaded her home with his
missionary "summons to the ideal."
The strangest part of Langhoff's production,
for me, is that the acting could come off as so strong when the
concept is so misguided. Krumbiegel's range is extraordinary;
she can leap effortlessly between utterly convincing extremes
of joy, fear, wariness, disappointment, opportunism and more without
once touching the terra firma of credible character. Similarly,
Johann Adam Oest's Hjalmar is a comic tour de force; treating
the role as completely spineless, he is free to make it a self-contained
platform for singular displays of morbidly self-absorbed clowning,
fidgeting and mugging. Then there is Christina Drechsler as the
suicidal child Hedvig, a marvel of irresistible earnestness and
charm who is also ultimately in a world of her own. As I walked
out of the BE, I thought of Ellen Terry's notorious advice to
Sir Cedric Hardwicke about how an actor can always trump a playwright:
"My boy, act in your pauses." This Wild Duck was a ringing
medley of pauses.
By
far the most satisfying production I saw in Berlin was one that
recalled dynastic inheritance mainly in its subject matter. Racine's
Andromache is a tight kettle of a tragedy from 1667 in
which unrequited love among survivors of the Trojan War threatens
to reignite that conflict. Orestes loves Helen's daughter Hermione,
who is betrothed to the dead Achilles's son Pyrrhus, who loves
not her but rather Andromache, Hector's widow, his war prisoner.
Pyrrhus has been protecting Andromache and her infant son Astyanax,
heir to the Trojan throne, in the hope of winning her love and
trust, when Orestes arrives with an ultimatum from the Greek leaders
that he either turn over Astyanax or face invasion. Orestes hopes
that Hermione will transfer her affections to him when Pyrrhus
proves intractable, but events take a much messier and bloodier
course when passion gets the better of reason. Luk Perceval, a
Belgian who was recently named house director at the Schaubühne,
has (along with his brother Peter) boiled this five-act drama
down to a rich 55-minute concentrate--part installation art, part
theater of images, part competitive wrestling, part tragedy.
The Perceval brothers' text reduces Racine's
Alexandrines to the most minimal colloquial dialogue, establishing
the situation and the principal characters' essential qualities
with brief matter-of-fact remarks that include epithets like Schlappschwanz
(limp dick) and Hosenscheisser (one who shits his pants)
and outbursts like "You're perverse. You turn love over and fuck
it in the ass." Taken alone, this text would be trivial, a shallow
digest of Racine, but in the context of Perceval's remarkable
staging it becomes a perfect informal foil for physical formality.
A cylindrical plastic curtain squeaks round
on a high ceiling track to reveal Hermione, Pyrrhus, Andromache,
Orestes and Orestes's friend Pylades in frozen poses atop a plinth
apparently made of thick metal plates, about six feet high and
fifteen feet wide, surrounded at its base by a sea of broken glass
and thousands of bottles, broken and intact (stage design by Annette
Kurz). A listless clinking sound turns out to be Hermione (Yvon
Jansen), in a low-cut dress, leaning steeply over the side and
scraping a bottle against the metal, presently smashing it. She
then lunges with all her strength at the man beside her (Pyrrhus,
played by Mark Waschke), who, like the other men, is shirtless
above a blue floor-length skirt. Muscles rippling, their heavy
breathing amplified loudly by head mics, these two wrestle each
other for ten minutes, to a tense and sweaty stalemate.
This is Perceval's powerful reinvention
of Racine's claustrophobic neoclassicism. The Perceval characters
are not rationally passionate disputants in some idealized space
of abstract reason but rather physically brazen denizens of a
sensually supercharged purgatory where they are doomed to play
out their passions to the hilt, over and over. That they may be
dead hardly lessens their immediacy as the audience relishes the
hot, straining bodies played off against frozen sculptural poses.
There are also fascinating ambiguities born of uncertainty over
which words whispered into the head mics (and heard only from
the wings) are meant for whom. Hermione, speaking "privately"
to Andromache, drapes herself across Pyrrhus and then turns to
scream silently into Orestes's belly. A string of "I love you's"
has no clear addressees since during it no character looks at
the person he or she loves. Jagged bottle shards are held tensely
against bare skin on backs, breasts and throats. It's impossible
to avert one's eyes.
Meanwhile,
Andromache--played by Jutta Lampe, a Schaubühne star from the
Peter Stein era who is making her long-awaited return to this
theater--sits motionless to the side in a brown knit dress that
extends a yard below her feet. She looks vaguely like a Greek
Fate and listens closely the entire time with mostly neutral but
occasionally sympathetic expressions. She is utterly collected
and impassive, rarely looking at the others, her self-possession
clearly due to her foreknowledge that she need only bide her time
and let the drama take its course, since her character comes out
on top every time. It's a wonderful but surprising performance
for Lampe, a consummate actor's actor whose towering and expansive
portrayals as Phaedre and Athena are legendary at this theater.
Here she sits with eyes closed and hands behind her back during
the play's culminating violence (all reported, not enacted), fiddling
with her fingers as the curtain squeaks round to end the play.
One of the greatest living actresses of the German-speaking stage
returns triumphantly to Berlin in order, well, not to act!
She was happy to serve Perceval's fine idea. Now there's a grand
tribute to an exciting new theatrical leader and fresh blood he
brings to the art.
Travelers Note: The Schaubühne
Andromache is scheduled to play at the Edinburgh International
Festival from August 16-18, 2004.
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