Dynastic Reflections
By Jonathan Kalb
Die Dreigroschenoper
By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Maxim Gorki Theater
Die Wildente
By Henrik Ibsen
Berliner Ensemble
Andromache
By Luk and Peter Perceval (After Racine)
Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz
"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.