June 1986
| From the left: Sean Baker, Pauline Moran, Clive Merrison, Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw in the RSC's production of Mephisto directed by Adrian Noble at the Barbican. |
HERE'S a fair
amount of quotation from The Cherry Orchard in Mephisto both
overt and covert. The trees though are elms, and they have to be cut down
because they are diseased rather than that Lopakhin has bought the estate.
And yet. being set in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it is Hitler who has
bought--indeed. bought and sold--the cherry orchard, and the privileged
old order giveth way to the hideous new.
Paradoxically.
it is only when the wise doctor is invoked or echoed that Timberlake Wertenbaker's low-keyed
translation of Ariane Mnouchkine's 1979 stage dramatisation of Klaus Mann's 1936 novel
focuses upon the lives of individual flesh-and-blood beings. The actors
suddenly seem to relish having your actual lines to speak emotions to express,
characters to reveal rather than most of the long evening is spent listening
to vapid political attitudinising--being identikit cyphers muttering about
"the betrayal of the revolution" and the like. It is depressing
that, in our century, so few playwrights have found a stage language to
explore the issues and complexities of politics without resorting to the
unimaginative drabness and cliches of political pamphleteering.The episodic chronicle
reports upon the fortunes of a Hamburg theatre company whose members' lives,
professionally and personally, are shattered by the rise to power of the
Nazis. Thus the theatrical metaphor of Germany as cherry orchard is apt.
Bizarrely, in spite of Adrian Noble's slow, uninventive (his favourite ping
pony ball noses are back), unfluid production being centred visually around
two stages each upon the gigantic hollow drum of the Barbican stage. What is lacking is theatrical life and vitality.
Instead, in this Ladbroke's sponsored production, we have the RSC at its
most solemn. lecturing the audience on events in Germany as if we somehow
missed the news.Certainly John
Gunter's set dominates, and hackneyed theatre metaphors--tabs, footlights,
spots, music, applause, the lot--are energetically worked but because the
historical ground covered is so immense, the characters whose lives followed
so numerous the life and bad times of no individual concerns us sufficiently
for us to become involved. The 21 scenes range in time from November 1923
to the same month 1933. They take place on stage of the Hamburg theatre,
in the dressing room, the Peppermill satirical cabaret established by some
of the more adventurous actors, a restaurant, the verandah of Thomas Bruckner's
house (with the elms behind), an enormous rust red bridge from which the
trains to Berlin, carrying Jews to their fate, are watched, and--grandest
of all the Berlin opera house where the sour apotheosis of the company's
leading actor, Hendrik Höfgen, becomes complete. But it is all hollow.
The Marxist sweep of history may be there but it is neither given dramatic
life nor made new. Alan Rickman attempts to breathe life into Höfgen.
based on the actor Gustaf
Grundgens (he committed suicide in 1963), who
collaborated with the Nazis to sustain and increase his artistic ambition.
But it is a flat performance exuding no inner understanding or commitment
to the part. Whereas in the film, [Istvan
Szabo's1981 movie] Höfgen dominates the action.
In the play large chunks of the evening pass without his being involved,
which makes it hard for Mr Rickman. Clive Merrison brings a dinner
party to dramatic life; Paul Spence registers strongly as a young actor
with fervent Nazi sympathies who fails to be broken by Höfgen. Clive
Russell is powerful and resilient as Otto, a communist supporter uninclined
to be disillusioned. Fiona Shaw is more muted than usual as Erika, wife
of Höfgen and sister of Sebastian Bruckner (Sean Baker), our narrator
and, in effect, Klaus Mann, son of Thomas.llona Sekacz's
sonorous music, although it embraces Schubert, is too sweet for the Weill-sound
it would invoke. The best thing about the evening is the programme, edited
by Margaret Gaskin. It's a mine of background information, back to the then
normal standards of RSC programmes of a decade ago.
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