GERMANY
A City of the Theatre
SARAH GAINHAM writes: Tilla Durieux was eighty-five on August 18. Has anyone in London ever heard of her? Yet she was the first Eliza Dolittle, in the original production of Shaw's Pygmalion at the Lessing Theatre in Berlin in the autumn of 1913. It was difficult for the 'new realists' to get their plays shown in London, and this was not the only ocdasion when Ibsen and Shaw turned to the supposedly backward Imperial Berlin, where the authoritarian censors were more generous thee the great world of London and Paris, whose stages were filled with the trivialities of societY comedies, now deservedly forgotten. Tilla Durieutt is still playing, still travelling to provjnei0 theatres, still acting everyone who plays with her off the stage. In 1909 she was already experience.d enough to be playing Countess Eboli in Schiller s Don Carlos. One wonders what she felt whe° My Fair Lady opened as a musical in West Berlin with all the glamour of a million-dolltlf Cinderella success-story. She must have laughed' to herself, that sinister chuckle one has so often heard.
She spent the 'emigration 4ime' living dan- gerously in Zagreb and returned afterwards, not to her native city of Vienna, but to Berlin, wherc most of her life has been spent working. Why should an exile return to the ruins of the eit„Y from which she had been shamefully exilall Put in the familiar black-and-white terms, there is no answer. An artist returns to the public that understands and needs him; especiallY writers and actors, who depend on language, are, mutilated if they are cut off from the source 0' their art.
Berlin was, at the turn of the centurY, a city of the theatre and has remained one, iii spite of everything. During the empire, its caPI; tal had no traditional high society to commanc the admiration and imitation of ordinary peoPle; the army, social unifier of a new country still very regionalist in its loyalties (this is one of thc, reasons for latter-day German militarism), We' the object of ribald scorn to the Berlin popt113' tion. The theatre and its figures were the arbiter'
of taste and fashion who rose, to fame and a Popularity that bordered on adoration, from any background by virtue of talent alone. Whatever the state of the rest of society, the stage in Berlin was of the highest :standards and entirely democratic.
It still is, and one may hope that some of the London critics who have found the Berliner Ensemble so admirable will go to the Berlin Pestival this autumn and see the theatre of West Berlin; the language need not put them off any more than it put off Shaw, for they presume to 11.nderstand the subtleties of Brecht while admit- ting to not understanding a word of what goes on on the stage. They will find to their surprise that the theatre in West Berlin has just as high standards and a very much wider repertoire than the showpiece of East Berlin—including the Com- munist-inspired Auschwitz oratorio of Peter Weiss, produced by Erwin Piscator. For all Berlin Is a theatre city and the East-West argument has nothing to do with it.
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