THEATRE
Play for yesterday
KENNETH HURREN
What makes a successful con man is his shrewdness in spotting the character flaw that exposes his victim to being gulled, and when the flaw exists on a national scale, the operator is really in business. This observa- tion is doubtless obvious, not to say trite, and much the same has to be said, I'm afraid, of the theme of Carl Zuckmayer's play, The Captain of Kopenick, which has to do with a man named Wilhelm Voigt—a German ex-convict unable to get either a passport or a work permit—who puts on an army officer's uniform he has bought from an old clothes dealer and is immediately ac- cepted as a man of superior importance, respected, fawned upon and obeyed. Voigt has cottoned on to his compatriots' awe of authority, especially uniformed authority, their docility inbred through generations of feudal militarism; and he briskly takes over a passing platoon of soldiers, marches them in- to the town hall at Kopenick, arrests the mayor and expropriates the civic funds.
In every important particular, including the name of the central character, it is a true story. There was a Wilhelm Voigt who did exactly this in 1906. Zuckmayer, writing twenty-five years later, kept the exploit in its Proper period, but the intention was, of course, to satirise an aspect of the German character still threateningly dominant. The barbs drew a little blood, for the Nazis even- tually closed the play; but the brave gesture of the 'thirties• just seems, forty years on. to be exploring yesterday's cliches. It is amiable but aimless; even in its best scene—Voigt's hour of glory in Kopenick—it borrows from, but does not match, Gogol's The Govern- ment Inspector; and in its lethargic trudge to its main point, it is far from improved by the trendy and smirking elaborations of the adapter, John Mortimer, or by the latkish caricatures that the director, Frank Dunlop, encourages in too many of the minor parts in his National Theatre production at the Old Vie, It is nevertheless redeemed by the haun- ting truthfulness of Paul Scofield's per- formance. Even in the pathos of Voigt, a man worn down by the disciplines of prison and the obstructionism of bureaucracy, a stump of blasted oak, despair etched in the lines of his rumpled Auden face, he finds the essential underlay of comedy; and in uniform he astutely avoids the trap, into which a lesser actor would surely have Pitched headlong, of changing the man as well as the shell. Mr Scofield skirts such hazards with the sure-footedness of a moun- tain chamois. It is a marvellous per- f°rmalice; and, having regard to the sur- rounding capers, a bit of a miracle.
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