Anti-Brecht , Wozzeck and Leonce und Lena. By Georg BUchner.
(Sadler's Wells.) 4acts —It's the Geography that Counts. By Raymond Bowers. (St. James's.)—Six Months' Grace.
By Robert Morley and Dundas Hamilton.
(Phcenix.)
IT is almost fruitless for me to urge you to go and see the company from the Kurfilrstendamm Theatre of West Berlin now visiting Sadler's Wells, for their season ends with the week. This is a cruel deprivation, but if they return (and someone must certainly persuade them to) they are quite as well worth a visit as their rivals the Berliner Ensemble were when they were here last year—in fact even more so.
This may seem a large conclusion to make on the strength of one evening's performance; par- ticularly, it might be added, considering the nature of Bilchner's plays which were the material of it. Leonce und Lena is a comedy, as. romantic as a Schubert song but full of metaphysics and satire, about the revolt of two young lovers from the stifling atmosphere of a small German court; Wozzeck, as every opera-goer knows (and for some reason likes to recount), is a tragic study in morbid psychology whose hero is a melancholy barber driven by imagination, jealousy and hallucination brought on by a villainous doctor, to murder his mistress. These, you may say, are ideal materials for a kind cf exotic theatre which might look sickly in less heavily mulched soil.
Consider then. Oscar Fritz Schuh's production bears a good deal of superficial resemblance- to the Brechtian pattern as we saw it. There is the same spareness, almost sparseness, of the sets; the same chic, stylised furniture; the same con- slant harping on the fact that we are in a theatre, not a house of illusions—ropes and scene-shifters are much in evidence. One is forced to realise, of course, though it has been very often forgotten recently, that this kind of technique was not a patent of Brecht's; it is the common inheritance of the German theatre from the experiments and discoveries of the Twenties, experiments of which the English theatre never took much notice. What principally put off English producers then, I imagine, was that this kind of production seemed unsuitable to the English style of acting which was, and probably is, too deeply established in its naturalistic ways to be easily dragooned into a stylised, almost balletic self-negation.
Brecht took over these ideas, adapting and extending them to suit his own philosophy, and in spite of all the shouting I doubt whether he will ever have any real influence over here simply because, in the process, he made them even less assimilable than ever.
The Kurfiirstendamm's performance fascinates because it represents a quite different use of the same technique and one which might with luck have more lasting effects in this country. That is because it solves the problem of combining sym- bolism with realism, of playing a puppet show with live characters. The warm naturalistic acting of the whole company, in particular of Bruno Dallansky as Wozzeck and Ida Krottendorf as his mistress, gains immeasurably from its cold, strange setting, and Biichner's sad, bewildered, fevered hero becomes truly exemplary and tragic. This is not an alienation effect but an identifica- tion effect, identification with alien, silhouette figures who suddenly take life. Anyone who has seen Petrushka knows that this is a shattering business.
In celebration of the summer doldrums we have It's the Geography that Counts and Six Months' Grace. The first is a hard-working, cerebral how- dunnit; enjoyable if you concentrate. The second is a comic vehicle for Yvonne Arnaud, who rides it like an aristocrat on a tumbril; tolerable if you don't concentrate.
DAVID WATT
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