Theatre
Value codes
Peter Jenkins
Undiscovered Country (Olivier) On this occasion there is no faulting the literary judgement of the National Theatre. Here is a major work of the 20th century, never before performed in Britain, which so chimes with the spirit of the times that it could have been commissioned yesterday. To be sure, the wit of Tom Stoppard, who is credited with more than a translation of Arthur Schnitzler's original, , is audible, but Undiscovered Country achieves simultanously the status of a fin de siecle period piece and an exploration of human behaviour which is utterly modern and contemporary.
The play was first performed in 1911 and in its spirit anticipates the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here is the Vienna in which they were shortly to joke 'The situation is hopeless but not serious', a line which Schnitzler could well have written himself. Friedrich Hefreiter is the wealthy manufacturer of incandescent light bulbs who is systematically unfaithful to his wife in accordance with the upper-class mores of the times which 'made adultery not merely permissable but compulsory. Genia, his elegant wife, declines an affair with a romantic young concert pianist who also a friend of her husband. He shoots himself after playing some billiards and playing some Chopin. His death is tragic but not serious. That is until Friedrich (John Wood), in a brilliantly written and acted scene with Genia (Dorothy Tutin), suggests that her fidelity, which he forces her to confess, was the cause of the death.
His allegation, and the specious and decadent reasoning which inspire it, are at the moral heart of the play. When Friedrich takes off for the Tyrol with a smart party in order to engage in further conquests of both a sexual and a mountaineering kind, Genia — as an act of expiation, one feels — takes a young naval lieutenant for her lover. Friedrich, in the second stunningly effective scene of the play, challenges him to a duel, the dramatic outcome of which I shall not reveal. In so doing he conforms as unthinkingly, and with the same moral irresponsibility, to the code of honour which persisted in the Vienna of that time as he had doneg earlier, in his own behaviour and the virtual incitement of his wife, to the casual code of dishonour which inspired its sexual mores.
The intricacy of plot, subtlety of characterisation and lightness of dramatic touch whichgo into Schnitzler's construction of an elaborate multi-layered play around these two key incidents cannot be conveyed in a short review. Act Three, which takes place in the lobby of the Lake Vols Hotel, in which the imagery of mountaineering and sexual conquest is interwoven with the theme of human fulfilment and the exploration of the 'undiscovered country of the soul', says more than the whole of Heartbreak House about the character of decadence.
Undiscovered Country is rich with jokes and fancies and the underlying blackness of its meaning is achieved by drawing the audience into the elegant and brittle immoralism of the world and people it creates so as, in the end, to shock us more deeply about ourselves. There is no need to seek analogies between our own times and Vienna on the eve of war and imperial collapse in order to appreciate the universality of the Hefreiters amid their circle.
But Schnitzler is brilliantly evocative of the decadent spirit and manners of that Vienna and as we, with keen interest, examine his pathology we are bound to look for clues. The source of the tragedy, perhaps, is the persistence of a code of values and of conduct among the dominant class which is singularly inappropriate for the needs of a society obliged to adapt and change. Schnitzler himself makes no such heavy-handed point, but it is the genius of this frothy and entertaining play that it should go so deep and so near the knuckle.
Peter Wood's direction elicits perfectly matched performances from John Wood, happily returned from New York, and Dorothy Tutin. Wood's mannerist style of acting is exactly what is needed here and he is one of the few who can combine showi ness with serious grasp. His challenge to the duel is made while he mops the sweat of tennis singles from his brow and then elaborately towels the handle of his racquet as if it were an offensive weapon. He gets away with this sort of thing triumphantly. Genia has to be the sensitive one among them, beautiful and morally intact at the beginning, so that there can be tragic passion in her declaration at the end that she has become like all the others. Tutin achieved exactly this counterpoint in mood and style to Wood's extrovert performance.
The cast is on a scale which only the subsidised theatre can handle, but is immensely rich in good supporting roles. The National Theatre has a limitless supply of first-class performers for such occasions and at least half a dozen performances deserve special mentions. John Harding personified the idle spirit of the times as a tennis-possessed chinless wonder. Emma Piper achieved the difficult task of making a real character out of a pretty, love-struck 20 year old. And Michael Bryant as the famous mountaineer turned hotel keeper and famous seducer would be reason enough alone for ensuring to see this most successful and rewarding National Theatre production in a long while.
Previous page
