Playwright Of Many Interests

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30534, 1 September 1964, Page 13

Playwright Of Many Interests

[By a special correspondent of “The Times." Reprinted by arrangement] Since he is the most international dramatist in that generally international enterprise, the theatre, Peter Weiss necessarily has a stake in London, as in many other cities. Thirty years ago, he studied photography at the London Polytechnic—an activity only remotely related to his present return as author of the play opening tomorrow at the Aldwych, “The Persecution and Murder of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.”

This is that most talked-of play of the year, which was first performed in West Berlin and-will be produced in New York by Peter Brook, in France by Roger Planchon, and in Sweden probably by Ingmar Bergman. Productions have also been arranged for Brussels and The Hague and for the national theatres of Warsaw and Prague. The dramatist is himself quite as international as his play. Because he writes in German, he has often been called on to explain that he is not and never has been a German: “The German language is only an instrument for me.” He is a former citizen of Czechoslovakia who is now a Swedish subject Born in 1916 in Nowa Wes, near Berlin, of a Czech father and a Swiss mother, he lived in Bremen and later in Berlin but left Germany in 1934 to spend two years in London and two years in Prague. “I spent the worst years of my life in Prague, years without hope.” More Hopeful The next year in Switzerland was more hopeful, for he was visiting the aged Hermann Hesse, whom he calls “the god of my adolescence”, -the first person to encourage him as a writer. Since 1939 he has lived in Stockholm, but it is obvious that this gentle, serious man is at home almost anywhere. He prefers the “human freedom” of Scandinavia, but he could conceivably settle in London or Paris. His pretty, blonde, blueeyed wife. Gunilla Palm-' istierna-Weiss, is a ceramicisti j who designed the costumes for I

“Marat” in both Berlin and London. Her personal history makes her another internationalist; she was born in Switzerland and has lived in Holland (in Rotterdam during the bombing) and in Austria. All of these geographical involvements are not mere oddities: they go to support the contention of both the Weisses that nationality no longer has much meaning in the modern world; for them, “nationality has been given up absolutely.” Mr Weiss has long been an important figure in the arts but never before has his work enjoyed the attention that “Marat,” his second fulllength play, has brought him. (Its predecessor, a surrealistic work called “The Insurance,” was written more than 10 years ago and was never performed.) His first ambition was to be a painter, but in response to parental urging, he studied photography instead. He began to study painting when he moved to Prague, and he was, for a time, primarily a painter. Film-making

His surrealistic painting led him into surrealistic filmmaking. Later, he made a number of documentary films —in particular, a full-length film, “The Mirage,” which took a year to make and lost a good deal of money; he describes it as “a poem of a day in the city, a complex film about finding’ a way to exist.” Other documentaries treated social problems—a Danish film about housing and Swedish films about a Swedish Borstal and about vagabonds. He does not paint now, but he still sketches and makes collages. Over the years, this painter-cineaste-dramatist found time to write four books, two of them autobiographical volumes.

“Brecht influenced me most as a dramatist,” he says. “I learnt most from Brecht. I learnt clarity from him, the necessity, of making clear the social question in a play. I learnt from his lightness; he is never heavy, in the psychological German way.” He learnt also from the theatres of his youth, the puppet plays of the German fairs;' that influence is highly visible in “Marat.” “I am interested in the technique of Strindberg’s late plays,” he says, “but I find his usual problems not of so much interest I don’t care who is the father of the child.” He has translated Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” and “Dream Play” into German and has provided the text for an operatic performance ' of the latter play in Kiel. ■ Strindberg impresses him iwith his portrait of “a mad

world and the insanity of life in “The Ghost Sonata” and such narrative works as “Inferno.” Other dramatic influences include Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and specially Antoine Artaud, theorist of the theatre of cruelty. His favourite non-dramatic writers . seem to be Kafka and Henry Miller: “To get out of the Kafka world, Miller was very essential.” “A Marxist Play”

Mr Weiss’s first statement about “Marat” was astonishing to anyone who had seen the Berlin production or the reviews of it: “It is a Marxist play. Marat should be the victor; if de Sade wins the debate, that is bad.” Those reviewers who presumed to interpret the play mostly supposed that its aim was to cut the French Revolution down to size and that the grinning skull of Napoleon (who will be presented differently .in London) indicated the folly of the Revolution. Visitors from the Berliner Ensemble saw the play that way, complained of its . rightwing values, and expressed a preference for a “healthy” Marat. But, to Mr Weiss, all the play’s peculiar circumstances do not prevent Marat from being essentially correct. “Napoleon,” he adds, “represents Stalinism, which lies on the other side of Marat and de Sade sees it.” That still does not discredit Marat. Such confusion as to the play’s meaning must be due in some measure to the Berlin production. Mr Weiss assures me that Peter Brook’s version at the Aldwych is “absolutely different and closer to the original conception.” In Berlin, the madhouse tended to be aesthetic and abstract: at the Aldwych, “the atmosphere of madness is stronger and more dangerous.” This time, Mrs Weiss’s costumes are more realistic, “more used.” Instead of being performed by an orchestra, the music— -a new and more flexible score—will be played on the stage by a few musicians garbed as lunatics. Mr Weiss is now working on a new play, a modern version of “The Divine Comedy.” Inevitably, there are three parts, ironically conceived: the inferno, where “sinners live in this world unpunished;” the Purgatoria, “a very modern world of doubt and mixed values;” the Paradiso, a world of “disaster, difficulty, and no reward.” The dramatist has been getting material for his Paradiso by attending the current Auschwitz trial, “a drama in itself.” In prospect, this “Divine Comedy” sounds like an authentic successor to “Marat”