Shaking up the classics — with the lunatic fringe

Press, 12 June 1984, Page 13

Shaking up the classics — with the lunatic fringe

ELRIC HOOPER,

the artistic director

at the Court Theatre, has returned to Christchurch after a six-month leave to study theatre in Europe and the United States. During his travels he wrote a series of articles for “The Press” on his impressions of the theatre in Sydney, Athens, Rome and London. In the final three articles he writes on Germany and Austria today, France on Wednesday, and New York and San Francisco on Thursday.

Oedipus in horned-rimmed spectacles, robbers on wardrobes, and Spanish tragic heroines in print dresses from the second-hand stall: these are some of the surprises in store for the unwary Anglo-Saxon visitor to the West German theatre. The thing that has always been evident to me on my various visits to Germany is the fundamentally different place the theatre occupies in city life there from England, America, or here. Theatres, opera, ballet companies, and orchestras are as fundamental to civic life as gas works or water refining plants. Also, Germany has inherited a long tradition of royal and aristocratic patronage of the performing arts such as has never existed in the Anglo-Saxon world. This patronage is maintained in huge subsidies from the federal, state and city governments. The boxoffice in most cases provides less than a third of the required income. Almost the exact reverse is true for subsidised theatres in New Zealand, which have to find by far the larger proportion of these funds from direct ticket sales. The state theatres of Germany are, therefore, released from the pressures of survival. Although the results of this for art are on the whole beneficial, there are some aspects that are not so good. This liberty allows directors to take risks, to be daring in a way that is not always possible elsewhere. For example, I saw a production of an American play by Jane Bowles, “In the Summerhouse,” in which the picture-frame stage was enclosed by four giant black screens — two at the sides.

one top and one bottom. As the play progressed, the screens closed in like an iris of a camera to frame the speakers. At one point, for example, the cast was sunbathing, and the upper screen came down to within a metre of the stage to frame the prostrate figures. This was a brilliant, if rather limited, way of solving one of the great problems of theatre direction, the pin-point-ing of attention to a specific area on a giant stage. I saw several other scenic innovations of the same nature in West Germany, though not always as successful. But subsidy can also make theatres arrogant. The theatre artists, because they do not always have that most true of sounding boards, the box office, can easily disappear up their own imaginations. This is particularly possible in Germany, where one feels the audiences enjoy being insulted and bewildered. Art has to be a little painful, a little sadistic, to be any good.

I sat in Munich among an extemely well dressed, glamorous audience watching Garcia Lorca’s wonderful play, “Yerma,” about a woman’s agony at not being able to have children in a society where child bearing is required. This play, when produced by the Spanish or Brazilians, is harsh, fantastic, full of blood, screaming colour and dark eroticism. In Munich, in the current fashionable style, it was very low key, muttered, decorated in clothes from the flea market, and with a set made from all the rejected flats from the theatre’s old productions.

In its own terms it was of great integrity. One could see what was happening. They were trying to exclude all false glamour, exoticism, - and romantic excess. However, they had thrown the baby out with the bath water. The German audience, in their guilty diamonds, sat dutiful before this very pale sweat. I could see the Spanish trooping out by the thousands if the play were given like this in Spain. What I was witnessing is, in fact, an example of one of the major trends in European theatre over the last few years. Peter Brook stripped “Carmen” down to her essentials in an 80-minute version of Bizet’s opera (with only five characters) in order to show the naked skeleton without romantic or exotic excess. I caught up with the production

in New York. It was interesting and did what it set out to do, but I was not swept away by its pretensions as so many others have been. I just longed for a really first-rate production of the original. Brook merely showed that at heart Bizet was honest. Perhaps the most famous example of this technique of shaking up the classics in recent years was Patrice Chareau’s production of Wagner’s “Ring” at Bayreuth in 1977. He had the gods of Valhalla in nineteenth-century evening dress and made the gigantic myth of the Nordic gods into a commentary on industrial society. Donald Mclntyre, the New Zealand bass, sang Wotan.in this version. The production caused a riot but also won many devotees, including Dr Oswald Bauer, who is a world authority on Wagner production

and who showed me round Bayreuth, talking about the way things were going in Germany. The cleansing effects of this approach cannot be denied. So many of the great works in our repertoire have the barnacles of tradition all over them and need a good scraping down. However, as with most fashionable theories, the lunatics who take it to excess seem to get most attention. In Cologne, I saw the “Oedipus of Sophocles.” The king wore a long army overcoat and large horned-rimmed spectacles. His mother/wife Jocasta wore a lace nightie and a rather fleabitten fur coat. I’m still not awfully certain why. Underneath all this, the acting was rather good. In Nuremberg, I saw the play that inaugurated the romantic movement in the German theatre in 1782, Schiller’s “The Robbers” done as a punk opera. The set was a semicircle of pillars from St Peter’s in Rome, the space in front being filled with old wardrobes, pianos, commodes, and tables as in a second-hand furniture shop. The robbers of the play dressed rather like members of the 1.R.A., or punk rockers of five years ago, slumped on to a dining-room table at the front of the stage after robbing the bishop. I could see that the set symbolised the stages of European civilisation from aristocratic through bourgeois to modern anarchical democracy, but apart from that, and the incidental amusement, I really couldn’t see why the director had lumbered these very good actors with this obstacle course.

Also, the theatre was full of adolescent school children, giggling and eating as they do the world over when they are herded to culture. Schiller’s “Robbers,” the “Macbeth” of German literature, is no doubt perennially on the examination syllabuses. They were there doing their duty. I felt it a pity that their first exposure to what is undoubtedly a very powerful work should be in such a quirky and idiosyncratic production. However, they were certainly not uncritical of the greater absurdities. Their derisive laughter, as the evil brother dragged the heroine from the piano by her hair, showed that they knew what was Schiller and what was shallow. Common sense prevailed. Too often the protests against such lunatic innovations are against offence to hallowed tradition or bourgeois morality. That sort of protest merely strengthens the arrogant artist’s hand. Mahler said, “Tradition is laziness,” meaning the classics have to be constantly re-invented. He was right. But protests in the cause of plain common sense are rarer in Germany. These adolescent kids, still unbrainwashed, like the child in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, were responding with clear vision. It was a relief to get to conventional old Vienna where they know what’s what. “Cats” was playing to sell-out business in the theatre where “Fidelio,” “The Magic Flute,” and “The Merry Widow” were first performed, and the Burgtheater, the great theatre of Vienna, had Pinter and Stoppard in the repertoire. But somehow, it wasn’t as exciting.