Presley and Lennon rock traditionalists

Press, 17 November 1987, Page 13

Presley and Lennon rock traditionalists

By

DAVID LEWIS

NZPA-Reuter Vienna Vienna’s most famous theatre is rocking with a new show on Elvis Presley and John Lennon in which the king of rock and roll is played by four women and the Queen of England is portrayed as a foul-mouthed singer. “Nothing of the kind ... had ever been presented within these venerable walls,” the Munich "Sueddeutsche Zeitung” wrote of “Elvis and John.” More accustomed to Schiller, Schnitzler and Shakespeare, the imperial Burgtheater has never before offered either rock music or a work written mostly in a foreign language. “I suppose it is a bit of a cheek,” admits the director and co-writer, Uwe Jens Jensen, who has offended many Vienna theatre-goers since his arrival from West Germany last year. "For the first five minutes the audience can’t believe the traditional home of German literature is doing a show in English. But after 10 minutes they get used to it.” Premiered recently to public if not critical acclaim, the show is subtitled, “Two Scenes of the Artistic Life.” "Elvis” is an often comic biography of Presley — who died in 1977, aged 42 — told in English by an entertainer called Gerry and his Elvis Presley Memorial Players. “John,” mostly in German, covers the life of Lennon (1940-80) before and after the Beatles in a more sober style laced with lavish special effects illustrating hit songs like “Yellow Submarine” and

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” One Englishlanguage scene shows Queen Elizabeth canoodling with a chamberlain in her Buckingham Palace bed before awarding the Beatles the M.B.E. In another scene she literally lets her hair down to lead the Beatles in “Lady Madonna,” a song about a prostitute. Why has Jensen — who says he considers the Beatles are as important as Beethoven — put Presley and Lennon together? A genial 46-year-old with a walrus moustache, he sees Elvis and John as the most important singers, composers and musicians of the 1950 s and 1960 s respectively. “Lots of things in their lives are very different, but lots of things are similar,” he told Reuters in an interview. “Both came from a certain kind of working class, both had problems with success ... and both died.” Presley sank into drugs and obesity and Lennon suffered bouts of extreme depression, says Jensen. Unlike Presley, Lennon became involved in politics and rejected show-biz. "And the differences between them dictated the style. If Elvis Presley was the American comicstrip hero, then John Lennon was the European intellectual, and for that we used a mixture of fiction and documentary,” says Jensen. Why must the Austrian audience accept “Elvis” in English? “The American kind of joking or expression is not really possible in German,” says Jensen. “If I had written ‘Elvis’ in German, I would have written a different play.”

The “John” half of the evening was also written in English, but all but two scenes were translated into German. “I needed the Lennon part to convey specific experiences and emotions, so it was necessary to have it in German so the audience could understand every word,” he says. Foreign and foul language apart, the most shocking aspect of the evening for many is the depiction of Elvis not by a man, but by four different women. “Jensen has castrated the King,” wrote a critic, Wolfgang Hoebel, in the “Seuddeutsche Zeitung.” Jensen says he used women to “put the portrayal in inverted commas,” to make people think. “It would be wrong for Tom Jones or Tony Sheridan to do it,” he said. “If they did, all the audience would do would be measure the imitation.” Conservative Viennese theatre-goers already have many grievances against the Burgtheater chief, Claus Peymann, Jensen, and the actors they brought with them from West Germany last year; over everything from the style of their speech to allegedly antiAustrian plays they have presented. Has Jensen had complaints for portraying the Queen using four letter words? “Not yet..he said. But he would not be worried if he did. He finds Austria “astonishingly” xenophobic and plans to leave next year. The British Embassy in Vienna had no comment on the show.