THEATRE IN GERMANY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 96, 6 April 1934, Page 3

THEATRE IN GERMANY

“Henry IV.” as Hitler Hero PARABLE FOR GERMAN YOUTH German theatre directors are now busy looking for plays that will illustrate in dramatic form some of the leading ideas of the Third Reich, says a Berlin correspondent. Native drama, so far, has not been very promising, and the producers have now had to fall back on “the greatest dramatic genius of the Germanic world,’’ as one Berlin theatre critic calls him —William Shakespeare. The Prussian Theatre of Youth, which has its home in the beautiful Schiller Theatve, has just produced “King .Henry IV,’’ With udmirabl? daring, the director has combined “Part 1“ and “Part 11.” into a full-length single evening’s entertainment. He has cut down the thirty scenes to fifteen, left out many of the characters completely, and reduced the battles to one. It is a typically German dramatic feast, taking fpur hours in all—fur schoolchildrani—and lasting till midnight. The play has obviously been chosen because it can be used as a parable for German youth. Young Henry is shown as a hero thrown among i.ho beer-swill-ing Falstaff se’i (symbolic, as one critic. says, of the past fourteen years in Germany), and who eventually finds his way—like the Hitler Youth—on to the divinely appointed road of leadership and responsibility (the figure of the prince is symbolic of the “freeing of German youth”). One can see how the idea of “divine right of kings,” as it existed in Shakespeare’s day, is subtly introduced into the Naw scheme as “the divine right of leaders.” The royal youth who was transformed from a good-for-nothing into a hero calls for the., impressionable young spectators to identify themselves with this inspiring character. Falstalf, as befits a youth theatre, is played as a monstrous figure of comedy, pleasing to the garajXuan German taste. It is amusing to see the over-eager dramatic critics all tumbling over each other to draw the social moral from this play. No longer is Shakespeare the dramatist of character; the Nazi critic interprets the social significance of the plays. Thus, “Henry IV.” is regarded as specially suitable because it presents to contemporary German youth “the glorification of the idea of leadership.” These gramoplionic critics, who all use the familiar claptrap of the Nazi leaders—Leadership, Responsibility, Duty, Heroism, Sacrifice, etc.—find a special meaning for Nazi youth in this drama. There are some critics who see in it “the fight of a father tor the heart of his son,” which, translated into Nazi language, means, “the fight of Adolf Hitler for the heart of German youth.”

However, one critic finds this interpretation dreadfuuly “liberalistic.” Indeed, he actually objects to the adaptor’s own interpretation, which is in the theatre programme, describing it as too “aesthetically individualistic.”