CALL OF THE DEAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20562, 13 May 1930, Page 9

CALL OF THE DEAD.

PASSION PLAY OF TO-DAY.

MEANING OF THE WAR.

NEW GERMAN ENTERPRISE,

An event of supreme artistic importance to Germany has been timed to coincide with the performance of tho Oberammergau Passion Play, says tho Berlin correspondent of the Observer. Tho idea of expressing tho Passion of our own times, tho terror and suffering of the Great War, in somo dramatic form bound up with the art of to-day as closely as Oberammcrgau is with the past, arose, appropriately enough, in tho neutral nnnd of a Swiss, Albert Talhoff. Ho looked to Germany, and found in Munich tho means of producing his objective impression of what the war meant and what the dead 'have to say to the living to-day.

It may bo as well for tho too highly strung to avoid this extreme peak of German artistic endeavour; others may regard it in the same light as many notable Germans —a milestone in stage history. The very simplest description of what Munich intends to show the world in "Totenmal" ("The Call of tho Dead") during the summer months this year is best clothed in the most banal of words. There is little point in telling a person lie is going to see a "synthetic choral and choreographic rhythmic Vision." But when he realises he is going to see tho identical light effects of the inoon flickering on tombstones which have caused so many ghosts to walk in country churchyards, to hear the hollow sighs and chants of an invisible and ghoulish chorus, and watch masked dancers —and what masks!—sway, advance, and disperse in dreadful groups with ■ that supremo mistress of tho German intellectual school of interpretative dancing, Mary Wigman, at head, he will understand what Talhoff, Professor Linnebach, lighting expert of the Bavarian State Theatre, and the "symbolic-syn-thetic" expressionists of Munich have to offer.

Unknown Warriors must return in masks, says Talhoff, or the individual would not be everybody's own beloved Warrior, and time and space and vision and hearing must be submerged in an abstract of feeling if an agony is to be of universal understanding.