CALL OF THE DEAD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21032, 22 May 1930, Page 13

CALL OF THE DEAD.

PASSION PLAY OF TO-DAY. MEANING OP THE WAR. An. event of supreme artistic importance to Germany has been timed to coincide with the performance of the Oberammergau Passion Play (says the Berlin correspondent of the Observer). The idea of expressing the Passion of our °tvn times, the terror and suffering of the Great War, in some dramatic form bound up with the art of to-day as cloeely ns Oberamraergau is with the past, arouse; appropriately enough, in the neutral mind of a Swiss, Albert Talhoff He looked to Germany, and found in Miiniph the means of producing his objective, impression of what the war meant and, what the dead have to eay to the living to-day. It may be as well for the 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 ; verjr simplest .description of what Munich intends to show the world ’ in “Totenmal" (“The Call of the Dead”! during the summer months this year is best clothed in the most banal of words. ' There is little point in telling a person he is going to see a “synthetic choral and choreographic rhythmic Vision.” But when he realises he is going to see the identical light effects of the moon 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 v in dreadful groups with that supreme mistress .of the German intellectual school of interpretative dancing. Mary Wigman, at their head, lie yB) 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, of 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 any agony is to be of universal understanding.