Hands up everyone who has heard of the Chinese version of Hamlet, rewritten with a happy ending? Or the Swedish version of Twelfth Night which turned the play into a tragedy by bumping off Malvolio at the end? Whatever will these silly foreigners get up to next? Everyone knows you can't rewrite Shakespeare. But here in Britain, artistic crimes of a very similar sort are being committed against foreign playwrights on a regular basis. One can argue that in the theatre anything goes, particularly when the author is safely dead and the original play is long out of copyright. But on the other hand, there's such a thing as respect for the text and the artistic integrity of the author, even if he or she isn't around to complain. As I'll discuss in more detail further on, the Donmar's current production of a German classic play is seriously marred by a daft change in the ending.
Until the final moments, there's quite a lot to admire in this revival at the Donmar of Heinrich von Kleist's 200-year-old drama The Prince of Homburg (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin). This version by Dennis Kelly, based on a literal translation, follows the original fairly closely, though the language is clumsy and lurches between colloquial modernism and Kleist's mannered poetic style. Donmar veteran Ian McDiarmid gives a flinty, sardonic and eminently watchable performance as the Elector of Brandenburg, and Charlie Cox is terrific as the dreamy, self-absorbed and vain prince, who disobeys an order in the heat of battle. There's lots of other top-flight acting talent on show -- Siobhan Redmond as the Electress, Harry Hadden-Paton asthe prince's friend Count Hohenzollern and David Burke as the grizzled military veteran Colonel Kottwitz. Jonathan Munby directed Calderon's Life Is A Dream at the same theatre last year, and it's no surprise that he's back at the Donmar directing another play which handles the conflict between dream and reality.
It begins with a tricky scene in which the prince, snatching a rest away from the battlefield where the troops of Brandenburg are fighting the Swedes, begins to sleepwalk. Barely awake and with his mind elsewhere, he doesn't pay attention to his battlefield orders and leads his cavalry into a charge without waiting for orders. The battle is won, but the Elector has him court-martialled and sentenced to death for disobeying orders. Suddenly aware of the real threat to his life, the prince begs ignominiously to be spared, but after being offered a pardon by the Elector, he insists on being executed. Kleist's play ends with another tricky scene in which the prince is taken blindfolded to what turns out to be a mock execution. Instead of being shot, he is garlanded with a victor's laurel wreath and faints amid the cheers of his fellow-officers. It's a subtle echo of the opening scene, and in both the prince is unsure if he is awake or dreaming.
But in Kelly's version, the prince's body jerks as he is executed by firing squad, with the elector presiding over the scene from a balcony like a fascist dictator. This changes the entire meaning of the play, abandoning Kleist's ambiguity in favour of a crude political reading which has much in common with the way the play was understood during the Third Reich -- as a hymn to obedience and to German nationalism. I'm no expert, but I think Kleist's message is more subtle than that.
Why is it that classic foreign authors always seem to suffer this abuse at the hands of the British theatre's professional rewrite men? After seeing plays by Gorky and Bulgakov given similarly shoddy and sexed-up treatment at the National Theatre by Andrew Upton, I think I can detect a clear pattern. Plays by Germans or Russians, because they have to be translated, are seen as just so much raw material, to be mucked around at will by the author brought in to produce a 'version'. As the author generally doesn't speak the language of the original play, he is several steps away from understanding the nuances and feels none of the translator's responsibility for rendering them into English. If a scene doesn't make sense, there's a strong temptation to improve on it by writing something better. Except that the result generally isn't.
I'm not arguing for a return to the age of literal or literary word-for-word translations in the theatre; old plays in any language can be adapted or reinvented by directors to give them new meanings, sometimes with stunning results. But the wilful rewriting meted out to foreign-language classics in the monoglot British theatre horrifies me; it suggests a deep insularity, verging on xenophobia, in its refusal to engage properly with the plays in their original language. The message is that only English-language texts deserve respect, while foreign texts are just so much raw material.
When I saw Prince of Homburg I didn't know anything of the original and in my ignorance really, really enjoyed it. But I completely understand your point about messing with originals as I've seen it done to so many times and rarely makes an improvement.
Posted by: Rev Stan | August 19, 2010 at 08:05 PM