Captain, my Captain

Köpenick's memorial to its Captain

Picture this.  In 1906 a man named Wilhelm Voigt, a life-long petty criminal, was released from his latest term of imprisonment.  Now in his late fifties he’s had enough of his former life.  He wants to go straight.  He wants a job.  He wants a place to live.  But Wilhelm Voigt is invisible.  He has no identity papers.  Without identity papers he cannot get a residence permit.  Without a residence permit he cannot get a job.  Without a job he cannot get a residence permit, and so on in an endless vortex.  He is lost, a little like the Flying Dutchman, seemingly doomed forever to be tossed around on waves of bureaucratic idiocy. 

In one final attempt to break to break the bars of the prison outside prison, he dons a military uniform, that of a captain.  As if by magic he ceases to be invisible.  The clothes have made the man.  He orders some passing troops to fall in, marching them to the town hall, hoping to trace his missing papers.   

On the way he stops at the police station, there ordering the officers to ‘care for law and order’ by preventing all telephone calls to the capital for the next hour.  In the town hall both the mayor and the treasurer are arrested for ‘crooked bookkeeping’.  The Captain orders the safe to be opened.  When the mayor asks for a warrant he points to the bayonets of his soldiers, saying ‘These are my authority’, a line in any other country in the world that would have exposed him as a fake.  The safe is opened and the mayor relieved of a fairly large amount of cash.  A receipt is provided, of course.  After all, this is a society built of paper. 

I know this seems like a fairy story but it really happened.  You may very well have guessed where from the name of the Captain.  Yes, this is Germany, the Germany of Kaiser Bill, Prussia, to be precise, a place obsessed with uniforms and tied tight in regulations, a place where to hear is to obey, a place where everyone only obeys orders.  The little drama took place in the town of Köpenick to the east of Berlin, from which Voigt was ever after known as the Captain of Köpenick. 

He was caught and faced another lengthy term in prison.  But his exploit captured the imagination of a people not generally noted for their sense of humour.  Bit by bit he was transformed in to a German version of Robin Hood, and as such he is still celebrated today.  Even the Kaiser was amused, later pardoning Voigt as an ‘amiable scoundrel.’  But Bill was not a subtle man; the irony and absurdity of the incident and all that it told of the Second Reich was lost on him.  He was pleased, rather, by the obvious reverence that a military uniform carried among the people at large.

A quarter of a century later Carl Zuckmayer, a playwright, wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick – The Captain of Köpenick -, a satire based on the incident.  First performed in Berlin in 1931, it was a commentary on contemporary society as much as the past, a commentary and a warning.  Two years later it was banned and Zuckmayer went into exile.  The Kaiser, unsubtle or not, had a sense of humor.  Hitler had none.

The Captain of Köpenick is a play not that well-known outside Germany.  I don’t suppose there is any great surprise in this, in that the humour does not travel that well, or German humor, to say the least, tends to be a little bit on the heavy side.  But it has made one of its rare foreign excursions to London’s National Theatre, which is where I saw it at the weekend. 

In a new English language version by Ron Hutchison and directed by Adrian Noble, it stars Anthony Sher as the eponymous anti-hero.  It was a commendable performance, just as I have come to expect from Sher, an actor of range and depth.  Here he could embrace comedy and pathos with equal ease, as he was transformed from a real nobody into a fake somebody, the talented Herr Voigt! 

Set in the National’s Olivier Theatre, the play made good use of all the technical wizardry at the director’s fingertips, allowing for rapid scene changes, including some wonderful expressionist-cum-cubist Berlin cityscapes in the style of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

The Captain of Köpenick is as relevant today as it was when first performed.  The continual flow of bureaucratic absurdity from Brussels is sufficient proof of that.  I could only wish that it had been handled with greater skill.  I found Hutchison’s updated version irksome and silly at points rather than funny, descending now and again into outright vulgarity.  More than that, Zuckmayer’s message is obvious enough, the satire biting enough, without the need for the continual reminders, and certainly without the need for the climatic “hysterical Dance of Death.”

This is a play, as I wrote above, that does not travel well.  It might have travelled better with a little more discipline, a little less reverence and a lot less Teutonic stodge!  Still, Sher, along with some of the supporting cast, makes the experience all worthwhile.  If you are in London, and minded to go, the Captain will be goose-stepping around until 4 April. 

Eliza Doolittle Plays Hedda Gabler

When I was little we had a dressing up box in the playroom.  For me this was a dragon’s horde of old clothes and shoes, things that mother no longer wore, things I could adapt to my own imaginative ends.  It was such fun.  I used to clunk around on footwear several sizes too big, dragging the tail of some long dress or other behind me!  It was fun pretending to be what I was not, bigger than I was.

I went to London’s Old Vic Theatre on Saturday more or less to see an actress doing the same thing, pretending to be bigger than she was, draped in a costume several sizes beyond her.  The play was Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and the actress was Sheridan Smith.

I should make it clear straight off that for me the play is the thing.  That’s what I went to see, not Sheridan Smith, apparently unlike a number of people in the audience.  Hedda Gabler is one of my favourite dramas.  The central figure, Hedda herself, is a complex character, who weaves a tragedy, partly out of frustration and boredom, partly out of malevolence and spite.  She is at one and the same time a victim and a perpetrator.  For me she is another dimension of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, except she is Madame Bovary with brains. 

Her dilemma is the same as Flaubert’s bathetic heroine: she is full of romantic sensibility while married to a commonplace mediocrity.  Otherwise Ibsen’s femme is a fatale contrast.  While Emma Bovary is stolidly petty-bourgeois, Hedda is full of aristocratic hauteur.  The daughter of a general married to Jørgen Tesman, an insufferably dull academic, Ibsen emphasises her independence by allowing her to retain her maiden name.  She is her father’s daughter, not her husband’s wife. 

The one thing that Sheridan Smith assuredly does not have is hauteur, aristocratic or otherwise.  She is more Bovary than Gabler.  Actually I had another part in mind for her as I watched her strut and fret her hour or two upon the stage – that of Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  She was really a lot worse than she aught to be!  But, my, how she has shot up, from such delights as the musical Legally Blonde and telly sitcoms like Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Gavin and Stacey, shot up, well beyond her talent and her capacity

She was clearly selected for the lead in Hedda Gabler, a play which she disingenuously admitted in interview that she had not previously heard of, because of her star rating.  It was most certainly not for her star quality.  She was simply too little for the part, a littleness that even carried touches of comic absurdity, like me in mother’s shoes.  Quite simply she could not occupy Hedda's spirit, causing many of the nuances and all of the subtlety to be lost.  In short, she was hopelessly out of her depth, the depth being Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

Then there was the play itself, a new interpretation by Brian Friel, the great Irish dramatist.  Great?  Well, he has to be; it said so in the Daily Telegraph!  And here is a measure of his greatness, a sort of free-flowing English that I feel sure Ibsen would have loved – “What a corker, as I think the new-fangled American expression is.”  Yes, indeed, what a corker.  It takes real greatness to produce a great line like that!

Oh, I'm being super bitchy tonight, a real Gabbler, bored by timidity and littleness.  It wasn’t all bad.  Actually most of the cast were really quite good and some even better.  Special honours go to Adrian Scarborough as Tesman, Hedda’s devoted husband, devoted also to researching the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant.  Simply thrilling!  Daniel Lapaine was reasonable as Ejlert Løvborg, Hedda’s old amour and her husband’s chief rival, and Darrell D’Silva was on top form as a sinister Judge Brack, her would be amour.  But the real star, certainly the real female star, was Fenella Woolgar as Thea Elvsted, Løvborg’s new love and bourgeois amanuensis. 

But these were just fragments that simply gave no coherence to the whole.  Without a strong Hedda, the spider weaving the web, the play just falls flat, sluggish and underpowered, with all psychological tension and insight lost.  For me the whole thing was just hopelessly one-dimensional, the greater the pity because, as I say, Hedda is one of my favourite female parts.  The other is Strindberg’s Miss Julie.  I should have gone to see Juliette Binoche play her in the new French production at the Barbican instead, if only my French had been up to the experience!  

In Blood Stepped in so Far

I love Shakespeare for his words, his poetry and his great theatrical dramas, high and low, tragic and comic.  He may have been a poor player but he did not strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then was heard no more.  He has been heard down the ages; he will be heard through time, for as long as English is spoken and the theatre exists.  That’s the other reason why I love Shakespeare – his abiding relevance. 

His plays can be read on so many levels, read in such a way that they bring out novel and dynamic interpretations.  Last year, in his directorial debut, Ralph Fiennes created a striking Coriolanus.  The setting is Rome and not Rome; the setting is a war-torn world which could easily be Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Chechnya or even Serbia, where it was shot on location. 

Incidentally, to go off at a slight tangent, that same play once caused a riot in Paris!  It was even banned for a time.  Yes, that’s right.  In February 1934 the government of Eduard Daladier, reacting to an anti-parliamentary interpretation that had been placed on a new production of the play by the right-wing pressure group, Action Française, banned further performances. In the growing heat engendered by the Stavisky Affair, a scandal that exposed extensive political and financial corruption, members of the group had appeared in the theatre in force, cheering on the play's denunciations of political leaders.

In Action Française, the movement's newspaper, praise of Coriolanus was used as an excuse to attack French democracy; to hurl accusations of corruption and villainy against the republic and its institutions in the light of every fresh revelation about Alexandre Stavisky, a Jewish financier and embezzler. Circulation shot up as Action Française urged people to come and protest in large numbers at the Chamber of Deputies, the first time in history, so far as I am aware, that Shakespeare contributed towards a major political riot - and a French one at that!

Anyway, let me get back to my theme, which is the abiding topicality of Shakespeare’s work.  I watched a performance of Macbeth last week on BBC iPlayer, and what a performance it was, the Scottish Play as I’ve never seen it before.  Directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart (think Star Trek!) in the title role, it brought out so many nuances.  The play’s central themes of ambition, treachery and guilt are all there, but there was something more – a brilliant dissertation on the nature of tyranny and the moral corruption it engenders.

The setting, and the costumes, as well as some old news footage of goose-stepping soldiers, make it clear that Stalinist Russia has become Stalinist Scotland!  Macbeth has been transformed from the courageous soldier, whose reputation travels ahead of him, to a bloody dictator.  The growing body count seems to merge into one great purge.  People live in fear and fear engenders suspicion. 

The whole atmosphere is suffused with menace, as the terror takes deeper hold.  Even Shakespeare’s own words take on added meaning.  I’m thinking here of the lines in Act Four, Scene Two, where the earl of Ross speaks to Lady Macduff, whose husband has not long fled the country;

I dare not speak much further;

But cruel are the times when we are traitors

And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and none.

Cruel indeed are the times when we are traitors and do not know ourselves.  Macbeth’s hired assassins come like an NKVD death squad.  Lady Macduff and all her children are butchered.  Earlier we see Banquo being murdered by means of a lethal injection and Ross being interrogated in what could easily be a cell in the Lubyanka. 

The lead performances were excellent, Kate Fleetwood’s depiction of Lady Macbeth as good as that of Patrick Stewart as the king, dammed by delusion and equivocation.  Even the lesser roles I’ve never seen performed more brilliantly.  How wonderfully sinister the three witches were, the three weird sisters who appeared as just that – sisters, hospital sisters to be exact.  My goodness, these are no angels of mercy!  

The setting itself is kind of hospital come hell’s kitchen come hotel come lunatic asylum which serves as Macbeth’s castle.  The atmosphere is intensely claustrophobic.  As the play enters into the dénouement we are no longer in Stalin’s Russia but in Hitler’s bunker.  Yes, the references to Downfall are obvious!  There were other movie references I recognised.  At the very end, an end after the end, in a nice little touch by Goold that I feel sure Shakespeare himself would have admired, we see the Macbeths, holding up their bloody hands in an old-fashioned caged elevator.  It's on its way down.  This is Angel Heart; this is the descent into hell. 

It will be on iPlayer until 4 July if you are able to get it.  Incidentally, in the programme notes it says that the play is set in an “undefined and threatening central European world.”  I assumed this meant that all of Shakespeare’s geographical references had been removed, but no, Scotland still stands where it did…even if it is part of an undefined and threatening central European world! 

Finding Ophelia

The first story that caught my eye yesterday morning when I glanced through the days reports was one concerning Shakespeare, still making the news hundreds of years after his death! Actually the story concerns one Jane Shaxspere (sic), who was found drowned when she was just two years old, her body floating in a pond in Upton Warren in Worcestershire, just twenty miles from where her near namesake lived in Stratford.

The details of Jane’s death were discovered by historians from Oxford looking at sixteenth century coroners’ reports. She died in 1569, when Shakespeare was approximately five years old, accidentally falling into the pond while picking marigolds. The suggestion is that she was the bard’s cousin. It’s certainly possible, given the near similarity of their names and the proximity of their locations, at a time when people did not travel much, and extended families could be found across a fairly limited area.

It’s further suggested that Shakespeare, many of whose characters and plots were based directly on his own experiences, may have used this tragedy as the basis for the death of Ophelia in Hamlet, one of the most haunting scenes in his whole canon. There the Prince’s former lover, driven mad by the death of her father, falls into a brook, floating for a time before being dragged down by the weight of her saturated clothes;

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.


Hitherto academics believed that the inspiration behind this scene came from the death of Katherine Hamlet, a friend of the Shakespeare family, who fell into the River Avon and drowned when she was sixteen years old. It was believed by some at the time that she had committed suicide because of the breakdown of a relationship. Ophelia in Hamlet is certainly mad, though it’s uncertain if she committed suicide or not, at least by Queen Gertrude’s account to Laertes, her brother, softened possibly to spare him the full horror. In the play the church is under no doubt that she took her own life, denying her a full Christian burial.

The whole thing is certainly quite intriguing, though a precise link is almost certain to prove elusive. Though the researchers have enthusiastically embraced little Jane, there is no need for the tragedies to be mutually exclusive. The drowning of Katherine may very well have resurrected memories of the earlier event, linking possible death for love with death for love of flowers.

The researchers are looking for further clues that might possibly identify Jane as the original Ophelia. Dr Emma Smith of the faculty of Language and Literature at Oxford has said that “It’s interesting to think of Ophelia combining classical and Renaissance antecedents with the local tragedy of a drowned girl.” Yes, it is, though I would hazard that it’s never likely to be much more than that. But it’s comforting to believe that Jane, and Katherine, have been transfigured and immortalised in great art.

Büchner, Pain and God

I simply love the plays of Georg Büchner, arguably one of the most startlingly original German dramatists ever. I recall his commentary on the work of Spinoza, particularly his proposition that God exists necessarily; for if we ''think'' God, then God must exist. To this contention, taken from Spinoza's belief in the primacy of mind, Büchner says 'But what compels us to think an entity that can only be thought of as a being?', which he follows shortly after with this thought;

If one accepts the definition of God, then one must admit the existence of God. But what justifies us in making this definition?

Reason?

It knows imperfections.

Feeling?

It knows pain.

Pain, the phenomena of pain and suffering, is central to Büchner. It is through pain that the eponymous hero in Lenz achieves his most mystical experience; through pain that Lena recognises the route to redemption. It is, for Büchner, through pain that one enters into the presence of God.