MARIELUISE. To 14 August.
London
MARIELUISE
by Kerstin Specht Translated by Rachael McGill
Gate Theatre To 14 August 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Sun 1 August 6pm
BSL Signed 9 August
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
www.gatetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 July
A dramatic life theatrically and poetically caught.This play's at the right theatre: Rachael McGill's English verse script is 2004's winner of Revelations, the Gate translation award. And it was the Gate which brought Marieluise Fleisser's two early plays to England.
As childhood impresario, Marie collected paying audiences in her first step away from conventional girlhood aims. The puppets reappear at the end, her fame re-established with the final call for More chairs' (individual seats replace audience benches for this production), optimistically recalling the dying Goethe's More light'. Between, though, it's Marie who seems the puppet resisting others' strings.
In 1926 Purgatory in Ingolstadt made this convent-educated blacksmith's daughter a Berlin success. For all her distaste at the nuns' way, she was amazed by Berlin's cabaret life, including provocative cabaret lesbian Anita Berber, and prominent cabaret-influenced writer Bertolt Brecht.
He insisted on directing her next play, Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1929), leaving her to take the flak for his scandalous production. Like many women fascinated by Brecht, she fell into depression. And there was always the philistine father back home to make things worse. Yet she lived till 1974, seeing younger German playwrights rediscover her work.
This is all contained in Kerstin Specht's 22 brief scenes. Structurally and stylistically, they recreate the turbulence of life as Marie experienced it. Catherine Kanter stands straight, becoming a centre for the insistent demands, denunciations and coaxing of others.
Erica Whyman's valedictory Gate production catches this ever-surprising whirl, characters reaching down or calling from a gallery round the stage pit (Marie herself only uses the raised area when shut behind doors, creating a distance from her family). A flowing-train representing the Danube catches Marie round the neck as she comes closest to suicide.
Kanter's fine performance apart a voice of reason looking back on a reality that could seem crazily unreal - there are technical limitations to the acting, though Chris Myles catches Brecht's self-concerned danger. What makes the short evening is the fluent script, scenes flowing yet making sharp-etched individual points in building a picture of Marieluise's life. And a production which neither hurries nor flags, a dreamlike yet vivid experience.
Luise: Catherine Kanter
Sister/Schoolgirl/Marta Feuchtwanger: Joanna Croll
Emmi/Sister/Moriz Seeler: Josphine Myddelton
Mother Superior/Anita Berber/Danube: Yana Yanezic
Soldier/Jappes/Bertolt Brecht: Chris Myles
Bruno Frank/Joseph Bepp: Hopward Teale
Lion Feuchtwanger/Father/Helmut Draws: Christopher Campbell
Director: Erica Whyman
Designer: Soutra Gilmour
Lighting: Colin Grenfell
Sound: Michael Oliva
Puppets/Puppetry: Polly Laurence, Polly Laycock+
Assistant director: Joe Austin
2004-07-26 11:46:36