MUSIK. To 7 May.
London
MUSIK
by Frank Wedekind translated and adapted by Neil Fleming
Arcola Theatre 27 Arcola Street E8 To 7 May 2005
Final performances 4,5 May 8pm 7 May 4pm
Runs: 2hr 10min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7503 1646
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 April
Drama on the attack a century back, in a revival gradually revealing its energy and anger.The Last Waltz' is a temptingly elegiac title under which to market three plays from Germany and Austria a century ago. Yet these plays are anything but nostalgic. They were the hard-edged political drama of their time, confronting respectable social mores as brutally as any Royal Court playwright today.
Frank Wedekind is best known for dramatic examinations of teenage homosexuality in Spring Awakening and adult hetero-lusts in the 2 Lulu' plays. Here, with slow-burning anger, he attacks society's attitude to abortion. Topical stuff in 1906, it was Wedekind's response to new anti-abortion laws. (Though abortion is common to all the Last Waltz' playwrights, handled with sudden shock in Hauptmann's Rose Bernd and by implication forming the background to the disruptions of Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi.)
It's a theme with a new topicality, increased by Mike Leigh's recent film Vera Drake, set mid-way between Wedekind and today's neo-con tinged morality. Thrown in here is a radical journalist whose public pro-abortion stance shifts when he has a private agenda, seeing Klara as hurting the married woman to whom he feels attached.
Young Klara's from a rich Swiss family, in Germany for tuition as an opera-singer. Her teacher Josef needs her money to maintain the style he and his wife Else enjoy. But he and Klara have been making music metaphorically too; when her pregnancy's terminated and the back-street abortionist convicted, Clara's dragged into court as co-defendant.
Various moral compromises are spelled out in Neil Fleming's translation (first seen 5 years ago in Plymouth). Deborah Bruce's revival uses the Arcola's space to create an initial sense of Klara (Mariah Gale, hardly suggesting a potential Wagnerian singer but with an apt vulnerability) lost and alone. The web she's caught in is visualised, later stressing her capture' in the prison cell where her spirit breaks.
John Lloyd Fillingham brings a curling-toned sarcasm to the journalist Lindekuh, a shining knight of progress in public, in private a xenophobic bully. Lucy Briers' sharp-tongued Else, Deka Walmsley's strutting, self-serving Josef and Christopher Godwin's prison governor, commanding to prisoners, obsequious to the well-placed, complete Wedekind's assault on a hypocritical society.
Klara Huhnerwadel: Mariah Gale
Else Reissner: Lucy Briers
Josef Reissner: Deka Walmsley
Female Warder/Mrs Huhnerwadel: Yvonne Gidden
Prison Governor/Dr Schwarzkopf: Christopher Godwin
Franz Lindekuh: John Lloyd Fillingham
Director: Deborah Bruce
Designer: Jon Bausor
Lighting: Neil Sloan
Sound: Adrienne Quartly
Assistant director: Sam Leifer
Assistant designers: Anna Jones, Tom Rogers
2005-05-02 18:31:27