Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

1:50h

with

Werther Hans Löw Lotte Fritzi Haberlandt Albert Ronald
Kukulies Regie Jan Bosse Bühne Stéphane Laimé Kostüme
Kathrin Plath Musik Arno P. Jiri Kraehahn, Sebastian
Morsch Dramaturgie Andrea Koschwitz

The beautiful Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, is now one of the main Berlin theatres, alongside the Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater. The theatre is clearly a historical site, hosting premieres by Felix Mendellsohn and others, but also broader historical events such as the 1848 Revolution that seems to have begun in or near the theatre. Of course, Maxim Gorki, was neither German, nor was he a Berliner. The theatre was formally known as the Berlin Singakademie, the venue where Mendelsohn gave his 1829 performances of the Matthew Passion BMV 244. It became the Maxim Gorki Theater after WW2, when the site fell within the Soviet Sector. It seemed appropriate to the Soviet authorities to name the theatre after one of the great authors of the Soviet era, but one whose demise was probably at the hands of Stalin. This is the kind of obvious hypocrisy that the leaders of the USSR often indulged in. The play last night at the MGT was an adaptation of JW Goethe´s epistolary novel, the first European bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther. After the Wende the MGT was one of Berlin´s major theatres but declined somewhat until recently when a change of director brought audiences flooding back.

The problems raised by an adaptation obviously concern how to transfer a static, prose work to the stage. The director choose a number of strategies to broadly engage or incorporate the audience into a work that is clearly unsuited to the theatre. Actors were placed in the audience thus ensuring that the division between the play, its participants, become blurred. At the point where Lotte enters the play a Handy (mobile phone) went off thus engaging members of the audience in much hapless banter that served largely as a distraction. Thus the ambigities that such a strategy might engage were largely diffused. A large mirror was placed onstage half-way through the play. Obviously the audience had the opportunity to watch itself, not the action, thus asking some frequently asked questions about the division of audience and performance\fiction. But it´s unclear whether such strategies really worked in relation to Goethe´s novella, one of the first of many pessimistic, romantic works in European literature (the last of which was perhaps Beckett´s Waiting for Godot). The protagonist Werther commits suicide (thus initiating a series of copycat suicides throughout Europe. Suicide imitators even dressed in the clothes Werther wears in the novella.) but in this adaptation he is shot by Albert with a plastic gun, then besmattered with theatrical ´blood´. Hans Löw is clearly a powerful, competent actor but Fritzi Haberlandt, apparantly a major actress at present in German theatre, seemed stolid, indeed even bored with the proceedings, as if going through the motions of acting rather than being terribly interested or engaged. Ronald Kukulies, very manic indeed, the audience seemed to warm to his onstage antics.

Overall this play was quite successful in adapting Goethe´s great bestseller, but it is questionable whether this work should ever have been considered in any sense theatrical, for it is cast in epistolary form. An epistolary novel is probably the least theatrical work, hence the play consisted of a series of connected monologues by Werther, some dire interaction with Lotte. The audience seemed engaged but perhaps puzzled by directorial attempts to create a self-reflective, post-modern fiction from a major work of the Sturm und Drang period of German Romanticism, which was neither a particularly self-reflective nor obviously a post-modern period. Indeed the subjectivity of Romantic literature of this period is it´s most obvious tendency. So Werther´s romantic seriousness ending in his suicide, what is actually going on in Werther´s head, is clearly intrinsic to this work, to the world of Werther and Goethe. As Hans Löw breaks the stage backboard down in order to storm off at the end of the play, one can only think: all Sturm and no Drang.

Paul Murphy, Berlin