<b>✭✭✭✩✩
</b><b>by Ariane Mnouchkine, directed by Bruce Alexander Pitkin
Equity Showcase Theatre, York Quay Studio Theatre, Toronto
November 8-18, 2001
</b>
“Acting Politically”
Most people will know the story of “Mephisto” from the 1981 Academy Award-winning film of the same name directed by István Szabó. But two years before the film, acclaimed French director Ariane Mnouchkine premièred her own stage version of “Mephisto” with the company she founded, the Théâtre du Soleil. Both play and film are based on the 1936 novel by Klaus Mann, but theatre is the natural medium for an adaptation since the work's principal themes are actors and acting, the role of the theatre, politics and art. The Equity Showcase production, the play’s Canadian première, is the kind of consistently thought-provoking, political theatre one seldom sees in Toronto any more. If on the whole the show is not as effective as it could be, it still contains a high proportion of trenchant scenes and fine performances.
Unlike the film, the play has a dual focus--one on Klaus Mann himself, the other on the actor Hendrik Höfgen. The play begins with a German publisher rejecting Mann’s novel. He feels that the story of an actor who changes his political allegiance to further his career is too closely modelled on the life of the real German actor Gustaf Gründgens (1899-1963) and could lead to a lawsuit. Indeed, Mann’s only solution was to have the book published in Amsterdam. Mann is also our narrator and plays his alter-ego in the play, the novelist Sebastian Brückner.
Through a series of short scenes we follow Höfgen’s career from his rise to fame in Hamburg to his departure and success in Berlin, his most famous role being Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust, Part 1”. He begins as a staunch Communist mingling with other Communist actors in the company as they try to deal with hyperinflation, high unemployment and the rise of the National Socialist party. Höfgen longs to move from the provincial stage of Hamburg to be in the national spotlight in Berlin. To do so, he has to conform to Nazi dictates and so must drop his former friends and his long-time non-Aryan mistress Juliette. As a result he reaches a pinnacle of success and is used to promote the superiority of Aryan drama but finds himself isolated and hated by his peers. It is a fitting irony that Höfgen’s most famous role should be Mephisto, whom Goethe calls “the spirit of negation”, since Höfgen tries to deny his opportunism even to himself. As Mann/Brückner is impelled to reveal the truth, Höfgen is impelled to hide from it.
Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil have continued the traditions of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. This is a huge narrative play with 20 actors playing 36 roles. The use of a narrator/actor is only one of Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekte” that mark the play. Mnouchkine has constructed “Mephisto” from so many scenes of rehearsals of plays or cabaret skits that Brecht’s ideal of our awareness of the actor acting is built into its structure. Indeed, we first meet several characters acting roles before we meet them as themselves. The play most similar to “Mephisto” is “Our Country’s Good” by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who translated “Mephisto” into English. While Wertenbaker’s later play focusses on the power of theatre to transform people and society, Mnouchkine has the more difficult project of asking what role theatre has in a society that has transformed itself into something inhuman. Although Mnouchkine herself is a leftist, she presents the dilemma of the characters in an even-handed way, even showing the Nazis' early appeal to the working class and the Communists' misguided faith in Stalin.
That this complex work comes across so clearly is due to the intelligent direction of Bruce Alexander Pitkin. If there is a flaw it is his attempt to reach the same pitch of emotion in each scene. Jacques Lamarre’s set, creatively lit by David Meredith, consists entirely of chairs in different styles. Pitkin has the actors carry them across the stage for each change of scene, but this ultimately slows the pace and is mostly unnecessary. Yet, the show is filled with memorable scenes most notably the last scene of Act 1 when the characters recall scenes from “The Cherry Orchard” and we see the correspondence between their roles in “Mephisto” and those in Chekhov’s play.
The cast is generally very strong. Peter Van Wart (Höfgen) is best in Act 1 portraying an actor torn between comradeship with his friends and longing for fame. In Act 2 he does not quite reveal the charisma that would explain Höfgen's success. David Petrie (Mann/Brückner) gives us a rumpled intellectual whose wealth no longer isolates him from rising evil. Andrew David Long (Hans Miklas) is excellent as an actor and early Nazi sympathizer, humiliated during rehearsal by an imperious Höfgen, but who finally recognizes the Nazi revolution as a new form of tyranny. Stephen Jennings (Otto) and Michael Wacholtz (Alex) make a strong impression both as Höfgen’s fellow communist actors and in the various roles they play in the left-wing cabaret they run. Dwight McFee (Sarder) has an excellent scene as an old-school playwright who in a drunken fit blurts out a lament for a Germany who has betrayed her former ideals. Allan Rosenthal (Gottschalk) seems more like a car salesman than a theatre manager, but rises to the occasion in his final scene with his wife, and Christian Lloyd (Josthinkel) needs more control to make the the new Nazi theatre manager as chilling as he should be.
Among the women, Catherine McGregor (the Gottschalk’s Jewish wife) clearly distinguishes her primary role from the two comic ones she plays in the cabaret. She is especially moving in the scene where she convinces her husband that their best act of resistance will be suicide. Imali Perera (Höfgen’s mistress) is excellent at expressing conflicting emotions particularly in Act 2 when she realizes that Höfgen is breaking with her because of her race. Deborah Hay (Nicoletta) is also excellent in detailing the transformation of another opportunist, an actress who breaks off a lesbian attachment to link herself to Höfgen’s rising fortunes, finally becoming his own apologist. Araxi Arslanian (Theresa) makes her role as a no-nonsense actress and Communist a vivid character throughout. Unfortunately, two actors in major roles--Lorraine Sinclair (a renowned Jewish leading lady) and Susanne Schneider (theatre and cabaret actress and Brückner’s sister)--neither have the strength or presence necessary for their parts.
Although the production is uneven, there is so much that is good I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the period or in plays about the theatre. We should be grateful that we have the Equity Showcase Theatre to bring us this kind of large-scale, politically charged theatre that commercial theatre shies away from nowadays. The questions Mnouchkine raises won’t go away and in face of the latest propaganda war are more pertinent than ever.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Peter Van Wart.
<b> 2001-11-13</b>
<b>Mephisto</b>