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by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, directed by Michael Thalheimer

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

November 6-9, 2008

"Action Versus Language"

The presence of “Emilia Galotti” on Stratford’s 2008 playbill is a product of the Don Shipley’s work as part of the triumvirate that served as co-artistic directors until Shipley and Marti Maraden resigned in March this year.  Shipley, who was Manager of Performing Arts at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre (1988-2001) and then headed the Dublin Theatre Festival (2005-07), is well acquainted with theatre productions that have garnered world-wide acclaim.  “Emilia Galotti”, a production by the Deutsches Theater of Berlin that has been touring since its triumphant debut in 2001, is one such show.  Playing in a small town like Stratford rather than a more likely location like Toronto would over time suggest that Stratford, too, could be the home of theatre that could stand comparison with the best in the world.  With Shipley’s departure this project has ended and the Festival can return to its happy cocoon where New York is the be-all and end-all of theatre and the latest trends in world theatre, too radical for Broadway, can be ignored.

“Emilia Galotti” (1772) is the first play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), a founder of the German Enlightenment to be performed at Stratford.  Soulpepper staged his “Nathan the Wise” (1779) in 2004.  “Emilia Galotti” is one of the classics of German literature read by every schoolchild in Germanophone countries.  It is part of a project that began in the 18th century and continued through Ibsen to Arthur Miller of trying to create so-called “bourgeois tragedy”, that is to realize and to show that the protagonists of tragedy need not be kings and queens for a play to affect us as tragedy but can be part of the middle-class as well.  To demonstrate this, Lessing takes the story of Appius and Verginia from “Ab Urbe condita” 3.44-58, a history of Rome by Livy (59 BC-AD 17) in which the corrupt decemvir Appius Claudius lusts after the plebeian girl Verginia.

Lessing transfers the action to contemporary Italy.  Here Hettore Gonzaga, Prince of Guastalla (Sven Lehmann), lusts after the virtuous Emilia Galotti (Regine Zimmermann), daughter of middle-class parents Odoardo (Peter Pagel) and Claudia (Barbara Schnitzler).  Though Gonzaga is already engaged to the Countess Orsina (Nina Hoss) and Emilia to the Count Appiani (Henning Vogt), Gonzaga gives his malign chamberlain Marinelli (Ingo Hülsmann) leave to do whatever is necessary to bring Emilia to him.  The play is revolutionary in many way, not least in demonstrating that the middle-class has a higher standard of morality than the ruling nobility a fact which calls into question the rationale for allowing hereditary nobles to rule at all.

To an audience in Germanophone countries as familiar with the play as we are with Shakespeare, Michael Thalheimer’s radical presentation of it would be extraordinarily exciting.  The production shows Stratford theatre-goers a way of approaching the classics unlike anything they have ever seen before.  Director Michael Thalheimer has become famous for a style that some have called “reductionism”.  He takes a classic play and basically cuts it to the bone, hacking away large swaths of dialogue, secondary characters and subplots to reach what he sees as the very essence of the piece.  Thalheimer reduces Lessing’s original twelve person cast to only seven.  The most notable character absent is Conti the painter, through whom Lessing develops themes of art, objectification and possession.  As is typical of his approach, Thalheimer replaces words with actions.  Thus, between the bare wooden walls of Olaf Altmann’s box of a set, each of the characters enters from the single rectangular opening at the back and walks forward to the front as if on a catwalk at a fashion show, thus each objectified before our gaze.  Emilia is the first to enter and her arrival is accompanied by roman candles on either side and a fall of pyrotechnic sparks, since she is the one who sets Gonzaga’s heart aflame.  Since Gonzaga’s uncontrollable passion for Emilia is the starting point for this work of art it is also symbolic that her entrance is accompanied by “feux d’artifice”.  Thalheimer signals Gonzaga’s obsession and desire for possession by having him repeatedly trace the outline of Emilia’s features on his own face.  

The blocking is rigorously stylized.  Most characters’ movements are confined to the pattern of a narrow tee shape, with a straight line (the “runway”) from the upstage opening to the front of the stage meeting a perpendicular line the length of the stage opening.  Similarly Thalheimer enforces a strict separation of speech and subtext, the notion being that the more evil a character is the more duplicitous, the more of a façade he has to maintain.  Thalheimer has gradated the characters from most insincere to most honest using rapidity of speech as the key to insincerity.  Therefore, Marinelli, the Prince’s henchman rattles off his lines at an incredibly velocity (but with absolutely clear diction), while Emilia speaks at a normal pace since she is the epitome of honesty.  The Prince has a pace nearest Marinelli’s while Emilia’s mother as a pace nearest her daughter’s.  For those with a façade to maintain, their rapid speech is immediately followed by a demonstration in silent action of how they really feel.  Thus, the prince shoots out his commands to Marinelli to keep up his stance of control, but after speaking crumples into a writhing ball on the floor wracked with his uncontrollable obsession for Emilia.  In movement the nobility are confined to the strict tee-formation for their public actions and use the quadrilateral spaces on either side of the tee for their private emotions.  The middle-classes characters, however, are freer to roam the stage at will, implying there is little discrepancy between their public and private actions.  Thalheimer shows us Lessing’s point that the middle classes have greater freedom which should be subject to the rigidity of the nobility.  

Thalheimer’s interpretation of Emilia’s “tragedy” is quite different from Lessing’s.  In Lessing, Emilia is outraged when Gonzaga seeks her out in church to speak to her of his “love”.  In Thalheimer, when Emilia tells this story to her mother, she can’t help repressing a smile that so high a personage should take an interest in her.  In Lessing, Emilia, kidnapped and imprisoned by Gonzaga, begs her father to kill her so that she will never disgrace her family or herself by giving in to his advances.  After much persuasion her father obliges and then turns himself in to Gonzaga as a murderer.  Gonzaga, grief-stricken, pardons the father and condemns Marinelli for urging on his baser nature.  

Thalheimer cuts this entire (and quite famous) dénouement that derives directly from the Latin source.  In his version when Emilia encounters her father after she has gone off with Gonzaga, it is clear that the prince has already deflowered her.  Her tragedy thus becomes not her potential abasement but her actual abasement in her own and in her father’s eyes.  Her father exits one way and she another holding a revolver presumably to hunt down Gonzaga.  All previous possessors of the gun, Osina, Marinelli and the father have first held it to their temple in contemplating suicide.  Thalheimer leaves us in doubt what Emilia will do, for as soon as she exits, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, the stage is suddenly filled with dancers dancing to the strains of Bert Wrede’s waltz that have accompanied the action from it very beginning.  In Olaf Altmann’s costume design, all the men wear variations on a 1970s three-piece suit and at some all four men begin to tear it off, button flying, as if this civilized exterior constrained the expression of their inner desire.  Meanwhile, Altmann has given all three women dresses of a similar cut, Countess Orsina’s simply having a longer hemline that Claudia or Emilia. 

The implication is that Lessing’s play encapsulates an essential tragedy in the relations of men and women in general.  When the stage is filled with waltzing couples all wearing black versions of the male-female coded costumes we’ve seen before, this image has a number of meanings.  It has the effect of wiping the slate clean and returning us to normality where desire is formalized in dance where before this characters touched each other at most with a poke of a finger.  It also suggests with the appearance of so many couples that Emilia’s tragedy is just one of many, as if an individual’s loss of self-worth were part of common human experience.  On the negative side, this mass of happily dancing couples suggests humanity’s indifference to the agony of one of their own.  

For anyone who has studied Lessing’s play and seen it in numerous conventional productions, Thalheimer’s interpretation would provide much food for thought and has the effect of making this revered classic seem utterly new.  Those who do not know the play, which I assume would be the majority of the Stratford audience, will have seen Thalheimer’s “Emilia Galotti” but not Lessing’s.  To end the play without Lessing’s iconic ending is like ending “Othello” before the final bedroom scene.  On the one hand I was exciting to see a such innovative direction and such intense, truly flawless performances from the entire company.  On the other, I felt sorry that the Stratford audiences had not really seen the play Lessing wrote.  This is the first play by Lessing ever to appear at Stratford.  Let’s hope the Festival continues to explore his groundbreaking work that opened the way for modern drama not just in Germany but in Europe.  Let’s also hope that despite Shipley’s departure, the Festival seeks out directors who are willing to delve more deeply into the texts they present.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Regine Zimmermann. ©Ruby Washington/NYT.