INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL
The Croatian Faust
So it was last week, when those of us in the opening-night audience for Theater an der Ruhr’s production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera discovered to our horror that Kurt Weill’s songs, sung in their original German, were not being translated over our handy “simultaneous translation” headphones. To make matters worse, when the show was being translated, the single translator was a woman who spoke in the sort of droning voice we all remember from language lab and who made no attempt to act out her lines. The fiction that seeing a show performed in German but simultaneously translated into English was equivalent to watching a play in one’s native language was immediately exploded.
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But for those who demand that all classics be performed the way God intended, with a central unifying vision and a dramaturge to comb the libraries for evidence of the one true way to perform the work, this sort of freestyle adaptation is insufferable. Hence one critic’s objection to the show on the ground that this “deconstruction” of Brecht is nothing more than a tedious “academic game.” And another’s that the show is “senseless,” “bankrupt of theatrical invention,” and “amateur night in West Germany.” Both complaints are wrongheaded and closed minded: the complainers would be on firmer ground if Threepenny Opera were not a work by Bertolt Brecht.
If I were in a psychoanalytic mood, I would accuse Ciulli and Theater an der Ruhr of wanting to obscure or deny the play’s central metaphor: that Croatia is Nazi Germany in microcosm, and that every act of murder in the play stands for a million murders in the Third Reich. And it scares me that this avant-garde theater, which so willingly looks at the decadence of Threepenny’s Weimar Germany, should be unable to perform a work about Nazi Germany without employing–without irony–the same brain-twisting mythopoeic imagery that united the German people behind Hitler in the first place. Especially on the eve of reunification.
