The Prince of Homburg
Donmar, until 4 September
Danton’s Death
Olivier, in rep until 14 October
Welcome to London. This month we’re hosting the world’s very first, but probably not its last, Useless German Playwright Festival. Here’s a scribbler you may not have heard of. Heinrich von Kleist, born in 1777, angered his Prussian family by quitting the army and setting up as a dramatist. After an energetic start he decided he had better things to do with his life and killed himself.
His final play, The Prince of Homburg, shows that he still had much to learn before his premature exit. It takes him an hour to tell us that an excitable young general, Homburg, has fluffed his orders during a victory over the Swedes, been charged with disobedience and sentenced to death. The second hour examines Homburg’s culpability while the winsome young madcap languishes in jail wondering whether to unsheathe his regimental meat cleaver and sacrifice himself to the higher ideal of army discipline. (The Nazis loved this play, apparently.) I’m sure barristers, field marshals and professional advocates concerned with the minutiae of military jurisprudence will flock to this show in their dozens and will emerge from its two hours of turgid quibbling in paroxysms of joy. The rest will find it a tedious Mozartian potboiler with lots of nice uniforms and shiny boots.
Homburg’s commanding officer is played by Ian McDiarmid, an able and severely limited performer. If you want fastidious Bohemianism there’s no one better for the job but if you want stiff-necked Prussian rectitude there are thousands better. It’s like casting John Inman as General Patton. McDiarmid has every skill of enunciation known to acting but he lacks the wisdom to conceal his artistry. I felt I was watching a performance played on a miniature church organ, full of piping trills and lyrical flourishes and mellow booming bass notes. Admirable but a little too taken with its virtuosity. Newcomer Charlie Cox plays Homburg. He’s a pretty enough chap who may be a star but it’s hard to tell through this murky script. Clearly he can play a posturing yuppie halfwit very convincingly. And there are plenty of English actors, mentioning no names, who have turned smaller skills into superstardom.
Over at the National, another handsome doomed hothead gets the chop. I wouldn’t normally give away the ending of a play but the title does it for me. Danton’s Death is the creation of Georg Büchner, another playwright loudly toasted in the vaults of obscurity, who takes the riveting story of a genius brought low by envious pen-pushers and turns it into a mirthless heptathlon. Büchner is all too fond of long, long speeches and he wants every phrase to sound deathless even if its sense is all but meaningless. ‘Parting words,’ harrumphs Danton early on. ‘A prophecy: the statue of freedom is not yet cast!’ The epigrammatic form is designed to add velocity to ideas that have no internal momentum and this play is full of them. It’s a shame Büchner has no interest in women either. The female characters are a trio of pouting jolly-dollies who pop up at random to affirm the erotic vitality of their menfolk.
Fresh from his outstanding performance in The Real Thing, Toby Stephens plays Danton with his dependable ‘swaggering rotter’ routine. He’s charming and watchable, for a bit, but he runs into the sands of the author’s incapacities. Büchner can’t bring any depth or untidiness to the characters. Danton is Jesus, Hamlet and Cicero with touches of Churchill, Socrates and Jason Bourne thrown in. His flaws — roistering with comfort-girls and generally living in the moment — are further varieties of perfection. He has a repetitive habit of chuckling in the face of mortality and he constantly reaches for a note of super-sophisticated fatigue, of oh-not-this-again. He disdains everything. He disdains Robespierre. He disdains virtue. He disdains the revolution. He disdains his wife. He disdains death. He even disdains disdain, I think, at some point although it was hard to tell because of my burgeoning disdain for Danton.
In extremes of adversity, he indulges in a special ‘disparaging laugh’. Practise yours at home. First tilt your noble forehead forward while guffawing histrionically and massaging your weary eyebrows. Then let your finely sculpted hand fall so it strikes your well-tailored thigh with an accidental slap to signify metaphysical nonchalance. Finally, throw both hands aloft, shrug ‘Ha!’ and sling a matey arm around your nearest comrade. You’ll find these gestures inestimably consoling when your next tax bill arrives.
The show is beautifully designed by Christopher Oram with exquisite lighting and lovely costumes. The dream-home elegance, reminiscent of a Habitat fashion-shoot, is almost distractingly fetching. Was the French revolution entirely bloodless? Even the Bastille looks like a coffee bar. In a much-praised visual effect, six prisoners are beheaded on stage at the end. This is achieved with consummate brilliance — but still no blood.
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