THE BIG BRECHT FEST 1
The Jewish Wife / A Respectable Wedding
Young Vic, London SE1
Opened 4 April, 2007
****
The Young Vic gets to show off both its new studios in tandem with this
first of two double bills of short plays by Bertolt Brecht. They can be
seen in either order; a colleague advised me, "See The Jewish Wife second, because
after it you won't want to laugh at anything," but on the contrary,
after seeing it first I found myself all the more eager for comic
relief.
I have often joked about director Katie Mitchell's fondness for dim
lighting, but she strikes exactly the right note in the smaller Clare
studio by eschewing stage lighting altogether. The middle-class bedroom
set is lit only by a few ordinary domestic electric lamps, as Anastasia
Hille's wife sets about packing her clothes and effects. After ten
minutes, she speaks: in a series of phone calls, she gives transparent
excuses for her departure to various friends and relatives. For this is
one of Brecht's sketches from 1938's Fear
And Misery In The Third Reich, and even before the wife
practises a farewell speech to her husband's photograph, we are in no
doubt why she is leaving. Nor does it surprise us that, when he does
enter, the couple go through exactly the specious motions which the
wife had earlier predicted and condemned. Martin Crimp's translation is
as spare and direct as his Sophocles translation Cruel And Tender a few years ago.
In contrast, the much earlier A
Respectable Wedding (1919), staged in the larger Maria space, is
rendered in Rory Bremner's translation into a delicious comedy of
embarrassment with no class-conflict edge to it at all. Joe
Hill-Gibbins directs it as a squirming farce set in a doll's house of a
set in which everything collapses piece by piece, along with the social
niceties. The bride's father bores all with his anecdotes, her sister
gets off with the best man in the kitchen, the groom's friend recites
inappropriate verse and mixes alcohol with his medication, another
married couple keep going for each other's and everyone else's jugular.
Former History Boys James Corden and Russell Tovey head a fine cast of
nine which also includes Doon MacKichan and Jemima Rooper. A second
Brecht pairing opens later this month.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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