One day Ronald Harwood may once again
write a script that is not centred on an individual’s relationship with
Nazism. Harwood, best known now as the screenwriter of
The Pianist, premièred a
play about British Nazi sympathiser John Amery earlier this year, and
now Chichester has twinned a revival of his 1995 play about the
de-Nazification interrogations of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler,
Taking Sides, with a new companion
piece about composer Richard Strauss and his sometime librettist Stefan
Zweig,
Collaboration.
One of the spurious, desperate “evidences” of Nazi commitment flung by
his monomaniac American interrogator is that German state radio
followed the announcement of Hitler’s death with Furtwängler’s
recording of a Brückner symphony. We are implicitly directed to
consider the absurdity of this as amounting to an ideological
endorsement by the conductor, but we recognise how emotionally
manipulative the music is. Harwood’s writing is similarly transparent:
Michael Pennington may play Furtwängler as formal and reserved to
the point of coldness, but we are in no doubt that, however naïve
his beliefs about the separation of art and politics might be, we are
on his side rather than that of David Horovitch as the proto-McCarthy
determined to condemn him. The same contrast is used in
Collaboration, though this time it
is Horovitch’s Zweig who is naturally reserved but a man of explicit
principle in contrast with Pennington’s Strauss, far more garrulous but
also unable to resist being drawn further and further into exploitation
by the Nazi regime.
It is a paradox that the plays are intelligent (and Philip Franks’
productions are characteristcally considered) yet not particularly
deep. The implied question – what would
you do, and when? – is one that
strikes keenly, but not necessarily one we could answer honestly from
our safe distance. Would we, like Strauss, acquiesce in the face of
threats against our family? Like Furtwängler, continue to believe
in the sanctity of our art? Follow Zweig into exile and suicide? In the
last lines of that play, Strauss makes what is clearly a specious
self-justification but is none the less an arresting idea: that in one
way Zweig was the real collaborator because, by taking his own life, he
achieved what the Nazis wanted – a world deprived of him. Both plays
cause us to think and feel to a great extent, but not in any new
directions.
Taking Sides, in
particular, ends on a note (literally) of sentimental affirmation which
cannot rival the same moment in István Szabó’s film
version, when a few seconds of archive film footage eloquently sum up
the complexities and ambiguities of the entire issue.
In Chichester’s main house, meanwhile, Jonathan Church’s canny
programming balances Harwood’s more pensive dramas with a slice of
old-fashioned Englishness. A colleague claims that once, when the
lights rose on a Chichester stage set, he heard a punter exclaim, “Oh,
goody, a chaise longue!” A matching pair, in fact, in Simon Higlett’s
set for
The Circle. This
country-house play may have been Somerset Maugham’s brittle best in
1921, but it has not aged at all well. Arnold and Elizabeth
Champion-Cheney find themselves playing host both to Arnold’s father
and, on their first return in 30 years, his mother who ran off with his
father’s best friend; at the same time, Elizabeth is on the brink of a
similar flight with a handsome planter from the Malay States. Questions
of love, happiness, independence, decency, are all drowned in a torrent
of clipped accents (and, in the case of Susan Hampshire’s Lady Kitty, a
clipped gait – she walks like a geisha marchioness). It is moderately
amusing in a post-Wildean way when it intends to be, but often
downright hilarious when it doesn’t.
Written for the Financial
Times.