Do3: Danton's Death

[DracoM]

A bit over-wrought for me. HUGE amount of raving and confused shouting and posturing, and very few moments of reflection - OK, so a young man's frantic play, I get that. But I really did want to hear much more of the Robespierre vs Danton argument, and I wonder if the production had gone out of its way to make the 'people' seem so violent and unlovable - 'as tenderly led by the nose as asses are', even by their deeply cynical leaders?

Given the experience of one of the lead actors in recent Egyptian events, surely a more sympathetic portrayal could have been emerged?

Woyzeck next. Looking forward to that.

[aeolium]

I'm glad I just got back from 10 days out of the country to hear the first programmes in this season. I'm a great admirer of Büchner's work and I think his early death was one of the real tragedies of world literature.

In some ways it might have been better to have had the programme about Büchner, the Sunday feature, before Danton's Death, as it was a good introduction to his work and life. I agree with the man who argued that Büchner was fundamentally a pessimist, rather than with those who were claiming that DD showed an enthusiasm for revolutionary action. The strongest influence on him seems to have been Shakespeare (at least in DD) and to a lesser extent Goethe, who like Büchner was very interested in science.

As to the play itself, I was disappointed in the translation (called an 'adaptation') which was so loose in places as to be more of a paraphrase and appeared in places to add on elements that were not in the original. It barely captured the quality of B's writing, the striking imagery, the irony, the playing with ideas, nor indeed the great set-piece speeches which were in part verbatim from the actual National Convention debates. The translator/adaptor seemed too concerned to make the play seem up to date, which to me is a fatal error. I didn't think the character of Danton came across sufficiently strongly in this portrayal, compared with others I have heard and seen (e.g. Brian Cox at the NT). So I'm afraid that for me it was a disappointing production, though I hope it gave at least sufficient flavour of the original to have encouraged people to explore further.

What always amazes me is how different B's works are, the three plays and the introspective novella Lenz. In Wozzeck everything seems to be extraordinarily compressed, like Beethoven's op 95 string quartet - even stage directions are pared to the minimum ("Boden. Lichter. Volk.") And it is, as was said in the documentary last night, one of the earliest plays to focus on a poor man, rather than the nobility or royalty. I'm looking forward to it next week.

[french frank]

Hope to tackle this tomorrow, probably starting with the feature (thanks for the tip).

[DracoM]

Actually, for me, the feature was better than the play as we heard it!! Got a lot of big guns in to talk.

[Forget It (U2079353)]

The sound effects of the guillotine and its aftereffects were rather gruesome making - don't you think!

[french frank]

I'm glad to have made its acquaintance but felt there must have been something between this production and Büchner's play which made it hard to appreciate what his message was. The main characters didn't come through very clearly to me: Robespierre, with muddled views on 'virtue', came over nevertheless as a calm rationalist. Danton seemed an even harder character to pin down, with his private 'life of vice' and public conscience over the excesses of the Terror. The two facets of each man's character seemed uneasily combined here.

Having written the which, I see Brenton's version was at the National last year. I liked this short trailer. I can well visualise the contrasting complexities of the men being brought out more clearly in that production.

Further thought on reading the Telegraph review of the NT production: this seems to have taken a more 'authentic' approach. Paradoxically, the attempt to modernise ends up by making the action less immediate, less vivid, whereas I assume the point of modernising is to bring out the universals and thus make it more credible to a modern audience. For me, on this occasion, it had the reverse effect.

[aeolium]

It's interesting to note the differences between the tone of the Hessian Courier messages written in Darmstadt a year or so before Büchner wrote DD and that of the Danton play. The Hessian Courier was co-written with a revolutionary pastor Friedrich Weidig and has a lot of Biblical quotations used to support the attack on the idleness and luxury of the aristocracy and the princely states. In DD, by contrast, there seems a pretty tolerant attitude to 'vice' - indeed, the puritanism exemplified by Robespierre and St Just (and exploited by them to attack the degenerate Girondins) is unsympathetically portrayed. I like the way Büchner makes this one of the themes of the play - puritanism has after all been a characteristic of several revolutions, not just the French but the English in the 1640s, and arguably the various communist revolutions of the C20 (and the Iranian one in 1979). Orwell parodies this revolutionary puritanism in the junior Anti-Sex League in 1984.

There was sadly much that was not brought out well in this production: for instance the conscious allusions to classical history and myth, presumably largely cut out because the adapter assumed they would not be recognized. But that misses the point - Büchner was deliberately seeking to recreate an evocation of the classical past which was a source of inspiration to the revolutionaries, e.g. in David's paintings. Those allusions should no more be omitted than they should in productions of Shakespeare or Marlowe (which would require a hefty use of the red pen). Also a number of Danton's aphorisms were simply lost because they were translated in a non-aphoristic way. Here are a couple, from a different translation: "Conscience is a mirror before which an ape torments itself" (in response to Robespierre's claim that his conscience was clean) and "The world is chaos. Nothingness is the world-god yet to be born."

I think a better translation, and more characterful portrayals of the main protagonists, especially Danton and Robespierre, would bring out the strengths of this play. I like the Brenton version and wish they had used that one here.

Incidentally, as part of this season there will be a concert of excerpts from Berg's Wozzeck and von Einem's Danton's Tod, which should be interesting. A slight puzzle though is why the season is being mounted two years before Büchner's bicentenary - not that I am complaining or think that we should be controlled by anniversaries.

[Russ]

I'm not familiar with the original, but I get the impression from aeolium's post that we didn't get the full slice in this adaptation, and perhaps the loss of the set-piece speeches that aeolium mentions is why we got short-changed over the argument between the two protagonists, although for me I think this production did carry its essence sufficiently. My feeling at the end was that the strength of the sound effects (yes, authentically gruesome) overwhelmed the language, leaving me thinking "Oh, is that it then?"

It was ok verging toward good, but certainly didn't ding the 'great Do3' bell for me.

Russ

[french frank]

This is Brenton on the changes he made to his earlier translation, tying in with a couple of aeolium's points:

Why have you found it necessary to make new changes since your first 1982 version of the play?
Nicky Wright, who’s a fellow playwright and was Literary Manager at the National Theatre for some years, said he thinks that translations have a shelf life of about 10 years and that’s sort of true.
Did you feel that?
Yes, I did, when I read it I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I couldn’t believe the audience had sat through it. I think a shift has happened in the last 30 years.
In the way we speak?
No, in the way people perceive classics. I think they were much more tolerant in saying, "Ah, this is a German classic. And the fact we don’t understand anything for thirty minutes..."
Were prepared to listen...
Audiences don’t want "library" theatre. They want plays to live, that night, for them. And they’re right. Their tolerance is lower of great German plays perhaps. But I think it’s a good thing.


I wonder if R3 should have a different role from the live theatre, in presenting the bare, unvarnished, versions of the times - at least in some circumstances. Or perhaps it's up to us to discover them for ourselves? - not always easy where another language is involved. This radio version, it seems, had a wider canvas than Brenton's:

"Brenton's text is a revised version of his original, staged at the National in 1982. In a fascinating interview with the online review ArtsDesk, Brenton makes clear his view that modern audiences will no longer tolerate what he calls 'library' theatre -- unvarnished translations of great foreign classics. Re-reading his 1982 version, he couldn't make head or tail of it. 'I couldn't believe the audience had sat through it.' So the new version (Buechner for the short-attention-span generation) runs for 105 minutes without an interval; the Methuen playscript runs to just 60 pages (on sale in the NT bookshop at an outrageous £8.99). Brenton cuts ruthlessly, omitting most of the crowd scenes, the role of Tom Payne, and the final two scenes around the scaffold, but mostly remains faithful to what Buechner wrote. I never saw the original longer Brenton version on stage, but my feeling is that something has been lost by creating what is essentially a chamber version of the play." [John Morrison]

[aeolium]

Then I have to say that it is the earlier Brenton version (the one I saw staged at the National in the 1980s) that I would prefer - although I don't know his revision. He may be right about what modern audiences would tolerate now in the theatre, though I am not sure, but radio at least should have greater horizons. I sometimes despair of whether any production of a classic play now can be made without conscious directorial interference to reinterpret it for the modern age. Is it not possible to have a historically-informed production, as we have had in performances of early music now for nearly half a century? By this I do not mean a return to the performance practices of the period, but an effort at historical imagination to bring out the very different language and ideas of that earlier period. There is no danger, in classic plays, that the resonances to modern events, modern ideas, modern feelings will not come through in any case, but it does a disservice to the playwright and the intelligence of the modern audience to assume that we are not able to appreciate the differences as well as the similarities ("The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.") And what better opportunity for the historically informed production than on the radio, where the bare text has primacy and action, physical movement, gesture mean nothing?

Oh, reform it altogether - as someone else said

[Mobson7]

Yes, french frank, I saw Danton's Death at the National last July...the Sunday Times said it was a grim German play about 'the Terror' in France, and the production was a credit to Britain's National theatre! There were balanced scenes between Danton, Robespierre and the thuggish and fearsome St Just, which you would expect from director Michael Grandage, who directed at a fast and furious pace. Good believable performance from Toby Stephens as Danton, hotfooting it from being excellent in a wonderful production of Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing at the Old Vic; ......but the star was definitely the Guillotine!

[french frank]

Nice discussion here. I'm almost through South Wind, light entertaining but too long - and longing to move on to something meatier. I think it will be the Penguin Büchner (one-click - done!), especially Lenz.

Thank you R3

[aeolium]

And I have ordered a cheap German edition of the complete works on Marketplace, as I currently only have a couple of tiny yellow Reclam copies of Dantons Tod and Wozzeck bought in Munich in the pre-internet age - very portable, but hard on the eyes

And I cannot agree with DracoM in his opening post that DD is a young man's work (except in the obvious literal sense) - it is no more that than Marlowe's Tamburlaine, written at about the same age that Büchner wrote DD. And if you can't have raised voices during a Revolution, when can you have them?

[french frank]

And I cannot agree with DracoM in his opening post that DD is a young man's work (except in the obvious literal sense)

Was it in the following feature that someone expressed the view that, had he lived, his works would probably have been stored away in a drawer, that he would have taken up a distinguished career in medecine and written no more?

Rather like Rimbaud who was written out before he was 21?

[aeolium]

Was it in the following feature that someone expressed the view that, had he lived, his works would probably have been stored away in a drawer, that he would have taken up a distinguished career in medecine and written no more?

Yes, that view was expressed, but I don't think it was a very likely outcome. His surviving works teem with ideas, and I don't think his temperament would have been satisfied with a life as a lecturer in medicine. The letters show his interest in writing right up to the end, and he was working on revisions to Woyzeck just before his final short illness (and started it after he received his Doctor of Philosophy in September 1836). In a letter to his fiancée less than a month before he died, he wrote: "Poor Shakespeare was a scribe during the day and had to write his own works at night, and I, who am unworthy to untie his shoelaces, am far better off...".

Apropos Woyzeck, I hope there is a brief introduction this Sunday about the way the play is to be presented for this production. It was left in a fragmentary and unfinished state, including a revised draft, and different editions come up with different sequences for presenting the material.