Historical recording of Brecht's Coriolan (1964/1978)
Berliner Ensemble streaming, until February 18th.: This is indeed one of those productions that made theater history in the best sense. Because it was not only a remarkable event whose lifetime stretched by the way over more than a decade but also it had a lasting impact on theatre aesthetics afterwards.
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The story of this production in the Berliner Ensemble’s streaming program is as complex as its text of Brecht’s
Historical Brecht recordings
Coriolan
By William Shakespeare
Adopted by Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert
Choreography: Ruth Berghaus
February 12.-18 2021
adaptation of a lesser popular Shakespeare tragedy about the Roman warrior from the 5th century BC.
Brecht started working on his version in the early 1950s as a political drama about the successful military leader Coriolan, who is exiled by his own people and collaborates with his former enemy, Aufidius. Brecht’s subject is how a great man and specialist of war may not be indispensable for his heroic deeds because the people’s needs are different from egotistic leadership. Associations in the historical context of the early 1950s could be manifold, not only of Hitler and Stalin, but Brecht aborted the project over a dispute with his lead actor, Ernst Busch, who refused to play Coriolan alongside Helene Weigel as his mother, both being the same age.
Powerful battle scenes
The text of Brecht’s adaptation, for large parts a new translation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, remained unfinished when he died in 1956. It was, however, published in his posthumous Collected Works and premiered in Frankfurt am Main in 1962 with widely negative reviews in the press. Two years later, Brecht’s disciples Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert directed Coriolan at Berliner Ensemble with the young Ekkehard Schall as Coriolan, Helene Weigel as his mother Volumnia and the emerging actor Hilmar Thate as Aufidius. Wekwerth and Tenschert had ‘finished’ the play after their own dramaturgical vision with translations from Shakespeare arguing that they would faithfully complete what Brecht had left unfinished. Karl von Appen, one of Brecht’s closest collaborators, made the stage design, Paul Dessau orchestrated all musical arrangements, and Christine Stromberg, later one of the most prominent artists in this field, designed the costumes of Roman military apparel. The production gained attention for its artistic acting achievement, first of all Schall’s overwhelming appearance, but the most powerful element could be seen in the choreographic battle scenes. These battle scenes, often deleted in conventional Shakespeare staging of Coriolanus, became the foundation with their physical attraction. These scenes were directed and choreographed by Ruth Berghaus, a modern choreographer trained by Gret Palucca. Berghaus not only moved a group of individual bodies in war-like motion but she made these men also shout in chorus with astonishing effects. While the single war leaders would stand alone, these warriors would create a collective body with powerful speech. About twenty years later Einar Schleef picked up this aesthetic idea for his chorus-choreographic theatre that became one of the landmarks of recent German theatre history.
Seeing Coriolan today, the associations of populist leadership seem inevitable. The man of great deeds manipulates and blackmails his followers before he fails as a hero, which is an easy interpretation for the first part of the story. What happens then with people and their secondary leaders is more subtle and maybe even challenging for us with this political drama of power and defeat.
After Helene Weigel’s death in 1971, Ruth Berghaus became the artistic director of Berliner Ensemble and revived the production from 1964, now with Hans-Peter Reinecke as Aufidius and Felicitas Ritsch as Volumnia alongside Schall’s still super-strong acting in the lead role, certainly one of his greatest achievements. The streaming presents a recording with this cast, indeed a monument of theatre history. (12.02.2021)
