Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Not All One Song: Arthur Miller in the German Theater

78 Michael Raab Not All One Song Arthur Miller in the German Theater December 17,1982,seemed to mark the nadir of Arthur Miller’s standing in the German theater. On the evening of that day Peter Iden, the critic for the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the four well-respected national dailies, entered the stalls of the Schauspielhaus in Nuremberg to attend the German premiere of The American Clock. The fact that no theater in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg had tried to secure the rights for the play spoke for itself, but when Iden looked around he was surprised to see none of his usual colleagues,as the rival papers had sent only their second or third stringers.The day after his review appeared he felt obliged to justify his trip to Franconia in an additional commentary and tried to come to grips with the German theater’s apparent disinterest in Arthur Miller: The aesthetics at least at our major theaters are far removed from the straight storytelling of an author like Miller. For this development there are many reasons. Paradoxically it is the lack of new plays that makes it difficult for the few of them still at hand to find a director’s attention.That would be less hard to swallow if the audience really had followed the quantum leaps of the theater’s aesthetics.But this is far from the case.In Nuremberg in the stalls you felt rather a kind of relief on the side of the spectators confronted with Miller’s conventional dramaturgy. And a lot of sympathetic feeling.From the first German-speaking production in Basle one heard similar reports.How Miller describes people and their conflicts is still of interest for many.1 The German theater is, of course, director dominated. Despite the fact that audiences generally like a well-constructed story with compelling characters, directors tend to consider plays in terms of how much of their own vision and personality they can project into them.After all,that is what will earn them marks from the critics,enhancing their chances for Not All One Song 79 further employment or even leading to the artistic directorship of a theater .A play as linear and tightly plotted as All My Sons is not particularly appealing to directors keen to demonstrate their own uniqueness, if need be at the cost of a text. In their attempt to be original, directors are supported by the reviewers, who all too often refer to a very good production of a well-made play as“merely solid.”At worst,a critic who is unable to differentiate properly between the work of playwright, director, and actor might even insinuate that the result was mainly due to the company, imagining the director as not much more than an onlooker at rehearsals. No wonder directors who see it as their biggest achievement to disappear behind their work lead a tough existence in Germany. Rather than stage a Miller play, their publicity-conscious colleagues take on the world premiere of a half-baked new German text in the hope of getting the credit for having at least turned it into a bearable evening in the theater.Or they might deconstruct a classic, because the author is no longer protected by copyright. So if a director is keen on making a statement on bourgeois society by using the text as a springboard for his own ideas, he will not look to Miller but rather go back to one of Miller’s idols: Henrik Ibsen. The highest ambition of a director is to be invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, where every year the previous season’s most notable productions from Germany,Switzerland,andAustria are staged.To be chosen means an enormous career boost.How low playwrights rank on the scale in Berlin was illustrated by a book celebrating the festival’s first twentyfive years in 1988.The index lists theaters, directors, stage and costume designers, and even the dramaturges involved, but not the playwrights. Contemporary American writers have never played a big part in Berlin. EdwardAlbee did relatively best with Who’sAfraid ofVirginiaWoolf? (1964), Tiny Alice (1966), and All Over (1972); these productions were followed by a big gap until the production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1986) and Oleanna (1994).Tennessee Williams in 2000 was featured with a free adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire; the regular German title, Endstation Sehnsucht, had to be changed into Endstation Amerika.The first Eugene O...