Collaboration/Taking Sides
The Guardian, 31st July 2008, Michael Billington
How does the artist survive in an authoritarian society? The question haunts these
engrossing, subtly linked plays by Ronald Harwood. If I prefer the new Collaboration,
dealing with Richard Strauss, to the revived Taking Sides, exploring the case of
conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, it is because the former deals with the creative process
and encompasses a greater tragedy.
The title, Collaboration, has all kinds of resonances. In part, Harwood is dealing
with the fruitful partnership in the early 1930s between Strauss and the Austrian
novelist, Stefan Zweig, on the opera Die Schweigsame Frau, but Harwood’s play also
charts the growing tension between the Jewish Zweig, who could not endure the Nazis’
destruction of the European culture he so greatly prized, and the German Strauss,
who was forced into an accommodation with the prevailing tyranny.
While we share Zweig’s revulsion of the growing Nazi menace where artists, like everyone
else, feel “defenceless as flies”, we also understand Strauss’ surrender when assured
that cooperation with the regime will ensure the safety of his Jewish daughter-in-law
and grandchildren. Even if Harwood omits crucial evidence, such as the grovelling
letter Strauss wrote to Hitler in 1935 calling him “the great architect of German
social life”, his play illuminates two different responses to barbarism: that of
the tragic realist, Zweig, and the naïve dreamer, Strauss.
Under Philip Franks’ limpid direction, the play is finely acted. Michael Pennington
brilliantly captures the obsessiveness of Strauss, David Horovitch’s Zweig moves
perfectly from deference to defiance, and there is exemplary support from Isla Blair
and Martin Hutson.
Taking Sides, first seen in 1995 and dealing with an investigation into Furtwängler,
who remained chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich,
tackles many of the same questions: above all, that of whether music can ever be
a form of resistance to an evil ideology. But Harwood weakens the argument by Making
Furtwängler’s principal interrogator a philistine American major who refers to the
maestro as “the bandleader”, and our sympathies flow towards Furtwängler from the
start. Pennington lends the morally equivocal conductor a superb wounded hauteur,
and Horovitch does all he can with the galloping major. But, although the play if
full of narrative tension, it feels like a vindication of the flawed artist, whereas
Collaboration offers an exploration of a timeless political dilemma.
The Times, 31st July 2008. Benedict Nightingale
The Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig brought Richard Strauss a libretto based on Ben
Johnson’s The Silent Woman that delighted the German composer and left him avid for
more joint ventures. But the title of Ronald Harwood’s new play has a second meaning.
Zweig was a Jew and had to flee his native Salzburg while Strauss remained in Germany
throughout the Hitler period and is still sometimes accused of being a quisling,
an appeaser, a collaborator. What’s the truth? Where, if anywhere, is the blame?
Well, Harwood has always been fascinated by the predicament of those artists who
couldn’t or wouldn’t see how long a spoon one needs if one sups with the Devil. Indeed,
it’s also the subject of his Taking Sides, which is being revived at Chichester in
tandem with Collaboration. That play, which I’ll review tomorrow, takes a cautiously
critical look at the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Its successor is more sympathetic
to Strauss, and not just because he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren
who, had he been openly anti-Nazi, would have died in Auschwitz.
From the moment Michael Pennington’s dishevelled Strauss bustles excitedly on stage,
to be reproached for not wiping his shoes by Isla Blair as his battleaxe wife, the
composer comes across as an innocent, at times almost a child, uninterested in politics
and fanatic only about his music. He initially welcomes Hitler as a new broom and
regards his anti-Semitism as a passing absurdity. He can’t understand why David Horovitch’s
grave, gentle Zweig leaves for England, then Brazil. How can the friend he so admires
and loves desert him and his muse?
Anyway, Strauss doesn’t resist when he’s crowned president of the Reich Chamber of
Music in 1933, goes on to compose an anthem for the Berlin Olympics, and even makes
the odd anti-Semitic remark to Zweig, whom he accuses of caring more about his tribe
than his art. Yet he disgraces himself in the Nazis’ eyes by insisting that the programmes
for The Silent Woman acknowledges its librettist and, later, by decrying German nationalism
in an intercepted letter. In other words, he discovers the hard way something that
the realistic Zweig tells him and that other realist, Harwood, regretfully believes.
We like to think that art opens eyes and ears, enriches, humanises. Actually, history
teaches that it’s at least as vulnerable as it’s resilient and is easily co-opted
and/or suppressed by ruthless politicians. And this gives us a moving ending to a
gripping play: Horovitch’s Zweig having committed the ultimate “collaboration” with
the Nazis by inflicting on himself the destruction they couldn’t manage; Pennington’s
half-broken old Strauss battling back the tears as he accuses himself and laments
his long-lost collaborator.
The Daily Telegraph, 31st July 2008. Dominic Cavendish
Brilliant – and devastating. They’re the only words that do justice to the experience
of watching Ronald Harwood’s latest play, Collaboration, in tandem with a fresh revival
of his 1995 hit, Taking Sides.
Harwood gives us richly absorbing accounts of two very different musical maestros
yoked together in historical notoriety by their apparent complicity with the Nazis
– despite the recorded endeavours of both men to save Jews from the Holocaust.
In Collaboration, it’s the conduct of composer Richard Strauss under the Third Reich
that courts our attention; in Taking Sides, it’s the career of conductor Wilhelm
Furtwängler, who also survived and thrived during Germany’s darkest days, that fascinates
and perplexes.
Taken on their own, each yields provocative questions, but, taken together, they
form one exhilarating theatrical debate, encompassing the role of the artist in society,
the value of art as a civilising force, and the power of individuals to resist tyranny.
The title Collaboration packs a powerful pun. At the outset, we see a declining Strauss
pining for some creative rekindling from the Austrian novelist and playwright Stefan
Zweig, a reticent spark of a man. They begin collaborating on an opera based on Ben
Johnson’s The Silent Woman, but, as the ideological mania of the Nazis intensifies,
so does the pressure on Strauss to dissociate himself from Zweig – a Jew – or face
the consequences.
While steadfast in his courage against Hinkel (Martin Hutson, superb), the lackey
dispatched by Goebbels to tighten the screws, Strauss nonetheless strays into the
realm of culpability by virtue of his obstinacy. His mantra –“All I want in life
is to be allowed to compose” – suggests a man hermetically sealed off from reality.
Michael Pennington is mesmerising as Strauss; full of rheumy dignity, his tufty snowy-white
hair makes him resemble some lonely Alpine peak. Towards the end, like a sustained
note that suddenly breaks, cracks of anguish appear across his face as he learns
of Zweig’s fate.
He’s matched for precision by David Horovitch as a twitchy Zweig, who conceals a
growing impatience and disbelief beneath a carapace of stiff Teutonic formality.
The pair then go on to triumph again in Taking Sides, set in wrecked, post-war Berlin.
Horovitch takes the role, originally performed by Pennington, of an American major
hell-bent on exposing Furtwängler, with scant respect for artistry or factual accuracy,
as a Nazi stooge.
Just when you think that Harwood has loaded the argument too much in favour of Pennington’s
beatific artist, we’ll be apprised of a particularly repellent contribution to the
Nazi cause, in the face of which Furtwängler’s calm self-justifications come across
as so much wriggling.
Blessed with the thrilling tension of courtroom dramas, neither play puts a food
wrong – and the same goes for Philip Frank’s exquisitely paced and performed productions.
The Times, 1st August 2008, Benedict Nightingale
So how could you cope with similar pressures, especially if their full enormity became
evident only gradually? That’s the question raised by the Nazi-period artists in
the two Ronald Harwood plays in rep at Chichester. The dramatist, himself a Jew who
left apartheid South Africa for England, made Richard Strauss the subject of his
ethical quiz in his new Collaboration, which I reviewed yesterday. The 1995 play
Taking Sides involves Wilhelm Furtwängler, who (among other questionable things)
agreed to serve under Strauss as vice-president of Hitler’s Reich Chamber of Music.
Michael Pennington brilliantly demonstrates his range by following up a warm, naïve
Strauss with an elegant, withdrawn, melancholy Furtwängler whose final breakdown
is almost more distressing than the composer’s parallel self-accusations.
But this time we see the 1930s only in retrospect, because the conductor us facing
post-war investigation from an American officer whose civilian job was sniffing out
false insurance claims. And he’s decided in advance that the “bandleader”, as he
dubs Furtwängler, is a lying “bastard” who must be “nailed”.
The justification Harwood gives Major Arnold is that he’s haunted by the sight of
Belsen, but David Horovitch still can’t humanise an inquisitor who comes across as
coarse, chippy, philistine and, ironically, Nazi-like in his kangaroo-court biases.
This near-caricature is the play’s weakness, but it’s outweighed by strengths that
include narrative energy, moral subtlety and, given what artists still sometimes
suffer, an awful topicality.
Anyway, Furtwängler’s justification is that he rescued many Jews, including some
banished from his own Berlin Philharmonic, and that he genuinely believed that he
was keeping alive serious music and humane values during the Hitler darkness. And
Harwood tends to accept this, acquitting the conductor of fascist sympathies while
accusing him of the same sin that Furtwängler ends up urging against himself: that
he failed to see that Beethoven, especially well-played Beethoven, could be used
to support, bolster, even legitimise the Nazi murderers.
Watch Pennington’s face tighten, then sag, as Furtwängler hears his own recording
of Bruckner’s great adagio, the lament played on German radio just after Hitler’s
death. That moment encapsulates Harwood’s theme. What are the strengths, the weaknesses,
the uses and misuses of art? They are the questions finely and formidably enough
asked to convince me that both plays and both Penningtons should be transferred to
London forthwith.
Daily Mail, 1st August 2008,
Michael Pennington, an under-appreciated veteran of the English stage, is in Chichester
playing two snowy haired musical despots.
He stars in Ronald Harwood’s matinee/evening double-bill and is terrific in both.
In Collaboration, he plays composer Richard Strauss, a man often accused of helping
the Nazis. In Taking Sides, he becomes the infamous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler,
another artist suspected of supporting Hitler, even though he also helped many Jews
escape from Nazi Germany.
My Pennington makes Strauss an unworldly, unpredictable figure, sometimes sweet and
henpecked, sometimes irascible. Isla Blair is certainly pretty terrifying as the
indomitable Frau Strauss.
With Furtwängler, we have greater sense of self-importance. Conductors are like that,
you know.
Mr Pennington achieves these two markedly different characters – who on paper seem
so similar – with just one false moustache. The rest is pure acting.
Taking Sides was written in 1995 and is a belter, notable for its balance. Yes, Furtwängler
was a cultural pin-up in Nazi Germany, but yes, he saved many Jews and stayed in
Germany to defend his country’s artistic life.
By allowing the audience to make up its own mind, Mr Harwood makes this a more interesting
play than if he had himself taken one side.
The water is further clouded by the coarseness of the American intelligence officer,
Major Arnold, who interrogates Furtwängler.
Arnold, just like the Nazis, has tame journalists he can manipulate. He concocts
and ignores evidence. You sense Mr Harwood (a Jew bought up in South Africa) is extending
his charge beyond Nazism to include wider examples of abusive officialdom.
One of the charges against Furtwängler is that he had a rude newspaper critic packed
off to the Russian front.
Not unknown today, that sort of behaviour. I know of at least one West End producer
(much on TV recently) who tries to silence people who give him bad reviews.
The newly-written Collaboration may feel like a minor-chord riff on Taking Sides.
The first half is slow (I saw three people fall asleep), mainly because it had no
injection of Nazi brutality. The whole thing could benefit from more of Strauss’s
music.
Yet I liked the two shows equally. Collaboration is better at catching the naivety,
the other-worldliness, of artists. It is less overtly theatrical, but I liked its
more subtle pace and it had a greater warmth.
In both plays, Mr Pennington is paired with David Horovitch, who first plays Strauss’s
Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, then has a bash at the charmless Major Arnold.
I was slightly worried by the wigs Mr Horovitch wore, but he is a solid pro – one
of the best.
Martin Hutson catches the eye as a swaggering sidekick of Goebbels. Sophie Roberts
also deserves a plug, if only for the most piercing stage scream I have ever heard.
These Harwood companion plays, meanwhile, deserve only applause.
Verdict: Art versus the Nazis (Collaboration)
Verdict: Art versus authoritarianism (Taking Sides)
****
Return to Collaboration
Return to Taking Sides
