Guy Willoughby
theatre
Does German expressionism translate tangibly for a South African and contemporary audience? The question will occur to theatre-goers at Kurt Weill and Georg Keiser’s The Silver Lake (first performance February 18 1933), currently in its first local production at Spier.
The expressionists sought to mirror psychological realities rather than physical appearances through novel stage devices. Later, more politically conscious dramatists used these techniques to interrogate society as in The Silver Lake.
The play gains a latter-day cachet through being one of the first cultural events in Germany to suffer Nazi censorship. It opened three weeks after Adolf Hitler’s succession to power; within the following three, it was shut down.
Weill built his musical reputation on a series of stage collaborations with radical dramatist Bertolt Brecht. With Keiser, Weill produces here a curious hybrid: part sentimental fairy tale, part harsh political tract. Against a backdrop of grinding poverty not unlike our own, the plot turns on the love-hate relationship of two poor men, Olim the policeman (Herman Hardick) and a thief, Severin (Vumile Nomanyama). They are thrown together when the constable severely wounds the criminal after a botched robbery.
As if in some Brothers Grimm tale, Olim magically turns into a rich man: he wins the lottery, a plot twist with a topical spin. Remorse-struck, he chooses to spend his money in caring for the maimed Severin, forgetting (as a great man once said) that charity creates a multitude of sins.
After a series of mishaps, both men flee together at play’s end, victims both of get-rich-quick capitalism and the old landed aristocracy. At this point Teutonic mysticism seems to take over, as they cross the frozen Silver Lake surrounding the castle into what? Death? Valhalla? An unwritten sequel? If the Nazis were more aesthetically astute, perhaps they could have proposed national socialism as the answer to Severin and Olim’s troubles.
Director Mark Dornford-May has chosen an austere staging, making deft use of a few hard-working props (they involve a series of visual puns on the social ladders we all climb). Those of us who’ve seen the Spier’s summer season may grow tired of the all-purpose wooden stockade set, which does little to suggest the aesthetic or social world of the play.
The casting is efficient: Hardick’s Olim is a vocally adept if rather stolid presence, struggling to sustain sympathy for an ingenuous character whose inner life remains opaque.
As Severin, Nomanyama has the meatier role; vocally he achieves some stirring moments, such as a Verdi-like aria blood-and-thunder revenge aria that he renders magnificently.
Pauline du Plessis as Fennimore the (curiously named) singer gives a touching performance, while comic value is offered in smaller cameo parts by Sibusiso Ziqubu (baron), Sandile Kamle (lottery agent) and Sam Goosen (fat policewoman). One note: local audiences are now tired of hearing every stage policeman/woman with a thick Afrikaans accent. Aren’t there other dialects that cops speak these days?
Best of all is British import Buffy Davis, who as Severin’s scheming housekeeper Frau von Luber, sets the playing style bright, caricatured, flawlessly mannered. Her grasp of the right acting mode rather outshines the others, which brings us back to the validity of The Silver Lake in 2001.
Perhaps the production has something to say about poverty and its effects; but the solutions offered and the entire tenor of the plot take us back to a European theatre style now a curiosity.
Musically a tasty if eccentric blend of elements, supported here by a vigorous orchestra and strong choral work, The Silver Lake will chiefly appeal to the musical cognoscenti. And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.
The Silver Lake is on at the Spier Estate, Stellenbosch, on March 2 and 9. Tel: (021) 809?1165