Brigitte Salino
Eighteen months ago, when opposition to Jrg Haider then leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom party was at its height, Peter Zadek announced that he intended to stage The Jew Of Malta at Vienna’s Burgtheater. It would, he said, be “the biggest provocation you have ever seen”.
He was right. Since the Nazi period, when it was put on to stir up anti- Semitic feelings, Christopher Marlowe’s play has not been staged in a leading Austrian theatre. And it has rarely been seen elsewhere in Europe, where each new production causes controversy because of the representation of its central character, the Jew Barabas.
He is the wealthiest man in Malta, and hated by the Christians who govern the island. To avoid war with the Turks, who threaten to invade unless they are paid a large tribute, the government demands that the Jews give up half their wealth. Barabas, the only one to refuse, is eventually forced to part with all his money to avoid banishment.
He gives in or at least appears to. In secret he plots a coup against the government. He is so desperate to succeed that he is willing to sacrifice his only daughter, Abigail. But in the end he is killed by his enemies.
The character of Barabas is the anti-Semitic archetype of the Jew: rich, grasping, arrogant, underhand and prepared to venture anything. Does that make Marlowe’s play an anti-Semitic manifesto? Yes, if staged as it was by the Nazis, with Barabas’s character traits exaggerated. No, if one believes, like Bernard Sobel, who has put on the play twice, that the Jewish figure is purely instrumental.
Zadek, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Nazism with his family by emigrating to England in the early 1930s, thinks Marlowe’s play is “neither anti- nor pro-Semitic”. It “describes a state”, which he deliberately chose to stage at the Burgtheater, Vienna’s most august theatre and, as such, a mirror of Austrian society. There is no more bourgeois place than the Burg- theater, where uniformed female attendants flush the toilets after women spectators have used them.
But it has also been the scene of many epic battles, such as the one waged by Claus Peymann in 1988 when he put on Heldenplatz (Heroes Square), Thomas Bernhard’s attack on Austrian spinelessness and anti-Semitism. And Zadek knowingly chose this emblematic symbol of ambiguity as his venue, and asked Gert Voss, who is adored by the Viennese, to play the title role.
At last month’s premiere the audience seemed stunned, yet remained quite calm. The provocation had not come where it had been expected. Zadek skilfully disarmed possible detractors by stripping down the mechanism of hatred that makes Barabas “the” Jew par excellence.
That mechanism is a mirror: you want me to be the Jew you imagined? OK, I’ll personify him even more than you imagined. That is the image that Zadek throws back at the audience, who throughout the performance remain as bathed in light as the stage.
The effect is enhanced by having Barabas sitting on a sack of gold in the opening act, and wearing a mask that makes him look like an anti- Semitic caricature of a Jew. The mask is removed to reveal a bare-faced Voss/ Barabas, but at times others put on the mask.
The most memorable feature of Voss’s performance is his constant smile that twists his mouth into a rictus expressing a terrifying mixture of despair and loathing. His smile is probably the most effective weapon in this production. Zadek succeeds in touching a nerve about anti- Semitism in Austria, even though, as he says, “one can never change anything except in the theatre, for two and a half hours”.