Peter Zadek's Productions of Shakespeare's the M

Ludwig Schnauder (Vienna) “The villainy you teach me I will execute…” Peter Zadek’s Productions of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta at Vienna’s Burgtheater The essay explores aspects of the work of one of the most influential representatives of postwar German director’s theatre, Peter Zadek. As the son of Jewish parents who emigrated to London in 1933 and as having spent his formative years in England, Zadek occupied an outsider position in the German theatre scene but also served as a cultural mediator, bringing aesthetic elements to his productions that were perceived as Anglo- Saxon. Although the range of plays that he directed was extremely broad, he was especially renowned for his productions of Renaissance plays, in particular those of William Shakespeare. Possibly due to his biographical background Zadek was again and again drawn to The Merchant of Venice, which deals with anti-Semitism and the role of a Jew in a hostile gentile society. The article gives an overview of the development of Zadek’s conceptual and aesthetic approaches to the play and offers a detailed discussion of his 1988 Merchant at Austria’s national theatre. As an epilogue (or possibly prologue) to his engagement with Shakespeare’s controversial drama, Zadek returned to Vienna’s Burgtheater in 2001 to put on The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, arguing that Barabas was ‘a different kind of Shylock’. The essay attempts to throw light not only on the two productions themselves but also sets them in their respective political-historical context(s) and analyses their reception. Introduction: Director’s Theatre, Peter Zadek, and The Merchant of Venice As most theatre scholars and critics would confirm, German theatre is primarily a director’s theatre, that is a theatre in which the director – and not the actor or the playwright – rules supreme. Christopher Innes indeed claims that the dominance of the director is “a major factor distinguishing German theatre history from the rest of Europe” (172). Contemporary audiences have become used to expect a director to impose his or her artistic vision on a play or “in more extreme cases [to] simply use[.] a play as raw material to make an almost totally independent dramatic creation” (Carlson x). Although there is also opposition to the so-called ‘Regietheater’ and its excesses are frequently ridiculed in the press, “the theatregoing public […] and […] the critical establishment [have, in general,] strongly supported the work of innovative directors” (Carlson x). It is, in fact, relatively common that spectators attend a theatre production because of who has directed it rather than of who has written the play. This is in stark contrast to Anglo-American theatrical practices that are, by and large, still 306 Ludwig Schnauder informed by the traditional view that “the major concern of theatre should be the faithful conversion into visual terms of a pre-existing literary text” (Carlson ix). Although mainly associated with the second half of the twentieth century, Christopher Innes (cf. 172-174) and Marvin Carlson insist that the roots of German Regietheater are much older and go “back to the very founding of the German national stage” (Carlson x). As intendant of and principal director at the Weimar Court Theatre Goethe could be regarded as one of the first representatives of Regietheater, followed in the nineteenth century by theatrical greats such as Joseph Schreyvogel, Heinrich Laube, and Franz von Dingelstedt at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Karl Immermann in Düsseldorf, Carl von Brühl in Berlin, and, most notably, Richard Wagner and George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. In the first half of the twentieth- century this tradition was continued by Max Reinhardt and, during the particularly innovative and radical interwar years, by Leopold Jessner, Jürgen Fehling, Erwin Piscator, and the young Bertolt Brecht. During the Third Reich, director’s theatre was in abeyance as it was regarded as ‘entartet’ (decadent, sickly, and subversively Jewish) and ‘fidelity to the text’ was decreed the only permissible approach to staging plays. Although after the end of the war, theatrical life was resuscitated astonishingly quickly, there was no decisive aesthetic break with what had gone before. The classics including Shakespeare were performed with the intention to recuperate humanist traditions lost during Nazi barbarity. Theatre had to be “uplifting and spiritual, the playwright reigned supreme, and very few works challenged the rites in this temple of high art, either aesthetically or politically” (Carlson xi). In line with this conservative approach, the directors “stuck to a kind of pathos-drenched declamatory style on abstract sets while professing to let the plays speak for themselves” (Raab, “Zadek” 510). This only changed in the 1960s due to transformations within German society, such as the student protests and the general shift to the left, but also, more mundanely, due to the retirement of a number of conservative stalwarts of the German theatre scene. Three directors in particular are associated with initiating what has been called the West German theatre revolution (cf. Hortmann 217) and with establishing new forms of Regietheater on the German-speaking stage: Peter Stein (1937– ), Claus Peymann (1937– ), and Peter Zadek (1926–2009). They were all “closely associated with the youth movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s and with experimental and non-traditional theatre companies and spaces until they moved, gradually, to the centre of the theatre establishment” (Carlson .

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