Beatrix Hesse (Bamberg)

Crossing Borders: The Example of Michael Frayn’s Afterlife

This paper examines various types of Anglo-German theatrical transfer, using as an example Michael Frayn’s play Afterlife (2008). Afterlife describes the last twenty-three years in the life of German-Austrian director Max Reinhardt, employing Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Jedermann as its foil, since Frayn considers Reinhardt’s production of Jedermann as his major lasting achievement. In a first step, Afterlife is discussed in the context of Frayn’s trilogy of German history plays that also includes Copenhagen (1998) and Democracy (2003). In these plays, Frayn takes up the function of a cultural interpreter, introducing British audiences to German themes. The second part of this paper discusses Afterlife from the point of view of drama translation, since a substantial part of the play consists of translated passages from Jedermann. In the third section, Jedermann itself moves into the focus of investigation, since it is itself an instance of Anglo-German theatrical transfer, an adaptation of the fifteenth-century English morality play The Somonynge of Everyman. Finally, the essay considers the issue of theatrical re-appropriation in evidence in Frayn’s reversal of several of Hofmannsthal’s changes and innovations to the medieval model. Another aspect of theatrical re-appropriation is the 2011 translation of Afterlife into German, which reinstates Hofmannsthal’s verse and, in its afterword, questions some of Frayn’s central claims concerning the afterlife of Jedermann in the Salzburg Festival after 1945.

Among contemporary British dramatists, Michael Frayn has shown a particularly pronounced and sustained interest in Germany and German themes. This interest is so conspicuous that in 2008 an entire volume on his relation to Germany entitled Frayn in Germany, edited by Albert-Reiner Glaap and Susanne Bach, was published. This volume mainly concentrates on Frayn’s two major successes in the theatre, the meta-farce Noises Off and the memory play Copenhagen, as well as on Democracy, a dramatization of the Brandt-Guillaume affair. Since Frayn in Germany came out in 2008, it could not possibly cover his most recent contribution to his sustained treatment of German themes, the play Afterlife that was first presented in the Lyttleton auditorium of the London National Theatre on 11 June 2008, but only give us tantalizing glimpses of the work in progress: “There’s a new play coming at the National. […] This time it’s set, not in Germany, but in Austria. […] At the moment it’s called Afterlife, but whether we shall stick with that, I don’t know” (Glaap 12). However, Afterlife is perhaps the most fitting example of Anglo-German theatrical transfer in Frayn’s entire oeuvre, revolving as it does around the character of an eminent Austrian/German theatrical personality, Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). Born in Baden near Vienna under the name of Max Goldmann, Reinhardt strongly influenced 150 Beatrix Hesse both the German and the Austrian theatre for the first three decades of the twentieth century, becoming artistic director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1905 (following the phenomenal success of his legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and of the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna in 1924. Afterlife covers the last 23 years of Reinhardt’s life, beginning with the first production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann in 1920 and ending with Reinhardt’s death as an exile in New York. The play sketches Reinhardt’s method of rehearsal and direction, his constant struggle for money (as his productions were becoming more and more lavish), his parallel struggle to obtain a divorce from his first wife Else Heims in order to be able to marry his long-time companion, actress Helene Thimig, his spectacular refurbishment of the derelict Schloss Leopoldskron he had acquired in 1918, and the increasing threat of rising National Socialism. Although the truth of this event is contested, Frayn also includes the Nazi government’s bizarre offer to Reinhardt to become an ‘honorary Aryan’ following the annexation of Austria in 1938. As the title “Afterlife” suggests, the main issue of the play is what remains of a person’s life after physical death. In the case of Reinhardt, two competing achievements are singled out: his conservation and restoration of Leopoldskron and his production of Jedermann, which has been cyclically repeated year after year, except for the eight years between the ‘Anschluss’ and Salzburg’s surrender to the American troops in 1945. Although both Leopoldskron and the Salzburg Festival survived Reinhardt, Frayn seems to suggest that the seemingly ephemeral achievement of theatre in the end turns out to be more durable than the apparently more solid art form of architecture on account of the possibility of infinite repetition. And hence, unsurprisingly, repetition is also one of Frayn’s key technical devices in this play. The fact that Frayn singles out Jedermann as Reinhardt’s main achievement, however, is somewhat surprising, since it ascribes authorship of the production to its director, not to its playwright. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is only mentioned in passing and does not appear as a character on stage. This choice is particularly striking since Frayn is himself a playwright, but it may be due to the fact that Hofmannsthal himself was not the ‘author’ of Jedermann in the Romantic sense of the original creative artist but had adapted a medieval English morality play that had recently been rediscovered and put on the stage by theatrical antiquarian William Poel. In any case, for Frayn it is Reinhardt who is Jedermann, though he concedes in his “Postscript” for Afterlife that “[i]t is impossible to know whether he consciously recognised any parallel between himself and Everyman” (Afterlife 103). In Afterlife, the parallel is pointed out expressly, to such an extent that Jedermann becomes a foil for the entire play. Characters quote extensively from Jedermann and take up individual parts of its cast of