Einar Wie Eva

Einar wie Eva Towards an Economy of the Feminine in Schleef’s Puntila Günther Heeg After the Zürich premiere of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti [Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti] (), Brecht felt it imperative to warn that “[t]he actor playing Puntila must be careful not to let his vitality or charm [...] so win over the audience that they are no longer free to look at him critically” (Brecht :). At the same time, he called for a distinct revaluation of Matti by future directors and actors: “Matti must be so cast as to bring about a true bal- ance, i.e., so as to give him intellectually the upper hand” (). The compli- ance with Brecht’s suggestions didn’t work well for the piece because the expanded revaluation of the figure of Matti as a sovereign director and expo- nent of a superior consciousness defers the dialectic of master and slave (Hegel) that the text seeks to exhibit. When the phantasmic grandiosity (Größenselbst) of the servant prepares to assert itself as the orchestrator of the fabel, the “parable,” or of the “model” for instructing the spectator at the theatre, it kills the movement that inheres in the text of the drama as well as in the text of the production. This movement is the text’s “labor.” Its center and inner drive is, as with Hegel, fear. Einar Schleef’s Puntila production at the Berliner Ensemble in sets the stalled dialectic of master and servant in motion again by making its inner center, the fear of death, the driving force in the staging. To do this, Schleef allied himself with Brecht’s text in opposition to Brecht the author and theatre maker, who thought he knew it better. But all—even the discarded versions of Puntila—are to be understood in their interplay as Brecht’s texts. The first unpublished script from December (BBA :–), in particular, is a treasure trove of stories and anecdotes, which in later tellings were dropped and painted over. Schleef’s archaeological dramaturgy doesn’t, for its part, make the mistake of hypostatizing the first script, but lays the versions like layers over one another so that they form reciprocal “inscriptions.” In them the movement of the text’s labor, suppressed in the finished work, can be experienced as a struggle. The following becomes visible: the opposition of master and servant is overlaid by the attraction and repulsion of the two men, who can’t let go of each other because each is the alter ego of the other; and, the dramaturgy of the sovereign directing of the servant underlies an ambiva- The Drama Review , (T), Winter . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263552 by guest on 25 September 2021 Einar wie Eva lent “dramaturgy of Besprechung [discussion].” On the one hand, besprechen [to discuss] leads to the seduction of one’s own point of view into the talk of another. But it also means the conjuring away of evil spirits—the exorcism of demons—which, in the dialogues of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, are un- doubtedly of a feminine nature. The longing for the alliance of soldierly men, which is the vanishing point of the dramaturgy of Besprechung, amounts to the exorcism of the feminine. Eva’s examination, usually lauded as the climax of Matti’s demonstrations as the sovereign director, is shown from the perspective of the play’s original ver- sion—which remains faithful to Eva—in its entire wretchedness: as ritual female sacrifice that is meant to support a community of “weak” men. At the end of the interrogation, Puntila and Matti do, in fact without hesitation, meet in the disowning of the daughter and prospective wife because of her “unnatu- ralness.” The most rigid servile consciousness triumphs, articulated in the awaited answers to the examination, which Eva doesn’t know to give: eating herring till it comes out of her ears, darning socks, shutting up in front of the husband as proof of the feminine ability to empathize, and no balking whatso- ever at the master, who has the whip hand. Demand for total adaptation to the . Central to Einar circumstances, banning of every spontaneous movement, prohibition of Schleef’s Puntila wishes. No superior self-awareness of the servant is expressed throughout this production at the Berliner examination, rather one with its back to the wall. Matti knows that “[a]nyone Ensemble is an inordinately who keeps quiet and controls his passions can go a long way” (:); and, large round disc suspended “[t]en paces distance and no familiarities, or chaos sets in, that’s my inflexible in pale light—the table of rule” (), decrees Puntila: wise words dictated by fear enforced by the sacri- the Grail Society—around fice of the feminine in the interrogation ritual. In Eva, the suppressed “fear which Puntila (played by center” (Furchtzentrum) of the piece, an example must be established so that the Schleef) and his people as- fear of weakness and loss of self can be made to disappear behind the presump- semble in anticipation of tions of servile consciousness. salvation during the first part of the play. (Photo by Ute Eichel) Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263552 by guest on 25 September 2021 Günther Heeg The “praxis of the text” works against this disappearance. In the interplay of the two versions everything is laid out in the open: the mind-set in the concept of the sovereign directing and its undermining through a dramaturgy of discussion; the counter-concept of a male order and the withdrawal of its basis for validation by making visible the sacrifice on which it is founded. Nothing is definitively ruled out; the one doesn’t come to rest in the other. The textual analysis of the combined versions sets the unrest in motion in the corpse of Puntila, which is the precondition for its actual return to the theatre. Everything hinges on the productive unrest of the text not being brought to a standstill in the finished production. However, this would be the case if Eva’s objection to the male bonding and female sacrifice were merely pre- sented—if, for a change, a different fabel were narrated—instead of herself be- coming the driving force of representation. The classic medium of the epic theatre, the Gestus, is therefore, as we have seen, not suitable. For everything that evades meaning is removed from its images. In the seamless end product of what is represented, body, speech, and movement are subordinate to the abstraction of the meaning, the way concrete use value is subordinate to the abstraction of exchange value. The cut of abstraction into the actor’s body locks the feminine—that is to say, meaningless—articulation and autonomic movement out of the performance because it threatens to disturb the intelli- gible, clear, and observable theatrical representation of the fabel. Schleef re- sponds to this sacrifice of representation with a theatre form that brings the production process of representation back into that which is represented, and allows the violence of the abstraction of meaning that was integrated in the finished product of the representation to become visible and palpable. The re- lease of this violence reveals the scene of the performance, the battlefield of labor and fear. The theatrical medium in which this occurs is the ancient chorus tragedy. With its proximity to cult and ritual on one hand, and to oratory on the other, it is especially suited to work against the violent “transposition” of meaning in the visual conceptualization and instead to “translate” the movement of the text into scenic events. As a theatrical form, the chorus tragedy refers back to early forms of social interaction, presenting elementary relations between the individual and the community: the individual stepping out of the chorus, his opposition and assertion against the group or against another individual, the clash that the doppelgänger threatens to expand into community-destroying civil war, and finally the expulsion of the scapegoat in the conciliatory sacrifice. For Schleef, who takes up this form of theatre, it isn’t about its historic re- construction, but its up-to-date adaptation through the excavation of its sub- merged tradition in German drama and theatre history. There, female sacrifice is strikingly often found to be involved as an archaic relic in the dramatic plot. An example is Wagner’s Parsifal, which for Schleef is the German model of the theatrical repetition of ritual: the community of the Knights of the Grail, their addiction to the drug of the Grail, the Last Supper; the threat to the community from the enemy within—in this case, in Amfortas’s wound in- flicted as a result of succumbing to the feminine; the redeemer Parsifal, who resists its temptation in the form of Kundry; the (self)sacrifice of the feminine, the death of Kundry. That this world of sacrifice and its sacral veiling is not completely foreign to Puntila, which was conceived as a folk piece and a comedy, is alone already evident in Puntila’s continual self-apotheosis through the reference to biblical prefigurations. The stylizations toward the abandoned savior in the garden of Gesthemane, toward the prodigal son and the heavenly betrothed, toward Moses on the Mount who glimpses the Promised Land, don’t allow them- selves to be reduced to mediums of comical contrast. Rather they point, sur- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263552 by guest on 25 September 2021 Einar wie Eva .

Load more