If Ronald Harwood was looking for another subject to turn his meaty double bill of Taking Sides and Collaboration — recently seen in the West End — into a hefty trilogy, he could do a lot worse than focus on the German writer Ödön von Horváth. Unlike his contemporary Bertholt Brecht, Horváth chose to ply his trade from inside Nazi Germany, as did, for that matter, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and the composer Richard Strauss, who were the subjects of Harwood’s plays.
But Horváth was never feted by the Nazis in the way Furtwängler and Strauss were. The playwright may have joined the Nazi Writers’ Union in 1934, but the evidence that he was no Nazi is overwhelming.
The previous year he was briefly married to the Jewish opera singer Maria Elsner so that she could get a passport. And by staying in Hitler’s Germany, his objective was not to collaborate — as Furtwängler and Strauss were accused of — but to observe National Socialism from within instead of writing about it from without, as did Brecht.
By the time this play was first seen in 1937, the year before Horváth’s bizarre death (he was killed by a falling tree branch while sheltering from a storm), Germany was in the firm grip of Nazis. Yet there is no mention of Hitler or Nazis in the piece. That’s not how he worked.
In Judgment Day — given a new English translation by Christopher Hampton — Horváth examines German society through the subtlety of an allegory — the prism of a rural German town of just 2,000 inhabitants.
Like many small towns it is a place of petty grievances and gossip, most of it surrounding the stationmaster Hudetz (Joseph Millson), a fine upstanding man, proud that he has always “followed orders and done his duty”. No, you do not have to look far in this play for symbolism or archetypes.
Orders and duty is the mantra by which Hudetz lives his life after he was distracted long enough by the publican’s pretty daughter (Laura Donnelly) to miss changing the train signal in time to prevent a fatal accident.
The only evidence against him is provided by his estranged wife (Suzanne Burden), an older, unpopular woman who serves as the town’s figure of fun.
Horváth’s plot tilts and turns on whether Hudetz will confess his crime of negligence, and on whether the publican’s daughter is willing to perjure herself in his defence. But the much more interesting subject is the way the town forms its consensus about guilt and innocence. The message about dangerously fickle public opinion is clear. Possibly too clear.
James Macdonald’s production is strong on Gothic atmospherics. In the railway station scenes, steam entertainingly blasts out from the side of the platform as the express thunders past. But the moral message is so heavy- handed and obvious that by the end of an uninterrupted one hour and 50 minutes you feel bludgeoned by allegory instead of illuminated by it.
It could have been worse. Apparently Maximilian Schell’s 1977 production of Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods, which was also translated by Hampton, had a scene in which the mood of the country was depicted by the protagonists raising their hands in the Nazi salute. The moment never appeared in Horváth’s original script. And here you can see here why it never had to, even if Horváth had been able to insert such an explicitly critical moment without risking persecution.
A later play by Hampton imagined that Horváth did not die under a tree but that he made it to Hollywood. It was more interesting than this cumbersome revival. And ultimately the evening ends with the impression that a play about Horváth’s life in Germany under the Nazis would have been more interesting too.
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