Financial Times, 23 April 1982, by Michael Coveney.
Cottesloe; The Prince of Homburg
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Everyone agrees that the National Theatre should carry on 
digging into the European repertoire. But there really is no 
point if the spades are inefficient and frail. The *Prince of 
Homburg* (1811) was the last play of Heinrich von Kleist, a 
verse drama widely held to be the author's masterpiece. It 
is a strange, expressionist piece about an incident at the 
battle of Fehrbellin in 1675 between the Prussians and the 
Swedes. The Prince, who is the General of Cavalry, has 
ordered a charge in definance of the sovereign, the Elector 
of Brandenburg. The Swedes are repulsed and the Prince 
sentenced to death. 

On one level, the play is conducted as a moral debate 
between the officers and their supremo. The nature of an 
authority who triumphs by being disobeyed is interestingly 
investigated in the figure of the Elector, and the role is 
very well taken by Robert Urquhart. But the Prince's 
allegiances are more complicated than would appear. He 
operates in a dream world, one particular vision haunting 
him from the outset. In a garden, he is promised the 
affections of the Princess Natalie who decorates him with a 
chain and a laurel. The material fragment of this dream is a 
glove which he finds embedded in his tunic. 

From this there develops an odd texture to the Prince's 
utterances and impulses. He seems to hover between life and 
premonitions of death, given to piercingly ironic 
commentaries. It is as though Hamlet has been crossed with 
Hofmannsthal's Der Schwierige. "If life's a journey," he 
soliloquises in John James's stilted but frequently florid 
translation, "I will lay me down half-way." On being 
sentenced to death, he greets a comrade with a yelp of "Im 
free!" 

The trouble with John Burgess's production starts with the 
casting of this role. Patrick Drury simply does not convey 
the haunted, peculiar temperament of the Prince, summoning 
only mechanical shouts and whimpers in passages that ought 
to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. He 
gives a flat, pedantic and wholly monotonous reading and I 
am afraid that, with the exception of Mr Urquhart and 
Nicholas Selby as a dyspeptic Colonel, he has the supporting 
cast he deserves. The company is essentially that of Mr 
Burgess's unmemorable *Sergeant Musgrave's Dance* revival last 
year. Lindsay Duncan is a welcome addition as the Princess. 
But nobody gives the impression of knowing what he is doing. 

It is all like a Peter Gill production devoid of heart or 
spark. Gloomily staged on a bare floor against which Alison 
Chitty has designed a featureless blue grey sky, even the 
basic principles of stage blocking and fluency are missing. 
The stage never hums with excitment and is too often plunged 
into complete torpor by fiddling scene charges. These 
involve five black silhouetted stage hands, two tables and 
three chairs. At one point three men move two chairs while a 
third adjusts table decorations. Finally, and most 
laughably, four men shuffle around with one chair and two 
tables while the fifth sprinkles a few pathetic flowers on 
the ground. 

In such a fatuously dull environment, what chance is there 
for themes of reality an dillusion to emerge? The soldiers 
stomp around in traditional Prussian military uniforms, but 
no imagination is employed with regard to shifting locales 
and switches of mood. In all, the evening is one of 
devastating tedium, and von Kleist is allowed to slip away 
sadly unreclaimed. 



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