The Times, 23 April 1982, by Irving Wardle
"Clear portrayal of a poetic outsider"
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In launching Heinrich von Kleist on the London Public, the 
National Theatre has sensibly opted for a "new readers start 
here" studio production, rather than a main house military 
spectacular. In its time *The Prince of Homburg* has been a 
star exhibit, both in the Nazi repertory and on Germany's 
postwar Marxist stage; and there is everything to be said 
for a quietly searching exploration of the text uncoloured 
by any strong directorial viewpoint.

With no more than a skycloth and a few isolated furnishings, 
its narrative outline takes shape with elegant clarity on 
the Cottesloe stage. An hallucinatory first scene 
establishes the Prince's private dream of glory; then we see 
him acting it out by disobeying orders at the Battle of 
Fehrbellin and going out to defeat the Swedes, for which he 
is rewarded with a death sentence. Intercessation by his 
beloved Princess Natalie moves the Elector to offer a 
reprieve if the Prince himself considers the sentence 
unjust; an offer which the Prince refuses, as it enables him 
to come to terms with his own death.

At this noble resolution, the Elector tears up the warrant, 
thus converting the individualist hero into a religious 
devotee to the State of Brandenburg.

What comes over most forcibly in John Burgess's production 
is the sight of a protagonist who lives by an inhumanly 
exacting code of honour, breaking down in straightforward 
terror of death when he sees his grave being dug: and then, 
when he is given the chance to escape, refusing to seize it 
because he cannot find the right words for a letter of 
acceptance.

However, without going to the full extremes of endorsing the 
Prince's worship of the State, or showing him turning into 
is brainwashed creature, there are multiple ironies to be 
examined in this slippery text. In one sense, perhaps, the 
opening dream continues throughout the play, with the Prince 
wandering through a Kafka maze of imcomprehensible 
authority. In down-to-earth terms, the motives of the 
Elector and Natalie are quite possibly not what they seem 
and the magnanimity of the final reprieve is undercut by the 
fact that the Army is about to mutiny in the Prince's defence.

Very little of this is hinted at by Mr. Burgess' cast. 
Patrick Druty's Prince has the contemplative look of a 
poetic outsider in a military society, but his delayed 
action responses do nothing to tell you what is on his mind.

Lindsay Duncan's girlish Natalie telegraphs generalized 
sympathy and distress without defining any personal tastes 
beyond an admiration for displays of male heroics. The 
Elector is extremely well played by Robert Urpuhart as a 
genially approachable monarch, too confident of his own 
status ever to assert it, and breaking into the surrounding 
tirades of John James's translation with the sound of 
authentic human speech.

He would have made an even stronger impression if the 
production had done more to characterize the Army community 
either as a model of nobility or as an arrogantly 
overbearing elite. As it is, they are just men in uniform.



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                     Bentley's Bedlam
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