Daily Telegraph, April 30, 1990, by Jeremy Kingston
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Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63) was a gloomy, doomy German 
dramatist whose plays are thought to have had a direct 
influence on Ibsen and Strindberg. He is particularly noted 
for his studies of wronged women, but that didn't prevent 
him from ditching the mistress who had selflessly supported 
him in his impoverished early years and marrying an actress 
who became the "ideal" interpreter of his roles.

His play "Maria Magdalena" (1844) is now being staged at the 
enterprising Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. Watching Malcolm 
Edwards' uneasy and at times inadvertently hilarious 
production, one can readily understand why this apparently 
influential work has had to wait almost 150 years for a 
British premiere.

Not that Edwards makes things easy for himself. For reasons 
best known to himself, he has uprooted this distinctly 
Germanic, 19th-century "Burgerliches Trauerspiel" (bourgeois 
tragedy) and attempted to replant it in the infertile soil 
of the Texas Bible Belt in the 1950s. The play's highly 
resistible mixture of anguished emotion, ludicrous 
melodrama, biblical imagery and poetically charged language 
is juxtaposed with a soundtrack of country and western music 
at its most maudlin. And the unfortunate cast are required 
to deliver their tortuous dialogue in the accent of Miss 
Jerry Hall.

There were, I regret to report, some titters on the first 
night. Nay, not just titters, but chortles too. The story 
focuses on Klara, the daughter of a grim, overbearing 
coffin-manufacturer and his unbalanced, religion-obsessed 
wife. When the son of this unhappy household is accused of a 
diamond robbery, Mom promptly collapses in horror. As one 
character helpfully explains, there is no need to call a 
doctor: "That's the look of death."

But Klara's troubles have hardly begun. Abandoned by her 
childhood sweetheart, she has taken up with a callow, cruel 
young man who has got her pregnant. Forced by her father to 
"swear by your dead mother's hand that you are all you 
should be," Klara first lies, then desperately tries to 
persuade the man she hates to marry her, promising to submit 
meekly to his blows and even eat rat poison if that's what 
turns him on. Even this fails to persuade the heartless 
rogue, and Klara commits suicide to save what is left of the 
family's honour.

As an added bonus, the two men in her life fight a duel, and 
Klara's true love finally staggers on stage looking as if he 
has had a nasty accident with a bottle of tomato ketchup.

If would take acting of genius to redeem this inelegantly 
translated exercise in morbidity and it fails to get it 
here, though Robert Bowman and Alexis Denisof have a brave 
shot in their roles as Klara's lovers.

Indeed this is a play which seems capable of driving people 
quite literally up the wall. In moments of high emotion, 
Laura Eddy's Klara spends a good deal of her time cowering 
and scrabbling at the side of the set, as if in desperate 
search of an exit.

One can hardly blame her. I left the theatre uncertain 
whether to salute the courage or deplore the foolhardiness 
of the Theatre Manoeuvres company in taking on such an 
impossible task.



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