Financial Times, May 1, 1990, by Alastair Macaulay
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Written in 1844 and drenched in the German Romanticism of 
that era, Friedrich Hebbel's "Maria Magdalena," which now is 
reaching the British stage for the first time, is 
impressively modern in several ways. It's a domestic drama 
about a devoted daughter rejected by the man she loves, made 
pregnant by the fiance she doesn't love, and obliged to 
personal misery by her father's sense of family humiliation. 
Full of melodrama, it keeps showing how futile and misplaced 
those melodramatics are.

Malcolm Edwards, who has directed and designed this Gate 
production, has updated it to the recent American South. He 
has also adapted Sarah Somekh's translation to this end. But 
a plot that involves deaths by shock, by duel and by suicide 
proves hard to take when the heroine begins in a pony tail 
and her father ends in dungarees. I found myself 
transferring it, even as I watched, back to the Germany of 
Hebbel's day. The play's language - sometimes left very 
19th-century, as in "Unfortunate girl, at last I understand 
you" - is often intensely Romantic.

Single speeches contain as much significant imagery and 
metaphor - the gold buckle on one man's belt, the tear in 
another man's eye, the moon drowned in clouds, the candle on 
the table, bread in the cupboard, a mole in the ground - as 
a whole Schubert song-cycle.

The same period flavour is true of parts of the plot. This 
staging zips so speedily through the sudden accumulation of 
family disasters near the end of the first scene that they 
become ludicrous. Anton (Robert Jezek), mere seconds after 
his wife's collapse, stops people fetching the doctor by 
shouting, mere inches from her face, "There's no need to! 
That's the look of death!" Moments later, he is forcing his 
daughter Klara to swear a solemn oath on her dead mother's 
hand. Anton, a largely hateful character driven by self-
righteousness, self-pity and self-dramatising may well be 
the hardest role of all; and Jezek, stressing his booming 
insensitivity, at this point tipped the play into "Maria 
Marten" terrain.

To some of the Friday's audience, guffawing loudly to show 
their sophistication, it never recovered. One character's 
last words were "will I never have another drink in this 
world?," a perilous line to speak in a pub theatre after 
some hundred minutes with no interval. The play's truly 
modern elements were in fact submerged by this modern 
setting.

The cast had been well coached by Jeff Crockett into their 
American accents. But the play was held back by too many 
other incidental features. Jezek is too young for Anton and 
his force too externally applied; Laura Eddy, rightly 
showing how Klara is a victim of her inconsiderate family, 
underplays her martyrdom. Marie Stillin, Robert Bowman and 
Ciaran McIntyre made much of other roles. This is a play I 
hope to re-encounter in other conditions.



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