The Guardian, 1 May 1990, by Nicholas De Jongh.
"Maria Magdalena - The Gate"
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For the last five years Malcolm Edwards has been delving 
into the vaults of the classic German theatre repertoire. 
His valiant exhumations, revived in modern-dress 
productions, have put our gutless national companies to 
shame.

Friedrich Hebbel's "Maria Magdalena," which Edwards has 
adapted from a translation by Sarah Somekh for his new 
Theatre Manoeuvres company, is a play as unknown in Britain 
as its mid-19th century author.

Like his far more famous predecessor, Buchner, who brought 
naturalism, popular speech and the working class victim 
centre-stage, Hebble was a trail-blazer.

His psychological dramas are clear 19th century premonitions 
of Ibsen and Strindberg. But Maria Magdalena, for all its 
radical critique of rigid moral codes in the 19th century 
lower middle classes, depends upon a schematic melodrama and 
matching diction which are redolent of mustiness.

Edwards has therefore hit upon the ingenious idea of 
transposing Hebbel's devout God-fearers to the American 
western Bible Belt where the so-called moral majority are 
proud to be a century behind the times. The characters are, 
provocatively, second or third-generation German immigrants.

In a way this device works sharply. For the play depends 
upon an obsessed religiosity and capacity for social shame 
that might well endure in portions of America, even if the 
play's first catastrophe is laughably preposterous.

Anton, a devout joiner, and his devouter wife, each 
luxuriating in morbidity, are portrayed as wretched victims 
of their children's waywardness and their own developed 
sense of guilt. The melodramatic sequence is instigated when 
the couple's gambling son Karl is charged with a jewellery 
theft. His mother instantly drops dead, killed by one of 
those fatal shame-attacks so prevalent in defunct weepies. 
Since their daughter Klara's betrothed, the mercenary 
smoothie Leonard, played by Robert Bowman, witnesses the 
arrest, he at once makes an exit from the girl's life.

The masochistic desperation of this pregnant girl, who far 
prefers her former lover but attempts to do the decent thing 
by her father and the faithless Leonard, is just about 
believable in Laura Eddy's woebegone performance. But 
Hebbel's diction, abounding in strained, religious imagery, 
constantly confounds belief.

The girl's suicidal tendencies ("Stop heart, close yourself 
up") are expressed with a glib relish and religious 
symbolism which emphasise the facetiousness of the play's 
resolution. Klara vanishes down a deep well while Leonard 
turns out to be a victim of a mad woman's false charge.

Edwards's inventive concept and production, which badly 
needs an interval, falls victim to Miss Somekh's rather dire 
translation. Her version is decked out with fustian and 
imitation antiquery. It sometimes even encourages rather 
than subdues those ripples of laughter which the play's 
contrivances induce. But the actors, even though they seem 
too middle-class, admirably avoid those terminal histrionics 
which Hebbel invites. Robert Jezek sounds and looks too 
well-heeled to be a joiner, but Alexis Denisof, as Klara's 
conscience-struck true love, contributes notes of authentic 
grief. The play emerges as an oddly memorable curio; its 
deathly luxuriations and melodramatic contrivances do not 
altogether mute the force of Hebbel's social and religious 
critique.

Maria Magdalena is at the Gate Theatre, 11 Pembridge Road, 
W11 (01-229 0706)



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