Independent, May 1, 1990, Georgina Brown
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Friedrich Hebbel, author of "Maria Magdalena" (which is 
receiving its British premiere at the Gate Theatre), was a 
self-educated German pushed off the dramatic map principally 
because of his popularity in Nazi Germany. Yet our dramatic 
debt to Hebbel remains large. Written in 1844, "Maria 
Magdalena" represents a milestone in German realism and is 
one of the first bourgeois tragedies - until then the 
working classes had been locked in roles of buffoons or mere 
dramatic instruments. But as Hebbel wrote in his preface to 
the play: "One need only to be human to have a fate, and in 
certain circumstances a terrible fate..."

The play deals with the agonies of a cabinet-maker and his 
family. "I'm not aware I've done anything wrong," says his 
nervous wreck of a wife as she searches her mind for the 
reasons that God first struck her down with an illness and - 
more perplexing - has now delivered her from death's door. 
Her imagination, like that of her husband and daughter, is 
vividly possessed by ideas of salvation and damnation; like 
Bunyan in "Pilgrim's Progress," the menacing texts of 
Scripture fill every waking moment. But in this tale God 
looks on indifferently.

The wife is a victim of a pretty rotten fate - she drops 
dead when her son is accused of theft; but the more terrible 
fate to which Hebbel refers is reserved for her daughter 
Clara, pregnant and dumped by her cowardly fiance while 
father's threat "Lay anything on my shoulders except 
disgrace" still rings in her ears. To save him she chooses, 
with the composure of a Shakespearean heroine, to sacrifice 
herself.

Hebbel's psychological insight has a striking modernity and 
Malcolm Edward's production is most effective for its bold 
transposition of the play to the American bible-belt in the 
Fifties. Here, as the Patsy Cline soundtrack suggests, a 
woman lives in the shadow of her man, and, more 
significantly, men and women live in fear and trembling of 
the judgement of God and their next-door neighbour.

The stiff intensity of the characters lends itself well to 
the landscape, but their tendency to spill their thoughts in 
asides and soliloquies, frequently raced and garbled, makes 
a less than smooth transition across the centuries. And even 
this committed, talented cast is ultimately defeated by such 
lines as "One of us has to die" in the Western-style duel or 
Carl's absurdly bathetic response to death ("Will I never 
have a drink again?"). If the corn was cut and pace slowed 
down then a fascinating document would make a bigger 
dramatic impact.



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