Skip to main content
Read page text
page 34
THEATRE T H E A T R E orchestrate her own seduction at his hands. They spend a few days together, then he heads off on his travels, promising to seek her out once he returns to Vienna. equivalent of a mass for the dead. At this disclosure, the letter falls from the author’s hands, his consciousness stirred by dim memories of a girl, then of a woman, who matches the contours of the letter writer’s story. “He shuddered, feeling as if an invisible door had been suddenly opened, a door through which a It is a promise he fails to keep, the woman reminds him, shortly before disclosing that her dead son was also his, conceived on one of their three nights together. She gave birth in a public maternity hospital in such squalor that she resolves to do anything necessary to ensure that his son will not be raised in poverty, even though this requires her to become a kind of courtesan: “You were the only one to whom my body could belong and you did not love me, so what did it matter what I did with that body?” “The novella resonated in the aftermath of Brexit, the rise of Trump and the far-right” chill breeze from another world was blowing into his sheltered room.” The political questions provoked by the story are distilled in that spectral evocation of another reality of hardscrabble, unseen lives suddenly exposed in the form of a bitter wind While in the company of her affluent patrons, she frequently crosses paths with the writer, but he never recognises her. A year before the present moment, on the day after his birthday, their eyes meet at the opera and, when it becomes apparent that he is watching her covetously, she abandons her present admirer to spend the night with him. She waits for him to recognise her, but it never happens. On their first night together, he had given the woman a bouquet of white roses. Every year since then, on his birthday, she has anonymously delivered to him the same floral tribute. All she asks of him now is that on his birthday he purchase some roses and put them in the vase where hers had been arranged. It will be the blowing into the well-to-do artist’s refuge. The woman insists that the author bears no responsibility for seducing her since she passionately sought out his attentions at every turn. However, it’s clear, even before the conclusion, that everything about the man, from his material cocoon to his capricious amusements, constitutes a beguilement by virtue of its beautiful freedom alone – by sheer contrast to her own straitened circumstances. “WE CAN NEVER AGAIN BE LIGHT-HEARTED” Zweig’s tale unfolds “without making any kind of moral judgement one way or another”, says Hampton, whose play mostly stays faithful to Zweig’s novella. The action unfolds on a single set representing the author’s Vienna apartment and the cast is limited to the unknown woman, the writer, his valet and a phantom version of the woman as a 13-year-old girl who weaves in and out of view. Hampton has also interjected some details from Zweig’s life into the story, including allusions to his relatively disengaged Jewishness. But the most significant change Hampton has made is to shift the drama forward from the era of its composition at the beginning of the 1920s to 1934, the year of Austria’s bloody civil war, which helped pave the way for the Anschluss four years later, and which convinced Zweig that it was time to go into exile, first to England then to Brazil. In February 1942, in the town of Petrópolis, despairing at the destruction of his former world, he killed himself, together with his much younger second wife Lotte. By transposing the story to the period of the Nazis’ ascendancy, Hampton has also been able to imbue the character of the writer with some of Zweig’s own apprehensions about the deteriorating political situation. Hampton was struck by how the novella resonated with contemporary themes preoccupying him in the aftermath of Brexit, Donald Trump’s election as US president, and the resurgence of the far-right across Europe. The sense of escalating, savage pressures on the comfortable world of liberal culture that Zweig experienced has obvious counterparts today. Hampton is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses (an adaptation of the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel) and the 1988 film version, Dangerous Liaisons, along with the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. He sees his 34 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024
page 35
A L A M Y latest drama as completing a trilogy of plays he has been developing since 2016. The trilogy begins with Youth Without God, which is based on an Ödön von Horváth novel and was adapted for Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt. Set in Austria in the 1930s, it tells the story of a teacher who chastises a student for a racist comment and finds himself endangered when the boy’s Nazi father reports him. This was followed by A German Life, derived from the reminiscences of a woman who served as Joseph Goebbels’ secretary. Hampton sees his latest drama as completing this trilogy. Nazi menace was becoming undeniable. The year before Zweig wrote the novella, he travelled to Italy. Strolling into Piazza San Marco in Venice, Zweig watched as a group of young Blackshirts appeared out of nowhere, swinging sticks in synchrony and audaciously singing the Giovanezza, the “In Piazza San Marco, Zweig watched as a group of Blackshirts appeared out of nowhere” “In Piazza San Marco, Zweig watched as a group of Blackshirts appeared out of nowhere” “In Piazza San Marco, Zweig watched as a group of Blackshirts appeared out of nowhere” hymn of the Italian National Fascist Party. Zweig later wrote in his memoir that, for the first time, he’d seen that “this hazy Fascism … was something real, something well-directed and that it made fanatics of decided, bold, young people.” In Zweig’s case, one of Hampton’s concerns was the thought of how long it had taken him – along with other writers of his milieu – to fathom the scope of the Nazi threat. “Given the very settled world they inhabited, it must have appeared so unlikely – the idea of all that being just upended and trashed,” he reflects. In Hampton’s adaptation, the only real window onto exterior reality comes through the writer’s casual observations about events in the news. At the beginning, these remarks are fairly blasé, Hampton notes, but, as the play goes on, “one has a sense of things closing in”. He explains: “As the play continues, you take a different view of the writer’s frivolity and acceptance of the world. By the end, you sense that he realises he might have been more attentive to what’s going on in his life. He’s undergone a transformation.” In 1922, on a trip to Paris, he also sensed signs everywhere of “concentrated hatred”, brought on by the populace’s enduring resentment at the destruction inflicted by the Zeppelin bombings of World War I. “I feel we can never again be altogether gay or light-hearted anywhere except within our inmost selves,” Zweig wrote to Friderike, around the time Letter from an Unknown Woman was published. Everywhere he travelled in this period, he found evidence of poisonously unfinished business. It’s telling that, in his novella, the prior tenants of the flat the author will rent embody a vengeanceminded poverty. This family despises the woman and her mother for their attempts to hold themselves aloof. They drink and revel in coarse aggression. All they need is a strongman leader to help focus their anger – to promise revenge and the glorious restoration of an illusory former greatness. At the same time, the audience starts to understand that the woman is there, not exactly as an “avenging angel, but as a kind of wake-up call that runs parallel to what’s been happening in the outside world”. There’s a historical logic for Hampton’s decision to set his play in an era when the DARK FORCES CIRCLING Zweig did not live in self-delusional luxury during the interwar years. He worked tirelessly in different capacities to promote the cause of international humanism in the hopes that culture From left: Italian Blackshirts in Venice, Feb 1933; Zweig, 1930s; the Nazi League of German Girls celebrate the Anschluss, Mar 1938; Josef Hader as Zweig in the 2016 film Farewell to Europe could become the vehicle for defusing bellicose jingoism and ethnic hatred. He was a generous philanthropist and took part in socialist initiatives to provide free cultural education courses to workers. But he also became demoralised by the very individuals who should have been allies in the struggle to salvage civilisation. He wrote to his publisher of the revulsion he felt for “the new intellectuals, eager for power, without discipline, caught up in ideologies and without ideals”. In these moods, he tried to bury himself in his work and the company of his illustrious friends. But he could never really shut out consciousness of the larger, dark forces circling his sanctuary on the Kapuzinerberg hill above Salzburg. “It would be good if there were more people willing to learn from the past,” Hampton says of the world depicted in his Nazi trilogy. Zweig would certainly agree. His memoir, The World of Yesterday, most of which he composed the year before his suicide, can be understood as a warning to the world of tomorrow – our own. Perhaps the most frightening thought of all is that we’ve already had our wakeup call again and again. Yet we have not discovered how to act on our awareness – how to remove our leaders even when the danger they pose gyrates before our eyes. What’s still unknown is the secret of how to make ourselves heard by those equally indifferent to the value of love and life. n Visit from an Unknown Woman runs at Hampstead Theatre, 21 June – 27 July. See What’s Happening for info, p59. George Prochnik is the author of six books, including The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World. His most recent book is I Dream with Open Eyes (Counterpoint). T H E A T R E SPRING 2024 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK 35

Page Text

View plaintext

THEATRE

T H E A T R E

orchestrate her own seduction at his hands. They spend a few days together, then he heads off on his travels, promising to seek her out once he returns to Vienna.

equivalent of a mass for the dead.

At this disclosure, the letter falls from the author’s hands, his consciousness stirred by dim memories of a girl, then of a woman, who matches the contours of the letter writer’s story. “He shuddered, feeling as if an invisible door had been suddenly opened, a door through which a

It is a promise he fails to keep, the woman reminds him, shortly before disclosing that her dead son was also his, conceived on one of their three nights together. She gave birth in a public maternity hospital in such squalor that she resolves to do anything necessary to ensure that his son will not be raised in poverty, even though this requires her to become a kind of courtesan: “You were the only one to whom my body could belong and you did not love me, so what did it matter what I did with that body?”

“The novella resonated in the aftermath of Brexit, the rise of Trump and the far-right”

chill breeze from another world was blowing into his sheltered room.”

The political questions provoked by the story are distilled in that spectral evocation of another reality of hardscrabble, unseen lives suddenly exposed in the form of a bitter wind

While in the company of her affluent patrons, she frequently crosses paths with the writer, but he never recognises her. A year before the present moment, on the day after his birthday, their eyes meet at the opera and, when it becomes apparent that he is watching her covetously, she abandons her present admirer to spend the night with him. She waits for him to recognise her, but it never happens.

On their first night together, he had given the woman a bouquet of white roses. Every year since then, on his birthday, she has anonymously delivered to him the same floral tribute. All she asks of him now is that on his birthday he purchase some roses and put them in the vase where hers had been arranged. It will be the blowing into the well-to-do artist’s refuge.

The woman insists that the author bears no responsibility for seducing her since she passionately sought out his attentions at every turn. However, it’s clear, even before the conclusion, that everything about the man, from his material cocoon to his capricious amusements, constitutes a beguilement by virtue of its beautiful freedom alone – by sheer contrast to her own straitened circumstances.

“WE CAN NEVER AGAIN BE LIGHT-HEARTED” Zweig’s tale unfolds “without making any kind of moral judgement one way or another”, says Hampton, whose play mostly stays faithful to Zweig’s novella. The action unfolds on a single set representing the author’s Vienna apartment and the cast is limited to the unknown woman, the writer, his valet and a phantom version of the woman as a 13-year-old girl who weaves in and out of view. Hampton has also interjected some details from Zweig’s life into the story, including allusions to his relatively disengaged Jewishness.

But the most significant change Hampton has made is to shift the drama forward from the era of its composition at the beginning of the 1920s to 1934, the year of Austria’s bloody civil war, which helped pave the way for the Anschluss four years later, and which convinced Zweig that it was time to go into exile, first to England then to Brazil. In February 1942, in the town of Petrópolis, despairing at the destruction of his former world, he killed himself, together with his much younger second wife Lotte. By transposing the story to the period of the Nazis’ ascendancy, Hampton has also been able to imbue the character of the writer with some of Zweig’s own apprehensions about the deteriorating political situation.

Hampton was struck by how the novella resonated with contemporary themes preoccupying him in the aftermath of Brexit, Donald Trump’s election as US president, and the resurgence of the far-right across Europe. The sense of escalating, savage pressures on the comfortable world of liberal culture that Zweig experienced has obvious counterparts today.

Hampton is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses (an adaptation of the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel) and the 1988 film version, Dangerous Liaisons, along with the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. He sees his

34 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content