FringeReview UK 2024
Stranger Than the Moon
The Berliner Ensemble and The Coronet Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Biography, Cabaret, European Theatre, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, New Writing, Poetry-Based Theatre, Political, Short Plays, Spoken Word, Theatre, Translation
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Stranger Than the Moon arrives at the Coronet till December 6th, directed by the Berliner Ensemble’s Artistic Director Oliver Reese.
Essential for anyone interested in Brecht or 20th century drama, it’s far more: starkly entrancing, then engrossing over 110 minutes.
Review
A boy gazes out of the window. He’s privileged but the landscape isn’t. Soon there’ll be clouds and a girl to kiss them under to frame this narrative of Bertolt Brecht’s life. But he’ll remember because of the vanishing cloud. In between all kinds of war break out. Stranger Than the Moon arrives at the Coronet till December 6th, directed by the Berliner Ensemble’s Artistic Director Oliver Reese.
Brecht’s words – letters, poems, memoirs – are set by his tireless music collaborator Hanns Eisler (who rivalled Brecht in wit and aphorisms), and others. Onstage throughout is pianist and musical director Adam Benzwi. Actor-singers Katharine Mehrling and Paul Herwig appear together or solo. A broadly chronological march through over 30 years of Eisler/Brecht rhythms is wrought by Benzwi, Reese and dramaturg Lucien Strauch.
We might particularly know Brecht from his mature plays, notably Life of Galileo, Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, The Good Person of Szechwan, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. But Brecht was an even greater poet than playwright.
It’s all starkly entrancing, then engrossing over 110 minutes. It might be what Brecht would want, but by the end it’s what we want too. It refreshes the aesthetic Brecht himself did so much to enshrine in this Ensemble. Reese and his collaborators have radically invigorated it: but more, it’s a slap of water in the face. And where better to strip back Brecht-style but Brecht’s own, laconically-inflected life? Applying Brechtian technique to Brecht’s plays can cancel their radicalism: not here.
There’s three parts: Part one traces Brecht’s early life in Augsburg, his birth through a lonely pregnant woman, where “it can’t really be well”, then his bourgeois home and the poem on how he broke with the “ordering class” and became a “traitor” to those giving orders. It jumps over the First war and touches on his success in 1920s Weimar, hardly taking in The Threepenny Opera or collaborations with Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill.
We really start with Eisler and the 1930s. Songs like ‘You Have to Pay’ sung mostly by Mehrling, ‘The Perhaps Song’ – there isn’t a playlist and I rely on my own memory of Eisler song titles. Mehrling’s voice is more mellifluous than Lotte Lenya or Dagmar Krause, slightly more in the vein of Utte Lemper. Herwig contributes less but tellingly.
There’s a slow shift to the visual, paradoxically as the context gets greyer and grimmer as in ‘Ballad of Bourgeois Welfare’ and ‘Change the World’. . Andreas Deianrt’s video is sometimes quiescent, but bursts with black-and-white images which haunt through much of the performance, sometimes in film, sometimes stills: soldiers, meat-markets and mining, both work and suffering recur on a carousel of repeats. There’s a partially ironic move to technicolour after the war, with Hollywood even post-war East Berlin both affirmed by post-war joy and tainted by capitalism.
Hansjorg Hartung’s set uses the minimum that so suits both the Berliners and the Coronet. A chair, an axe, a connection. Elina Schnitzler’s initially twin costumes seem functional. Blue-tinged green boiler suits are very Bert default, but ther’s surprises. In particular Mehrling might burst out in a wedding dress. There’s a stark irony: it adorns the Song beginning: ‘From Prague’ with gifts from the front ending we can see it coming ‘From Russia’. With ‘The Perhaps Song’ a cabaret vamp act or later in haunting rags. Herwig’s green monochrome alters too: often when he’s forced to change into white, a vulnerability rather than Mehrling’s ironic adornmentwhich reaches its apotheosis in a helmet and Charlie Chaplin riff on The Great Dictator, ripping off the moustache. Steffan Heinke’s lighting is realised with wit and poignancy with spotlighting. Likewise, Leslie Unger’s choreography is sparse and visual.
If part two sashays exile to Denmark, Sweden and US, writing about politics and war, it affords a greater variety in dress. ‘Mother Beimlein’ is yoked to images of a Berliner production of Mother Courage, and the grimmest war ballads like ‘Ballade’ and ‘The Trenches’.
In the final part, after Hitler’s defeat, we leap over California (save songs of thanksgiving) and Brecht returns to East Berlin, where he (and his wife, actress Helene Weigel, again excised from the telling) found The Berliner Ensemble and enjoy success before his death in 1956. There’s little mention of Brecht’s agon with the new regime, still less of the 1953 East German uprising occasioning the (posthumously published) ‘Bad Morning’. It’s where Brecht suggests “the government dissolve the people/and elect another.”
Brecht’s compromises with communism are fascinating and human, and a little more of this would be welcome. For instance after visiting the Soviet union in 1935, asked why he didn’t stay, Brecht quipped “not enough sugar”; the grainy metaphor grates inside any boiler suit.
If there’s an occasional smoothing of Brecht’s contradictions, there’s no attempt to swerve the justice also found in Brecht’s communism, nor his graphically impersonal accounts of sex, contrasted with his lack of appetite for food at the outset. And towards the end the haunting title poem emerges: ‘Stranger Than the Moon’ a poignant exploration of mutual sexual alienation at the height of intimacy. Visuals oblige.
Essential for anyone interested in Brecht or 20th century drama, it’s far more in Mehrling’s and Herwig’s hands, with Benzwi forever driving his piano stage right. It refracts from mid-century what hope and idealism we’ve lost in 70 years, what we can still learn. Above all from the bristly embrace of Brecht’s great poetry. Quietly devastating.
Assistant Director Louisa Rogowsky, assistant Set Designer Janina Kuhlmann, Assistant Costume Designer Esther von der Decken, Prompter Virag Markus, Inspection Manager Frank Sellentin, Stage Manager Steffan Heinke, Sound Technician Frieder Wasmuth, Video Technician Thomas Schwarz, Lighting Operator Johannna Buchberger, Make-Up Designer Friederike Reichel, Wardrobe Technician Marija Obradovic Director’s assistant Noa-Claire Salzmann, Annika Schwerdt, Stage Design assistant Naima Petermann, Wardrobe assistant Lilian Axton.
