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Isla Blair and Michael Pennington |
Double dose of moral conflict
TAKING SIDES AND COLLABORATION
Duchess Theatre
SHOULD you judge an artist by his art? Or by his opinions and life-style? Wagner was an anti-semite but does that make his art any the lesser?
These thoughts stirred in my mind though Ronald Harwood’s plays, Taking Sides and Collaboration, deal with the internal conflict that wracked two great German musical figures – the composer Richard Strauss and the conductor Leon Furtwanger – confronted by the moral dilemma of life under the Nazis in Germany.
In Collaboration, Strauss is overflowing with musical sounds that he cannot transcribe into notes because he needs the “scaffolding” of a libretto.
Enter Stefan Zweig, the great German writer, but there’s one snag – Zweig is a Jew, an object of hatred for the Nazis.
You’re drawn to sympathise with Strauss who fears that if he doesn’t accommodate the Nazis his Jewish daughter-in-law will suffer.
Eventually Zweig flees Germany, ends up in Brazil and commits suicide, leaving Strauss devastated.
In Taking Sides the same dilemma faces the loftier Wilhelm Furtwangler: should he quit Germany and take his chance as a refugee or remain, whatever the moral price, and perform beautiful music?
In Collaboration a broken Strauss asks the audience: What would you do?
In Taking Sides, Furtwangler, under interrogation by US lawyers, cracks and owns up to being seduced by the power, the wealth and the womanising.
For Harwood there appears to be no clear moral conclusion.
The final scene in Taking Sides plays like a eulogy to Furtwangler’s greatness. As for Strauss, he opts out completely.
Bertolt Brecht wrestled with similar dilemmas in Galileo but struck a clear moral position.
The plays, performed separately, are well worth catching – not only for the questions they ask about how we would stand up to a brutal regime but also because of the commanding performances by Michael Pennington who doubles as Strauss and Furtwangler, David Horovitch who switches from Zweig to the US prosecuting lawyer, and a gem a performance by Isla Blair as Strauss’s wife.
Light moment: in Collaboration Strauss, angry with the Nazis, cries: “Why are politicians so shabby and dishonest!”
This was met with a swell of laughter from the audience – thinking of politics today, not of 70 years ago.
Until August 29
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