Clash of Queens makes for a right royal night

Published on Friday 30 August 2002 01:00

The imagined meeting forms the core of this play by the great German dramatist Friedrich Schiller. And director Andrea Breth has made it the absolute focal point of this long and stately production from the Burgtheater of Vienna.

Before the meeting actually happens, everything occurs as if in anticipation of it. And when it has happened, everything else is but a long sigh of relief that it is over. Even Mary’s death.

This being a drama written to reflect reality not replicate it, Schiller has also knocked a good decade off the ages of both queens and distilled the events of 20 years down to a few days. It is the characters of the two rivals for the crown of England that remains the same.

In the first act, Maria Stuart has fled to England after being implicated in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley. Played by the German actress Corinna Kirchhoff, Maria is a consummate politician in the use of her gender to twist the wills of the men around her to her needs.

In the second act, Elizabeth is meeting with her Council of State to consider Maria’s fate. Elizabeth, as conceived by the Austrian actress Elisabeth Orth, is the equal of her cousin in using her gender in a man’s world. Except that where Maria flaunts, Elizabeth withholds to create even greater desire.

At the end of a Festival which has dared to be a bit different on the theatrical front, this production of Maria Stuart was always going to be a hit.

Here we have the Burgtheater, one of the great producers of German language theatre and Andrea Breth, a leading German director to put her personal seal on a play that is unique in Schiller’s output for its depiction of powerful female roles.

In the first of those roles there is Elisabeth Orth, an actress who some say is the greatest in any language. Against her, stands Corinna Kirchhoff, an actress who is every bit as compelling to watch. And so in the wonderful third act when the meeting eventually occurs, there is the frisson and crackle of tension across the stage.

And yet, despite this huge talent on stage, there is something cold at the heart of the production. While you might even stand to applaud just the technical aspects of it, there remains the faint whiff of concern that these aspects have been gained at the price of the production’s soul.

For non-German speakers, there is the perennial problem of the subtitles. The situation here is that they are almost too good. When actors speak their lines, there is a pause between them. But with these subtitles, there is no gap which means that you have to watch the subtitle boards constantly, making you unable to focus on the actors. Either that, or watch the actors and risk missing the meaning .

Even for those fluent in German, however, this is not the perfection it might have been.

It’s not the fault of Nicholas Ofczarek who plays the impetuous young gaoler’s nephew, a supporter of Maria who falls under her spell, and does so with all the air of a German Gerard Depardieu.

Nor is there any failure on the part of Orth and Kirchhoff, in their spinning of the great lords of England around their little fingers.

There is simply too much alienation here, not in the acting, but in the production itself, which pushes its audience away from itself when it could be drawing them in.

Run ends tomorrow