Boleslaw Barlog [Boleslaw Barlog (1906-99) was a distinguished German theatre director, later Intendant General of the Schiller-Theater in Berlin. He directed dozens of plays at the Schlossparktheater and the Schiller-Theater in Berlin from 1945 to 1972. Author of Theaterlebenslanglich (1981). This and all other interviews with the actors and directors of the Schiller-Theater are by JK, kindly assisted by Walter Asmus or Dr Walter Georgi.] Godot was first played at the Schlossparktheater and Godot alone would have been reason enough to keep the Schlosspark open. It was a small theatre of the Schiller, a lovely theatre with about 450 seats.*
Rosemarie Koch [Rosemarie Koch was the Assistant Dramautrg of the Schiller-Theater for many years, advising Albert Bessler and Boleslaw Barlog.] We heard some rumours about this play which was on in Paris, so I got hold of the original French version and read it. I talked so warmly about the play that Albert Bessler [the chief dramaturg] became curious and went to Paris to see Roger Blin’s production. Then he was enthused. I thought it was wonderful, a great piece of literature - but I said you can’t play it on stage; it’s impossible, I think. Bessler met Elmar Tophoven in Paris. Then a rough translation came from Tophoven to Bessler and Barlog read it. Barlog was a ‘juicy’ character, a theatre man, not an intellectual. I think he read the play but intellectually he couldn’t understand very much of it. But he was a theatre man and instinctive and he said, ‘Yes, we’ll do it’. The final decision lay with Barlog. But Bessler exercised an enormous influence on Barlog from an intellectual point of view. He was the shadow boss, as it were.
Boleslaw Barlog.
Boleslaw Barlog In the beginning I got the play to read from Bessler. ‘I would like to direct it myself’, I said. ‘I would make a lovely Chaplinesque production of it.’ But then Karl Heinz Stroux came along and said, ‘But I am your main director. I have the right to do it. I must do it.’ But he directed it, not, as had been done in Paris, as a ‘Chaplinade’, but with German metaphysical depth.
Rosemarie Koch Barlog said, OK, I’ll do it’. But at the same time he saw how difficult it would be. It was not such a hard decision for him to give it to Stroux because he felt instinctively that he was not the man, the director, for this play. That was Barlog’s strength: to give in in difficult situations, you know, to listen to people who could convince him, and then, instinctively, he would say, ‘You are right’. And he would accept other people’s opinions - because he knew where his capabilities lay, you know, and where they did not, in the end. That was his strength, I think, as a theatre leader.
It has been well documented, of course, that Beckett didn’t agree very much with this first production. It was ‘too German’ for Sam. It was so deeply serious. Roger Blin had done more or less a clown thing with it… [Butin Germany] some said, ‘It’s Nietzsche: “God is dead” ‘. And another said, ‘No, it’s Nietzsche: “God is dead”, but underneath it says “God is alive” ‘ - you know all the Catholic newspapers and so on. There was much speculation about the nature of Godot. ‘Who is Godot?’ It was even attributed to the character in Balzac, ‘Godeau’.*
Sam came to Berlin to see it. He came alone - with his translator, Elmar Tophoven. He was very polite but a bit confused about the production … irritated in fact.
Boleslaw Barlog At the première, Sam wanted to leave. He took his coat but they brought him back again and pushed him on to the stage to bow. One could see that he was very unhappy with that kind of production, although Stroux was an excellent director. Sam felt that he didn’t have the right approach to the play.
Rosemarie Koch We expected a scandal at the time but there was no scandal. The main critics were capable of understanding the play and doing it justice. They felt that the play was important, and, even if they didn’t really understand it, they said it was an important piece for the theatre to do. And, in contrast to that, there was the general opinion that … some people made it into a joke, but they didn’t know what was going on, in spite of the production. So, it was good for the German public that jokes were directed at it in this way because the German public always wants, of course, this metaphysical approach and so they said, ‘Oh no, it’s not some crazy author who is playing a joke on us; it’s a serious play. We have to think about it.’ That production was good for the reception of the play. Otherwise, if it had been a light thing, you know, they would have said, ‘Oh no, it’s just a vaudeville piece or something.’ And this error helped to make the play successful. It was really courageous to do that first German production because there were many people who said, ‘You are crazy to do this’. And remember the Schiller-Theater had an important position in Germany and the play spread inexorably all over the country, in all these theatres.
Boleslaw Barlog The best Pozzo we ever had was Walter Franck in this first performance at the Schlossparktheater. A great actor. He was excellent. But there is this story in my book: a woman stood up in the audience and shouted to Herr Franck, ‘You want to be a State Actor and you are playing such shit!’
Beckett as Mediator
Warten auf Godot (Waiting for Godot)
Produced again at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, February 1965, directed by Deryk Mendel, with help from Samuel Beckett.
Klaus Herm (Lucky)
[Klaus Herm (1925-) Distinguished German stage and film actor. Born into an acting family, Herm worked extensively in Munich and Berlin theatres. He played Lucky in both the 1965 and 1975 productions of Waiting for Godot, directed in the second production by Beckett. He also acted in Damals (That Time) and Spiel (Play). At Süddeutscher Rundfunk, he played in television productions by Beckett of Ghost Trio and … but the clouds …]
There were great difficulties with the 1965 production of Warten auf Godot [Waiting for Godot] when Deryk Mendel was directing. Mendel simply could not explain the sense of it; he could not get the actors to work together on it. He also had difficulties telling Bernhard Minetti [who played Pozzo] what to do.* Minetti was an egomaniac, an excellent actor but very much on the edge, with a very big ego.
Beckett did not take over. He just tried to listen, then suggested how Minetti could come down a little from his exuberant self-projection. Until his arrival, they were searching and digging to get at the deeper sense of it and Beckett said, ‘But why? It’s so simple. It’s just a play’. This helped them very much to accept it as such - as just a play. The fact that Beckett was present helped us all so much. And it also calmed down Minetti. It went on to be a good production and they were all happy.
After the première, there was a party and Beckett also came and said, ‘That was very nice - but one day maybe I would like to take over myself, and direct it myself, not today, not tomorrow, but whenever, and if you would play Lucky again that would be wonderful.’
HorstBollmann (Vladimir)
[Horst Bollmann (1925-) Distinguished German stage, film and television actor who was directed by Beckett at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin on several occasions in Waiting for Godot (twice) and in Endgame.]
When Beckett came the sun was rising for us, everything became so clear and we were altogether very content, you know. Ohne Metaphysik … genau richt [No metaphysics … that’s right]. The first night was a huge success. The press were happy. We were all happy. During the party after the première, Sam said, ‘Shouldn’t we do it again? I think we should do it again.’*
Beckett as Director
Endspiel (Endgame)
Produced at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, September, 1967, directed by Samuel Beckett.
Horst Bollmann (Gov) You have to be courageous enough to give in to Beckett’s way of doing things. It’s a matter of trust. He is a musician, preoccupied with the rhythm, the choreography, the overall shape of the production. [In this play] the sound of the steps can be used as a form of percussion, an additional instrument, adding another language to the dialogue. Every now and then Beckett would talk in particular about the silences, the long pauses. We asked him, ‘What does it mean? What are we supposed to do during the
pauses?’ He told us, ‘Act as if you are in a boat with a hole in it and water is coming in and the boat is slowly sinking. You must think of things to do; then there is a pause; then you get the feeling you have to do something else and you work at it once more and the boat goes up again.’ This is a direction which any actor can understand. In Endgame, ‘imagine that the relationship between Hamm and Clov is like flames, glowing, roaring flames and ashes. The flames are roaring, then they sink, by and by, into ashes. But beneath the ashes there is still the danger of the roaring flames flaring up again at any time. What holds your attention is that at any time they can blow hot again.’
With Ernst Schroder [who played Hamm] there were problems. There were personal things and also he had these long monologues and when Schroder did these monologues for the first time Beckett was…well, he didn’t know what to make of them. At the beginning there were two worlds, Schroder’s and Beckett’s. Schroder had apparently said at one point that Beckett was not really a theatre man. The opposite is true [but] that is the way of the theatre when somebody is so dominating, domineering even, as regards his personality and Beckett was just the opposite. And, of course, Beckett was not brought up in the theatre. I remember one evening we all went to Schroder’s house by the Wannsee. After the reception, Beckett said, ‘Now we must go for a beer!’ It was such a relief after all the formality.
Beckett with Ernst Schörder (Hamm) and Horst Bollmann (Clov), rehearsing Endspiel, 1967.
Gottfried Büttner
[Dr Gottfried Büttner (1926-2002) medical doctor and author of Absurdes Theater und Bewusstseinswandel (Berlin, 1968) and Samuel Beckett’s Novel Watt, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. We are most grateful to Dr Marie-Renate Büttner for allowing us to use extracts from her husband’s memoirs, in which he offers an outsider’s view of a late rehearsal of Endspiel.]
There was a relaxed atmosphere, although there was obviously a lot of respect for Beckett. The work was wonderful. One actor said, ‘It is all so friendly, but we also know exactly what we are doing in the way we could only have with somebody who was a very important figure like Beckett.’
Beckett took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, leaned over the table where the prompt was sitting and, with some notes in his hand, went through a series of details with the actors. To Herr Bollmann [Clov] he said, ‘When you are speaking with Hamm about the word “grey”, you must at the end speak so quietly that nobody hears you. Nobody must hear the word. You must whisper it.’ The performance was almost perfect, almost without mistakes. Beckett was obviously very satisfied. In a very few places he stopped, corrected a false word, a position or an attitude that was not quite correct. He watched with great attention, leaning or sitting on the edge of the table. Obviously he knew the German off by heart because he noticed every little mistake and could correct people without having the text in front of him.
We were very impressed by the density of the action. The two main actors were bathed in sweat after one and three quarter hours. I asked Beckett whether Clov should not, after he had put on his travelling clothes, whether he could not give up his bent attitude and stand up a bit more upright when the curtain falls. Beckett was very strict and said, ‘No, it must remain open as to whether he is going away or not.’
He didn’t appear to know much of what was going on in the theatre in Berlin. He didn’t seem terribly interested either. For example, he didn’t even know that at that time a play by Audiberti was being performed in the Workshop of the Schiller-Theater (that is in the very same house where he was doing Endspiel). He didn’t seem to be aware of this. He seemed simply to be doing his own work and going to rehearsals. Although one can imagine that he must have had a lot of discussions with artists and people and that took up a lot of time, he seemed to avoid as much as possible any kind of formal gathering. [This visit to a rehearsal at the Schiller-Theater took place on ii September 1967; the first night was 26 September.]
Das letzte Band (Krapp’s Last Tape)
Produced at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, October 1969, directed by Samuel Beckett.
Martin Held (Krapp)
[Martin Held (1908-92) Famous German stage, film and television actor. His performance in Das letzte Band (Krapp’s Last Tape) was recorded on film by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. This interview was conducted by Ronald Hayman, translated by Helen Watanabe, and revised by James Knowlson. It was first published in Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape. Theatre Workbook i, ed. James Knowlson, London, Brutus Books Ltd, 1980. We are grateful for the publishers’ kind permission to reprint it here.]
In the beginning, he seems to have felt that he had to tell me a lot of what he could remember from the first production [at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1958] and that was, of course, not such a happy beginning, especially since Beckett was not really a director. If he had been a director, he would have translated what the earlier actor had done for me, but because he wasn’t a director, he couldn’t do that.
At first he was a little like some directors who are not very sure of themselves but to whom someone has said, ‘Don’t let the actors ride rough-shod over you; get your own way’. This was the case for about three days of the four weeks we rehearsed and then he gave me my head a little. There were stretches when he left me a completely free hand right up to the last day. For example, the actual last tape which I recorded, he said practically nothing about that; I just did it. We’d talk in the evenings over a bottle of red wine. He’d sit there in that chair and we wouldn’t by any means speak exclusively about the play. He talked a lot about James Joyce, whom he knew well, and from there we got back again to the play.
Beckett with Martin Held, 1969.
For me among the best things in our collaboration, and something I always like to do, was that he sometimes said, ‘Let’s save this situation up for the last few days of rehearsal. We haven’t got so far yet that we can be completely clear about this’. This was a beautifully flexible way to work. I find this the ideal method of direction. He often went into detail, for example, in those glances to the rear, when Krapp is listening or he wants to switch the tape on, and he jumps and turns slowly round. He rehearsed these things exactly. They were more than just stage directions.
Beckett speaks very good German and we got on very well together right from the start, in so far as I knew immediately what he meant, for example, when he said that Death the Reaper, whom Krapp has been looking for unconsciously, is standing behind him or that, when he listens, he switches off and sinks into dreams; Krapp is eaten up by dreams. But this is without sentimentality; there is no resignation in him. It is the finish, the end. There is nothing more to say about it. All these three things are treated without sentimentality.
The encounter with Beckett gave me a lot of happiness. It belongs to those encounters in life which can help one to develop inwardly. I knew the play already and I’d seen the première ten years previously, the first performance in Germany. But I read Krapp only once and then put it away in order to go into rehearsal without preconceived ideas. This was all the easier for me in that, strangely enough, not very much of the previous production stuck, although I know that it was good. Beckett once said something very beautiful about this play. He said that Krapp is not a way of looking at the world (keine Weltanschauung), and that in fact answers everything. No, this is just Krapp, not a world-view. It is not valid for everyone.
I did something once where I was afraid I might hurt his feelings. When I have my hand on the table [and here he crooks the knuckle of one finger] - then this is Beckett. He can’t move his hand. I gradually worked towards it and made it more each time. And he looked at it once and just said, ‘Good’. There is an amazing amount of Beckett in Krapp. Even though he always said, ‘Don’t act any resignation’, I still think that in him - he’d be at my throat if he heard me say this - there is resignation. For example, in that chair he once said something which shook me very much, it shook me so much that I have difficulty in repeating
it - perhaps it is even very indiscreet of me - but I asked him what he was working on and, with a movement of his hand, he said, ‘I have written myself out’. That is Krapp. But that doesn’t have to be true, for heaven’s sake. When a writer of the stature of Beckett says he has written himself out, then that can be the valley before the next peak.
Glückliche Tage (Happy Days)
Produced at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, September 1971, directed by Beckett.
Gottfried Büttner [describes a talk that he had with Beckett in September 1971] Beckett spoke about his current work. The actress who was playing Winnie [Eva-Katharina Schultz] looked very young and had only played parts up till then in which she had really been able to let it all out as it were, but here, as Winnie, she had to hold back very much. He was very keen to get the musicality of the movement across. This is how the play had been conceived: as music and movement, very economical, conscious, clean movement; nothing superfluous was meant to be happening. For example, when one was putting on a pair of glasses - he demonstrated this - you only need one hand; you don’t need to use two hands. Today they had the first lighting tests. The actress had needed eye drops because most of the time she is staring at this very bright light, but she is not allowed to blink. It is very demanding on her. Turning the head; the movement of the eyes; everything must be exactly studied. ‘Time is too short’, said Beckett. The actress was still a little bit unsure about the text. When I asked whether Madeleine Renaud, who had played the part in the French première and played it hundreds of times since, whether she was not a very good embodiment of this role, Beckett said she played very well in her way, but in a very French style. There was a lot of self-presentation going on there, whereas here in Berlin he was very keen to get the presentation of exact movement right, to focus on the musicality. Selfless presentation? In the sense of Kleist’s essay on the marionette theatre. Movement must be like marionettes, objectively moved as if by a God. Beckett expressed doubt about whether the performance would come off because of the difficult circumstances. To my question as to whether he was interested in criticism, since the critics had always been very kind, or very favourable about his Berlin productions, he just made a sort of dismissive gesture, ‘Oh critics! So much hot air’ as if to say he didn’t care about that. He said it was possible that it was important for the actors.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 18