Sense and sympathy

Schiller is not performed much in the UK. If we want five-act historical plays we choose Shakespeare. They suit our tastes better - bloodier, bolder characters and more dynamic than Schiller's rhetorical set-pieces. His is the drama of reason rather than emotion. Even Maria Stuart, who has had her husband killed and has now taken up with his murderer, is a figure who tries (unsuccessfully) to argue her way rationally out of the hole she is in.

Schiller shows her as a politician who relied too much on her looks to get what she wants. She is an actress and for the director presents a major problem. How good an actress is she? In this Vienna Burgtheater production by Andrea Breth, lead actress Corinna Kirchhoff plays out her last hand in desperation; but by the end has fallen in love with her own romantic fate. When she swoons into the arms of Leicester in the final act, it is hard to know if she is fainting or making one last bid for the affections of a man who might grant her freedom.

Breth's production is a thing of real splendour, particularly after the apocryphal meeting between Mary and Elizabeth - a scene that the actresses attack rather than draw out. It may not possess the sense of symphony present in the same company's Seagull last year, but Breth has wrought a modern tragedy from a play whose politicking can seem remote to a British audience. From characters who have no sense of themselves and who make rational arguments in verse, she has conjured up a collection of personalities with unexpected depth - the cowardly but sympathetic Leicester, the melodramatic Mortimer.

The field is led, however, by the finest performance of this year's Festival from Elisabeth Orth as Elizabeth. Throwing off her ear-rings and slouching in her chair, she begins her soliloquy with a moment of anachronistic genius and continues to define the character for a modern sensibility. Her rival isn't permitted the same opportunity to explain herself. It's hard to know how deliberate an act it is but Breth has revealed something. Schiller's real sympathy lies with Elizabeth.

Copyright 2002
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