334
URSULA BRUMM
dramatization of Shaw's letters, was wildly cheered as Mrs. Patrick
Campbell.
This winter's current productions offer the latest in inter–
national playwriting. Besides a veritable Giraudoux renaissance
(Undine, Tiger at the Gates) The Madwoman of C haillot)
we
have Jean Genet's
The Balcony)
Anouilh's latest, rather feeble
L'Hurluberlu)
Osborne's
The Entertainer
and his earlier
Epitaph
tor George Dillon)
WilIis HaIl's
The Long and the Short and the
Tall)
Shelagh Delaney's
A Taste of Honey)
the world premiere of
Ezra Pound's
Women of Trachis
in a production that could not
quite bridge the gap between Antiquity and modern slang, and
Tennessee WiIliams' psychopathic thrilIer,
Sweet Bird of Youth)
a
failure with reviewers and public alike. At the other extreme,
Edward Albee, a young, relatively unknown American, made a
notable and weIl-deserved success with his one-act play,
The Zoo
Story)
first performed with Beckett's monologue,
Texte pour rien)
on the new Studio Stage of the Municipal Theaters.
The most impressive theatrical event of the season, however,
was a performance at the West Berlin City Opera of Arnold
Schoenberg's unfinished and supposedly alI but unperformable
opera,
Moses and Aaron.
Like the presentation of almost all the
above-mentioned moderns (including that of Genet's
Balcony),
this was undertaken by a municipally subsidized theater: the sum
required for an initial run of eight performances is
in
absurd excess
of the box office receipts for those eight showings. Next spring, how–
ever, before going to Paris, there will be further performances of
the opera; for since the opening-which was disrupted in the
second scene by organized and determined enemies of Schoenberg
and the new music-this extremely difficult work has become an
undefinable sort of hit. Is this because of the music, or the extra–
ordinary performance? Twelve-tone experts regard this Schoenberg
opera, which was originally written as an oratorio, as one of the
most important, if not the most important musical event of the
twentieth century. The receptive layman with an ear for contem–
porary music, responds
(in
the magnificent third scene, "Ghetto
in
Egypt," if nowhere else) at least to a sense of a consistent and
autonomous musical world, even if he can not surely grasp the
full import of this musical revolution.
