288
SUSAN SONTAG
If
Arthur Miller's play fails as a serious play because of its intel–
lectual softness, Rolf Hochhuth's
The Deputy
fails because of its intel–
lectual simplicity and artistic naivete. But
this
is failure of another
order.
The Deputy
has been put into awkward English, and even in
German it can't be much as a play. Hochhuth couldn't care less about
the truth of Aristotle's observation that poetry is more philosophical than
historical; Hochhuth's characters are little more than mouthpieces for
the exposition of historical facts, for the collision ,of moral principles.
But after the way in which Miller turns all events into their sub–
jective reverberations, the artistic weakness of
The Deputy
seems almost
condonable.
The Deputy
has all the directness toward its subject that
Arthur Miller's play lacks. Its virtue is precisely that it refuses to be
subtle about the murder of the six million Jews.
But the production by Herman Shumlin is as far from Hochhuth's
play (as written) as that play (as written) is from being a great play.
Hochhuth's crude but powerful six to eight hour documentary in play
form has been put through Shumlin's Broadway Blendor and emerges
as a two hour and fifteen minute comic strip, and a dull one to boot–
the story of a hands,ome well-born hero, a couple of villains, and a few
fence-sitters, titled The Story
of
Father Fontana, or Will the Pope
Speak?
I'm not of course suggesting that the whole six to eight hours must
be played. The play as written
is
repetitive. But a theatre public that
is willing to sit through four or five hours of O'Neill could surely
be
persuaded to sit through-say-four hours of Hochhuth's play. The
important thing is to get a four hour version that would do justice
to the narrative. In the present Broadway version, you would never
guess that the noble SS Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein (a true person )
is as important a character and as much the hero of
The Deputy
as
the Jesuit Father Fontana (a composite figure based on Provost Lichten–
berg and Father Kolbe.) Neither Eichmann, nor the notorious Profes–
sor Hirt, nor the Krupp industrialist-all imp.ortant characters in
Hochhuth's playas he wrote it-appear at all in the Broadway version.
(Among the dropped scenes, one particularly misses Act I, Scene 2,
the party given by Eichmann.) By concentrating exclusively on the
story of Fontana's vain appeals to the Pope, Shumlin
has
gone far
toward burying ,the historical memories which Hochhuth's play aims
to keep alive. But this drastic simplification of Hochhuth's historical
argument is not even the worst offense of Shumlin's version. The worst
offense is the refusal to dramatize anything really painful to watch.
Certain scenes in
The Deputy
are excruciating to read. None of this-
