Marshall Cohen
THEATER 66
Danton's Death
is, almost certainly, the greatest first play
ever written. In it Buchner examines the political foundations of private
sentiments; he defines the "epic" conditions of "absurdist" attitudes.
No classical play is more relevant to the contemporary theatrical situa–
tion, and it is obvious enough why Buchner is the only playwright
since Shakespeare whom Brecht and Ionesco hold in equal esteem. It
is all the more distressing, therefore, that the Lincoln Center's produc–
tion of
Danton's Death
should
be
so wrongheaded in its literary assump–
tions and in its theatrical techniques. Wishing to emphasize the political
aspects of the play and to claim it for his Theater ,of Protest, Blau
tampers with the text. While Buchner opens the play in a private
drawing room where Danton impresses upon his wife the impossibility
of "knowing" another human being, Blau establishes an entirely dif–
ferent tone by staging a pantomime of public entrapment against a set
whose vanishing points imply "infinite" space. A similar distortion is
achieved by ,omitting Danton's bitter, apolitical jest on the guillotine.
Blau's murky, gratuitous translation is as damaging as
his
wanton cut–
ting. One of its faults is to blur the distinction between the public
rhetoric, often reminiscent of Schiller's, that characterizes the Jacobins,
and the coarse, metaphorically daring idiom of Danton. The allusion
to Schiller is important. Like Brecht, Buchner wishes to set
his
own
historical materialism against Schiller's transcendental idealism. He op–
poses
his own realistic sense of necessity (Woyzeck pisses in the street)
to Schiller's moral cant about freedom (the Doctor proves to W,oyzeck
that the
musculus constrictor vesicae
is subject to the will). Buchner
detests those "so-called Idealist poets who give us nothing more
than
marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected pathos." It is important
to
observe, then, that Danton is no Posa, dying for ideals that history
will vindicate, no Maria Stuart experiencing the sublime and triumphing
in death. A hint of this in the program would have been more to the
point than Blau's effort to launch a crusade against President Johns.on.
Danton's "What is it in us that lies, whores, steals and murders?" is not
