A Remembrance

I don't know which regiment my grandfather was in, or in what battles he fought, only that he was "in the trenches", and a few stray connected facts. That it was a menace that could be used to make children clean their plates. "You'd be glad of that if you'd been in the trenches". That they used candles to clean the lice out of the pleats of their kilts. That Churchill had visited them, and "he had a tin hat but we had no tin hats". That my grandfather had escorted a group of Gurkhas to raid the German trenches at night, fallen asleep while waiting for them, and been woken by one of them dangling a string of severed ears in his face. (Or so went the story.) That he had lied about his age to enlist, found the regiment not to his liking (dirty fellows), feigned deafness to be discharged, then re-enlisted in another regiment. That he finished the war as batman to Sir Thomas Dalling, a veterinarian, in Paris, where he was studying equine diseases, and my grandfather would balance trays of horse eyeballs as if he were a waiter. (Sir Thomas indeed existed, as he is in the Dictionary of National Biography, but there is no point in looking in the records for a Jimmy Campbell from Glasgow.)

And this must come from the Great War:

There's work to be done,
And it's not much fun.

Which I always dreaded to hear from my father early in the morning as I lay in my bed.

Remarks on Emilia Galotti

THE chief defect in this Tragedy is that it is written in an explanatory, colloquial, and prosaic style ; but this is what may be almost called the mortal sin of German literature ; it has never yet attained that laconic indication of the passions, which is best calculated to express their rapid, confused, and desperate course.

In other respects, Emilia Galotti is a masterpiece: the progress of the plot is truly dramatic, the contrast of the characters is finely imagined, and the feelings excited are among the noblest within the province of the tragic Muse. This piece only requires a master hand to lop away its superfluities, preserve its beauties, and link them in a quick and poetical succession, to render it perhaps the finest modern tragedy known to the stage.

Thomas Holcroft
quoted in The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, 1810

Emilia Galotti

Just back from Stratford where we saw Lessing's Emilia Galotti performed by Deutsches Theater Berlin, in German, with surtitles. It was thrilling! The director, Michael Thalheimer, works (Google tells me) by taking classic texts and stripping them down to essentials, getting rid of secondary characters, and replacing text with movement wherever possible. The set is abstract, costumes are modern dress, music is integral, and some interesting lighting and effects are used. Acting style could be called expressionist, lots of grotesque movement, exaggerated speech, people screaming in each other's faces, and then abnormally long silences. I am a little stunned.

It is only here for four days. I don't know how many tickets are left, but if you do go, try to sit more toward the middle of the theatre (the Avon), as the set is quite deep, and if you're at the edge, you might miss just a bit of the action. Also, you will have to look up to read the surtitles, so the balcony might be the best place to sit. Of course, if you speak German, you're laughing. (Many in the audience seemed to be German which would explain the lack of a standing O even though they applauded lustily. Civilized people, they stood up when it was time to leave, and not before.)