The Stone

Reviews

Mesmerising

— Evening Standard,4 stars 4 stars Evening Standard

The ghostly strangeness of Marius von Mayenburg’s The Stone, which shows up the enduring impact of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, complements his terrifying one acter, The Ugly One. In that earlier work, delightedly received at the Court in 2007, von Mayenburg envisaged a eugenic Nazi future in which cosmetic surgery threatens to clone everyone into identical blue eyed beauties. In both plays, this remarkable German playwright suggests how Hitler’s malign spirit resonates today.
The Stone is fairly conventional in theme, though not in treatment. It shows how a grandmother’s claim that her husband saved a Jewish family from death in the 1930s comes to be revealed as a guilt-laden inversion of the truth.
What helps to make it such a extraordinary piece of memory and false memory drama is the form in which it has been conceived rendered by Ramin Gray’s hour-long production in disjunctive realism. Seamlessly negotiating five decades of the 20th century and a period of almost 60 years, through which Linda Bassett’s memorable, evasive Witha survives as a false witness, The Stone leaps through time with the natural fluidity of a dream, leaving us not always certain of who did what, why and how.
The scene is a Dresden house, its ownership having passed through several hands. The building is transmuted in Johannes Schutz’s ravishing design into a prison, a white and turquoise windowless box, with a few chairs and tables. Gray assembles figures from the past on stage.
They lounge and stand around like expectant spirits waiting their chance to offer reminiscence and revelation. In 1993 Helen Schlesinger’s Heidrun, her teenage daughter, Loo Brealey’s Hannah, and her slightly senile mother, Witha, seen hiding under a table for fear of imaginary bombs, have somehow managed to reclaim the house that first belonged to the family in 1935.
Time springs back to reveal how Witha and her husband Wolfgang managed to buy the place from the departing Jewish Mieze (Justine Mitchell) and her family. With deceptive casualness the past lets slip its awful truths and disavows old subterfuges. The axing of a piano betrays long-suppressed fury. The cherished, long-hidden stone of the title, thrown by Nazis at liberal Wolfgang, is supposed to be his memorial. In his oblique, casual style von Mayenburg finally shatters our illusions and Hannah’s. Mesmerising.
Nicholas de Jongh, 10 February

4 stars Financial Times

A web of official memories

The Royal Court begins its ‘‘Off The Wall’‘ season of new German work with a characteristically unflinching piece by Marius von Mayenburg, probably (thanks to previous Court productions) the best-known in Britain of his generation of German playwrights. We Brits cannot perhaps appreciate the social and political audacity of the play’s piercing gaze upon those who benefited from one or both of two eras of national upheaval within living memory, but we can surely all understand the impulse to mythologise our way out of guilt.
In non-linear scenes set at various times between 1935 and 1993, von Mayenburg portrays a family who, having fled the ‘‘Russians’‘ of the East German regime in 1953, have subsequently had their old house in Dresden restored to them following the reunification of the country. The three generations of women who now live there are disturbed one night by the arrival of one of the house’s DDR-era residents, claiming what she was promised by them on a visit in 1978. (The bars of chocolate in question clearly stand for a bigger financial and moral debt.) Yet it transpires that ‘‘their’‘ house was not honourably acquired in the first place.
Teenager Hannah has been taught that her late grandfather was a hero for financing his Jewish former boss’s escape from Nazi Germany in 1935, but we see that he, a fervent Nazi, did so by bargaining to buy the boss’s house at a knock-down price, and may in fact have betrayed the escapees as well. The stone of the title is a paving cobble supposedly thrown at the grandfather because he had helped Jews; in fact, he protests that the throwers are mistaken and the house is now inhabited by Aryans. But in a sense, the stone is the play itself, directed at the unreliable collective recollections of a nation that has gone through a century of repeated redefinition and perhaps prefers now to set expedient limits on such a process. It is in this respect a fictional, dramatic counterpart to the kind of indictment of collaboration and self-enrichment made against the French of the second world war by Marcel Ophls’ classic documentary film The Sorrow And The Pity.
As with his production of the playwright’s The Ugly One here in 2007, director Ramin Gray keeps things bare. The set is a closed box (ceiling and all),which the cast of six enter and exit through the auditorium; Matt Drury immerses this in white light just short of downright harsh. Linda Bassett is outstanding as grandmother Witha, the only character who appears in all periods and whose elderly befuddlement is complicated as she tries to keep the official version of her memories distinct from the actual events. She is counterpointed by Justine Mitchell as the bosss wife in 1935, who exhibits the same fingernail grasp of politesse when she asks for a formal toast of friendship as when she takes an axe to the piano.
Ian Shuttleworth, 11 February 2009

3 stars The Times

There’s something wilfully confusing about Marius von Mayenburg’s hour-long trek through 20th-century German history in microcosm. The Stone comes in short snatches that flick between 1935, 1953, 1978 and 1993 without an omnipresent cast changing costumes or dates being projected on to the walls of the stark room in which the play is set. And though a piano is supposedly smashed by its axe-wielding owner there’s no piano visible, just a few institutional tables and chairs substituting for what has apparently been expensive furniture. Especially at first, I felt the way I do when I tackle a fiendish Su Doku.
But the puzzle does largely come out. And Mayenburg’s play is confusing because his subject is confusing, not least to a youngish German such as him. What has really occurred in the house near Dresden where The Stone is set? Yes, it becomes clear that it was far enough from the city to survive the Allied bombing, that Linda Bassett’s Witha was widowed at that time and departed with her daughter Heidrun for West Germany, that the East German regime commandeered the place, that Helen Schlesinger’s Heidrun returns to reclaim her family home. But, but, but …
The big buts are what occurred in 1935 and 1945. The tale told by Witha, and accepted by her daughter and Loo Brealey as her granddaughter Hannah, is that her husband Wolfgang was an heroic anti-Nazi. Why, the house was even attacked by Hitlerites after he had bought it from his Jewish boss at the veterinary centre where he worked, so giving the man enough money to escape with his wife to America. And then Wolfgang was accidentally shot as he stood on his balcony to welcome the Soviet liberators.
Gradually, Mayenburg exposes this as myth. I can’t reveal too much, but as soon as Jonathan Cullen’s anxious, flummoxed Wolfgang enters the action you know he’s no fervent pro-Semite or provincial von Stauffenberg. As the discovery of a stone scrawled with a swastika helps to confirm, he’s just another member of a generation that bought the Nazis’ promises and grabbed what it could, and Bassett’s Witha is deep into a deceit that, you feel, has become self-deceit.
Mayenburg and his director, Ramin Gray, could surely have made more concessions to a British audience. But if you want to know why so many Germans claimed to have known so little about the Holocaust, see this admittedly unusual but always well-acted play. It’s not only the cheated Jewish wife who is bitter. The play resonates with its author’s angry shame.
Benedict Nightingale, 11 February 2009

Related Pages