Financial Times - 28th July 2004

Theatre: Marieluise ***

By Sarah Hemming

It's rare these days to attend a studio theatre and be confronted by a red curtain across the stage, but this is the case with Marieluise. Soutra Gilmour's pleasing design for Kerstin Specht's play transforms the place into a makeshift puppet theatre, with mismatched wooden chairs for the audience and a workmanlike but pretty wooden set behind the crimson drapes. It's a clever and sympathetic design that works with the spirit of both the play and the production.

" Marieluise" is Marieluise Fleisser, the German playwright who died in 1974. She achieved early success with Purgatory in Ingolstadt, staged in 1926, became caught up with the radical intellectuals in Berlin and entangled, personally and professionally with Brecht. But her second play, Pioneers in Ingolstadt, met with disapproval, she slid into obscurity and was only restored to favour in the 1970s.

Specht's play draws on techniques now so identified with Brecht: episodic structure, open set changes, characters stepping out of the action to introduce a scene. The play rattles through Fleisser's life in short splintered scenes: through her convent schooling, her early attempts at writing, her short-lived success, her love-hate relationship with Brecht, her misfortune with men and her descent into depression. In Erica Whyman's production the puppets stay on stage, adding to the distancing effect, standing in for characters and encouraging a metaphorical reading of the play with Fleisser as puppet and then survivor of a crushing society.

Catherine Kanter makes a vivid Marieluise: intense, earnest and passionate. Whyman's staging is ingenious, the cast is versatile and Rachael McGill's translation has clarity, energy and poetic economy. Yet there is a problem with the enterprise - because the play tells us very little about Fleisser's work itself. Its style may reflect that of Fleisser's work, but unless we are familiar with that work we can't know this. The piece doesn't reveal her theories, ideas or plots and so it doesn't really illuminate her success or her downfall. This is an inventive piece of theatre but, ironically, its very inventiveness contributes, ultimately, to a sense of frustration.