The Sunday Times - July 25, 2004

Marieluise

Robert Hewison

The Bavarian writer Marieluise Fleisser is a victim of history, redeemed by time. Taken up by Brecht in the 1920s, her two plays made her briefly a heroine of the German avant-garde, before the Nazis closed them down. Yet she survived war and mental collapse, and lived long enough to become a new heroine of the German avant-garde of the 1960s. Kerstin Specht’s play, translated by Rachel McGill, tells her story in the episodic, expressionist style of her times, and is given an economic but engagingly imaginative Brechtian production by Erica Whyman. Fleisser began by writing puppet plays, and they become the ruling metaphor for both production and design. There is a point to making the audience sit on wobbly chairs. The end is a little rushed, the fault of the text, not the production, which honours the Gate’s tradition of creative internationalism. Three stars