The acting throughout was artistic, Professor Bernhardi impersonated by Bruno Decarli, and Father Reder by Alfred Abel, the latter a subtle characterisation. The "team play" of the Kleines Theatre company was seen at its best in the third act, where the directors hold a stormy meeting. It was the perfection of ensemble work. The creator of Das Süsse Mädel type of Vienna has painted a large canvas and revealed a grip on the essentials of characterisation. To Ibsen's An Enemy of the People he is evidently under certain obligations; Professor Bernhardi is a variation of Doctor Stockmann, plus not a little irony and self-complacency. But the thesis of Ibsen is less academic, sounder, of more universal interest than Schnitzler's. There is no metaphysical hair-splitting in An Enemy of the People, nor sentimental talk about euphoria and going happily to death. Grim old Daddy Ibsen told us that people were being poisoned by impure spring water, and, as Alan Dale said, was the first man to write a drama around a drain-pipe. Arthur Schnitzler, shedding for the nonce his accustomed Viennese charm and nonchalance, has written a comedy about a very grave subject, and has not uttered a single word that can be construed as disrespectful to either religion, Jewish or Roman Catholic. He is a genre painter almost to the point of perfection.
III
Once upon a time I called Hermann Sudermann the Klingsor of the German stage, meaning thereby that he was a master of black magic. Of course, like most comparisons, this was a far-fetched one. Yet Sudermann is a master of theatrical machinery. With a pressure of his little finger he can set the wheels whirring and make their noise attractive if not precisely significant. This is the case with his latest offering, Der gute Ruf (Good Reputation), which captured Berlin at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus on the Friedrichstrasse. The play, in four acts, is a variation on its author's early theme, Honour. It is also a variant of his Joy of Life (Es lebe das Leben), translated by Edith Wharton, but with the difference that the motive of Honour was more malleable for the purpose of dramatic treatment, and also truer to life, while in Reputation (as I suppose it will be called when translated) the thesis is too incredible for belief; hence the magician, wily as he is, scrambles about aimlessly in the last two acts, sparring for wind, and seemingly anxious to escape from a blind alley of situations. That he does it so well is a tribute to his technical prowess.
He knows how to write a play. This play would succeed in foreign countries where the Hauptmann and Schnitzler plays would fall down. The reason is because of the strong theatrical quality of the piece, and the grateful rôle for the heroine, a rôle that might have been written in Paris; indeed, the entire work, despite its local flavour, recalls the modern Parisian theatre of Bernstein & Co., because of its cynical satire, its mysterious intrigue, its doors and bells, its numerous exits and entrances.
A woman, rather a superwoman, the Baroness von Tanna, sacrifices her name—not of the best because she flirts—to save the good, nay, spotless reputation of her dearest friend, a millionaire's wife—who, in a "mad moment" (Aha!) becomes the beloved of a certain fascinating Max, a young and handsome ne'er-do-well. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the baroness, a beautiful woman, and not, like her friend, the mother of children, is entangled in the same net; she, too, adores Max the heart crusher, though she will not cross the Rubicon for his silly sake. The usual "triangle" becomes star-shaped, for a new feminine presence appears, a girl who is matched to marry the fatal Max. That makes five live wires; two husbands, two wives, a naïve virgin, with Max as inaccessible as a star. But after a capital exposition, Sudermann gets us in a terrible state of mind by making the lady with the good reputation go off in a hysterical crisis, and almost confess to her stiff, severe husband—who is a maniac on the subject of his house being above suspicion. The charming, reckless baroness intervenes at the crucial point, becomes a lightning-rod that draws the electric current, and pretends to be the real culprit. Her husband, a sinister baron and ex-lieutenant in the Hussars, is present. A duel with Max is the result. In the last act, after she has been subjected to all kinds of ignominy, Baroness Dorrit von Tanna, without confessing, is socially rehabilitated. Skim-milk in this instance has passed for cream, the prudish millionaire's wife, her honour saved for the world at large, is now revealed as a hypocrite to her astounded and snobbish husband. The curtain falls on a maze of improbabilities, with the baroness in the centre.
For people who don't take their theatre seriously, i. e., neither as a fencing ground for propagandists nor for puling poets, this new Sudermann piece will please. It has triumphed in Berlin and Munich. Its people are portraits taken from fashionable West End Berlin, while the dialogue, witty, incisive, and also characteristic, is one of the consolations of a play that does not for a moment produce any illusion. There are plenty of striking episodes, but logic is lacking, not only the logic of life, but the logic of the theatre. No living playwright knows better how to arouse suspense than Sudermann, and he can't make us believe in his false theme, consequently his motivation in the last two acts is false and disappointing. But there is the old Sudermann pyrotechnical virtuosity, the fireworks dazzle with their brilliancy, and you think of Paris, and also that some drama may be divorced from life and literature and yet be interesting. Insincere as is the dénouement, the note of insincerity was absent in the acting of the cast. The honours were easily borne away by a pretty Viennese actress from the Volks Theatre there, Elsa Galafrés by name, whose methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer. His puppets are all agreeable, and, in one instance, vital: the father of the baroness, a financier, who could be easily turned into a "heavy" conventional father, but, as played by Hermann Nissen, is a positively original characterisation. Max the butterfly (Ernst Dumcke) was wholly admirable. I shall be very much surprised if Der gute Ruf does not soon appear on the stage of other lands. Its picture of manners, its mundane environment, its epigrams and dramatic bravoura will make it welcome everywhere. Sudermann is still Klingsor, the evoker of artificial figures, not the poet who creates living men and women.