Review Round-up: Kleist’s Prince Bows at Donmar

| London's West End |

28 July 2010

Hot on the heels of the National’s Danton’s Death
comes The Prince of Homburg at the Donmar Warehouse, another historical epic
charting a European revolutionary’s fall from grace.

The play, written by Heinrich von Kleist in 1809, takes place in 17th century Prussia
rather than 18th century France and follows the idealistic Prince of
Homburg as he is sentenced to death for disobeying military orders, despite
returning victorious from the battlefields of Fehrbellin.

Von Kleist’s original verse is given a modern lick of prose
paint by writer Dennis Kelly and director Jonathan Munby. The title role is
tackled by Charlie Cox, whose Prince is counterpointed by Ian McDiarmid’s villainous Elector of Brandenburg. The
production opened at the Donmar Warehouse on 22 July 2010 and will run until 4
September.

Did this Prince divide or conquer
the critics?

Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (three stars) – “Jonathan Munby’s revival…
certainly looks like a Donmar production: torches, flagstones, big dark wall,
great lighting (by Neil Austin), doomy music… Ian McDiarmid plays the
Elector of Brandenburg as a viperish intellectual sadist… This slightly
unbalances the central guessing game of who’s abiding by the rules of honour on
the subject of the prince’s salvation or execution. And there seems to be an
odd re-writing of the last act … Charlie Cox is a splendid, straightforward
Romantic prince… even though his articulation tends to be slovenly. And there’s
a great array of Prussian military types led by David Burke’s stern
commanding officer, William Hoyland’s humanely dedicated infantry colonel,
bloodied but unbowed, and Julian Wadham’s slyly inflected, very funny, field
marshall. The prince has his Horatio, too, in the devoted figure of Harry
Hadden-Paton’s royal count, and there are delicate, pointed contributions from
Siobhan Redmond as the Electress and Sonya Cassidy as Natalia… But
without any real sense of Kleist’s poetry, and a lot of idiomatic low-grade
speech, you don’t feel close to the heart of this strange, slippery European
milestone.”

Michael Billington in the Guardian (three stars) – “Heinrich von Kleist‘s great German play… has been
given a new ending by Dennis Kelly which perverts the play’s meaning and
undermines an otherwise fascinating evening… To the Nazis, (the play) was
clearly a vindication of obedience to a strict military code; and both Kelly’s
version, with its references to the “Fatherland”, and Jonathan Munby‘s
production, with its orgy of Prussian heel-clicking, treat the play as if it
were guilty by association with national socialism. But Kleist’s play is
infinitely more subtle and morally ambiguous than that… The tantalising thing
is that when Munby’s production sticks close to the original, it is very good. Angela
Davies‘s design, Neil Austin‘s lighting and Dominic Haslam‘s music lend
the opening sequence a phantasmagoric quality. Charlie Cox also catches
perfectly the uncertainty of the prince himself torn between cowardice and
heroism… But the dilemma of this production is expressed by Ian McDiarmid‘s
oddly confusing performance as the Elector. On one level, McDiarmid gives us a
neat display of manipulative irony and handles the potential military
insurrection with an amused guile. But gradually McDiarmid turns into a barking
autocrat shrieking ‘I want rules and order.’ And, while it would be unfair to
reveal the new ending, I can only say that it is not what Kleist wrote or
intended.”

Libby Purves in The Times
(three stars) – “The Prince of Homburg is a romantic soldier, prone to mooning
over Princess Natalia and fabulous lines like ‘Night out here is like a Persian
bride, it wraps its hair around you like perfume…” Beautiful Charlie Cox
resolves the psychological atavism of this transition by playing it like a
high-spirited, good-hearted sixth former: it works. Natalia is an honest
performance by Sonya Cassidy, and brother-officers click and bark with
convincing brittleness and occasional Germanic soupiness… But the real star is Ian
McDiarmid as the Elector: a bleak, arid slave to principle; a tick-box tyrant…
Curiously, the bleaker and odder and more Prussian the outlook gets in Act II,
the more absurdities draw huffs of hilarity from a tense audience… Expect no happy ending. But any
Nazi seeking to recruit this play to the cause wouldn’t end it quite as Kleist,
Kelly and Munby do. The last ‘Heils!’ ring as hollow as the thunk of any
guillotine.”

Quentin
Letts in the Daily
Mail –

“Here is a play about the clash
between military heroism and martial law. Should it go for laughs? Last night’s
audience of Donmar friends and supporters certainly thought so… Every time these
men clicked their heels and slammed their chests in salute, young women in the
stalls giggled. You’d have thought they were watching an episode of TV’s
Blackadder…The audience’s reaction was the result of Jonathan Munby‘s
relentlessly modern direction. He has his actors gurn and gawp and play things
for humour in places where far greater power could come from sticking to the
rigidity of the military codes of the 19th-century Prussia setting. Charlie
Cox‘s prince is convincingly headstrong but there is a disastrous scene when
he tells a friend that he has been sentenced to death… Mr McDiarmid, despite
his amazingly deep voice, is miscast. He hams and camps and rolls his eyes…There
should be more to admire in this show… In this director’s insufficiently serious
grasp, it underwhelms.”

Henry Hitchings
in the Evening
Standard (two stars) –

“Dennis Kelly’s rendition suggests the
modernity of Kleist’s writing, particularly in its scrutiny of anxieties and
embarrassments. However, the highly-strung wit of Kleist’s verse is lost in a
welter of rhetoric, and Kelly has unnecessarily amended Kleist’s ending. Charlie
Cox effectively evokes the prince’s adolescent brand of disquiet… Better when
passionate than when contemplative, he too often seems merely earnest. More
memorable, though not happily so, is Ian McDiarmid as the Elector, who veers
between a Blackadder-ish smoulder and the strangled rage of a cartoon fascist.
He has moments of wintry gravity, yet his performance is weirdly mannered. There
is some deft work from Harry Hadden-Paton and David Burke. But Jonathan
Munby’s production is either too static or bombastic, and it accentuates
without much subtlety the play’s relevance to Hitler’s Germany… True, there are
flickers of familiar Donmar dazzle, mainly in the stronger second half, and Angela
Davies’s design is ingenious. But The Prince of Homburg is
a misfire from this so often excellent theatre.”