The Stone
Royal Court, London
BRITISH playwriting must be in the doldrums. Everywhere you look, it is American plays that are getting audiences excited – from West End revivals of classics such as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (at the Duke of Yorks) theatre to off-West End arrivals such as the multi-award-garnering Spring Awakening (at the Lyric, Hammersmith). Even the Royal Court, once a powerhouse of British new writing, is increasingly promoting American and European work.
Its latest main stage production, The Stone by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg, is a good example and shows the superiority of much European drama to most of our native plays. In this outing, Mayenburg takes a house in Dresden and uses it as a symbol of Germany’s place in European history. As enormous political and social changes take place, the house changes hands repeatedly.
The opening shows a family returning in 1993 to the house they once bought from a Jewish couple in 1935. They are very civilised and seem to be the classic “Good Germans” of legend. But soon darker shades gather in the corners. The same family abandoned the house in 1953, because they found the East German regime increasingly oppressive and moved to the West.
Having recovered their house after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they now have to face an unexpected visitor: the daughter of the family of East Germans who once occupied it. As they struggle to explain their possessive attitude to what they once considered their home, it slowly emerges that the various stories the family has told to justify their occupation of a Jewish home during the Nazi era are untrue.
It’s enthralling to watch how family myths build up through tiny accretions of lies and how these lies solidify into monstrous myths, passed down from parents to children. In fact, the play’s title alerts us to this symbolism. In the 1950s, the young Heidrun buries a stone which, according to family legend, was once thrown at her father. He was mistaken for a Jewish sympathiser.
Forty years on, Heidrun’s daughter believes completely in her grandfather’s hero status. Even the fact that he is said to have been accidentally shot by a passing Russian parade in 1945 (how improbable is that?) does nothing to dent his image. When the truth comes out, however, it is both more ordinary and more unpleasant.
Switching between something like four or five time periods (it’s easy to lose count), The Stone is a complex play that is very short (barely an hour), but packed with incidents which slowly unravel the family myths and present us with the truth: the vicious expropriation by ordinary Germans of the Jewish people’s misfortunes under the Nazis. At the play’s emotional core is the dialogue between the Jewish wife and the German wife while their husbands haggle over the price for the house in 1935.
In this way, the ideologies of Nazism and state socialism are shown to be rooted in the emotional needs – and greed – of ordinary people. By linking everyday desires – for a comfortable home, for instance – to the opportunities of social upheaval, Mayenburg shows how evil regimes drop roots into people, reward them and thus get their support.
The sophistication of the play’s structure is enchanting and the various dialogues move fast across the tumultuous years of 20th-century central European history. In Ramin Gray’s impeccable production, with a superb cast led by Helen Schlesinger as Heidrun and Linda Bassett as her mother, The Stone is a clear argument for the dazzling superiority of the best European drama. British writers should put their study caps on.
Aleks Sierz
