Omphale

Peter Hacks set his 1971 play Omphale in a remote, mythic time, but the piece examined gender roles in ways that must have hit very close to home for the play's original audience. Hacks used the play to (among other things) critique the tradition-defying social experiments of the communist German Democratic Republic. However, even a staunchly socialist writer like Peter Hacks had to be careful.

After having his first successes in West Germany, Hacks voluntarily moved east in 1955. If he expected to be welcomed by the communist government with open arms, he must have been sorely disappointed. His mildly critical play Worries and Power premiered in 1960, but only after he was forced to make numerous revisions. Even with those changes, the communist party pressured the Deutsches Theater to shutter a revival of the play two years later.

For Omphale, Hacks reached back to the Herakles myth to explore issues in his own society. Adaptations of classics were frequent in the GDR, in part because they allowed East Germany to make the case that its writers were the true heirs to the German literary tradition. Classical adaptations also allowed writers to dodge the authorities. Hacks could write about recent developments in the GDR while pretending to write about someone else's society. In this case, he explored shifting gender roles.

Hacks was not the only East German playwright to respond to the Women's Movement, which swept across both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1970s. Volker Braun probed men's anxieties over feminism in such works as his 1976 play Tinka. With Europe at peace and many traditional ideologies no longer holding sway, women were taking on men's roles. Similarly, men were exploring new identities other than the stereotypical masculine breadwinner. It is within this context that Hacks wrote Omphale.

In mythology, Zeus sent Herakles for a period of time to be slave to the Lydian Queen Omphale in punishment for an unjust murder, and while he was with her she amused herself by having the hero dress in women's clothing and do weaving and spinning. Though in the original myth Herakles feels degraded by this treatment, Hacks shows the Greek hero reveling in his ability to play the role of a woman.

Since two cross-dressers are always funnier than one, Hack follows the lead of numerous artists by having Omphale dress as Heracles and carry his famous club. This motif goes back to classical times, as can be seen in this Roman mosaic:

By choosing to remain enslaved to Omphale out of love for her, Hacks's Herakles does not fit the stereotype of the powerful man. This is not true slavery, however, as the hero claims he is bound to her only by his own choice. Herakles is so powerful he can renounce power and so manly he can renounce manhood.

Once Herakles completes his conversion to the feminine, the other characters are filled with disgust for him. The exact reason for his transformation is unclear. Herakles gives multiple justifications for his cross-dressing, each of them designed to play up his masculinity. He first explains that since he is doing the queen's duties he must borrow her sex as well as her rank. Next he says he imitates women because of his love for them. Finally, he says that to know a man's pleasure, he must feel a woman's.

All of these excuses allow Herakles to engage in role reversal without giving up any of his manliness. The problem is that no one else in the play is buying it. In their eyes, Herakles ends up less than a man, a typical fear of men resistant to feminism.

Hacks then reveals another great fear of anti-feminists--the masculinized woman. Omphale enters holding Herakles's club and dressed in his lion skin, and the scene that follows is a travesty of a lovers' quarrel, with Omphale taking on the role of a rational man while Herakles exhibits the over-emotional whims of a stereotypically irrational woman. Worst of all, Herakles does not even want to be touched by his lover. The role reversal has sapped the sexuality out of their relationship.

Fortunately, this condition does not last long. As the lovers attempt a tearful reconciliation, they receive news of the monster Lityerses. The prospect of battle seems to return Herakles to his natural manly state, and he goes off to face the monster. Her love threatened, Omphale likewise returns to being feminine. Though she goes in pursuit of Herakles, she does so for womanly motives.

If the play ended here, it could be regarded as a simple rejection of feminist principles. Instead, Hacks goes on to play with the gender identity of his two main characters in a way that is still comic but no longer derogatory. Herakles bravely rushes in like a man to fight Lityerses, but the hero is still dressed as Omphale. Just as brave is Omphale, who rushes in with womanly concern to protect her beloved, all the while still dressed like him. Both characters are enacting gender stereotypes, but they are now enacting positive stereotypes.

Lityerses has never met the pair, and besides that he seems to be a particularly unobservant monster, so he mistakes each one for the other. To a fool like him, it is simply a club that makes the man, and a skirt that makes the woman.

As Herakles proves his manhood by slaying Lityerses, Omphale goes into childbirth. The observers see these separate but equally important acts--bringing forth life and slaying the enemies of humanity--as both being the highest possible bliss. Having learned their lessons, Omphale takes off the lion skin, and Heracles removes his mask of Omphale. Now a mother, Omphale must accept her womanhood. In order to restore sacred and immutable gender roles, Herakles need only take up his club as a sign of man's eternal duty to preserve order through brute strength. However, that is not what he does.

In the final scene, Herakles plants his club into the earth, where it changes into an olive tree. He announces it is a symbol of humanity, which must grow forth from a savage past to a life of peace and fruitfulness reminiscent of a simpler time. In Brechtian fashion, Hacks demonstrates that the world is not eternally fixed, but can and must be changed. Whether those changes extend to gender roles is an open question, but Hacks does not rule out that possibility.

The ending is fundamentally utopian, looking forward to the progress that socialism promises. It remains ambivalent about the progressive goal of women's liberation, but solidly confirms a belief in progress. Like with Hacks's other plays, there is more to Omphale than immediately meets the eye.

Hercules and the Augean Stables

Friedrich Durrenmatt's play Hercules and the Augean Stables started out as a radio play in 1954, was later staged by several amateur groups, and eventually received its official premiere in Zurich in March of 1963. The play nominally takes place in The Heroic Age of Ancient Greece. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Durrenmatt is writing about contemporary Switzerland, not some distant Mediterranean past. The result: pretty darn hysterical.

From the beginning, Durrenmatt makes it clear that the mythical land of Elis is a stand-in for the dramatist's native Switzerland. In the prologue, Hercules's private secretary Polybius announces that the play deals with "man's zeal for cleanliness." This poking fun at Swiss stereotypes continues in the next scene, where Hercules chases the Erymanthian Boar through freezing mountains, which--much like the Alps--are prone to avalanches. In the third scene, Augeas describes the climate of Elis as "temperate--like our morals." This vision of a middle-of-the-road people continues when he describes the country's religion as "moderate Dionysian tempered with orthodox Apollonarian." Even Switzerland's history of relative tolerance for both Protestants and Catholics is fodder for laughs.

Most importantly, however, Augeas is not a king, as he is in the original myth, but merely president of a small republic. This honor falls to him not due to any great ability, but simply because he is the wealthiest of a number of peasant farmers. The original audience probably recognized Augeas as a version of Rudolf Minger, the successful farmer who rose to become President of the Swiss Confederation in the 1930s. Even if audiences today miss this point, however, they will undoubtedly catch that Augeas is precisely the type of moderate politician produced by small democracies like Switzerland. After his lengthy introduction, Augeas uses a bell to call parliament to order and suggests his plan: Hire Hercules to clean the dung-filled stables so the Eleans can have time to tend cattle and to produce cheese and butter. Durrenmatt does everything to associate Elis with Switzerland short of stating that Elean cheese has small round holes.

In spite of his humiliation at the idea of a hero being reduced to a glorified janitor, Hercules accepts the job of cleaning the stables simply in order to clear his debts. (Elis, Durrenmatt later informs us, is known for its sound currency, yet another resemblance to a certain other country, and there are frequent allusions in the play to a flourishing banking industry.) Unfortunately, the problems of the modern world are not suited to the brute heroics of an earlier age. Before Hercules can damn up the rivers and wash out the Augean stables, he must get a permit from the Water Board, and before he can do that, he must register with the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Works, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Dung. The battle with bureaucracy turns out to be a more Herculean task than any of the hero's famous twelve labors.

The 1960s saw the awakening of an environmental consciousness in Western society. Hercules and the Augean Stables premiered only a year after the publication of Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book Silent Spring in the United States. A growing concern for the environment is apparent in Durrenmatt's play as well. In the world of the piece, humanity is choking on its own filth. Pollution, in the form of bovine waste, is threatening society with complete collapse, but to wash it all away could "pollute the entire Ionic Sea."

Reflecting the environmental movement of the early 1960s, Durrenmatt echoes calls for a greater respect for nature. In Scene 10, Hercules's mistress Deianira rhapsodizes on the earth, which produces all that man requires. While Augeas's son Phyleus is determined to dominate nature, Deianira's vision is of a harmonious world in which humanity loves the earth, and the earth requites that love with its fruitfulness. No one listens to Deianira, however. The dung becomes an unqualified environmental disaster, submerging the landscape, burying trees, and suffocating a once pristine brook.

Environmental concerns in drama go back at least as far as Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Like Ibsen, Durrenmatt is less concerned with physical pollution than he is with the moral pollution that is tainting society. Just as Ibsen takes aim at democracy in An Enemy of the People, Durrenmatt uses Hercules and the Augean Stables to attack the inability of democratic governments to deal with any serious crisis. As Augeas's servant Cambyses remarks, "the dung is deepest in the minds of the Eleans. And you can't purify them with river water." Hercules fails to clean out the Augean stables not because he is unable to do so, but because the government will not allow him to do so. As in the public meeting in Act IV of An Enemy of the People where the crowd turns on Dr. Stockmann, the citizens of Elis turn against Hercules in the parliament scene of Durrenmatt's play, placing more and more obstructions in the way of his job.

The bitterest satire comes at the end of the play. After Hercules abandons Elis, Augeas shows his son Phyleus another plan for dealing with the catastrophe. In a private garden, Augeas has been composting small amounts of dung, slowly converting it to soil. Democracy has failed, but like Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann, Augeas is doing what little he can to improve his country. Multiple critics have compared the ending of the play with Voltaire's final chapter of Candide. However, the ending even more closely follows the final scene in An Enemy of the People. Augeas rejects politics as doomed to failure and exhorts his son to prepare the way for enlightenment, just as Stockmann turns his back on the majority to train his sons and a few other young people for the future.

Durrenmatt goes one step further than Ibsen. Stockmann can envision an improved democracy somewhere in the distant future where his descendants can continue the fight for truth. Augeas has no such comfort.  His teenage son ignores his advice and goes off to fight Hercules, an action certain to be fruitless and fatal. Not only does democracy not work now; there is no prospect for it to ever work in the future if the youth of Elis refuses even to try.

The play originally ended with Augeas's hopeful speech, but Durrenmatt decided to add the twist ending of the son's rejection after the opening night performance. In the new ending, the playwright offers a sliver of hope only to pull it away at the last moment, a technique he used the previous year in the bleak conclusion of The Physicists. The optimism of Augeas masks the play's pessimistic nature. The audience can sympathize with the patient farmer-president even as the play proves him to be wrong. While Hercules and the Augean Stables seems like good-natured fun, its critique of democracy actually cuts quite deep.

Tomorrow, I'll be posting my thoughts on another play dealing with the Herakles myth, Omphale by Peter Hacks.

In Praise of Hacks

Other than Bertolt Brecht, how many East German playwrights can you name? Okay, yes, there's Heiner Muller, but who else?

I've been reading up on Peter Hacks, a German playwright who emigrated east from West Germany in 1955. In the U.S. today, Hacks is probably best known for his children’s fiction, but he also wrote a number of fine plays, including Omphale, a hilarious send-up of the Herakles myth.

Having positioned himself as an orthodox Marxist (even supporting the erection of the Berlin Wall), Hacks should have had plenty of support from the East German state. However, censorship issues dogged him throughout his career. Authorities nixed his 1959 play Worries and Power claiming it did not represent the "authentic" proletariat. This was in spite of the fact Hacks had researched and written the play in close consultation with coal miners. Eventually, the piece was produced, but the official press continued to hound the play, claiming that workers had walked out of the production in droves. This, of course, was a complete lie, as the play had been a hit with miners.

 

After such trouble with Worries and Power, Hacks turned to adaptations of classic works. In his 1970 play Omphale, he retold the story of how Herakles was made into a servant of Omphale, the Queen of Lydia. Herakles must slay the monster Lityerses, whose superpower is bad breath so powerful it even kills plants. However, once he falls in love with the queen, Herakles turns effeminate, dressing in women’s clothing, wearing cosmetics, and anointing himself with perfume. Omphale takes to wearing the lion skin of Herakles and carrying his club. This all causes much confusion for Lityerses, who isn’t sure which of these two he is supposed to fight.

 

Hacks again turned to adaptation with Market Day at Plundersweilern, which completed an unfinished play by Goethe. The original play went through several versions, in some of which Goethe himself appeared onstage in performances. Hacks reworked the piece to give the play-within-a-play a fitting resolution, but he largely sidestepped political issues. Instead, he strove to write a play that was simply sheer fun. Its premiere in 1975 seems to have been relatively free of controversy.

 

In 1980, Hacks undertook an adaptation of another Goethe play, Pandora. In the hands of Hacks, however, it became an environmentalist parable rather than a philosophical musing. Eventually writers like Muller, who produced edgy avant-garde dramas that challenged theatrical forms, eclipsed more traditional writers like Hacks, but his plays might just deserve a second look.