Thoughts on Sternheim

This summer, I had the pleasure of seeing two Sternheim plays in one with David Mouchtar-Samorai's mash-up of Die Hose and Burger Schippel at the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen. Both plays satirize the pretensions of the would-be bourgeois, so they very much fit together.

Carl Sternheim had a habit of recycling his characters. In fact, Die Hose began a cycle of plays by Sternheim on what he called "The Heroic Life of the Bourgeois." He followed up Die Hose with his 1914 play Der Snob. This play continues the story of Theobald and Louise Maske, as well as letting the audience in on the life of their son, whose birth is alluded to in the previous play.

The first act of Der Snob opens with the ironically named son, Christian Snob, breaking off a relationship with Sybil, a lover who helped him rise in society but whom he has now outgrown. He offers Sybil cash to pay for her services, with interest, so he can be completely independent and owe nothing to anything. Next, he tries to make the same arrangement with his parents, paying them for everything they spent raising him. It's as if he wants to be a truly self-made man.

Christian aims to marry Marianne, the daughter of a count. In the second act, he makes progress toward this goal and becomes engaged to Marianne, in spite of the count's reservations. The presence of his father, however, becomes a source of continual worry. Christian seems to vacillate between being embarrassed by his father and wanting to use Theobald to rub the count's nose in the fact that his daughter is marrying such an upstart.

In the third act, the story of Louise's courters in Die Hose comes back, and Christian begins to wonder whether or not he might be the bastard son of a Viscount. This becomes a source of both shame and titillation. In the final scene, Marianne discovers the secret on her wedding night. She enthusiastically greets a portrait of Louise as "sweet mother adultress" and Christian as her "dear husband and lord."

With such complicated psychosexual messes in his plays, it's as if Sternheim is the spiritual son of Frank Wedekind. In fact, Sternheim married Pamela Wedekind in 1930, becoming the great playwright's son-in-law. Wedekind was dead by that time, but still, you can't make this stuff up!

Read my next post for my thoughts of Wedekind.

Sternheim Mash-up

I have to admit, it was with more than a little trepidation that I approached David Mouchtar-Samorai's adaptation that brings together Carl Sternheim's comedies Die Hose and Burger Schippel. (In the U.S., Die Hose is better known by the title of Steve Martin's adaptation, The Underpants.)

The adaptation alternates between scenes from the two plays, with each actor taking on parallel roles. So for instance, the guy playing Theobald Maske plays Paul Schippel, and the woman playing Maske's put-upon wife also plays Thekla Hicketier in the scenes from Burger Schippel.

Towards the end of the play, the characters start to blend together. At the end, when Schippel is crowned with laurels and welcomed into respectable society, he is addressed as Herr Maske. The conceit seemed unnecessary to me, but the actors definitely pulled it off.

Adding to the production was a superb set that was filled with photographs, some in negative, of various respectable members of society from throughout history. This served as a constant reminder of the world into which Maske and Schippel wanted to enter. At the rear of the stage was a circular door through which actors could make exits and entrances.

This was a very earnest production, showing the true human emotions behind Sternheim's characters. That sometimes took away a few laughs, but it made up for it in emotional intensity.