The Prince of Homburg

The Donmar’s got a track record of putting on tricky and neglected European classics: Life is a Dream, Caligula, Creditors, Henry IV among others. Now they’ve turned to Kleist and his 1810 play The Prince of Homburg.

In the play, a high-ranking officer, the eponymous Prince, has disobeyed an order in battle, leading a charge before receiving instruction to do so, despite being told to wait for the order. Even though the result was a famous victory, he has broken the rules and comes before a Court Martial and is sentenced to death. He’s expecting a pardon but it becomes clear that the Elector plans to carry out the sentence, perhaps to make the Elector’s niece, Natalia, in love with the Prince, available to marry off as part of a peace settlement. The officers are outraged and petition the Elector, as does Natalie. The Elector is moved only to write to the Prince promising that if he can prove the sentence to be unjust he will be pardoned. This stirs the Prince who seems to accept the justice of his execution.

In Kleist’s original, the Prince is led to the execution blindfolded whereupon he is told that he has been pardoned and faints. In Kelly’s version, the sentence is carried out. This has caused all sorts of fuss, with critics as diverse as Michael Billington, Paul Taylor and Ian Shuttleworth sharply criticising Kelly and the production for changing the ending.

First things first: Kelly’s version is very good indeed. It’s free-speaking, rich but lean. He’s found some excellent equivalents for the poetic language of the play but keeps it sharp and minimal so that it doesn’t get - as some Romantic plays can get - puffed up with cod-Shakespeareana. It’s also very funny in places. I particular, Kelly has mined a profitable seam of absurdism in the play; from the play’s beginning in the midst of a dream to the curious oneiric turns of the plot, the positions taken to nightmarish extremes, the play is cruelly funny about the nightmares of a military state, the demands of law and rule, and the problematic place of the individual.

The ending seems to me entirely of a piece with that. Kleist’s original is very cruel. Like the ‘happy endings’ of Iphigenia at Aulis and Patient Griselda in The Clerk’s Tale, the original ending is twisted and hideous. The whole thing revealed as a strange and mysterious trick played on the Prince. But we know this play after the horrors of the Third Reich and it seems just as nightmarish, just as horrifying, but in a sense more logical - in an inexorable and foul way - that the Prince die at the hands of the firing squad.

It’s not at all clear to me why the critics were at the throats of this production. Kelly’s been very faithful to the original. He’s just changed the ending, but in doing so has oddly not changed very much because we don’t take the Prince’s rescue seriously. It seems like a sick joke. Instead he’s pursued the play’s logic and that also seems like a sick joke. It’s nothing like having Romeo and Juliet living happily ever after because the roots of the ending are not deep in the play; the ending is a false ending. We’re probably coming out of a period of false endings, where theatre is continually ironic and narrative to be joked about. Dennis Kelly - like Simon Stephens and Duncan Macmillan - is, if anything, drawn to moments of sudden, gauche, naive articulacy and communication, set within worlds of cruelty and moral collapse. They are typical in some ways of a new cultural mode and the joke ending of Homburg would just have seemed outdated.

Do I think you can change anything? No. I suppose I thought that Katie Mitchell’s A Dream Play crossed a line; not that I didn’t enjoy the production - I did - but I’d have enjoyed it more if I had gone to see a devised show inspired by A Dream Play. I went wanting to see A Dream Play, which I’ve never seen staged, and I was disappointed because I really didn’t. The Restoration rewrites of Shakespeare seem stupid to us now because they clumsily reveal the aesthetic and moral presumptions of the age. Well, maybe this version also rests on clumsy contemporary presumptions, but what show doesn’t? It’s our age and they are our presumptions, and it seems absurd not to let the play be shaped by that climate - especially since the change seems to me entirely within the spirit of the play.

And anyway, the script’s still there. You can read it any time. And it’s not as if the play is completely unknown or unperformed. I saw Neil Bartlett’s version eight years ago and very good it was too (though much more austere and less in tune with the absurdist universe that this is). This is an excellent piece of reclamation that finds in The Prince of Homburg a play of genuine contemporary feeling.