Found in Translation: One Bloody, Funny, German 'Macbeth'

German dramatist Heiner Müller, hailed by some as successor to Bertold Brecht, wrote a famously controversial adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Famous, at least, in Germany, where people could understand what the players were saying on stage.

It's taken 29 years for the English-speaking world premiere of Macbeth: after Shakespeare to be produced, and that is happening in Vancouver this week.

The story of how that came to be includes the Big Brother politics of Soviet-era East Germany, the translation skills of a brilliant, 85-year-old cigar lover, and a props list that includes 11 litres of blood, a flaccid penis (used by transsexuals to fluff their pants), and from Craigslist, a used washing machine to wash the clothes after each performance.

The play, directed by B.C.'s own Quinn Harris, is wrought deep in the Brechtian and Müller traditions. Both playwrights are known for deconstructing flowery prose and ruling class themes found in other works. Subtexts of class struggle and social commentary run rampant. Blood and gore play a prominent role, and even a dismembered sexual organ gets thrown across the stage.

"It's fabulous, really, the way it looks," says Carl Weber, the Stanford professor emeritus who translated Macbeth: nach Shakespeare into English. Weber was in Vancouver as the production at Performance Works by Theatre Conspiracy took shape, and I met him over a glass of red wine on Granville Island. "It's such a shame," he said, "that it will only show nine times."

Banned and censored

Weber was introduced to theatre while imprisoned in a British prisoner of war camp in Belgium during the Second World War (where he met and worked with the renowned German actor Klaus Kinski), and later became both the right-hand man of playwright Bertolt Brecht, member of the Berliner Ensemble as well as the leading translator for Brecht's successor, Heiner Müller.

Weber has done countless translations of Müller's scripts, poetry and prose. He says the bloody entrails and grim subtexts of the play has been a long tradition of Müller's, and that the real beauty of his adaptations lies in scathing social commentary.

Müller spent years battling with the East German state because of his controversial plays. He was banned from the Writers' Association and had many plays censored until he acquired world-wide fame, in part due to Weber's translations.

The Macbeth translation came about with a phone call to Weber at his office at Stanford. The young stage director Quinn Harris and colleague James Foy sought an English version of Müller's Macbeth, and wanted to know if Weber knew where they could get their hands on one. Weber didn't, and when asked if he'd take it on, he agreed.

Following the Bard's lead

"It's a really fascinating play, quite different from Shakespeare," says Weber.

"The narrative is basically the same, but there are nine new scenes and several scenes have been changed with inserted text."

Although Weber says Müller gave Macbeth a massive gutting, it wasn't done on the scale as his other major works like Hamletmachine or his version of Titus Andronicus.

"It's different than the others, because its all blank verse and retains quite a number of Shakespeare's lines. One-third of the text is still Shakespeare."

Müller was a master of borrowing from other published works -- or stealing as some first thought of the technique he adopted from Brecht -- and tweaking them to create original pieces (called kopien in German).

This technique was not lost on the Bard, though, as Weber points out.

"That's what Shakespeare did all his life," says Weber. "There was a Hamlet before his Hamlet -- he took stuff from wherever he found it.

"Probably Shakespeare would've totally agreed that the play should be made contemporary now."

Shakespeare and Tarantino

Does more Shakespeare mean less class struggle, violence and gore that so defined Müller?

The simple answer: no.

Rest assured Macbeth: nach Shakespeare is a departure from the Bard's handiwork and not meant for the prim and proper.

Costume manager Shawna Picken "totally" recommends it for fans of the zombie genre and of Tarantino flicks to come.

"There's a lot of wounds, there's severed limbs, slit throats," says Picken. "It will be bloody -- it's like they took all the good parts out of Macbeth and left all the nasty."

And that's "good" as in the "goodness within people" kind of good.

The play, as with all of Müller's works, is not just a senseless blood bath. Müller was Marxist and someone who experienced the horrors of the Second World War. He constantly struggled against Big Brother in order to get his plays to the stage -- part of why he wrapped them up in Shakespeare.

Working class focus

"One of the themes Müller was exploring was the difference between class," says Picken.

Macbeth is, after all, a soldier who returns home victorious upon quelling a peasant uprising. Then, drunk on the possibility of more power, assassinates his king, gains the crown and leads himself and others into ruin.

Weber points out that Shakespeare overshadows the peasant revolt with Macbeth's ascension to the Scottish throne. But where it was only mentioned briefly in the first scene of the original, it becomes the most prominent issue in Müller's.

This focus on resistance against entrenched power is something Harris and company wanted to seize on, considering the current political climate in both the United States and Canada, as well as the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, says producer of Macbeth: nach Shakespeare, Tim Carlson.

"The piece resonates very well, I think," says Carlson. "It has international perspective, with matters of state terror, leadership, and class conflict."

"It's interesting that we started rehearsal on the day of the federal election with Osama bin Laden's picture on the front pages. That kind of context adds a certain timeliness to the play."

Weber slowly shuffled his way into the theatre on opening night Saturday. He stood, cane in hand, to receive applause from the audience in appreciation of his work. He then sat down. The lights dimmed. And Weber listened to the small Canadian cast make his English script come alive for the first time on stage before him.

When asked how it feels, at his age, to be still involved in the production of Müller's work -- and the colourful shopping lists of props that goes with it -- he takes a sip of his red wine, and says, "It feels pretty good."

Macbeth: nach Shakespeare runs until Sunday, May 29. Tickets prices range from $15 to $25. Go to Theatre Conspiracy's website for details.