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The titular Prince cuts a Romantic figure: impetuous and ardent, he dreams of winning glory, but although the courageous cavalry charge he leads against the enemy turns possible defeat into a crushing victory, he has disobeyed the Elector’s battle order not to advance until commanded. In prison after receiving the death sentence from a court martial, he still revels in his own heroism and cannot at first believe that the father-figure Elector will carry it through.
Not only do the Elector’s wife and niece (with whom the Prince is in love) plead on his behalf, but also his fellow army officers sign a petition for his pardon. However, the Elector seems determined to stamp out any sign of insubordination as he asserts the importance of national interest over personal concerns.
Having left the Prussian army himself after tiring of its relentless discipline but thereafter pursuing a rather rootless search for a new identity, Kleist portrays with great psychological insight a man trying to be true to himself within the confines of political order. The Prince takes subjectivity to its extreme as he lives in a dream-world which seems more real to him than any external circumstances until death assumes a tangible urgency.
This new prose version by Dennis Kelly of Kleist’s verse drama gives a lucid account of its story and themes but lacks some of the original’s metaphysical poetry, while the changed ending undermines the play’s subtle ambivalence.
Jonathan Munby (who directed Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, with its similar juxtaposition of illusion versus reality, at the Donmar last year) here foregrounds the political over the philosophical aspects by later presenting the Elector as a proto-Fascist dictator speaking of the ‘Fatherland’ and declaiming ‘Heils’.
Designer Angela Davies’s towering grey palace walls evoke an overbearing brutalism, while Neil Austin’s imaginative lighting sometimes suggests a visionary reality and Dominic Haslam’s martial music contributes to the sense of military might.
Charlie Cox cuts a dash as the suitably wide-eyed and enrapt Prince, only half in this world, but shows him changing from lofty self-glorification to begging for his life and finally touching bravery. As the Elector, Ian McDiarmid shifts not altogether convincingly from comic paternalistic exasperation to sinister scheming despot.
Sonya Cassidy is his impassioned niece Natalia and Siobhan Redmond plays the Electress with gracious restraint. Harry Hadden-Paton is the Prince’s amiable but concerned friend Count Hohenzollern, Julian Wadham an amusingly do-it-by-the book Marshall Dörfling and David Burke the bluff veteran Colonel Kottwitz, who comforts the Prince at the end by answering his question with “A dream, what else?”
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