Nathan the Wise
Evening Standard 20th September 2005, Fiona Mountford
It says a lot about our troubled sensibilities that, on witnessing a host of potentially
explosive showdowns between Jew and Christian, Muslim and Jew, we automatically fear
the worst. Especially as the setting is Jerusalem, 1192, at the time of the Third
Crusade. Then, as now, the Holy Land was no stranger to blood spilled due to religious
intolerance.
But such negativity discounts the fact that ‘Nathan the Wise’ (1779) is the work
of that great writer, humanist and all-round optimist of the German Enlightenment,
Gotthold Lessing. Thus his most famous play, inexplicably unproduced in London for
nearly 40 years, upliftingly preaches tolerance and multi-faith co-existence.
The three great monotheistic religions come into contact via the sultan Saladin,
a young Knight Templar and the eponymous Jew. An intricate web of connections is
woven, as the Templar rescues Nathan’s daughter from a fire and the bankrupt Saladin
asks the wealthy merchant for help.
When Edward Kemp’s confident new translation was first heard two years ago at Chichester
it graced a suitably accomplished production. Too often here, director Anthony Clark
lets the tone go worryingly flat. Some below-par performances and uneven line learning
don’t help.
But Michael Pennington steadies everything with his astute Nathan, sidestepping Saladin’s
importuning with 1001 Nights-style storytelling. Sam Troughton’s Templar is all proud,
impetuous, youthful conviction and Vincent Ebrahim as Saladin has a lovely way of
making the most unpromising-sounding statements end positively.
Patrick Connellan’s evocative design has palm trees overhang a backdrop of burnished
gold sliding panels and a typical mosaic design printed on the wooden floor. It’s
a tranquil aesthetic, suitable for this unusual fable of the still, small voice of
peace winning through in the Middle East.
Guardian, 20th September 2005, Michael Billington
This is a play whose time has come again. First, G E Lessing’s classic of German
Enlightenment drama was picked up by Chichester in 2003. Now we have the same brilliantly
lucid translation by Edward Kemp, but a slightly less dynamic production. But no
matter: this is a play eminently worth seeing.
Set in Jerusalem in 1192, it seems a straightforward plea for mutual toleration between
Jew, Muslim and Christian. The eponymous protagonist is a shrewd Jewish merchant
who finds himself caught between the worlds of Saladin and the Crusaders. In a key
scene he is forced by the sultan to arbitrate between the claims of the rival faiths.
He answers with a riddling fable, derived from Boccaccio, which suggests that no
one religion has a monopoly of wisdom. Instead, we should strive for “gentleness,
tolerance, charity and a deep humility before the love of God”.
The message could hardly be more timely. But Lessing’s action is at odds with his
theme. Nathan is wise and virtuous, but Christianity is represented by an intemperate
Knight Templar who is all young, hotheaded and full of antisemitic arrogance. As
Eric Bentley pointed out, the play is really addressed to Christians, telling them
to mend their ways. It moves beyond preachiness to show the need for reconciliation
and harmony, it cannot fail to move.
But Anthony Clark’s production, in aiming for period fidelity, ends up looking like
an exotic Aladdin; this is a world, in Patrick Connellan’s design, of pearly turbans,
curled slippers and flower-encrusted robes. The production is also a little too laid-back,
as if the battle for mutual understanding has been achieved before the action has
begun. That said, Michael Pennington endows Nathan with just the right mixture of
wiliness, wisdom and judicious stoicism. Sam Troughton’s Templar is the epitome of
impetuous, brazen folly. And, even if, Vincent Ebrahim’s Saladin is hardly the lion
demanded by the text, Shelley King lends his sister with a wonderful sinuous guile.
But what really matters is Lessing’s play: a seminal piece of world drama written
in 1779 and banned by the Nazis in 1933, its theme speaks urgently and forcefully
to us today.
Metro, 21st September 2005, Robert Shore
Rather improbably, German Enlightenment drama has already provided some of the year’s
theatrical highlights in London. And now, following on from successful productions
of Schiller’s ‘Don Carlos’ and ‘Mary Stuart’, audiences are tempted back to the stalls
with Gotthold Lessing’s fable of religions tolerance, ‘Nathan the Wise’, written
in 1779 and set in Jerusalem during the Crusades.
When his adopted daughter is saved by a Knight Templar, the Jewish merchant Nathan
finds himself caught between the rival worlds of Muslims and Christians, needing
to promote “unprejudiced affection” among his multi-faith neighbours.
Obviously this is a play rich in resonance for contemporary audiences. And while
I’m not sure it contains any answers to the world’s current woes, it certainly makes
for an entertaining and morally inspiring evening. Edward Kemp’s prose translation
of Lessing’s poetic original is lucid and peppy, although there is a sense that the
action’s poetic logic would be better served by verse.
Oddly, Anthony Clark’s lively production has a certain pantomime air. You find yourself
wanting to shout: “Behind you!” when Justin Avoth’s unfeasibly wicked Patriarch makes
his entrance.
But that’s not inappropriate: ‘Nathan the Wise’ belongs to the same moral universe
as Shakespeare’s late plays, where the mysterious workings of providence ensure the
triumph of the forces of goodness and tolerance, whatever the apparent odds. Alas,
it’s not realism.
The Daily Telegraph, 21st September 2005, Charles Spencer
If ever a dusty old play spoke urgently and movingly to our current concerns, it
is ‘Nathan the Wise’ (1779) by the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
A product of enlightenment values so sadly eclipsed in these troubled times, its
plea for religious tolerance and a brotherhood of common humanity seems almost unbearably
poignant when religious hatred seems to be rearing its head everywhere.
The play was banned by the Nazis for its sympathetic depiction of a Jew. And were
he alive today, Lessing would probably be the subject of a fatwa from the Muslims.
For this is a play that forcefully and beautifully argues that no one faith has a
monopoly on truth and that what matters isn’t the religion we choose to follow, but
the way we behave as people.
The action is set in Jerusalem in 1192 at the time of the third Crusade, a reminder
that Christians once fought their own Jihad. Caught between the Christians and the
Muslim leader Saladin is Nathan, a rich, wise Jew who has brought up an orphaned
Christian girl, Rachel, as his own daughter.
An arrogant Knight Templar, reprieved from execution by Saladin, falls in lover with
her after rescuing her from a fire, agonising with his conscience as he believes
her to be Jewish.
The plot develops into a fascinatingly complex knot involving Christians, Muslims
and Jews, and Lessing untangles it with subtlety, grace and a final scene of revelation
and reconciliation reminiscent of late Shakespeare.
Edward Kemp’s fine translation, which combines Germanic seriousness with a winning
English wit, and cuts the sprawling four-and-a-half hour original down to a manageable
playing time of less than three hours, was first presented in Chichester in 2003.
All credit to Hampstead’s artistic director, Anthony Clark, for recognising that
the piece deserved a wider audience. However, his own production fails to match the
lucidity and searching intelligence of Steven Pimlott’s staging in the Minerva Studio.
While Pimlott opted for a stark white-box design and dress that simultaneously suggested
ancient and modern, Clark has gone foe the gilded palm trees and oriental costumes
that might have been borrowed from a panto Aladdin – all curly slippers and silly
turbans.
The acting is sometimes rough too. Noël Coward’s advice to actors was to remember
their lines and not to bump onto the scenery, but in a wretched performance on the
first night, Anna Carteret failed both these rudimentary tests as Rachel’s Christian
guardian, Daya.
Vincent Ebrahim captures the wit, but misses the dangerous power, of Saladin and
Celia Meiras is dismayingly bland as Rachel. And though Michael Pennington gives
a benignly twinkling performance as Nathan, coming on with all the reassuring folksiness
of Rabbi Lionel Blue, he fails to locate the intense spirituality that Michael Feast
discovered in the character in Chichester.
The best performance comes from Sam Troughton as the arrogant Templar, whom he plays
as a mass of insecurity, religious prejudice and dangerous mood-swings, and there
is strong support from Justin Avoth doubling as a delightful dervish and a sinister
Christian patriarch.
But don’t let the occasional inadequacies of the acting put you off. Not only is
‘Nathan the Wise’ both relevant and resonant, it is also one of those rare plays
where you genuinely want to know what will happen next.
A word of caution though, to Christian fundamentalists already simmering with rage
over ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ and Howard Brenton’s forthcoming play about St
Paul: in Lessing’s dramatic vision of religious tension, the devious Christians are
by some distance the least attractive characters in the play.
Daily Mail, 23rd September 2005, PM
As in ‘Playing With Fire’ at the National Theatre, multicultural issues are meant
to be distilled into this drama, billed as “a plea for religious tolerance” and ser
in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades.
And on the face of it, the 18th-century German work by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing seems
every inch a play for today as Jews, Muslims and Christians try to get along. But
the fact that it was once banned by the Nazis lends it kudos it doesn’t deserve.
The story is little more than a piece of half-baked melodrama.
The central dilemma involves a rich Jewish merchant who’s been raising his Christian
daughter secretly as a Jew. This is the cause of moral outrage in a devout young
Christian crusader who happens to have saved the young woman in question from a fire.
And although a local abbot gets a bit hot under the cassock, too, the ruling sultan
takes it all in his pointy-toed stride – after all, it’s really no big deal.
Instead of the terrifying predicament Shakespeare conjures up with Shylock in ‘The
Merchant of Venice’, Lessing allows the action to drift into Teutonic posturing and
the sort of farcical coincidence even Bollywood producers might sniff at. It’s a
mystery, then, as to why Anthony Clark deemed the play suitable for the Hampstead
– a home of new writing which has traditionally tackled the issues of the day. Clark’s
sluggish production finds little conflict in the scenes and establishes no clear
overall tone, comic or otherwise.
The occasional boisterousness of Edward Kemp’s generally bland translation is rarely
exploited and it feels like an olde worlde episode of ‘The Archers’, only less racy.
Torn between the Muslims after his money and the Christian crusader after his daughter,
Michael Pennington’s wise old merchant Nathan faces a choice: prophet or loss. Although
Nathan has experienced his own personal tragedies, Pennington makes him so nice he’s
no longer interesting. And the fact that he is besieged by some very un-kosher ham-acting
leaves him looking none too clever.
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