REVIEW: The White Horse Inn, Renaissance Theatre Berlin ✭✭✭✭✭

Renaissance Theater, Berlin
5 Stars
Book Tickets

When this grandiloquent operetta (or musical comedy) first appeared in 1930 it became an international sensation.  Immediately translated into English and much expanded with lots of new material, it moved into the London Coliseum the next year, where it remained for 651 performances – a long run then – and offered the now unimaginable spectacle of a cast of 160, three bands and a huge chorus.  Cameron Macintosh is presumably still trying to work out how it also managed to recoup its entire £60,000 budget before it even opened.  Stuffed full of splendid tunes by Ralph Benatzky, Robert Stolz and Bruno Granichstaedten, with literate and poetic lyrics by Robert Gilbert and a book furnished by Hans Mueller-Einigen and Erik Charrell out of an original play by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelberg, it is a testament to successful collaboration.  But the last you probably heard of it was when it would crop up in occasional jokes by the likes of Hinge and Brackett, as a symbol of all that has now faded into the past, an object of embarrassed ridicule.

None of that could prepare you for what the enterprising Renaissance Theater in Berlin has resurrected.  The surprise hit of last year’s summer season, it is coming back this August and sure to be enormously popular again.  But in a form and manner that could not be further from its original manifestation.

With a cast of just nine, the show begins as it means to go on, by overturning every single preconception you might have brought with you into the theatre.  In a kind of sultry twilight, the company – in a mix of contemporary and traditional Austrian attire – perch on the edge of the stage, dangling feet towards the audience, and deliver the show’s most famous tune, once known as a tub-thumping waltz, as a breathless, hushed lullaby.  A soprano gets excited and wants to open up the volume, but the rest of the ensemble rein her in: that’s the production’s first joke – and there are many more to follow – but they all serve the same thoughtful purpose: to make us stop and listen and pay attention to what is happening and how people are behaving.  This way, we hear every single word of the finely wrought text (Hannah Arendt was a huge admirer of Gilbert, comparing him to no less a figure than Heinrich Heine), and are propelled into a luscious world of the imagination, where dreams really do come true.  Yet, it is also a world in which we have to be very carefully aware of our conduct and interactions with each other.  It is a brilliant opening by director Torsten Fisher, the first of many master-strokes that make this production one of the most strikingly memorable I have seen.

As Gerhard Littau’s meticulous lighting comes up, we see not only Herbert Schaefer and Vasilis Triantafillopoulos’ smashing design of the wooden interior of a generously proportioned by still rather simple and homely alpine hostelry, but also the five-piece on stage folkloric band who will take us on an unforgettable musical journey: it is a kind of mini-orchestra featuring piano, accordion, viola, mouth-organ (Harry Ermer – also musical director and arranger), percussion, dulcimer, flute (Volker Fry), cello, trumpet (Johannes Severin), violins (Angelika Feckl), with double-bass and tuba (Otwin Zipp/Dirk Schmigotzki).  In the hands of these remarkable players, the score, while preserving faithfully the sung lines of the characters’ voices (and occasionally referencing some of the many densely scored choral episodes, where six part harmony was more the rule than the exception), passes through a kaleidoscopic variety of musical styles and idioms, comprising everything from hymnody to rap, via folk, Schlager, rock’n’roll and, of course, the familiar rhythms of austro-germanic operetta.

It is as bracing and thrilling a journey as any hike in the hills and mountains of the Salzkammergut that surround the pretty little Wolfgangsee, against whose crampt shore nestles the once dainty ‘grand hotel’ of the title, now long since demolished and replaced by a gargantuan premises better suited to containing the thousands of nostalgia-hungry visitors who pour into it every summer, and amongst whose number I am pleased to be able to have counted myself.  But this show allows you to see beyond the glare of the sunshine on the waters of the lake; it allows you to see into the hearts of those who live and work here, and of those who merely pass through in their seasonal migrations.  Outstanding amongst these is the central character – and the main draw for anyone wanting to see this show – the awful Sigismund Suelzheimer, a grotesque caricature of the ‘spiesser’ middle-class Berliner, who once a year wants to escape the grime and drabness of the big city and escape into a rural idyll… with the proviso that everything, and that means absolutely everything, remains exactly as he had it back in Berlin.  The impossibility of his realising this fantasy is the principle motor driving the comedy of the narrative, and it is hugely enjoyable to sit in a theatre filled with Berliners seeing themselves epitomised by this figure and laughing at not only his but also their own self-importance and stubborn inflexibility.  In fact, it ceases to be theatre, and becomes more like group-therapy.

Around this winning personality – given raucous credibility in Ralph Morgenstern’s blazing incarnation (who plays him as a kind of mix between King Lear and Don Pasquale) – rotates a system of other fascinating character portraits.  The mistress of the establishment, Josepha (Winnie Boewe, a presence to be reckoned with), is only too willing to mix business with pleasure, but plays off the attentions of her table-waiter, Leopold (the gorgeously mellifluous and handsome Andreas Bieber), in favour of the socially superior guest, the lawyer, Dr Otto Siedler (the dashing Tonio Arango), who just happens to represent the father of… Suelzheimer, who promptly develops an interest in the landlady himself.  The tangle is completed by the budding affection of jilted Leopold and Ottilie (the delicious soubrette, Annemarie Bruentjen), the daughter of another guest, the factory-owner Wilhelm Giesecke (an even more grotesque representation of bourgeois Prussian trumpery, Boris Aljinovic), who in turn wants to marry her off to Suelzheimer, thereby transforming a business rivalry into a merger.  Thus the stage is set for a lot of romantic complications, not to say farce.  The sequence of the narrative is perfectly interleaved with a succession of charming and wonderfully characterful musical numbers, to which Karl Alfred Schreiner’s choreography is brilliantly adapted to the shifting patterns of their liaisons and fortunes and perfectly synchronised with Fischer’s adept pacing of the twists and turns of the comedy.  The versatile company is completed by another guest, Professor Hinzelmann (Walter Kreye), Klaerchen, his daughter (Nadine Schori), and the yodelling wonder that is Angelika Milster (in a variety of roles).

You do not have to speak fluent German to follow all this, either: English surtitles are projected for all to see, although you’ll have to be quick in reading them: the dialogue comes thick and fast, and is packed full of jokes.  There is even the mysterious appearance of the former Austro-Hungarian emperor and king, Archduke Franz-Joseph II.  His ‘manifestation’ takes on an almost mystical feel, an apparition from a by-gone era, almost a deus ex machina who arrives to fix the plot and make a happy ending possible.  It again reminds us to remember that penumbral opening: we teeter here in Wolfgangsee on the brink of this world and another, a world of pure happiness, where we lose our hearts, and which – once we leave – misses us in a mutually bittersweet pang of separation.  Rather like the act of coitus itself, the sorrow at our holiday’s completion only serves to intensify our delicious appreciation of its joys and reinforces our longing to repeat the experience.  Next summer!