AARHUS THEATRE / DENMARK 1985

WRITER: BERTOLT BRECHT
DIRECTOR: KLAUS HOFFMEYER

* The production of this pre-Brechtian Brecht astounds, beyond all intervening matrixes, by bringing the spirit of the times, and many of the period’s artistic impulses, back to glorious life. The drama’s characters look like they were photographed out of a period gallery of theatrical characters, in costumes with crazily screwed-up shoulders, a color scheme out of the painter Franz Radziwill and makeup inspired by artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz or Rudolf Schlichter and Jeanne Mammen. Even Fritz Lang’s film “M” is enlisted to supply a few male types. The effect is overpowering, a distorted witch’s cauldron of carefully botanized characters in an expressionistic environment of black and red diagonals.
The stage space is a scurrilous synthesis of battlefront, prisoner of war camp and nighttime cabaret. The city’s menacing surroundings, the battleground of the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, are announced as shattering explosions and drums. Germany’s imperialist build-up in Africa reverberates in the empire’s capital.
The thread of the plot is straight-out melodrama, while the tone of the play veers from farce to rasping madness. A soldier, Kragler, returns from captivity in North Africa as a ghost – half cadaverous, half upright – mutilated to death by gaping flesh wounds clotting on his jacket and his face bluish white with thick burn wounds.

- Information / Newspaper / Carsten Thau -

* In painting, the style was expressionism. The style barely gained purchase in theater, which still was for the select few. This is where Århus Teater and its skilled crew make their incision. ‘Drums in the Night’ is an unusual and very thrilling experience. You enter a room of distorted perspectives and a pair of waiters that seem to have stepped out of an abstract painting.

- Land og Folk / Newspaper / Jørn Gade -

* B.v.H.H.S. has constructed a brilliant stage set, seating the audience on balconies protected by barbed wire or at tables on the floor incorporated into two bar milieus. The cars of the revolution go through and the bourgeois sitting room also has its day. The characters are sharply and excellent made up and costumed. The acting is all out, pushing the envelope.

- Aarhus Stifttidende / Newspaper / Holger Christensen -

* The cast gave solid performances in the shifting bar environment created by scenographer B.v.H.H.S. The audience on the floor played café guests, while others, a floor up, sat protected behind barbed wire. From there, they had a secure view of the revolutionary troops making their way by car, flying red banners, to battle the counterrevolutionaries. True total theater on the basement story of Aarhus Teater.

- Aktuelt / Newspaper / Herluf Christiansen -