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Photograph by: Donald Cooper of Sophie Ward and Giles Havergal in Schiller's The Robbers
Photograph by Donald Cooper of
Sophie Ward and Giles Havergal

THE ROBBERS

13 August 1998, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
17-21 August 1998, King's Theatre, Edinburgh
By Friedrich von Schiller
Translated by Robert David MacDonald
Adapted, Directed and Designed by Philip Prowse
Lighting by Gerry Jenkinson
CHARACTER ACTOR
Karl/Franz von Moor Benedick Bates
Count von Moor Giles Havergal
Spiegelberg Paul Albertson
Roller Jay Manley
Grimm Kenneth Harvey
Schwarz Howard Teale
Schufterle Niall Faber
CHARACTER ACTOR
Razmann Craig Scarborough
Schweizer Stuart Bowman
Amalia Sophie Ward
Hermann Stephen Scott
Daniel Stephen MacDonald
Priest Murray Melvin
Pastor Moser Robert David MacDonald
Review by John Peter, SUNDAY TIMES online, 23 August, 1998

Shock waves:

Controversy is the lifeblood of the theatre. This is one of the reasons why it survives, unperturbed by pale, nerve-racked pundits who seldom set foot in it and keep predicting its demise. You don't need a degree in crowd psychology to understand that a play, performed live, like a spontaneous event before an audience, can have an impact more intense than any other art form. This year's festival offers a varied menu of it: plays by rebels and dissidents across the ages, apocalyptic, thoughtful, argumentative.

Rebels start young. When you are young, injustice is more monstrous, oppression more stifling, and your wounds stay for longer. Schiller was 19 when he wrote his first play, The Robbers (King's), and it overflows with all the fury of youth.

Its faults are easy to see. It is big, blatant and turgid, full of half-digested bits of Shakespeare, clumsily plotted and too long. Schiller, who had wanted to train for the church since he was 14, felt imprisoned at the famous Hohe Karlsschule, where he had to study law at the behest of the Duke of Württemberg. This is the emotional source of this crude, tempestuous play.

The Robbers is about two brothers. The younger, Franz, falsely accuses the absent Karl of criminal behaviour; their credulous father, Count von Moor, disowns Karl; Karl becomes the captain of a band of vicious robbers to avenge the injustice on society at large. Schiller's point is that oppression turns its victims towards evil. The play is both a Cain and Abel conflict and a collision between authority and the individual, age and youth. Its premiere in 1782 was a sensation. People shouted, shook their fists, fell into each other's arms. Women, naturally, fainted. Absolutism in the German states was feeling its first underground tremors.

Philip Prowse's Glasgow Citizens production is all subtlety and intelligence, which is quite a feat in the circumstances. He respects this torrid text but refuses to tame it; he knows that smoothing away its rough edges would be a cop-out. This is a key text of German Romantic drama, and you need to feel both its elemental Sturm and its self-conscious Drang. Years later, Schiller admitted that he had written a play about real men before he ever met any; and director and actors recognise that the play has its own immature integrity.

Robert David MacDonald's translation has a muscular, melodramatic drive. Prowse's settings work by hints and vaguely outlined shapes: the action is mostly defined by rolling mists and shafts and pools of light, brilliantly designed by Gerry Jenkinson . The effect is like a storm with doomed figures painted by Caspar David Friedrich.

Benedick Bates turns in a virtuoso performance playing both brothers. Franz is unctuous and reptilian, then brutish and almost unhinged by power; Karl is saturnine, introspective, agonising. Bates's voice begins to tire towards the end, but his performance keeps up an astonishing level of sophistcation: almost like warring aspects of the same tortured soul.
Review by Keith Bruce, Glasgow Herald online, 19 August, 1998
THE term "total theatre" has - paradoxically - become much restricted to mean a certain sort of fashionable physical performance. The Citizens' Theatre Company perfoming Friedrich Schiller's first play is truly total theatre. In under three hours, director Philip Prowse uses this apprentice work by the 18th century's finest dramatist to give us the flavour of the past century of European theatre's development. From Victorian melodrama to contemporary staging, with nods in the direction of sitcom and soap opera, The Robbers is a highly educative, entertaining, and often breathtaking lesson in theatre.

Adapting his colleague Robert David MacDonald's translation - probably to enhance its contemporary resonances - Prowse weaves a production that is enthralling in every detail. His simple but imposing setting, swathed in smoke for most of the action, is a palette for a stunning lighting design by Gerry Jenkinson . The soundtrack, including a ticking clock, police sirens, an offstage chorus, and enough firearms to outgun Tarantino is as sense-catching. Speeches are delivered in styles that run the gamut from broad comedy through stagey self-consciousness to heartfelt emotion without any sense of incongruity. And through it all, the youthful Schiller's blinding critique of both the establishment and its corrupt opposition shines clear.

In this vision Stuart Bowman's broad accent (as Schweizer), and Jay Manley's mannered stutter (Roller), sit comfortably alongside Sophie Ward's honest Amalia, a tortured beauty on a stage full of messy men. Cameos from Murray Melvin and MacDonald hold the stage as easily as Benedick Bates' tour-de-force as the brothers Franz and Karl von Moor. A satire of the paternal (e)state - and a triumphant start to the Citz' Festival residency.

Review by Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN/OBSERVER online, 19 August, 1998
The indiscriminate slaughter of women and children. The defiance of all moral standards. The final condemnation of terror as a political weapon. These are among the themes of Schiller's The Robbers, written in 1778, when he was only 19, and now revived by Philip Prowse and the Glasgow Citizens Company; and in this of all weeks, the play acquires a hideous topicality. On one level, Schiller's play seems a bookish neo-Shakespearean melodrama. It confronts us with two brothers, the Machiavellian Franz and the idealistic Karl. When the latter is disinherited by his deceived father, he takes to the Bohemian woods and becomes leader of a band of social outlaws. He sees himself as a mixture of Robin Hood and Rousseau: his followers, however, become intoxicated by their own violence. Returning to his father's castle in disguise, Karl finally sees that lawlessness is no answer to injustice and that terror is incompatible with idealism.

Derivative the play may be, with echoes of King Lear and Hamlet. But it has youthful fire and energy, a racing plot and a genuine clash of ideas. Franz is a ruthless pragmatist who wants to cancel the natural bonds and who chillingly asks, of his own ailing father, "If we can prolong life, why can we not shorten it as well?" Karl is the impetuous idealist whose belief in absolute freedom and disregard for law results in criminal anarchy. If the play is melodrama, it is highly philosophical.

I have mixed feelings, however, about Prowse's production. Its key idea, and a very good one, is to cast the admirable Benedick Bates as both brothers. His Franz is a horn-rimmed, dark-suited schemer; his Karl a naive, russet-cloaked dreamer. But by casting Bates in both roles, Prowse brings out - rather like Robert Wilson in his Salzburg production of Danton's Death - the similarities between two seemingly opposed characters. Franz and Karl are spurred by vengeance and both promote death: ironically, it is the champion of liberty who causes the greater mayhem.

But while Bates has a strong presence and fine voice that augurs well for his classical future, Prowse's production also muddies the waters. Some figures, such as Giles Havergal as the anguished paternal count and Sophie Ward as Karl's faithful lover, occupy an 18th century world. The outlaws, however, with their anti-semitic slogans, woollen face-masks and bazookas and rifles, seem a random mix of modern urban terrorists. Psychologically, Prowse's understanding of the play is acute; politically, he simply throws in too many competing references.

But the play, in Robert David MacDonald's translation, is eminently worth reviving, particularly in the context of a festival dominated by Schiller and Verdi: later this week one can see I Masnadieri, which treats the same story operatically. And if Schiller's play proves anything, it is that terror, having started as a political means, rapidly becomes an end in itself.

Review by Benedict Nightingale, TIMES OF LONDON online, 19 August, 1998

Over the top, not before time

They're off at long last, at very long last. Imagine a starter self-importantly firing his pistol well over a week after the race got going, and you have some of the weirder feelings provoked by the 1998 Edinburgh Festival's opening production: Glasgow Citizens' florid revival of Schiller's torrid Robbers.

We all know an overblown Edinburgh Fringe has long threatened to make the Festival's theatrical sector an irrelevance; but I can never before recall the Fringe so calculatedly plotting destruction or the Festival so assiduously conspiring in its own death-throes. It is ten days since I watched the bagpipers parade down Princes Street, and by then I had seen three or four of the score of productions I have so far attended at the Traverse and elsewhere. As the three weeks of the official Festival begin, there are already playgoers complaining of Edinburgh fatigue. What will they feel by September, when, inanely, the Festival's most interesting-looking theatrical offerings are scheduled to open?

And is The Robbers, which Schiller wrote when he was 19, worth the kind of revival that comes with sepulchral murk, red-tinted stage smoke, half-visible crags at the back and late 18th-century characters dressed in terrorist-style balaclavas or ratty suits and black polo-neck jerseys? Well, maybe. This was the play that liberated German, and eventually European, drama from its neo-classical manacles.

But if historical importance were the main criterion for revival we would regularly be enduring productions of Addison's terminally dull Cato; and, to be fair, there is plenty that's gripping in Schiller's big, sprawling, neo-Jacobean tale of the good brother driven by anger and despair to become a blend of Robin Hood and Tamburlaine, and the bad brother who deprives him of his father's love, his inheritance, his fiancée, everything.

The subject, topical at the dawning of Romanticism and scarcely out-of-date now, is the desire for freedom from moral and social repression, and the perils inherent in indulging it. The upright Karl (Benedick Bates) finds himself burning women and children to death, while Franz (also Bates), a snarling swot in specs, ends up throttling himself.

But the play's strength is also its trouble: its precocity, its immaturity. Philip Prowse's admirable cast resists the temptation to send up a play that is undeniably melodramatic, preposterous, verbally overwrought and, with a battered old Methuselah rising from the tomb and an Ophelia-like heroine flitting hither and yon, way over any known top. But do they compel a 20th-century audience to take Schiller more seriously? That is another matter.

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