Volume 6, Number 3 · March 3, 1966
We Are All Murderers
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Condemned of Altona
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center
'The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast, man himself.' In fragments like this one from the final scene of Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, we see why the play was chosen as a part of the political and historical season at the Repertory Theater. The play, about German guilt, was meant, when it was produced in Paris in 1959, to take the audience beyond Germany to the French guilt for atrocities in the Algerian War. We, here in New York in 1966, are in the midst of a war defined by bestial atrocities on both sides; hideous documents will one day, if the war is ever over, present themselves for our contemplation, for our moral judgment on the victims and the victors, for our atonement perhaps. In the interval at the play, I heard the title called 'the condemned of Altoona,' and I wondered if we could ask ourselves to make the leap from Germany to Algeria to ourselves. The play is difficult and it seems unlikely that we were truly confronted. This failure does not lie altogether at the door of the production, although it was not imaginative. Sartre's play is poorly constructed and it takes several slow readings of the text to uncover the brilliant ideas entombed in an awkward plot.
Review, 1592 words
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