Volume 5, Number 8 · November 25, 1965
A Death at Lincoln Center
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Danton's Death
by Georg Büchner
Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center
Danton's Death is a lyric tragedy, a work of great and expressive beauty. True, on the surface it appears too calm in its development, too negligent in its shifts from private to public life; and yet in the end it is just this slow, careless moving toward death that is the very center of the peculiar power of the play. The paralysis, the static nihilism, the already ruined hopes, the fixed despair of Danton are the astonishingly moving and complicated results of his previous explosion of revolutionary energy. To have brought these two themes together is the glory of Büchner's conception. The French Revolution is the scenery in which an individual man comes to his last act—the Revolution at that moment when idealism has frozen into corruption and the revolutionary victories are beginning to institutionalize themselves by the Terror and the destruction of the revolutionaries. It is as it was in French history, and of course we know all about the painfully similar road taken by Stalin after the Russian Revolution. Ideology and Terror, as Hannah Arendt says, 'one compelling men from within and the other compelling them from without,' have been the fate of almost every country at one time or another. We see at present no relief from Terror in support of Ideology and so there was every clear civic, as well as artistic, reason to open our new 'people's theater' with Danton's Death.
Review, 2012 words
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