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The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Renee Goddard obituary
Renee Goddard, who has died aged 102, came to Britain from Germany in 1934, with little education and no English. Despite being exiled as a child, she went on to develop a substantial career as an actor, script editor and screen commissioner. As a performer, her TV appearances included The Glittering Prizes (1976) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), but she achieved most through influencing scripts and production. This started in 1954, when Oscar Lewenstein, a West End producer and a champion of contemporary drama as general manager of the Royal Court theatre, appointed her as a script consultant. She had particular responsibility for introducing writers and directors from mainland Europe, and new British writers. In 1955 she visited Bertolt Brecht in East Germany to assist Peter Daubeny in bringing the Berliner Ensemble to London for a season the following year that included Brecht's Mother Courage. Jean Genet's groundbreaking The Blacks was premiered in Paris in 1959, and two years later Goddard brought it to the Royal Court. In 1964 she joined Associated Television, part of the ITV network with franchises in London and the Midlands, whose managing director was Lew Grade, and went on to become its head of scripts. Soon after her arrival, she was responsible for one of the first interracial kisses in the UK television drama, in the series Emergency Ward 10. Prompted by the success of the BBC's science fiction series Doctor Who, the ATV script editor Ruth Boswell, another Hitler émigré, devised Timeslip with her husband, James. Goddard took it up for production, and the story of two time-travelling teenage friends – starting with a visit to Cornwall in 1940 – ran for 26 episodes (1970-71). In 1972 she left to become a freelance consultant to international TV stations on scripts and drama operations. I first met her in 1980, the year that she founded the English-speaking theatre in Munich, which went on to run for six years. She was hosting a British Council-backed production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker that I directed, and escorted me around Munich pointing out the beer cellars where Hitler had given speeches. Her English was truly the Queen's English, and her German was faultless. She was in at the start with Channel 4 in 1982, introducing foreign drama to the network, and from 1988 she was secretary general of the European Community's script fund, forging alliances across Europe's media and entertainment industries. Born in Berlin, Renee was the younger daughter of Emmi (nee Wiechelt) and Werner Scholem, the editor of the communist newspaper the Red Flag, and from 1924 a Reichstag deputy. Renee's first years were spent with her maternal grandparents in Hanover, where she was known as Reni (Renate) Wiechelt. Her Jewish father and gentile mother, also a communist, had an open marriage, and Renee knew nothing of her Jewish parentage. To protect her identity, her grandparents enrolled her in the Hitler Youth. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Renate was taught how 'evil' the Jews were. When Hitler visited Hanover that year, she expressed pride at being chosen for the guard of honour to welcome him, waving her flag at the railway station. Her mother's Nazi lover, Heinz Hackenbeil, got her out of Germany in 1934. In England, she was reunited with her sister, Edith, and her mother, who had fled to the UK via Czechoslovakia. Renee was sent to a Catholic school, but Jewish aid organisations insisted that she also learn about Judaism. She was fostered by Naomi Birnberg, a leading member of the London-based Jewish Refugee Committee and mother of the eventual lawyer and civil liberties campaigner Benedict Birnberg. Renee was with the Birnberg family until her arrest as an 'enemy alien' in 1940, held initially at Holloway prison. With 4,000 other German-born women, she spent 18 months behind barbed wire on the Isle of Man. She spoke of the indignity of being a Jewish escaper forced to share sleeping quarters with Nazi girls and women. There she was told of her father's murder in Buchenwald. On her release she returned to London, married Gebhard Goldschmidt, who took the name George Goddard to serve as a British soldier, so giving her a professional name, too, and worked as a waitress at Lyons Corner House. 'They took me because they were short of girls for the night shift serving fire-watchers,' she said. As a 'nippy', she developed her appeal as an entertainer: 'I was popular because I could do cockney in the kitchen and then go la-di-da in the dining room. I got very good tips.' A natural performer whose life had already instilled in her a capacity for reinvention, in 1943 she joined and did theatrical work with the Free German Youth, a communist organisation. For a couple of years she lived with the director Peter Zadek, another émigré, who went on to revitalise West German theatre in the 1970s, and starred in his then small-scale productions. West End and Broadway experience came from minor parts in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in a company led by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1950-52). There was plenty of repertory theatre and radio work, and a film role came as Lady Branstead in Murder at 3am (1953), with Dennis Price as the police inspector. In John Van Druten's play I Am a Camera, adapted from Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin, she was Natalia Landauer alongside Dorothy Tutin's Sally Bowles (New Theatre, now Noël Coward, 1954-55). The launching of ITV in 1955 brought more opportunities for live broadcast drama. But by then she was already busy reading scripts and encouraging productions. In 2002 BBC Radio 4 broadcast Robin Glendinning's dramatisation of her early life, Reni and the Brownshirts. Her marriage to Goddard ended in divorce, as did that to the actor Michael Mellinger, with whom she had two daughters, Andie and Leonie. In 1964 she married Stuart Hood, who had done much to reinvigorate BBC television. They divorced, and in 2000 she married Hanno Fry. He died in 2019. She is survived by Andie and Leonie, and her grandchildren, Rose, Woody and Aurelie. Renee Goddard, actor, script editor and screen commissioner, born 2 February 1923; died 12 March 2025
Forbes
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Revivals Of Classic Weill, Chekhov Plays Offered Now In Brooklyn
Top revivals of two classics—Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera and Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard—are being performed in Brooklyn this month. The Threepenny Opera is being presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse through April 6, while The Cherry Orchard, a new version of the play by Benedict Andrews that originally ran at the Donmar Warehouse in London, will be offered at St. Ann's Warehouse through April 27. 16 December 2019, Berlin: Oliver Reese (l-r), artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, conductor Adam Benzwi and Barrie Kosky, director and artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin, will be at a press conference at the Berliner Ensemble. Kosky stages a new production of the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill at the Berliner Ensemble. The premiere will be celebrated in early 2021. Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa (Photo by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance via Getty Images) dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images The production of Bertolt Brecht's and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera was created by director Barrie Kosky; it is performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and whose home remains the theater where the opera premiered in 1928. As BAM explains, 'Murderous antihero Mackie Messer (a.k.a. Mack the Knife) slashes through Victorian London in The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht's scandalous satire that electrified Weimar-era German audiences 400 times in just two years after its 1928 debut. 'A century later, Brecht's razor-sharp critique of unbridled capitalism still cuts deep—an eerily prophetic vision of a well-fed society teetering on the brink, propelled by Kurt Weill's infectious, jazz-infused score. 'Barrie Kosky's Berliner Ensemble production is sly and perversely sexy, embracing seediness and cynicism with glitzy disillusion and more than a hint of danger. A master showman, Kosky manages to beguile us through the familiar rise and fall of Brecht's sociopathic leading man, adding a knowing creepiness to his unrepentant antics. 'As Mack the Knife's indelible melody lingers, this sleek, elemental staging amplifies the play's knife-edge allure, proving its savage indictment of greed remains as urgent and seductive as ever,' BAM concluded. LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 02: Benedict Andrews attends the press night after party for "The Cherry Orchard" at The Donmar Warehouse on May 02, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by)Discussing its Chekov production, St. Ann's Warehouse said, 'In this in-the-round staging, the international cast arrive all at once and remain visible throughout the show, free to improvise and inhabit the characters' sacred home that will soon be gone. In the The Cherry Orchard Ranevskaya and her aristocratic household are confronted by the demands of a changing world. The tensions between the past and future, the personal and the political, are explored with urgency and passion while the family grapples with the inevitable loss.' Andrews, the theater continued, 'has developed a reputation as one of the world's leading interpreters of Chekhov. With the critically acclaimed The Cherry Orchard, he takes on the writer's masterpiece, contemporizing elements of the text in an unbridled, playful, and devastating vision that feels, (The Evening Standard said), 'entirely true to the spirit of the original.'' According to St. Ann's, Andrews said, 'I just love being in the rehearsal room with actors and Chekhov, it is the greatest gift. It invites enormous play, enormous exploration. It's a very democratic, collective, exploratory process where there's room for people to make offers and search for the life of the play together. By us putting the audience all the way around, there's an openness to it, it's only, only about the actors, their contact, and how they play with each other, and how that resonates with an audience. That collective experience is all I'm interested in.' St. Ann's previously offered Andrews' production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby and Ben Foster. In an interview this week with Andrews said the text he created for his Chekhov production is 'direct and contemporary,' though he did retain Russian references. He also praised the intimacy of St. Ann's theater. Chekhov's characters, he added, live in a society 'that's on the brink of change and uncertainty, there's a storm on the horizon.' In today's 'time of division, (for the audience) to watch an ensemble play like this together I find really moving,' he concluded.
New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Theater Company's Lost French New Wave Film Gets Its New York Premiere
The French film industry was hardly the only force spurring the barricades, Molotov cocktails and worker strikes that were synonymous with Paris in May 1968. But the French government's attempt to fire the head of the Cinémathèque Française earlier that year supplied crucial kindling. And while the Cannes Film Festival managed to open amid the unrest, with a glittery restoration of 'Gone With the Wind,' Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were among those who helped scuttle the festival at the halfway point. This is the environment in which Lee Breuer and other ambitious New York theater artists found themselves dubbing French films into English for the Hong Kong market. They were also absorbing lessons in elliptical, pugnacious, visually striking theater from the likes of the Berliner Ensemble and the Living Theater, a group of New Yorkers living in voluntary exile in Europe. By 1970, Breuer had returned to New York and formed Mabou Mines, the influential Off Off Broadway theater troupe. (The other founding members included fellow dubbers Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, as well as JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass.) But first the Paris-based gang set out to produce a silent film, called 'Moi-même,' about a 13-year-old boy who tries to create a film collective through begging, hustling and sometimes armed robbery. They wrote some provisional lines of dialogue on a few envelopes and grabbed cameras, bankrolled by the man who owned the dubbing studio. They began shooting just as the protests were winding down — and then their unfinished project ground to its own halt. Now, over 50 years later, 'Moi-même' will finally make its New York debut at L'Alliance New York on Thursday, co-directed and co-written by Breuer and his son Mojo Lorwin, who wasn't born until 1984. Additional screenings are scheduled for next month at Yale University Film Archives (April 24) and as part of a film festival in Athens, Ohio. 'We all knew the basic contours of the story from sitting around and talking to Lee, and the assumption throughout was that we were going to dub it and have a script when we got finished with the shoot,' said Kevin Mathewson, who was 13 when he played the film's central role. (His parents were academics who had befriended met Breuer and Maleczech at a Christmas party.) 'We just never got around to that.' The 'Moi-même' footage resurfaced in 2009 after Breuer had returned to Paris to film a production of one of Mabou Mines's most famous works, 'Dollhouse.' A few years later, his son became involved and had more modest ambitions. 'I thought I might put together a little montage of the footage for Mabou's 50th anniversary,' Lorwin said. 'I really looked at it for the first time, and that's when I realized there could be a feature there.' Although Breuer was in poor health by the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he and his son discussed the project via Zoom. 'There was this beautiful footage and a bare-bones plot, but not much else,' said Lorwin, who also had a notebook from the time in which Breuer devoted some 30 pages to snippets of dialogue and ideas for scenes. 'Lee remembered a lot of names and gave me the skeleton of the plot,' Lorwin said. 'But it wasn't until after he died in 2021 that I really tried to channel him and figure out what he had tried to do.' Then began the painstaking process of creating a script and the accompanying soundtrack for the 65-minute 'Moi-même,' essentially a French New Wave film reconstructed in hindsight. In several cases, the new dialogue is spoken by children of the original cast members. The L'Alliance film curator Jake Perlin, who called the original footage 'an enthusiasm in search of a film,' described May 1968 as a major moment in film history as well as political history. 'For anyone who's interested in French New Wave cinema moving into post-New Wave, 1968 is the pivotal event,' Perlin said. 'Godard is on the barricades, but so is Philippe Garrel,' another French film director, 'who was 20 at the time. And the fact that a bunch of New Yorkers were running around capturing this on film — I was all over that.' And when Godard wasn't on the barricades or at Cannes in 1968, he also managed to make a cameo in 'Moi-même.' 'He just showed up one day,' said Mathewson, who is traveling from Brazil to see his 13-year-old self at the L'Alliance screening. 'He stood there laughing at the production, and then he walked through.' Lorwin pointed out that many of Breuer's early scripts use film metaphors, particularly the Beckettian early works that helped cement Mabou Mines's reputation. But he never fully understood what his father meant by them until he saw the raw 'Moi-même' footage in 2020 and gained new appreciation for what Breuer was attempting to do. 'Lee had this incredible theater career,' he said, 'but he was always talking about making a movie. I feel like this was maybe the one that got away.'
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Barrie Kosky Is the Director New York Has Been Waiting For
When 'The Threepenny Opera' returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons. For one, it will be a homecoming. Although 'Threepenny' was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954. And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where 'Threepenny' had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent New York productions. But what is most important about this run of 'Threepenny,' presented by BAM and St. Ann's Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky. Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of 'The Magic Flute,' a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, 'Threepenny' will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today. He is a director accomplished in theater and opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This 'Threepenny' will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching? Born in Australia, Kosky has described himself as a 'gay, Jewish kangaroo.' His grandparents were European transplants who came from Budapest and the shtetls of Belarus. His grandmother from Hungary instilled in him a love of operetta, he wrote in his book ''Und Vorhang auf, Hallo!,'' or ''And Curtain Up, Hello!'' He ended up developing a passion for classical music, operas and musicals without much regard for genre or hierarchy. To him, 'The Magic Flute' was the 'mother ship of the musical.' Mahler's symphonies were art, and so was 'The Simpsons.' As he grew up, and began to perform in and then direct theater, his artistry was informed, he likes to say, by two other cultural artifacts: Kafka's writing and 'The Muppets.' They weren't so different, at least in his mind. Several Kafka stories are about talking animals, and there is something Kafkaesque in Kermit's never-ending struggle to keep his show going. Both, Kosky wrote in his memoir, are reminiscent of Yiddish theater; Fozzie Bear is even a kind of sad Jewish clown. He thought of 'The Muppets' as 'a queer space' in which Miss Piggy was the reigning drag queen, flirting with Rudolf Nureyev in a steam room and tormenting Kermit, a gay 'Max Reinhardt meets Charlie Chaplin.' It's sensational for Kosky to say that his aesthetic is Kafka and 'The Muppets,' but if you watch his productions with that in mind, it's accurate. There is hardly a trace of realism in his shows, which tend to unfold throughout dreamscapes. A room may not have a wall; comedy may become irrationally nightmarish; life may just be an endless vaudeville. Kosky's career bloomed in Australia before flourishing in Europe, with tenures running the Schauspielhaus in Vienna and the Komische Oper in Berlin. (He has also had champions in the United States. The Met had planned to import his production of Prokofiev's 'The Fiery Angel' in 2020. It was canceled because of the pandemic, with no rescheduling in sight. Upstate, however, he is developing a new work with the Fisher Center at Bard.) Throughout his projects you sense someone, like Kermit, determined to put on a good show. That is why even his weaker productions still function well as theater. If anything, that is the thread through his stagings. Some are maximalist and some are minimalist, but all are theatrical, which isn't always the case with his peers in Europe. And while there are visual hallmarks to a Kosky show, like bold colors, his work is more recognizable for its sensibility: Audience members can count on virtually airtight logic, no matter how zany his work may appear, and they can expect performers to behave with the organic freedom that comes from thorough, detail-obsessed rehearsals. Like the best of directors, Kosky also knows that different titles call for different looks and dramatic gestures. In his book he describes 'Tosca' as an opera that calls for 'thick oil paint and a broad brush,' whereas something by Mozart or Janacek requires 'a fine brush.' One of the broadest canvases in the repertoire is Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,' which Kosky staged at the Bayreuth Festival in 2017. The production encapsulated his bravery, wit and charm. 'Meistersinger' contains over four and a half hours of music, with pitfalls throughout: comedy, romance, antisemitic tropes and, in the final minutes, a darkly nationalistic turn. Even more difficult is staging it at Bayreuth, which was founded by Wagner and comes with the baggage of complicated history, not least as a favorite opera destination of Hitler's. Kosky addressed all that head-on. He set the first act inside a replica of Wahnfried, Wagner's home, where the composer was known to play and sing through his opera scores. Kosky recreated one of those gatherings, with 'Meistersinger' characters represented by real, historical people like Cosima Wagner and her father, Franz Liszt. He even included Wagner's Newfoundland dogs. At first, the set design was unusually realistic for Kosky. But at the end of Act One, the walls were pulled up to reveal the comparatively chilly courtroom interior of the Nuremberg trials. In Wagner's libretto, the second act closes with a comedic riot sparked by a misunderstanding and an attack on the character Beckmesser, a pedantic villain coded as a kind of Jewish outsider. There was humor in Kosky's staging, but it was replaced by horror at what suddenly started to look like a pogrom. It felt as if everyone in the theater was holding their breath as an enormous antisemitic caricature based on 'The Eternal Jew' inflated onstage like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float. As it deflated and the curtain closed, the audience was left with a provocation for the hourlong intermission that followed. For the nationalistic ending, Kosky had the character Hans Sachs deliver his monologue about 'holy German art' as if testifying at Nuremberg, shaking his fists with conviction as the courtroom emptied and he was left alone while a Fellini-esque orchestra in black tie rolled onstage to play the jubilant finale. Was it delusion or triumph? The audience was left to decide, a stand-in for the jury. Like the opera, Kosky's staging was hardly simple. But it was clear, funny yet terrifying, delightful and then haunting. He has achieved similar effects with starker images. In his production of Janacek's 'Kat'a Kabanova' at the Salzburg Festival in 2022, the opera's tragedy unfolded both on a bare stage and before hundreds of mannequins with their backs turned on the action. The action of his 'Fiddler on the Roof,' which originated at the Komische Oper but has traveled to Lyric Opera of Chicago, springs from a stack of wardrobes and wooden furniture. 'Fiddler' is far from the only musical that Kosky has staged at the Komische Oper, a one-stop shop in Berlin for opera, operetta and musical theater. During his time there, which ended in 2022 with a delirious, three-hour show called 'Barrie Kosky's All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,' he revolutionized the company's repertoire and unearthed operettas by composers like Paul Abraham, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman. Kosky continues to direct at the Komische Oper, and he is midway through a plan to stage five musicals there. He began with 'La Cage aux Folles,' in a gayer, grander treatment than it ever got on Broadway, and continued with 'Chicago,' free of Fosse clichés and heavy on razzle-dazzle. Last fall he directed 'Sweeney Todd,' which at first appeared to take place in a Victorian toy theater before unfolding against images of urban decay, including in Thatcher-era London. All these were better than their most recent counterparts in New York. Directing 'Threepenny,' at the storied Berliner Ensemble in 2021, had similar pressures to the 'Meistersinger' job at Bayreuth. He was replacing the chilly, unmusical production by Robert Wilson, and 'Threepenny,' a beloved but imperfect work, is difficult. Too often, modern productions are bogged down by humorlessness and affected sleaze, as if it were 'Cabaret.' But 'Threepenny' is filthily hilarious and dangerously entertaining, daring audiences to be seduced by Weill's earworm melodies before stinging them with the barbs of Brecht and Hauptmann's script. Kosky, more than most directors, is sensitive to its polyphonic structure in his staging, which moves around, repeats and trims material throughout to make the show move briskly and with a light hand, allowing the subtext its slithering grace. For people who were brought up on Brecht as a purveyor of deliberatively blunt theater, Kosky's approach may seem sacrilegious. But in its affability, its showmanship, his 'Threepenny' works the unsettling magic it should. It's not until the lights come up, and you begin to relax your smile, that you realize you were just cheering for a narcissistic murderer by the name of Mack the Knife.
