The Independent (08/Aug/2007) - Obituary: George Tabori
(c) The Independent (08/Aug/2007)
Obituary: George Tabori
Playwright and theatre director with a sharp eye for the farcical nature of tragic situations
"When I was a young child in Budapest, my father took me to the circus", the playwright and theatre director George Tabori recalled. "A beautiful, bold woman climbed up to the trapeze like an angel, accompanied by a drum roll. I was so excited that I wet my trousers. Then she took aim for her salto mortale, missed the trapeze, smiled, and crashed through the net and her angel locks were swimming in a puddle of blood. For years I thought that that's what it's like in the circus: every night a woman flies through the air, smiles, and lies on the ground amid blood and sand."
Horror and comedy were always closely linked in the imagination of Tabori, who rose to become one of the most emblematic and disturbing writers and directors in post-war European theatre.
He was born Gyorgy Tbori in 1914, the son of a journalist. His literary interests were apparent from the start, but believing that Hungary had "more writers than readers", his father sent him to Berlin in 1932 to learn the hotel trade. He spent several months waiting on tables and cleaning ashtrays before returning to Budapest a year later, after Hitler came to power.
In 1936, aged 22, Tabori decided to leave his native Hungary and emigrated to London, where he made ends meet by writing articles and translating. As the Second World War began, he volunteered for the British Army and began a career worthy of a James Bond: he was a foreign correspondent in Bulgaria, joined the Secret Service and was sent to Istanbul, where on one occasion he faked his own suicide.
As the persecution of Jews intensified in Budapest, Tabori tried to convince his parents to join him in Istanbul. Having refused to emigrate, his father was gassed in Auschwitz in 1944. His mother escaped deportation due to extraordinary luck and determination, a chain of events Tabori later dramatised in his play My Mother's Courage (1979), which was made into a film starring Pauline Collins in 1995.
Tabori went to Palestine after Turkey and from there back to London, where he worked for the BBC and began writing fiction. He published several novels in English, including Beneath the Stone the Scorpion (1945), Companions of the Left Hand (1946) and Original Sin (1947). He gained British citizenship in 1945 and decided to try his luck in Hollywood. Initially planning to stay just three months, he was soon working as a scriptwriter, writing several screenplays including Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953).
In Los Angeles the young writer also socialised with famous emigrants including Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Berthold Brecht, whose plays Tabori translated into English. "That changed my life," he later recalled. "My encounter with Brecht made me abandon fiction and seduced me into the theatre - I am grateful to him for this, but I also curse him for it."
Increasingly disillusioned with the film business, Tabori was attracted by the theatres of New York, where his first play, Flight into Egypt, was staged on Broadway in 1952 by his then close friend Elia Kazan. Kazan's role in the McCarthy persecutions would estrange the two men and cause Tabori to be blacklisted, another factor pushing him away from the movies and into the theatre. In New York, the budding director began working with Lee Strasberg in the Actors' Studio, a key force for renewal in the theatre world at that time.
Tabori's directing style was marked by his aversion to authoritarianism. "Most things you can see on stage come from the actors. I only reacted to their ideas," he would later say.
In 1969 he was invited to stage his play The Cannibals at the Schiller Theater in Berlin. The controversial play, which had premiered on Broadway the year before, shows a group of Jews in Auschwitz who are given the choice of either can-nibalising one of their fellow inmates or going to their deaths. The protagonist was clearly drafted on the author's own father - "always a moderate eater" - and was seen on stage entering the gas chamber with an impeccably courteous "after you, Mr Mandelbaum". Tabori feared rioting in the audience and had an escape car parked by the stage door, but the German public greeted the play with "thunderous applause".
Enthusiastic about the ensemble work on the Berlin stage and the intellectual possibilities of subsidised theatre, Tabori decided to stay in Berlin, ending a period of more than 20 years in the United States - and his marriage to the actress Viveca Lindfors. An earlier marriage to the actress Hannah Freund had ended in 1952. He married one further time - "not such a lot for my age", he commented towards the end of his life.
The most important part of Tabori's career began at an age when most of his colleagues were long retired. Via Bremen, Bochum and Munich he had moved to Vienna in 1986, where he directed operas and led his own theatre, Der Kreis ("The Circle"), until 1990 and continued to stage both classic repertoire and his own works at Vienna's Burgtheater and throughout the world.
In 1990 when he came to London with his play Mein Kampf, Farce, an account of the early years of Adolf Hitler, he was asked by The Independent about his views on commercial theatre, and was in characteristically caustic mood: Commercial theatre is essentially anti-theatre. It has to be likeable - but it is not the function of art to be likeable. Coca-Cola is likeable, summer is likeable, a stroll along the river in Henley where I was on Saturday - that's likeable. But don't tell me that Hamlet is likeable. Who would want to spend a weekend with him?
Tabori's plays always circled around questions of guilt and remembrance, but his love of the absurd and his sharp eye for the farcical nature of tragic situations turned even the grimmest theme into comedy. Goldberg Variations (first performed 1991) became an iconic work of modern theatre and reveals his debt to Kafka, Brecht and Samuel Beckett, with whom he had shared accommodation during his early days in Berlin. In the play, a struggling Jerusalem theatre director becomes God the father and crucifies his assistant. It contains the lines - now famous as graffitti the world over - "God is Dead - Nietzsche." "Nietzsche is Dead - God."
Tabori published in three languages and lived in many countries: "I have lost my English, my German is deteriorating, and I speak Hungarian only to my dog", he once confided to a journalist. Asked what he would like to pass on to future generations, he said: "Once, at lunch, in Budapest before the war, I repeated what somebody had said at school, namely that all Romanians are homosexuals. My fathergave me a slap in the face, the only one I ever received. Perhaps that's what I could hand on." George Tabori was a major influence on my work, writes Michael Batz. Our friendship and collaboration date from the time I directed the British premiere of what is probably his most brilliant play, Mein Kampf, Farce (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, 1989). His own production had been a huge success in Vienna, but he was immediately willing to work with us. He not only invited me and the actors over to Vienna, but when realising we were as skint as most British theatre companies paid for the journey out of his own pocket, and put us up in his and his actors' flats; his reasoning for this typical act of generosity being (spoken very calmly and slowly as usual): "I want you to see my production ... not because I want you to do the same ... but because I want you to know why yours will be different."
When he came to Edinburgh with his wife Uschi to see the show he spent several very happy days with us and gave a notable talk at the Traverse. As he always maintained that "God is coincidence" he was particularly pleased that the role of Gretchen was played by Esther Freud (now famous for her novels), great-granddaughter of Sigmund, who had lived around the corner from his Vienna theatre, Der Kreis. We worked together on many occasions after this, all over Europe, including our British premiere of Weisman and Copperface - a Jewish Western (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, 1991) and he agreed to become patron of my company. I was always aware of his background as Hollywood screenwriter (impossible to forget the stories of his friends from Chaplin to Garbo) and his great importance in the German-speaking theatre world; but only in the last six years of working in France did I realise his truly European stature. Here, in Paris and elsewhere, his plays are constantly performed.
It is important not to forget that Tabori is a writer belonging to the English language: he wrote all his plays in English, and they were translated for the German productions. This makes him the only English author to have been awarded the Bochner Prize, normally exclusively honouring German writers. It is sad, therefore, that in Britain there has been so much less interest in his plays and none at all from the "big boys" at the RSC or the National.
Gyorgy Tbori (George Tabori), playwright, theatre director, novelist and translator: born Budapest 24 May 1914; married 1942 Hanna Freund (marriage dissolved 1945), 1953 Viveca Lindfors (two stepsons, one stepdaughter; marriage dissolved), 1985 Ursula Hopfner; died Berlin 23 July 2007.
