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Michael Frayn on Max Reinhardt
Max Reinhardt today is not much remembered in this country. For the first forty years of the twentieth century, though, he was a world celebrity.
He was probably best known for his spectacular international stagings of a now-forgotten epic of religious kitsch called The Miracle, which he mounted with a lavishness that far outdid any modern musical or rock show – in Vienna with a cast of 1,500 and an orchestra of 150, in London with a cast of 2,000 and and orchestra of 200. On Broadway in 1937 he outdid this with an even more stunning excursion into show-business piety, Judaic rather than Christian, called The Eternal Road, which covered the entire history of the Jews. This had a rather more modest cast – 350 – but between them they wore 1,700 costumes, and the sets, which were four storeys high and covered almost an acre, required the rebuilding of the theatre. The result was a sell-out – and beggared all who had been cajoled to invest in it.
Even at the height of his success he was often dismissed as a mere showman, and his son Gottfried, in his memoir of his father, accepts that “a slight whiff of charlatanism” has always hovered about him. His real achievements, though, were on no less a scale than his great religious extravaganzas. In 1905 he took over the direction of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and rebuilt it. Without any support from the state he turned it into a kind of German National Theatre. By the time he gave up the running of the theatre in 1932 it had produced over 450 plays – and he had directed about 170 of them himself.
His energy and ambition were boundless. By the end of his life he had directed some 340 productions and built or rebuilt no fewer than thirteen theatres.
He had also acquired and restored Leopoldskron, the great baroque palace outside Salzburg – out of all his productions, said his wife, the one that he was proudest of.
And lost it.
Extract taken from Reinhardt and the world of the play by Michael Frayn. Read the article in full in the National Theatre programme for Afterlife.
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