“The highest rule is that which beats in the heart.” A new version of Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 play The Prince of Homburg by Dennis Kelly
Heroic commander of the Prussian cavalry, the Prince of Homburg dreams of victory, glory and fame. But reckless disobedience during a crucial military operation leads the Prince into his greatest battle yet.
The creative team behind the Donmar’s critically acclaimed production of LIFE IS A DREAM present von Kleist’s poetic masterpiece, which is considered to be one of the most haunting and beautiful plays of the nineteenth century, exploring honour, courage, ambition and love.
The Prince of Homburg
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2.9 (13) |  |
0.0 (0) |
| Venue | Donmar Warehouse (click for full venue information) |
General
| Genres | 19th Century • 21st Century • Drama |
| Begins previews | 22 July 2010 |
| Opening | 27 July 2010 |
| Closing / Booking until | 04 September 2010 |
| Show times | Mon-Sat 7.30pm; Thu/Sat 2.30pm |
| Production website | http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl112book.html |
| Prices from | £13.00 |
| To | £29.00 |
| Running time | TBA |
| Ticket tips | Mondays and Thursday matinees: £15-£20 |
Cast & Creatives
- Author/Writer Heinrich von Kleist
- Director Jonathan Munby
- Designer Angela Davies
- Lighting design Neil Austin
- Featuring Charlie Cox, Ian McDiarmid
Editor reviews
View all editor reviewsAverage editor rating from: 13 user(s)
Fascinated the head but failed to move the heart
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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| Review | If it's uplift you're looking for then the Donmar Warehouse's "The Prince of Homburg" should be given a wide berth. A gruellingly philosophical evening that consistently made me think but often about slaughtering half the characters on-stage. There's been much talk of the rather drastically changed conclusion. I can only comment on what they deliver here and it works intellectually but left me feeling entirely short-changed emotionally. |
| Written by | Rob Walport |
| Full review | http://tttcritic.blogspot.com/2010/08/prince-of-homburg.html |
Prince of Homburg at the Donmar
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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Bit of a theatre packed week this week and kicked off in good style with a trip to the Donmar on Monday night. Now the plays they choose can be a bit hit or miss but Prince of Homburg was like a nice roast shoulder of lamb - tasty and with plenty to chew on. Written in the 19th century as the last play by Henrich van Kleist before he committed suicide at the age of 34 it examines personal freedom versus authority. The Prince (Charlie Cox) is a popular and successful military leader, charming but impetuous. The play opens on the night before a battle and the Prince sleepwalking in a moonlit garden. The Elector (Ian McDiarmid) and his family are called to observe the Prince's behaviour for their entertainment and decide to tease him in his somnambulatory state. |
| Written by | Rev Stan |
| Full review | http://theatre.revstan.com/2010/07/prince-of-homburg-at-the-donmar.html |
An act of betrayal
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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| Review | I admire Dennis Kelly immensely as a writer, and his version of the text here is strong and modern without being modish.?.?.? until the ending. I have simply had enough of “new versions” of plays that turn the original endings through 180 degrees. If you don’t believe in what the original playwright was saying, why bother with their work? If you do believe, why distort it? The dream/reality ambiguities of the original, and our own bleaker 21st-century outlook, are no excuses for what is a far greater act of betrayal than that of which the prince himself is accused. |
| Written by | Ian Shuttleworth |
| Full review | http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9ebc91ce-9f0f-11df-8732-00144feabdc0.html |
Robs the original of its subtlety, symmetry, and enigmatic equipois
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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harlie Cox strikingly captures the hero's existential perplexity as he progresses from dashing romantic innocence through desperate, death-haunted compromise to born-again Prussian conformity. Eerie song and balefully subjective lighting atmospherically establish the treacherous nature of the "reality" the protagonist is forced to traverse. But Kelly's adaptation does not trust the fact that Kleist's condemnation of the military ethos is all the more devastating for being so studiedly equivocal. I have no quarrel with the way that, though the production is set in the period of the play's composition, Prussia is referred to as "the fatherland" or that the heel-clicking soldiers have a proto-Nazi verbal salute. Where the version traduces the original is in substituting a tragic ending that absolves the drama from the taint of its future associations. Kleist's close, in contrast, unnerves by its ostensible, state-sanctioned happiness: it brilliantly mirrors the somnambulistic opening and leaves one wondering whether the Prince's surrender to obedience has been engineered by playing an equivalently bamboozling and shoddy trick on his susceptibilities. To expedite Kelly's changes, Ian McDiarmid's compelling stickler of an Elector has to coarsen from sardonically self-aware manipulator with mysteriously mixed motives to hectoring fascist devoid of paternal interest in the Prince. Given that this is a rare English revival of a German classic, would it not have been a courtesy to the audience to indicate in the programme that not all of it is echt Kleist? |
| Written by | Paul Taylor |
| Full review | http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-prince-of-homburg-donmar-warehouse-london-2039016.html |
In this director's insufficiently serious grasp, it underwhelms
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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Serious satire demands a delicate balance. Is it tragic or comic? The Donmar Warehouse's new version of The Prince Of Homburg veers too much to the latter. Here is an early 19th-century play by Heinrich von Kleist about the clash between military heroism and martial law. Should it go for laughs? The opening night's audience of Donmar Warehouse friends and supporters certainly thought so. How they laughed! How they tinkled away at the pompous soldiers talking about honour and comradeship and the necessity of obeying battle orders. Every time these men clicked their heels and slammed their chests in salute, young women in the stalls giggled. You'd have though they were watching an episode of TV's Blackadder. I found myself infuriated by their silliness. The Prince Of Homburg is so much better a play than this brainless laughter suggested. The audience's reaction was the result of Jonathan Munby's relentlessly modern direction. He has his actors gurn and gawp and play things for humour in places where far greater power could come from sticking to the rigidity of the military codes of the 19thcentury Prussia setting. |
| Written by | Quentin Letts |
| Full review | http://www.upthewestend.com/shows/west-end-major-shows/the-prince-of-homburg-donmar-warehouse.html |
As satisfyingly chewy as the most teeth-wrecking kind of German sausage
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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The Prince of Homburg is as satisfyingly chewy as the most teeth-wrecking kind of German sausage. Christopher Nolan’s Inception? Pah! Here’s a play, layered with paradox that needs no big movie special effects to make its audience’s heads spin. Dennis Kelly’s lucid, often beautifully lyrical new version betrays the original by altering the ending. Realpolitik rather than philosophy wins out. Fine by me: Kelly’s subversive stroke subtly connects the emergence of the modern German state with the terrifying absolutism of the Nazis, without jeopardising the drama’s other concerns. What’s less fine by me, though, is the déjà vu aesthetic of Jonathan Munby’s production, which shares the same bare-bones, austere look as last year’s triumphant account of Calderon’s Life is a Dream. Yes, you can view them as companion spirits, but we need more of the palace and less of the prison from Angela Davies’s punishingly grey design. |
| Written by | Dominic Cavendish |
| Full review | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/7914764/The-Prince-of-Homburg-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html |
A misfire from this so often excellent theatre
| Rating: | 2.0 |
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Charlie Cox effectively evokes the prince’s adolescent brand of disquiet. But he never really engages us. Better when passionate than when contemplative, he too often seems merely earnest. More memorable, though not happily so, is Ian McDiarmid as the Elector, who veers between a Blackadder-ish smoulder and the strangled rage of a cartoon fascist. He has moments of wintry gravity, yet his performance is weirdly mannered. There is some deft work from Harry Hadden-Paton and David Burke. But Jonathan Munby’s production is either too static or bombastic, and it accentuates without much subtlety the play’s relevance to Hitler’s Germany. |
| Written by | Henry Hitchings |
| Full review | http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-23860873-i-cant-tip-my-hat-to-this-prince-of-homburg.do |
One of the most satisfying on-stage letter writing scenes we’ve witnessed
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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Jonathan Munby‘s direction in the first half hour is rather flat and Dennis Kelly‘s new version (“NOW WITH NEW IMPROVED ENDING!”) of the Führer’s fave play suffers from a lack of “show don’t tell” – battlefield tactics are described at some length but we don’t see a single battle! No horses! Nothing! Just the Prince and his cohorts watching from a hill. Thankfully towards the end of the first act the dilemmas created gradually became more engaging and the core theme emerged: what is more important – winning at all costs or obedience to one’s superior? |
| Full review | http://westendwhingers.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/review-the-prince-of-homburg-donmar-warehouse/ |
You don’t feel close to the heart of this strange, slippery European milestone
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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Charlie Cox is a splendid, straightforward Romantic prince, not the existentialist hero you might have expected, horribly impulsive, even though his articulation tends to be slovenly. And there’s a great array of Prussian military types led by David Burke’s stern commanding officer, William Hoyland’s humanely dedicated infantry colonel, bloodied but unbowed, and Julian Wadham’s slyly inflected, very funny, field marshall. The prince has his Horatio, too, in the devoted figure of Harry Hadden-Paton’s royal count, and there are delicate, pointed contributions from Siobhan Redmond as the Electress and Sonya Cassidy as Natalia, the object of the prince’s hectic desire in a moonlit garden.you don’t feel close to the heart of this strange, slippery European milestone |
| Written by | Michael Coveney |
| Full review | http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=198&types=X&site=D |
New ending undermines an otherwise fascinating evening
| Rating: | 3.0 |
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| Review | The dilemma of this production is expressed by Ian McDiarmid's oddly confusing performance as the Elector. On one level, McDiarmid gives us a neat display of manipulative irony and handles the potential military insurrection with an amused guile. But gradually McDiarmid turns into a barking autocrat shrieking "I want rules and order." And, while it would be unfair to reveal the new ending, I can only say that it is not what Kleist wrote or intended. A brilliantly elusive play about the shifting nature of reality is turned into a trite lecture on the danger of nationalistic militarism. To which my only response is "Oh, Kleist!". |
| Written by | Michael Billington |
| Full review | http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jul/28/prince-of-homburg-review |
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