A Great Actress
No one who saw Helene Weigel (1900-71) perform seems to have forgotten the experience. Her diction, gestures, and sense of drama were meticulously equilibrated. A biographer has written that ‘Weigel’s movements on stage were employed deliberately and economically, as the actress believed that too many details would lead to an extreme naturalism that could ruin a character’. That’s worth remembering also on the stage we all share of ordinary life. Weigel’s great-heartedness was proverbial. I love the story of how she, a signed-up member of the Communist Party, took pity on the FBI agent assigned to watch her house on a bitterly cold day during her WW2 American exile, so invited the fellow inside, ‘where’, she said, ‘he could observe her more easily’. On YouTube I have found this recording sparkling with intelligence of Weigel reading works by her husband Bertolt Brecht. Oh, the mystery of the human voice! Though Weigel has been dead for half a century she becomes tantalisingly near as we hear her tell of Giordano Bruno’s overcoat, a story of tenderness, of the composition of the Book of Tao Te Ching and of the Soldier of La Ciotat. And what noble indignation in her rendering of Brecht’s Class Enemy.
