The Prince of Homburg

3 / 5 stars
Donmar Warehouse, London
The Prince Of Homburg
The Prince Of Homburg. Photograph: Johan Persson Johan Persson/PR

Is it legitimate to tamper with the climax of a classic play? How would we feel if Hamlet lived on or Rosalind failed to marry Orlando? I ask because something similar has happened here. Heinrich von Kleist's great German play, written shortly before his death in 1811, has been given a new ending by Dennis Kelly which perverts the play's meaning and undermines an otherwise fascinating evening.

Set during the time of Brandenburg's war with the Swedes, the play starts mesmerisingly. In a moonlit garden, the eponymous prince has vivid dreams of military glory and royal betrothal. But, on waking, he becomes a distracted figure who fails to attend to the battle-plans of the ruling Elector.

As a result, in ordering the cavalry to charge too early, the prince suffers a bad case of premature exhortation. Although the Swedes are routed, the prince is court-martialled for disobeying orders and sentenced to death. What follows is an intricate cat-and-mouse game in which the Elector, bombarded with pleas for mercy by his generals and his niece, offers to quash the sentence if the prince himself can prove it was unjust.

So what is the play saying? To the Nazis, it was clearly a vindication of obedience to a strict military code; and both Kelly's version, with its references to the "Fatherland", and Jonathan Munby's production, with its orgy of Prussian heel-clicking, treat the play as if it were guilty by association with national socialism. But Kleist's play is infinitely more subtle and morally ambiguous than that. In part, it is about the age-old conflict between freedom and order. But it is also a startlingly prophetic play about the equivocal nature of reality. In his dreams, the prince seems on solid ground. Only when he wakes is he plunged into a world of utter confusion. In this sense, it is only a short step, as George Steiner once pointed out, from Kleist to Pirandello.

The tantalising thing is that when Munby's production sticks close to the original, it is very good. Angela Davies's design, Neil Austin's lighting and Dominic Haslam's music lend the opening sequence a phantasmagoric quality. Charlie Cox also catches perfectly the uncertainty of the prince himself torn between cowardice and heroism, between instinctive fear of death and surrender to the military ethos. Sonya Cassidy as the Elector's love-struck niece and Harry Hadden-Paton as an outspoken count also provide vigorous support.

But 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!".