Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John

Reviewed by: Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John Vera Stegmann Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare. By Joerg Esleben with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 365. Cloth $52.50. ISBN 978-1487500382. The East German theatre director Fritz Bennewitz (1926–1995) had a colorful career and left a remarkably versatile body of work that may not be widely known outside the field of GDR studies. Born in 1926 in Chemnitz, he was drafted in World War II, taken as a prisoner of war by the Americans in 1945, and had to work in a coal mine. After the war, he studied humanities in Leipzig and theater in Weimar; and from 1953–1955 he was a lecturer on Marxist-Leninist aesthetics at the Theater Academy Leipzig. In 1955 he became senior director of the Meiningen Theater, which he [End Page 182] transformed into the second most important Brecht stage in the GDR. In 1960 Bennewitz took over as director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar. Beginning in the 1970s, Bennewitz's artistic career was increasingly shaped by international experiences. He directed plays and conducted workshops in Romania, West Germany, the US, Switzerland, Venezuela, and most frequently in India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Bennewitz first went to India in 1970 to produce Brecht's Threepenny Opera with students at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. This visit initiated a twenty-four-year-long engagement with Indian theatre, during which he returned regularly to India to produce plays. His long-time involvement with the International Theatre Institute and his role as the institute's vice president since 1984 facilitated these visits. In 1991 Bennewitz received the coveted Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the highest award for performing arts in India, as only the second non-Asian to be granted this honor. His last productions concentrated on Goethe's Faust, in Hindi at the Tata Theater in Mumbai and in German at the Meiningen Theater. He could not complete the latter, since he died of cancer in 1995 and was buried at the historical cemetery in Weimar. Research on Bennewitz's work has recently grown dramatically. The Fritz-Bennewitz-Freundeskreis, founded in January 1996, established the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig, which is curated by Rolf Rohmer, one of the contributors to the volume. Canadian scholar David G. John, another contributor to this volume, published Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings in 2012; and Esleben's Fritz Bennewitz in India represents the product of team work and the most advanced state of intercultural Bennewitz scholarship to date, for which prominent Indian scholars, such as the cultural critic Rustom Bharucha, were consulted as well. The book is divided into two parts: the larger first part, about two thirds of the volume, covers Bennewitz's letters about his experiences in India, translated and adapted into English by Esleben and presented with Esleben's contextualized commentary and annotations. Interestingly, these letters are now first presented in English; a publication of the original letters in German never materialized, primarily for financial reasons. Most of these letters were addressed to his friend and confidante Waltraut Mertes. It is a one-sided correspondence; Mertes's responses have not been preserved. The shorter second part of the book contains external sources about Bennewitz: a character sketch by the Indian theater personality K.V. Subbanna; excerpts from Esleben's interviews in India with theater practitioners and scholars Amal Allana, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Akshara K.V., Prasanna, and Anuradha Kapur; a biographical essay by Rolf Rohmer; and an article by David G. John on Bennewitz and Brechtian political theater in India. A complete chronology of Bennewitz's productions in South Asia and his Indian projects in Germany, as well as a glossary of Indian and German theatrical terms, complete this rich and detailed sourcebook. Bennewitz's letters cover a fascinating array of subjects. We learn in detail about [End Page 183] Bennewitz's productions of plays by Brecht, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Volker Braun; we hear about the Indian performances that Bennewitz witnessed, and his...

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