[In the following excerpted review, Hornby gives a mixed assesment of The Living Theatre's production of German Requiem.]

Long-time theatregoers will be interested to know that the Living Theatre is alive, if not completely well, in a tiny store front theatre on the lower East Side of New York. The Living Theatre, founded in 1948 by Julian Beck and his wife, Judith Malina, became an important part of the experimental Off-Broadway movement in the fifties. It was also an important part of my own early theatrical experience; I saw all its major productions thirty years ago—William Carlos Williams's Many Loves, Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise, Gelber's The Connection and The Apple (which I saw on my honeymoon, which shows how stage-struck I was!), Brecht's Man is Man, Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig—and became infatuated. How wonderful theatre can be, I thought, and was hooked for life.

Then, as far as I was concerned, the Living Theatre went crazy. Although the Becks had always had an anarchist-pacifist viewpoint (which was OK by me), they also were devoted to a poetic concept of theatre, as the above list of plays indicates. Brown's The Brig was their first openly social-protest play, but it was far more than agit-prop; the rigors of survival in a Marine Corps brig were depicted with a strange, austere stylishness. Style was jettisoned in their later work, however, especially in Paradise Now, the epitome of mindless sixties radicalism, which had the performers (one could hardly call them actors) standing around whining about not being allowed to smoke marijuana or take their clothes off. Then they went off to change the world, in Europe, Brazil, Pittsburgh coal mines. Their low point for me came when Beck gave a talk at a national theatre conference around 1969, denouncing the entire western dramatic tradition as cold, racist, sexist, fascist, imperialist, and maybe vivisectionist. To this day, I curse myself for not having booed.

Julian Beck died in 1985, having failed to change the world. Ask too much of the theatre, and you will receive too little. The irony of the sixties was that the more pretentious the LT became, the more notoriety it got, but the ultimate irony is that the notoriety led finally to its being dismissed as a historical quirk, its earlier, genuine achievements forgotten.

Since her husband's death, Malina has continued to run the company, which last spring presented Eric Bentley's German Requiem, based on Kleist's romantic drama Die Familie Schroffenstein. Bentley, the most distinguished drama critic living today, has written a number of fine plays, which are less well known than they should be. This is because no one believes that a critic can have any practical theatre ability, but also because most of his plays are historical and political (in the style of Bertolt Brecht, his friend and mentor), while the prevalent fashion in American playwriting is narrow character study.

In German Requiem, two feuding branches of a medieval German family rule a divided kingdom. Mutual suspicion, envy, misunderstanding, and assassination are counterpointed by a Romeo-and-Juliet love story between the eldest son of one family and the beautiful young daughter of the other. The play can be seen as a parable about the recently-divided Germany of today, or about the wider split between East and West, or about human nature generally whenever two nations become rivals.

Although the play is crowded with incidents, including a beheading, a stoning, and several sword fights, Malina staged it deftly in the cramped space. The actors, always visible, posed like medieval cathedral statuary on long platforms on either side of the room; encounters between the two families thus took place between the platforms, or on a third, high platform at the back. This simple spatial iconography meant that it was always clear who was who, and always possible to follow the twists and turns of the political struggles. Bénédicte Leclerc's costumes, despite being constructed of the sleaziest of low-budget fabrics, also helped to establish character and mood, with a genuinely medieval look.

The acting, unfortunately, was uniformly amateurish. The LT was never known for superior acting talent, but there was usually sincerity and raw emotional power. The current group, mostly young, all non-Equity, lack even that. Malina had obviously worked hard with the actors, because their performances had balance and pace. They delivered the elaborate language stumblingly on the tongue, however, managing to overenunciate and slur words at the same time. Quiet, tense, humorless, their performances were an exercise in monotony. Nevertheless, I was pleased to see the LT back in New York, in a permanent (meager!) home, doing the kind of play they used to do in the old days—challenging, imaginative, well staged, and unashamedly literary.