Charley's aunt

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WS Penley as the original Charley's aunt, drawn by Alfred Bryan

Charley's Aunt (English original title Charley's Aunt ) is a farce in three acts by Brandon Thomas from 1892.

action

The two students Charley and Jack urgently need a chaperone for a scheduled date with their friends Amy and Kitty . Since the intended Donna Lucia d'Alvadorez, Charley's aunt from Brazil, does not arrive in time, the two persuade their friend Lord Fancourt Babberly ("Babbs") to disguise the role as a woman. The situation comedy resulting from this travesty is what makes the piece so attractive.

reception

It premiered on February 29, 1892 at the Theater Royal, Bury St Edmunds. The premiere production already reached over 1,500 performances. The play was first performed in London on December 21, 1892 and on October 2, 1893 on New York's Broadway , where it ran for four years.

The German-language premiere took place on September 18, 1893 in Berlin's Adolf Ernst Theater (later Thalia Theater ), with Guido Thielscher in the lead role. In November 1893 the ensemble was ordered to the New Palais in Potsdam to perform their play to the emperor, which all of Berlin laughed at. Maximilian Harden wrote a critical article about this guest performance. On August 15, 1896, the play celebrated its 450th performance. The piece was first played in Vienna in 1894. In 1911 Leo Melitz counted the play in his Guide to the Drama of the Present to be one of the most frequently performed plays in Germany. In the 1920s it was even performed at the Deutsches Theater Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt and with Werner Krauss in the title role.

The piece sparked a fairly permanent wave of travesty roles . At the same time, around the turn of the century, great attention was paid to homosexuality , transvestism, and Magnus Hirschfeld's intermediate theory ( Sexology - History ). In 1901, a doctor, known only by initials, discussed in the article Vom Weibmann on the stage in the yearbook for sexual intermediate stages, among other things, men who, after years of unemployment and defamation, were suddenly able to secure a good income in women's clothes. Hirschfeld describes several cases of men in the 1910s who only questioned their own sexuality after seeing a rock role. And he describes several anecdotes in which men in women's clothes were stopped by the police in the street and were allowed to go on unmolested after they claimed they were playing in a rock role production. Dozens of variations were written from the material of the play, which were played on large and small stages, and in the years 1910 to 1914 alone (at least) 36 (still identifiable) rock roll films were brought onto the German market.

From 1948 to 1950, a musical version written by Frank Loesser and George Abbott under the title Where's Charley? , which was filmed in 1952. The German-language premiere of the musical was on November 25, 1960 under the title Wo ist Charley? at the Ulm Theater.

As an operetta, the piece was musically revised with Ernst Fischer's instrumental pieces and a corresponding version with dialogues and song texts by Dominik Wilgenbus , who also directed. It premiered on January 4, 2014 at the Munich Künstlerhaus .

Charley's Aunt is one of the most famous comedies in the world and has been translated into over a hundred languages.

Film adaptations

The play was made into films several times, first in 1915 as a silent film with Oliver Hardy and in 1925 with Sydney Chaplin , Charlie Chaplin's brother . A sound film with Charles Ruggles in the lead role was released in 1930.

A British parody of the play appeared in 1940 under the title Charley's Big-Hearted Aunt . The most famous film adaptation in the English-speaking world was released a year later, with comedian Jack Benny in the title role.

The films from 1955 with Heinz Rühmann ( Charley's aunt (1956) ) and 1963 with Peter Alexander ( Charley's aunt (1963) ) in the title role are well known in German-speaking countries . In December 1954, the NWDR broadcast Charley's aunt from the Millowitsch Theater in Cologne with siblings Willy and Lucy Millowitsch in the leading roles. Jörg Pleva played the leading role in another theatrical performance produced for television . The director Sönke Wortmann also filmed the play for television in 1996 with Thomas Heinze in the leading role ( Charley's aunt ) . An early film adaptation with Paul Kemp in the title role was made in 1934 under the direction of Robert A. Stemmle .

A Soviet adaptation for television was made in 1975 and proved a great success.

Historical radio play

On October 20, 1925, the piece was broadcast live as a radio play by NORAG ( Hamburg ) without the possibility of recording. The direction was directed by Ernst Pündter .

The speakers were:

Performers in the title role on stage (selection)

The following actors acted in the role of Charley's aunt: Axel von Ambesser , Leon Askin , Albert Bassermann , Curt Bois , Gino Bramieri , Lando Buzzanca , Sydney Chaplin , Hans Clarin , Sir Noël Coward , Will Dohm , Fernandel , José Ferrer , Gerhard Friedrich , Sir John Gielgud , Boy Gobert , Gustaf Gründgens , Sir Alec Guinness , Sir Rex Harrison , OE Hasse , Leslie Howard , Emil Jannings , Paul Kemp , Victor de Kowa , Werner Krauss , Theo Lingen , Erminio Macario , Markus Majowski , Heinz Marecek , Herbert Mensching , Willy Millowitsch , Sir John Mills , WS Penley (world premiere), Jörg Pleva , Freddy Quinn , Charles Ruggles , Tullio Solenghi, Heinz Rühmann , Carl-Heinz Schroth , Heinrich Schweiger , Guido Thielscher (German-language premiere), Brandon Thomas , Ugo Tognazzi , Erkki Hopf (Ohnsorg-Theater 2010), Torsten Schemmel .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anthony Slide: Great pretenders: a history of female and male impersonation in the performing arts . Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1986, ISBN 0-87069-474-X , pp. 71 .
  2. ^ William Grange: Thielscher, Guido (1859-1941) . In: Historical Dictionary of German Theater (=  Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts ). Scarecrow Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8108-6489-4 , pp. 317 (English).
  3. ↑ Manfred Nöbel: See you at five in the morning in Luisenstadt . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 2, 1998, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 17-23 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  4. ↑ Karl Friedrich Flögel , Max Bauer: History of the Grotesque-Comical . extended Edition. Georg Müller, Munich 1914, p. 175 .
  5. ^ Reinhard E. Petermann: Vienna in the Age of Emperor Franz Joseph I. R. Lechner (W. Müller), Vienna 1908, p. 98 ("Of the novelties of the decade, the English farce" Charley's Tante "(1894) and Hall Jones' English operetta" The Geisha "(1897) made the most talk.").
  6. ↑ Jan Distelmeyer (Ed.): Fun aside, film from: Jewish humor and suppressive laughter in comedy films up to 1945 (=  CineGraph ). Edition Text + Critique, 2006, ISBN 3-88377-803-6 , p. 137 .
  7. ↑ Klaus Dermutz , Karin Messlinger: The outsider worlds of Peter Zadek . Ed .: Klaus Dermutz (=  Edition Burgtheater . Band 1 ). Residenz, 2001, ISBN 3-7017-1243-3 , pp. 230 .
  8. ↑ Charley Aunt's comedy play on BR-Klassik from December 4, 2014. Accessed on April 19, 2017.