The mandatory mandate

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Movie
Original title The mandatory mandate
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1973
length 105 minutes
Rod
Director Ulrich Engelmann (theater),
Margot Thyrêt (television)
production Television of the GDR
music Reiner Bredemeyer
camera Rosemarie Sundt ,
Waltraut Sandau ,
Gerhard Jarius ,
Joachim Lietzke ,
Wolfgang Rehausen
cut Dagmar Brähmisch
occupation

The compulsory mandate is the GDR television recording made in 1973 of a production by Ulrich Engelmann in the small comedy of the Deutsches Theater Berlin based on the stage play The Dock Brief by the British writer and playwright John Mortimer from 1958.

action

The previously unsuccessful lawyer Wilfred morning Hall is public defender of the murderer Henry Fowle. When he introduces himself to him in prison , he has no use for the term lawyer and regrets that he has gotten on the wrong track. Morgenhall tries to explain to the prisoner that he only came to help him, but he also offers to help. Morgenhall admits that although it has some problems at the moment due to a temporary business downturn, these will certainly be resolved with the upcoming process . Now, of course, the question for Fowle is what kind of process it is about, because his own is completely unimportant and irrelevant to him. Also, he has so many tasks to do in his prison cell that he doesn't have time for such things.

This indifference arouses Morgenhall to the utmost and he first explains to his client the effort that he had to make to learn this profession. He informed Fowle down to the last detail about his problems and efforts during his studies, which also included Latin lessons . After passing his exams, he worked in his law firm until his first case, solving crossword puzzles, which five years later, due to a lack of clients, was still his main task. When he tells that his bride was killed by a ricochet while driving an ambulance during the war in 1914 , Fowle replies that he was not so lucky because his wife was not drafted into the army. Morgenhall emphasizes once again that he is in this cell to defend him, but Fowle tells him that there is nothing to be done because, as an honest person, he admits to having murdered his wife. Now the lawyer tries to explain to him that he was chosen as a public defender when he pointed to him, but on closer inspection this turns out to be an oversight. When he points out to Fowle that his future life depends on this process, because with this task he expects the long-overdue breakthrough in his profession, he receives the promise that Fowle will endeavor not to disappoint him again as he did with the confession did.

Now Fowle tells how the falling out with his wife Doris came about. She was a very funny woman who could laugh out loud at every joke and joke, but that bothered him very much, because he wanted to have his peace and quiet, which he only found with his budgies . So that she could continue to live out her amusement, he obtained an advertisement from a lodger who shared the same inclinations with her and with whom she could laugh a lot. When their relationship got closer and closer, Fowle already had the hope that they would both leave him together and that he would finally be alone, but one day Doris had thrown the lodger out of the apartment because he was too close to her. So Wilfred had his wife alone all day long with her merriment. Since this story does not help the lawyer, he now constructs a court hearing in which Fowle represents the judge and in which he wants to try out his tactics in a very practical way. Morgenhall gets so involved in the story that in the end he thinks the negotiation really went that way. Only Fowle makes him emphatically aware that it was just an exercise, which disappoints him very much, but he doesn't want to think about giving up. But the lightning-fast enlightenment of how things should go on is a long time coming, which is why both still play through different variants of a court hearing in which Fowle always has to take on the role of the respective witness.

The hour of the trial comes and then Fowle tries to comfort the lawyer in his cell, as he could not obtain an acquittal for his mandatory client . For Morgenhall a world is collapsing because he has lost this process in which he placed so much hope. But he does not want to give up and has the intention to appeal , which the convict strictly rejects. This in turn irritates the lawyer, but theoretically he is already getting involved in the appeal negotiations until Fowle makes it clear to him that this effort does not make sense. Although he had to promise Morgenhall in the morning to spare him further disappointments, he cannot avoid telling the truth that the lawyer desperately wants to know: After the trial, Fowle is called to the prison warden, who tells him that he has been granted an act of grace obtained immediate freedom, on the grounds that the compulsory lawyer was already very old and unusable, that he did not utter a single word to exonerate the accused and that he was thus completely without a defense.

Since Fowle already looks like a criminal, Morgenhall, despite all his disappointment, hopes that one day he will commit another crime and he will then be able to be his lawyer again.

Production and publication

The translation was carried out by Marianne de Barde and Hanns A. Hammelmann , the lyrics are by Maik Hamburger and Klaus Wischnewski worked in the dramaturgy. The stage set created Falk von Wangelin .

The play had its premiere on April 10, 1972 in the small comedy of the German Theater Berlin and was broadcast on February 21, 1973 in the first program of the GDR television.

criticism

In the Neue Zeit , Helmut Ullrich noticed about the theater premiere that the play can be viewed from different perspectives, with one being the opportunity for two actors to simply take it as an offer to develop their brilliant comedic art. And he continues:

“From the latter point of view, however, the performance in the Small Comedy of the German Theater is to be primarily appreciated, where the set designer Falk von Wangelin set up the prison cell in which the honorable public defender's counseling with 'his' murderer takes place, as a tent and where it is precisely directed Ulrich Engelmann, who understood Mortimer's whole, half, intermediate and undertones perfectly, Messrs Reimar Joh. Baur and Jürgen Holtz act. "

Ernst Schumacher from the Berliner Zeitung comments on the premiere in the Deutsches Theater as follows:

"The logic and course of this comedy are actually quite absurd, lose themselves from the human to the all-too-human, touch upon the bizarre and yet constantly drill into fragile places of our existence, even if the story seems to be completely out of place."

In the review of the New Germany about the theater premiere, Rainer Kerndl wrote :

“The young director Ulrich Engelmann has the hilarious psychology of the two characters used as material for the prominence of two lavishly played individualities. He goes to the limits of character comedy without even smoothing out the grotesque situations or the clown-like roles. Baur and Holtz make the most of all the chances of the piece without exposing their figures to the merely grotesque. They remain lovable and likeable, cause ironic pity and cheerful amazement, are as sovereign as actors as their characters are hilariously unworldly, clumsy or awkwardly tricky. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of March 30, 1972, p. 6
  2. ↑ Neue Zeit of April 21, 1972, p. 4
  3. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of April 23, 1972, p. 10
  4. ↑ Neues Deutschland, April 30, 1972, p. 6