Nina (Bruno Frank)
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| Genus: | comedy |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Bruno Frank |
| Premiere: | September 3, 1931 |
| Place of premiere: | Dresden theater |
| Place and time of the action: | Berlin (1st and 2nd act), Munich, a year later (3rd act). |
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Nina. Comedy in three acts from 1931 is a play by Bruno Frank . The world premiere took place on September 3, 1931 at the Schauspielhaus Dresden, with further performances in Berlin, Munich, Rome, Paris and London. The comedy was very successful on German stages and in London, where the play was performed 183 times. The printed edition of the piece was published in 1931 by Drei Masken-Verlag in Munich / Berlin.
Overview
The celebrated film diva Nina Gallas is tired of her fame and the stress of work, especially since there is hardly any time left for life with her husband. She leaves her career to her film double without the public realizing it, and withdraws into private life.
action
Note: Numbers in round brackets, for example (152), refer to the corresponding pages in the printed edition #Frank 1931.1 used .
The world-famous film diva Nina Gallas cannot save herself from offers. She is happily married to the successful car designer Stefan Breuer. But her job and fame hardly leave her time for a private life. The capable secretary Eva Weininger takes over the internal organization from the star, and a double, the naive Trude Mielitz, shoots the insignificant, time-consuming and exhausting scenes in her place. Mielitz is from Berlin, but "she doesn't speak a careless dialect, she tries to speak fine and stately." (18)
Stefan Breuer is not satisfied with the fact that Nina seldom devotes a bit of her precious time to him, but also Nina herself profession and fame are becoming more and more a burden. When one day her husband even mistook her double for herself, she made the decision to fundamentally change her life. The event encourages them to believe that the audience does not worship themselves, but only their “speaking shadow” (9). Couldn't her double completely replace her in her film roles, and she herself withdraw into private life? She finally convinced her initially reluctant director Paul Hyrkan to use Trude Mielitz in her place.
The couple bought a stately villa property in Bavaria, where they spent a happy time far from all stress and haste. Trude Mielitz marries Paul Hyrkan and pursues a career in Hollywood instead of Nina. She pays the Breuers a visit to present her first film in Germany. Obviously, the borrowed fame did not do her any good, she has transformed from a modest extra into a blasé star with ugly airs.
Fritzi Massary
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Fritzi Massary and Bruno Frank lead actress and author of the play "Nina" at the end of the Berlin premiere |
The double role of film diva Nina and her double Trude was written for Bruno Frank's mother-in-law Fritzi Massary (1882–1969). Although she was not a film diva, she was the operetta diva of the Weimar Republic. Bruno Frank always had the role model of his Nina in mind and was able to draw on unlimited resources.
At the end of the twenties, the Massary switched from operetta to comedy. On October 18, 1929, she played the leading role for the first time in the comedy “The First Mrs. Selby”, a play by the Englishman St. John Ervine in a translation by Bruno Frank in the Berlin theater on Königgrätzer Strasse. At the Dresden premiere of “Nina”, the Massary could not take on the role of Nina due to scheduling reasons, but in October 1931 she was the focus of the Berlin production.
In 1932 Fritzi Massary, of Jewish origin, fled from the National Socialists to Vienna, then to London. In 1939 she emigrated to Beverly Hills in the USA, where she lived in the house of her daughter Liesl and her son-in-law Bruno Frank. After moving to the USA, the Massary remained without engagement. In 1940, Bruno Frank wrote the play “ The Forbidden City ”, in which his mother-in-law was supposed to portray the Chinese empress widow. However, there was no stage that wanted to perform the play.
reception
- LW, Bohemia, September 13, 1931:
- Nina is a graceful game, a noble joke that, despite all the nonchalance, contains a good deal of time criticism.
- Herbert Günther: Revolving stage of the time. Friendships, Encounters, Fates, page 91:
- Frank suffered more and more from increasing radicalization, confusion and brutality. A boon for him was the success of "Nina" with his mother-in-law Fritzi Massary, for whom he had written this role. "As far as I can see, a very useful play," he had announced to me. The Berlin premiere in October 1930 proved him right. Here I saw him for the last time, cheered. Happy he stood in front of the curtain and kissed Fritzi Massary's hand again and again while the audience applauded both of them enthusiastically.
- Bruno Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner judged the piece in 2009:
- Nina is a comedy about the emptiness and the futility of fame: “He's imagination. Gossip. Misunderstanding. [...] There remains a speaking shadow in the world that bears my name. Is that me now or am I not? I was there but again ... "(152) An effective dual role for Fritzi Massary in which they at the same time as a diva and as cheeky brat with" could put Berlin snout "in scene. After the Munich premiere on September 8, 1931 with the much admired Maria Bard in the lead role, Bruno Frank was again confronted with the familiar criticism of his plays. He wrote to the journalist Richard Braungart: “I'm gradually getting used to the capers of the Munich criticism. The gentlemen ask for plums from the Christmas tree, from a comedy from Hebbel's abysses. ”A German writer hardly ever allowed that upscale entertainment, which in France or England is not considered crude. In a lecture on “today's theater”, which he gave on February 23, 1932 at the Rotary Club in Munich, Frank criticized contemporary drama: “Above all: there is too much psychology, hair splitting and motivation on stage. The playwright should grab a hand, be somewhat carefree and not be too afraid of questions from the audience. […] A second piece of advice to the writers should be: Don't think yourself too good to entertain your audience! There is no shame in being entertaining. "
Print output
- Nina. Comedy in three acts. Munich / Berlin: Drei Masken Verlag, 1931, pdf .
literature
- Herbert Günther: Revolving stage of the time. Friendships, encounters, fates. Hamburg: Wegner, 1957, page 91.
- Frank, Bruno. In: Renate Heuer (ed.): Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Archive Bibliographia Judaica, Volume 7: Feis – Frey, Munich 1999, Pages 250–268, here: 265.
- Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887–1945) - life and work. Düsseldorf: Grupello, 2009, pages 192–193, 252.
Footnotes
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 192.
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , pp. 192–193.
- ↑ # This year 1999 .
- ↑ # Günther 1957 .
- ↑ Must read: Berlin premiere with Fritzi Massary in October 1931.
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 193.