Mute role

A silent role is a stage or film character who does not have to speak or sing a text.

Supporting roles

There are numerous silent roles as supporting roles in operas and plays . Under the Dramatis personae at the beginning of the piece texts, they are often marked with the addition “silent role”. Also extras usually have no text. These characters need not be mute in the sense that they cannot speak.

Leading roles

Mute leading roles are rarer. They make mute an issue. Almost without exception, they are “good” characters. There are those who fundamentally cannot or do not want to speak, such as Kattrin in Bertolt Brecht's mother Courage and her children , and those who learn to speak in the course of the plot or regain the lost language. Such characters are often given a language through “gestural” music ( melodrama ). Because the mute characters lack normal language, it is believed that they are not pretending to be, and their efforts to make something understandable are touching. They are usually the most artificial characters in the game.

stage

Its history goes back to the Parisian fairground theaters , in which speaking was forbidden at times since the 17th century. In Molière's play The Doctor Against Will (1666) the young Lucinde pretends to be mute in order not to have to enter into the marriage arranged by her father .

Modern pantomime developed from this situation . The Parisian boulevard theaters in the 19th century were still forced to allow silent characters to appear because the number of speaking or singing characters on the stage was restricted by the license of the theater. For example, the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin was temporarily in this situation . As a result, an acting craft of silent play developed. But mimes were not generally mute. However , there were standing roles that were consistently silent, like Pierrot in the Théâtre des Funambules . - In a silent game Ballet specialized mimics .

Mute leading roles were popular in the now-defunct theater genre of melodrama , which had been cultivated especially in the theaters on Paris' Boulevard du Temple since the beginning of the 19th century , but had worldwide appeal. Famous silent leading roles were Victorin in The Orphan and the Murderer (1816), Eloi in The Dog of Aubry (1814) and the title character in Yelva, the Russian Orphan (1828). As an experiment, the silent main role of the melodramas was also adopted in a grand opéra in 1828 : La muette de Portici . The silent role of the fishing girl Fenella was often played by a dancer, but could also be played by an actress or singer.

A parallel can be seen between mute roles and trained animals that were sometimes integrated into stage plays, such as in The Dog of Aubry , where a trained dog and a mute human role meet, both with a touching effect.

This tradition is reflected in the opera Der Junge Lord von Bachmann and Henze (1965), set in 1830 . Barrat, the supposed nephew of Sir Edgar, but actually a circus monkey, speaks, sings and dances. The uncle wraps himself in elegant silence. He has a secretary who speaks for him.

Movie

The tradition of the silent characters on the boulevard stages has been carried over to silent films via Vaudeville and Music Hall , as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton show. Even in sound films there were still mute characters like Harpo Marx from the Marx Brothers , who made himself understandable acoustically by playing the harp and with horns and whistles. A critic from the vaudeville era of the troupe noted that his talent for pantomime loses a lot of its fascination as soon as he begins to speak. Harpo was reluctant to be persuaded, but then became a "silent film star of the sound film era".

Silent leading roles are quite common in film history. One of the most famous examples is the British-Canadian adventure film How a Scream in the Wind (1966), in which a silent orphan ( Rita Tushingham ) is sold to a wilderness trapper ( Oliver Reed ) in 1850 . This motif took up The Piano by Jane Campion in 1993. Here music serves as a substitute language.

In the film Children of a Lesser God (1986), which goes back to a play, there are clear parallels to the stage melodrama. The film Nell (1994) is also based on a play. The exploration and learning of language as a topic can also be seen in Leeloo from The Fifth Element (1997).

The concept of the silent role in the film can also be extended to animals ( Flipper , Fury , Lassie , Commissioner Rex ) or machines (like living cars: Herbie ). The dramaturgical means and the musical support are similar to those of human mute roles, even if the line to comedy is crossed more quickly.

literature

• Mathias Spohr: Melodrama - Technical Media, Mute Figures and the Illusion of 'Expression' , in: Claudia Jeschke, Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Ed.): Movement in View. Contributions to movement research in theater studies , Berlin: Vorwerk 2000, pp. 258–273