Joerg Esleben's publication on Fritz Bennewitz, written with David J. John (a Fritz Bennewitz scholar) and Rolf Rohmer (chief archivist of Bennewitz's archive in Leipzig), attends to the underanalysed status of Bennewitz's theatre in India. Until the early 2010s, Bennewitz, resident director at the Deutsches Nationaltheater between 1960 and 1990 in the East German city of Weimar, received little attention from theatre practitioners and scholars, despite his immense contribution to theatre, particularly in India. Esleben explores Bennewitz's contribution to Indian theatre comprehensively, incorporating his work on Brecht and Shakespeare, unlike previous publications such as David J. John's Bennewitz, Goethe, ‘Faust’: German and Intercultural Stagings (2012), that tended to focus more narrowly on Bennewitz's work with Goethe.
In his visits to India – ‘at least twenty-eight times’ (p. 295) – Bennewitz pioneered and facilitated intercultural collaborations that altered the way theatre was experienced in post-independence India. Esleben, who specializes in mapping cross-cultural interactions between India and Germany, expands the scholarship on Bennewitz by exploring the collaborations he initiated that led to significant intercultural productions. A case in point is Ajab Nyaya Vartulacha (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), a performance in Marathi directed by Bennewitz and Vijaya Mehta, an Indian director, on 16 November 1973. The performance became a major success after the premiere in Mumbai ‘as well as during the subsequent tour to the GDR and Switzerland in 1974 with guest performances at the Berliner Gesttage theatre festival in East Berlin, the German National Theatre in Weimar, in several other East German cities, and in Zurich’ (p. 59).
The book, divided into two parts, explores Bennewitz's productions of Brecht and Shakespeare in India. The first part, encompassing the first four chapters, translates and analyses Bennewitz's letters, mostly written to his partner, Waltraut Mertes, between 1970 and 1994. These letters document Bennewitz's engagement with the Indian theatrical scene while directing performances in India. Two significant themes run across these letters, namely how to build modern Indian theatre using native forms such as tamasha, kathakali and yakshagana, and how the new theatre should attend to the social problems of India.
Chapter 5 consists of reminiscences written by Indian theatre directors who collaborated with Bennewitz, such as Akshara K. V. and Prasanna. These reveal Bennewitz's capacity to inculcate critical thinking in his students and his ability to engage across culturally different contexts. This is followed by chapter 6, which includes two essays written by Rohmer and John respectively, on the intercultural aspect of Bennewitz's performances in India. These provide a short biographical sketch of Bennewitz and further highlight Bennewitz's ability to synthesize German and Indian theatres.
Esleben's translation of Bennewitz's letters from German to English is the first of its kind, and thus an important contribution to Indian theatre as it highlights how not only India's own native traditions but also intercultural encounters, such as Bennewitz's experiments, are responsible for giving a palimpsestuous character to modern Indian theatre. Moreover, by documenting the opinions of Bennewitz's Indian collaborators, who directed performances with Bennewitz in different Indian regional languages such as Kannada and Bengali, Esleben highlights the cross-cultural dimension of Bennewitz's project in India. This draws attention to the collaborative, multi-lingual, non-colonizing aspects of his work that exceeded the GDR's cultural propaganda to seek political recognition from countries like India.
The book makes a significant contribution and can serve as a compendium for future scholars who work either on Bennewitz or on the dissemination of Brechtian or Shakespearean aesthetics in India. Esleben also reassesses the present debates on intercultural theatre, which accentuate its often-parasitical character, by transporting us to a world where ‘elements from an alien culture (and its strange mixture) do not become exhibition material’ but ‘a platform for dialogue’ (p. 272). By recognizing the intercultural as less hierarchical, the book registers a shift from early models, such as that of Patrice Pavis's Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (1991), which saw the intercultural as being less equitable. Nevertheless, a connection between Bennewitz's homosexuality and ‘political reprisals in his early career’ (p. 3), made early in the Introduction, remains unexplored and undeveloped. This is an unfortunate gap in the otherwise capable scholarship.
