A Schiller thriller for our time

Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlosechoes contemporary politics and intrigue through a prism of history, writes Peter Crawley

It may have taken a while - 220 years, to be exact - but a classic play about politics and idealism, one that reverberates with the clash between liberty and tyranny, is about to receive its professional Irish debut.

Indeed, when Don Carlos opens this Monday in the Project Arts Centre - delivered to us by the Rough Magic Theatre Company in a stirring and timely adaptation by Mike Poulton - it should put the prescience of its original author centre-stage.

"Let's go ahead and say it," announces Christine Madden, "Friedrich Schiller is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world." That may be a bold claim to make of Germany's national dramatist, but Madden, Rough Magic's literary manager (and a regular contributor to these pages), has a point.

"If you think about it," she continues, "he could almost be a new playwright. This is the first play of his that the audience is going to receive. You have to give them something that is immediately interesting."

If Schiller's play seems unfamiliar, largely eclipsed by Verdi's opera version, both its plot and characters are likely to induce a sense of deja vu. Here is Carlos, a prince with an occasionally antic disposition, who harbours improper desires for the queen (who, admittedly, is not his mother) while engaging in fitful plots to overthrow the king (Philip II, his true father). Added to the blaze of Hamlet references there are flickers of King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello and King Henry IV. It may be a text of the 18th-century Enlightenment, exploring the dark machinations of politics, holy wars and the Spanish Inquisition, but at times it can read like a Shakespearean collage.

Shakespeare may have been Schiller's hero, admits Lynne Parker, fresh from rehearsals of what she considers a rewardingly tricky play to direct, but the German writer was also a man of his time. Schiller's time straddled the emotional excesses of the Sturm und Drang movement through to the lucid new dawn of German Classicism, making Don Carlos - written in fits and starts over four years - an unwieldy text in its original version.

"The old 18th-century version reads like Boucicault," says Parker. "It's very melodramatic and the language is very florid. What Mike Poulton's version does brilliantly is hone all that down into something that's a very taut political thriller." Poulton, an acclaimed playwright who was last seen in Dublin with his creditable adaptation of Aeschylus's Myrmidons, tends to speak about his adaptations with a self-effacement that borders on deference. With Don Carlos, however, a play that would have run for seven hours without intervention, he admits to taking a more muscular approach.

"Don Carlos has never been performed in its entirety," he says. "Not even in Schiller's day. In my first approach to cutting it, I dispensed with some of the more outrageous sequences." Towards the end of the original, for instance, Don Carlos disguises himself as his grandfather's ghost to move unimpeded through the court of Spain - a manoeuvre too preposterous for a political thriller.

Poulton's translation also moves with the relentless fluency of a contemporary idiom. In one scene, Philip II, an inflexible ruler and ideologue who we might call a paleo-conservative, gets a particular humdinger: "The instrument God places in my hands is terror." (Any similarities to a certain world leader are, presumably, purely coincidental.) In another, a flummoxed Don Carlos is given a line without words (" . . . ?").

Although Poulton is at pains to stress his fidelity to the spirit of the original - "I've focused rather than imposed, I hope" - even those familiar with the florid arches of the 18th-century original will not pine for what has been lost in translation. A sample line from Schiller: "You labour for ingratitude: - in vain, with nature you engage in desperate struggle." A sample response from today: " . . . ?" If Christine Madden sometimes misses the phosphorescent verses of the original, the language that burns and glows, she readily admits: "There's just so bloody much of it."

THE CLARITY OF Poulton's version has also unlocked the political resonance of Don Carlos. "We were quite interested in doing something that reflected our interest in the present political global situation," explains Parker. "Ironically, to do that you look back through history. You go back to an 18th-century play which deals with a 16th-century subject through a 21st-century adaptation. It seemed to me there was a very nice prism of history there."

What you see through a prism may depend on your perspective. Not too long ago, Mike Poulton appeared on BBC Radio 4's arts programme Front Row to talk about Don Carlos when the London production transferred to the West End. The host, Mark Lawson, announced to him that he had written a play about George Bush. Poulton sounds exasperated at the memory. "I said, 'No I haven't. Everything that's there is Schiller.' The fact is that it may seem so immediate to what's happening to us at the moment. But it was immediate for Schiller in the years leading up to the French Revolution and it was also relevant for the time that he's anachronistically writing about - the time of Philip II." He sighs. "But, again, I simply show what is there. It is a play for our times. But it's a play for all times."

Schiller, however, has meant different things to different people at different times. In 1859, before Germany had even become united, he was posthumously appointed the "leader and saviour" of the nation. The Nazis would later twist his Enlightenment spirit to turn him into a standard bearer of National Socialism. (During the Third Reich there were 10,600 productions of Schiller's plays - although none of Don Carlos.) Even in the aftermath of the second World War, Schiller was the subject of competing claims; his work was depoliticised in the West, while a new cultural slogan was born in East Germany: "Schiller belongs to us!"

The man's own desire was to belong to no one. Forced into a military academy by the Duke of Württemberg, an autocratic ruler who maintained constant supervision and stifled all creative impulses, Schiller developed in a climate where, as Madden puts it, "reading Shakespeare under the covers was a political act".

When the young Schiller left Württemberg without permission, to attend the production of his first play, The Robbers, he was arrested, forbidden from publishing further dramatic works, and sent to prison. If Schiller's plays highlight the struggle for human dignity, moral idealism and the impulse towards freedom of expression, these were not abstract concepts. They were worth doing time for.

It seems all the more remarkable, then, that Don Carlos makes such efforts to humanise the tyrannical. "What makes Schiller a classic is his understanding of character," offers Poulton. "There are no blacks and whites. The reason Schiller leaps out of the page is that the characters are believable; they are not cartoon pasteboard characters. I think with Schiller the man, there is a sympathy there; he does attempt to see how Philip was brought to the position that he finds himself in."

Likewise, the idealistic Rodrigo, often read as Schiller's proxy, is no less complicated in his fundamentalist zeal. When Madden read the play as a student, the Rodrigo that would die for his principles was her hero.

"Now I look at him and he's a highly suspicious character," she says. "He's a suicide bomber." These, as Lynne Parker puts it, are the terminals between which the electricity of the play flows. And in that charge everyone can see a different Schiller. For Parker, he is a man who presented freedom as something to fight for, but not at the expense of social responsibility.

"It's a very good metaphor for any theatre company to observe," she says. "You have to allow the impulse of the actors free rein within the context of what it's trying to serve . . . individual liberty always being subject to the common good." She catches herself and laughs. "Which makes it sound terribly ideal. I assure you it's not absolutely as rosy as that."

For Poulton, currently working on an adaptation of Schiller's three-part masterpiece Wallenstein, the man cannot be disentangled from the circumstances that formed him. "I think the main thing is the unfairness," he says, "the oppressive upbringing. It's about rigidity. It's about having no voice. Even as a young man he had an extraordinary voice. The things he said, he wanted to say at great volume." This is why Schiller's writings blew open the rigid systems of church and state, Poulton thinks, why he found that theatre was the best way of "expressing loudly obvious truths", and why, perhaps, we can hear him still.

It may be a belated premiere, but now, finally, Schiller belongs to us.

Schiller's Don Carlos, in a version by Mike Poulton, runs from March 12 to 31 in the Project Arts Centre