Output details

"Badenheim 1939", by Arnold Wesker after the novel by Aharon Appelfeld.

Although Wesker’s adaptation of Appelfeld’s novel "Badenheim 1939" provides the verbal text of performance, the reason why the characters of the drama choose to congregate at the town of Badenheim is not words but music, and neither Wesker nor Appelfeld provide a single note of this, confining their contributions to when it should be heard and occasionally what its general effect might be. Wesker’s title page confesses: “With music needing to be composed.” The research imperative of this staging of Wesker’s silent script was therefore to start with his hints of emotional outcome and to build these into coherent musical entities of a weight and significance that could justifiably serve as the magnet for the protagonists’ descent into the novel’s allegorical depiction of the Jewish holocaust of WWII.

One problem that had to be resolved through the research process was how to portray internationally renowned musicians with actors who possessed few musical skills. The option of simply commissioning a complete score to be performed by an off-stage band of musicians was rejected as compromising the essential unity of the work in which the musicians are often the major protagonists. Rather than separating the functions of musician and actor it was decided to incorporate the musicians into the group of actors and in this way partially to dissolve the distinction between the two.

A second problem addressed in the research process was how might the musicians be understood to “own” the music that they were performing. This was obviously less of a problem in the more formal “set-piece” numbers, but posed a significant problem in those sections apparently composed by the musicians themselves. The selected solution saw the composer – Julian Philips – initially work through improvisation with the musicians before finally producing the score of the work.