Charles Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, a collection of the two novellas Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, first published 1946, has been frequently adapted and readapted for both stage and screen. The semi-autobiographical account of decadence and debauchery in Weimar era Berlin has proved unusually well suited to enactment and reenactment. First adapted for the Broadway stage in 1951 by the British expatriate John Van Druten as I Am A Camera, this initial attempt to find a life outside of the novel for Isherwood’s story has proved equally enduring. Indeed, Van Druten’s adaptation served as the basis for not only a 1955 film adaptation, but was one of the primary sources for John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret, subsequently filmed in 1972 with Bob Fosse as director and Liza Minelli in the lead. Clearly, Van Druten discovered something in Isherwood’s stories that immediately flourished in the hands of actors and directors, and that could be seized upon over and over by other theatre and filmmakers.
Isherwood famously wrote in the Berlin Stories, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” suggesting that he will weave his tale through a singular vision masquerading as an objective camera lens. A human being (not a camera), after all, is perpetrating the “passivity” and “not thinking,” and thus we can assume that this objectivity is a pose, a mask to cover the messier aspects of subjectivity. If the narrator aspires to be a camera, then the character of Sally Bowles desires to be the ideal subject of its gaze, a perpetual leading lady, delighting the viewer with her quirks and bravado, while screwing up the master shot. In fact, Isherwood often refers to Sally in theatricalized metaphors, positioning her as the exact opposite of his passive narrator: the actress. Sally Bowles is all intentionality and action, a figure that Isherwood cannot quite conceive of as authentic, but rather assumes that everything she does is somehow performed. This is why Sally always assumes a central focus in stage and screen adaptations of Goodbye to Berlin, despite her less prominent position in the stories as a whole.
When John Van Druten decided to adapt the story for the stage he was at the height of his career. Although generally ignored by the both the academic and artistic theatre worlds in recent years, from the late 1920’s until his death in the late 1950’s, Van Druten was an enormously successful and popular mainstay on the Broadway stage. Indeed, many of Van Druten’s early plays, comprised mostly of light character driven living room comedies, are challenging for a contemporary reader to get excited about, seeming to blend in almost seamlessly with their historical milieu. This fact is a testament to Van Druten’s keen talent as a playwright to structure his plays out of the materials of his audiences’ lives, although it has perhaps not served his longevity well. Yet, I Am A Camera is uniquely positioned in Van Druten’s oeuvre both in terms of its critical success, garnering a New York Critic’s Circle Award, and its aesthetic concerns. In I Am A Camera the characters move about the stage as though entirely by their own volition, less encumbered by formulaic Broadway plots or expository devices than the plays of period tended to be.
Van Druten’s approach closely resembles Isherwood’s image of the narrator/writer as camera lens in The Berlin Stories, an anti-narrative narrative device. This is what makes Sally Bowles an ideal character for Van Druten to construct his adaptation around: she was naturally inclined to being observed. As Isherwood constructed Sally to appear to be constantly performing, Van Druten literally made her perform on stage, positioning her before his camera-like gaze. It is perhaps unsurprising that Van Druten also served as director on the original production. In a story that has its backdrop as the rise of an authoritarian regime, this approach, by both Isherwood and Van Druten, is notably anti- authoritarian, allowing the messy aspects of character to be left tangled on stage, rather than forcing them to unravel in service of reversals or dénouements.
Van Druten felt that he had broken new ground with I Am A Camera, and in an article published in The New York Times that year he proclaimed that it belonged to a new genre for the stage: “The Mood Play.” Van Druten traced the genealogy of this form to Anton Chekhov and noted its best contemporary practitioners to be Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. For Van Druten, this form was defined by an almost documentary approach to character, where once the play had been populated, they should by left alone, so to speak, by the playwright’s more structured concerns of plot and idea. In the Mood Play, character moves from its position as “mere embroidery” on the play, to being the play itself. In the article Van Druten rejected what he termed “theatricality” or plot driven plays, effectively creating an anti-theatrical stage work.
The original production of I Am A Camera, which Van Druten directed in 1951 at the Empire on Broadway, starred William Prince, Julie Harris and Mariam Winters. Although the acting received near universal critical acclaim, with Julie Harris and Mariam Winters both winning Tony Awards for their work, many critics struggled with Van Druten’s foray into the “Mood Play.” Brook Atkinson at The New York Times outright admitted that he had a difficult time describing the “impromptu” style of the play, while Walter Kerr, who infamously titled his review of the play for the New York Tribune, “Me no Leica,” would later state that the play was “crippled” by a “calculated inertia” inherited from Chekhov. Thus, it was with no small degree of contention that Van Druten was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the play that year. The production was, however, enormously popular and ran for nine months. After a short-lived Off-Broadway revival in 1956, I Am a Camera drifted out of the professional repertory, popping up as a perennial favorite with colleges and amateur companies, but rarely receiving serious attention.
Although I Am a Camera’s anti-plot structure may have seemed challenging and strange in 1951, contemporary theatre audiences are far better equipped to savor the Chekhovian set-up transposed onto Weimar Berlin. Walter Kerr’s grumblings about the dangers of not hewing the well-made play line seem quaint in retrospect, a holdover from a conservative era that was in its waning days on the American stage. Yet, there is still something disarmingly visceral in the text, something that does not let the characters off the hook with elaborate twists and turns, but rather forces them to show themselves in their natural state. Romance would seem to be an absurd topic of conversation in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, yet these characters cannot help but be human, for better or worse, in the most inhumane circumstances. When taking a look at I Am a Camera now, one is immediately surprised by how little dust has clung to it; rather it seems to have gained subtler nuances and a deeper dignity when viewed through our longer lens of history.
