Mann's 'Death in Venice' adapted for stage

NEW YORK, June 24 (UPI) -- Thomas Mann's provocative 1912 novella, "Death in Venice," has been made into a devastatingly powerful one-man drama by Scotland's Citizen's Theater of Glasgow and is being staged at the Off-Broadway Manhattan Ensemble Theater with Giles Havergal playing the doomed novelist, Gustav von Aschenbach, and several other characters.

Robert David MacDonald, co-director with Havergal of the Citizen's Theater, is the adapter of the work, but Havergal also has a reputation as an adapter of works by Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, and Graham Greene for the stage, notably Greene's "Travels with My Aunt," which Havergal performed Off-Broadway several seasons ago.

MacDonald and Havergal are a formidably talented team of playwright-actors who have made "Death in Venice" a truly memorable theatrical event of which Mann himself would most certainly have approved. MacDonald's script provides a seamless telling of the story of Aschenbach's obsession with an angelically beautiful Polish youth, and Havergal is the perfect actor for a role requiring visible spiritual transformation.

Aging but still handsome in a professorial Mr. Chips sort of way, Havergal moves with the guarded grace of a somber, emotionally repressed man who has never before in his life felt deeply about anything or anyone. With his first glimpse of Tadzio, a youth vacationing at Venice's Lido beach with his mother and four sisters, Aschenbach opens up to unexpected feelings of admiration that quickly develop, with ominous overtones, into unrequited love for a male nymphet.

How this irrational relationship, barely acknowledged by Tadzio who has a male companion of his own age, would have developed is a matter of speculation because Aschenbach contracts a form of cholera that has virtually emptied Venice of visitors and is decimating its natives. Normally, the prudent author would have been one of the first to leave the city, which reeks of disinfectant.

But Tadzio's mother, perhaps unaware of the danger that is downplayed by city officials, has stayed on with her children until the last possible moment of escape, making it impossible for the fevered, obsessed and possibly insane Aschenbach to make plans for his own departure. He continues to stalk Tadzio and dies in a beach chair watching the boy wade into the waters of the Adriatic.

This story is the first of the German novelist's work to embody the relationship of pure art, in the form of unattainable beauty, to the artist and to the society in which the artist, however isoldated, must live. Havergal, whose style of acting is extremely subtle, is able to endow this relationship with a range of emotional responses that strike a resonant chord in the hearts and minds of any mature audience.

The Manhattan Ensemble Theater is to be congratulated on importing such a stunning show to its Soho stage where it can be seen through Sunday. Philip Witcomb's set is simplicity itself -- a writing desk with an antique typewriter, an office chair with wheels, and a column bearing a bas relief bust of Mann. Zerlina Hughes' lighting does much to suggest the ethereal light that is an essential part of Venice's many charms.

The success of this dramatic adaptation of "Death in Venice" should encourage some opera company to revive Benjamin Britten's impressive 1973 opera based on Mann's novella. This was the British composer's last opera, one of his most complex and effective scores, and has Aschenbach singing almost entirely in unaccompanied recitative while dancers suggest the forces of destruction threatening his sanity.