Carl Zuckmayer’s 1931 comedy The Captain of Köpenick is subtitled “a German fairy tale” but its seemingly fantastical lampoon on the fatherland’s militaristic conformity is rooted in real events. In 1906 shoemaker/petty crook Wilhelm Voigt became a folk hero after posing as a Prussian Guards officer and raiding the local civic treasury.
Zuckmayer used the story to satirize the German people’s subservience to uniformed authority and strong leaders, which though set in the run-up to the First World War clearly had terrifying contemporary relevance with Hitler just two years away from taking power.
At the outset, we see Wilhelm released from a Berlin prison after 15 years but without identity papers he is adrift in the outside world as an “administrative oddity” who has fallen through the cracks of society. In a Kafkaesque bureaucratic stalemate he cannot obtain papers without a permanent residence, for which he needs a job, which in turn requires ID. On the run from the police after getting caught up in a political demonstration, he gets hold of a captain’s uniform from a second-hand fancy-dress shop and, taking command of some guards, marches to the town hall where he exposes the mayor’s corruption while helping himself to the contents of the safe.
Zuckmayer’s send-up of Germanic rule-bound uniformity, confirmed by his own experience as a soldier in the Great War, is expressed neatly by Wilhelm: “I used tothink all the trouble in the world was caused by people giving orders. Now I reckon that it’s people being so willing to take them.” Unlike his contemporary Bertolt Brecht (with whom he worked as a dramaturg at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin in the early 1920s), Zuckmayer avoids taking a didactic political line, but you feel he could have driven home more forcibly the parallels with the rise of the Nazi Party (which later banned his plays because of their part-Jewish author). The result is an enjoyable if cartoonish ridiculing of absurd hierarchical attitudes rather than a savage satire on the dangers of “just following orders”.
With its echoes of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Ron Hutchinson’s new English version gives a colloquial earthiness to the play, even if while some of the jokes work well others seem a bit heavy-handed. Adrian Noble’s entertaining, spectacular production certainly makes full use of the Oliver’s size and revolve, with military brass bands marching, Keystone Cop-like chases and loads of stage business, though it does seem a bit overblown sometimes, ending in Monty Python surrealism. Anthony Ward’s striking design features an expressionist high-rise city backdrop, moving from a cramped doss house and modest grocery shop, to resplendent regimental mess hall and imposing town hall.
Antony Sher plays Wilhelm as a little man cocking a snook at the establishment, a worm who eventually turns. With his wheedling voice and submissive body language, he initially accepts his humble lot, but his need to assert his identity turns him into an impudent subversive – if only until he is formally recognized by the authorities. Anthony O’Donnell gives good support in the dual roles of pompous mayor and taciturn lavatory cleaner, with Olivia Poulet as his domineering wife who wears the trousers if not his uniform. Adrian Schiller excels as a sardonic tailor, cheeky waiter and communist demagogue, while Alan David’s Franco-Prussian War disciplinarian prison director and Nick Sampson’s urbane Minister of the Interior take different approaches to the same end: keeping the lower ranks in their place.
