A talk with Heinz and David Bennent

 "a text  must be felt into the small toe..."

Why actors are more afraid of readings than of plays.

Heinz Bennent, thirty years ago you lived with your family on a Greek island and read Hoelderlin.  Why do you still read it?  

HEINZ BENNENT:  It  was comfort for me,  in the country,  that Hoelderlin enthused of.  Then he always encountered me.  Later I learned texts for TV exactly the way I did with Hoelderlin-texts.  And if it was a Derrick [German crime TV series].  Hoelderlin is  good nourishment for the soul.  He is a prophet.  He mediates you an understanding for the value and the beauty of life. The more one reads him, the better one understands that. 

David Bennent you spoke Heiner Mueller's "description of a picture"  on stage  for the first time in 1987.  What has changed since then?

DAVID BENNENT:  At that time I played around a lot with the text. In the meantime, the fantasy of Heiner Mueller became consciously to me, so much that I am wary to dare an interpretation. I become  more modest and approach to the text more clearly, so that I can mediate the text more clearly, too.  I also feel this way when I listen to my father on the stage. I always understand new aspects about Hoelderlin and notice that my father maybe is also... 

HEINZ BENNENT:  ... totally unsecure. 

DAVID BENNENT:  In addition, always tries to mediate the "Hyperion" completely simple. If one wants to mediate a thing, then one becomes poor with words. 

You recite the texts. As an actor, don't you miss the physical employment?

HEINZ BENNENT:  The actor does not only speak.  If I sit on the stage, then I sit consciously.  I must feel the texts into the small toe, it always speak the whole body.  The resonance of the voice is also in the hands or elsewhere.

DAVID BENNENT:  It is more simple, to have a role, it is more encouraging to speak a text. When I stand completely alone, completely naked on the stage, it is more difficult to me.  I am afraid to be so small on stage and not  to have the strength to present it .

HEINZ BENNENT:  You may not think of this.

DAVID BENNENT:  No, but one is nevertheless busy with onself. When one takes part in a play  then there is the light, the music.  Here is only the voice and thoughts.

You stand on stage as father and a son.  Would this have worked out with your father?

HEINZ BENNENT:  The conception is completely absurd in my case, because my father did not have to do anything with literature.  If I  had had a famous actor as a father, I would have probably tried to imitate him.  I never try to affect David.  When I tell him something,  he does the opposite anyway. And it's good this way. 

Always?

DAVID BENNENT:  No, but I try to find another way, even when I know that he is probably right.  It is good that I worked without him at the beginning of my career.  Even if he helped me  with the texts in the beginning, since I did not visit an actor school.  Now I can work with him as  a colleague.

Hoelderlin and Mueller felt as outsiders.  How do you look on Germany?

HEINZ BENNENT:  Hoelderlin never was acknowledged in Germany, made his way with private lessons. I was born in 1921, as the youngest of six children in a small catholic village.  There  couldn't  care anyone for me as well. Since at that time I have relation to Hoelderlin: There are the completely simple things, which he says about the life.  One does not need to be a philosopher, in order to understand Hoelderlin.

DAVID BENNENT:  I am very curious about the Berlin reactions.  After our reading in Switzerland some Germans came and asked:  How can you speak about Germany in such a way abroad?  Although I live in Paris, I feel  a closer relation to Germany again, also politically.  Here  are the people who make awake. In Paris the people die of laughter about the thing with Joschka Fischer.  Marvelously:  Finally a man, who govers.

Would you like to play  in Germany more often again?

DAVID BENNENT:  Yes.  I like Berlin very much, at the “Schaubühne” I began.  I would come immediately, if one wanted me.