61. “Jugendfreude”

Comedy in four acts by Ludwig Fulda
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

The few hisses that made themselves felt on Saturday after each performance of Fulda's play "Jugendfreunde" seem to me to stand on a position of judgment that the critic must not take towards the amusing, amiable work. Nothing makes the critic more boring, superfluous and ridiculous than applying standards which are excluded by the nature of a work and by the author's intentions with it. Certainly there is a point of view from which one can criticize the drawing of the characters and the course of the plot in "Jugendfreunde". I believe, however, that the best refutation of such criticism is the fact that the critic, if he indulges in unbiased and naïve enjoyment, must smile and laugh heartily for two hours at these "friends of youth" and that the contradictions in which they become entangled through the contrast between their views and their real lives are quite true to nature and wittily portrayed by the author.

Four companions stick together faithfully and spend their lives as they please. Three of them get engaged in the first elevator. They believe that their wives will fall into each other's arms just as the men did when they were bachelors. Instead, the women quarrel at the first opportunity that brings them together and say the worst things to each other. The friends soon convince themselves that they must continue their merry life without the women. This seems easy enough, as the fourth man behaves for three acts as a vigorous opponent of marriage. Why shouldn't the three friends meet twice a week in his "bachelor pad" for cozy get-togethers without their wives? The three married men are already in agreement when the fourth surprises them by deciding to marry his stenographer. And since he has obviously made a luckier catch than the three companions, he is not at all inclined to grant his companions, blessed by fate with troublesome marital halves, a rendezvous through which they can happily dream themselves back to their bachelor days again and again.

Fulda lets the opposites collide in an amusing way. It is not his style to use situational jokes to create entanglements and solutions. Everything emerges from the characters with a certain necessity. This necessity, however, is not one that is drawn from the deep, psychological depths of the soul, but it seems to me that Fulda is not at all wrong in the easy way he takes people and things. In life, we are no more interested in people like those in Fulda's play than the author shows us. Fulda tells us just as much about them as we wish to know about them. A greater deepening of the characters and intricacies would, in my opinion, give the impression of ponderousness. I consider the witty, light way of playing with the characters and plots to be an excellent quality of the author of "The Friends of Youth".

However, I believe that only such an excellent performance can help the play to achieve the effect I have described, as the German Theater did on Saturday. In Mr. Nissen, Mr. Rittner, Mr. Sauer and Mr. Thielscher, the four youthful friends found four actors who expressed the author's intentions magnificently. And the female troublemakers were well characterized by the ladies Trenner, Schneider and Eberty. If Miss Lehmann had been able to portray the stenographer so gracefully that one could have believed in the conversion of Martens, the opponent of the marriage, there would not have been the slightest objection to the performance.