George Tabori | Books | The Guardian

Publish date: 2020-05-16
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George Tabori

The dramatist and writer George Tabori, who has died aged 93, was one of the last of the generation of writers forced into exile by the Third Reich. Hungarian by birth, writing in English and directing and occasionally acting in German, he combined experience of British and American life with the cosmopolitan cultural traditions of central Europe. Starting as a maverick director in 1970, he was the most widely performed modern writer in the German theatre by 1992.

Tabori was born into a comfortably off Jewish family in Budapest. His father sent him to Berlin to learn the hotel trade, and he was in the crowd when Hitler appeared on the chancellery balcony after his 1933 election victory: he thought that Hitler looked sad. In 1935 he joined his brother Paul, a literary agent in London, where he translated press reports, mastered English, and acquired the name George.

In 1939 he went back to Budapest as a foreign correspondent. His extended family from Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia gathered in his father's flat there for Christmas. Eighty per cent of them were to perish in the Holocaust. He worked for the British Army Near East News Service from 1941 to 1943, and in 1942 in Jerusalem married Hanna Freund. From 1943 until 1947 he worked for the BBC in London, where he took British citizenship.

Tabori had begun to write novels: Beneath the Stone (1945), a thriller written in Jerusalem, Companions of the Left Hand (1946), composed on the boat back from Egypt, and Original Sin, a psychological crime novel set in Cairo. These came to the attention of MGM, which in 1947 signed him as a scriptwriter. He moved in émigré and film circles. With Thomas Mann he tried to set up a film of The Magic Mountain to star Montgomery Clift and Greta Garbo, but in the end he had few Hollywood credits, although he wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's I Confess in 1953 and shared a Bafta with Robin Estridge for the screenplay of Anthony Asquith's The Young Lovers in 1954.

A meeting with Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood in 1947 spurred a serious interest in theatre. In 1953 he left his wife and went to live with the Swedish film star Viveca Lindfors in New York, and became the adoptive father of her three children. Although not a communist, Tabori was blacklisted and unable to work in television and radio. He and Lindfors founded their own theatre company, the Strolling Players, for which she acted and he wrote, notably Brecht on Brecht in 1962, a collage of writings which toured widely.

In 1968, at the Brecht Congress in Berlin, Tabori attended rehearsals and performances by the Berliner Ensemble, the company Brecht had founded in 1949, and would ever after pronounce its work the best he had ever seen. His play The Cannibals, about a group of concentration camp prisoners who eat one of their fellows, had been premiered in the US and in 1969, to his surprise, it was produced in West Berlin. This prompted him to move to Germany and, at the age of 58, start a new life as a theatre director. In Bremen in 1975 Tabori set up the Theaterlab, a close-knit, experimental group of actors who devised their own material. "Work-in-progress" was the watchword, with the end product almost incidental, a freedom unknown in the German state system.

In 1979 he staged My Mother's Courage in Munich with Hanna Schygulla, the Rainer Werner Fassbinder diva, in the lead. The play dramatised the incident in 1944 when Tabori's mother persuaded an SS guard to let her off the Auschwitz train, claiming that she had left her Red Cross pass at home. Tabori once said: "You don't gradually become a Jew and you're not a Jew from the outset. You are reminded by other people that you're a Jew."

My Mother's Courage was the first of a series of plays that employed wit, paradox and surprise to bypass the taboo surrounding the Holocaust. Jubilee, written in 1983 for the 50th anniversary of Hitler's assumption of power, was set in a cemetery where five victims of Nazism, a Jewish musician, his wife, their daughter, who is disabled, and two gay men, rise from the dead to face taunts from a neo-Nazi vandal. This was theatre of remembrance, confronting the audience with Hitler's victims in an imaginary contemporary situation.

In 1987 Tabori directed Mein Kampf at the Vienna Akademietheater. "A Great Love Story - Hitler and his Jew," he wrote in the programme. Hitler is living in a doss house in Vienna preparing for the art college entrance exam, and wily old Schlomo Herzl, a Jewish hawker who sells Bibles and Korans, tries to teach him manners. Schlomo trims Hitler's droopy moustache and combs his unruly hair to create the well-known visage before sending him to his exam minus his trousers. When he is rejected, Schlomo advises him to go into politics. This deeply serious, utterly hilarious black farce was a runaway international success.

In the same year, at 73, Tabori finally achieved a well-funded theatre of his own in Vienna, Der Kreis, but in 1991 the Burgtheater, Austria's national theatre, beckoned, and he triumphed again with The Goldberg Variations. Mr Jay, assisted by Goldberg, a concentration camp survivor, is rehearsing a montage of biblical scenes in Jerusalem. It is inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. "Just two," says Jay. "The boy is bringing his own." Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form.

Tabori knew no bitterness - wit, wisdom and tolerance were the hallmarks of his exploration of the relationship between Germany and the Jews in the 20th century, and he held no brief for Israel. He often suggested that his penchant for joking in the face of disaster was an English trait, but it is just as likely to have come from the coffee houses of Budapest. Though he admired Brecht, his own bent was for open, not closed form. Whimsy was his mode, and he could switch from bathos to profundity in the twinkling of an eye.

He directed several plays at the Berliner Ensemble in the new millennium. Premature Demise in 2001 was developed from one of his own tales, a sex/crime/love/spy story touching on old themes. Tabori slumbered fitfully in an armchair stage right while his fourth wife, Ursula Höpfner, whom he had married in 1985, played the female lead.

At the 2005 Berlin Theatertreffen, the 91-year-old raconteur kept an audience spellbound for 90 minutes, though he could hardly remember the names in his stories. Tabori is survived by Ursula, and his three adopted children.

· George (Gyorgy) Tabori, dramatist, theatre director and novelist, born May 24 1914; died July 23 2007

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