Foreign News: Wilhelm v. Piscator

‘Round and ’round turns slowly a great skeletonized globe. Above it squats a dummy representing God. On three platforms near the periphery of the globe stand actors wearing lifelike mask-faces of Emperor Franz Josef, Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II. As the globe turns, all three call upon God to grant victory to their respective armies; but when the dummy makes no sign, each monarch begins loudly to protest his own complete innocence of War-guilt.

Such is one scene in the drama Rasputin, recently produced in Berlin by dynamic modernist-communist Director Erwin Piscator. At the piece there have been no audience-riots—for Berlin playgoers are supremely tolerant—but at Doorn, in the Netherlands, an old man has grown angry, hired lawyers, made threats. Last week the lawyers of Wilhelm of Dorn were successful. From one of the lower Berlin courts they obtained a permanent injunction restraining Director Piscator from placing on his slowly turning globe any actor, mask or dummy in the likeness of Wilhelm II.