isbn: 3-423-31067-7

Anat Feinberg's biographical portrait provides a concise account of George Tabori's life and career, which is especially useful since his childhood in Budapest was followed by a career in Hollywood and an enduring presense in European Theatre, a complex mix of influences and experience spanning ten decades, yet one that was crucially marred by the epoch of Nazism, that saw his father interned and finally murdered in Auschwitz.

Born in 1914, Tabori now works as writer and director with the Berliner Ensemble, directing ‚Oedipus' (2001), Enzenburger's ‚Titanic' (2002) and Mozart's ‚In the Seraglio' at the Berlin Gedächtniskirche that same year. His literary and theatrical career took off in the nineteen forties, after life as a reporter for newspapers all over Europe and the BBC Hungarian service from Jerusalem. Three novels brought him to the attention of MGM and Warner Brothers. His subsequent screenwriting career included a version of Thomas Mann's ‚Magic Mountain' for the Alexander Korda, projects for Hitchcock, Jules Dassin and a British Academy Award for Anthony Asquith's ‚The Young Lovers' in 1954. His first play for theatre, ‚Flight into Eqypt' was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan in 1952 and by the mid fifties Tabori was involved with Lee Strasberg's ‚Actors Studio'. There followed a substantial theatre career mainly in the US, but also with Peter Hall in London, with translations of Max Frisch and Brecht, and productions both of theatrical classics and his own work, in particular, ‚The Merchant of Venice as Performed in Theresienstadt' (First Berkshire Theatre Festival, 1966).

In 1970, Tabori returned to Europe and began a new phase of his career, creating a Theatre Workshop in Bremen and a string of productions throughout the German speaking theatre for over thirty years, ranging from film to opera. Feinberg devotes more than half her book to this German phase of his career, which included several years in Vienna, but her account is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of work Tabori has undertaken. The most useful aspect of Feinberg's book is the contrast between Tabori's early experiences and their importance for his later work, for example, ‚Mother's Courage', which was based on the hair raising story of his mother's successful escape from a concentration camp transport in which she pursuaded the officer in charge of a bureaucratic error and he allowed her return home.

Too soon to put Tabori's work in perspective, with Feinberg's portrait as a reference, it is probably worth turning next to Tabori's recently published memoire, „Auto da Fe"., or another of the DTV eclectic series of Portraits that sets Tabori alongside other luminaries from Hannah Arendt and Bettina von Armin, through Kant and Kafka, to Oscar Wilde and Frank Zappa.

JC.