Schiller's Wallenstein, written in the 1790s, is rarely seen here for two reasons: its length (the uncut trilogy plays for about 10 hours) and our unfamiliarity with a military hero as famous to the Germans as Cromwell is to us. But Mike Poulton's new two-and-three-quarter-hour version proves eminently playable and dramatically engrossing: what Schiller understood, like Shakespeare, was the dynamics of power.
The Shakespearean echoes are audible. Wallenstein is a great general who, midway through the thirty years' war in 1634, finds himself at breaking point. His instinctive loyalty to the Hapsburg empire is undermined by court intrigue, ministerial meddling and his desire to rule Bohemia. So, through a miscalculation that proves fatal, he enters into secret deals with the empire's Swedish Protestant enemies. Schiller's hero is that familiar figure: the superb fighting machine who is politically naive. When, in Poulton's version, Wallenstein cries, "Alone I do it" in describing how he holds a ragtag army together, we hear the sound of Coriolanus; the hero's constant invocations of fate and the stars plunge us into the world of Julius Caesar.
Schiller's play lacks the tightness of his Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, but it dramatises exactly the labyrinthine process of power. We see, for instance, how the hero's supposed ally, Count Octavio, woos his once-loyal generals to the emperor's side by appealing to their greed. The role of Wallenstein is a great one, endowed by Iain Glen with the perfect mix of arrogance, idealism, vanity and vulnerability. One only wishes Glen spent more time on the classical stage.
Angus Jackson's hurtling production has first-rate support from Anthony Calf as the devious Octavio, John McEnery as a spidery war minister, Tom Brooke as a calculating Swedish colonel and Charlotte Emmerson as the hero's ruinously intemperate sister-in-law. If you relish historical-political drama on the grand scale, get down to Chichester.
