Stage-to-screen review: Death of a Hunter

Fond as I am of the Finborough Theatre, some of its deadly-serious, issue-based programming can be a hard sell. It does produce its share of joyous shows - I still sometimes go on about how funny Quality Street was a decade later, and only last year they camped After Dark up to within an inch of its life - but its online offerings during lockdown haven't exactly been focused on escapism. Which brings us to September's offering, the story of Ernest Hemingway blowing his brains out. Mercifully not in musical form, but in German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's 1977 play Death of a Hunter, which got its English-language premiere at the Finborough in 2018 (this archive recording is being released as a tribute to the playwright, who died in May.) We follow Hemingway (Edmund Dehn) in the last hour of his life, having already decided to follow his father's example and commit suicide.

The monologue is essentially a stream of consciousness as Hemingway gears up to kill himself by going over not only his depression but also the writer's block he believed was caused by electric shock treatment. It's so severe he can't even write a suicide note, which is the main thing giving him pause as he believes it's the least thing he owes his sons.

Recording his thoughts on a tape recorder and occasionally having a conversation with himself by playing them back, Dehn gives a powerful performance that gives you some sympathy for the man's inner turmoil, but I found it interesting how much Hemingway's reputation affects how I watched the play: Arguably remembered as much today for being a colossal asshole as for his writing (and the reason the archetype of the revered writer who treats everyone around him like shit is pretty much set in stone in American fiction,) it's particularly hard to swallow the notorious trophy hunter having a last-minute conversion to a conservationist. The pettiness feels true though - he wants to remember to sign a cheque for his cleaner before he dies, not because he wants to ensure she gets paid but because he doesn't want to be remembered as cheap; he similarly makes sure his copy of The Old Man and the Sea isn't found too close to his body lest he be accused of reading his own work. Death of a Hunter is an odd, dark little journey into the way despair and pettiness weave together into self-destructiveness.

Death of a Hunter by Rolf Hochhuth, adapted by Peter Thiers and translated by Peter Sutton is available until the 7th of October on the Finborough Theatre's YouTube channel.

Running time: 55 minutes.

Photo credit: Fionn Hutton.