At a little before eight on International Women’s Day we were ushered into the Judith E. Wilson studio, a black cube of a space beneath the English Faculty at Cambridge University, redecorated as Berlin’s famous Romanisches Café. I have never seen the room look so welcoming: little tables scattered around one side of the space, lit by tea lights, surrounded by chairs, and waited on by members of the production team, who brought biscuits, tea and coffee as the audience watched a projection of Manfred Noa’s 1922 film of Nathan der Weise and admired the reproductions of Otto Dix that hung above the acting space. Once a full house was seated, the lights went down and the play begun. Or, to be clear, the frame of the play began, for this production would show Lessing’s play as acted by seven culturally prominent women, all active in or connected to Berlin during the Weimar republic. The first of these women to appear was Mascha Kaléko (played by Maïra A. Kaye), who read one of her poems in German, with surtitles appearing behind her; the next, singing – again in German – softly as she entered, was Marlene Dietrich (Sonja Käufeler). Soon they were joined by the rest of the group, albeit with occasionally jarring abruptness: the German dancer, performance artist and writer, Anita Berber (Simona Hudoklin); the Indian poet, activist and politician, Sarojini Naidu (Priyanka Joshi); the Jewish German poet, playwright and painter, Else Lasker-Schüler (Esme Mahoney); the Chinese-American actor, Anna May Wong (Hope Chen); and the German art journalist and poet, Sylvia von Harden (Constanze Hammerle).

As might be noticeable from the actors’ names, director Eva Urban, assisted by Maïra A. Kaye, had cast the play in such a way that the production was cosmopolitan at every level. As befitted the heteroclite group hypothetically gathered in the Romanisches Café, each actor – student amateurs who developed their performances collaboratively – came from a different country. Lessing’s play, meanwhile, tells the tale of Jewish merchant, Nathan, who has raised an adopted Christian daughter, Recha, in Jerusalem, currently ruled by Saladin during an armistice towards the end of the Third Crusade. As the discussion of Dietrich, Kaléko and the others turned towards the decision to act out the 1779 Enlightenment play, connections were drawn – occasionally a little heavy-handedly – between its world and 1920s Berlin: the rising shadows of anti-semitism in particular, but also how stereotypical casting, found everywhere by Dietrich, had ruined the ambiguities of Lessing’s female characters. Soon, and, again, perhaps too soon, the decision was made to begin acting, and parts were allotted. Nathan by Kaléko (so by Kaye), Recha by Dietrich (Käufeler), both the friar and Saladin’s sister Sitta by Berber (Hudocklin), Daja the nurse by Wong (Chen), Conrad the Templar by von Harden (Hammerle), the dervish Al Hafi by Naidu (Joshi), and both Saladin and the Christian Patriarch by Lasker-Schüler (Mahoney). Of these, the strongest performances were those by Käufeler and Mahoney. The former’s Recha (as would suit Dietrich) was rich with emotion and held the audience captivated each time she sung. The latter’s blunt Saladin and Machiavellian Athanasios were well-distinguished and compelling, no mean feat given that Mahoney had also to act according to the principles of alienation announced by her Else Lasker-Schüler in the frame.

Lessing’s tale is a peculiar mix of eighteenth-century domestic drama and philosophical conte. It begins with Nathan returning from a trading expedition to discover that his daughter almost died in a fire at his house, only to be saved at the last possible moment by a mysterious Templar, pardoned by Saladin a few days before. All this exposition is given in a scene between Nathan and Recha’s nurse Daja, and makes for a tough start to proceedings: both actors did a good job of communicating the information clearly, although Chen (as Wong, as Daja) tended to over-employ a series of gestures that would not have been out of place on an eighteenth-century stage, and Kaye (as Kaléko, as Nathan) was unable to render with sufficient strength the cascading emotions accompanying each revelation. From here, we are introduced to Recha, delighted to see her father (who she believes her biological parent), and dreaming of the Templar, with his white cloak, as some kind of saviour angel. Nathan, rather more philosophically, observes how the good deed of the Muslim leader Saladin, in saving the captured Christian Templar from execution, has now rebounded to save the daughter of a Jew.

Such connections between Islam, Christianity and Judaism repeat throughout the play, and ultimately structure its dénouement in which Recha discovers that she is no Jewess, for all she loves her father, but rather the brother of the Templar who saved her. This in turn makes Recha, and the Templar, on the proof of a long-lost manuscript in the hands of Nathan, the bastard children of Saladin and Satta’s vanished brother. The ensuing tableau, a device used sparingly (and well) in the course of the performance, could not communicate Lessing’s central message of tolerance and inter-faith dialogue more clearly. The legerdemain, which brings this conclusion about while heading off any hint of incest, is too complex to summarise here. To help with all the twists and turns, and at a few similar moments of potential disorientation (such as Al Hafi’s insight into the true financial state of Saladin), the play returned to the Romanisches café frame, with largely improvised discussion between the gathered women intellectuals and artists injecting some needed energy by both suggesting angles for critique and summarising nuances that were easy to miss. For the most part, however, explanation prevailed over interpretation. I would have preferred more of the latter, not least because of the aims and interests stated in the introductory discussion.

At the conclusion of the performance, there was no return to the café, and this felt odd. Perhaps this was to be understood as leaving the weight of interpretation upon the audience, who, seated at tables and sipping their drinks, had, of course, never left 1920s Berlin. Yet, apart from a few lines spoken at the start by Harden (Hammerle) and Dietrich (Käufeler) as they looked over the assembled tables and chairs and wondered if anyone there would, or indeed should, take on the male roles of the text, little was done to bring those attending further into the production, and nothing once Nathan the Wise had begun. Again, this may have been a deliberate means of placing the audience in a difficult position, half-complicit with the cosmopolitan experiment of the show, and yet, at the same time, limited to the role of mere observers. One could also find pragmatic reasons for this choice: Lessing’s play is already sufficiently complicated, and further emphasis laid upon the frame created by Urban’s refashioning of the work may well have been a step too far.

Overall, this production was at its best whenever Lessing’s work and the intricate mise en abîme worked in harmony. Sometimes this was on the back of particular skill, as in the case of Hammerle’s Recha and Mahoney’s Saladin, and at other it was thanks to the resonance between Lessing’s words and the frame narrative, as with Nathan’s telling of the ring parable. When the time came for applause to turn the café back into a drama studio, everyone present, I’m sure, was left with much to think of.

Nathan the Wise, directed by Eva Urban was performed in the Judith E. Wilson studio at the Faculty of English from 5th to 8th March 2014.