Cold War Compassion: The Politics of Pity in Tom Stoppard’s Neutral Ground and Heiner Müller’s Philoktet

Abstract

At the same time on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, two avant-garde playwrights decided to remake a 2400-year-old tragedy. Heiner Müller (1929-1996) and Tom Stoppard (1937-) are widely regarded as two of the most innovative dramatists of East Germany and Great Britain and respectively. In 1965, Stoppard submitted a script for a spy thriller to Granada TV and Müller published his first play since being banned from the East German Writers’ Association in 1961. Though unbeknownst to each other and writing for drastically different purposes, media, and audiences, they both lit upon Sophocles’ Philoctetes as the appropriate vehicle for their work. Sympathy has been recognized as central to tragedy since Aristotle’s Poetics, and Philoctetes is the ultimate drama of compassion. The story of the wounded Philoctetes is an Ur-scene for pity in the same way that Ajax’s slaughter of the sheep in his madness is a primal scene for indignation, or Orpheus’ descent to the underworld, for grief. In finding their way to Philoctetes, Stoppard and Müller grapple with a fundamental problem of theatrical art.