To Be or Not to Be

A theater troupe rehearses a satire about the Nazis until the war becomes a reality. When a death list from the anti-fascist underground surfaces, the actors must suddenly become masters of deception.

Real Nazis meet fake Nazis, fake Nazis meet real spies, real spies meet semi-fake double agents—theater becomes a survival strategy. A bizarre comedy of mistaken identities.

The Story

Warsaw, 1939, a few weeks before the German “master race” invades Poland. At the Polskitheater, rehearsals for the next premiere are in full swing. The play: a hard-hitting comedy about the Gestapo. The set: a hyper-realistically simulated Gestapo headquarters. The costumes: astonishingly realistic-looking Gestapo uniforms. Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! This is going to be a blast! Or maybe not. Even before the Nazi satire gets its premiere, it’s pulled by the Polish censorship board. Hamlet is put on the schedule instead, much to the delight of Josef Tura, the lead actor and show-off with a massive stage ego. All the more humiliating for Tura is that in every performance, the same spectator—young, attractive, in a pilot’s uniform—leaves the auditorium at the cue “To be or not to be.” Only Maria Tura, Josef’s wife (who is also an actress), knows where the dashing pilot disappears to: namely, into her dressing room. CUT.

Warsaw, 1940. The Polish Theater is closed; the troupe hopes for real coffee and better times. Then the dashing pilot reappears. This time not on a romantic mission, but a political one: resistance against the regime! The acting troupe joins the mission and, dressed as Nazis, finally performs what they had rehearsed before the war. But unlike before the war, it is now truly a matter of to be or not to be, of life and death.

At the Tyrolean State Theater, we’re not performing for our lives. Good! And to keep it that way, let’s laugh at fascism until it’s finally laughed to death.

The Story

New York, 1938. The Hungarian playwright and exile Melchior Lengyel writes a brutally funny comedy about the Nazis titled Poland Is Not Yet Lost. At the request of his friend Ernst Lubitsch, who had already emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1922, Lengyel adapts the play into a screenplay. Comedy specialist Edwin Justus Mayer is hired as dialogue designer. In 1942, the film is released in U.S. theaters under the title To Be or Not to Be. A New York Times critic writes: “As the film stands, one has the strange feeling that Mr. Lubitsch is Nero playing the violin while Rome burns.” Today, To Be or Not to Be is considered a film classic and—in Nick Whitby’s 2008 stage adaptation—a theatrical blockbuster. Given the political upheavals of our time, it almost seems as though we are once again playing the violin while Rome burns. But as Lubitsch himself said back then: “I am not Nero. And I only play the violin because it annoys the fire.”