What is the Homo Ludens theory? In The Sounds of Music, when Fraulein Maria arrives at the von Trapp house and speaks with the housekeeper, Frau Schmidt, about the children, Frau Schmidt says:
âThe von Trapp children donât play; they march.â
Captain von Trapp, who had lost his wife, lost his ability to play. He was running away from himself. Grief turned him into a detached disciplinarian. Ironically, this was happening in the 1930s when Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, was writing his Homo Ludens (Man the Player).
Observing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he felt that the spirit of play and spontaneity was slowly replaced by marching. The country was forgetting how to play. Play is spontaneous by definition. No one can be made to play. You can make people march but not play.
Play comes over you when you have no cares in the world. When you care, you canât play. When you donât care, you canât help playing. Huizinga wrote,
âPlay is free, is in fact freedom. Play is not âordinaryâ or ârealâ life. It is rather a stepping out of ârealâ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.â
Captain von Trapp was too overwhelmed to play or allow his children to play. He needed Fraulein Maria to burst into his ârealâ world and reawaken him to the spirit of play. Maria was a God-sent. She saved Captain not only from his self-imposed shell of a man â she saved him from the spirit of marching that was overtaking Germany.
For Maria, play was as natural as breathing. She turned everything into a piece of cake. She turned drapes into childrenâs clothes, boredom into song, and enemies into friends. Thatâs what the von Trapp children lacked the most; thatâs what they resented their father mostly for â for his refusal to play.
Maria may not have been an âasset to the abbeyâ because she âwaltzes on her way to Mass and whistles on the stairs,â but this was exactly what was lacking in the von Trappâs household. Captain von Trappâs soul was dead. He marched to the tune of grief, despair, and apathy and made his kids do the same.
And yet, there was an edelweiss still alive deep down in his soul. Mariaâs natural playfulness reawakened the spirit of play in his heart, and the flower bloomed again. She gave him a gift of himself.
âIn play there is something âat playâ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.â Homo Ludens
What did Mariaâs play mean? It meant that there was something transcending the immediate needs of life â something beyond the world of care. Captain felt that âsomethingâ knocking back into his life. A Life from beyond life. He let down his guard and allowed the spirit of play in.
Why did he refuse to serve in the Royal Navy of the Third Reich? Because of his strong moral and ethical principles? Maybe. But it seems more likely that he didnât want to march anymore. There was too much play in his soul to march to the Naziâs tune. The time of seriousness was gone. He was full of life, song, and poetry again.
â[Play] lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the childâs.â Homo Ludens