Has Berlin changed? Not noticeably. One of my favourite grab-a-very-quick-bite-before-rushing-to-the-theatre spots has transformed itself into a fancy wine place, which is a little annoying. On the other hand, one of the very, very few positive side-effect of the pandemic is that everywhere — but EVERYWHERE — now accepts credit card payments. Other than that, the place looks and feels pretty much as it did in 2019. I sat in a completely sold out theatre this evening, with an audience about as middle-aged-trending-towards-retirement as I’m used to seeing in most Berlin theatres, and many of them headed to the theatre cafeteria for a drink afterwards (presumably without the masks we all wore during the show). Me, I wandered along the always fairly deserted residential streets of Mitte, contemplating the weirdness of eScooters.

Those didn’t really exist two years ago; now they’re everywhere, and they’re oddly present, materially insistent. Which is strange. It’s not that they’re especially big — in fact, they take up less room than a bike, though their squatness, the thickness of their frame, seems to make them more noticeable. Visually impolite, in a way. Making undue demands on one’s attention. They’re also morphologically unsettling. It’s something about the way they’re parked: not quite upright, but not leaning far enough to the side either, just slightly angled, as if frozen in time while negotiating a long curve. And because their little stand is almost invisible, their position feels uncanny: nothing should be able to just stand askew like that. Walking along the street, your empathy is triggered over and again by eScooters that fool you into thinking they’re about to fall. Also part of this frozen motion effect is that they all look ready to take off: unlike bikes, which are locked to things, clustered together, clearly rendered immobile and safe from theft, and unlike cars, which are little worlds onto themselves, closed off, ignoring you and allowing you to ignore them (especially if parked and empty), the eScooter somehow always seems to be about to get going, or not quite fully stopped, just leaning in space for a moment. And they’re unsettling morally, too. They just stand there, apparently unowned, apparently unlocked, a seeming invitation to hop on and take off. I assume that wouldn’t actually work, but the temptation is very real. Except I’ve also seen what people look like on those things, and it’s not much of an improvement on a Segway.

Sometimes they stand in pairs, and that makes them a little less unsettling.

*

While trying to stay awake early in the evening yesterday, I discovered that there is now a German version of the Great British Bake Off, scheduled, in evident disregard for the brilliance of the format, in the early evening — the traditional soap opera slot on German TV. It’s deeply uncanny: just close enough to the original to be perfectly recognizable, and yet so disturbingly different (unlike the Canadian version, which is basically identical but very Canadian where GBBO is very UK). For one, it’s spectacularly ugly, with a nearly all-purple set, and even though they’ve kept the tent they’ve covered it in stage lights suspended from dropped ceilings. There’s an almost Brechtian insistence on making the tech visible: all the contestants wear hideous lavalier mics attached to their faces, so they look like they’re selling knives on the Shopping Channel. On the other hand, almost all of the human interaction, especially between the hosts and the contestants, is absent. It’s almost as if the producers think the show is only about baking. There’s only one host, for starters, and she doesn’t seem interested in silly jokes and salacious puns; she also doesn’t talk to the contestants. Instead, there’s a disembodied male voiceover that asks them questions, which they answer to a disembodied camera eye, nervously. The judges hover occasionally, but they don’t do the usual group visits to each station. Oh god, and the music. The title sequence is basically the same visuals, but with a bizarre cover version of “Build me up, Buttercup” (!!!) as the theme tune. And throughout the show, they keep piping in thematically matched music for each contestant and each bake: it’s a profoundly disorienting hodgepodge of stock tunes, assembled by an elevator muzak DJ on speed.

But none of this is as remarkable as the judging. It goes on forever. FOREVER. They comment on absolutely everybody, and in some detail. They have clipboards. They award points for specific things. When they rank people during the technical, everyone gets a score, and everyone’s score is announced, one at a time. And then at the end, they tally up the three scores, and the person with the fewest points goes home. One the one hand, that just seemed profoundly unentertaining: there’s obviously a ton of repetition in the comments, and the judges aren’t exactly prime time TV personalities. On the other hand, I found myself thinking that it was much fairer than the UK/Canadian process: have we not all wondered why people’s catastrophic (or stellar) performances during the signature round never seems to matter in the end, and why and how some showstoppers seem to cancel out total failures in the technical while others don’t? Not on Das Grosse Backen (yeah… “The Great Baking” is what this is called!). A dismal signatures with a crappy score will hang like an anchor around a contestant’s neck to the end, and even a perfect score for a showstopper isn’t going to rescue that lacklustre average.

Technically, all the bakers seemed pretty impressive; aesthetically, um, not so much:

Then again, the trophy is a gigantic golden cupcake (you can see it behind the judges!), so aesthetic abjection is certainly on brand for Das Grosse Backen.

*

I’m not here, strictly speaking, to look at eScooters or watch German Bake Off, though. I’m here to return, finally, after a too-long hiatus, to the research on my endless Shakespeare in Berlin project, and for that, I get to spend all my daylight hours in the archive of the Academy of the Arts — a spectacularly nondescript GDR building that houses a breathtakingly rich treasure of theatre historical material. Just today, I got to work my way through not just a prompt book for Erich Engel’s 1937 production of Coriolanus, but three sets of interleaved copies of the standard Dorothea Tieck translation, covered in layers and layers of rewrites, one set by Engel, the other, initial, set by one of the Deutsche Theater’s dramaturgs; a cue script; a version of the prompt book that Engel had annotated during what must have been a close-to-final run (“this needs more rehearsing!”); a stage-manager’s prompt book so detailed it’s almost a verbal description of the show (meant, I think, for the frequent remounts and brush-up rehearsals common in the German repertory system); dozens of photos; and, of course, dozens of newspaper clippings with reviews (though those, during the Nazi years, aren’t especially helpful, since critics were meant to suspend their critical faculties). Now, this particular production is reasonably well known, partly because Engel had directed an earlier staging of Coriolanus in 1925 which, by some accounts, hugely influenced Brecht, and because Engel went on to work closely with Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, where their conversations influenced Brecht’s own adaptation of the play. But as far as I can tell, no-one has actually looked at and made use of any of these archival materials — and more staggeringly, similarly rich documentation exists for many, many other productions, going back to the beginning of the century. Things will get properly wild when I get to the GDR years, when most of the East Berlin theatres adopted the Berliner Ensemble’s policies of documenting rehearsals and production processes in absolutely exhaustive details — that’s when I’ll get to go through hundreds and hundred of pages of rehearsal protocols for shows famous and utterly obscure. And all of this, kilometres of files full of this stuff, is just sitting there, in this spectacularly nondescript corner building in central Berlin, mostly untouched. I love this place.

A lot has happened since my last attempt to catalogue what theatres in the German-speaking world are offering online while we’re all in self-isolation, so rather than update the old post, I’m doing a proper second edition.

Here goes.

Rather than figuring out new formats on the fly, most theatres have resorted to streaming archival video recordings. While I do agree with people who say that watching a recorded performance isn’t the same as seeing it live (of course it isn’t!), it’s still pretty exciting to me that an international audience can now get a sense, however mediated, of what theatre looks and sounds like in German — and in many cases, with the added benefit of English subtitles. I do want to talk about why this is happening in Germany, but not really, or only to a far more limited degree, elsewhere, but that will have to wait.

Kammerspiele Munich

The Kammerspiele in Munich were first out the gate with an alternative schedule of online offerings. It’s not all archival recordings — they have programmed a number of live events (including a kind of hilarious Zoom-version of Leonie Böhm’s Yung Faust, which had a moment of genuine audience interaction), and on April 21, they will stream a live-cam version of Toshiki Okada’s No Sex, the staged performance of which they streamed last week. If you were lucky enough to see that recording, this should make for a fascinating comparison.

The videos live on Vimeo for 24 hours and most of them have English subtitles.

Today’s screening is Susanne Kennedy’s Theatertreffen-invited stage adaptation of Fassbinder’s Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? No subtitles, oddly, but a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the most celebrated recent directors in Germany.

Most of the Berlin theatres have followed the Kammerspiele’s lead in one form or another:

Schaubühne Berlin

The Schaubühne in Berlin (not really the coolest theatre in the world, pace Time Out…) are doing something rather different: they’re offering some recent productions (mostly by Thomas Ostermeier and Falk Richter — aesthetically, nicely representative of the spectrum of things typically on offer at the Schaubühne), but they’re also opened their historical archives and are streaming a whole bunch of seriously famous productions from the company’s past. So far, this has included Peter Stein’s Prince of Homburg, Peer Gynt, and Oresteia as well as Klaus-Michael Grüber’s legendary Bacchae from 1974; Stein’s Three Sisters is still to come. Most of the productions are filmed for TV and of higher quality than standard archival video.

The shows are online for six hours only, from 6 pm to midnight German time, and live on Vimeo during that time. Many are subtitled in English or French.

Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble is going another route: they are putting some productions online, but for longer than 24 hours. This week, it’s artistic director Oliver Reese’s production of The Tin Drum — an adaptation of Günther Grass’s novel as a two-our solo performance. The recording was made on March 12 — the last show before the venue was shut down; it includes the entire curtain call, which ends, poignantly, with Holonics stopping the applause to say “Stay healthy — and I hope we’ll see each other again soon.”

On Wednesday (April 15), the theatre will also host a live Q&A session with Reese and the show’s actor, Nico Holonics. They’re also hosting a rich archive of videos and photo galleries about specific productions, talkbacks, and other related topics.

Deutsches Theater Berlin

The Deutsche Theater hesitated a bit longer than the other Berlin houses before opening their archives; instead, they started hosting an on-going (and obviously extremely topical!) reading of Boccaccio’s Decamerone performed by members of the ensemble. This continues: it is online every day at 6 pm German time, and archived on YouTube. (Decamerone readings seem to have become something on international trend among theatre artists — someone should make a list!)

As of last week, however, the DT is also streaming full productions, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last Thursday’s was a fascinating deep dive into the GDR archive: Friedo Solter’s 1987 staging of Lessing’s Philotas, starring the late Ulrich Mühe. This week, they’re streaming Stefan Pucher’s recent production of Marat/Sade and Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Hauptmann’s The Weavers — the latter filmed for broadcast in 2011, the former an archival recording. Neither is subtitled, sadly.

Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin

The Gorki, Berlin’s queerest and most multi-cultural theatre — the city’s post-migrant ensemble, in their own words — also took some time to figure out how to respond to the closures. They have now begun to offer archival streams every Wednesday for 24 hours, starting two weeks ago with a screening of Falk Richter’s Small Town Boy which was accompanied by a live chat including the director and hosted on Nachtkritik; there have been three such collective watch-and-discuss events from three different theatres so far (the Munich Kammerspiele with Christopher Rüping’s Drums in the Night and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden with Sebastian Hartmann’s take on Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted were the others), and I hope the series will continue.

I’m really excited for their Hamlet, which is streaming on March 22 — here’s a trailer for your delectation. I expect it’ll be subtitled: most of the Gorki’s productions are.

The one Berlin theatre that’s not really doing anything online is the Volksbühne. What’s up with that? I fear it’s yet another long-term effect of the dark Dercon period: he dissolved their archives and handed everything over to the Akademie der Künste, including a huge trove of archival video (fully digitized, I believe) that had been assembled during Frank Castorf’s decades as artistic director. And the ADK archive is a marvellous, marvellous place for research, but not authorized or equipped to simply put recordings up on its website for public consumption. So, the Volksbühne, with no archive to speak of, is staying silent.

In Hamburg, cool stuff is happening too:

Thalia Theater

The Thalia Theater, one of the most reliably excellent theatres in Germany, went online with a program of archival recordings and new online-only ventures two weeks ago — launching with a new take on Schiller’s Mary Stuart by the brilliant Antú Romero Nunes. Their programming most closely resembles a typical repertory schedule: for instance, they streamed archival recordings of Nicolas Stemann’s Faust (both parts) early on, and both are coming back now; Nunes’s Schiller, in three parts (with takes on Wilhelm Tell and Kabale und Liebe as well), is returning this week, too. They’re offering a remarkably rich blend of brand new things, recent productions, and older pieces that are no longer in their current repertory, some in made-for-TV edits, others in archival recordings.

Next week, it’s all Schiller all the time, with Stemann’s excellent Robbers from 2008, Jette Steckel’s Don Carlos, Stephan Kimmig’s Maria Stuart from 2007, with the incandescently brilliant Susanne Wolff in the title role, and then Stemann again, doing Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart — a famous production I can’t wait to see.

Most of these videos aren’t subtitled, unfortunately, but for my money, this may just be the most unmissable set of offerings of the lot.

Deutsches Schauspielhaus

Hamburg’s other major theatre was a bit slower to get going than the Thalia, and they seem to be relying on video from recent seasons for their offerings (all from the current AD Karin Beier’s years rather than the deeper archive). Their first screenings were of shows that were invited to Theatertreffen and were broadcast at the time, but next up are a number of productions that are new to screens — most intriguingly, Falk Richter’s much-lauded and multiply award-winning staging of Jelinek’s Trump-inspired Am Königsweg (April 23).

Most of these shows aren’t subtitled, and the schedule seems a little haphazard, but the Deutsche Schauspielhaus regularly produces some of the most interesting theatre in Germany, with a large and deep ensemble; I’m excited to see what else they have in store in the coming weeks.

I started with the Kammerspiele in Munich because they kind of got the ball rolling on streaming shows, and because under their artistic director Matthias Lilienthal, they have produced a lot of challenging, fascinating, sometimes infuriating, sometimes baffling theatre over the past four years — and Lilienthal’s contract is ending this season. There’s a real possibility that that final season will just fizzle out, so the Kammerspiele’s online presence is doing a kind of double duty as a retrospective over a short but intense period that’s about to conclude. The same is true somewhere else: at the

Schauspiel Dortmund

where artistic director Kay Voges is stepping down after a decade of programming and creating some of the most innovative theatre in Germany, or anywhere else in the world. The Schauspiel Dortmund website, under the programmatic title Déjà Vu, is explicitly hosting a retrospective of Voges’s decade at the helm, and they seem to be keeping most of the videos (all of them, I think, archival) online for the time being — not just for the 24 hours most other theatres are allowing viewers. Dortmund’s been the hotbed for theatrical investigations of new media and intermediate work in German theatre for the past few years, and the productions they are showcasing give a really rich, exciting sense of the kind of work that’s been going on there.

They don’t seem to have a set schedule, so I don’t know what ahead, but you can share in the past excitement here. No new videos have been posted since April 8, so perhaps this is it for now; but what is there is certainly worth a visit.

I’d particularly encourage those of you from the English-speaking world to have a look at Voges’s own Hamlet. The play has become a bit of a perennial presence in these streams: there was Rüping’s Hamlet from Munich; Thomas Ostermeier’s from the Schaubühne; this one; then a riff by the Finnish playwright E. L. Karhu from Leipzig; another production from the distinctly off-the-beaten-track ETA Hoffmann Theater in Bamberg (I’m allowed to say that because it’s my hometown theatre — where Hamlet was the first show I ever saw on a stage! They are now streaming their production of Faust); and the Gorki production I mentioned above — SIX very different takes on the play from six different theatres, all available, for free, within two weeks of each other.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the Dortmund shows are subtitled. This reflects one aspect of all this online activity that is easy to miss: its target audience is not the international community of theatre goers. These theatres are specifically local institutions — many of them are municipal entities — and they are making these videos available first and foremost for their local audiences who cannot come to the theatre right now. That’s why so many of the companies are also programming short YouTube videos of ensemble members doing readings or staging little impromptu playlets in their living rooms: because those actors are local presences. They are part of the cultural fabric of their cities, and as public life has moved largely into the virtual realm for now, they are connecting with their highly localized audiences, paradoxically, through a world-wide medium.

Alright. Back to my brief! I’ll conclude with a list of other theatres, most major, some more surprising, that are also streaming full productions — and I’ll end with a total highlight.

Schauspiel Köln (Cologne)

The Schauspiel Köln is putting a new archival video up every Friday — so far, they’ve offered Pınar Karabulut’s Romeo and Juliet, Therese Willstedt’s Woyzeck, and (currently) Armin Petras’s The Weavers as part of their “Dramazon Prime” program, which also features podcasts, radio plays, and other virtual pleasures. (Notice something? If you want to see two prominent directors’ extremely different takes on Hauptmann’s most famous play, you can watch this one and then head to the Deutsche Theater’s website for Michael Thalheimer’s version!)

Schauspiel Hannover

The Schauspiel Hannover, which is in its first season under its new artistic director Sonja Anders, probably doesn’t have as deep a video archive as many of the other companies I’m listing, but they are showing one recording a week from their current season (for 24 hours only); so far, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; Chekhov’s Platonov (or rather, Platonova); and an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Time out of Joint (does that count as another Hamlet riff?). Worth noting that both in Cologne and in Hannover, two out of the three productions being streamed were directed by women!

Schauspiel Leipzig

The municipal theatre in Leipzig is trying out a number of different things, including a Zoom-based show built from Kafka texts and directed by Philipp Preuss (open for 40 audience members each time it runs, with required pre-registration). But they have also streamed some recent productions, all, as far as I can tell, from their studio spaces rather than their mainstage venue. One of them was the aforementioned Hamlet-riff. They are planning to stream two shows a week, but haven’t yet announced the next programmed shows. I’m afraid they’re unlikely to be subtitled.

Staatsschauspiel Dresden

The Dresden theatre had a rather memorable season last year, with two productions invited to Theatertreffen, and they are showcasing both of those on their website now: Sebastian Hartmann’s Dostoevsky adaptation mentioned above is still available until April 14; next up, on April 18, is Ulrich Rasche’s Das Grosse Heft. This was such an aurally and physically overwhelming production that something is bound to be lost in translation, and it won’t be subtitled, but I wouldn’t miss this one. I don’t know if further streams are planned — I have high hopes though!

Nationaltheater Mannheim

The theatre in Mannheim is the kind of institution you will find in many larger German cities, but are almost unheard of in the English-speaking world: a single organization that combines a theatre company, an opera company, and a dance company under one umbrella and one leadership team. Accordingly, the Nationaltheater is streaming productions from all of its branches, including dance and opera; in the category of what in Germany is often called “Sprechtheater,” spoken-word theatre, they have put two shows online so far, including a Maria Stuart directed by Claudia Bauer — something of a Theatertreffen regular in recent years. These aren’t streamed recordings, but archival videos that remain, for now at least, accessible on the theatre’s website. No subtitles, but highly recommended anyway, if only for a sense of the remarkable level of production you can expect to find even beyond the major metropoles.

A pretty cool extra: they’ve also started a series of master classes, including classics karaoke led by the opera company’s solo répétiteur!

Schauspielhaus Zürich

The theatre in Zurich, under new artistic leadership as of this season (including, as co-AD, Nicolas Stemann, and as staff director Christopher Rüping — two names that have appeared multiple times already here!), was off to an extremely promising start before having its season curtailed by Covid-19. Rather than put archival video up, they are now starting to experiment with virtual formats — bits and pieces of which they’re posting as work in progress. Rüping is starting a new project, designed for a live online audience and based on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue this week, with the first episode going live on April 17. I’ll be there to watch, though I have no idea what this will look like; it’ll certainly be fascianting to see how a director who usually relies on actors’ bodies taking possession of the actual spaces they occupy tackles the problem of online disembodiment.

Burgtheater Vienna

It might seem a bit weird that one of the most famous theatres in Europe should come so late in this catalogue, but that’s because the Burgtheater (yet another company where a new artistic director had an inaugural season cut short by the closures) hasn’t done very much yet. Like many other theatres — too many to list them all and too many to follow — the Burgtheater is publishing solo video performances and readings by ensemble members (one of which is a total gem that I already raved about on Twitter but will happily include here again: Sarah Viktoria Frick’s hilarious and fantastically moving riff on performing while child-minding). As of this weekend, though, the Burgtheater is now streaming select videos of past performances from the rich archive of multi-camera filmed productions they have published on DVD over the years. Slightly disappointing in the sense that these are shows one could already catch on video — but still a welcome opportunity to (re)encounter some historically important stagings. All streams are online for 24 hours; they’re not subtitled.

Volkstheater Vienna

As promised, a highlight at the end. The Volkstheater is a venue that flies a bit under the radar, since the Burgtheater takes up so much of the international attention. I will admit that I wasn’t aware of how much interesting work they have been staging — but thanks to the closures, I now know. Because the Volkstheater, at the end of current AD Anna Badora’s term in office, is screening an extensive retrospective, including a whole slew of pieces by Yael Ronen. It’s a very rich program of productions, organized like a proper repertory schedule with repetitions and a mix of older and brand new shows — but as far as I can tell, none of them are subtitled.

As a final side note, I am intrigued how frequently some directors’ work appears in these streams: one could have turned oneself into something of an expert in Falk Richter’s or Yael Ronen’s oeuvre simply by watching what Germanophone theatres have been putting online over the past month, for instance. I wonder where that focus comes from — is it that some directors are more reluctant than others to give permission for their work to be screened?

Somewhat amazingly, this is not a complete catalogue. There’s still more, and more yet to follow. I haven’t talked at all about non-state theatres, about production houses (such as the Hebbel am Ufer/HAU, whose YouTube channel is a total treasure trove), or about independent companies. I’ll stop here for now, though, but not without mentioning, again, the stellar work being done by the editors of Nachtkritik, the most indispensable online source of information and venue of debate about theatre in German. Not only do they host a daily stream themselves, often from smaller or less visible venues, they also maintain a daily schedule of online events and streams, as well as of filmed productions permanently streaming on YouTube. Among other things, they list the many streams of opera productions now available, from Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna, and elsewhere.

Phew. CovidTheatre is exhausting — there is just too much of it!

German Theatre

Where else would I start?

The Kammerspiele in Munich were first out the gate with an alternative schedule of online offerings — mostly archival video of recent productions, but also a few live events (including a kind of hilarious Zoom-version of Leonie Böhm’s Yung Faust, which had a moment of genuine audience interaction). The videos live on Vimeo for 24 hours and most of them have English subtitles.

Today, they’re screening Toshiki Okada’s The Vacuum Cleaner, which would have been staged at the Theatertreffen in Berlin next month if the festival hadn’t been cancelled.

On Sunday, they’re streaming Christopher Rüping’s fantastic Drums in the Night, and there will be a live chat with the director on Nachtkritik starting at 8 pm German time.

The Schaubühne in Berlin (not really the coolest theatre in the world, pace Time Out…) are doing something rather different: they’re offering some recent productions (mostly by Thomas Ostermeier and Falk Richter — aesthetically, nicely representative of the spectrum of things typically on offer at the Schaubühne), but they’re also opened their historical archives and are streaming a whole bunch of seriously famous productions from the company’s past, including Peter Stein’s Prince of Homburg, Oresteia and Three Sisters as well as Klaus-Michael Grüber’s legendary Bacchae from 1974. Most of the productions are filmed for TV and of higher quality than standard archival video.

The shows are online for six hours only, from 6 pm to midnight German time, and live on Vimeo during that time. Many are subtitled in English or French.

On Saturday, you can catch Ostermeier’s brilliant Hedda Gabler, which has been in rep since 2005, still with the original cast (!); on April 1, his delightfully anarchic Hamlet. Both have English subtitles.

The third theatre that is putting out new archival videos of recent productions has a somewhat stronger claim than the Schaubühne to the title of coolest theatre in the world: the Schauspiel Dortmund is hosting a retrospective of Kay Voges’s decade as its artistic director (he is on his way to Vienna). Dortmund’s been the hotbed for theatrical investigations of new media and intermediate work in German theatre for the past few years, and the productions they’re showcasing give a really rich, exciting sense of the kind of work that’s been going on there.

They don’t seem to have a set schedule, so I don’t know what ahead, but you can share in the excitement, day by day, here.

I’m intrigued, elated, and a bit puzzled that Hamlet is a fixture on all three platforms: Rüping’s recently closed production at the Kammerspiele is no longer online, sadly (but I imagine it might come back), but Voges’s still seems to be on Vimeo — and Ostermeier’s as I mentioned is coming up in a few days.

The Thalia Theater in Hamburg, one of the most reliably excellent theatres in Germany, is starting a program of archival recordings and new online-only ventures, this Saturday — launching with a new take on Schiller’s Mary Stuart by the brilliant Antú Romero Nunes. After that, they’re streaming archival recordings of Nicolas Stemann’s Faust (both parts) — one of those productions that have already found their place in modern theatre history. And then Jette Steckel’s Danton’s Death, which I’ve never seen, but have longed to see for forever — partly because Steckel must be the single most underrated German director and partly because the set looks astonishing.

This may just be the most unmissable set of offerings of the lot.

The Berliner Ensemble is going another route: they are putting some productions online, but for longer than 24 hours. The first one is Michael Thalheimer’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, which will be available until 2 April. They’re also hosting a rich archive of videos and photo galleries about specific productions, talkbacks, and other related topics.

Other theatres are doing a similar thing. The Schauspiel Köln, for instance, is streaming a recording of Pinar Karabulut’s Romeo and Juliet for the next few days (until midnight on March 30) as part of its “Dramazon Prime” program, which also features podcasts, radio plays, and other virtual pleasures.

The Schauspiel Hannover, which is in its first season under its new artistic director Sonja Anders, probably doesn’t have as deep a video archive as many of the other companies I’m listing, but they are showing one recording a week from their current season (for 24 hours only); this Saturday (March 28), an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; next Saturday (April 4), Stephan Kimmig’s production of Chekhov’s Platonov (or rather, Platonova).

And yet another different approach: the Deutsche Theater, rather than streaming filmed productions, is hosting an on-going (and obviously extremely topical!) reading of Boccaccio’s Decamerone performed by members of the ensemble. It’s online every day at 6 pm German time, and archived on YouTube.

Finally, the marvellous and utterly indispensable theatre criticism and discourse website Nachtkritik is hosting its own daily rotation of streamed productions in collaboration with various major theatres and independent companies.

On April 1, they’re streaming Falk Richter’s Small Town Boy, a production from Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater — and I hope that won’t be last Gorki production we’ll see!

The Nachtkritik team have also compiled, and constantly updating, a day-by-day schedule of online theatre, which includes all sorts of delights, and should be regularly checked, here. Among other things, they list the many streams of opera productions now available, from Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna, and elsewhere.

That’s it for now. More to follow!

In the theatres, though, it’s business as usual. Here’s the daily listings from Freiheit, including two announcements of the programming for the week ahead (and the Staatstheater is missing again, but we know what they performed on January 12 from yesterday’s Börsen-Zeitung):

I say “business as usual” — but after my musings yesterday, I wonder if that doesn’t mean that the theatres, at least some of them, continued their mildly politicized programming during the pivotal weekend of the turmoil. The Volksbühne offered Wilhelm Tell again, and the Palast-Theater, rather than going back to The Mikado, as they had done for the previous week, ran a second night of The Shadow-Dwellers. Other than those, though, there is little going on in the theatres that seems out of the ordinary at all. One thing to note: Sunday matinees, almost everywhere! The Volksbühne Association, the organization that owned the theatre that still survives, in much modified form, today, but also organized a rich array of other theatrical and cultural events for its thousands of members, was one of the main drivers of this programming, and bought large blocks of tickets for these matinees, sometimes entire houses. As we saw before, it’s a mix of classics and fairy-tale shows, though on Sundays, the mix also seems to include popular shows from the evening repertory (such as the operetta Schwarzwaldmädel at the Komische Oper, which ran twice on 12 January — an arrangement familiar from modern Anglophone theatre, but quite unusual in Germany). Reinhardt’s three theatres all offered well-known productions from his regular repertory in the afternoon, though it’s not certain that these would all have featured the original casts: Hamlet at the Deutsche Theater, in a version directed by Reinhardt himself that had been in rep since 1913; Spring Awakening at the Kammerspiele, in Reinhardt’s 1906 staging that eventually racked up an astonishing 387 performances, far more than any other Reinhardt production; and at the Kleine Schauspielhaus, Pension Schöller, a farce by Carl Laufs and Wilhelm Jacoby that remains in the German comic repertory, and has emerged as a minor classic in the hands of leading directors such as Frank Castorf and Andreas Kriegenburg in recent decades. Like the week-day matinees for students, these Sunday afternoon shows were clearly not reserved for light entertainment: just consider that even a venue as sharply focussed on commercial froth as the Lustspielhaus chose to offer Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (or Nora, its more common German title).

Anything else? Not really, except to reiterate what I’d noted in an earlier post: just how much Wedekind there was on stage in those years. The Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse staged virtually nothing but Wedekind, and between the two versions of Spring Awakening Reinhardt directed, that play saw almost 450 performances — a count that dwarfed everything else in his repertory, including the famous stagings of Midsummer Night’s Dream and the notoriously endless run of Shaw’s Saint Joan.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: that none of this appears to have affected the theatres and popular performance venues is really remarkable. Or maybe it actually did, in not instantly obvious ways. It’s hard to believe that no shows were received differently under these circumstances than they might have been even weeks earlier. When the Schiller-Theater Hamlet opened in October 1918, for instance, one critic found the play newly topical: “‘Time is out of joint!’ cries the Danish prince, and we are touched to the quick; for what the poet is having this one figure feel and experience before our eyes, our entire people feels and experiences now: to be or not to be, that is the question” (or rather, in the German translation, that is the question here, “das ist hier die Frage” — a suddenly weighty adverb). Seeing the same show three months later, with public order truly out of joint in the streets near the theatre, that effect must surely have been heightened. Similarly, The Cherry Orchard must surely have taken on a new weight under the circumstances, must surely have felt at least slightly less far removed in its setting and subject matter, even for the audience of manual and white-collar workers that the Volksbühne was designed for: if the sound of the trees being chopped down mingled with the sound of gunshots in the street (did it?), how can that not have affected one’s response to a play that was read by all of its reviewers in political terms? And what did it mean for the Volksbühne to stage that play in the middle of the January uprisings?

What, for that matter, did it mean for them to put on Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell the next day, today, on January 11 — a play that deals, after all, with an individual resisting an oppressive regime? When the production opened in late November 1918, it didn’t seem activist enough to Ulrich Steindorff, writing in the Socialist daily Freiheit: “four weeks earlier” — before the fall of the German monarchy, that is — Wilhelm Tell “would have been a revolution play for the Volksbühne. Now it is a reactionary piece.” From Steindorff’s political perspective, Tell’s struggle is too personal: he takes action against an oppressive tyrant, not against a system of tyranny. The only thing that prevented the show from “drifting by in irrelevance” were the passionate pleas for the values of freedom “hurled with overwhelming violence towards the 3,000 people of the Berlin Volksbühne” by Stauffacher, the political figure that, as far as the critic is concerned, ought to be at the centre of a contemporary take on the play (the Volksbühne held barely half as many spectators as that, but never mind). Tell himself is no “leader for these times.” But what about the performance on January 11? Is it too far fetched to imagine that at least some of the Volksbühne spectators would have seen Gessler, the tyrannical ruler in Schiller’s play, as a version of Noske, or vice versa, and would have thought of Tell’s resistance against arbitrary violence as a version of the protesters continued resistance against violent suppression? In November 1918, the critic reviewing the production in the more moderately left-wing Vorwärts identified the dying nobleman Attinghaus’s plea to his fellow rebels — “Seid einig — einig — einig”: “Unify — unify — unify” — as the central line of the show, but how would that line have registered two months later, when Social Democrats were killing Social Democrats in the streets?

The play certainly could be made to trigger violent responses, as Leopold Jessner would discover at the Staatstheater in December, in a different venue, with a different set of regulars in the audience. But if the Staatstheater’s old court-theatre crowd could be upset by Jessner’s portrayal of the nobility, might the Volksbühne crowd not have responded with renewed sympathy to staged cries for freedom, whether political or individual, on the eve of the violent quashing of such cries among their peers and comrades? And might the Volksbühne leadership not have known that they were courting that kind of response? Could programming Wilhelm Tell on 11 January 1919 have been a wholly innocuous, non-political decision?

A little belatedly, here is the listing of today’s performances, from the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung:

Besides the Volksbühne Tell, there are other plays that may have been read differently in those days of turmoil than before: I continue to wonder about the Palast-Theater’s Die im Schatten leben (see the post from two days ago). When the Volksbühne came under new artistic leadership in the 1918/19 season, this play about oppressed workers was one of the documents of “proletarian struggle” that was explicitly suggested as the kind of drama they ought to be staging. But the Palast-Theater was a huge, primarily commercial entertainment theatre, home to Otto Reutter’s famous revues during the war (which started out as patriotic and became more melancholy over time — but certainly never an occasion for revolutionary fervour); by 1919, it belonged to the film giant Ufa (and would soon be converted into a cinema). And yet it somehow became the venue not just for The Mikado, which seems like a perfect fit, but also for The Shadow-Dwellers, which does not. Was there money to be made with proletarian discontent, and the Palast-Theater capitalized on that? Also, what exactly was the Staatstheater up to in deciding to stage their production of Schiller’s The Robbers, his most fervent, most Sturm-und-Drang-driven play — and not once, but twice, including an afternoon  performance, at reduced prices, on Sunday? It was an older staging, first produced in November 1917, and, given its courtly origins, surely not a subversive one: but how would it have been received in the new context? As appeasement? As a provocation? As mere costume drama of minimal relevance?

A final thought: the Apollo-Theater, day after day, throughout this week, advertised its variety program and “personal appearances” by the “world-famous composer J. Gilbert.” I don’t know who this was — the only composer whose name and initial match is the American James L. Gilbert, whose most well-known song was “Bonnie Sweet Bessie,” but he was dead already in 1919. But whoever he was, those “personal appearances” must have been quite unlike what he might have expected. The Apollo-Theater and the Berliner Theater across the road from it were almost in the epicentre of the January street fights, on the very edge of the newspaper quarter where most of the occupations took place (theatres are marked in red, occupied buildings in blue):

To hear Gilbert perform, or to see the afternoon fairy-tale show at the Berliner Theater, audiences would have had to pass barricades such as this one, on the corner of Charlottenstrasse and Zimmerstrasse:

Then again, the Apollo-Theater was used to turning calamity into entertainment. In November 1918, as the German monarchy was collapsing and the inevitability of military defeat became inescapable, it staged a huge variety show on theme of global demise: “Die Welt geht under,” “The world is ending.”

The only theatre listings for this day are from Freiheit (with both of the postponed shows still listed):

Lots of new titles from the repertory, and one opening (though it’s not listed here): Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Staatstheater. The Volksbühne is offering its staging of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Barnowsky’s Lessing-Theater has a Peer Gynt that had to compete with a juggernaut adaptation of the play at the Staatstheater, which ran over 700 times between 1914 and 1930; and the Schiller-Theater in Charlottenburg brings back its Hamlet, which had premiered in late October 1918 and would see a mere 5 performances this year before being retired. At the Kleine Theater, it’s sequel time: Henriette Jacoby was Georg Hermann’s follow-up novel to Jettchen Gebert, also turned into a play by the author, and also was filmed in 1918 — I suspect what we’re seeing here is a theatre piggybacking onto the commercial (and artistic?) success of a two-part film. An inauspicious title at the Deutsche Opernhaus: Der polnische Jude (“The Polish Jew”); yet as far as I can see Karel Weis’s opera is not as antisemitic as the title might suggest, but rather the story of a Christian inn keeper who murders a Jew seeking shelter.

With so many newspapers affected by the uprising, no reviews of the Staatstheater Ibsen appeared in any of the sources available to me — even the papers that did appear seem to have ignored it. Perhaps it didn’t seem an especially exciting occasion: Ghosts was frequently staged in Berlin in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Before Reinhardt became a director, he appeared in it at the Deutsche Theater for two years, from 1900-1901; he then mounted his own production with set designs by Edvard Munch in 1906 as the opening show in the new Kammerspiele. Between then and 1910, that version  frequently returned to the repertory at the Kammerspiele and also in other theatres he owned; In January 1918, it transferred to the Volksbühne as well. At the same time, the play had been in rep at the Lessing-Theater, on and off, from 1908 to 1912, directed by Emil Lessing; Victor Barnowsky staged his own take after his took over the Lessing-Theater in May 1916, and revived that show in October 1918. It may just not have been a production of such burning importance to attract immediate critical attention in the midst of armed unrest. When reviews eventually did appear, days later, they focussed almost exclusively on the actors’ performances, revealing little to nothing about the show itself. Alfred Klaar, in the Vossische Zeitung, wonders if the impressive crowds at the theatre are seeking a homeopathic remedy, healing the pain of recent days by exposing themselves to a milder — or fictional — form of turmoil. In any case, the kinds of people who go to the Staatstheater, he thinks, may in fact be new to Ibsen’s play: “the audience members here don’t change as often as the artistic directors.” That’s a running theme in many reviews of Staatstheater production in these months: it’s a dusty old pile full of dusty old people, and all of that is about to be shaken up. Klaar is kind: the production understands Ibsen, to his mind, the actors are acquitting themselves fine, and the new material seems to have sparked some energy. The Börsen-Zeitung‘s critic isn’t quite so nice: they’re working hard at the Staatstheater, he concedes, but the evening isn’t up to snuff in a city full of Ibsen aficionados and experts, onstage and off. Tepid critical opinion notwithstanding, these Ghosts remained in the theatre’s repertory until 1930, ultimately appearing on stage 86 times.

The Volksbühne’s Cherry Orchard was the German premiere of Chekhov’s play; it had opened on 9 October 1918. (Stanislavski’s MAT production toured to Berlin in 1922, when it was received as piece of living history — museum theatre. Herbert Iehring responded with deep ambivalence at that time, lamenting that Stanislavski’s  “art shows no development at all. It stands before us as a completed whole, showing its beginnings and its end together. The art of theatre, more self-consuming than all the other arts, has never preserved itself as much as here. It is already a piece of history, though it is still effective.”) Directed by Friedrich Kayßler, far more talented as an actor than as a director, it starred the young Jürgen Fehling as Trofimov, far more talent as a director than as an actor (and destined to become one of the most important directors of the next two decades). Reading the reviews makes for a very odd experience from our historical vantage: Chekhov was still largely unknown in Germany, especially as a playwright. Adolf Lapp, in the Tageblatt, introduces him as “Anton Chekhov, the author of novellas;” the review in Vorwärts misinforms its readers that “Anton Chekhov only wrote two plays.” Given how routinely Chekhov and Shakespeare get lumped together now as the two most “universal” playwrights, it’s also striking to see complete agreement across all the reviews that The Cherry Orchard is a deeply “Russian” play, about a very specific, historically concrete Russian situation, populated by very particularly Russian characters. The set — generally praised, though unfortunately not in especially specific terms — works because it is the result of a “deep immersion in Russian circumstances and Russian people,” the Vorwärts critic argues; Lapp reads the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down at the end, “this lonely, sad thumping” as “strange and mysterious, like the last painful beats of a heart. It is the heart of the cherry orchard, but perhaps it is more, might be the heart of Russia, struggling with tremulous, convulsive beats for repose.” (Franz Köppen, in the Börsen-Zeitung, while acknowledging the literary and “ethnographic” strengths of the text, considers it essentially incomprehensible to anyone without a deep understanding of Russian culture!) And there’s widespread puzzlement about the dramaturgical recklessness of the play: Lapp calls it “odd” and “entirely unconcerned about theatrical effectiveness”; Köppen a “lyrical poem” “wholly focussed on atmosphere,” which “resists being captured by the stage”; even Stefan Grossmann, in a rapturous review (in the Vossische Zeitung), finds the lack of conventional dramaturgy amusing: “What kind of mini-conflict [Konfliktchen] is this?” They’re not wrong, of course, but it is fascinating to read these first, slightly bewildered encounters with a play that has become such a staple of our modern repertory! Much of what the reviewers say also happens to be extremely perceptive. The critic for the Berliner Volks-Zeitung’s analysis of the “tragic” situation, for instance: “It is true, after all, that the cherry orchard was indeed largely useless — they couldn’t even figure out what to do with all those cherries — it was useless like the people that loved it and owned it. So let’s get rid of it, right? And Chekhov smiles a ‘yes’ full of boundless bitterness.” Or Grossmann’s notes on Chekhov’s dialogues, which really are “interwoven monologues”: “Everyone really only lives in their own imagined worlds and barely hears a few key things from the isolated worlds of the others. That is the source of the melancholy and the humour of Chekhovian dialogue. These people talking past one another is deeply tragic and enormously comic at the same time.” I’m not sure I disagree with a word of that. The production receives universal acclaim, even from the skeptical Köppen, who thinks the play gives the actors so little to do that their relative success is all the more remarkable; Grossmann considers it “simply a perfect staging.” One final observation. No one seems to have found Trofimov’s ideas worth discussing, and no-one described Lopakhin as anything other than a”money man,” a heartless, almost inhuman figure. But Firs! The Volks-Zeitung singles Guido Herzfeld’s performance in the part out — a performance that “in the end, was devastating to an extent that words cannot capture.” Lapp, too, found Herzfeld’s Firs “unforgettable and incomparable especially in the shattering death scene.” So Firs, in this staging, unequivocally died. And became the emotional centre of the production.

Not from The Cherry Orchard, but that’s Herzfeld in the centre.

I’d love to say something about Barnowsky’s Peer Gynt, but will leave that for another time. As for the Schiller-Theater’s Hamlet, I wish I had things to say. But as with most productions at that theatre — a venue in Charlottenburg, built by the city for the express purpose of bringing stagings of classics and “folk plays” to the middle class denizens of this then independent municipality — it was mostly ignored by the critics. What reviews there are tell of a “worthy” effort — “clear,” “dignified,” “at times surprisingly strong.” The most remarkable aspect of the production may have been the fact that its Ophelia (whose name is variously reported as “Ms Brohm” and “Ms Brohne” died a few days before the opening, a victim of the flu epidemic. On that occasion, in October 1918, she was replaced by Hilde Coste, a member of the Staatstheater ensemble; but later in the run, a different actor must have been found, as Coste was in the cast of Ghosts at the Staatstheater as well. The most powerful scene, not coincidentally, seems to have been Ophelia’s funeral. One reviewer at least saw an original take on the title role, a Hamlet “not adrift, ‘sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought’, but superior, disgusted by the rot all around him. … This Hamlet was full of passion, alive with cutting satire, animated by grim humour.” It’s an intriguing thought: on the fringes of Berlin’s theatre world, in a mostly ignored production, a Hamlet seems to have made an appearance that anticipated the “man of action” reading of the character that would become the favoured interpretation in Nazi Germany!

And from the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung:

Today will be a relatively short post, perhaps mercifully: lots of repeats in this schedule! The Staatstheater is back to Ein halber Held, which we had encountered on Monday, when it had its premiere (this is something worth noting: a show opens, then disappears for a few days before it comes back. This still happens in contemporary German theatres!). They’re also announcing another premiere for Friday: Ibsen’s Ghosts! Reinhardt’s theatres continue with their en bloc runs of Tolstoy (at the Deutsche Theater) and Wedekind (at the Kleine Schauspielhaus), but at the Kammerspiele, there’s a new title: Der Sohn. (A few words about that one below.) Elsewhere, we get more fairy tale shows in the afternoon, and another matinee classic: the first two parts of Schiller’s massive Wallenstein-trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp and The Piccolomini at the Palest-Theater.

At the Kleine Theater, we have a new title: Jettchen Gebert. An adaptation of Georg Hermann‘s bestselling 1906 novel by the author himself, it had its first ever production at the Kleine Theater in 1913; whether it stayed in rep for six years or was revived after the novel was made into a film in 1918, I don’t know. The production starred Paul Bildt, yet another emergent major figure who would remain a staple of the Berlin theatre world throughout the Weimar years and beyond. Hermann’s is a tragic story: a prominent German-Jewish novelist, he fled from the Nazis in 1933, but not far enough: he was arrested in Holland in 1943, was deported, and died at Auschwitz.

A poster for the 1918 film

Remember Fritz von Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht the other day? Der Sohn, by Walter Hasenclever, on offer at the Kammerspiele on 9 January, was the only other “Young Germany” production to make it into the regular repertory. Unlike Unruh’s play, it was quite successful, being performed 44 times. It probably benefitted from its rather more prominent cast: there was Paul Wegener, prominent enough to have a (small) book written about him a year later.

Monty Jacobs’ 1920 book about Wegener

Among the others, Ernst Deutsch and Werner Krauss were well on their way to stardom. Paul Graetz would soon be one of Weimar Germany’s most celebrated comedians and cabaret performers. And the author himself acted in the show, too. Der Sohn is one of the key Expressionist plays (and Deutsch, at this point in his career, was a key Expressionist actor). Expressionism was almost over in Berlin by 1919, but not quite: Hasenclever’s play is one of a handful of clear markers of the movement’s lasting presence and impact.

What else? Two bits of Orientalism in popular entertainment: the Palest-Theater’s The Mikado (not the first time the Gilbert and Sullivan opera appears in these listings, but I didn’t have space and time to mention it before) and an announcement for an upcoming premiere at the Wallner-Theater, closed today in preparation for that opening: a show called Geisha. We’ll see tomorrow if anything can be discovered about that.

And in Freiheit, in the shape of a large display ad, a helpful reminder that the Volksbühne was not just an institution dedicated to making “serious” theatre available to everyone, but had a broader cultural mandate: on 12 January, they would host a piano recital by Arthur Schnabel. Yet another major German artist of Jewish origin, he, too fled the country in 1933. His recordings of two of the sonatas he performed at the Volksbühne on 12 January 1919 are available online:

Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E Major, Op. 109

Schubert, Piano Sonata in D Major, Op. 53

Second, from the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung:

We have classics! The Volksbühne put on Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell — a play that later this year, when Leopold Jessner directed it at the Staatstheater, would cause one of the biggest theatre-political scandals of the century. And the Staatstheater staged Othello. I’ll talk about this one in some detail below.

What else is worth noting? Lots of afternoon performances. A number of theatres are offering “fairy tale shows”: “Lisl’s Märchenreise” at the Berliner Theater, “Aschenbrödl” (Cinderella) at the Trianon-Theater and the Theater des Westens, “Rotkäppchen” (Little Red Riding Hood) at the Residenztheater and the Thalia Theater, “Struwwelpeter” at the Palast-Theater, “Die Reise ins Schlaraffenland” (The Journey to the Land of Cockaigne) at the Palast-Theater. I presume these were meant for children. And there’s another set of matinees, which may have been intended for (and marketed to) high-school students: productions of classics, quite likely plays that were part of the high school curriculum. The Schiller-Theater in Charlottenburg staged Grillparzer’s 1838 comedy Weh dem der lügt; the Theater am Nollendorfplatz a play called “Das Leben ein Traum” — either another Grillparzer, his 1834 Der Traum ein Leben or Calderón de la Barca’s 1635 Life is a Dream. The Theater am Nollendorfplatz regularly hosted such production, as the dramaturg Hans-J. Weitz later recalled in a memoir of his first encounters with the theatre: they were produced by an association called the Vaterländischen Schauspiele — in this context, something like “the patriotic acting company” — which aimed to give students at institutions of learning “a lively impression of classical drama;” ticket sales were organized by high-school teachers. Once Weitz, then thirteen years old, had seen his first “real” show, though, Reinhardt’s Minna von Barnhelm at the Deutsche Theater, in 1918, he proudly declared “I’m never going to the Nollendorf-Theater again!” Established in 1914 and increasingly a means of providing work for actors who had become unemployed during the war, the organization continued into the early 1920s, staging plays as well as operas; here’s a cover of one their programs from November 1920:

Other things: a bit I missed yesterday. “Kater Lampe” at the Staatstheater on January 7 was a folk play, in Saxon dialect, by Emil Rosenow — and another Rosenow play was also on stage at the Palast-Theater on January 6, and is back today (after The Mikado took its place yesterday!): Die im Schatten leben (“The Shadow-Dwellers”). Perhaps innocuous enough, probably a coincidence, but I wonder how this play would have read during those days of political turmoil: a tragedy set among coal miners in the Ruhr valley, written by a dramatist who also was a Social Democratic member of Parliament until his early death in 1904. It’s certainly somewhat edgier fare than I would have expected in a theatre seemingly specializing in popular entertainment and light opera!

The award for creepiest title goes to Die toten Augen (“The Dead Eyes”) at the Deutsche Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, a turn-of-the-century opera by Eugen d’Albert, first performed in 1916. There is a modern recording!

Now, for that Staatstheater Othello. It was a new production that season, having premiered on 5 December 1918, and would remain in the repertory for two more seasons, with an ultimate total of 53 performances. In the 1921/22 season, it was replaced with Leopold Jessner’s Othello, a staging widely hailed, at the time and since, as a high point of Weimar theatre — but Jessner’s version only ran for two years, being performed just 35 times! The older staging, directed by Reinhard Bruck (one of the two interim directors of the State Theatre), with sets by Hans Kautsky and Fritz Mach, and costumes by Robert Franck, was an altogether less distinguished production, redolent everywhere of this theatre’s old, courtly, pre-revolutionary aesthetics (Herbert Ihering, one of the period’s most important critics, would soon decry those aesthetics as “Mr Kautsky’s decorative hodgepodge”). The program in fact list four designers, noting that “furniture and props” were built based on “drawings by theatre painter Eugen Quaglio” — it was precisely this attention to decorative detail that Jessner’s regime would sweep away come the end of 1919. Quaglio was the last scion of a family of theatre painters stretching back generations; he lived until 1942, but his employment at the State Theatre ended in 1923. He must have realized that he had already become something like a historical figure at that point: he offered to sell his family’s collection of sketches and drawings to the Munich Theatre Museum when he retired, and the museum hosted an exhibition about his and his family’s work that same year. (See Christine Hübner, Simon Quaglio: Theatermalerei und Bühnenbild in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts [Berlin, 2016], 138-39.) Quaglio’s art was the pictorialism of a bygone era, a visual embodiment of the State Theatre’s reactionary, royalist heritage; here’s what his art (in a landscape painting rather than a set design) looked like:

That the show nevertheless marked a transition point is clear from the reviews. Its premiere was the first in the Staatstheater after the end of the monarchy on November 9, as Fritz Engel, writing in the Berliner Tageblatt, notes: “So, not ‘royal’ anymore! A few draperies, embroidered with the crown, have disappeared, almost all the eagles [of the royal crest] have been covered in gauze, and in the great royal box, for which tickets can now be bought, a single man sits, looking abashed.” Engel senses hints of a longed-for change in the production, an impression of a directorial “temperament,” even though on the whole, he finds the evening incoherent, a blend between “old theatre” and the attempt at a more contemporary mode of performance. The Social Democratic party newspaper, Vorwärts, sees a similar tension: the venue, so “sophisticated and ceremonial” hasn’t changed, except the royal “stucco nonsense” has vanished (metaphorically, not literally: the Nazis would actually strip out the Wilhelminian stucco almost third years later); on stage, “one senses something of the new spirit, the shaking-off of the old shackles and a delight in the new-found freedom.” But the “comfortable seats” are still occupied by the “old regulars” — “for now,” at least. And the Berliner Volkszeitung is sure that the production was put on with precisely those regulars in mind: the audience that had “remained faithful to this theatre even in these revolutionary days” deserved an Othello at “their” theatre to rival the stagings of the play Reinhardt had directed at his venues in previous seasons (and which remained in rep in 1918).

Even so, or for that very reason, the Volkszeitung sees Bruck’s direction as a clear break with the Staatstheater’s established style of “mis-en-scène, which has to be regarded as a superannuated court-theatre tradition, dominated by pageantry in every aspect,” seeking instead to come closer to a true “Shakespearean spirit” in “simplifying and humanizing” his approach. But as vague as that statement is, it is also the most detailed any of the reviews get in assessing what the production or its director actually tried to do. (For good reason, probably: Ihering later described Bruck as a weak director, devoid of a sense of space or an idea what to do with actors’ bodies, obvious in his interpretative angles and superficial in his stylistic choices; “the best that could be said of his direction is that it avoid kitsch, but it does not move beyond it.” Hardly a figure to lead the Staatstheater into a new era.) Mostly, the critics describe one thing: the performance of Theodor Becker in the title role.

Becker had only recently joined the ensemble of the Staatstheater, having established a stellar reputation in Dresden before. (In its casting, the production was literally a mix of old and new: Becker, the newcomer, delivering a kind of Othello not seen before on this stage, on the one hand — and, in a smaller role, Agnes Straub, destined to become one of Berlin’s most admired actors, playing an Emilia described as “boundary-crossing,” “surprisingly original,” even “disquieting”; but also as “doing too much” and a “busybody.” On the other hand, the veteran Alfred Kraußneck’s Brabantio was literally imported from an earlier staging: as the Volkszeitung remarks, without obvious disparagement, “Kraußneck’s Brabantio is well familiar from the past.”) If the December 1918 reviews are anything to go by, his Othello was a star turn. But if it seemed strikingly modern, that modernity — a modernity grounded in an avoidance of “old-fashioned pathos” and a focus on a “psychological, interior working-through of the jealousy issue,” an Othello reluctant to act violently, whose “injustices and cruelties are merely the forced actions of a deeply confused soul” — would very soon seem terribly old fashioned, an approach long practiced on other Berlin stages, and soon outmoded by young directors combining a sense of political urgency with a focus on “re-theatricalizing” the stage. But for a brief moment, Becker’s star shone very brightly: Fritz Engel thought his performance a “precious achievement” and felt certain that “it would not be forgotten.” Becker, he prophesied, was destined to be “Matkowsky’s heir” — the successor of the State Theatre’s legendary actor of heroic parts, its iconic Coriolanus and Othello, a huge figure, physically and otherwise, excessive onstage and off, who had died young just ten years earlier. A slightly strange claim, this, given Engel’s description of the performance: not at all physically expansive or expressively outsized, on the contrary, almost “child-like” — Othello as a “good child, that is awoken from a sweet dream and becomes furious,” a “moor” “credulously in love with his happy fate” in the first act, a man who “wants to keep dreaming on,” and hesitant to allow Iago to rob him of his calm. His fury, later, is “more like a convulsion, flashing through him briefly without quite subjugating entirely” — a “lyrical” Othello, a “pious” one, who “acts out his revenger’s office as a terrible necessity.” (Alfred Klaar likewise thought what was powerfully affecting in the performance was Othello’s “enormous pain” rather than his “wildness.”) There was one moment, though, that reminded other reviewers of Matkowsky as well: when Othello, suddenly furious, jumps on Iago, grabs him by the throat, and demands proof — a moment that, to one critic’s mind, illustrated a fury “beyond all European measure.”

Most of the critics, as much as they would like to see the Staatstheater awoken from its court-theatre stupor, seem to see in Becker a return to past glory, under somewhat different performative parameters (a Matkowsky informed by Naturalism and psychology, perhaps). That’s not the tenor of the Vorwärts review, though: the change that reviewer has in mind is clearly rather more of a real departure. His response to Becker’s performance is correspondingly tepid: admiring his power, his ability to “think through and give a shape” to his role and the play as a whole, he still sees in him an heir to a reactionary tradition: “He has the affectations of the grand court-theatre style, his delivery rolls and hisses, he thunders loudly. One would hope for more mid-range, more shading.”

The left-most critic seems to have had it right. Becker did not last. Three years later, he was gone, unable to adjust to the new tasks set for him by a new generation of directors — widely criticized, in fact, as an almost singularly catastrophic failure in Leopold Jessner’s epochal, pathbreaking opening production on the same stage almost exactly a year after his seemingly career-making Othello.

Perhaps oddly, about the Othello, I can say no more: nothing specific about the sets, nothing about the text, nothing about anything, really, other than Becker’s performance; the fact that it ran for almost four hours; that Becker wore light brown make-up, “Moorish” (“Maure”) not “Negro” (“Neger”) — most reviews of most Othellos, until not too long ago, include this kind of racist categorizing; and the critical consensus that most other actors faded to irrelevance. If photos of the production exist, I have not seen them. But I wonder how quickly its initial promise faded. If in December 1918, the hope for a recovery through some sort of restoration still seemed plausible, how disconnected from reality would that hope have felt on 8 January 1919, in a Berlin in the midst of an armed uprising, a clash between different democratic forces that would eventually be resolved through a deeply troubling alliance between Social Democratic and reactionary forces?

Here’s the theatre and entertainment section from Freiheit:

And here are the front-page ads from the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung:

One trend may already be visible if we compare today’s listings with yesterday’s: some venues run shows en bloc, others operate on a true repertory system. Operas don’t seem to be performed night-after-night anywhere — the State Opera is following yesterday’s Carmen with Figaro’s Hochzeit and is announcing tomorrow’s Fliegenden Holländer, the Deutsche Openhaus, where Der Freischütz played yesterday, is now staging Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (not an opera I was familiar with, but apparently it remains in the repertoire). Reinhardt’s theatres — the Deutsche Theater, the Kammerspiele next door, and the Kleine Schauspielhaus — operate on a system of short runs (we’ll see this over the next few days); only one of the three has a different show on today from yesterday. The same is true of the Volksbühne. The State Theatre changes over daily: today, they’re offering a folk play, written in dialect, as forgotten now as yesterday’s Ein halber Held: Emil Rosenow’s Kater Lame. Theatres specializing in popular entertainment aim for long runs — we’ll see how rarely venues such as the Lustpielhaus, the Central-Theater, or the Trianon-Theater change their programming. Victor Barnowsky again deserves special mention: his Lessing-Theater was trying to run a repertory-based program rich in new and recent “serious” plays; similarly, the “Kleines Theater,” which he took over from Reinhardt in 1905, continued to operate on that model after Barnowsky moved on to the Lessing-Theater in 1913 (a word more about this theatre in a minute).

Any noteworthy plays or productions this day? Fritz von Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht at the Kammerspiele is, sort of. The play was first staged by the private theatre club Reinhardt initiated in 1917 to allow for the production of cutting-edge new drama despite war-time censorship restrictions, the “Das Junge Deutschland” (“Young Germany”). Those productions were only ever put on as matinees. Once theatrical censorship ended with the collapse of the monarchy in November 1918 such work-arounds were no longer necessary, yet the Young Germany scheme continued until 1920 — but only two shows produced under censorship conditions were ever transferred to the regular repertory. Ein Geschlecht was one of those, and the performance on January 7 was its evening premiere (it would only see 7 more performances).

Also worth noting: how prominent Wedekind’s plays were in those years. Der Marquis von Keith at the Lessing-Theater, Die Büchse der Pandora at Reinhardt’s Kleinem Schauspielhaus, Musik at the Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse (where the play had been running since 13 December 1918).

Finally, the promised word about the Kleine Theater: the tiny theatre that could. It was Reinhardt’s first stage in Berlin, it’s where he became famous, made a set of new, young actors famous, and launched the careers of playwrights — it’s also the theatre where Oscar Wilde’s Salome was first performed in Germany and where Gorky’s Lower Depths became a sensation in January 1903 (mere weeks after its Moscow premiere). within a year of Reinhardt taking over, Alfred Kerr, Berlin’s leading critic, called it “the noblest place” for the fostering of new dramatic developments. And it remained a key venue for new drama for decades, despite its extreme physical limitations. In a speech in 1930, the critic, dramaturg, and director Felix Hollaender recalled its unlikely emergence: “soon all of Berlin flocked to the uncomfortable, cold auditorium he unpretentiously calls the ‘Little Theatre.’ This rather bleak room, whose stage was more like a pastry board, was where the future of the Deutsche Theater was born.” “All of Berlin” would have been difficult to accommodate: the Kleine Theater had fewer than 400 seats; its stage really was little more than a cutting board, a mere 80 square metres; and it had no technical equipment to speak of (and would not acquire any, ever). Given Reinhardt’s later fame for technical wizardry, it’s intriguing to think that he rose to fame as a director on Berlin’s smallest and most limited stage.

Liebelei, the Schnitzler play on offer there on 7 January 1919, was not new (it had premiered 20 years earlier in Vienna) and without the kind of digging that would take me too far off my current research’s path, I can’t say anything about this particular production. But it might be worth noting that of all the plays on stage in Berlin that day, it is pretty much the only one that remains in the modern German repertory. It had its most prominent recent — well, sort of recent — production at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 2002, directed by Michael Thalheimer, and invited to the 2003 Theatertreffen.

No video online, sadly, but here’s an intriguing video montage of the actors’ faces (in true 2002-YouTube-quality) that was used in the show:

Edit: I knew I had seen a clip from the production! Here it is, starting at 0:37: