Let me rephrase that. I’m sure I saw quite a few things of this kind when I was a kid. I know for a fact that I painted my face brown, red, and yellow for carnival. But as an adult, in a serious play, this was a first [...]]]> Today, I saw my first blackface performance.

Let me rephrase that. I’m sure I saw quite a few things of this kind when I was a kid. I know for a fact that I painted my face brown, red, and yellow for carnival. But as an adult, in a serious play, this was a first for me.

Blackface performance has for a long time been a staple of German stage acting, and for a long time, it went largely unquestioned. Then, a year or so ago, a debate erupted in Berlin in the context of a production of Herb Gardner’s I am not Rappaport in which the role of Midge was cast with a white actor in heavy, unironic blackface whose image appeared in posters distributed all over the city. The argument developed along fairly predictable lines, with one side pointing out the racism inherent in the reduction of a person to a set of phenotypical markers, expressing frustration at the lack of non-white actors in many German theatres, and drawing connections to US minstrel shows, and the other side arguing that the minstrelsy tradition has no serious equivalent in Germany, that the basic principle of theatre is that an actor is not the character (and that everyone should be allowed to play anyone), and that artistic freedom needed to be protected from political correctness. I am not entirely off the fence as far as that debate is concerned. It is certainly the case that German acting traditions place so much less of a premium on authenticity than those dominant in the English-speaking world that identity politics of any kind will always function differently on stage here than, say, in the US. Especially in the context of a production that engages with the question of why a character’s skin tone should matter, blackface may be more of a viable artistic choice here than in many other countries. I know of a number of shows that have done interesting things with black makeup; but all of those shows usually draw explicit attention to the fact that the actor’s face is painted, that the dark skin is not real, that it is a signifier — and that its presence has been problematized and needs to be discussed. I don’t think such a thing would be easy to pull off (and perhaps it shouldn’t be attempted) in the US. Some images carry a historical load so heavy that they simply become unusable. And there are equivalents in Germany, too, of course: I’m not sure I could imagine a Shylock played in Jud Süß fashion, no matter how ironized the portrayal. Or has someone actually tried to do that?

But leaving aside that larger debate, what happened tonight was, to my mind, more offensive than these kinds of blackface performances — either the well-intentioned but woefully misguided I am not Rappaport staging or the self-conscious, self-reflexive use of face paint. Sebastian Baumgarten, in his production of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses (originally staged at the Schauspielhaus Zurich and one of the ten plays invited to the Theatertreffen), chose to turn one of Brecht’s characters, the implausibly named Mrs Luckerniddle, into a bizarre, broad caricature of a “black woman” — not just in thick black face paint and red lipstick, but also wearing an afro wig, dressed in some sort of “ethnic” outfit, weirdly knock-kneed and hunched over, and speaking in a French accent. What’s more, he also had one of his actors in yellow face, with a long thin moustache, literally munching on a bowl of noodles, and speaking “Chinese.”

Why? I have no idea. Neither character is marked ethnically in Brecht’s play. Well, I didn’t have a clue until I read the director’s and dramaturge’s statements on the Theatertreffen blog and went to the post-show Q&A to hear their explanation — an explanation that I found worse than the original offence (all translations below are my own).

Apparently introducing these figures (as well as turning another of the workers into a fur-hatted Russian) was intended as an update on Brecht’s critique of capitalism. As Baumgarten writes, “how can one portray the working class on stage now? Unlike in Brecht’s time, capitalism now functions on a global level. In developing the figures, we deliberately wanted to play with signifiers in order to add a perspective on the globalized world to Brecht’s relatively historical treatment of his material.” Leaving aside the weird notion that capitalism only became a global phenomenon in the later 20th century (hello, colonialism?), that’s not, of course, a terribly problematic position to take: an all-white proletariat would indeed ignore global, national, or local realities. But if the point is to show that the working poor are from all over the world, why then undercut that point by using a distancing manoeuvre? Because that’s what Baumgarten says he is doing: “Our approach to performance works by exaggeration, and that happens on all levels; among other things I used blackface consciously as a means of representation, and especially of a heightened kind of representation. That is an artistic device.”

At first glance this may even sound vaguely plausible. But exactly what is being “heightened” here? What work is the exaggeration doing? It’s true that there’s little room for psychological realism in the entire production. All of the figures are more or less absurd versions of their own stereotypes. The capitalists move as if they were so loaded they could barely lift their feet, Slift (the main villain’s broker — here played by Carolin Conrad as Pierpont Mauler’s lover) was oversexed and power hungry, the salvation army workers are by turns oily and howling hypocrites, and so on. Johanna didn’t strike me as quite as broadly drawn as the rest, but in general, extremes ruled. However, what was exaggerated about those figures were the things that defined their role in the world of the play: the greedy entrepreneurs, the hypocritical clergy, the impossibly idealistic Johanna, the whiny and ultimately spineless workers. What exactly is Mrs Luckerniddle’s role in Baumgarten’s view of the play? Is she a member of the international proletariat, or is she primarily a person of colour? (If the latter, how does that, in and of itself, signify?) From his explanation for the character’s ethnicity, I get the impression that he thinks of her primarily as a worker — her cultural background serves to illustrate that worker “now” aren’t all white anymore. In the performance, however, she reads first and foremost as an absurdly exaggerated assemblage of racial stereotypes; unlike the other two workers, her occupation does not clearly define how she moves or speaks.

Exactly why the figure of the landlord Mulberry has become Chinese is even less clear — as is the question of why his stereotypically Chinese attributes should be so strongly portrayed (rather than his hard-heartedness and greed).

To be fair, Baumgarten’s arsenal of heightened choices is strangely skewed across the board. Mauler and his fellow butcher Cridle both have exaggerated speech problems (Mauler has a strong lisp and Cridle stutters). The third entrepreneur, Graham, has a yiddish accent that fades in and out of audibility. During the Q&A, the actors were asked what the logic of those choices was, and the answer, again, was “heightened representation.” Apparently, Mauler and Cridle’s speech issues were supposed to mark them as relatively “simple” characters, self-made men, not old money types. Cridle’s stammer was associated with “weakness.” None of this is very far from black facing to my mind. It’s turning heavily exaggerated portrayals of physical attributes into signifiers for something else. Though here, as with Mrs Luckerniddle, the relationship between the two is difficult to see. Does a representation of a capitalist seriously become more “heightened” as a portrayal of a capitalist because the character has a lisp? Does a landlord become more grotesque because he’s Chinese?

The yiddish accent is a particularly odd choice, and one Baumgarten, unsurprisingly, brings up himself: “It is all a question of representation; and it’s not like we’re only talking about blackfacing. I could also be charged with antisemitism because one of the capitalists speaks with a Jewish [sic!] accent in one scene. But our entire work functions by starting a narrative with these pop culture clichés only to join Brecht in exposing the social circumstances he’s describing.”

In the case of the Jewish banker (although that’s not what Graham is…), I suppose that argument kind of works, up to a point. But really only up to a point. Because while the stereotypical association of Jewishness and money is surely fair game for satirical treatment, even in Germany, the “exposure” Baumgarten promises would then have to include the various stereotypes the production trots out. I don’t recall Graham’s supposed Jewishness ever coming in for special attention or particular examination as a stereotype; I am certain Mrs Luckerniddle’s or Mulberry’s stereotyped ethnicity never was “exposed” as racist. In other words, how exactly does mobilizing racist tropes aid in the exposure of racism if racism or ethnic identity never becomes an issue in the production?

Baumgarten is right about one thing, though: I think it would be misguided to call him a racist, let alone an anti-semite. Noting that his production is using racist stereotypes in a remarkably naive and unreflected way is not the same as saying that Sebastian Baumgarten thinks African-American women look, sound, or move like his Mrs Luckerniddle, or that he believes greedy meat speculators are typically Jewish. But his work here is really quite astonishingly tone deaf, historically oblivious, and frankly obtuse. Here’s the paragraph from his self-justification that really got me:

“When what happens on stage is a caricature, any colleague of colour would be more than right to complain about that. The decisive point is that the person on stage who is playing the Russian or the African with full emotional investment, is not playing a caricature. A heightened representation is no caricature, because that would mean giving up on the figure — and I would be the first to intervene as a director to make sure that doesn’t happen. As soon as this sort of thing becomes a caricature, any critique is justified.”

How in the world can anyone play a “Russian” or an “African” with “full emotional investment” — and in what would that actor be invested? How can you, as an actor, be invested in your character’s national or ethnic background? What does that even mean? What would a heightened portrayal of a German, driven by full emotional investment, look like? Or that of a Brit? Or a US citizen? “Playing an African” — how can such a project ever not result in a caricature? (Playing a worker who happens to be Russian is obviously a different matter altogether, though why one would choose to heighten the Russian stereotypes and not the workerly ones in such a portrayal, and how that choice furthers Baumgarten’s project is, frankly, beyond me.)

Most problematically, though, leaving aside the issue of whether such a project is possible at all, is the fact that Baumgarten does not think the Mrs Luckerniddle in his production is a caricature. Has he ever met a black person? (I’m being facetious. I’m sure he has, and I’m sure he has a richly multiethnic circle of friends.)

As infuriating as this entire debacle is, it’s also quite representative of the entire production. The set is nice, makes quite wonderful use of projections to define spaces, and employs a clever mix of modern technology and very traditional (and Brechtian) elements, including a half-height curtain. Stylistically, it’s a rigorous show, relentless in its commitment to the heightened performances Baumgarten describes. It’s also rich in visual and gestural allusions to a kind of pop cultural canon, including cartoonish punching and drinking noises. But that’s where the tone-deafness of the director’s response to the blackfacing issue resonated with the entire production for me: as allusive as it is, its allusions mostly seemed awfully shopworn to me, to a pop culture and an America that’s neither of Brecht’s time nor of ours, but stuck somewhere in the 70s and 80s. A final video montage that romps through those eras and winds up with Obama didn’t really do enough to make the production’s universe of references feel relevant. Perhaps I’ve lived on the other side of the Atlantic for too long to still see cowboys as especially pertinent cultural representations of modern-day America, but even within a contemporary German context, those images and signals all felt terribly nostalgic. As a consequence, the entire satire of the production, to the extent that it worked, seemed to target things that have long ago become their own best self-parody. In that regard, at least, the racial stereotype seemed of a piece with the rest of the show: beyond its offensiveness, it just felt dated.

This was a production I had looked forward to. The photos promised fun, if nothing else. It was supposed to be an unsentimental take on the play, putting desire above love. And Lars Eidinger is an exceptionally talented actor who has done great work in Shakespearean roles — his Hamlet in particular has [...]]]> Well, fuck.

This was a production I had looked forward to. The photos promised fun, if nothing else. It was supposed to be an unsentimental take on the play, putting desire above love. And Lars Eidinger is an exceptionally talented actor who has done great work in Shakespearean roles — his Hamlet in particular has deservedly brought him international recognition. So I thought this, only his second foray into directing (he previously helmed a production of Schiller’s Robbers with acting students at the Schaubuehne), should at least be interesting.

Well, it wasn’t. It was juvenile and laboured, with nary a trace of that fleet-footed improvisatory quality I’ve grown to love in the past two weeks. Virtually everything that happened on stage commented on the theatricality of it all — not a move I normally object to, but here, that metatheatrical move itself seemed so thoroughly staged that it lost all bite. The opening fight between the Montagues and the Capulets, sadly unfunny in its punning prelude (which needed to be illustrated with physical actions to work at all: never a good sign), played out as a stage-blood orgy, with actors squirting each other with fake blood from plastic bottles. Again, not a bad idea, just as the quick transformation of a battle to the death into something approaching a gangbang was a neat move — in theory. In practice, there was a slowness to the proceedings, a lack of spirit, and frankly, a lack of sexiness that didn’t bode well for the rest of the evening. Prince Escalus appears: he’s a little boy with a little golden crown. No idea why, but it’s a neat touch. Lady Capulet is all that remains of Juliet’s family, and she’s a screechy caricature of a sex-obsessed housewife, literally humping everything in sight, including the nurse (played by Sebastian Schwarz, who doubles as Paris). Illustrating her speech about Paris as an unbound book, she demonstrates (I guess) what she means by baring the nurse’s bum and pulling open her buttocks. Later, at the masked ball, she’s wearing a giant vagina as her costume; Juliet is a sex doll. Romeo and Juliet’s shared sonnet is gone, replaced with Mercurio’s Queen Mab speech (he interrupts them; once he’s done, they get to kiss again). Somewhere along the way, more or less all the men in the cast casually wave their dicks about: there’s never any kind of sexual charge to that, though sometimes it’s vaguely funny — unless the joke gets killed by a stagey double take.

I get it: the play’s not about love, its about sex. But where was the sex? Where was the desire? I saw a bunch of actors miming physical actions, but everything was so thickly parodied that lust was nowhere to be seen. Nor did it have a verbal habitation or name, despite all of Mercutio’s efforts to the contrary. I figured that would be a dream role for any German actor. It’s one of those Shakespearean characters, after all, who so often fall flat in English precisely because the impression of wit and verbal legerdemain so central to the figures is difficult to pull off if everyone knows your lines are scripted. I’ve never seen actors better at that feat — making the rehearsed and scripted seem improvised — than the actors I’ve been watching for the last two weeks. Tonight? Nothing. Tilman Strauss resorted to exactly the same arsenal of comedic histrionics you will see in every other Anglophone Shakespeare production: there was even a hip thrust or two. And accents! Funny accents! At times there was more laughter on stage than in the audience, unsurprisingly. Also funny: moonwalking. Which happens a lot.

Sex is, of course, awkward and inherently comical. But that’s not what the production tapped into. I didn’t get to laugh at oversexed people embarrass themselves. I didn’t even get an object lesson in how sex becomes awkward or funny on stage, or how ridiculous the stage can be when it’s trying to represent sexuality. For any of that to happen, the show would have had to take something seriously. I’m not sure it did. A figure like Lady Capulet could have been devastatingly sad, or repellent, or even funny — instead I’m not sure Lady Capulet was much of a figure at all, beyond an assemblage of tics, grabs, lunges, squeals, and screams. And I’m reluctant to blame the actress for that (Regine Zimmermann has, after all, done stellar work before).

Alternatively, sex could have been dangerous. It wasn’t that either. It’s quite emphatically not what kills Romeo and Juliet (I’m not sure what does). There’s a flash of danger in the nightingale scene, one of a handful of inspired moments, when Moritz Gottwald’s Romeo does not respond to Juliet’s invitation to pretend it’s still night by playing along, but by hurling a heavily sarcastic version of her pretence back at her: for once, something was at stake. But it was a tiny glimpse, no more. In general, the moments — and it really was little more than moments — between Romeo and Juliet (Iris Becher, who has only just finished her training) were head and shoulders above everything else in this production for me, as both actors allowed themselves to play with their figures, with each other, and with us in a way hardly anyone else did (Kay Bartholomaeus Schulze’s Friar Laurence also had that loose quality, even managing to make his lines sound throwaway and by-the-by at times). During the balcony scene, Gottwald reels off a string of love song references; eventually he’s handed a guitar from the wings and serenades his balcony-bound love. It’s like a less polished, roughly charming version of the love-song scene from Moulin Rouge, thoroughly entertaining, and it feels like it could go on forever — I at least didn’t want it to end. Now, that’s a cool moment: it’s obviously not from Shakespeare’s text. It’s in some ways not even true to the scene, as it puts Romeo in charge, at Juliet’s expense. It’s a bit rough and ready, endearingly imperfect. And it’s not make-belief; the guitar alone ensures that no-one could mistake this for anything but theatre. And yet, even as Gottwald came close to corpsing a couple of times, and for all its playful distancing manoeuvres, the scene had me feeling the same way the figures in the play feel: can this go on for a bit longer? Please?

Scenes like that had me wishing Eidinger had trusted his leads more. Or that he had decided to actually make the play about Romeo and Juliet rather than about Romeo and his bros. Gottwald, when with Becher, and Becher with him or on her own make so many interesting choices that I would have loved to see more of them, and less of the awfully predictable or uninteresting other characters. (I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a Juliet giggle her way through the charnel-house fantasy, seeing the humour in Tybalt’s green corpse. I’m still not sure I think it’s a completely credible choice, but it certainly was an interesting one, and it made sense in the moment. It didn’t illustrate the text. It didn’t joke about it. It was a rare moment in the production where I got to watch an actor play with the play. And promptly, something intriguing happened.) In those scenes, the production did genuinely interesting work, vis a vis Shakespeare’s text, vis a vis what these figures have been in others versions, and in terms of the figures or the issues in this show itself. I would very much have liked to see what they could have done with the figures’ first meeting, or with the full nightingale scene, or what Juliet might have done with the intensely creepy “fiery-footed steeds” speech (that entire scene is gone), and so on. There is so much to play with in this overdone play, and so little of that playing gets done in this production.

Playing has nothing to do with being comical or comedic, of course. I’ve seen heartbreaking playful moments in many a performance these past two weeks. Which is why I wish Eidinger had taken the fact that he was directing a tragedy a little more seriously. Yes, it’s a hysterically overcharged play. No, it would be foolish to take Romeo and Juliet really seriously. But people do die in the play. In the Schaubuehne production, though, Mercutio’s and Romeo’s deaths might as well have been played by Nick Bottom (which made me wonder why Eidinger didn’t choose to stage Midsummer Night’s Dream instead). The verse didn’t help any, sounding rather a bit like like Peter Quince’s at times. (I don’t want to slight the late and much revered Thomas Brasch’s work, but what’s the point of larding blank verse with a rich serving of jingling rhymes in translation?).

I don’t mind parody. I don’t mind thick layers of metatheatricality. I don’t mind stagings that take the text apart. Nor do I mind productions that don’t take their text especially seriously. All of that is fine. But I do like to get a sense that a production is taking itself seriously, and that it’s trying to make some sort of point (either of an interpretative or a performative kind). Here, I’m not sure I could say what that point is. There’s too little sex in the show for it to be about sex, least of all teenage sex. There’s too little death for it to be about death. There’s too little love for it to be about love. Is it about how silly people are to take all of these things so seriously? Maybe, but then no-one in the play takes anything seriously at all. You can make fun of pathos, but surely not without portraying pathos first — can you? In this show, everything is always already at least a little bit ridiculous: deaths are funny, and sex is, or wants to be, funny, and the idea of authority is funny, and suicide is funny, and love — well, love is obviously a joke. But if that’s all there is to a production of this play, then it better be really, really funny. Because if most of those jokes turn out to be kind of lame, kind of laboured, kind of trite, kind of tired, kind of unspontaneous, kind of scripted: then why bother telling them?

Here’s what fascinating about this really quite disappointing evening, though: one of the most anarchic, free-wheeling actors in Germany gets to direct, and what happens looks anarchic and free-wheeling, but feels (to me at least) random, forced, and predictable. How does that happen? One thing I’ve come to realize in my two weeks in Berlin is that the phenomenon that looks like director-driven theatre from the outside is actually at least in part a form of theatre in which directors create space and limitations for actors and let them play within those parameters, and that sense of play continues past the rehearsal period into every night’s performance. But the process is not simply about freedom. It’s a system of restraints and liberties, and directors working within it need a fine sense for when the right balance has been struck. If actors have that sense, I don’t know. So Regietheater may still be a thing, not in the sense that directors are dictatorially in charge in Germany, but in the sense that the kind of acting I’ve written about so admiringly perhaps needs a helping (encouraging and limiting) hand, and an eye that’s not a performer’s.

None of these were immediately deeply relevant to my “classics” project. I decided to see Armin Petras’ adaptation of Anna Karenina at the Gorki Theater mainly because I’d grown to like that little venue so much in [...]]]> Can’t keep up! So to stay on schedule, I’ll lump a few shows together and do quick summaries.

None of these were immediately deeply relevant to my “classics” project. I decided to see Armin Petras’ adaptation of Anna Karenina at the Gorki Theater mainly because I’d grown to like that little venue so much in my first week here, because it was the final show in a five-year run (and I figured the atmosphere would be fairly special), and because it was a chance to see a couple of big theatre names on stage, mainly Milan Peschel, who played Vronsky, and Fritzi Haberlandt, who was Anna Karenina. The next night, I went back to the Berliner Ensemble, and wasn’t as bitterly disappointed this time around. They have four of Robert Wilson’s productions in rep right now: Lulu, The Threepenny Opera, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and the most recent one, Peter Pan, which opened a few weeks ago and which I saw yesterday. I thought I couldn’t really spend over two weeks here and ignore Wilson altogether, and I’m glad I didn’t. And finally, I saw Katie Mitchell’s dramatization (if that is the right word) of Friederike Mayroecker’s novella Reise durch die Nacht (Night Train), my second Theatertreffen production, and a show I didn’t think I could miss given Mitchell’s extraordinary status as an artist working in both English and German theatres.

Alright. Brevity. Not a personal strength.

Anna Karenina:
Closing night energy was tangible. The woman next to me, who’d seen the show before, said one particular exchange went on for about twice as long as the first time she’d seen it (and it could have kept going!). Amazing set: basically a very tall, wide, and shallow rectangle blocking the proscenium, made up of differently sized boxes, some the size of small rooms, some that of a large cardboard box, all of them used as playing spaces. Anna enters in a dense cloud of smoke in the biggest box, Vronsky comes crashing through the drywall ceiling, literally smashing the frame of her life in the process. Those drywall partitions took many a beating — Vronsky and Karenin at one point destroy two walls. Anyway, brevity. Jan Bosse’s production of Petras’ adaptation is pretty ingenious: it exploits the absurd potential of the novel’s pathos, but can turn on a dime to tap into its tragedy, too. The same is true of the actors as well. Everything seems at least partly improvised (but who knows if it is?), everything is potentially a joke — but also potentially a disaster. Wanda Perdelwitz’s Kitty at one point spends what felt like an eternity curled up in one of the smaller boxes, crying, while the rest of play goes on around her. Robert Kuchenbuch’s Levin is isolated in a tall, narrow box at the very top of the set for a long time, where he gets back to nature by putting up forest-scene wallpaper — unrolling one long strip after another, applying glue, putting them up — while the other cast members go about their business in other boxes. Ronald Kukulies plays not just Karenin, but also, hilariously and devastatingly, the nine-year old son Seryozha.

What I loved most, though, and not for the first time either, was the sense of utter freedom the actors conveyed: a sense that they were completely in control of the play, but also so in the moment that any and every decision they made was being made right there and and then — and could be made differently. If not having a fourth wall made sense, they didn’t; if they wanted to ignore the audience, they did. They were completely inside the text, inside their figures one moment, and commenting on what they were saying or doing the next. Tonally, all of them sounded entirely contemporary, colloquial, local even — but that didn’t prevent them from switching into a more formal, heightened register in an instant. Fritzi Haberland’s final monologue was a pretty amazing example of this: she jumped off the stage altogether, stood right in front of us, addressed us directly (including castigating someone for looking at her breasts [which weren't on display]), but although she sounded perfectly chatty, it was clear that she was speaking as Anna. And then, out of this loose, amusing, casual moment, she began narrating her suicide — though it wasn’t obvious at all initially that that was what she was about to do. As it became clear what this story she was telling was, the entire auditorium seemed to lean forward. No-one coughed, no-one fidgeted. And although her intonation didn’t change, although she remained quite casual in voice and attitude, her relationship with the audience had changed completely. And then she died. Or perhaps the lights just went off. It was an extraordinary performance, but of a kind that I’ve now grown to recognize and to expect in Berlin: a performance that makes it difficult to maintain the notion of “being in character.” These actors, in their best moments, are in and out of character simultaneously; the character is them and they present the character; they retain their personal identity and the figure retains its fictional nature, and yet becomes palpable and powerful in a particular way that I’ve rarely if ever seen in an English-speaking theatre.

Brevity? Yeah…

Peter Pan:
Robert Wilson does his thing. Its what he does, it’s always technically impressive, and at this point, also a little stale. But I’d never seen one of his productions live, so I thought I might as well. And it was interesting. It got at some of the deep creepiness of J. M. Barrie’s play — Peter’s desire to remain a boy seemed profoundly neurotic, and the alternative, sketched in the song “To die would be an awfully great adventure,” both unsettling and very sad. Hook’s project of turning Peter into a man was rich in pedophiliac overtones, as it should be, featuring a disgusting use of the cup that hold the hook on the pirate’s arm (he spits into it and hands it to Peter to drink; Tinkerbell sucks up the liquid secretly before Peter can swallow; all of this is accompanied by a disgustingly visceral soundscape). And there were some wonderfully rich and evocative images — that of Wendy tied to a swaying and creaking mast in particular. But alongside all of the wondrous creepiness, there were also plenty of scenes too twee for words, sequences that went on for forever as we got to watch actors distort their faces or shake their gravity-defying hairdos. There were some great songs and some not-so-great songs; altogether too many songs, really, given that this hadn’t been billed as a musical (it could easily pass for one). As far as stagecraft goes, the show is very impressive (given that it’s not a Broadway musical). At various points, there were up to four manually operated and multiple remote-controlled follow-spots in action, and the precise timing of the live music and sound effects was equally remarkable — after just a week of previews. The overall effect was about equal parts Edward Gorey and a real-life Little Big Planet, which is not an altogether unappealing mixture if you’re in the right mood.

That Wilson is such a staple of the Berlin theatre scene is a further indication, though, of just how diverse that scene is. His productions are playful in their own way, of course, but they are at the very opposite end of the spectrum from shows like the Gorki Anna Karenina or The Robbers in terms of actorly freedom. I have no idea if Wilson’s performers get to improvise at all, but if they do, Peter Pan showed virtually no trace of it. This is highly artificial, highly crafted, highly finished theatre, and Wilson is interested in pursuing very different aspects of the art form than other theatre makers in this city. It’s that diversity, the unbelievable range from the extreme artifice of Wilson to the near-naturalism of Thomas Ostermeier’s Ibsen, that defines Berlin’s theatre, not a commitment to deconstruction or an amorphously defined Regietheater.

Argh. BREVITY!

Night Train:
What a set! Basically, a train carriage with a large wooden screen suspended on top of it. The carriage more or less comes apart — individual segments can swivel in and out of place, walls lift up, ceilings fly up. Four camera operators surround the train car, filming through its windows, sometimes entering the carriage, sometimes maneuvering small projection screens into place, sometimes manipulating various special lighting instruments that give the impression of passing obstacles and the like. Most of the actors do their work inside the carriage. We catch glimpses of them, sometimes more than that, sometimes less.

What we do see is the film Mitchell and her team are creating in front of our eyes, projected onto the large, rough screen. Technically, this is an awe-inspiring show. Intellectually, it’s intriguing and for me at least, it worked: the (kind of obvious) point seems to be a deconstruction of the reality effects of both film and stage, and I repeatedly found myself getting lost in the “reality” of the images on the screen before snapping back to the realization that I was watching those images be made just a few feet below. Mitchell plays with mimetic seduction very impressively. And the naturalism of her sets and her actors is really remarkable, especially given the circumstances (all of them are performing their parts in very cramped spaces, with cameras everywhere, including right in their faces, and operators surrounding them physically at all times).

But. BUT. What happens to the theatre in Mitchell’s work? It would have been interesting to have the opportunity to choose between the two versions — either watch the stage or the screen, compare the effect of what the actors are doing without the visual mediation of Mitchell’s cameras and editing to that of the images unfolding on the screen. The nature of the set didn’t really allow for that: the cameras always see more than the audience. Which is to say that ultimately, this piece seemed to me to use live performance to make a point about film; it didn’t really tell or show me a lot about live performance (and yes, I’m aware that I’m making a distinction that’s increasingly difficult and pointless to maintain in an ever more intermedial performance culture). Given the particular mixture of prerecorded sound and background images and live video and acting, the aspects of the work specific to the theatre were largely lost or unexplored: what, for instance, would happen if an actor changed something significant about his or her performance? How flexible is the soundtrack? How quickly could the operators, whose movements seemed to be as tightly choreographed and as perfectly timed as any actor’s, adjust to a new set of circumstances? My sense — and perhaps I’m wrong — was that the risk of breakdown that’s always so tantalizing in the theatre (given that actors can often do such impressive work when faced with an unexpected scenario, especially in the kind of performances I’ve been writing about so enthusiastically) here held little potential for excitement, and a lot of potential for disaster: this is a show that really could collapse in on itself. The amazing thing is that it doesn’t, that the cast and crew pull it off; but that’s an achievement I associate less with the theatre than with TV — think of “events” such as the famed live season premiere of “ER” in 1997.

Mitchell, interestingly, falls outside the various types of spectrum I’ve used to understand the Berlin theatre scene. In terms of artifice, she’s far beyond Ostermeier in her commitment to realism; on the other hand, Night Train also draws attention to its own made-ness in a very obvious way (as I said, that foregrounding of artifice is sort of its point). That tension between truth and fiction is at least one way of understanding the theatrical logic of many of the shows I’ve seen, so in that regard, Mitchell may be a true Berliner after all. In terms of acting style, though, she’s again working in a register I haven’t seen on any other stages here. Then again — again — for all the screen naturalism we see through the camera, the show also keeps us conscious of the constructedness of that naturalism. Though in that regard, the difficulty of seeing the actors directly becomes an issue, because their physical performances may, after all, convey a similar degree of naturalism if only we could see them. The question of whether the camera makes an emotional reality or whether the actors create that reality first is one the production may raise, but it does not allow us to even put it to test, let alone to answer it. And that feels like a bit of a let down to me.

And there we go: three plays in one post. Phew.

This is not all bad news. The first not-so-exciting show was a contemporary play, which I had picked specifically as a control sample. Since this entire theatre marathon is part of my nascent research project on Anglophone and Germanophone stagings of [...]]]> Ah, yes. After seven days of gushing posts, I’ve come back down to earth.

This is not all bad news. The first not-so-exciting show was a contemporary play, which I had picked specifically as a control sample. Since this entire theatre marathon is part of my nascent research project on Anglophone and Germanophone stagings of the classics (a category I’m reluctantly opening up to “plays written by now-dead authors, normally before World War II”), I wanted to get a sense of just how different things are when it comes to producing recently written works by living dramatists. And while a sample size of one is obviously not quite good enough, I learned some things the other day, when I went to see the Deutsche Theater’s frankly disappointing production of Simon Stephens’ Wastwater. (Perhaps I ought to rephrase that: the Deutsche Theater’s production of Simon Stephens’ disappointing Wastwater. I don’t think either sentence is quite true without the other.) Primarily, the experience has strengthened my sense that things get thrilling when older material and contemporary theatre artists get to clash.

The second disappointment was a bit sadder, as it was an instance of what happens when older materials and contemporary theatre artists just sort of muddle along. I thought I’d see Claus Peymann’s new production of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe at the Berliner Ensemble despite the very negative reviews it’s received, imagining that what struck German critics as trite and old hat would perhaps look innovative and exciting to my eyes, used as they are to a very different aesthetic these days. That turned out to be false hope. But at least I’ve now been to the Berliner Ensemble: one more box ticked.

First, then, Wastwater. I’d seen half the cast the previous night in Oedipus Stadt, where they all impressed me (yes, that’s how actors in these German ensembles work: one role one night, another the next. Some of them are in seven concurrently running plays). Susanne Wolff inspired an all-out rave. In Stephens’ play: not so much. That in itself was interesting to me. It would be easy to claim they had an off night; it would be more difficult to claim their performance in the new piece wasn’t as “good,” since I’m not sure what that would mean. After thinking about the problem for the past two days, I’ve now convinced myself that part of the issue is presence. Actors like Wolff (and some of her fellow cast members) are simply too much there to function well in the small-scale, realist, contemporary, really quite straightforward drama Stephens delivers here. (Sure, she plays a cop who’s meeting her lover in a hotel room and proceeds to reveal her past as a heroin addict and a porn actress. Not exactly everyday stuff, you might say. But actually, it kind of is. Divorced from the kind of sentimental attachment slice-of-life journalism could wring from this scenario and in the absence of any kind of political discourse — which would probably have been boring, too — all that’s left is a paint-by-numbers modern character, complete with barely hidden biographical abysses to discover. Not larger than life, just an assortment of the sadnesses of modern existence. Or so one hears.)

I learned some things. Even a director as un-Regietheater as Ulrich Matthes appears to be (he’s primarily known as an actor; I believe this is only his second directing gig, and the previous one was ten years ago) obviously has no problem disregarding the author’s ideas of what the play is supposed to look like on stage. Wastwater is a triptych of very loosely connected one-act plays; each is set in a specific, clearly defined space. “Two,” for instance, takes place in “A room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Heathrow Airport. It’s a modern, rather beautiful room. It has a large bed. There is a large, plasma-screen television. A large screen for a computer. A digital radio. A large window behind beautiful curtains. It’s raining heavily outside. The rain stops.” Literally not one of those descriptions or directions made it into the DT production, where the abstract, black set looks more or less the same for all three scenes, though the grid of neon tubes that organizes the space lights up in different formations and with different effects as needed (now they’re a runway, now a cell).

For your reference, here’s what that scene looked like at the Royal Court in London two years ago:

And whereas Stephens runs the three segments one after the other without ever putting all six characters on stage at the same time, Matthes starts the play with all of them sharing the same space, muttering key lines, before they clear the stage for the first scene. In general, there’s also a more theatrical use of space than one might see in a standard English production: the actors range in ways that have more to do with expressing relationships or giving the specific energy between characters a spatial form than with any effort at realism. But in all these efforts, they’re doing battle with the text, and ultimately, the text wins. Which left me feeling that I’d rather see this on film or on TV, played by specialists in psychological realism. The slight against that sort of stage acting here is that it’s “Fernsehspiel:” earnest, serious TV drama — but so, frankly, is Stephens’ piece. Sure, there’s room for playfulness, but that potential is quite strictly circumscribed: that ex-junkie ex-pornstar cop can be a hysteric, she can be unhinged, but the point is that she’s an ex-junkie ex-pornstar cop, not a figure played by an actor. Perhaps Thomas Ostermeier could have done something vaguely interesting with this material, as he’s the only director I’ve encountered here so far who’s interested in that approach. But it was a bit depressing to watch these DT actors shrunk to size, given how much they impressed me with their ability to be both characters and actors on stage in the two previous productions I saw them in earlier this week, and given how much I admired them for their ability to play (I also suspect that they are perhaps not as used to, not as interested in “just being”). It felt like a waste of talent.

The entire production, as a consequence, seemed incomplete. The set did not match the text’s realist logic; the actors seemed to be doing the kind of work that left half their resources underused; and the play itself had none of the daring, the strangeness, or the wilfulness I’ve so enjoyed in all the other productions I’ve seen here. If I had seen this England, I would likely have admired the actors’ craft; I doubt the play would have impressed me much more there either. But at least it wouldn’t have felt like a waste: there, it would have found actors who, by and large, are very good at this kind of work, and whose expertise finds greatest and most awe-inspiring expression in this kind of work (which is why so many of them are as good on film as on stage; and it’s surely no coincidence that the Royal Court production looks like it’s a film). Here, it seemed like I was watching great artists practice someone else’s craft, abandoning the very things that made them great in the process.

The director Jorinde Droese told me the other day that she is always looking for plays that give her room for distortions, for skewing things, for creating (now in my words) powerful and provocative mismatches between representation and reality. I don’t think Stephens’ play has much tolerance for skewing: twist that thing too much and it’ll just snap. But skewing is what German theatre, and German stage actors, do best — it’s what they excel at in an almost unique way. In all its various forms, skewing is, to my mind, at the heart of what makes theatre so interesting, so challenging, so engaging, and so unpredictable in this country. Wastwater is just too relentlessly straight a play, populated by off-kilter characters but built with no allowance for structural or mimetic crookedness, to bring out what’s best about German theatre.

Now, Peymann. There’s plenty of strained skewing and distorting going on in his production of Kabale und Liebe, to be sure. And none of it worked, because none of it felt — to me at least — serious. But now I’ve gone on for long enough, and Peymann will have to wait.

I had only seen Susanne Wolff act on video before, in Stefan Kimmig’s brilliant production of Maria Stuart (originally staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and now part of the DT’s repertory). Her performance in that filmed-for-TV show was very impressive, virtuosic, powerful. What it did not prepare me for was her [...]]]>

I had only seen Susanne Wolff act on video before, in Stefan Kimmig’s brilliant production of Maria Stuart (originally staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and now part of the DT’s repertory). Her performance in that filmed-for-TV show was very impressive, virtuosic, powerful. What it did not prepare me for was her stage presence. As Creon in this mashup of Oedipus Rex, Seven Against Thebes, The Phoenician Women, and Antigone, she simply owns the theatre, especially in the concluding third. It’s one of the most commanding performances I have ever seen.

The production as a whole has strengths and weaknesses (I’m quite aware that I’m despatching gushfest after gushfest from my Berlin hotel room, and that I probably ought to rein in my enthusiasm a bit, but really: theatre is so unspeakably exciting here compared to what I’m used to. Plus, I’m not writing as a theatre critic but from my researcher’s perspective of trying to understand — and to remind myself –what these productions are attempting to do, what work they do, and how they go about the business of playing). Any version of these four plays that crams their action into two-and-a-half hours will have to cut corners. One of those corners is the chorus, which is gone entirely. Another is Oedipus Rex, and that’s a bit of a problem. Ulrich Matthes is a wonderful actor, and he has some brilliant moments here, too, but his Oedipus just doesn’t have enough time and space for his tragedy to gather enough steam. And that affects everyone and everything in the first half of the show. For all the emotional vigour and the impressive (and impressively precise) physical work on display, without the pressure cooker of Sophocles’s endlessly building dramatic irony, intensity often felt postulated and presented rather than generated.

Creon, on the other hand, has all the time in the world to develop and change, from loyal, if mistreated, advisor to tortured father to despotic leader. Oedipus is in a way just the prologue to an extended portrayal of Creon’s successful but ultimately (self-)destructive battle to rid Thebes of the plague of Oedipus’s family. The only character who’s given a similar arc is Antigone, and in Katrin Wichmann’s hands she is, for the most part, a worthy opponent for Wolff, though operating in a very different register: where Antigone is always projecting authenticity, Creon, particularly in the final segment, is spinning on a dime, trying on a dizzying range of characters and voices — an amusingly ferocious intonation followed by a chillingly sweet smile; the cardboard crown almost slipping over her face (as if it didn’t really fit) one moment, then pushed into place (a place where it obviously, unquestionably belongs and sits quite comfortably). And she inhabits the entire stage: where other characters run against the back wall, she perches on it; where others come downstage to declaim, she steps right onto the very edge of the stage, almost into the auditorium, and glares at us while she listens. No other character removes herself as much from us as Wolff’s Creon, but no other character gets quite as much in our faces as Creon either.

Stylistically, the production seems to inhabit two different performative universes, but I have noticed a similar, and similarly interesting trend in Kimmig’s work before. There is a great deal of respect for the language of the text — not to quite the same extent as in Thalheimer’s Medea, but of a comparable nature. And there’s ample room for performances that read, to me at least, as grounded in psychological realism. But the actors never live entirely in this performance style or maintain that respectful relationship to the text: whenever emotions get too large, or conflicts get too intense, they are just as likely to switch, instantly, to a high theatrical register, from guttural growls to roars of anger to high-pitched whines; or even to leave language behind altogether and resort to physical action, dance, drumming, or hurling themselves against walls. Sometimes, these moves can feel contrived — not like a theatrical correlative to strong feelings, but like a half-empty gesture. And sometimes, they work astonishingly well. The most powerful moments of the night, to me, were almost all beyond language: Creon taking the crown off Oedipus’s head, and Oedipus crumpling and relieved in response. Oedipus’s son Eteokles performing a crazed dance and drum routine, strongly backlit. Oedipus himself, finally banished, breaking into a happy dance that echoed his son’s war march. Antigone and Ismene dancing to their own beat (rhythm plays a huge role in this production, and this scene, at the beginning of the final segment, signalled Antigone’s impending rebellion with perfect clarity: Wichmann’s entire body radiated determination).

Creon appearing at the side of the stage, now as king, running first her wrist, then her elbow along the edge of the central platform in a gesture both casual and totally in control, before jumping up onto the set and moving into a darkly funny and unsettling self-crowning routine (I should mention that the set looks like half a half-pipe open to the auditorium, with trenches on either side behind the proscenium).

And Haimon defying Creon, both standing in silence, completely still, a foot apart, the atmosphere charged with more rage, held just on the brink of explosion for longer and more tantalizingly than I have seen on a stage in a long time (and when she finally, finally speaks, Wolff doesn’t yell, and it’s terrifying).

So on the whole, this was a visually often arresting show; a show full of interesting choices; a production that richly demonstrated that a sense of play has nothing inherently to do with being funny; but also a production that didn’t quite, for me, channel its various energies into a coherent work. In some ways, I might have preferred to just see Kimmig’s Antigone, though I suspect this Creon may have felt out of place in that — and that wouldn’t have been a price worth paying.

What an action packed day! A morning discussion with Michael Thalheimer and Constanze Becker about their Medea, an afternoon discussion about the play with Inge Stephan and Hans-Thies Lehmann, and then my second Enemy of the People in three days, at the Maxim Gorki Theatre — the smallest of the six [...]]]>

What an action packed day! A morning discussion with Michael Thalheimer and Constanze Becker about their Medea, an afternoon discussion about the play with Inge Stephan and Hans-Thies Lehmann, and then my second Enemy of the People in three days, at the Maxim Gorki Theatre — the smallest of the six theatres I’ll see. It’s a rather quaint auditorium with a significantly smaller stage than the other houses. But of course even this stage has a turntable. Because apparently you can’t have a stage without a revolve in Berlin. Wouldn’t be a theatre if things couldn’t spin.

I’ll be meeting with the director and the actress playing Stockmann (the genders of the Stockmanns are reversed in this production) on Tuesday, and will have more to say after that. Briefly, though, Droese’s version of the play makes for intriguing comparison with Thomas Ostermeier’s, which I saw at the Schaubuehne two nights ago. It’s a far more theatrical take: where Ostermeier’s actors played in a broadly realist, almost screen-actorly fashion (not quite that, but close enough), Droese’s characters are far more broadly drawn. The first encounter between Dr Stockmann and her mayor brother devolves into a yelling match very quickly (right off the bat, she nearly strangles him with his tie). Emotions are strong, gestures are big, character traits are amplified and pushed to extremes.

Ostermeier’s set (designed by Jan Pappelbaum) wasn’t exactly hyper-realist, but it didn’t foreground its stagey quality either; Droese’s (designed by Annette Riedel) is ostentatiously theatrical, functioning as an additional player more than a mere backdrop. In the opening scene, it features an enormous sofa (sign of Stockmann’s profligacy) that takes up so much space and is pushed so close to the edge of the stage that the actors can only get on it from the back or by jumping over the armrests — easy enough for the agile hipster journalists Billing and Hovstad, hilariously difficult for the stodgy mayor. The entire proscenium is covered in a sheet painted with a Magritte-like bright cloudy sky, leaving just a narrow strip of stage, perhaps a metre or so deep, as the playing area for the first two acts.

After that, Dr Stockmann tears down the sheet, revealing a version of the same blue sky penetrated by a large tube — presumably representing the bacteria-filled water pipes Stockmann has discovered, but also serving as the sole entrance; for the rest of act 3, characters tumble onto the stage through the pipe opening. This is worlds removed from Ostermeier’s aesthetics.

Still, there are similarities. Fairly early on, Mayor Stockmann turns to the audience to collect a shortlist of negative stereotypes about politicians (he got “fascist” twice, along with “liars,” “slimy,” and “creeps”). And the entirety of Act 4 is staged after the break in the theatre lobby, with Dr Stockmann walking addressing the audience first standing on the bar, then walking through the crowd with a microphone. Like Ostermeier, Droese’s Enemy of the People leaves Ibsen at least partially behind in the speech — except Droese, instead of opting for the acceptable if so far ineffective current manifesto her Schaubuehne colleague inserted into the play, makes the more interesting choice of having Stockmann channel RAF member Gudrun Ensslin’s letters. And whereas the Schaubuehne Stockmann was angry and somewhat messianic in tone, the Gorki one got close to out-and-out madness, yelling uncontrollably towards the end of her rant, after concluding with Ensslin that hate is a necessary precondition of revolutionary change — a conclusion her daughter loudly rejected, and to which a large part of the audience seemed to respond with puzzlement and unease.

As in Ostermeier’s production, Droese’s transformation of the theatre audience into Stockmann’s creates a problem for the play, in that we’re not running riot or calling Stockmann an “enemy of the people” — so where do the destruction of the family’s apartment and their apparent marginalization come from? The problem isn’t quite as pressing as at the Schaubuehne, partly because Stockmann’s new speech in Droese’s version isn’t anywhere near as agreeable as the Ostermeier version (though the “Coming Insurrection” manifesto is clearly alluded to in this show, when Petra refuses to translate a French political text that advocates theft as a form of social protest). The production also directly engages the audience’s complicated role: when we got back to auditorium for Act 5, Mayor Stockmann was already there, handing out styrofoam “rocks” to the audience and encouraging them to hurl the rocks in the direction of the stage. Of course, the first throw caught him squarely on the back of his head. He humoured the audience, even encouraged us to pelt him with the harmless “rocks” — but then he handed one guy an actual cobble stone: “Go ahead, throw it. Let’s see how radical you really are.” It was a pretty chilling moment, for me watching, but even more for the man with the rock, who muttered something and then quickly put the projectile down on the stage floor. And finally, the last act shows an entirely transformed Stockmann in any case — she’s yelled her last. The stage is empty now, smothered in smoke and lit by a bank of orange lights; open to the back wall, with only the crumpled sheet of sky in the centre of the revolving turntable. We see her running in silence on the revolve, round and round, as other characters speak for her (“Katharine says… Katharine says… says Katharine…” becomes a refrain). Her daughter Petra, former staunch ally, trades ideals for cash and withdraws the allegations about the polluted water in her mother’s name (while her mother revolves, revolves, revolves). At the very end, Dr Stockmann steps forward, all the way to the edge, stares out at us, and begins an erie countdown from ten. I genuinely had no idea what would happen, half braced myself for the sound of an explosion, but then nothing happened but a blackout.

This is a different Stockmann yet again — not Ostermeier’s ambivalent revolutionary representative, not Ibsen’s megalomaniac singular man, but a woman who has dropped out of the discourses that organize everyone else’s reality. The final set, so very different in its visual language from the rest of the play, mirrors that lack of a social context that would, in however theatrical a fashion, allow us and her to make sense of Stockmann’s life and convictions. Droese is no more on Stockmann’s side than was Ostermeier, though in her case, where the character end up is already prefigured in a sense in her near-hysterical frame of mind in the first scenes. There is a general thread of hysteria in the Stockman family in this show: the Doctor and her brother, the Mayor, and even her daughter are easily provoked. Mr Stockmann doesn’t get much of a look in (though Cornelius Schwalm captures the figure wonderfully in a pitch-perfect portrayal, never quite a caricature, of a discombobulated, super-soft, mentally pudgy liberal stay-at-home dad) until he asserts himself, first pathetically, in Act 4, then with chilling success in Act 5 (as he starts to speak for his wife). But by then, there isn’t much of a person left for him to usurp.

As with the Schaubuehne version, I’m not entirely sure where the production leaves us politically. But theatrically, this was a much richer take on the play. Less disciplined, too — there was a lot of play, and playfulness, on display, both funny and horribly serious. At times, Droese’s is a riotously theatrical show. After the austerity of two Thalheimer evenings and the realism of Ostermeier’s Enemy, the exuberance of this production was a bit of an aesthetic jolt. Mostly, though, it served as yet another reminder that “German theatre,” or even “Berlin theatre” is defined most of all by its sheer unpredictable variety. Tomorrow, Schiller’s Robbers: same theatre, different actors and director. I’m not sure what to expect, but I know it’ll be nothing like the other five shows I’ve seen now.