Germany takes theatre seriously. Every production in some way participates in an ongoing discussion of German nationhood—that’s a given. At least that’s what I thought as I began the 10-plays-in-15-days marathon that for 44 years has gathered together the 10 German-language productions from Germany, Austria and German Switzerland that a jury has judged the most notable of the past season. In opening the May 2007 Berlin Theatertreffen (literally: “theatre meeting”) with Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart, from Hamburg’s prodigious Thalia Theater, its organizers were signaling their allegiance to this tradition. But the signals, as I soon discovered, were mixed.
In Ulrike Maria Stuart, the Austrian Nobel laureate Jelinek explores a theme that stirred a fierce debate this past year as Germans approached the 30th anniversary of the bloody 1977 “German Autumn” of the RAF, the Red Army Faction (a.k.a., after the names of two of its leaders, the Baader-Meinhof Group, or Gang). Were members of the group merely vicious murderers, or were they tragically misguided utopians? Did the police torture and execute its leaders in prison, or were their suicides a bid for martyrdom? Should any of the convicted still in prison be released? And the Baader-Meinhof sympathizers, then and today, are they idealists or idiots? This whole ricocheting crisis of conscience and ideology is captured in Jelinek’s dense, searching text. (“Text,” not play: a run-on scenario of voices and images that lends itself to, or becomes an element in, what is coming to be called “post-dramatic” theatre.)
Jelinek uses Schiller’s queens Maria Stuart and Elizabeth as underpaintings for Ulrike Meinhof, here seen as a Maria martyr dedicated to her people, and Gudrun Ensslin (the actual co-founder of the group with Andreas Baader), who becomes a closet bourgeois interested in fashion and image. In keeping with Schiller’s historical drama, the two terror queens are in love with the same man, Baader. The text summons up incarnations of the women as young revolutionaries, as aged returnees from the dead, and as Schiller’s royals, each perspective offering a different face of an unresolvable conflict of interpretation.
But, whoa!, here come Meinhof and her friend, author Marlene Steeruwitz, suddenly in the act, with their heads sticking out of huge pink fur vaginas. An ever-revolving Busby Berkeley stage with its cascade of stairs, suggesting the mediatized world of so-called revolutionary action, turns without end (in both senses). The merry-go-round metaphor, if it is one, swallows up dialectics in repetition. Meanwhile, a three-man Chorus of Children and Old Men performs Three Stooges hijinks as transvestites in minidresses. They strip to the buff, attach pig snouts to their penises, smear themselves with murky brown stuff while shouting “Scheiss!” (the s-word in German) and throw water balloons to the spectators, who toss them back at cardboard cutouts of various public figures, including, as a dig at the old guard, theatre director Claus Peymann. Maybe this is still theatre about German nationhood, but the nation is shrugged off, sent on vacation, told to, hey, lighten up.
Director Nicolas Stemann has recently made a specialty of Jelinek stagings that “deconstruct…the author’s deconstructions,” as one German critic puts it, leaving behind “scorched landscapes of text.” Not that I can write about the text. It was withdrawn from even its temporary online publication after Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter turned up at a Hamburg rehearsal last year and charged that Jelinek distorted her family history. But to this critic, Jelinek’s wracked inner debate over how to understand and where to historically place the RAF epoch offered a compelling premise for an evening in the theatre that didn’t take place. Stemann served up a winking “The RAF, that’s so over”—and so over, theatrically speaking (the endless revolve, guys in dresses), is what we got. I know the canny reader has spotted an aesthetic! Outworn theatrical gestures pass judgment on outworn political ideology of the 1970s. But Stemann’s staging style, “apolitical and post-ideological,” as some German critics have observed, left the impression that all that ’70s trauma is only good for laughs. I wondered too whether the production didn’t suffer from the German theatre’s Castorf complex (of which more later).
Germany boasts a director’s theatre, an actor’s theatre and sometimes a designer’s theatre, but not a playwright’s theatre. Jelinek was one of two living authors whose work appeared at the festival, neither of them German; the other was the Paris-based Yasmina Reza. Her Der Gott des Gemetzels (The God of Carnage) was the only festival offering I was unable to see. The German stage is still a classic stage, even if performances are nach (after) Shakespeare, nach Moliere, nach Aeschylus, etc.—with a recent upstart or two, for instance, J.P. Sartre. From the Hamburg Thalia, again, came a production of Sartre’s Dirty Hands (Schmutzige Hande) by one of Germany’s golden directors, Andreas Kriegenburg.
The back-to-back scheduling of Ulrike Maria Stuart and Schmutzige Hande still looked like the high seriousness of the good old days in German theatre. Sartre’s play concerns Hugo (played by one of Germany’s greatest talents, Hans Low), an idealistic young Communist in a non-communist European country, who takes on the job of assassinating the pragmatic party leader at the behest of the orthodox apparatchiks vying for power. As the play opens, the young man has served five years in prison for the crime and returns to his party friends to find that the political line has changed: the assassinated leader has been rehabilitated. If the present leadership can depict the assassination as a “crime of passion” (Hugo’s wife and the murdered man had begun a dalliance), then the party may still embrace him; but if it appears he was acting from conviction, Hugo will have to be exterminated—the newly revised version of ideological purity would demand it. Within this frame, most of the action is a flashback into the Hamlet-like circle of affirmations, fears, doubts, recantings and reaffirmations that led up to the killing.
Told as an old-fashioned thriller, the play is an indictment of Communist manipulations of intellect and morality. With the whiplash shifts of political paradigms in the German East and across Central and Eastern Europe, the play speaks to Now. And, like the Jelinek, it examines the chilling spectacle and messy realities of true believers turned killers.
Schmutzige Hande notably appeared at the 1999 Theatertreffen in a Volksbuhne production directed by Frank Castorf that set the play in the former Yugoslavia, so perhaps one of the dialogues going on in the production was Kriegenburg’s with Castorf. Okay, here’s the Castorf connection as I understand it: A generation older than Stemann and Kriegenburg (both born in the 1960s and innocent of mid-century political anguish), Castorf is the fabled director of East Germany who became a thorn in the side of the regime by bringing a Dada-esque spirit of anarchy to regime-approved theatre texts. Soon after the Wall fell he was rewarded for his subversions by being named Intendant (director-in-chief) of the East Berlin Volksbuhne (People’s Theatre). The Castorf performance style is linked with over-the-top slapstick, actors drenched in water (or alcohol), continuous videography of live action (partly an influence of the Wooster Group, I am told), American pop music, uprooting acres of text in favor of a riotous growth of actors’ improvisations, more nudity than anyone had ever seen on a stage short of a porno house, and extreme length. Tracing the Castorf influence from the Volksbuhne through the “off-scene” of the West all the way to the “rigorous selection of the Berlin Theatertreffen,” critic Gunther Riihle of Deutschlandfunk recently wrote that Castorf “made satyr plays out of the system” and showed his admirers and imitators “the fun of the death dance.”
But where Castorf castorfized to political ends (still visible in his productions remaining in repertoire, like his five-hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, on which he mounts an allegory of the transition from the impoverished economy of the East to the neoliberal global marketeering of the new unification), many younger directors took on Castorf’s anarchic traits as style, with the exception of the length. (At the moment, length is so over. People roll their eyes at the memory of Peter Stein’s 21-hour complete Faust of 2000, though I must note a counter-trend to this season of respect for Stein’s return to Berlin with a 10-hour Wallenstein, a disaster beyond the scope of this article.) Merely as style, of course, these traits begin to look shallow. And, in truth, many are now saying that through a process of self-imitation, this has happened to Castorf too. It’s up to the critic to decide whether she is seeing earned, or merely imitated, “Castorf.”
Set in what looks like an icy contemporary boardroom/motel suite, and distanced as a fable delivered by miked actors who read stage directions instead of performing them, the Schmutzige Hande performance slowly leads the audience into a world of gun and bedroom farce, its heart staked through at sudden intervals by sex, death and politics. In turning Sartre’s tragedy of Communism—so many lives wrecked on the shoals of ideology—into a farce (Marx: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy…etc.), Kriegenburg appeared to this viewer at least to be thinking about history, not dismissing it. Was the entire world-historical convulsion of 20th-century Communism, the production asks (in a ferocious redoubling of Sartre’s own investigation) for nothing? Just boys playing with guns and ideas? The madcap improvisations, clown chorus and text-shrugging were not only more theatrically inventive than Stemann’s, they served as comment on the issues raised in Sartre’s earnest dialectic. (German intellectuals may laugh at their naive American visitor, but I still think the text counts. For something.)
If these two tragedies-of-state, so to speak, could be turned into howling farces, where could a director go with comedy itself? Every theatre student knows that German drama is more or less a comedy-free zone, but the German appetite for comedy (especially dark comedy) from other peoples’ drama is keen. The judges of this year’s festival perhaps over-rewarded it. The biggest crowd-pleaser of the festival was Jan Bosse’s Vienna Burgtheater production of Much Ado About Nothing. Its reputation for entertainment preceded it, and for a city block en route to the theatre, the sidewalk was lined with ticket-seekers holding up piteous signs.
Bosse, at 39, is only a year younger than Stemann, six years the junior of Kriegenburg, but with his curly hair and youthful demeanor, he is often spoken of as representing the “younger generation” of German directors. Like Kriegenburg, he remarkably had two productions in the Theatertreffen, the other almost standing for youth itself—an adaptation of Goethe’s novella The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Bosse sets Much Ado in a Vegas hotel version of Waikiki Beach, with stagehands strewing about decorative rocks and sand. Beatrice slouches in black gym shoes and a slinky tiger print slit up the front. Hero is a blonde airhead in tennis mini-skirt and knee-high boots. Actors chat with the audience, legs dangling over the stage edge. The whole cast breaks into a “native dance” in grass skirts and wild headpieces. The design feeling was Studied Tacky, sprinkled with eau de Castorf. And then…Everyone into the pool! Well, not everyone, but several, including Hero, Beatrice’s maligned cousin, who is thrown in, wedding dress and all.
(A moment here. Ponds littered with bodies go way back in German drama, but I suspect that the general water fad on the current Berlin stage can be traced to Castorf. Two of the three Castorf productions I saw at the Volksbuhne had pools; in one, Forever Young—nach Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, conceived as a film being shot by a porno company in a Florida subdivision—there wasn’t a dry T-shirt as actors plunged again and again into the onstage pool or got caught in “monsoon” downpours.)
A waterfall effect provided the one great coup de theatre of Much Ado. Just before the wedding scene, stagehands bustled on with palm trees, tables, umbrellas, an entire gazebo. As backdrop to this set-within-a-set, designer Stephane Laime created a flies-to-floor water curtain on which a rainbow and clouds gently shimmered. Fabulous effect! (Last time I saw something this deliciously downscale was at a Trader Vic’s in San Diego, now sadly gone.) This was a total showstopper and left the actors plenty of time for a costume change.
But even more than Everyone into the pool at this Theatertreffen, it was Everyone into the house. Of the festival plays I saw, three had actors racing through the auditorium; two more, set in the round, had actors moving up the aisles; and then there was the audience tossing water balloons in Jelinek and hiding Hugo’s incriminating gun in Schmutzige Hande. That’s seven out of nine, mostly for gags, some of them actually funny. American directors pulled back this kind of spillover almost 40 years ago after the transgressions of Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in ’69 and the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, and in the U.S. today it is mostly the province of variety shows and children’s theatre. In Germany it is a full-blown craze—one, incidentally, that can’t be traced to Castorf.
Dimiter Gotscheff, director of the Theatertreffen Tartuffe (yet another winning production from the Thalia), took the Everybodyintothehouse Prize. Gotscheff, a Bulgarian who has based his career in Germany for the past 15 years, is one of the great directors working anywhere in the world. This season, the Berlin theatre intelligentsia was outraged that his production of Aeschylus’s The Persians at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in the Heiner Muller translation was not selected for the festival. Sober, monumental, with only four actors and the sparest scenic means, it seemed a rebuke to the current taste for both comic and, indeed, tragic excess. Tartuffe, with its religious zealot and credulous victim, would seem as much a play for now as the Jelinek and the Sartre, yet this production staggered and collapsed under its own form of excess.
Gotscheff cast the family of the hapless Orgon as partying Weimar decadents. And what a party! For the first five minutes, explosions of confetti boomed from what looked like Civil War cannons along the sides of the stage. At the same time a thousand colored ribbons dropped from the flies and swirled in the agitated air. As the stunned (or maybe stoned) family sat hip-deep in confetti, the stage ramp doors at the far rear swung open: enter the religious snake oil salesman, Tartuffe, small, plain and implacable. This spectacle was the work of Gotscheff’s set designer Katrin Brack, whose modernist inspirations are movement and evanescence. (Marx again: All that is solid melts into air.) Her stupendous Tartuffe opener, however, broke one of the first rules of making theatre: leave yourself someplace to go. There was no place to go but hysteria: You could feel fatigue deflating the audience when Orgon’s family broke into, “Oh happy Jesus washed my sins away.” Yet the production barely touched the most virulent sources of religious fanaticism in today’s world; that’s a third rail for Western artists.
As for sending actors into the house, I began to lose count. My notes say the entire cast clambered off the stage not once but twice to occupy the first row for instruction by Tartuffe. If you’re sitting in the back of the house you can’t see the first row. At another point, the gullible Orgon, draped in a toga (or was it Tartuffe in a toga? or both?), raced into the balcony to convert the spectators, but if you’re in the back of the house you can’t see the balcony either. I had a good view of all kinds of foolery on the stage, however, such as Damis, Orgon’s adult son, here dressed as a six-year-old, humping the maid Dorine, or was it vice versa (she’s on the floor, he’s standing, her foot is in his crotch; my notes read, “This is awful”).
I confess that as a stranger to the season-by-season evolution of German theatre production, the present moment as reflected in the Theatertreffen choices seems one of staggering brilliance and staggering purposelessness. But maybe I am behind the times and just don’t get it. Peter Kummel, the theatre critic for the German newspaper Die Zeit, reflects that the German stage may not be as nihilistic as it looks, but is peeling away useless content (so over) to touch the true depths of theatre art as dreamed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche, is it? German neo-romantic irony, is it? Well then maybe they’re behind the times. Such is the confusion of cultures into which this festival has plunged me.
I see some signposts pointing out of this vast, brilliant rubble, if perhaps only to other rubble. Kriegenburg’s Three Sisters from the Munich Kammerspiele presented the most original repertoire of visual images in the festival. Part fairy tale, part girl group (both favor sets of threes), there were no dropped-trousers jokes, no running into the house or dirty sex. Rather, Kriegenburg’s sisters appeared in dopey dead-white masks, like sad, lost children. This startling experiment in Verfremdung told not Three Sisters (another monument of the theatre so over?), but the Tale of the Three Sisters Who Could Never Go to Moscow—or perhaps just the “Three Sisters Show.” It was cold, repetitive, boring—but the empty faces and the claustrophobic set filling with a detritus that slowly closed off all escape continue to haunt.
Jan Bosse made a parable of the stage space. He put his adaptation of Young Werther on the forestage in front of the Maxim Gorki Theater proscenium, going so far as to design a backdrop “curtain” that was indistinguishable from the diamond-patterned decor of the theatre walls. This left a playing area of a few feet in depth. Intermittently the actors spilled into the house, but here with barely a stage the move seemed less gratuitous. Only with his histrionic suicide does Werther (played again by the protean Hans Low) stagger against this backdrop and crash through it into the stage space behind, suggesting a tragic historical divide. Left alive on our side of the stage is Charlotte’s husband, translated from Goethe’s noble Albert into a TV remote-wielding boor. On the other side, lying dead in the stage space, is imagination, love…perhaps the stage itself and all it suggests about high culture.
I also had to wonder whether director Michael Thalheimer (his work will appear in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival for the second time this fall, a rare distinction for a German director) wasn’t in another way thumbing his nose at the theatre as he made a splatter-flick of the Oresteia trilogy, rendered, in his signature gesture of extreme compression, in a brisk 90 minutes. This production, like the Werther, was set in front of the proscenium on two narrow levels backed by a plywood wall. As the playing area became a surfboard of stage blood, with the audience in range wrapped in protective plastic sheeting, Thalheimer both lampooned and strained against stage illusion. How the same Berlin theatre intelligentsia disliked this production! “Thalheimer is a real estate agent,” one of them groaned. “Here’s the apartment, here’s the view.” But I take this for the point. Thalheimer opened up our television sets and poured them on our heads. The more we see, the less we feel.
The strangely pacific slogan of this year’s festival was “Among Friends,” and it seemed finally apropos for the last production I saw, Theatre Basel’s conflation of Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, directed by the Swiss director Sebastian Niibling. It was performed not at the large Festspielhaus with its cavernous stage, where most of the out-of-town productions were shown, but at the nearby Schaubuhne, where the black-box space was turned into an intimate playing corridor flanked by a half-dozen risers on each side.
Figures by Marlowe, score by Purcell, this Dido and Aeneas was a nachnach. (Who’s there?) (Oh, I’ll resist.) The piece is in the genre the Germans call “crossover” (like Tanztheater), and this crossover was especially endearing with its mix not just of opera and theatre, actors and singers, but of domestic and royal, modern and mythic, spoken German and sung English, psychedelic rocker J.D. Blackfoot and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.
We are at Dido’s, celebrating, it seems, her lukewarm engagement to Iarbus, the “heavy” of the play. In wanders the passing soldier Aeneas, intent only on duty, and the love he ignites careens to its fatal conclusion in the course of a long night’s feast. The dance on the banquet table between Sandra Huller (star of the film Requiem) and Sandro Tajouri—the two locked in a silent sexual conflagration, bodies never touching—may have been the most explosive moment of a clangorous, glittering festival. And all this was packaged in a rich saturation of the senses, as Nubling framed the event with the smell of frying sausage for the banquet lasagna as spectators enter, and the aroma of roasted coffee in the bleak morning-after as they leave. The performance easily won the festival’s “best production” award.
What a difference a mountain range makes! This Swiss company had no interest in alienating or invading the audience, in attacking the theatre, in turning bodies into meat, in grinding every human exchange into farceburger. These moves often provided as stunning theatre as one is likely to see anywhere in the world, but they do not comprehend the entire universe of thought and feeling, which are not yet completely over.
Elinor Fuchs teaches dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at Yale School of Drama. This past spring she taught at the Institut fur Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Universitat in Berlin. Her most recent book is the memoir Making an Exit (Holt, 2005).
