WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 16, Number 1 Winter 2004

Editor Marvin Carlson

Christopher Balme Miriam DAponte Marion P. Holt Glenn Loney Daniele Vianello

Contributing Editors Harry Carlson Antoinette Di Nocera Rosette Lamont Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff

Erik Abbott, Managing Editor

Jennifer Worth, Editorial Assistant

Director Frank Castorf. Photo: courtesy Frank Castorf

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board James Patrick, Director Jill Stevenson, Circulation Manager Serap Erincin, Assistant Circulation Manager Frank Hentschker, Director of Special Projects

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2004 ISSN # 1050-1991

To the Reader
Each year our winter issue is devoted entirely or in part to a particular country or a special theme. In 2004 for the first time we are focussing on a single city, Berlin, which in terms of the variety of its experimentation and the number of major theatre artists working there has moved to a preeminent position among the European theatre capitals. The essays in this section provide information on most of the leading Berlin theatres, the Deutsches, the Berliner Ensemble, the Volksbhne, the Prater, the Schaubhne, the Komische Oper, a strong selection of the leading directors in Berlin today, among them Frank Castorf, Thomas Ostermeier, Leander Haussman, Nicolas Stemann, Ren Pollesch, Bernd Wilms, Michael Thalheimer, and Robert Wilson, and a representative example of the rich selection of current offerings, from classic to contemporary work. The issue constinues with a variety of other reports from elsewhere in Western Europe, three reports coverning a number of major productions this past fall in Paris, essays on Londons Triangle Theatre and Sadlers Wells, a report on recent work in Belgium, and a review of the recent Hamlet of one of Europes leading current directors, Calixto Bieito, along with an interview with that artist. As always, we thank our readers for their continued interest and support and warmly encourage contributions from any reader. Western European Stages (ISSN# 1050-1991) is published three times a year, in Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $15.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. For subscription inquiries please contact: Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. Queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309 or email mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Journals are available online from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts via the ProQuest information service and the International Index to the Performing Arts. www.il.proquest.com. All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Table of Contents

Volume 16

Number 1

Winter 2004

Special Section on Berlin Three December Productions in Berlin ...........................................................................Marvin Carlson Bernd Wilms at the Deutsches Theater ...........................................................................William Grange Two by Thalheimer at the Deutsches Theater........................................................................John Rouse A New Vision of Theatre: The Timely introduction of Video and Film in the Work of Frank Castorf, Ren Pollesch, and Olaf Nicolai........................................Thomas Irmer Sarah Kanes Crave at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin ....................................Steve Earnest Der Auftrag.............................................................................................................................Lydia Stryk Two by Bchner in Berlin ......................................................................................................John Rouse Le Grand Macabre at the Komische Oper, Berlin..............................................................Steve Earnest Two from Berlin: Taboris Jews and Kimmigs Stella ...........................................................Erik Abbott Letter from Paris ........................................................................................................................Barry Daniels Theatre in Paris: October 2003 ...............................................................................................Allan Graubard Hedda Gabler. Thtre Marigny. Paris. Autumn Season, 2003 ..........................................Joan Templeton Justifying War and the Case of David Kelly ............................................................................Janelle Reinelt Matthew Bournes Nutcracker! at Sadlers Wells ...................................................................Marvin Carlson A Lot of Work and a Flicker of Intuition. Calixto Bieito Stages Hamlet......................Maria M. Delgado Belgian Theatre Making a Comeback: Four Plays and an Opera ..........................................David Willinger Notes on Contributors 5 11 19

23 29 31 35 39 43 47 55 61 63 69 71 79 85

Inka Friedrich in Nicolas Stemanns production of Kleists Das Kthchen von Heilbronn at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Iko Freese/Deutsches Theater

Three December Productions in Berlin

Marvin Carlson In Berlin for a brief visit in mid-December of 2003, I enjoyed a sampling of the fare currently offered at three of the citys major theatres. I began, as I usually do, with the Volksbhne, which under the direction of Frank Castorf has become the citys trendiest and most honored theatre, its productions regularly cited by critics as among the best in Germany. To my disappointment, I just missed the most recent work in Castorfs American cycle, Williams Sweet Bird of Youth (called Forever Young in this production). Castorf was on the brink of departing with most of his company to present his award-winning Dostoevsky adaptation Erniedrigte und Beleidigte [see WES 14 :3] in Los Angeles 17 to 19 December. What an embarrassment for New York that Los Angeles continues to invite artists like Castorf while New York has not for many years seen anything by this or any other leading theatre artist of contemporary Germany. By contrast, the Spring 2004 season at BAM, New Yorks major venue for major European work will include only two major theatre works from Western Europe, and more conventional and conservative choices could hardly be imagined: a Peter Hall production of Midsummer Nights Dream and a production of Molires Imaginary Invalid from the Comdie Franaise directed by Claude Stratz. In Castorfs absence, the Volksbhne primarily offered Meg Stewarts dance-theatre piece Visitors Only, which I saw last spring, so I got instead a ticket for a new production on 10 December, Bernard Kolts The Struggle of the Black Man and the Dog, directed by Dimiter Gotscheff. Although Kolts is generally regarded in Europe as a major modern dramatist, he is rarely produced or even read in England or America, so I was pleased to have this opportunity to see his work. In the event, I missed most of the production, but as it happened the evening offered a parallel theatrical event which proved an even more interesting demonstration of current racial tensions than Kolts now somewhat dated post-colonial meditation. Because of a flight delay (December flying in Europe can be very tricky) I arrived late at the theatre, but a friend who was meeting me informed me that a large crowd of demonstrators had gathered there well before the production. Large demonstrations in the Rosa Luxemburg Platz, which the theatre faces, are not unusual, especially on leftist occasions like May Day, since both the district and the theatre have a long association with leftist causes. Normally, however, the square is mostly deserted except for the crowds hurrying across it just before or after the theatre. On this occasion, however, the square was full of people, a crowd remarkable in to respects. First, they were demonstrating against the theatre itself, instead of against the sort of conservative social and political causes generally denounced on this square and indeed by much of the work of the Volksbhne. Second, perhaps even more striking, the majority of the crowd was black,

The Volksbhne in Berlin. Photo: courtesy Volksbhne

this in a city where, unlike New York, London, or Paris, a non-white face is almost never seen, not on the streets, not in the subways, and certainly not in the theatres. The stimulus for this gathering, and the anger of the crowd, was not far to seek. The art deco facade of the Volksbhne has long served in part as a gigantic and often defiant advertisement for what the theatre is offering. For years the huge letters OST (East) on its roof have proclaimed its ongoing faithfulness to the ideals if not the particular political program of once anti-capitalist Eastern Europe, East Germany, and East Berlin. Beneath this defiant OST a banner normally carries one or two of the most provocative words in the play being presented that evening. On this occasion a single word appeared: NEGRE. Now, Negre carries much less cultural weight in Germany than the similar American term, but it is still an insulting and demeaning word, avoided in polite, or at least liberal conversation. Thus it is difficult to believe that the directors of the Volksbhne did not anticipate some protest, but clearly they were unprepared for the size or anger of it. Moreover, it seems an odd sort of scandal to be generated by a theatre with reputation for scandalous productions, but one based more upon its politics or its radical reinterpretation of classic plays than upon this kind of sensationalism. The Kolts play itself seems a perfectly likely choice for this theatre, since it is in large part a scathing indictment of Western colonialism and racism, set in a French African colony with a black man as the only really sympathetic character. Apparently few if any of the demonstrators, black or white, were actually familiar with the play, but the demonstration was clearly not simply a spontaneous reaction to the inflammatory sign. There were too many people gathered and too much preparation in evidence. The demonstrators challenged any patrons attempting to enter the theatre, upbraiding them for supporting racist work. Those who insisted up pushing past found labels stuck to their backs proclaiming them racists. One man who admitted he did not know the play but simply wanted to see it and just for himself was denounced as a good German, a term still redolent of Nazism. Not surprisingly, at the announced time of the performance the auditorium, usually full and often sold out, held only a scattering of patrons. The director and members of the theatre staff came out into the lobby and invited the demon6

strators to come in, watch the play, and judge it for themselves, an offer which did not seem to me very well advised, but in any case they refused. The theatre staff the attempted to turn the occasion into a kind of town meeting debate on racism and the theatre, and as the warning bells rang for the closing of the doors, not surprisingly at least as many people elected to stay and watch this ongoing action than to go inside. For another hour or so the parallel performances continued inside and outside the theatre. Although the argument was turbulent and unfocussed, it seemed to be largely about the potential racism of the play and/or its author and the theatres insensitivity in presenting it. There was, to the best of my knowledge, no discussion of a closely related issue that would obviously have been central had such an evening occurred in the United States, and this is that fact that the central character in the play, the black man, was being played by a white actor in blackface. When I asked my German theatre friends about this, on the whole they found my concern surprising. A black actor would not have been possible, they insisted, because there are almost no black actors in Berlin. I am willing to grant that blackface itself does not have as powerful and often negative cultural associations in Germany as in the United States, but it still seems odd to me that neither demonstrators nor theatre staff seemed particularly concerned with the fact that this production was being created in a theatrical culture that required blackface because it contained no black actors. My other two Berlin theatre experiences this visit provided far fewer surprises. My second selection was Leander Haussmanns production of Shakespeares The Tempest at the Berliner Ensemble. Haussmann built much of his reputation on modern, or postmodern interpretations of Shakespeare, most notably on a revolutionary Midsummer Nights Dream , which he is revisiting, along with The Tempest in this season at the Berliner Ensemble. I still remember that dazzling original Midsummer Nights Dream and found the current Tempest, although it has many interesting and imaginative touches, rather a disappointment. The production began well, with an extended and original presentation of the shipwreck. First Stephano (Norbert Str and Trinculo (Martin Seifert) appeared on the forestage facing the audience, Stephano bearing aloft a tray containing a number of tall thin glasses. They stood quietly and the glasses began to rattle, more and more loudly.

Far above them a single lantern hung in front of the proscenium began to sway and the house lights to flicker. The sound of wind and creaking timbers came from all corners of the auditorium. Gradually the uproar increased, as other characters tumbled onto the stage and ran in groups back and forth as if the stage were tilting first one way then the other. Water poured out of the stage boxes, the stage doors, even spouted from the costumes of the actors. Finally, in almost total darkness with wind, crasing thunder, and flashes of lightning, the thin stage curtain billowed out like a giant sail, then flew back to reveal a huge dark prow that pushed out over the heads of the audience, then split apart to reveal in a bust of colored lights Prospero (Ezard Haussmann), standing amid the writhing bodes and holding the two broken halves of a shattered ship. As he moved downstage, a screen showing the sea bottom with huge fish passing pieces of floating wreckage replaced the upstage ship. Nothing else in the long evening equaled this spectacular opening, although the closing sequence in some ways echoed it. The design (by Hamster Damm) was on the whole very simple, a dark bare stage, often presided over by Ariel (Steffi Khnert) in an elaborate flying harness manipulated from on stage, rather like a Macys Thanksgiving Day balloon figure, by five other spirits under Prosperos control, all clothed in black and for the most part wearing dark animal masks. For all of this flying about, however, Ariel was a surprisingly heavy figure, in a grotesque fat suit like a sugarplum fairy in a rather tacky Christmas pantomime. For most of the production this visual choice seemed quite inexplicable, but it did contribute to one of the evenings most striking and original sequences. When Prospero finally sets Ariel free near the end the flying apparatus disappears, and the heavy spirit tries to leave the stage without it. Very much like a pudgy fledgling bird, Ariel jumps about, falls several time, and finally staggers offstage, apparently no longer able to function without Prosperos support. Although the costumes (designed by Ursula Kudrna) and makeup of the ships company are fairly dapper (Rainer Philippi as Alonso is oddly comparatively drab, both in dress and character), the island costumes are calculatedly grotesque, even ugly. It is as if Caliban (Roman Kaminski) sets the island style, in an oddly padded body suit which provides strange lumps on his arms and legs and an umbilical cord stretching off into the wings as if 7

attaching him to the islands center. Indeed when Ferdinand (Dirk Ossig) becomes Prosperos servant he is dressed in a similar body suit, complete with lumps, and an ugly wig of long greasy black hair. Although Caliban is bald, this wig ties Ferdinand in with Miranda (Annika Kuhl), whose costume is by far the ugliest in the productionwith baggy pinafores, drooping stockings, and a huge brown fright wig that puts even Ferdinand to shame. When these young lovers come down to the forestage to join in a sentimental popular love song, the audience is much amused, but any suggestion of romantic attraction is totally denied. Oddly enough, Caliban is in fact the most visually attractive figure on the island, largely because of the somewhat odd design choice to project constantly shifting colored light patterns onto his body. The ending of the production returned to some of the visual spectacle of the opening, and at least to this viewer recalled the Tempest of Giorgio Strehler, in which Prospero literally destroys the stage illusion when he renounces his magic, and then, as an actor, brings it all back again. Somewhat similarly, Haussmanns Prospero drops his book (with a great splash) into the orchestra pit, breaks his wand, and stands silently on an empty stage. Then he slowly raises his arms, and as he does so the music and bird sons of the island again are heard

Anita Kuhl in Leander Haussmanns production of The Tempest at the Berliner Ensemble. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

from all parts of the auditorium. He turns upstage and conjures up the bow of a huge dark antique ship, now departing with its windows alight, like an image from Pirates of the Caribbean. As this grandiose image disappears into total darkness, the voice of Ariel speaks out of the dark to end the production saying I did a good job. It is a powerful but somewhat confusing statement. Were these final manifestations in fact not due to Prospero but to Ariel? Has the powerless spirit we recently saw depart regained strength? Or is this a final nostalgic reflection on the plays action as a whole? The effect is striking, but muddled, like much in this often original, but also very uneven production. For my final evening in Berlin I attended the historic Deutsches Theater. The prominent director there at the moment is Michael Thalheimer, whose 2001 Emilia Galotti and 2002 Three Sisters remain among the most popular offerings in the repertoire. Later in December he was scheduled to present a new production, Hauptmanns Einsame Menschen. Having seen the two earlier works and being too early for the new one, I decided on an offering by another recently emerged director, Nicolas Stemann, who was first seen in Berlin last

year with a controversial video-oriented production of Hamlet at the Theatertreffen. He has since gained much acclaim for his premiere of a new play by Elfriede Jelinek, Das Werk, at the Vienna Burgtheater. Heinrich von Kleists Das Kthchen von Heilbronn , Stemanns Deutsches offering, is, like The Tempest, an extravagant spectacle of magic and romance, a major challenge to actors, directors, and designers alike, but I felt Stemanns production met this challenge considerably more effectively than did Haussmann. Often Kleists strange fairytale play, set in medieval Swabia and featuring burning castles, mysterious grottos, peasant huts in remote mountains, and miraculous transformations, is presented with elaborate fanciful scenery and costumes, but Stemann, his scenic designer (Katrin Hoffmann) and his costumer (Esther Bialas) have gone in a totally different direction, toward the simplest anti-illusionistic style. The huge stage of the Deutsches is basically bare all the way back to a sweeping cyclorama, and the actors are in simple modern dress, Kthchen (Inka Friedrich), for example, in jeans and a light blue sweater and her evil rival Kunigunde (Ayln Esener) in a simple brown

Inka Friedrich in Nicolas Stemanns production of Kleists Das Kthchen von Heilbronn at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Iko Freese/Deutsches Theater

Nicolas Stemanns production of Kleists Das Kthchen von Heilbronn at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Iko Freese/Deutsches Theater

pantsuit. The opening sequence of Stemanns production is as quiet and understated as Haussmanns is flamboyant and theatrical. The difficulty of establishing truthwho people really are, what their relationships are or should beis central to Kleists play, and this forms the basis of the opening. A quiet, diffident young man, Friedrich (Frank Seppeler) hesitantly comes down to the footlights and appeals to the audience to trust him, to give him their hearts, and to believe his story. In a few minutes an older actor, Theobald, Kthchens father (Horst Lebinsky), appears on the other side of the stage, making the same pleas. Those familiar with Kleists play may recognize that the plea and counterplea for belief suggest the opening sequence, when Kthchens father accuses Friedrich of using spells to bewitch his daughter, with the theatre audience standing in for the mysterious judges who are hearing this case. However here more and more 9

cast members appear, repeating the same lines pleading for belief and thus adding to this verbal fugue until it becomes a chaos of completing claims to trust and to truth. Much of the production involves a frankly presentational style. Individual actors relate to the audience the complicated physical descriptions of the invisible scenery, supplementing their comments, when necessary, by projected slides on the cyclorama of simple cartoon drawings which they elaborate in the manner of a public lecture with arrows and lines they add to the projected image. At one point the rather foolish Rheingraf vom Stein (Michael Schweighfer), attempting to draw lines explaining the complex matter of a piece of disputed territory, ends by scratching lines all over the image, making it totally illegible. The image then changes to that of a piece of paper being crumpled up and disappearing. The most spectacular scene in Kthchen is

that in which she is sent into Friedrichs burning castle to retrieve a paper by the evil Kunigunde, and is then miraculously saved by an angel when the building collapses. When I last saw this play, at the Vienna Burgtheater, it was done with all the theatrical spectacle of a Victorian fairy tale pageant. Stemanns approach could not have been more different, but it was also far more original and memorable. The castle was represented, like other key settings, by a crude cartoon drawing on the rear projection. As the fire began, the paper on which the drawing appeared seemed itself to catch fire and burn. Then fire filled the projected image with Kthchen standing in front of it, the projected flames playing on her body. When the castle collapsed all the light in the theatre went out (up to this point the house lights had remained on at half power) except for a single dim spot on Kthchens fallen body upstage. After a moment of total silence, a beautiful clear soprano voice came from the balcony near the stage, apparently the voice of the savior angel. After a few minutes another, lower voice joined it

from the back of the auditorium, then more and more voices from different parts of the house joined in chorus as Kthchen slowly rose and moved downstage in wonder. As half lighting was slowly restored to both stage and house, individuals and couples dressed as ordinary audience members and scattered all over the theatre rose to their feet, still singing. This angelic chorus in fact had been among us from the beginning, a brilliant contribution to a play in which seemingly ordinary people turn out to be angels or demons in disguise. The role of Kthchen is close enough to a Patient Griselda to cause some discomfort to modern audiences, but Inka Friedrich is so sincere and winning in her devotion that she commands sympathy throughout. The surrounding cast is equally impressive, particularly Aylin Esener as the demonic Kunigunde, whose ironic smile and slinky seductiveness are as winning in their way as Friedrichs naive simplicity. Altogether this is a moving a memorable interpretation of a strange and challenging classic.

10

Bernd Wilms at the Deutsches Theater

William Grange During a period in which the Berlin theatre is facing some of the most unsettling changes (and some say its worst crises) in a long and storied history, Bernd Wilms has reason to be optimistic. He may not always be ardent in his enthusiasm, and there are certainly days when he must seriously ponder the viability of theatres future in the German capital. As Intendant of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, however, he runs not only one of the citys most tradition-rich institutions; it is also of its successful enterprises. If German theatres could measure success on a scale of tradition, the number of world premieres staged there, the innovations in design that have occupied its stage spaces, remarkable performers who have been members of its ensembles, or talented owners, directors, and managers who have occupied its spaces, certainly the Deutsches Theater would rank at the top on several gauges of accomplishment. Before it became the Deutsches Theater in 1881 it bore the name Friedrich-Wilmstdtisches Theater, named for its owner FriedrichWilhelm Deichmann (1821-1879). Deichmann secured exclusive performance rights to all Offenbach operettas in Berlin, and the Friedrich-Wilmstdtisches Theater subsequently did ten German-language Offenbach premieres, allowing Deichmann to sell his theatre at a high profit to real estate speculators and retire in high style to an estate in 1872. The theatre was also home to many of the Meininger troupes Berlin runs, but when playwright Adolph LArronge (1838-1908) and his partners bought the theatre in 1881, they gave it a new identity along with its new name. LArronges goal was to found an ensemble imitating the work of the Meininger and follow the commercial approach of Thtre Franaise in Parishence the new name Deutsches Theater zu Berlin. LArronges partners in the new enterprise were some of the most wellknown actors of the period: Siegwart Friedmann, Ernst Possart, Ludwig Barnay, and Friedrich Haase. Their efforts soon foundered as the partners could not maintain their pledges of availability for planned productions. LArronge bought them out and then presented productions of his own extremely popular plays, while premiering those of Oskar Blumenthal, Franz von Schnthan, and other comic playwrights whose success at the Deutsches proved stupendously lucrative. Adolph LArronge in the process became a multimillionaire. LArronge leased the theatre in 1894 to Otto Brahm, who ran it until 1904. Max Reinhardt and a group of silent partners bought it and the adjoining Kammerspiel (Chamber Theater) from LArronge in 1906, allowing Reinhardt to establish himself as a major force in Berlins theatre life for the next quarter century. The National Socialist regime expropriated his properties in 1933 and turned them over to Reinhardts protg and colleague Heinz Hilpert, who ran them under the super-

Offenbachs The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

11

Bernd Wilms. Photo: courtesy Bernd Wilms

vision of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels until 1944. After World War II, the Russian zone of occupation in Berlin encompassed most of the districts where theatres had been situated, including the district where the Deutsches stood. The Deutsches soon became a jewel in the German Democratic Republics cultural crown, and the East German regime refurbished the place as a showcase to compete with West Berlins better known companies, notably at the city-subsidized Schiller Theater, Schlosspark Theater, Freie Volksbhne, and later the Schaubhne am Halleschen Ufer. The East Germans rarely tried to compete with decadent, bourgeois operations like the Theater des Westens and Renaissance Theater, though they did periodically provide goofy entertainment spectacles in the old Metropol and in the Theater des Volkes, Reinhardts former Grosses 12

Schauspielhaus. When the German Democratic Republic dissolved in 1991, Thomas Langhoff ran the Deutsches for the next ten years. Langhoff successfully navigated the winds of change that blew through Berlin in the 1990s, fostering new directors and establishing the awardwinning DT-Baracke (Deutsches Theater Barracks) whose leadership later took over the Schaubhne. Under Langhoffs leadership the place remained prominent in the minds of most Berlin theatre-goers and critics but few observers during the 1990s could assert that the venerable house on Schumann Strasse was the same institution it had been. Everything changed for the Deutsches Theater in 2001, when Bernd Wilms was named its Intendant. Wilms is certainly one of the most unusual of major directors and managers in the German theatre, though he, like many of his colleagues, served in various functions at numerous provincial theatres before coming to Berlin. He began his professional career in Wuppertal as a dramaturg, moving on to a similar capacity at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg later in the 1970s. He held administrative posts in Bremen and Munich before becoming director of Munichs Otto Falckenberg Acting School in 1986. In 1991 he took over the Ulm city theatres, and from 1994 to 2001 he ran the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. That background prepared him to take over the Deutsches Theater, but equally significant was his work long before he even began to work professionally. Bernd Wilms completed one of the finest doctoral dissertations of the entire postwar period in 1969 at Berlins Free University, titled Der Schwank: Deutsches Trivialtheater 1880-1930. It focused on the popular fare that most German theatres presented to audiences during the years in the dissertations title; its scope and insights remain extraordinary valuable to students and scholars alike as they continue to ask the question, Where are German repertoires headed in the twenty first century? Wilms examined the nature, shape, con-

tent, and performance requirements of trivialentertainment from 1880 to 1930. He noted that in a 1964 survey by the television network ARD, viewers overwhelmingly said they preferred situation comedies, farces, and trivial plays to other forms of dramatic fare the network presented; that popular consensus was a legacy passed on from the nineteenth century, and Wilms examined in detail such plays in an effort to determine the reasons for such preferences. The Schwank is a form derived from Kotzebue and the French comdie-vaudeville; the word itself comes from the Middle High German swanc, meaning originally Schwung, or buoyant, flippant, even exuberant. Yet by 1899, Wilms noted, the term did not appear in the ninth edition of Grimms Dictionary of the German Language. The reason for that, Wilms said then, was the Schwanks unabashed eschewal of literary worth or deeper significance. Its goal was buoyancy and flippancy, attained through totally mechanical means intended to set up a situation in which the comedy could develop. The Schwank was historically connected to the German bourgeois world and its accompanying morality, as many critics and scholars had already noted. What makes the Schwank important for the theatre as a non-elitist, inclusive art form is its pre-modern embrace of accessibility. The best of such plays are the products of a seasoned professional hand and a knowledge of what will be most effective in performance.

It does not depend upon costume, setting, or other technical apparatus. Characters do not try to get laughs and actors who play the characters are by no means comedians. They are rather skillful performers (who could just as skillfully do classical roles or straight drama) who play the script according to its calculated design in order to achieve its pre-fabricated effects. The situations in which they involuntarily find themselves are skillfully created to evoke a pleasant response among audiences. As director of the Deutsches, Wilms finds himself at an aesthetic crossroads. Given the subsidies to which Berlin theatres had become accustomed during the Cold War, Wilms must, like all Berlin managers, make artistic decisions that have substantial financial impact. A traditional staging of Lessing, Schiller, or Shakespeare might find predictable resonance, but would it would attract audiences in numbers to pay for itself? Would a risky staging attract the attention of critics and audiences to justify further subsidy? Subsidies have in the past provided funds to do both kinds of productions, but the economic outlook in Berlin can no longer promise long-term support for all kinds of productions. Wilms is not about to forego subsidies, but he also recognizes that theatres must depart from traditional ways of doing business in Berlin. That includes taking some risks, like hiring Michael Thalheimer to stage an abbreviated and fast-paced Emilia Galotti that in effect provides the plays

Wedekinds Springs Awakening at Deutsches Theaters Kammerspiel. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

13

class-conscious kernel while allowing patrons to get back home by 9:30 PM. The Berliner Morgenpost awarded the production its Friedrich Luft Prize and the production sold out for weeks. A similar instance of abbreviation was Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Director Dimiter Gottscheff cut the play so severely that only the Loman family characters remained. That meant a saving on actor salaries, but the director included a nineteen-member chorus which added a classical Greek feature to the plays tragic dimensions; the chorus were, however, more than simply visual Paralipomena for the plays action, as they might be if director Gottscheff had attempted merely to a place a tragic overlay on the production. Chorus members alternatively appeared as commuters on their way to work aboard an imaginary New York subway train, as applicants begging for a job, or patrons in a restaurant where Willy is to meet his sons. Employment, or a lack of it, is a major preoccupation of this production. The director senses a kind of validating recognition of that preoccupation among audiences, especially among patrons who come from the former East Berlin and parts of the former East Germany to see the show. Unemployment continues to bedevil large sections of the German population, and this production infers that society as a whole is responsible for it. Gottscheffs outlook is strongly colored by his background as a Bulgarian national who worked for two and one half decades in the former East Germany. To Wilms, however, that background was advantageous because it served to attract exactly the audience that has often felt neglected in a unified Berlin, the one that formerly attended the Deutsches at least once a week during the East German era. But what about the expense of a nineteenmember chorus? Surely the expense of paying that many performers would overwhelm any budget, even if management could count on larger-thanusual audiences. The solution was to cast a chorus from the Ernst Busch Acting School in Berlin, much as Wilms had done in Munich with students from the Otto Falckenberg School. Here the chorus consisted entirely of second-year students, many of whom were making their first appearance on a major Berlin stage. A better example of Wilms using acting students is the production of Wedekinds Springs Awakening in the adjoining Kammerspiel. This production, like Death of a Salesman, regularly sold outbut to an altogether different kind of audience. This audience was much younger, consisting of a crowd who were reading 14

Wedekind for the first time in school, or adults who had never witnessed a production of the infamous play (it had created a sensation in its premiere under Reinhardt at the Deutsches in November of 1906). Director Ulrich Matthes used third-year Busch School students in all but two roles, and he cast himself in one of themagain saving money. The result is a highly energized, though oddly unerotic performance. Most recent productions of Wedekinds pice these about adolescent sexual neurosis have featured scenes of explicit nudity, masturbation, and sexual violence. This production has all three, but in a strangely restrained way. It also has an outstanding performance by Adina Vetter as Wendla Bergmann and Achim Schelhas as Melchior Gabor; in their famous Whip me, Melchior! Whip me harder! scene, Vetter has a detachment that allows her to enjoy the whipping Schelhas administers, making the scene far more disturbing than it usually is and allowing Melchior to do the real suffering. Schelhas has been hired on a regular, three-year acting contract for next year, and his example is one of the reasons Wilms wants to maintain a close working relationship with the Ernst Busch School. Schelhas and students like him not only get a chance to work with other professionals during the school term, but they are also afforded an opportunity to audition for jobs directly upon graduation. Schelhas and others newly hired (the entire ensemble at the Deutsches usually totals forty performers, about half of whom have been with the company for a longer period of time, the other half relative newcomers) begin working with veterans like Dagmar Manzel, whose career has recently enjoyed a profound upswing. Theater Heute, the most influential theatre monthly in the German language, recently named Manzel Actress of the Year for the 2001-2002 season. She added lustre to that award with her performance in the title role of Wilms new translation of Offenbachs operetta The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein. For many audiences, Manzels performance has been a revelation. She was well known in the German Democratic Republic, beginning her career in Dresden. She was a well established member of the Deutsches company when Wilms arrived, having worked with directors Langhoff, Heiner Mller, Alexander Lang, Frank Castorf, most often in classical roles. After reunification, she became more well known to German audiences as a whole by virtue of her work in television. Few audiences, however, had heard

her singat least, heard her sing the way she does in Gerolstein . A 1988 production of Rame and Fos The Open Couple (Copia aperta; in German as Offene Zweierbeziehung) marked the first time she had done so at the Deutsches, when she sang to her own accompaniment on piano. Rarely however, did sheor anybody else in the company, for that matterget the opportunity to sing in musicals or operettas in the relatively small house (it has a seating capacity of about 1,000). Previous managers of the Deutsches have in the main regarded the capacity as too small to afford the high cost of musicals and operettas, despite the irony that the house established itself as the German home of Offenbach under its original owner back in the 1860s. Manzel did song evenings through the 1990s at the Deutsches, but only when Wilms heard her during one such evening did serious contemplation about doing an Offenbach operetta begin. Wilms had already completed several Offenbach libretti translations, and indeed his libretto for La vie Parisienne had been staged at Berlins Volksbhne under the direction of Christoph Marthaler. For Manzel in particular, however, Wilms began translating The Grand Duchess of

Gerolstein, this time as Intendant of the theatre where the production would appear. That meant commissioning a score to accommodate a small ensemble instead of using the score intended for full orchestra. But the music was in the public domain, and Wilms translation of the libretto further reduced costs. Conductor Uwe Hilprecht had to transpose some of the numbers, since the Deutsches ensemble is not necessarily geared to musical production; they can all sing, of coursebut not always in the keys that Offenbach wrote. Wilms finds no artistic dilemma in such adaptation, since transposing Offenbach is a long tradition dating from the composers lifetime; he wrote the piece for the Paris world premiere starring Hortense Schneider, whose range was lower than most sopranos. Many theatres in the nineteenth century transposed the Grand Duchesss numbers upwards to accommodate the sopranos they had cast. From a public relations standpoint, Wilms also counted on the fact Friedrich-Wilhelm Deichmann gave The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein its German premiere in the same house where at the Deutsches Theater in 1868. What he did not anticipate were major artistic differences with the shows original director, Patrick

Death of a Salesman at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

15

Offenbachs The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

Schlsser. Schlsser left mid-November and Thomas Schulte-Michels took over the show, opening it three days after the planned opening on December 8, 2002. When it did open, it got excellent reviews, and critics hailed Manzel in particular. Few had any idea she could sing the way she does as the Duchess, a portrayal that reminds Americans of Carol Channing or Patti LuPone, but with astonishing vocal power and range approximating that of Kiri ti Kanawa. One critic praised Manzel as an Advent Angel, the kind who saves a theatres entire season. Given the financial exigencies of many Berlin theatres, the critics concern was probably well placed. But Wilms season needed no saving, even though it was certainly as ambitious as any in Berlin. It featured sixteen major productions, two of which were world premieres; Robert Wilson staged his Doktor Caligari in March of 2002 featuring Christian Grashof, the Willy Loman of the aforementioned Death of a Salesman , as Caligari. Elfriede Jelineks Jackie and the Other Princesses had its world premiere at the Deutsches in November of 2002, supported by the Durr Foundation and directed by Hans Neuenfels, starring Elisabeth Trissenaar as Jackie Onassis (for whom Jelinek wrote the play). There 16

were German language premieres of Charles Mees True Love, major stagings of Sophocles Antigone , Eliots The Cocktail Party, Schillers Mary Stuart, Chekhovs The Seagull (with Manzel), Shakespeares As You Like It, and ONeills Mourning Becomes Electra , in addition to the aforementioned Lessing, Wedekind, Miller, and Offenbach productions. Wilms also included staged readings by long-time Deutsches stalwart Eberhard Esche (now retired but with a faithful following), the song evening with Manzel, and several workshop productions to round out his season, one that has indeed proved to be remarkable. The Deutsches Theater finished this season with an average attendance at over ninety per cent of capacity, a figure remarkable for most any theatre. Even more remarkable is that the Deutsches finished its season without a deficit, an unprecedented achievement in Berlin and one that the Berlin Senate would do well to use as a benchmark for its other subsidized houses in the city. That is especially true as the Senate faces a profound financial crisis affecting schools, public transport, pensions, and the host of other social services for which the city government is responsible. Ultimately, Wilms notes, The entire country will have to take

responsibility for some of Berlins extraordinary costs as the countrys capital city. Berlins population alone cannot shoulder all the costs of running a city that is, in effect, a cultural showcase for all of Europe. By no means does Wilms advocate a stronger federal role in subsidizing theatres, since the German constitution provides that culture is a local and/or regional affair. But like many other artists, he upholds the position that Berlins extensive social costs require some national assistance. That the Deutsches Theaters achievements have come without added financial assistance and likewise without artistic compromise is a credit to Wilms; that they have come so soon after he assumed leadership of the Deutsches is nothing short of remarkable. The Deutsches was on the short list last year in Theater Heutes register for the best theatre in Germany (editors and critics ultimately gave it third place) and it will again be in the running for that distinction this year. Next year, Wilms will inaugurate his season with American playwright Neil LaButes The Mercy Seat, set to open September 12. Because the play deals with a family man who was absent from work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 in order to make a secret rendezvous with his girlfriend, the production should have some political resonance. A lot of people felt that The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein should have had a stronger political echo than it did: its depiction of war as a frivolous pastime among the privileged did not, however, bear any reflection on the war in Iraq, as many hoped it would. Director Schulte-Michaels eschewed any anti-war inferences, and Manzel described her character as a woman whose dilemma is unrequited love. Schulte-Michels supports that view, adding that the show as a whole is about intense feelings and a longing for paradise. The Mercy Seat, on the other hand, has a more direct political contrivance. It will also have Dagmar Manzel in the cast, a fact that will attract wide attention in Berlin and among readership of Theater Heute . Politics is 17

usually a persistent component in the German theatre business, given the government involvement at so many theatres throughout the country. Wilms calls subsidies risk premiums that allow a degree of freedom to take chances on plays, directors, or production approaches that other theatres might otherwise be reluctant to attempt. But subsidies are a two-edged sword: in the days of the German Democratic Republic, all East German theatres received subsidies and were expected to toe the Party line. The result was usually a boring conformity and at times a stultifying artistic calcification. Some theatres in East Berlin were not only showcases for the regime, they were museums, trotting out time-worn productions year after year. The conviction in the former East Germany that theatre art should serve the people as an arm of the state remains prevalent in contemporary Berlin, perhaps because Bertolt Brecht so insidiously justified it. Brechts influence in East Germany was wide-

Death of a Salesman at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

spread, and Wilms still hears echoes of it in the halls of the Deutsches. He says hes never seen or heard the ghosts of Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt at the theatre, but he does periodically hear disputes between Ernst Busch and Marlon Brando. The differing approaches to acting work that the dueling cultures of East and West Germany fosteredmore distanced (in the Brechtian sense) and rational in the former, more intuitive and personal in the latterhave analogies to arguments about how or if theatre can support itself in Berlin. The differing approaches to acting make for some interesting results in performance, and a growing reliance on the box office instead of government subvention will certainly make changes in the way Berlin theatres operate. The two approaches dont clash with each other, if this highly successful season at the

Deutsches Theater is any indication. Wilms endorsement of allowing both acting styles to wrestle with each other is at least one important reason for the success his theatre has recently enjoyed. He is concomitantly aware, as he says, of serious storm clouds on the theatre horizon in Berlin. Almost every week there are rumors of more theatre closures, threats of resignations, letters of protest sent to politicians, and announcements of budgetary restrictions. They are part of the winds of change blowing through Berlin, winds that began sweeping through the city 1989 and have at times reached gale force. Sailing a ship the size of the Deutsches Theater through the blasts will require all the helmsmans skill that Bern Wilms experience and expertise can muster.

18

Two by Thalheimer at the Deutsches Theater

John Rouse Michael Thalheimer burst into prominence duction style embracing both architectural, abstract two years ago, when two of his productions, from sets, usually by Altmann, and a spatial, emotive use the Thalia Theater Hamburg and the Sophiensle of music, organized by another long-time partner, performing space in Berlin, were invited to the 2001 composer Bert Wrede. His approach also requires Berlin Theatertreffen [see WES 13:3]. The producinterpretively adventurous actors with considerable tions won him and his long-time design partner, physical and vocal skills, and its no accident that Olaf Altmann, the 3sat-Prize, awarded by the festiboth the Thalia and the Deutsches boast solid vals television partner for foward-looking accomensembles particularly strong in young actors. plishment. Since then, Thalheimer has continued In his recent productions, Thalheimer has to direct one production a season or so at the Thalia; concentrated on plays from the German Classics his production of Schnitzlers Liebelei was invited or on plays from the turn of the twentieth century to the 2003 Theatertreffen [see WES 15:3]. He has that belong to what the Germans call the Modern entered a similar relationship with Berlins Classics. Another way to look at this would be to Deutsches Theater. During a May 2003 visit to the say that Thalheimer has concentrated on plays from city, I was able to see the first two of these the long century of the classical bourgeoisie. Deutsches Theater ventures in repertory: Lessings Emilia Galotti certainly qualifies as a clasEmilia Galotti, which premiered on 27 September sic in both categories. One of the first bourgeois 2001; and Chekhovs Three Sisters, which predramas altogether, the play triumphantly displays miered on 28 February 2003. Another production, the moral superiority of the (admittedly rather highof Gerhard Hauptmanns Einsame Menschen, has standing) bourgeois maiden Emilia and her family since opened in late December 2003. as she falls into the hands of the lustful Prince and Thalheimer, who was born in 1965, is eashis evil chamberlain, Marinelli. These two dont ily one of the most original young directors to shy away from kidnapping Emilia and murdering emerge in recent years. His originality combines her fianc, Count Appiania progressive aristocrat, dramaturgical intervention with a distinctive proas it were uniting himself to the bourgeoisie.

Michael Thalheimers production of Lessings Emilia Galotti at Deutsches Theater. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

19

Lessing does provide some human complication Emilia also struggles against her attraction to the Prince. This aspect of the play has been given increasing weight in twentieth-century productions, some of which have suggested that when Emilia stabs herself in the end she has fallen prey as much to her parents petty pietism as to the Prince. There is, then, a kernel of desire (to use a more contemporary and amoral term) shared by the plays younger charactersthe Prince, the Countess Orsina (spurned mistress of the Prince and desperately in love with him), Appiani, and, perhaps, Emilia. Thalheimer concentrates on this kernel, and simply slices away the rest of Lessings textabout 60%. The bare bones of the plot remain in Thalheimers eighty-minute versiona film-length production performed without intermission. And the confrontations between these principal characters, and also between them and Emilias father and mother. All the plays other characters are cut. And with these cuts go the texts historical specifics in social setting, language, or moralistic framework. What emerges is startlingly contemporary. Thalheimer has said that he considers his productions faithful to the work, but that faithfulness to the work doesnt necessarily require faithfulness to the text. Emilia shows how this kind of unfaithful faithfulness can work. Thalheimers teams provide this text a startlingly contemporary production. Altmann imprisons the action between two walls, easily twenty feet high, made out of two-foot wide strips of plywood bound together by narrow ribs. The walls begin at either end of the proscenium opening, then angle steeply inwards as they extend to a depth of twenty or thirty feet. Far upstage, there is only enough room between them for a six- or seven-foot wide flat rising up to a ceiling piece slightly higher than the walls. Cut into the center of this flat is a doorsized rectangular archway. For most of the production, the only ways into or out of this space are this upstage archway and entrances either side of the proscenium arch downstage. Near the end, though, as Galotti (Peter Pagel) starts searching for his daughter in the Princes lair, he pushes open one panel after another. They become doors, and characters begin to come in and out of them. But they open towards upstage, so that we see the same wooden wall, but now at a slightly different angle. Also as the doors open the production undertakes its one lighting change; golden afternoon side-light streams in 20

through the open doorways. The performance begins with a brief passage of music, a somewhat sentimental melody played by a violin in waltz tempo. The music is an adaptation by Wrede from Yumeis Theme, part of Shigeru Umebayashis soundtrack for the film, In the Mood for Love. This music will return again and again during the production; sometimes the passage will be longer, sometimes the music will swell or change slightly. Gradually, the music will establish itself as an emotional motif, a somewhat calmer evocation of the turbulent passions that grip everyone on stage in one way or another. As the music ends, two flames burst up from the stage floor at center. Then, amidst a shower of sparks, Emilia (Katharina Schmalenberg) enters through the upstage archway and walks down to center with the grace of a runway model. She is wearing a knee-length, high-necked, sleeveless dress of white satin. (All the costumes, also designed by Altmann, are contemporary.) She starts back upstage, meeting the Prince (Sven Lehmann) as he comes down. She strokes his cheek, touches his chest under his shirt. As she exits, the Countess (Nina Hoss) enters downstage from the stage-left proscenium, drops her letter to the stage floor (where it will remain unopened for much of the performance) and exits the way she came. (For most of the performance, the only entrances to the space will be upstage or right and left proscenium). The letter is one of only two objectsprops or furniture used in the production. The other is a large automatic pistol, which substitutes for the knife Lessings Countess gives Galotti, who gives it to his daughter. (Before I go further, a bit of record-keeping: Regine Zimmermann initiated the role of Emilia, but fell ill just at the premiere. She was replaced by Katharina Schmalenberg. Schmalenberg has continued in the role, but she is still credited as a replacement via a program insert and the production photos are all of Zimmermann.) By the time this opening sequence is complete, we understand that its an added dumb-show. But the dumb-show introduces a markedly different interpretation of Emilia. The figure here is not acting on her own desire; she seems to be a projection of the Princes passion. She also to some extent becomes our projection, as well, the object of our gaze. The production introduces her as the catalyst for desire rather than as either a nineteenth-century pious maiden or a twentieth-century desiring young

woman. And Thalheimer will maintain this interquickly but still distinctly. Particularly with the pretation throughout. In this, hes assisted, interestPrince and Marinelli, the dialogue simply rushes by, ingly enough, by the script. Even before cuts, often with witty inflection, but without any particuLessing gives Emilia very few lines. Even for him, lar emotion. shes as much catalyst as agent in her own story. Emilia Galotti displays Thalheimers theThalheimer has simply read the text. atre at its best, using radical dramaturgical intervenThe production confirms that the dumbtion and a carefully stylized production style to win show is a projection of the Princes desire by stagnew insights into a very hoary classic. The producing another dumb-show very soon after the opening tion was not invited to the 2002 Theatertreffenan of the first act, now reduced to dialogue between the inexplicable oversight to some critics. But it did Prince and Marinelli (Ingo Hlsmann). Marinelli win the Berlin critics highest award, the Friedrichtells the Prince Emilias name for the first time. The Luft-Prize, and a similarly prestigious prize in music plays again, and Emilia comes from upstage Vienna, the Nestroy-Prize. to downstage center, then slowly out again. The Three Sisters, on the other hand, is a proPrince crosses to her, lifts his hand as if to touch her, duction that suggests some of the limits of then collapses convulsively onto the stage floor and Thalheimers approach. Thalheimer keeps more of crawls back downstage to where Marinelli is standChekhovs text, although Rode and Anfisa are cut, ing. This kind of wordless outburst occurs several times during the production. At one point, the Count (Henning Vogt) stands behind Emilia and runs his hands achingly down the length of her body, never touching her; this dumb-show interrupts a dialogue passage between the two, shifting her quickly and starkly to the role of object. The Prince will repeat this action in a scene after hes had the Count murdered. Even the Countess gets a moment of physicalized desire. As she begs Marinelli to intercede on her behalf with the Prince in the middle of the play, she starts kissing him, then bends him backwards, still kissing him, until he falls to the floor. He leaps back up, tries to kiss her again, but now she stands cold and aloof. Marinelli half-runs away and towards her, and collapses at her feet. Desire for Thalheimers characters runs below a language insufficient to express or contain it. Instead, it erupts into bodily excess, into a kind of physical version of the expressionist Ausbruck. Certainly, the language of Emilia Galotti is largely a language either of scheming or moralizing. Thalheimers actors Michael Thalheimers production of Three Sisters at Deutsches Theater. separate this language off from their Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater bodies. They speak the dialogue very 21

and the production runs two hours fifteen minutes without intermission. It opens brilliantly. Altmann has arranged a set of high walls in a series of right angles on the Deutsches Theaters revolve. From a distance, these walls look like theyre made in three vertical levels of concrete strips. The revolve turns slowly off and on throughout Act 1, revealing characters standing in the narrow passageway where two walls meet, others standing along one long wall, sometimes talking across the wall to characters on the other side. The actors move around as well throughout the act, so that different spatial relationships between characters are continuously being presented. Theres more movement in the lighting of this production (and a particular designer is credited, Thomas Langguth). Sometimes combinations of front, side, and downlight are brought in and out on a group or individual, sometimes figures move into light as the set revolves. The result is a wonderfully evocative presentation of humans isolated from each other by their own confusions and desires. And this sense of longing and isolation is underlined by Wredes music, variations on a simple progression of piano chords. For the second act, the walls move back to form a box set, with two walls running perpendicular to the proscenium upstage to end just downstage of a third, providing for entrances upstage or downstage of each wall. In more conventional staging, characters play in pairs or small groups along the walls or under the proscenium. As in the first act, there are few physical outbursts of the kind we saw in Emilia. Instead, the characters seem to function rather quietly out of their own emptiness. This is also, indeed particularly true for the three sisters, who seem to have so little energy or illusions from the very beginning that the relationships that in the play provide some sense of momentum seem equal-

ly hollow. The production begins to grind down in Act 2, but it really comes to a halt in Act 3. The set remains the same for this act, as if the space has become lifeless in Natashas hands. But the characters seem lifeless, too, and the actors try to give them energy by incessantly shouting their lines. The physical and vocal control which the Emilia ensemble demonstrated seems to escape this ensemblewhich includes some of the same actors. At the end of this act, as the side walls track upstage and out, a grainy 8mm-type film is projected on the upstage wall. The film depicts the three sisters in various phases of childhood. It should be evocative, it should help us see the gulf that has opened up between those children and the adults theyve become. But it comes too late. At this point, we dont really care about the sisters enough to feel a loss. Thalheimer seems to have lost touch with the text, and he attempts to play the last act without it. The projection wall upstage suddenly falls forward to become a large platform on which the cast plays the action of the last act without any lines. The effect is a bit as if we were watching a continuation of the silent movie, but it doesnt win us any insights. I suspect that one reason for Thalheimers trouble with Three Sisters is the plays lack of any real conflict. Liebelei, Emiliathese are plays with a very limited number of very strong conflicts, Thalheimer can manipulate to suggest the impossibility of love in the plays worldsthat is, in the bourgeois world. Chekhov, on the other hand, has a larger number of very weak conflictsweak because the characters can no longer sustain their own desires. Vershinin and Masha have traveled a long way from the Prince and the Countess Orsina.

22

A New Vision of Theatre: The Timely Introduction of Video and Film in the Work of Frank Castorf, Ren Pollesch, and Olaf Nicolai
Thomas Irmer Theatron (Greek): A place for seeing. At the end of the 90s the live video camera became an almost indispensable theatrical means on the German stage, in the most striking manner. Even minor state theatre productions of the most conventional canonical plays utilized it, since the technical costs were within the means of even limited budgets and, moreover, the video had now become a part of everyday life. And yet the live camera appeared as something new and fashionable, especially since a different idea of the stage setting had come to prevail. No longer was the setting seen as an illustration at the service of the narrated and enacted story, but rather an evocative space for a performance, where a variety of different images might be presented, even though the mimetic function of a film image appeared to be concerned precisely with a specific depiction. Camera and screens can now technically occupy a space and permeate it, and this sort of relationship between room and image is perhaps what is truly new in this type of theatre. Nevertheless, the integration of moving pictures into stage performances is historically not so new, but indeed as old as the film itself. As early as the 1920s, the possibilities of making filmic images a part of the theatre were proposed and tried out. And a few theatre artists like Erwin Piscator, who was extremely conscious of the mutual influence and enrichment of theatre and film, brought these possibilities into practice. Thus, for example, at the same time Darius Milhaud and Paul Claudel created their Christophe Colombe with the expectation that filmic images would be utilized in its stage realization. Of course, these examples intended the use of a second level of images, which could not appear on the stage at all, or only with great difficulty, in the form of exotic backgrounds, or mass scenes, or documentary material, that were almost like footnotes to the stage picture. In any case, and it could not conceivably have been otherwise, film was ready to be integrated into the expressive means of the stage. A new magic for stage images was yet to come . Sixty years later the live camera allowed film to move into the frame of theatrical presen23 tation and offer itself as an image. The basis of this new phenomenon was video, but other developments must also be taken into account, such as the surveillance camera, the image telephone and the whole range of apparatus involved in the contemporary world of image production. Cameras of this new kind are so easily employed that they are scarcely noticed, and in the hand of a gifted camera operator they can penetrate into every corner. On stage they have become a third eye, which can enlarge, complete, correct, destroy, or confirm our given view of the totality of the stage setting. This was the point of interest which almost all the discussions of the most recent works of Castorf and Pollesch have been exploring. They all relate to the question of how these images on screens and monitors are integrated into the stage space and by what means this kind of vision can be held together. After pointing out relevant aspects in the work of these two artists, I will conclude with a discussion of the use of visual space by Olaf Nicolai, who has brought a unique approach to the staging of music drama, creating a setting exclusively out of a combination of film images on large screens (but not live video). My goal is not the investigation of this technology as a theatrical instrument, but rather its effect on the viewer, and how this may change the visual notion of theatre. In 1987 Frank Castorf utilized a live camera for the first time. In his production of Ibsens An Enemy of the People in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the image of a figure confined in a tiny basement room of the theatre was shown on the stage, where a single monitor on the otherwise empty stage indicated the despair of confinement in the clearest and most grotesque manner. The face of the actor Gerd Preusche appeared in close-up, at times so near to the camera that it did not appear as a close-up or portrait in the classic sense, but as the fragment of a face before an unflinching camera. Nevertheless, this close-up, on the then standard 13 inch television screen, seemed little more than postage stamp size in the space of the theatrical stage. It was a phenomenal effect, since the situation of the character and its significance for the play as a whole could not have been portrayed in a more striking manner.

This early example is all the more important because Castorf has returned to exploring the relationship between theatrical space and camera close-ups in his most recent work. Now far more technically developed and dramatically extensive, this still raises the question of how the integration of the live camera and its images make the primary setting work. It is quite interesting to note what has been added to the possibilities and effects since this early experiment. Although Castorf now and again has utilized projections and cameras in his productions of the 1990s, he first truly realized the potential of the camera on stage at the moment when he filmed his theatre production of Dostoievskys Dmonen (2000) in the style of the DOGMA-cinematographers (using primarily hand camera, real locations instead of studio settings, no hyper-realistic illusions, and so on). Since then cameras and video screens have become an established part of his theatre work. Dostoievskys Erniedrigte und Beleidigte (2001), Bulgakovs Der Meister und Margarita (2002) and Dostoievskys Der Idiot (2002) have intensively developed the possibilities

of live filming. A full discussion of these extremely complex adaptations of such comprehensive novels cannot be undertaken here, but some basic observations can be made with respect to technology on stage. First of all it must be noted that most of the camera shots are of interior rooms that cannot be seen or cannot be seen well by the spectator. Thus on the one hand, paradoxically, filmic imitation is emphasized at the expense of the totality of the stage picture, and on the other hand the usual visual coherence of the theatres visual field falls to pieces so that one sees whatever is best to see. Third, and last, the image of the actor appears in two forms, somewhat in the same way that an aficionado of histrionics, equipped with an opera glass, seeks to see more closely than the physical distance in theatre allows, to be able to read the tiniest movements of the face and thus subject their truthfulness to a more exact visual examination. The projection of images onto a large screen, which dominates the stage like a giant billboard bordering the setting with these images, makes this possible. Castorfs set designer Bert Neumann, already legendary for his

Frank Castorfs production of Der Meister und Margarita. Photo: courtesy Volksbhne

24

Bungalows that include characters while excluding spectators, has worked out a mode for this relationship between hidden spaces and such oversized towering images. He varies the flat building that comes with a complete interior from production to production, leading up to the huge spatial deployment of the Idiot, in which the entire auditorium of the Volksbhne was transformed into the performance space of the New City project. The entire interior was used for the stage setting and spectators were seated in a three-story container on the revolving stage, where they could follow the action by means of various large screens throughout the space and, on a minor level, by monitors attached next to the seats. Beyond any doubt, this development of new visual aesthetics in Castorfs work was only possible because of his collaboration with another specialist, the video artist and camera operator Jan Speckenbach. Reflecting on the contribution of his work, Speckenbach emphasized the intimacy of video technology and its similarity with performing on stage, comparing live filming and editing to theatre itself, stressing how this remains different from film with all its post-production polishing. Both live video and theatre have an immediateness of action in common, and in this way they differ most significantly from film. Decisive is the ultimate effect that the video-director achieves through the close-ups that are so much favored by Castorf. One of the most hotly debated questions in classic film theory, ever since 1895 when it all started, is whether the moving image is a kind of window into reality or rather a mere frame that excludes everything from the slice that is being shown. Theatre can pose this question in quite a new manner, because slice and frame are both challenged in the work of Castorf and Neumann. Nobody could tell when a perfectly defined image will prove to be a fragment of some totality (which is in theatre, of course, more or less defined but not determined). As Speckenbach has phrased it: The principle of concealing and revealing is reflected on the Neumann stage which works with fragments of reality that are in themselves only pieces that are hidden by other pieces. The close-up of a face on the stage thus fulfills a function that it cannot (or dare not) fulfill in television or in the film. The close-up on the screen is inserted into the overarching interrelationships of the stage. This symbolic unity is both served and undermined. The simultaneity of the stage events is documented as reality through the 25

fragmentary quality of the film, but it is more precisely the reality of an illusion and its production. The paradoxical nature of the gesture of bringing the means of live transmission into a space that is involved in nothing other than transmitting a selection of this space makes filmic solutions possible that are not possible either in traditional film or video. So far the technology of remote transmission has remained an alien body in the theatre precisely because it preserved alien forms that were thought to be embedded in the history of film and television. There are no conventions that apply to closeups in theatre, since their insertion was seemingly first fully developed by Castorf with no rules for this. Furthermore, one must also take into account the growing complexity of the camera work of Speckenbach, who began employing second camera for Der Idiot. This allows a movement of the camera toward and around the characters with live editing, a greater degree of different images of the staged, so that a conversation between characters can be carried on simply through a transmission out of a room unseen by the audience, while ultimately not excluding the possibility that the camera and its operator can become an important element of the direction, new every night. The spectators of this advanced sort of theatrical production are offered a multiplicity of opportunities to see, to watch, to review. This challenges and disturbs ones onedimensional perspective, offering a choice between the tiny close-ups on the monitor, the expanded images of details on the screen and the actors in the total picture, which of course can here no longer be considered as the natural object of the spectator. Watching now becomes a new art. Despite this progressive approach of video technology and theatre, one cannot exactly speak of it as a symbiosis. At least in the case of Castorf, the conflict is too clearly marked for that. His technique is more a matter of a collage of various technical means of seeing in a single space-theatre, both as it has always been and also as it never was. Ren Pollesch is also working in that third area between video and theatre in his own way. His production of Soylent Green ist Menschenfleisch, sagt es allen weiter, staged at the studio venue of the Volksbhne in 2003, asked the spectator to follow the developing action directly on the stage and also by means of live video images on screens and monitors. It is more than telling that Pollesch advised the actors to perform in scenes for the camera according to the conventions of that format, under-

Ren Polleschs production of Soylent Green ist Menschenfleisch, sagt es allen weiter at the Prater. Photo: courtesy Prater

lining this by giving them such directions as the actor checks his appearance before the camera, the group of actors ostentatiously draws itself together for a shot, performed as if before a camera, and so on. The platforms of the various performance spaces in Bert Neumanns so-called Living Room Stage were arranged in the shape of an U, with small confined spaces, among them a kitchen, open to the audience. For Pollesch the fourth wall was closed with canvases hanging down in front of some of them, like a smaller version of Castorfs hide-and-reveal bungalows. On the other hand, in this staging Polleschs production concept and utilization of film is extensively self-conscious, with the impression of ironic self-reflexivity between his discursive, and at the same time hysterical character-as-statement offered as theatre and its simultaneous media-savvy representation offered as live video. Pollesch relies upon the total ubiquity of these procedures and integrates their images on the monitors and screens directly into Neumanns setting, which in turn is packed with signs of all kinds suggesting our contemporary image abyss (such as Hollywood movie posters, Michael Jacksons numerous face surgeries, or the untouched Twin Towers). Live video, which in other productions is still the hallmark of theatre at the cutting edge of art technology, has here been stripped off its own particular aura, becoming in Polleschs work amusing26

ly ironic. His message has nothing to do with a collage of methods of seeing or of any other sort of experiment the realm of visual perception that one might characterize as a heightened cultural technique, as video already has become in some theatre. Polleschs theatre is rather concerned with representing the practice of creating images for making moneyand using the stage for the lo-fi attitude against this. And, as always in Polleschs work, this leads as a consequence to the question of how technology conditions us, since our perceptions have for so long been in service to it as well as to the currents of the circulation of big money, as for example in film business. The screen is never a savour, nor a saviour. Nor, when monitors and screens are inserted into the theatre, can the simple physiological fact remain unimportant that the eye is involuntarily drawn toward the brightest light source in a room. So, behind the cultural conditioning of vision and viewing, itself still very little studied scientifically, stands the biological foundation of how our vision is linked to our perception of reality. This holds true also for our theatre tradition, where the contrast between light and dark constitutes meaning. Normally, in European theatre, spectators in a darkened auditorium observe a distinctly lighted stage upon which the most important character or element is the most brightly illuminated. This convention, and here we are talking about something new, can

be disrupted by the introduction of video technolowhile others, on the contrary, operated in juxtaposigy, since peoples attention today is irresistibly tion, offering no single one-dimensional perspective directed toward monitors and screens, just as their but rather the visual impression of a faceted eye, look into a dark bar will always move quickly to the like that of a fly. video screen where sports news spill out, independAlthough in this case the compositional ent of the dramaturgy of the individual moment or strategy for using film in staging a musical work in the attractiveness of the given situation for any perthe theatre is clear and well understood as a concept, son. Olaf Nicolais disturbing scene-rejecting, visionThe reduction of the entire apparatus of creating work still can be compared to the beforetheatre to a screen for film marks a radical progress discussed utilizations of live cameras in reference to from what has been talked of so far. Olaf Nicolai vision in theatrical spaces. They all represent a created a spatial film composition at the Theater much greater theatricality of technological vision in Basel for the musical work in vain by Georg theatrical spaces, almost at the level of the cinema. Friedrich Haas. In the 2000 score the composer It is like a performance of moving images that is noted changing light intensities up to complete bound to no narrative closure, against whose realisdarkness, used like an instrument, as an optical arrangement in this otherwise purely acoustical work. In May of 2003 this was presented as theatrical performance by the Phoenix Ensemble, a group of about 25 musicians with a love for experimental, genre-crossing work, based in Switzerland. Nicolai started out with the premise of a performance without plot or characters or story (This is not film music!) even though the work had a strongly scenic quality. Working with the film director Volker Sattel (whose film Unternehmen Paradies was also presented as a part of the New City project at the Volksbhne), he edited in 16 mm film format distorted sequences of major urban architectural shots in combination with filmed still photographs of individuals. Projected on six screens, the arrangement gave the impression of a spatial object. Two screens were put together at right angles to one another, and the three picture-corners had been arranged that way so that the audience, within a U-shaped auditorium space, had the opportunity of looking at the screens as one image composed of different pictures, but what they could see also depended on the individual seat. In addition, certain passages appeared as a single large Ren Polleschs production of Soylent Green ist Menschenfleisch, sagt es image occupying several screens, allen weiter at the Prater. Photo: courtesy Prater 27

tic unreality the theatre keeps continuing to strive, even after three-quarters of a century, and with new images. Whether through video technology or the strategies of the film, this is continuing, and a new theatre of images is developing through this mode of depicting and prevailing theatrical space. Thus, theatre is coming closer to creating the impression of what it meant at its origin: theatron. Afterward (Close-up) Theatre has always been a vampire on the dominant mode of image production of its respective contemporary culture: in antiquity (in so far as we can judge), in the medieval mystery plays (this is certain), in the Renaissance (certainly), in the baroque period (unquestionably), in the early bour-

geois theatre (as self-expression), after that (in realistic sublimations of self-destruction) and therefore always operates in iconoclastic unity with the production of images that dominates and undermines what people like to do, as a species that makes progress by destruction. And therefore it must always involve change and changing. In this relationship, the theatre gives nothing back, not directly. Often however, it seems itself rather restricted, submerged, not really talking to its public. And this reveals something that applies to theatre now: The theatrical vision must concentrate upon seeing. Or, on that very special aspect of theatre, as a place for seeing. To be Real, therefore to be: video. (translated by Marvin Carlson)

28

Sarah Kanes Crave at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin

Steve Earnest Works by the late British playwright Sarah Kane continue to attract attention throughout Europe, receiving critically acclaimed productions in many larger state theatres of France, Germany and Denmark, among others. The Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin featured the fourth of Kanes theatre works, Crave (Gier), during the spring/summer season of 2003, in a production that successfully realized the unique visual and textual challenges of the work. Staged in the Schaubhnes smaller studio space, Crave featured an ensemble of four voices, signified in the text by letters of the alphabet. Falk Rockstroh appeared as A with Thomas Dannemann as B, Cristin Knig as C, and Michaela Steiger as M. The production was directed by Thomas Ostermeier, designed by Rufus Didwiszus, with lighting design provided by Jrg Felden and dramaturgy by Marius von Mayenburg. Crave is part of a series of Kanes works maintained in the repertory of Berlins Schaubhne during 2003 that included 4:48 Psychosis, directed by Falk Richter and Phaedras Love, also directed by Ostermeier. More like a narrative poem than a play, Crave echoes T.S. Eliots The Wasteland on many levels, quoting lines from the work directly, alluding to lines from other languages (recapturing the style of The Wasteland ) and including references to the city of Eliots work. Crave presents a minimalist, emotional landscape that, by definition, does not play out as a linear plot, instead presenting a uniquely urban aesthetic that balances naturalism with the formalistic structure of Kanes poetic language. Generally considered her most mature play, Crave explores the emotional disintegration of the fragmented characters while articulating their authentic experiences. The story includes several plot lines. M is an older woman and craves a child from the younger man, B. Kane has referred to the two characters as Mother (M) and Boy (B). There is also an abusive relationship between A (Author, Abuser) and C, or child as Kane referred to her. The situations are not presented with any sense of chronology, but as a series of random thoughts, events and memories. Ostermeiers staging of Crave was formal, placing each performer on one of four long horizontal platforms that included a swiveling chair upstage and a live microphone downstage. Facing the audi29 ence in readers theatre style, the actors movements were minimal, consisting of an occasional quarter swivel of the chair, a cross downstage to speak into the microphone, or a hesitant stop midway along the platform to ponder or react. Lighting design choices maintained the parallel structure and formal qualities. Each performer was lit by no color lighting frontally by a single instrument, illuminated from above by a florescent light hanging above them (parallel to the horizontal platform), and occasionally blasted from behind by a powerful lighting instrument. Additionally, a video projector was focused on each performer from the front so that video and images could be projected onto their bodies. This happened infrequently, but with strong effect; the most memorable instance was the projection of each character onto themselves, naked, violently smearing red and black markers over their unclothed bodies. As character C, Cristin Knig remained downstage for much of the performance, seated in front of her microphone. Knigs was the most visibly unstable character, and though she remained stoic and motionless at times, her shifts into more frenzied tones were violent and abrupt. For the most part, Crave was performed in a serious manner, as one would expect to encounter in tragedy. Acting choices were in the realistic tradition (as opposed to contemporary post-dramatic reportage), and each performer had a strong internal connection to their story. The performers overlapped dialogue, mumbled underneath while others spoke, and shifted from loud and passionate tones to quiet, introspective moments. Perhaps the strongest technical element in the production was sound, which ranged from driving rock and roll to ambient sounds such as dripping water, breathing, wartime fighting, machine guns and other less distinguishable sounds. Especially effective was the varied uses of the downstage microphones, which allowed for separation of voices and background sound effects. The most chilling moments of the work were the blood curdling screams of C, who was unable to maintain her composure as she recounted her abuse by the older man, A. Crave is unique in Kanes canon as the only work realized outside of the UK. Kane completed the work while in residence with The New

Dramatists in New York City, later premiering the play at the Edinburgh in 1998 in a production that was directed by Vicky Featherstone and featured members of the Paines Plough Theatre Company. The cultural wasteland of America (as Kane defined it) provided the unique urban landscape for Crave, as did her intense feelings of isolation and

separation during that time. Ostermeiers staging at the Schaubhne provides the essential combination of incomplete completeness, necessary for poetic works such as Crave : incredibly powerful moments of theatrical experience - realized primarily through the spoken text - that you can almost grasp before they disappear into nothingness.

Cristin Knig in Thomas Ostermeiers production of Sarah Kanes Crave at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin. Photo: courtesy Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz

30

Der Auftrag
Lydia Stryk The new production of Heiner Mllers play, Der Auftrag (1979), directed by his friend and former actor-collaborator, Ulrich Mhe, in his directorial debut, is a 75th birthday present from the actor to the playwright whose sudden death eight years ago was a national cultural tragedy. No premiere has been so eagerly awaited, and the run was sold-out long before the opening on Mllers birthday, January 9th. Der Auftrag , playing at the defunct West Berlin theatre, the Freie Volksbhne, now occasionally resurrected at the Haus der Berliner Festspiel, is an unusual production in that it is a commercial venture with corporate sponsors. The director, Mhe, chose the commercial American-style route, he says, to maintain artistic freedom, rejecting the auspices of the subsidized theatre system where Mllers work has been a staple for years. This fact, which might seem unimportant to an American reader, does take on a certain resonance in the critical response as will become clear later. And fitting to a commercial production the cast is star-studdedincluding among its illustrious members a young movie actress who has never appeared on stage, a soon to be 80-year-old legend of the German stage, as well as theatre stars from both the stages of the formerly-known-as-East and West Berlintne Berliner Ensemble and .the Schaubhne. But Heiner Mllers 75th birthday was the impetus not only for this gala event, but also for an ambitious conference sponsored by the Heiner Mller Society at the Academy of Art with lectures and panel discussions of a sociological nature on terrorism and a full day devoted to artists from the Arab world describing the Arab reception to Mllers work. The celebration began with acting students interpretations of Mllers very short play, Herzstck, which after the tenth interpretation, one had learned by heart and was well on the way to coming up with an interpretation of ones own. The response to both the birthday production and the conference (which clearly aimed at finding relevance for Mllers work in a post 9-11 world) were hardly celebratory. Might the MllerMode in the theatre of the 90s have possibly lost its attraction for the time being, asked one critic cautiously. While a less cautious and influential 31 radio critic went so far as to open his dismissive review of Der Auftrag by saying he was not going to talk about the production or the play, but about whether Mllers work has a place in the world we are living in now, at all. To anyone who witnessed the reverential and cathartic response to Mllers death just eight years ago, this sounded something like sacriledge, a betrayal of the highest order! What happens to a contemporary artist who dies just before a world-transforming event? Does he or she have anything to say to us? If not, at what point do his/her concerns and world-view become relevant again? Can they, indeed, ever speak to us again? What is relevant and to whom, anyway? Der Auftrag is the story of a revolution. In a world rife with injustice, blood-shed and rage, is not such a story ready-made to answer our hunger for relevance? It would seem so, and yet, to the majority of critics and audience members (as well as can be gauged in the press and by hear-say), it is Mllers fate to be absolutely bound up with the questions of power and violence and exploitation of the late 20th century. And nothing in the postwar/cold war/post-cold war world of the last century has prepared us for where we are now. The pre9-11 worldMllers landscapeonly makes us impatient. Or so it would seem. The stage is a starkly raked Mars-scape; a rose-colored, pock-marked, shard strewn ruin, blasted and seemingly lifeless. The music, as such, is clanging, apocalyptic, recalling and suggesting nothing. Its reassertion later in the play for a brief interlude is hip-hop and unbearably loud. Some kind of golden statue hangs by its feet from a portal of the pillar-like structures surrounding the stage, a gaudy remnant. The pace of this long one-act play, surprising, in fact, in its brevity, is slow and deliberatea series of arguments, some repeated, presented in various forms: testament, debate, speech, letter, monologue. Images of the knife (Mllers seemingly favorite metaphor), the mask, blood, the dead, theatre, itself, play themselves out in this story of a historical moment when an idealistic revolution was set in motion and then as quickly abandoned. Moments of miscalculation, cultural insensitivities common in German theatre produc-

tions, (the mis-use of a bare-breasted actress of African heritage whose silent role it is to stand halfnaked on stage until she is shot; a scene of ape-imitation by the actor playing the former slave, Sasportas), mar what was otherwise, for this viewer, an entertaining and provocative work. As the French Revolution gains ascendancy in Paris in 1799, three men are sent on a mission (the auftrag of the plays title, which has no exact translation in Englishmission, task, assignment, commission not one of these has quite the right feel) by Antoine, a member of the Revolutionary administration, to foment a slave rebellion among the enslaved population of Jamaica against their British slave-masters. But no sooner does Napoleon take over power in France, than the mission is withdrawn and a peace pact signed with the slave-holding British. The three representative men sent on this mission are the farmer, Galloudec, a round and taciturn man with a comic and pathetic aura and a seemingly blood-splattered face, played by the long-time star of the Berliner Ensemble, Ekkehard Schall; Sasportas, the former African slave, played

by the young movie star, Florian Lukas, with great physical agility and power (mud-spattered, but thankfully not in black-face); and the nobleman and groups spokesman, Debuisson, played by Herbert Knaup, whose sickly thin frame is further accentuated by his costume of remnants of nobility and white-face make-up. It is these three, whom Debuisson literally identifies with the point of his finger, as liberty, equality and fraternitythe three ideals of the French Revolutionwhose mission it is to transform the slave society of Jamaica. The Theatre of the Revolution is open! proclaims Debuisson, and Mllers story is a parable of revolution with characters representing positions and ideals. Ultimately, the characters remain positions taken and abandoned, while at the same time, the occasional beauty of the language and the spare presentation of three lost figures stripped of their always suspect purpose, left to take action or not, brings Becketts Godot to mind. Mller is by no means setting out to create conventional suspense or the drama of a narration here. We learn from the plays opening momenta

Florian Lukas as Sasportas, Herbert Knaup as Debuisson, and Ekkehard Schall as Galloudaec in Ulrich Mhes production of Heiner Mllers Der Auftrag. Photo: courtesy Freie Volksbhne/Haus der Berliner Festspiel

32

testament first read as voice over and then repeated twice more by a messengerthat the mission has failed, its players dead or dispersed. Sasportas has been hanged, we hear, the testaments author, Galloudec, lies dying, writing these last words from his feverish death-bed. And then we watch as the Revolutionary commissioner, Antoine, now a bourgeois school-teacher, denies his involvement in the revolution, terrified lest the bearer of the testament find him out. And then the messenger takes off her black Gestapo-like coat and is revealed to be the angel of despaira figure based in likeness on Paul Klees angel of history, who, in Walter Benjamins famous description, looks back and is shocked. The Angel, by the way, is played by Christiane Paul, one of Germanys leading film actresses in her first stage roleand it shows. Her role, however, like those of the three other women in the cast, is secondary, rather gratutitous. The idea of woman, for Mller, is rather too starkly and unfortunately laid out here as metaphor for the whoreish betrayal of the revolutionfemale body parts as sources of corruption and seduction. Here too, as Halina Bendkowski has noted in her general critique of Mllers work in the TAZ , tough men share the stage among themselves. While the successful march of women off-stage is punished with their being marched off of the stage. Take for example, the character known only as First Love, played by the legendary actress, Inge Keller, in a star-turn cameo appearance as Debuissons first and abandoned lover. Looking for all the world like Dickens Mrs. Haversham in her wedding-cake of a dress and Marie Antoinette wig, she makes her way across the stage at a snails pace, wielding two ski poles, which may or may not actually be holding her up, and lambasts Debuisson in a long address in which the natural law of slaves and slave-holders is upheld and the rights of slaves to maintain their happy state as animals is insisted upon. As for the revolutionary mission itself, we watch as Galloudec and Sasportas place large masks on their heads that look, depending on the light, like the head of pigs or E.T. and play at being Danton and Robespierretheir revolutionary jargon punctuated by jarring canned applause and shouts of approval brutally orchestrated and cut off by Debuisson. This is a revolution doomed by cynicism and failed purpose from the start. As Debuisson states in a quintessential Mller paradox, 33

Revolution is the mask of death. Death is the mask of revolution. It is at this point, half-way into the play, between revolution and its abandonment, that the figure of Antoinethe commissionersteps forward in a new role, now dressed in the simple suit of a bureaucrat, bronzed into stone (a bronzed modern man) and sitting, delivers, very simply, a monologue of nightmare and occasional humor that leaves the audience spell-bound. It doesnt hurt that the actor is the great star of the former Schaubhne, Udo Samuel. He is remarkable. This legendary so-called elevator monologue depicts an unremarkable bureaucrats nightmarish elevator journey up to his bosss office where he is to pick up his assignment (again, that term, auftrag). This assignment is apparently very important although the speaker does not know what it is. On the way up, he tells us, he is almost defeated by his failure to have knotted his tie correctly, by his confusion as to the time, to the floor he is on or heading to, and ultimately, he arrives at his bosss office only to find him dead, shot through the right templea suicide?and so the modern bureaucrat is faced with an insurmountable existential dilemma: his task/commission/assignment is there in his dead bosss brain never to be retrieved. What can my assignment be? he asks the world at large, the cosmos. It is buried with my boss. What is each persons task? In this lost world? What kind of mission is it we were sent to perform? In this half-way moment in the historical drama, Mller brings us up sharply to the present where the man in the suit might be working in any government office, any kind of agency or corporation, the United Nations, for that matter. What is the assignment of any citizen of the world? The lost assignment, a metaphor with deep resonance for everyone watching. Suddenly, the elevator door opens and the man finds himself on a village streetin Peru! It is an evocative moment and funny, in a terrible way. Here, freedom is visualized as existing only as far as the other side of the planet. Yet the man misses his elevator, he tells us, his prison, as he calls it, and is homesick for it. On the streets of Peru he meets his double (his doppelgnger), and tells us, in breathtaking language, that his doubles face was made of snow and that one of us will survive. And then we are back to the revolution, just as the order comes down to abandon it at once and to return home. And each player is left to decidefor himselfon his action. And certainly,

this moment is the moment the play was constructed to dramatize. The ruling party is no longer in office, Debuisson reads from the letter, to his two companions. The world is what it was. A home for nobleman and slaves. Our performance is over, Debuisson tells them. The responses of the three characters is not surprising, rather, seemingly written in the stars. The ex-slave, Sasportas, will refuse to give up the rebellion and will continue to fight for a world free of slaves and slave-holders. The farmer, Galloudec, joins him for the simple reason that he cannot change his thinking that quickly. He is slow to change, to turn, to think, he says. I am going with you, he tells Sasportas, and they go off to meet the deaths that have been foretold in the plays opening. But not before Debuisson, now the betrayer of his mission, overcome with cynicism, begins a recital of the revolutions failures, physically manifested in his throwing Sasportas, who has clung to him in hope, to the ground. Not only does revolution make one tired, he says. But it has no home in Napoleons Europe, soon to be a slaughterhouse. Freedom is betrayal, in vain. Theirs was a revolution for a future that is already history. What do you want from me? Debuissson asks the others. They remain silent. And Debuisson transformed again into the nobleman and slaveowner he once waslaughs in the faces of his inferiors as they move off, while at the same time, confessing in a pivotal moment to fearing the shame of being happy in this world. So is Der Auftrag relevant or not? As Sasportas leaves, he turns back and makes a prophecy. When the living can no longer fight, the dead will revolt. And it is this line that perhaps resonates most deeply in todays world where revolution no longer seems realistic or even

utopian in a post 9-11 world and the suffering left by the failed revolutions is coming back to haunt us all. What else is terror? As Peter Lauterbach, in his Tagesspiegel assessment of Der Auftrag writes: Sasportas warning from the grave could be spoken today by a suicide bomber in his or her last video appearance. So in the end, despite the almost across the board insistence of Mllers lack of relevance at this time, it may actually be our societys unwillingness to see the relevance within the text. Or is the texts message simply too hard to read for all the hype? As Lauterback suggests, Mllers utopian revolutionary stance (however cynical) in which he states that terror is the first appearance of the new has a kind of sickly taste after 9-11. And as Ekkehardt Krippendorf argues in his Freitag piece on the production, Mllers text surely asks, arent we all, who survive, like Debuisson, betrayers? And Krippendorf goes further, bringing us back full circle to the events surrounding the production, itself, to ask again about its relevance, but this time, to suggest that the hoopla and hype of this star-studded commercial venture in honor of Mllers 75th birthday, is a betrayal of the play, itself. Beginning with the shiny content-free program (a la Broadway), the corporate sponsorship, the chic audience at the event which is the place to be seen this season, all these, Krippendorf suggests, spell the death-blow to Mllers passionate purpose and the plays relevance while paradoxically making its relevance all too uncomfortably clear. Krippendorf: Unintentionallybut not accidentallythe nature of our lifeless consumer-driven society and its class divisions as exemplified in the traitor to the revolution, Debuisson, are manifest in this event production of Der Auftrag.

34

Two by Bchner in Berlin

John Rouse A trip to the 2003 Theatertreffen also allowed me to see the premieres of two very different Georg Bchner productions by local Berlin theatres: Robert Wilsons Leonce and Lena, which premiered at the Berliner Ensemble on 1 May; and Thomas Ostermeiers Woyzeck, which premiered at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz on 20 May. This coincidence provides a somewhat arbitrary excuse for a discussion that nonetheless suggests something of the range of theatrical approaches on Berlins stages today. Robert Wilson enjoyed a warm welcome in Berlin early in his career, and hes returned to work there regularly in recent years. His aesthetic has lost some of its edge over the years, but since the same may be said for Claus Peymanns theatrical enterprise, the fit is an appropriate one. Wilson would also seem a potentially productive director for Bchners Lustspiel. Not only is this comedy radically different in tone from Bchners other plays, its also rather enigmatic in its own right. Its clear the play borrows its gross structure from Shakespeare, as the two title characters flee their arranged engagement and the formal world of the court on an italienische Reise, into the warm Italian countryside, where they rediscover each other. Its also clear the play is making fun of the ruling class of Bchners day, but its not clear how seriously we should take either Leonces melancholy or his fathers craziness. Wilson addresses the second problem by staging the text as a cross between fairy tale and farce. The court figures all wear whiteface (Leonce and Lena lose theirs as part of their Italian transformation) and exaggerated costumes, and they act in exaggerated manner. Some actors plunge into this style with joyous exuberance and skill, notably Gerd Kunath as the Privy Council President. Others are less successful, including Markus Meyer as Leonce. Nina Hoss plays Lena without much exaggeration, but with a nicely witty irony that comes into its own in the environment of Italy. Wilson creates the contrasting court and Italian worlds with all his visual brilliance. The court is a bluish, nighttime world organized through architectural arches, forced-perspective walls, and in one set, even a ceiling piece. The effect is very formal, and more than a little moonstruck, but the antics of Wilsons characters within these environments keeps them from growing too cold for comedy. Nonetheless, the transformation to Wilsons fauvist Italian landscape, with its vibrant reds and greens, is a stunning. Wilson brings off a particularly engaging scenographic joke in the first Italian scene. The scene begins with an obviously painted ground row depicting a hillside and trees, backed by a neutrally lit cyclorama. As the scene continues, an identical ground row glides in from stage left, then, after awhile, another from above, and another from stage right, until an amberish sky is fully

Robert Wilsons production of Bchners Leonce und Lena at Berliner Ensemble. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

35

Robert Wilsons production of Bchners Leonce und Lena at Berliner Ensemble. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

framed by fauvist hillsides. Wilson frequently collaborates with songwriters in his German work; for Leonce and Lena, he collaborated with the extremely popular Herbert Grnemeyer. Grnemeyer is know for his witty combinations of lyric and musical delivery, but his songs for Leonce dont work. Theyre overly clever, boring, and theres a lot of them. As a result, Wilsons visual wittiness isnt supported by the sound track. The other collaborator who balks a bit is Bchner. Leonce and Lena may have depth, but the depth is impossible to see from the surface. Wilsons work, notoriously, refuses to mine below the surface. The result in this case is an offering of theatrical desertbeautiful, charming, and without substance. For Bchner with substance, one need only sample Thomas Ostermeiers Woyzeck. Ostermeier and his team reimagine Bchners play in the postreunification slums of Berlin. The production takes place in the Schaubhnes huge main hall, an open space that features, among other technical goodies, a segmented, fully hydraulic floor. We spectators sit on risers that take up one half of the hall, and watch the production take place immediately in front of us. 36

What we see in the first instance is a seemingly fullscale drainage ditch, into one end of which juts a huge culvert. Below this storm-water pipe, spreading out a bit into the ditchs sandy Berlin soil, is a large puddle, almost like a small pond kept constantly supplied by drip from the pipe. The ditchs concrete walls slope steeply up eight or nine feet in a semi-circle, providing access down three sides. On the upstage left edge of the ditch is a (full-scale) snack stand. Offering everything from sausages to shish-kabob, these Wurstbude are a ubiquitous element of Berlin street culture. In the projects, theyre among the few places to eat out available at all. And were left in no doubt that were in the projects by the stages beautifully rendered backdrop, which depicts one of the enormous, depressing socialistera apartment blocks (Heiner Mller once called them fucking cells) that march across the empty wastelands of districts in the far east of Berlin such as Hellersdorf and Lichtenberg. This evocative combination of painted backdrop and realistically rendered location designed by the Schaubhnes principal designer, Jan Pabbelbaum, serves as a powerful reminder that the theatres style of socalled neo-naturalism results, scenographically at least, from a theatrical stylization rendered with

extreme artistic and technical skill. As the production opens in the cold light of dawn, we discover that the Wurstbude belongs to Andreas and the pond in the drainage ditch is one of Woyzecks work-placeshe catches frogs here for the Doctor. But its not long before were introduced to the real masters of this space. Berlins eastern slums are areas where the rate of juvenile crime and neo-fascism is disturbingly high, and the sandy drainage basin is a meeting and recreational area for one such gang. In the kind of group choreography Ostermeier can execute with considerable skill, few individuals begin to appear on the basin rim, including a skin-head with an attack dog; then, suddenly, the gang rushes down the walls and in through an underpass entrance stage right to occupy the scene, in all senses of the word. The productions strength is its dare to reimagine Bchners play in this contemporary sociological situation. Its weaknesses derive from the same undertaking. Ostermeier eliminates Bchners military society, with its clear social and power heirarchy. In its place, he substitutes a rather monolithic opposition: Woyzeck versus the gang that oppresses him, with Andreas functioning as a kind of hapless mediator. The Captain and Doctor have become the leader of this gang and his henchman. But this doctor isnt really a doctor; he

appears to undertake his experiments with Woyzeck as a kind of sadistic hobby. Similarly, the Captain demands that Woyzeck shave him (including the hairs on his rear end) more for the for sadistic pleasure than because he needs a daily shave and has the power to pay a barber. As a result, the production bogs down after this first introduction of the gang. We know the situation, theres not really any variation within it, so until Woyzecks relation with Marie explodes were left pretty much to watch variations on sadism thought up, in the first instance, by the director for his gang. It doesnt help matters that neither Ostermeier nor the actor Felix Rmer have found a way to update the period posing of Bchners Captain, particularly his pseudoRomantic melancholy. By the same token, Ostermeier eliminates Maries petty-bourgeois pietism; she becomes a rather tough gal from this milieu who goes for the gang member called the Drum Major without too many second thoughts. Nor does she have to worry too much about her son, who drops out of the production after his first appearance. The problem here is that with Maries pietism goes her pangs of conscience and with the need to take care of his son goes one of Woyzecks motivations. The result is a flattening out of both characters, particularly Marie. To me, these problems are symptomatic of

Robert Wilsons production of Bchners Leonce und Lena at Berliner Ensemble. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

37

a shortcoming that has affected more than one Ostermeier production. (See, for example, Marvin Carlsons critique of Ostermeiers Nora as part of the 2003 Theatertreffen. [See WES 15 :3] His dramaturgy is intriguing in its big ambitions, but all too often problematic in its indifference to detail

problems created by the broader approach. Nonetheless, puzzling through these problems at least encourages the spectator to think about the play. Wilsons productions are worked through to their smallest detail, but the play sometimes disappears into this accomplishment.

Robert Wilsons production of Bchners Leonce und Lena at Berliner Ensemble. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

38

Le Grand Macabre at the Komische Oper, Berlin

Steve Earnest Composer Gyrgy Ligeti said I cannot, will not compose a traditional opera; for me the operatic genre is irrelevant today it belongs to a historical period utterly different from the present historical situation. Yet by that I do not mean that I cannot compose a work for the facilities an opera house offers. The work Ligeti eventually composed was Le Grand Macabre, a musical theatre work that received its premiere in Stockholm, Sweden in 1977. Ligeti continued to refine the work during the next two decades with the final version, directed by Peter Sellars, playing at the Salzburg Festival in 1997 and later transferred to the Theatre du Chatelet in France for an extended run in 1998. The work has received a number a number of late 20th Century/early 21st Century opera and ballet adaptations, including Joachim Herzs critically acclaimed version with the Leipzig Oper, and productions with the Bern and Zurich Operas. Drawn from La Balade du Grande Macabre, written by Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode in 1934, Le Grand Macabre presents a comic book Armageddon tale, set in the fictitious town of Breughelland, somewhere in Northern Europe. The story, influenced by the fantastical deathly visions of the painters Pieter Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch, revolves around Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre, or Grim Reaper, who announces at the works outset that the end of the world is nigh. Nekrotzar then terrorizes the countryside of Breughelland, a fictitious city in Europe, attacks the court of Prince Go Go, witnesses a comet strike the earth to signal the beginning of the apocalypse, and finally dies traditionally, in the light of day on November 1st, after the failure of his mission to end the world. Michael Mescke helped the composer to work up a German-language libretto (eventually also translated into Swedish, the language of the

Barrie Koskys production of Ligetis Le Grande Macabre at Komische Oper in Berlin. Photo: Komische Oper

39

first performance) for Le Grand Macabre that embodies all the insanity and drunken revelry of All Hallows' Eve. Staged by Australian director Barrie Kosky, the Komische Oper production of Le Grand Macabre evoked disgust, fright, arousal, laughter and sheer disbelief from the audience. According to Kosky, his directorial function was to serve as the interpreter of both the story and the music, therefore his ideas for staging the work were inspired equally by music and text. In a post performance interview he stated that unlike certain other contemporary directors, I did not attempt to work against the style of the music or the situations included in the text, which is permeated with images of violence and death and is, at times, extremely disturbing. Though he did not mention any names, audience reaction led one to believe it was a direct reference to the works previous director Peter Sellars. Kosky noted that the work is perhaps best described as a surrealistic collage, unlike any previous work of music theatre. Given the scale of the story, the style of the opera is equally outlandish, having its roots in opera bouffe, vaudeville, surrealistic painting, Mel Brooks, sado masochistic play, and primarily, the absurdist theatre of Alfred Jarry. Often referred to by Ligeti as half opera, half play, Le Grand Macabre presents a number of challenges to performers. While the work requires well-trained singers (as opposed to actors who sing), there are a number of lengthy spoken passages and sections of dialogue that require speak singing, a tradition drawn from cabaret performance and known in Germany as Sprechgesang. By requiring performers to engage in rhythmic speech fragments (as Ligeti defines it), in addition to the tremendous vocal range of the score, Le Grand Macabre demands performers with extreme command of all technical capabilities. Outstanding musical performances were given by Martin Winkler as Nekrotzar, whose powerful bass voice created the necessary monstrosity required for the role of the Grand Macabre, Brain Galliford as the comedic tenor Piet von Fass and Michaela Lucas as the sexy, yet zany soprano Mescalina. However, it was the chorus of the Komische Oper, comprised of extraordinary singers and dancers, which provided the vocal power and physical tableau to realize Ligetis macabre vision. The scenic arrangement for Le Grand Macabre was essentially a bare stage with full view of the interior of the Komische Opers vast stage 40

space and superior stage machinery. This trend in German opera, to blend the classical tradition of grand opera with the Brechtian notion of nonillusionistic staging (exposing the theatres inner workings and capabilities) has given many recent works a high level of theatricality and Le Grand Macabre was no exception. The opening scene presented a simple hole in the stage, a gravesite littered with naked corpses through which Nekrotzar appeared with his bold prediction of the impending apocalypse. At the scenes culmination, the entire surface of the stage, colored bright green by a thin cover of fabric, was pulled through the grave which was then sealed from below. Scene two shifted to the residence of Court Astrologer Astradamors and his wife Mescalina, busy engaging in their ritual of sadomasochistic sex games, and featured a series of three houses that were shifted into various positions to imply the brief changes of locale. In the midst of frolicking with Mescalina, Astradamors retreats to his telescope and discovers a deadly meteor heading towards earth. Disappointed and grasping for ultimate sexual satisfaction, Mescalina summons the goddess Venus to send her a potent lover. The setting then shifted to the court of Prince Go Go, which resembled the interior of a contemporary mental hospital. It was during this scene that the extraordinary use of special scenic effects, made possible through the tremendous functionality of the Komische Oper itself, allowed this production to deliver Ligetis (via Ghelderodes) fantastic vision. During scene three, Nekrotzar made his abrupt entrance atop a portable throne, a moving pearl toilet seat, on which he would preside throughout the remainder of his reign. At one point during scene three, the toilet began to overflow with feces, allowing him the opportunity to perform the disgusting acts of his trade such as eating the feces, throwing it on others, and basically wallowing in the excrement of humankind. Though this act was visually disgusting (noted by audience members at the post show conference) it further linked the work to Jarry, according to director Kosky, and presented a side of decadence to the world of opera not yet seen in many previous works. Throughout the final scene, Nekrotzar watches as the town is purged of its least savory inhabitants, and the scene culminates in Nekrotzars death following a ritualistic drinking of blood by those who remain. The antithetical realization of Heaven following Nekrotzars death was the spectacular climactic visual moment of Le Grand Macabre . Following

Barrie Koskys production of Ligetis Le Grande Macabre at Komische Oper in Berlin. Photo: courtesy Komische Oper

his death, a gigantic scenic unit, undergirded by white billowy clouds, was lowered from the heights o the Komische Opers massive fly house. The scale of the massive unit, coupled with the fact that the audience was allowed to witness the process of its arrival was doubly astounding. The piece ended metaphorically, as a light snowfall fell on the uninhabited Heaven set. Ligetis score for the work is uniquely suited to Ghelderodes story, featuring a number of discordant leitmotifs throughout and an overall sense of atonal composition in the style of Alban Berg or Kurt Weill. Regularly acknowledged as a musical pioneer of the late twentieth century, Ligeti developed a style based on texture and sound density, and employs a technique known as micro polyphony, which is realized when a number of complex harmonies flow into one another and create a series of new intervals, in the style of improvisation. 41

Ligetis studies in composition were completed at the Franz Liszt School in Budapest, Hungary but he was unable to realize his unique musical vision until he immigrated to Germany (via Vienna) in 1956. It was there that his career as a composer flourished, and he generated several recordings that ultimately drew the attention of Stanley Kubrick who commissioned Ligeti to compose the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1974. Ligetis unique musical style was quickly noticed by filmmakers throughout the world and since that time his work has since been featured in several works, most prominently, Eyes Wide Shut in 2001, again with Kubrick. In order to achieve the complex overlaying and mixture of Ligetis score, the orchestra of the Komische Oper, conducted by Matthias Foremny, sat in three locationsthe orchestra pit and in the two stage left box positionswhich provided the necessary separation of instruments in order to achieve the desired

sound structure of the work. This technique is evident from the works beginnings with the Car Horn Prelude, a discordant overlaying of various horns as the works opening movement. The darkly comedic tone of the music, truly bizarre and literally macabre, drew audible responses from the audience on several occasions. The original Komische Opera was erected in 1742, near its present location on Unter den Linden. In 1892, the theatre was renamed the Metropol where light opera and ballet flourished until the theatres destruction in World War II. Rebuilt in 1955 as a state theatre of the GDR and

renovated in 2000, the Komische Oper boasts one of the most well equipped backstage areas in Berlin, as well as one of its most ornate theatre interiors. Under the guidance of Intendant Albert Kost, The Komische Oper continues to present a repertoire of consistently high quality works and, despite the more conservative climate of theatre producing in Berlin (due to a greater reliance on box office income), the risky choice of Ligetis Le Grand Macabre defines the companies mission to present exciting new works of musical theatre, opera and ballet in addition to contemporary standards and classics.

42

Two from Berlin: Taboris Jews and Kimmigs Stella

Erik Abbott As noted in January 2004 issue of Deutsche Bhne, the 275th anniversary of Gotthold Ephraim Lessings birth has prompted a spate of Lessing productions across Germany. Though born of unfortunate circumstances, it was nonetheless a happy accident that I was able to see one of them while in Berlin for a couple of days just after New Years. I went to Berliner Ensemble, having planned finally to see their much-heralded production of Arturo Ui, staged in 1995 by Heiner Mller and kept in the repertory continually since then [see WES 10:2]. The theatre was showing it again in honor of Mllers 75th birthdayalso in January; however, an actors illness forced the last-minute substitution of George Taboris production of Lessings 1749 play The Jews. Although initially disappointed not to see Arturo, I was delighted to get a chance to see this seldom-performed little gem directed by a renowned master. The production certainly did not disappoint. The house opened to a stage barren except for a rectangle of grass, framed by folding chairs, with a single folding chair, cane, and black hat dead center. Stage right, in a wingback chair, an elegant elderly man sat, quietly reading the newspaper. This, of course, was Tabori himself, although we were left to sort this out for ourselves. With no curtains in view, one could glance distant backstage movement. As curtain time arrived, the actors, costumed, but not in character, found their onstage seats and settled in to watch the proceedings with us. Tabori put down his newspaper and Axel Werner, who played the Baron, signaled for the plain muslin curtains to be lowered, creating a simple box-like playing area. The Barons assault by warden Michel Stich (Markus Haase) and steward Martin Krumm (Marko Schmidt), though only described in Lessing, is here pantomimed for the audience. This added violence further solidifies the nasty taste these two characters leave; we are not surprised to hear Krumms antiSemitic epithets when he desperately tries to lie his way out of being discovered by the Traveler (Markus Meyer). The production zips along in an increasing-

George Taboris production of Lessings The Jews at Berliner Ensemble. Photo: Monika Rittershaus

43

its not as if anyone would take anything of the sort that he says very seriously. Obviously, he has a good heart. His daughter (Hanna Jrgens), sweet and beautiful, is clearly smitten with the Traveler, and we must assume that in such a generally pleasant world, these two young people will almost certainly end up together. And what of the Traveler? Lessing, of course, tells us no more about him than the Traveler himself tells Christoph, his cheeky servant (the hilarious David Bennent). Christophs story that he makes up off the top of his head when Lisette (Therese Affolter) presses him for details about his master seems perfectly plausible, even as we know it is a lie . Meyer and Bennent make a wonderful teamalthough, in fairness, Bennent seems to form half of an equally fine team regardless of whom he plays against. Meyers Traveler is such a nice young man perhaps too nice for his own good, while Bennents Christoph, though rather an awful servant, is too clever for any genuine malice to be held against him. Bennent hones the wisecracking, scheming, lustful elements of Markus Meyer in George Taboris production of Lessings The Jews at Berliner his character to a delightful edge. His Ensemble. Photo: Monika Rittershaus is the broadest-written role and he revly playful style, with Lessings humor always at the els in it. His fumblings with the luggage especially, forefront, and seemingly with no deliberate irony and his flirtations with Lisette, are priceless. Meyer, imposed. The actors are clearly having great fun, who often finds laughs in a role that could, in less romping on the grass, almost like children at recess. skilled hands, perhaps become a little tiresome (hes Surely, one is led to think, nothing of import will be just so darned noble), is the perfect counterpoint to discussed or pondered here . Taboris presence at Bennent. Exasperated with Christophs insolence, the sidelines, part of the production, but notpart possibly even wishing for a more compliant of the audience, but not lends a feeling almost of employee (although Christoph eventually does do intimacy (a sensation not easily accomplished in the everything he is asked), still one never suspects that cavernous BE space); it is as if we have been invitthe Traveler would ever beat him or fire him even ed by him personally to watch this apparently genial were he given to such treatment of anyone. Besides, tale unfold. The actors sit and watch as well, rising that would be unpleasant, and weve already witand stepping onto the grass when it is their turn to nessed all the unpleasantness this cheery little world join the action and returning to their seats when they can take. are done. This playful sensibility and feeling of Tabori allows the play to build its own rehearsal camaraderie engenders a warmth and momentum, even as the tone is never permitted to comfort. Yes, the two criminals are anti-Semites, become heavy. This lightness of touch at first seems but one would hardly expect less from such fellows, to make the production read as being a little tentaand, after all, they will surely get their comeuptive, but the rehearsal-like atmosphere of the staging pance. Yes, all right, the Baron is a bit of one, too, gathers steam at just the right pace, and one gains an but hes really kind of a harmless old fool anyway 44

appreciation of the delicate balance Tabori and his (Corinna Harfouch), and Fernando (Sven Lehmann) actors have crafted. Once the antics and plot twists entwine in a vast sterile cavern of a room, vaguely (if one can call them thatKrumm steals the reminiscent of faded grandeur. Panels slide out to Travelers snuffbox, gives it to Lisette, who gives it create new spaces, lending a mechanistic, almost to Christoph, who shows it to the Traveler, who has science-fiction-like aura to the events. his suspicions of Krumm thus intensified, etc.) get The story involves a more-or-less simple rolling, there is something of a snowball effect to love triangle, or, perhaps more accurately, a tale of the proceedings . Moralistic as Lessing can be loves lost and found again. Ccilie, traveling as and at twenty he is here as preachy as he is anyMadame Sommer, comes with her daughter Lucie wherethe play is nevertheless resolutelyeven (Ellen Schlootz) to an inn near the home of Stella, earnestlyfunny, and Tabori has expertly mined for whom Lucie is to become a servant. Stella lives every humor vein. The moment, then, when the essentially alone, husband, Fernando, has been Traveler admits that he is Jewishas he is sitting away for three years, having left after the death of down on the grass, where a blanket has been spread their infant child. As the Postmistress (Inka and tea served, and the Baron, his daughter, and Friedrich), who is the primary source of story inforLisette are all warmly gathered around this stranger mation, functioning almost as a narrator, explains, they have all come to admire and lovelands with there are rumors that Fernando and Stella were a resonance that is at once startling and terrifically never actually married. Friedrich is a wonderful effective. An anvil dropped from the flies could not presence, providing a welcome island of stability crash upon this idyllic world with a bigger thud than amid the storm of emotion that is soon unleashed. this news. Here Tabori, who, according to the theatre, did not change a word of Lessings script, brilliantly shifts the tone. Suddenly, the ugliness and cruelty of the attitudes Lessing was protesting are laid bare, their essence seen for the crude bigotry that it is. Lessings characters speak remorseof course, they will changebut Tabori has pulled back their curtain and revealed them for who they are. The Barons daughter and the Traveler may love one another, but we are achingly aware of how impossible such a love will be. By stripping the stage environment to its barest essentials, Tabori has left these characters with no place to hide. We are forced to confront their malice, even as they struggle to deny its very existence. The play is suddenly horribly sad, and Lessings message sounds a lonely and ironic chord of truth. It is a masterful finish to a masterful production. The other production I had the opportunity to take in was Stephan Kimmigs staging of Stella, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who was not born in January) at Deutsches Theater. Placed within a remarkable and stunning set by Katja Ha, Kimmig envisions this play for lovers as a commentary perhaps more on Inka Friedrich, Petra Hartung, and Corinna Harfouch in Stephan Kimmigs the futility of love than the joys. The tanproduction of Goethes Stella at Deutsches Theater. gled trio of Stella (Petra Hartung), Ccilie Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater 45

From the Postmistresss tale of Stellas circumstances, Ccilie sees the similarities to her own life, as she is actually Fernandos first wife; he disappeared when Lucie was a small child. She does not know if he is dead or alive. His sudden return, unrecognized by Lucie, of course, sets the dramatic tension fully in motion. Fernandos reunion with Stella is an occasion of great joy for them. Once Ccilie recognizes him, she tries to depart, leaving him with his new lifethe women having great regard for one another. Before she can go, however, he recognizes her, and is himself overjoyed. He explains that he found their home occupied by strangers and that he has searched for them. Obviously, there are now complications. Fernando implores Stella to allow Ccilie to leave, but does not let on that he intends to go with her until Annchen (Marina Lubrich), the Postmistresss daughter, lets slip the news. Grief and remorse leads to talk of suicides, but in this version, none transpire. (Goethe wrote a later different ending in which Fernando shoots himself offstage and Stella reveals she has poisoned herself.) Instead, it is resolved that the three of them shall stay together. In less able hands, this emotional anguish pouring out all over the stage could be mawkish at the very least and embarrassingly comical at the worstnot to mention the credibility-stretching ending. The Deutsches cast, however, is superb. Their portrayals are richly textured. Their grief reverberates off the padded walls in this immense cavern of a space, never once threatening to over-

whelm the very real characters at the heart of this messy situation. It is indicative of Goethes craft, of course, that we are torn as to what outcome we desire, but it is no less the skill of the actorsand the disciplined nuance of Kimmigs directionthat really pulls us in. As Stella, Petra Hartungs collapse is agonizing to watch, her adoration of Fernando, her idealization of their lifeher relief at his returnall erupting into flames before her eyes. As Ccilie, Corrinna Harfouchs outburst at Fernando is equally effecting; her rage, her abandonment, as palpable and real as our own might be. Sven Lehmanns Fernando is an earnestwe want to believeand good man torturously aware that he loves two women. Kimmig avoids the easy solution Goethes words provide, instead framing the ending as an uncomfortable compromise, a painful but necessary solution, that we know will ultimately satisfy no one; nothing could really make these three damaged people whole again. The last stage picture, with the principles silhouetted against the stark emptiness of the set, seems emblematic of the painful loneliness that this production offers as an inevitable result in matters of the heart, for though the lovers are all reunited, Kimmigs vision makes it clear that this mnage will bring isolation to each of them, even as it forces togetherness. That such a bleak message can be so movingly conveyed without resorting to a deliberatelyand surely tempting bitter tone is a tribute to the ensemble and the sure hand that guided them.

46

Letter from Paris

Barry Daniels 1. September, 2003 The opening production of the Fall season at the Comdie-Franaise was a new staging of Twelfth Night by Andrzej Seweryn, a distinguished actor in the company. His work was inventive but generally more effective when dealing with the lovers than in the scenes involving the clowns. Jean-Michel Dprats provided a fluent translation that communicated the sense well, but failed to capture the best of Shakespeares poetry. Set designer Rudy Sabounghi divided the stage horizontally. The lower level represented Orsinos court. Above it, supported by tree trunks, was a narrow platform spanning the width of the stage and divided into three rooms in Olivias house. When not in use, a scrim with the outline of the upper part of the trees covered the upper stage. A stairway that could be raised and lowered from the middle room provided access between the two levels. Although the set was not particularly attractive, it allowed Seweryn to create multiple and overlapping images that were both sophisticated and expressive. Movement from room to room on the upper level with slamming doors or characters spying at doorways was some of the better slapstick comedy of the evening. The weakest visual element was the costumes also by Sabounghi. Orsinos court was dressed mostly in black and white and lots of leather. The result was the courtiers often looked like they were out for an evening in a trendy provincial gay bar. Violas disguise and Sebastians matching outfit were downright ugly. The clowns costumes were drab and lacking in any sense of the originality of the characters.

Andrzej Seweryns production of Twelfth Night at the Comdie Franaise. Photo: Agence Enguerand

47

Jorge Lavellis production of Homebody/Kabul at the Comdie Franaise. Photo: Agence Enguerand

Seweryn cast relatively young actors in the roles of the lovers. Their seeming innocence and youthful exuberance was engaging. Audrey Bonnet was absolutely enchanting as Viola. Her boyish figure made her disguise convincing and increased greatly the general confusion of gender in the play. She was amusingly confused by Olivias attraction to her. Coraly Zahonero was charming as Olivia, delightly brought out of mourning by her feelings for Cesario/Viola. She created the sense that this was her first experience of romantic passion, both frightening and wondrous. Although tall and handsome, Laurent dOlce as Orsino was less interesting than the two women. He never really convinced us of his passion for Olivia and never found the comic possibilities in playing the role. He was much more effective once Viola joined the scene. He was especially good in the final scenes of the play where his 48

affection for his page clearly disconcerted him. Seweryn was less successful staging the clown scenes. Thierry Hancisse, who is an immensely talented and creative actor, chose to emphasize the drunkard rather than the buffoon in playing Sir Toby Belch. The result was mannered and grotesque. Laurent Natrella never successfully found the comic possibilities in the role of Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Vronique Vellas Maria was vibrant and witty but she often seemed to be playing in a vacuum. Malvolio was suitably prissy as played by Grard Giroudon. His performance was very broad, a style that the French delight in. His letter scene and the subsequent scene with Olivia were the comic high points of the evening. Guillaume Gallienne was a melancholy Feste and sang the songs in a heavily accented English. He, and a young lute player (although the

music was recorded) were constantly on stage observing the action. Seweryn used them to frame his often elaborate and beautiful stage compositions. The Comdie-Franaise opened its smaller house, the Vieux-Colombier, with the French language premier of Tony Kushners Homebody/ Kabul , translated by Pierre Laville and directed by Jorge Lavelli. I saw the original production of this play at the New York Theatre Workshop and was disappointed with the text. Although Kushner has apparently revised the play, the text continues to be a problem. Kushners take on Afghanistan is always of interest, but I found it difficult to be interested in his central characters and the action they are engaged in. The French production was quite uneven. Kushners linguistic virtuosity did not translate well. More effective were the feminist questions represented well by the three female characters. Although Eric Gnovse was good as Khwaja, the

Deborah Warners production of The Powerbook at theThtre national de Chaillot. Photo: Agence Enguerand

Esperanto poet who serves as Priscillas guide and protector, it was odd casting since Lavelli used Iranian actors for all the other Afghan roles. Shokouh Najmabadi was excellent as Mahala, the Afghan woman trying desperately the get out of the country. I very much enjoyed the intensity of Lisa Pajon (an actor from the Jeune Thtre National) as Priscilla, the young British woman searching for her mother who has disappeared in Afghanistan. She didnt play with much variety, but I found her more convincing than the performance of this part in New York. Her weak-willed father was played by JeanBaptiste Malartre. The role is not terribly interesting and many of his scenes were directed at such a slow pace that one simply got annoyed at having to listen to the character whine. Alexandre Pavloff tried to turn the role of the drug addict Quango into a romantic outsider. Fashionably dressed and ingenuous, he glamorized the drug taking, a rather unfortunate interpretation of this character who should be seedy and a little bit sinister. Most disappointing was the opening monologue for Priscillas mother. It was heavily cut and Catherine Hiegel played the character as a kind of stereotypically mad housewife with clichd gestures of nervousness. She found neither the mystery nor the wonder that makes this character one of Kushners finest creations (see also the Grabaud report in this issue). Edward Bonds work is much appreciated by the French, and is now, more often staged in France than in England. Alain Franon, artistic director of the Thtre de la Colline has long championed Bonds work and chose to open the small space at the Colline with Bonds Have I None. Bonds play is set in the distant future. Cities lie in ruins and people live in houses without windows or any material embellishments. Art and history are forbidden. The play opens with a woman, Sara, sitting in a bare room (set and costumes were by Jacques Gabel). There is a knock at the door, but when she answers it no one is there. Her husband Jams, who is a kind of police officer who patrols ruins looking for people who cling to the past, enters the home. He is unsympathetic to her fears and often brutal with her. Bond introduces a stranger, Grit, who claims to

49

be Saras brother and brings with him a forbidden photograph from their past. The memories he carries with him begin to affect Sara. Bonds point is very clear and simply presented: a world without art and without a past is a world in which humanity is diminished. Bond is now a master at making his ideas dramatically effective and eloquent. Reminiscent of Beckett, he uses the absurd universe he presents to great comic effect. An extended lazzo involving two chairs and the three characters was staged with hilarious manic frenzy by Franon. Dominique Valadi was wonderful as Sara, gradually awakened by the memories Grit brings to her. Luc-Antoine Diquro was ferocious as Jams and Abbs Zahmani provided balance as the quietly centered Grit. Bond provides both men with dazzling monologues. Have I None is one of a group of short works written by Bond to be performed in schools. Its lesson of the need for humanity in an increasingly dehumanized world is an important one. Bond presents it with great dramatic flair and poetry. Director Franon and his fine actors provided a truly astonishing evening of theatre. The Thtre national de Chaillot opened its main stage with The Powerbook, an English language production created at the National Theatre in London in May 2002. The Powerbook was adapted for the stage from the novel of the same name by Jeannette Winterson, the novels author, Deborah Warner, the plays director, and Fiona Shaw, one of the performers. It is a lesbian love story set in virtual reality. Shaw plays an author who falls in love with a woman she communicates with via her Macintosh Powerbook. To try to entice her lover, (Pauline Lynch) she creates a series of fictions which are enacted by Shaw, Lynch and a third actor, Saffron Burrows who filled in as all the secondary characters in the play.Shaws performance was subtle and utterly compelling. Lynch was mysterious and beautiful as the object of Shaws desire. Warners staging of The Powerbook was technically extravagant and reminded me a bit of the Wooster Groups work. Language was heightened and distanced through the use of microphones. Projected imagessometimes poetic, sometimes merely scenicfilled the rear of the stage; the design and video work was by Tom Pye. At times the entire stage was covered with swiftly moving computer codes. The text of The Powerbook foregrounds language and storytelling. It is delightful and exhilarating, a kind of Arabian Nights for the 50

computer age. The production was hip and witty, a pleasant departure for longtime collaborators Warner and Shaw. One of the major events of the Fall season was the performance of Paul Claudels The Satin Slipper, directed by Olivier Py for the Thtre National de Strasbourg, and brought to the Thtre de la Ville as the opening production there. The play was performed uncut and could be seen on two consecutive evenings or in a single eleven-hour performance on Saturdays and Sundays. I opted, of course, for the single performance. Claudels masterpiece was published in 1928 and 1929. It was first performed in truncated form in 1943, in a staging by Jean-Louis Barrault. The complete text of the play was first performed in 1987, in a staging by Antoine Vitez. Pys staging was elegant and fairly traditional for this avant-garde director. He used a set consisting of a burnished gold floor and back walls designed by Pierre-Andr Weitz who also designed the handsome, simplified period costumes. Set pieces included the back of a proscenium arch placed downstage for the first day; then reversed in the second day. Moving platforms were used to represent ships for the fourth day. Curtains and different positions of the parts of the back wall helped keep the visual elements varied for the long duration of the performance. Py demonstrated his ability to create striking visual images. He was especially good in emphasizing the theatrical elements in Claudels text. Perhaps the greatest strength of the production was the strong understanding of Claudels verse and the fact that the visual production supported rather than overwhelmed the text. The most disappointing elements of the production were the performances of Rodrigue and Prohze, the lovers destined never to be united, who are the protagonists of the play. Jeanne Balibars voice did not carry in the vast Thtre de la Ville and her Prouhze was rather lackluster. Philippe Girard was a dashing Rodrigue but played the role on a single note. The rest of the company was excellent, however. The comic scenes were especially well done and played with a nod to 17th century theatre practice. It was daring of Py to tackle The Satin Slipper and he has earned the praise the production has received. 2. 15 November-15 December 2003 The Paris theatre season was in full swing when I returned there for a month starting in mid-

November. I had been looking forward the Comdie-Franaise production of Adam de la Halles The Play of Adam at the Vieux-Colombier. This thirteenth-century play is a series of lively and often funny scenes of medieval life. Unfortunately, Jacques Rebotiers production was neither very lively nor very amusing. The mostly young cast never seemed to find the reality of the characters they performed. They seemed lost on the stage except when they were demonstrating their physical agility by creating a series of animals that for some reason the director chose to include in his stage pictures. This looked more like acting exercises from the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s, but added little to the current production. Seasoned actor Alain Pralon was the only person in the cast who created interesting characters in his roles as Adams father and then of the Innkeeper. Director Reboutier seemed to take his inspiration from the paintings of Bosch and Breugel, but his production had neither the strange fantastical qualities of the former, nor the earthy peasant humor of the latter. The Comdie-Franaise presented Jacques Lasalles staging of Chekhovs Platonov on its main stage. Serge Rezvani was commissioned to translate this early Chekhov work and provided a fluent rendering of the text. Lasalles staging was traditional. Renato Bianchi designed handsome period

costumes. Alain Lagardes scenery provided slightly stylized enclosures for the realistic action of the play. The first act set was a kind of terrace looking out at a misty landscape with leaves painted on scrim hanging over the stage. In act two dark tree trunks closed in the space. The schoolhouse in act three was represented by a wall of rough-hewn gray planks. A gray wall with windows looking out on the act one landscape formed the interior for act four. The scenery was evocative without being heavy. Props were spare. The environment had a kind of abstract quality that foregrounded the costumed performer. It is characteristic of Lasalle to prefer such spaces and he is adept in making artful compositions with his actors. The production was always lovely to look at. but more importantly, the acting was superb: subtle, nuanced and deeply felt. My friend expressed amazement that Chekhov was able to understand such a range of human nature when he was only twenty years old. The play, although less subtle than his mature works, is engrossing when performed by such talented actors. Denis Podalyds has been widely praised for his intense performance of the title role. This talented young actor created a scruffy, bored, cynic given to extravagant mood swings. It was an idiosyncratic performance that was often dazzling and held the audiences attention through the three and one-half

Jacques LaSalles production of Platonov at the Comdie Franaise. Photo: Agence Enguerand

51

play is fairly static. Lvques staging was simple and clear but did not solve the inherent lack of dramatic tension in the script. Vincent Garanger was excellent as Tanaka and Jean-Claude Durand as the President (Judge) embodied the kind of bureaucratic mentality that Kaiser was criticizing. Kaisers 1932 play with music, Silverlake, is a much stronger drama and it was given a fine production by Olivier Desbordes for the Opra de Massy and his Dijon-based group the Opra-clat. The production that I saw was originally created in 1999, and was revived this season for performances in Dijon, where I saw it, and in Paris. Kaisers anti-capitalist fable was engaging and had songs and incidental music by Kurt Weill. Kaisers plot tells the story of a poor workman, Sverin, who with his Guillaume Lvques production of Georg Kaisers Soldier Tanaka equally hungry friends at the Thtre de la Colline. Photo: Agence Enguerand steals some food. He is shot by a policeman, Olim, hour performance. and placed in prison. Olim, however, has a revelaI was pleased to be able to see three tion reflecting on the circumstances that led the men German plays from the 1930s on this trip. The least to steal food. He changes his report so that Sverin successful of the three was Georg Kaisers Soldier can be freed. In the meantime, Olim wins the lotTanaka, which was staged by Guillaume Lvque in tery and purchases a palace where he welcomes the small theatre at the Colline. The play was writSverin and tries to comfort him. When Sverin ten in 1939 and first performed in Zurich in 1940. It learns that Olim was the policeman who shot him, is set in Japan and tells the story of Tanaka who has he desires vengeance, but in the end is reconciled left his peasant village to become a soldier. with Olim. The pair is chased from their home by Unbeknownst to him, his family has sold his sister schemers who have cheated Olim out of his possesto a brothel in order to pay for a banquet celebrating sions. The two walk towards the lake where they his visit home. In the second act Tanaka and his felplan to drown themselves but miraculously a snowlow soldiers visit a brothel where he discovers his storm turns the lake to ice across which the pair sister. He kills a superior officer who has engaged walk. her services. Tanakas trail constitutes the third act Desbordes staging of Silverlake was imagthat concludes with his accusing the Emperor of inative. He used a basically bare stage with a large creating the social ills that forced his family to act as narrow platform at the center which could be used they did. Unfortunately, until the last scene, the 52

as a stage-within-the-stage and which served as the banquet table in the last act. Eric Perez as Sverin and Michel Fau as Olim gave excellent performances. Eric Vignau nearly stole the show with his performance of the lottery man in clown face, singing one of Weills best songs. Jean-Franois Verdier was musical director and led a lively chamber orchestra placed at the left of the stage. Silverlake was Weills last score before leaving Germany in 1933. It brought to an end one phase of his career

and I was truly surprised that it is so infrequently performed. Both the play and the music are representative of the best work to come out of Germany before the Nazi regime. Judgment Day, one of dn von Horvths last plays, enjoyed a huge success in a production by Andr Engel at the Odon, Thtre de lEurope, temporarily housed in the Ateliers Berthier. Horvths play is a dry satire of German middleclass mentality. It is the story of Hudetz, a respected stationmaster in a provincial town. When Anna, the Innkeepers daughter flirts with him, he fails to throw a switch, and a terrible train wreck ensues. At the inquest Anna perjures herself claiming that Hudetz threw the switch in a timely manner. His shrewish and jealous wife testifies against him, but the court and townspeople side with the likeable Hudetz. He returns to his post in triumph, but in an ambiguous scene murders Anna. The townspeople gradually turn against him and he flees. The play takes a mystical turn at the end when Hudetz, planning to commit suicide is confronted with the ghosts of the engineer of the wrecked train and of Anna. He turns himself in but claims that the question of guilt is not relevant. Horvths portrayal of the small-mindedness and strict conformity of the townspeople is sharp. What people think is more important than a true sense of justice. Loyalties are easily changed. Engels production was Brechtian in feeling. Portions of each scene were scored as songs by Etienne Perruchon. Nicky Rietis unit set had doors in The Thtre de la Ville production Rodrigo Garcia's Human Gardening, at the Cit the lower level of the back Universitaire, directed by the author. Photo: Agence Enguerand 53

wall and windows above. It represented the waiting room of the station. Tables and chairs by a door down left became the inn or a caf when the area was lit. Support posts of the building stage right became the train viaduct. Andr Diots evocative lighting clearly delineated each area where the action was set. Acting throughout the production was excellent. Jrme Kirchner was a likeable Hudetz, under the thumb of his shrewish wife, played by Anne Se. Julie-Marie Parmentier had a kind of soulless charm as the flirt Anna. The rest of the cast created the world of the provincial town, a world that recalled Fassbinders scathing portraits of the post-war German middle classes in several of his films. I saw two contemporary works on this trip to Paris. The first was La Scne by Valre Novarina, presented on the main stage at the Thtre de la Colline, after being created in September at the Thtre-Vidy in Lausanne. Novarina is one of Frances most praised contemporary playwrights. He works in the mode of neo-surrealism that seems popular with younger audiences in Paris. Like his Oprette imaginaire, I found La Scne slight and unfocussed. It is precious doodling that doesnt have the force of the original surrealists. It is mostly linguistic tricks and poetic effects that dont add up to very much. After an hour of the two and one-half hour production the work becomes unbearable. Novarina staged La Scne and provided the large abstract painting that forms the set. The company of eleven actors and one viola player worked valiantly and seemed to delight the audience. Critical reception of the production was mixed however, and my negative reaction to the text is not an isolated response. I much preferred Argentine playwright Rodrigo Garcias Human Gardening, which was presented at the Cit Universitaire by the Thtre de la Ville as part of Pariss Autumn Festival. The production directed by Garcia had been created in Madrid and was performed in Spanish with French titles. The production received a lot of publicity due to its scandalous nature: it included lots of nudity and simulated sex. Although I cant say I was scan-

dalized, the production worked very hard to be shocking. Garcia had a youthful innocence in his desire to provoke that I found thoroughly engaging. The play was more like a happening, or sequence of images performed with great energy by six young actors. Garcias targets are consumer society and political tyranny. These are easy targets, but Garcias vehemence commanded our attention. In him the spirit of his surrealist models is successfully revived. The Fall season in Paris featured a festival of Italian theatre that included performances by troupes from all over Italy. I was delighted to be able to see the offering of the Piccolo Teatro di Milanos production in this festival: Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters . This play was the signature piece of the company founded by Giorgio Strehler in 1947. He staged ten different versions of the play during his lifetime. This revival was based on his 1956 staging and was supervised by Ferruccio Soleri, who has been performing Arlecchino with the company since 1960. In this version Strehler chose to set the play on a temporary stage placed in a palace courtyard. Wings of the palace formed the sides of the set by Ezio Frigerio. Charming painted curtains at the back of the stage created the different scenes of the play. An aged stage manager sat to the side of the stage and occasionally corrected or commented on the actors. Actors, when offstage, could watch the action on the stage and occasionally comment on it. Goldonis play is a farce. The pleasure in its performance came from watching the youthful actors work within the commedia dellarte tradition. The actors were uniformly excellent, but it was Soleris Arlecchino that dominated the production. For Strehler, Arlecchino represented the indomitable spirit of the masses. Soleri embodied this spirit with a vigor and physical dexterity that was astonishing, given his age. In spite of all the knock-about farce, there was elegance to Strehlers staging. The stage pictures were often lovely and the actors movement was often dance like. Frigerios faded scenery and Franca Squarciapinos gorgeous pastel 18th century costumes also contributed to the visual beauty of the production.

54

Theater in Paris: October 2003

Allan Graubard In Paris recently for eight days, I took in as many plays as I could to survey the new season, just beginning to roll. Theatre in Paris, of course, is a diverse, international affair with numerous offerings in venues large and small. And while it was not possible to gain a coherent sense of current trends, I took from the performances I saw a subtle optimism from two vantage points. With the exhaustion of a previously dominant post-modernism, a turn toward Anglo-American realism has taken root and, more importantly, an attractive new writers theater for contemporary plays with three stages has established itself: the Thtre du Rond-Point on the avenue Franklin Roosevelt. Nonetheless, I first came to a circus tent in the Parc la Villette, where the Italian director Barberio Corsetti re-staged his Ovids Metamorphoses, initially performed outdoors in 2002 in Romes Archeological Park of Aqueducts a collaboration between Corsettis company, les Colporteurs et Fattore K, and the circus arts troupe of Antoine Rigot. I prize circus technique and was intrigued by how Corsetti would use it. The opening sequence, though, while freshly conceived, found only an echo in the proceeding three hours, with twelve of Ovids fantastical tales, starting with the announcement of Eurydices death. Kept from entering the tent, the audience was directed into two lines. An actress casually thanked us for coming and announced the plays beginning with a bullhorn. Then a fellow on a motor scooter, perhaps Hades or one of his henchmen, zoomed up between us and chased her off. A small truck dragging some oil drums behind it on a makeshift sled pulled through, the rope separating the two become a high wire for a trapeze artist. As they slipped from view, an actor from the top perch of the central pole of the tent behind us cried out that Eurydice had died and invited us in to view how it happened. With performers appearing and disappearing through various traps set in or on the bleachers surrounding the circus ring, high wire acts, tumbling, acted sequences and a bath for a merman that overflowed, momentarily flooding the stage, we seemed to have entered a land where chaos reigned and fantasy sought its reason. Thankfully at last was the denouement, which rose above other scenes in 55 effect, and with a previously untouched gravity revealed Corsetti with all his inventiveness intact. Orpheus drives on stage and picks up a young male prostitute, who enters the car and performs fellatio. They argue, the prostitute leaves and Orpheus gets out for a cigarette. Suddenly the Bacchantes appear and stone him to death, throwing a last few handfuls of mud on the poets face down in the dirt. The prostitute returns, searches through Orpheus pockets, steals his wallet and exits. A troubling image, yes, but perfectly au point. (en point?) My next encounter came at the aforesaid Thtre du Rond-Point, which seemed quite the place to be, for the French premiere of the Australian Daniel Keenes Five Men, directed by Stphane Mh, set by Jean Rabasse. The play portraits the struggle of five immigrant workers, who have left their homelands in a desperate search for economic stability somewhere in Western Europe. Having met by chance, without papers, fearing the police, they work as they can on a brick wall, as perhaps do similar men at small construction sites around Paris. The wall extends across the stage up front to heighten an asphyxiating proximity with the action played straight out. The men mark scenes by swiveling the walls right and left wings into cramped living quarters with bunk beds while the centerpiece becomes a local caf, where they gather by night to guzzle beer, anger and despair bleeding through their exhaustion. Mh has his actors telegraph their relations in terse, unforgiving incidents, shot through with several monologues about who they were before leaving home. With the wall complete, the men gather their belongings and await their pay, wondering where they will work next. Samir, a reclusive North African, well played by Samir Guesmi, retrieves a pail of white paint, which he dips his hand in then presses on the wall. And for a decisive moment an archaic past rises up when the pressure of a palm, then on rock, now on brick, was enough to say I was here. Then the air thickens. The foreman explains that a majority of their pay is gone, and that one of men has stolen it. They fix the culprit, scuffle, retrieve the cash and, despite his plea that he wished only to return to his homeland, crucify him

Stphane Mhs production of Daniel Keenes Five Men at Thtre du Rond Point. Photo: courtesy Thtre du Rond Point

56

against his bunk bed. Samir and a workmate meet for a last goodbye. The violence already done to them by forced emigration, and the violence they did to their comrade (whose fate has vanished into time), seem two parts to the same piecethe finished wall behind them, where Samir washes off his handprint, a request of the boss. In the end, Mhs direction and pacing are adequate but little more. There is yet a certain reason to this, given the penchant of French actors to overstate themselves at the expense of relationships that Anglo-American audiences identify with as a matter of course. The muting of clichs here has its place, though, and Mh has made it his job not to burden his actors or his audience with anything other than what occurs before the wall, which fades off into darkness with the lowering of the lights. Krystian Lupa, the renowned Polish director from Cracows Stary Theater, brought his version of Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita to Paris for eight performances at the Odeon Theater de LEurope aux Ateliers Berthier. Renovated from its original use as the set construction site for the Paris opera, the Ateliers Berthier offers the space of a grand salle without reference to theater history. Comfortable bleacher seating rises from the floor of the skeletal industrial space, which Lupa used for his playing area. Adaptor, director and set designer, Lupa presented a structurally precise rendition of the novel. It is a work that, in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, has had some resonance for theater creators in Central and Western Europe, perhaps for its comic delineation of a process of statesponsored repression, which we recognize today as part of the political legacy of the previous century. The time between then and now has also allowed us to frame the action historically with less concern for its resonance today. We know such things happened and are fairly confident that they wont happen again, at least to poets, forgetting the risk poets have faced during reactionary periods in the developed and developing worlds over the last twenty-five years. This lacuna may be the reason that Lupa decided to root the piece within a curiously sober momentum as if to wrest from the evident humor of the situations a return to the world that Bulgakov faced as he struggled to write a novel he never finished, and which was published some twenty plus years after his death. Whether or not Lupa captured the bitter carnivalesque of the novel is a question 57

that this reviewer, at least, continues to ponder. For while it is true that Bulgakov wrote his satire with tears of blood, it is also true that he did so to sustain his attack on prevailing conditions within Stalinist Russia with all the humanity and verve in his possessionhis last trump against the encroaching darkness, and which still draws us to him. Lupas opening scene, which sets in motion the eight and a half hour performance, was also most sensitive to Bulgakovs talent for rendering his characters deftlytouching leitmotifs in the epic orchestration to follow. With the audience lit and the playing area in darkness, a small kiosk at the back, stage right, and a park bench up stage left emerge. Berlioz, our man of letters, well played by Zbigniew Kosowski, and Biezdomny, poet, anxiously caught by Bogdan Brzyski, approach the kiosk to buy something to drink. The humidity and warmth of this fine May evening have gotten to them, too. Supplies are limited, though, and the alluring clerk cuts each of their choices with a dull no, we dont have any as if deliveries come when they come, and thats the way of it. They finally settle for lemonada, the only drink available, and walk off toward the park bench, the clerk reminding them to return the bottles or pay more. There they discuss the irreality of the story of Christ, when Woland, our cryptic professor, appears decked in a red sports jacket and beret: the Devil. Expertly done by Roman Gancarczy, Woland fascinates the two writers by arguing against them and an air of expectation settles in. With Berliozs decapitation off stage, the sinister farce adds to it a transitional, oneiric element that will not sustain with equal poignancy throughout. The woman in the kiosk, all too bored, cradles her head in one hand while repeatedly, if uselessly, opening and closing the serving window. It is an unnerving moment; there are no customers anywhere. Lupa then shifts to ancient Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate (Jan Frycz) interrogates a prisoner suspected of torching the temple by way of Jesus admonitions against it. But the atmosphere has changed entirely and the seriousness of the charge deepens despite a trio of manikins on the opposite park bench from where Berlioz, Biezdomny and Woland sat, done up to mimic them. This chorus will offer a diversion from an otherwise realistic scene played for twenty or so minutes, stage center. The split focus is a device that Lupa will use in various ways to support his claim (in an 8 August 2001 rehearsal journal, quoted in the pro-

Stphane Mhs production of Daniel Keenes Five Men at Thtre du Rond Point. Photo: courtesy Thtre du Rond Point

gram) that in dreams, that which is different, quite unknown, monstrous and dangerous appears suddenly within the form of its passage. But as with most devices, its effectiveness will wane. Did any of this take place in fact, or was it simply a fever dream brought on by the preceding events? Lupa justly suspends the question with Biezdomny in bed, a fractured tango charade consuming the space behind him, until he wakens to the travail awaiting him. With the poets incarceration in a mental asylum, however, we understand that for Lupa the central issue is not so much the cruelty of a tyrannical social system but the poets belief in his insanity, which he plays, despite Margaritas care for him in the second act, some three hours later. And while we appreciate Lupas efforts to straddle a shifting line between serious drama and burlesque, and certainly between dream and reality, neither his grounding the work in credible acting nor the frantic chaos that sometimes frames it, sufficed. Audience attrition through the full eight and a half hours was as much as you might expect, and their applause was more polite than enthusiastic. In late September the Festival dAutomne unfolds vivaciously, with a variety of performances, from Wang Jianweis theater-video Ceremony to Christoph Marthalers re-visioning of Schubert Leider. I caught Ceremony opening night at the Centre Pompidou theatre, where dance and music events take place year round. Although the 45-year-old Jianwei lives and works in Peking, he is also known in Europe, having presented his first 58

performance, Fing Feng, in Brussels for the 2000 KunstenFESTIVALdesArts. Ceremony is a curious take on an ancient Chinese tale. A famous court drummer enraged at the emperor, Cao Caos, attack on his choleric mentor, vows never to play again until the finale, when he resumes his position at court with a funeral dirge; his mentor having died. With its huge back screen and two movable scrims for TV projection, center stage, the work bridges the centuries to catch a growing malaise in Peking, where all too many landmarks have fallen to urban reconstruction. Jianweis opening scene, a mask ritual in modern dress, sets the temporal link. But only later when the masks are worn do we note their devolution. It is as if Jianwei has transposed Chinese traditional theater, with its set characters, to a virtual choreography, where anomie reigns in minimal gestures drowned in Chinese script whirling across the screens, along with quick montages of Peking tourist spots. How can we tell such a tale for a Peking that has tipped into the twenty-first century? What is it that will make the telling or our failure to tell it live on stage? These are the questions that Jianwei asks. The work was produced in France, given in Chinese with French surtitles. The Comdie-Franaise is always an attraction, and its Theatre du Vieux-Colombier offered the French premiere of Tony Kushners prescient Homebody/Kabul, directed by Jorge Lavelli. Running parallel with a major exhibition at the Institute du Monde Arab on French Orientalism in

Algeria from Delacroix to Czanne, there is little question of the importance in France of its cultural and political dialogue with Islam. Kushners play, which took on added resonance as a result, along with Chiracs visit to Morocco during the same week, reinforced the plays currency as a compelling meditation on culture and terrorism. As scripted, of course, Homebody/Kabul is distinctive enough. The intimate conflicts are clear, with an ideological shade closely attendingan exploration, but one that calls upon the humanity behind it to make it work. Lavelli thought otherwise, pitting his characters against each other as if they were signs in a greater history, which no one understood. Balanced at the beginning by Catherine Hiegels torrid monologue and Shokouh Najmabadis touching finale, having fled Afghanistan for her English garden at last, the play seemed less than it could have been. Was there a point here? If so, I missed it. Nor do I know if it was Lavelli or his actors who were at fault, especially in the second act, lost to a high-pitched screaming match save for several moments of relief between Jean-Baptiste Malartre (as Milton Ceiling) and Alexandre Pavloff (as Quango Twistleton) back in London as they shot heroin (see also the report by Daniels in this issue). Sarah Kane is recognized as the most important playwright of her generation in Britain, which has even now given way to a younger set. More read than performed in the United States, her work in Paris recently found its third venue at the end of the number 8 metro line in Alfortville, a poor suburb. On a side street some ten minutes walk from the metro there is Christian Benedettis theater-studio: a garage transformed into a lean performance space, quite useful for the sort of onslaught that Kane projects. During my last night in Paris, I was fortunate not only to view the performance of Kanes Blasted, which established her career in 1995 when it opened at Londons Royal Court Theater Upstairs, but to talk with the director, Christian Benedetti. I must add here a curious irony. Benedetti is a Romanian of middle age and his troupe of actors is also Romanian, performing in Romanian without French or other sur titles. Audiences are small as a result. In fact, as Benedetti 59

relayed, he mounted the performance and one other Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, to prepare his actors to return to Romania to reprise the same two plays there. Benedetti had previously presented Blasted in French at his theater-studio and at the Thtre de Nanterre-Amandiers in the summer and fall of 2000, soon after its French premiere at the Thtre National de la Colline in April of that year, also under his direction. Blasted is perhaps the most shockingly poignant response of a Western writer to the Balkan wars that tore through Central Europe with the anesthetizing force of a shock wave. Although the scars are healing, we are still prey to weekly accounts from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague of what genocide occurred and where, and how frail relations are between ethnic groups, especially in Kosovo. Blasted thus comes to us still fresh however much we might wish it otherwise, nor is its resonance constrained to the Balkans that originally called it forth, given the world we face.

Christian Benedetti. Photo: courtesy Christian Benedetti

Its sometimes terrifying humor, which Alfred Jarrys umor approaches but which Kane outdistances , also ties the play to its national culture, and which seemed, at least in this production, an apt riposte to the distancing act that is part and parcel of a traditionally British take on explosive violence, normalized by redundancy. Where sexual violation and moral turpitude give way to anarchic terrorism sanctified by military law, and hunger turns to cannibalism that then is not enough to satisfy physical needs, there remains only an empty childlike merci for a handout bit of bread and sausage, and a final blackout. For Benedetti, this kind of concision is Kanes hallmark, and which gives to her more elaborate coruscations an unusual clarity. Benedettis eloquence here, as we talked before the play, was moving. He finds Kane with as much contemporary significance for theater as Shakespeare had in his day. The map of the world she drew from her life, where we find ourselves battered by brutalities without let-up, is less fantasy than honest response. Benedetti also related his experience with mixed audiences, young and middle-aged or older: with the former taking Kane directly, fascinated by her choices, while the latter dampened the encounter by accepting Kane esthetically, especially in his native Romania. As a result, Kane is a lifeline for theater, more attractive to young audiences than we might believe possible. Benedettis casting a generally young trio for this production does not reflect this experience but does lend to it the evidence of time and place. And while his Ian (Doru Catanescu) strained to capture the 45-year-old louse, busted by drink and mur-

der, the play does offer some leeway here: It is not so much a tryptich of character studies in a torture chamber as an evocation of the barbarity we possess or that possesses us in our most intimate affairs by dint of being human. In this way, Cate (Olimpia Malai or Matei?) and the Soldier (Constantin Lupescu) sparked a triangle of tensions that glowered in silence then vanished, as if there were no play to contend with at all, a perceptive directorial maneuver given the sometime tentative acting. I must return to the conclusion of the play, which not only offers us, as Cate, a sudden acknowledgment that we, the audience, have endured, as we now know the playwright did not, but provides an almost compassionate finale in a very minor chord that undercuts the least infectious details of what came before. Is this Sarah Kanes joke on our having taken the play too seriously or too humorously; in fact, of our having taken it as anything other than a piece of theater precise to its tempo and place? Beyond her own comments on the subversive character of art, and the need for great art to be subversive, is the composite of the splintered world she has given us, which will survive, I think, less because of its contestation than by way of her touching our capacity to continue on despite our worst debacles. Christian Benedetti understands this well enough. He is a director worth watching. There is hope in Blasted, too, albeit a hope blasted through, with hopeless laughter or silence left to fill it. And so we do. Theater in Paris in early October? Take your pick, but remember this: Parisian theater is in flux, and the next turn of the road unclear. Is it any different in New York? Thats for you to decide.

60

Hedda Gabler . Thtre Marigny. Paris. Autumn Season, 2003.

Joan Templeton Since Roman Polanski has gone on record as having little interest in realist drama, including the plays of Ibsen, it was a great surprise to learn that he was directing Hedda Gabler until I discovered that the person in the title role was the movie actress Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanskis wife. They should have left well enough alone. This Hedda Gabler was a great waste of both the rich resources of the Marigny, and, with the exception of Seigner, of solid theatrical talent. An actress who has appeared in thirteen films (three of them directed by Polanski), Seigner lists her only previous work in the theatre as the Thtre Montparnasses 2000 production of Tankred Dorsts Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter. She has a small voice and a small range of expression, and Hedda Gabler was not an apt vehicle for her to launch a stage career. Her Hedda is abrupt, direct, and mean, much like a self-absorbed and selfish adolescent, and her best scene is the one in which she gets Thea to reveal her relation with Lvborg, which Seigner plays like a ferret pulling a mouse out of a hole. Seigners Hedda is so superficial that when she complains to Brack about her marriage, we believe her when she says that her boredom would vanish if only Tesman had more money and an important position. The pettiness of this Hedda is enhanced by Seigners one-note delivery, a kind of talky whine, and when she has to say Courage, if one only had that, it is impossible to believe that she understands what the quality in question consists of. She tries to strike a deeper tone in her private encounter with Lvborg as she begs him to put an end to himself in beauty, but her sudden show of something like integrity is not convincing; later, her expression of dismay when she learns that Lvborg shot himself in the bowels rather than in a higher part of his anatomy made the audience laugh wildly; that this Hedda should care about such a detail was indeed incongruous. At the end, extreme-

Roman Polanskis production of Hedda Gabler. Photo: Agence Enguerand

61

ly upset by Bracks threats, she shouts, le scandale, le scandale!, after which she apparently kills herself to avoid it, death being preferable to the courtroom. It is not surprising that a movie actress with virtually no experience of theatre could not do a creditable Hedda; what is truly surprising about Seigners husbands Hedda Gabler is that not only her own role, but the production as a whole seems not to have been directed by anyone. There is no governing conception of Ibsens play, only a group of actors reciting the dialogue. And the resolutely period production, with a sumptuous, bourgeois parlor and gorgeous costumesBrack in impeccable tails, Hedda in grande dame gowns, Aunt Julie in elaborate silks with an enormous bustleadds to the impression that the whole performance is a period piece taking place under glass. One felt sorry for the actors, who, except for Seigner, are all well trained theatre professionals. The roles of Brack, played by Jean-Paul Solal, and Lvborg, played by Erick Deshors, particularly suffered; they were reduced, respectively, to those of an aging rou and an unreformed drunkard. Pascale Arbillots Thea was also a clich: the resolute heroine who stands by her man. Accompanying the old-fashioned melodrama was the lack of any attempt at innovation or novelty, unless we count the showy touch of Heddas wearing not black but white in the last act and the silly choice of Griegs The Hall of the Mountain King as the wild dance music Hedda plays before shooting herself. The performance, in Franois Regnaults fine, colloquial but cut adaptation, is without intermission, which is probably meant to perpetuate the suspense about Lvborgs fate, but which, given the production, only gave the impression of wanting to get through it as quickly as

possible. The production contains one redeeming feature, the veteran Molire actor Guillaume de Tonqudecs wonderful Tesman. Tonqudec lets the comedy of the slipper scene play itself, and in French, it is funnier than in any other language because of the phrase homme pantoufles (slipper man), which designates a humdrum male who adores his domestic comforts. De Tonqudecs Tesman is an asexual boy-man, as usual, but the novelty in his interpretation is that he is neither silly nor hypocritical; he feels ashamed that he is jealous of Lvborgs success and guilty about taking the manuscript, and his determination to reproduce his dead rivals book arises out of a genuine sense of duty. At the end of the play, putting someone elses papers in order does not seem comic, or even ironic, but as the finest effort this unimaginative but honest little man can make. Curiously, the plodding Tesman emerges as something of a modest hero in the wake of his dead, wasted superiors Lvborg and Hedda. Since de Tonqudecs Tesman is the only interesting performance of the production, it is difficult to give the director part of the credit for it. One cant help thinking that Polanski simply did not know what to do with Hedda Gabler. This would not be surprising given his other work as a theatre director: Peter Shaffers Amadeus in 1981 (in which he played the title role) and Terence McNallys Master Class in 1996. Both plays are melodramas and neither requires very much in the way of a directors interpretive skills. It seems curious that Polanskis only other venture in directing the classics thus far is a triumph, his adaptation of Macbeth. But that, of course, is a film, the medium in which Polanski is a master.

62

Justifying War and the Case of David Kelly

Janelle Reinelt On July 17, 2003, David Kelly walked into the woods close to his home in an Oxfordshire village and almost certainly committed suicide. By the first of August, the consequences of his death had led to a full-scale judicial process known as The Hutton Inquiry, named for Lord Hutton, the presiding judge. The inquiry lasted most of the month and heard seventy-five witnesses including the British Prime Minister: as this review goes to press, Lord Hutton has not yet made public his report, although it is imminent. Between the inquiry and the outcome, in early November, the Tricycle Theatre produced its latest in a series of Tribunal Plays. Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry consists of edited transcripts of the proceedings, compiled and arranged by Richard Norton-Taylor and directed by Tricycle Artistic Director, Nicolas Kent. During the 1990s, Kent produced four other plays following the tribunal format, three on contemporary topics (The Scott Arms to Iraq Inquiry, 1994; The Hague Hearings on Srebrenica, 1996; and The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, 1999) and one historical reconstruction of the 1946 Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. All were subsequently broadcast on the BBC, and two of them transferred to the National Theatre. The Colour of Justice, on the Lawrence inquiry, also toured extensively, sponsored by the National Theatre and The Guardian newspaper. Significantly, Norton-Taylor, who edited three plays, is a journalist: he is Security Affairs Editor at The Guardian. Perhaps the most striking aspect of these productions is their un-theatrical style. These plays are documentary dramas presented in naturalistic detail. The stage is set up to replicate the interiors where the inquiries took place (so precise that in Justifying War, empty bookshelves make the hearing room look particularly bleak). The dialogue is strictly limited to the actual words of the transcripts. The actors deliver understated, naturalistically detailed, quiet performancesall mimicking the decorum of these hearings that are held in place by high formality and the austere authority of the presiding official. When I saw The Colour of Justice in 1999, I thought it would attract only a small audience of people who were passionate about the Lawrence case; it turned out that most of Britain was passionate about the case, and large audiences followed the play everywhere during the following year. Although Justifying War was less successful than The Colour of Justice, it had a respectable run and was included in several end-of-year assessments of the best and most important productions of 2003. These tribunal plays make an almost impos-

James Woolley as Lord Hutton in Nicolas Trents production of Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, at the Tricycle Theatre. Photo: courtesy Tricycle Theatre

63

sible truth claimto capture without embellishment the accurate facts of the matter. Without embellishment seems like a tediously old fashioned goaleverything in the theatre is, after all, embellished! Yet the genuine public appetite for these dramas manifests itself in proportion to their claims to veracity. In the pre-production press for Justifying War, Norton-Taylor and Kent spoke frequently about their intention to bring to the public the possibility of judging the evidence for themselves. Because only ten seats were reserved for the general public at the actual hearings, very few were able to experience them, and they were not televised since Lord Hutton forbade it. The Telegraph reviewer, Charles Spencer, compared his own experiences at the hearings with the play and found the verisimilitude astonishing. This comment is interesting, appearing in what is generally viewed as a conservative paper. However, part of the interest at the heart of the David Kelly affair is that both left and conservative critics of the government have closed ranks behind a strong critique of the Blair government, the Ministry of Defense, and the BBC. The aggravated struggle between journalism and the incumbent Labour party in Downing Street led to the death of a public servant almost everyone agrees was the casualty of political rhetoric and power scrambles. Kelly may have been complicit in his own demise, but he bore such an inordinate set of pressures that he chose death rather than continue to live through it. Here is the basic story: David Kelly, perhaps the governments chief advisor on chemical and biological weaponry, and a United Nations weapons inspector with wide experience in Iraq dating from the 1980s, worked for both the MOD (Ministry of Defense) and the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office). He was consulted about and had written drafts of parts of an important government dossier published in September 2002. This controversial report on Iraqs war-making capabilities and Weapons of Mass Destruction began with a foreward by Prime Minister Tony Blair including the claim, His [Saddams] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. Kelly felt that the dossier overstated the intelligence that supported it, and said so to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan in an off-the-record interview on May 29, 2003, after the U.S. and the U.K. had invaded Iraq and declared victory. The 64

details of the interview, and the exact language Kelly used remain in dispute. Andrew Gilligan is/was a very influential journalist, and the defense and diplomatic correspondent of the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. He had been criticized repeatedly for his anti-war coverage by the Blair administration, and in particular by Blairs Director of Communications and Strategy, Alastair Campbell. Following his meeting with Kelly, Gilligan charged in an unscripted radio broadcast that the government probably knew that the forty-five minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. Following up in a scripted broadcast later that day, he said the dossier was transformed in the week before it was published, to make it sexier, and writing a follow-up column in The Mail on Sunday , he named Alastair Campbell as the person responsible. He attributed all of this information to a British government official involved in preparation of the dossier. When the inevitable storm broke in the press over this allegation, Blair denied it and Campbell wrote the BBC demanding retraction. For Blair, who had narrowly missed losing his premiership over the action of taking Britain into the war, this charge threatened to discredit his public image as truthful and sincere. While the public had largely disagreed with his Iraq policy, even the political commentatorscriticism of the way his government has been run by spin (the now-famous term for overly-manipulative self-presentation) did not completely undermine voters perception of Blairs integrity and forthrightness. However Gilligans charges, taken to mean that the government had exaggerated intelligence reports in order to make a weak case for war into a strong one had and still hasthe potential to undermine his premiership. The BBCs part in all this is also caught up in image: Invoking its historic claims to freedom of the press, and its public mission as a state chartered public-service media company, the BBC at first simply backed up their reporters story and, of course, refused to give its source. As the pressure mounted, both the government and the BBC dug in their positions. Within two weeks, a serious search was underway for the informant in hopes that he would contradict Gilligan and embarrass him and the BBC. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons was scheduled to hold hearings into the matter, as was the Intelligence and Security Committee. In his testimony at the inquiry, Alastair

William Chubb as Andrew Gilligan in Nicolas Trents production of Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, at the Tricycle Theatre. Photo: courtesy Tricycle Theatre

Campbell said, I felt that at that time, if we were going to bottom out this story and have it established beyond doubt that the allegations were false, then I felt that Dr. Kelly appearing before a [parliamentary] Committee probably was the only way that was going to happen. Private correspondence at both Downing Street and the BBC (made public as a result of the inquiry) exposed the grudge-match attitudes at both places. At the end of June, David Kelly wrote to his line manager at the MOD about his meeting with Gilligan, but stated that he didnt think he was the source for the story as he didnt recognize all the quotes as his own. The government and the MOD (it is in dispute about who exactly engineered this) decided if they did not make Kellys name public, the impression might be that they were covering up something, especially if Kelly held views opposed to the government. They acknowledged certain aspects of Kellys identity, such as that he worked for two branches of government and was a chemical and biological weapons expert. MODs press office said they would not reveal the name but would confirm it to anyone who guessed it correctly. In short order, and without Kelly knowing in advance, his 65

name was out. Between July 19th, the day MOD confirmed Kellys name to journalists, and the day he died on July 16th, Kelly faced two parliamentary committees, one of which (FAC) was televised. Press accounts of him and his career included various comments that his wife reported seemed belittling and deriding. Always an extremely private man, he was very upset with the publicity and the pressure. The FAC showed evidence of continuing to question him closely about his contacts with journalists, pressing him for more details about a list of such contacts on the afternoon he died. Then, without warning, he simply walked into the woods, took his arthritic wifes painkillers, and cut his veins. The next day, Tony Blair ordered a special judicial inquiry into the events leading to Dr. Kellys death. It may seem difficult to find the focus of the drama in this account. The real questions underlying this affair are mainly political ones: did the government sex up the September dossier and exaggerate intelligence reports in order to persuade the public to agree to go to war against Iraq? Did the BBC accurately report the news? Did the government conspire to shop Kelly in order to force the BBC to back down? Did Kelly receive treatment from the government and/or from the BBC that pushed him toward his death? Did Kelly, himself, lie? The claim of documentary dramas such as Justifying War is to sort through the evidence and present it for public consumption. The news coverage of the Kelly affair had been constant, widespread, almost unrelenting. Even if you read several papers during the inquiry, as I did, it was easily possible to get confused as to the sequence of events or become unsure which were the most important statements and evidential fragments. Unlike most melodramas, this case is not black and whitemost of the chief actors are flawed. Gilligan admitted his words exaggerated Kellys interview (they were not perfect he conceded.) Furthermore, he sent notes to members of the FAC suggesting lines of questioning Kelly that would shore up his own position. Alastair Campbells diary was full of his desire to get Gilligan and fuck the BBC. Kelly himself appears to have equivocated to the FAC about his conversations with Gilligan and at least one other journalist, Susan Watts.

The Tricycle production manages to suggest a way to view the events in question, even though the play covers only the first part of the hearings. (They were split into two parts with witnesses recalled for clarification or amplification in the second part. Since the play was scheduled for the beginning of November, Kent and Norton-Taylor decided it would cut it too close to include material from the second part.) In the selection of twelve witnesses, Norton-Taylor managed to pick critical testimony, although he did not include Tony Blairs. Besides the difficulties of impersonating Blair without turning the play into a question of mimicry, Norton-Taylor and Kent thought the Prime Ministers testimony was not crucial to understanding the situation. Campbell and Gilligan, however, as well as Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon are included. The last testimony in the show is from Janice Kellys, David Kellys wife. The most interesting testimony comes from two unlikely characters. A member of parliament who sits on the FAC and questioned David Kelly makes a surprisingly comic appearance, making the audience laugh at all three performances I attended. Largely, this is because he is plain-spoken, over-earnest, and stubborn: he carries on at length about his view of the importance of parliament in scrutinizing the government. In an otherwise genteel process, he is loud, ponderous, but exact in his pronouncements. He had been getting

hate mail because of the published question he put to Kelly, which in retrospect seemed like bullying: I reckon you are chaff; you have been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall guy? You have been set-up, have you not? This emerges as perhaps the most blunt statement of how David Kelly may have been used, and how he might have felt about it. The second critical witness is James Blitz, the political editor of the Financial Times. At first it is not clear why he is included, since he seems to be giving circumstantial testimony about how he discovered David Kellys identity as Andrew Gilligans source. Norton-Taylor, however, perhaps because he is a journalist himself, correctly identified the potential of this testimony to show how David Kelly was virtually outed by the government and the MOD. Showing his journalists tool, Blitz followed up on clues supplied by the Prime Ministers Official Spokesman at a briefing of journalists that the source worked for MOD but was paid for by another agency, and he was a technical expert in chemical and biological weapons. Blitz said he felt there would not be many who matched that description and so undertook to find him. He searched the web using the keywords: Ministry, defense, consultant, chemical, and weapons. The audience also laughed at this revelation, possibly because it was so simple and obvious a list. He turned up a document on a website

David Michaels as Alastair Campbell in Nicolas Trents production of Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, at the Tricycle Theatre. Photo: courtesy Tricycle Theatre

66

that bore David Kellys name, and he then called various contacts in Whitehall trying to get the name corroborated. Eventually, he put the name to the MOD press office and had it confirmed. Within the hour, The Times and The Guardian had also confirmed their own discoveries. Giving the time on stage to this testimony was a brilliant choice. It revealed how the government and the MOD had fed Kellys name to the reporters without actually revealing it themselves. It appeared inevitable that smart journalists would find out; it was clearly the intent of MOD and Downing Street that his name should come out. This way of playing with an individuals life for highly strategic purposes provides one of the key exposures of the play. It also makes Kellys plight central in the inquiry, and this, too, is critical. One of the problems of the Inquiry itself was that it was explicitly charged with investigating the events surrounding Kellys death, not the actual governmental policies and actions concerning the war on Iraq, although that is clearly the larger question. Kelly, however, can get lost in the story of the parry and thrust of press and governmental struggles. He was extremely private, drab even. There is no sex or other scandal in this story. There isnt any real heroism either: it is likely that Kelly waffled in his testimony, and feared public exposure of the distance between his conversations with journalists and his self-representation to this bosses. He hated being in the public limelight, and his suicide is trag-

ic only insofar as it shows an individual broken by the state whose role is to shelter and protect its citizens. This, Justifying War does convey through its interweaving of Kellys perspective with the machinations of institutions. Even the testimony of his wife, well chosen to be last in the play, leaves much of the character of David Kelly in question. They did not have a marriage of sharing confidences; there were many silences between them. He simply did not talk to her, so her account of him often suffers from her own lack of knowledge of his feelings or his own indisposition to speech. Not included in the play, but published in the program, were the comments of the Director of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University: I think that as far as one can deduce, the major factor was the severe loss of self esteem, resulting from his feeling that people had lost trust in him and from his dismay at being exposed to the media. I think being such a private man, I think this was anathema to him to be exposed, you know, publicly in this way. In a sense, I think he would have seen it as being publicly disgraced. Watching Justifying War, one can understand how he would come to this sense of himself and how the government and the press were culpable for driving him to it. To return to the observation with which I started, how could such a circumspect documentary succeed as theatre? Partly, I would argue that it didntan interest in the subject matter itself, and not

Mark Penfold as James Dingemans in Nicolas Trents production of Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, at the Tricycle Theatre. Photo: courtesy Tricycle Theatre

67

the theatrical energy or dramaturgical flourishes commanded the attention of its audiences. But partly, I would argue it did succeed because theatre can play a role in dramatizing important public events and aiding the public in their understanding of them. Journalist Richard Norton-Taylor spelled this out in his explanation for why he wanted to be involved in this project: I hope this [play] confirms my belief that the theatre is a medium, complementary to newspapers, which by capturing a different kind of

audience, or a similar audience in a different way, can lead to a greater understanding of how we are governed and what is being said and done on our behalf. Some of the tribunal plays make better theatreStephen Lawrences case provided more inherent drama and he was the perfect protagonist, cut down in his youth and his innocence, but Justifying War is sometimes gripping the way courtroom drama is always engaging: it challenges its audience to weigh up the evidence and decide.

68

Matthew Bournes Nutcracker! At Sadlers Wells

Marvin Carlson The ravishing music and Christmas setting of Tchaikovskys The Nutcracker have made it a theatrical staple of the holiday season, and it is hardly surprising that Londoners in 2003 could choose among three different major productions of this familiar classic. By far the most imaginative and unconventional of these was the version Nutcracker! by Matthew Bourne, who has achieved worldwide artistic and popular success with his radical new versions of such ballet classics as Swan Lake and Cinderella. Moreover, no venue could be more appropriate for this major new vision of the Russian classic, since it was at Sadlers Wells that the first complete version of The Nutcracker was performed in the West in 1934, based on choreographic notation smuggled out of Russia, launching its triumphant international career. Mark Morris, whose dance imagination, iconoclasm, and bad boy sense of humor make him a kind of American Matthew Bourne, created a brashly alternative Nutcracker, The Hard Nut, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991. Bournes equally radical staging followed in 1992 and has been several times revived, this year in a visually stunning new version. The first act of Bournes Nutcracker! is even more dark and savage than Morriss drunken Christmas party in a contemporary American home. It is set in a ghastly Dickensian orphan asylum, run by the evil Dr. Dross (Darren Fawthorp) and the matron, his wife (Annabelle Dalling). Although their own children, the flirtatious Sugar (Anjali Mehra) and the bumptious Fritz (Neil Penlington) are pampered and elegantly dressed, Clara (Etta Murfitt) and the other orphans wear only dreary cotton nightgowns and must slavishly sweep and polish their still, grimy sleeping chamber, a nightmarish expressionistic setting (designed by Anthony Ward) with sloping cracked walls and not a hint of decoration. Since the governors of the orphanage are paying a Christmas visit, a few pathetic decorations are put up, most notably the skeleton of a tiny Christmas tree, totally devoid of ornaments, even of needles. Cheap paper hats are passed out to the children, but all of this only accents he grimness of their situation. After the Dross family leads the children in several dances for the entertainment of the visitors, a box of gifts is opened, at the bottom of which Clara finds the Nutcracker, actually here a floppy male doll. When the guests leave, Dr. Dross pulls down the pathetic decorations and throws the tree out of an upstage window. His wife pushes the children into bed, locks Claras new doll in a closet, and leaves. All is then quiet, but the nights adventures are only beginning. First, Dross staggers through the dormitory, clearly drunk. Then his daughter

Matthew Bournes production of The Nutcracker at Sadlers Wells. Photo: courtesy Sadlers Wells.

69

Sugar sneaks in and opens the closet, clearly intending to steal Claras only gift. When the closet opens, however, a terrifying transformation is revealed. The doll is now full size and strides out stiffly, arms extended, a vengeful zombie. The walls crack open, revealing dark gothic tree shapes whose branches break through the ceiling. We have entered a Tim Burton-style horror movie. The children rush about, terrified. The Dross family returns and a pitched battle ensues. One by one the children vanquish the Drosses, tie them to beds, and wheel them offstage. The orphans attempt to decapitate Dross, but he evades them, only to be subdued at last by the huge doll, who rides offstage with him on the final bed. As Clara remains alone, the doll returns, removes its wig, mask, and jacket to reveal a handsome man (Neil Westmoreland), upon whose bare torso Clara falls in joy. The back wall of the orphanage flies up to reveal a Magritte-like setting, and huge circular inner proscenium painted with sky and clouds and framing a large floating feather and a silken mattress. Against this airy background Clara dances with her new prince, but they become separated among the skaters on a frozen lake. Clara, left alone again, shivers in the falling snow, then sets off to find her lost love. The second act deals with this question. On the Road to Sweetieland Clara encounters a dazzling group of ice skaters on a frozen pond and two engaging cupids (Sophie Hurdly and Samuel Plat) dressed in silk pajamas with molded golden wigs, bounding wings, horn-rimmed spectacles, and of course bows and arrows. They call down a polka dot dress from heaven to replace her orphanage rags and send her on to Sweetieland to find her love.

Arriving at the entrance, however (a huge, fulllipped cartoon mouth up center), she is prevented from entering by an imposing Freudian guard who protects this realm of King Sherbet and Queen Candy (alias Dr. and Mrs. Dross, now in elegant confectionary costumes). Other guests, bearing invitations, are allowed in, after performing the sequence of dance divertissements that are a central part of this act. Thus we have the Spanish Liquorice Allsorts, the suave, cigarette smoking Knickerbocker Glory, the bouncy pompom-festooned Marshmallow Girls and at last the helmeted action figure Gobstoppers. When the guard steps forward to break up the actors of the last group, Clara is able to slip past him into Sweetieland. Her troubles, however, are far from over. She finds herself in the middle of the wedding celebrations the King and Queen are holding for their daughter and Claras missing prince. The upstage circular proscenium, now red, frames a huge wedding cake which serves as the centerpiece for the Busby Berkeley-style dance celebration of the wedding. The prince and Princess Sugar are united, rice and the bridal bouquet are thrown, and poor Clara is discovered and hustled out by the guard. She finds herself back in the grim orphanage, the lifeless doll in her arms. Throwing it down in despair, she goes upstage to her bed and pulls back the covers, only to discover in it the handsome, bare-chested prince. He carries her up to the window and they climb out on a ladder made of tied bed sheets as the other orphans crowd in to wave goodbye to the escaping lovers. It is a charming and delightful conclusion to this imaginative reworking of a familiar classic.

70

A Lot of Work and a Flicker of Intuition. Calixto Bieito Stages Hamlet

Maria M. Delgado Spanish director Calixto Bieito has been a regular fixture at the Edinburgh International Festival since 1997 when his staging of the 1894 zarzuela (populist Spanish operetta) La verbena de la paloma (The Festival of the Dove) was seen at the Kings Theatre. The brash, energetic production presented a vibrant reading of one of Toms Bretns best-known zarzuelas, stripping the piece of its habitual saccharine sweetness and opting instead for a visceral approach where actors seized the roles that have, of late been taken by opera singers. This served not only to highlight the narrative focus of the piece, prioritizing character and movement, but gave the piece a faster pace as the sung and spoken sections were linked together seamlessly. The emphasis on meticulously choreographed action, vibrant physical performances, the open metaphorical set and the sense of reading against the grain of the contemporary production history of the piece all served to announce Bieitos decisive style as a director. Bieitos English-language debut came at the following years Festival with a production of Pedro Caldern de la Barcas 1635 play Life is a Dream which evolved on a sandy lunar landscape watched over by a giant suspended mirror hovering ominously above the characters. While Calderns repertoire has been a stalwart of the Spanish state subsidized Compaa Nacional de Teatro since the company was founded in 1985, his philosophical dramas have not enjoyed a marked presence on the British stage over the past thirty years. Bieitos production swept away associations of theological heavy-handedness and leaden dramaturgy, paring the play down to provide a fiercely paced exploration of the tensions between self and other personified by its central character Segismundos dilemma. Indeed when the production was then seen in Spain two years later, re-rehearsed with Spanish-language actors, it provoked fierce debate about what playing traditions for Caldern and the Golden Age repertory might be, with Bieito replacing the habitual slow rhetorical delivery of the text with a more urgent dynamism propelling the language forward. While Life is a Dream received exhilarating reviews from the British critics, his 2000 return 71 to Edinburgh with Ramn del Valle-Inclns Barbaric Comedies proved a far more problematic proposition [see WES 13:3]. Bieitos staging of Frank McGuinness four-hour adaptation of ValleInclns trilogy on the fall of the Galician feudal aristocrat Don Juan Manuel Montenegro failed to ignite the same degree of approval. While the critics ostensibly questioned the raw, aggressive performance style, their ambivalence towards the piece may have partly been to do with an inability to accurately position Valle-Inclns abrasive tragic-comedies. These plays had not hitherto been professionally produced in their entirety in the English-language. The translation from the Spanish, opting for Barbaric Comedies closer to the Spanish Comedias brbaras rather than the literal Savage Plays, tended to lead the audience to expect a comedy but Valle-Inclns plays are not comedies in the traditional sense. Their acerbic vision, brutal linguistic game-play and savage anticlericalism were dismissed as a theatrical extreme with little resonance for a UK audience. By providing an interval only half-way through the second play, Bieitos splitting of the three plays may have failed to preserve the dramatic tone of each of the three works which were only grouped as a trilogy after the completion of the first play of the tryptich, Silver Face in 1921. While Bieitos work has continued to polarize the British critics Don Giovanni and A Masked Ball were produced by English National Opera in 2001 and 2002 respectively, Cos fan tutte and Die Fledermaus by Welsh National Opera in 2000 and 2002 respectively and the Romea theatre production of Macbeth was seen in both Catalan and Castilian at the Barbican Centre, London in April 2003 Bieito has not returned to Edinburgh until 2003 when the Festival produced a new staging of Hamlet with Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The production, like the earlier Macbeth, reenvisages the play through markedly contemporary prisms. Selfconsciously juggling an array of filmic references from Pedro Almodvar to Nick Ray, Bieito reshaped both pieces into compact two-hour ventures more in line with the length of a film feature than the four hour epics that frequently result from director cut theatrical Shakespeare. Whereas Bieito had located

Macbeth within a mafia world of disposable consumables avidly devoured by the modern gangsters and molls conceptualized through the prism of popular TV iconography, Hamlet is positioned within a contemporary cocktail bar announced to the audience on entry to the theatre through the suspended fluorescent pink neon sign at the back of the stage spelling out Palace. The white wipe-clean sofas of Macbeth are here replaced by sleek black armchairs and a long drinks counter to fuel the decadent courts incessant partying and guilt-ridden mourning rituals. As the audience entered, Horatio (Karl Daymond), resplendent in a dapper cream suit, sat at a white grand piano, the consummate entertainer preparing for the shows opening number: Claudius, leading the court in a crooning rendition of the Hollies He aint heavy, hes my brother. here significantly rendered as he was my brother. and thus setting the tone for a rhetorical mourning that may convince the queen but not Hamlet or the audience. Indeed Hamlets soliloquies are fuelled by alcohol and pills, the delusions of a grief-stricken son unable to come to terms with the sudden death of his father. George Anton a restless Segismundo in Life is a Dream here provides a volatile Scots prince for whom not even the endless foolery with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can provide appropriate solace. Ophelia Rachel Pickups characterization giving a glamorous, anxious blonde attired in designer wear may break through the armour of his black suit on occasion, but her own traumas there is a clear suggestion that she is a daddys girl in more ways than one lead her to spiral into a hole of self-loathing, alcohol abuse and eventual suicide. Hamlet too while seeking to alienate himself from the hedonism of the court simultaneously allows its excesses to fuel his imagination. As such Bieito conceives old Hamlets ghost as little more than a figment of Hamlets drug- and drink-fuelled mind brought chillingly to life by Horatios eerie magnified voice and echoing thumps on the piano. There are no palpable spectres in this vision of the play, merely the subjective horrors conjured by an aggressively tormented psyche. In dispensing with the soldierly dimension of the work, and thus effacing Hamlets military aspirations, not in favour of metaphysical concerns, as in Peter Brooks recent reading of the play, but towards a paranoid neurosis embodied by the vulnerable Anton, Bieito offers a bleak portrait of contemporary angst, where cere72

monies are enacted which offer no palpable solution to the characters dilemmas. With no Fortinbras to breathe hope into the proceedings and Horatio remaining little more than a possible figment of Hamlets deranged mind, this is a portrait of both domestic and institutional paranoia that speaks to a collective neurosis and corruption at the heart of our most basic familial relationships. While Bieito had repeatedly admitted that I think maybe Hamlet is not a piece for children (Nick Curtis, Evening Standard , 1 August 2003), he seemed perplexed as to the Festivals marketing of the Bieito brandname with the publicity carrying warnings of graphic interpretations of some scenes and a suggested minimum age of 15. While Bieito may not position himself as a moralist, the work does engage with a court that is in a state of moral decay, presided over by Diane Fletchers voluptuous and giggly Gertrude and George Costigans coldly abrasive Claudius a veritable bouncer to Rupert Frazers wily and dapper Polonius. This is an environment where narcissism knows no bounds the Hello! celebrity magazines that are inertly flicked through on stage point to a dramatic void at the centre of this court; a world bereft of purpose where Lex Shrapnels Laertes returns from Paris armed with Eurostar bags full of goodies to continue the endless spiral of partying. Marcellus line Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, significantly cut from Bieitos version which dispenses with both Marcellus and Bernardo, resonated through its absence. As with Barbaric Comedies and his UK operatic ventures, Hamlet divided the UK critics with the Evening Standard, the Herald, the Financial Times lining up firmly behind Bieitos astonishing roller-coaster ride into the black heart of the play (Neil Cooper, the Herald, 21 August 2003) and Scotland on Sunday , the Independent, and the Guardian, generally lambasting this self-consciously cartoonish garbage Mark Brown, Scotland on Sunday , 24 August 2003). Bieito was certainly prepared for a critical onslaught, as he articulated in an interview in the Spanish daily El Pas on the day of the opening, when discussing a press campaign that he viewed as setting up the audience to judge what they were about to see as decidedly not Shakespeare (Anon, El Pas, 20 August 2003). Bieitos Hamlet is certainly in the radical European tradition of commenting on the text through a radical dramaturgical reworking. Indeed Bieitos work with the Hanover State Opera of late has seen a shift towards a German collabora-

tive team with designers Ariane Isabell Unfried and Rifail Ajdarpasic and dramaturg Xavier Zuber Swiss born but a member of the theatres artistic team who had all collaborated with him on the 2003 staging of Il trovatore (invited to the 2004 Edinburgh Festival), a collaboration set to continue with the 2004 Hanover production of La Traviata. While continental Europe may gravitate towards what Dennis Kennedy views as a movement to deconstruct Shakespeares plays, or to revise their representation by radical visual methods. (Looking at Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 288), in the UK a tradition where reverence to the Bard still dominates staging traditions tends towards a sanitation of the political within the aesthetic of pleasing costume dramas. As such the defiant tampering that Bieito subjects the text to, trimming it down to a two-hour chamber piece for a cast of 9, may have not met with universal acclaim but its anatomizing of the action, to borrow Dennis Kennedys phrase, recognizes the vast distance the

text has traveled to reach us, and to become, at least in one sense, traitors to our own time (Looking at Shakespeare, p. 207). The following interview (revised and now updated for publication) took place at the Edinburgh International Festival on 21 August 2003, on the second day of the productions run. The production has subsequently played at the Birmingham Rep theatre (9-20 September), at Barcelonas Teatre Romea (30 September 5 October) and at the Dublin Festival (9-12 October). In October and November 2004, the production will be seen in Michigan, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. It is hoped that other US dates will be confirmed in the next three months. [ Editors Note: The reader should note the absence of New York in this list. WES deplores the ongoing situation in which major European (or other international) directors like Bieito and Castorf are no longer invited to The Brooklyn Academy, or any other New York venue. As far as international theatre is concerned, New

Matthew Douglas as Rosencrantz, George Anton as Hamlet, and Nicholas Aaron as Guildenstern in Calixto Bieitos production of Hamlet, for the Edinburgh International Festival with Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Photo: Robert Day

73

York is no longer a significant venue, a truly deplorable state of affairs]. WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES: This may be the first Shakespeare that youve directed in English but youve been directing the Bards work for over fifteen years in Catalan, French, German and Spanish. How different is it working in English? Is your relationship to the language different? CALIXTO BIEITO: Its really the same process that Ive always used with the text. Of course I was aware of the fact that it was in English but it was still governed by the need to be totally free in the same way as if I were working with a Shakespeare play in Catalan, Spanish or German. Its always about being comfortable with the text. The weight of tradition is something you have to engage with, especially with regard to the actors who are very concerned with what each sentence means. But I come from a different practice. Of course when youre working in English you have to work harder with regard to the associations of the text, with what is expected. When I staged Calderns Life is a Dream in Spanish in 2000, people kept asking why the characters were talking so fast as this stopped them from understanding the text. My answer was that its impossible to understand the text because even if youre reading it you cant really understand it as you need a dictionary close by to really comprehend the meaning of the sentences. Its the same with Shakespeare. The sound of the words is like a song; its like music. You cant ignore this and just concentrate on what each word means. The work with the actors involved a lot of deconstruction. We separated the scenes out and then reconfigured them to create something fresh and different: a new piece called Hamlet. Its not because I dont trust the text. It actually has to do with presenting the text anew for an audience. Its about the audience listening to the words as if for the first time. It doesnt make sense to repeat and recycle what others have done before me. And the actors understood immediately that this was a different approach, that they could stop and breathe in different places. Pauses can be created in different areas so as to create a new music with the text. Indeed I never felt that the text was against me or that I was reading against it or in conflict with it. Rather I felt that it was a pliable text that I could do 74

what I wanted with. There are no limits to the freedom with which I approach it. Its why I direct. The rehearsal room must always be a space of freedom where everything is possible. The director is not a surgeon performing an operation. WES: The production seems to be part of a longer term cycle of Shakespeares works presented by international directors which Brian McMaster looks to present at the Festival over the next few years. CB: This is the future. An English director doing Lope de Vega in Spain; a Russian director working with French actors on a Molire play. The future is multicultural. I believe in small communities and identities. This is important. But we are part of a multilingual culture and this needs to be reflected in the theatre we make. I am using different traditions to make something new. And renewal sometimes needs traumas. This production will play at the theatre where I am artistic director, Barcelonas Romea in October. I think audiences will find it liberating to watch the play in English even if they dont understand it. This is the future. WES: One of the most striking features of your directorial aesthetic is the way in which you rewrite the text through the visual. You have a concrete scenic environment, this private bar that the royal family frequent and here you have a world of endless night, of ceiling fans that never stop spinning. Its very film noir . In a conversation earlier in the day Rick Fisher the lighting designer talked about the development of a scenographic language for the production reshaping a simple stage shape using darkness as an extra piece of scenery because lighting it in a particular way you create darkness to surround the characters. This seems particularly appropriate in a play about masking, hiding, and deception. CB: You can never do 100 per cent of this play. It is such a big account of the anguish of the human condition. This is like a dark thriller. The costumes are modern and smart, what royals who have money might wear. It is like a film noir and a surreal, unreal film noir . I have left the story as it is. But I am manipulating the words this gift that Shakespeare gives us to talk about human beings. There is so much pain in this play. Gertrude and Ophelia are victims. This is a misogynistic play. Both are vic-

tims of Hamlets egocentrism. When I manipulate the play I move things around so that the actors and characters can own it. The audience may not recognize it because the context is unfamiliar. The main soliloquies are there but just reallocated. We had undertaken a version of the play before rehearsals began. But then obviously things changed as the actors began to work on it. Shakespeare worked with actors and Im sure that the actors he collaborated with wrote sections of the scenes or changed lines. Im doing the same thing. Firstly, its a question of checking with the actors that the basis of the script seems solid and then things are altered and fine-tuned. It would have been too difficult to mould the shape of the play in rehearsal. We needed a structure to bring to the rehearsal. Its a bit like new Catalan cuisine, like Adri Ferra at El Buli, were reinventing the omelette! And this involves actor input. Decisions are made in rehearsal that therefore alter the structure of the play. So, for example, rehearsals placed the To be or not to be later in the play even though my intuition had suggested that it needed to go earlier. Of course, the actors you work with are so important here. I have actors who work with me. Were all on a journey, so its not about just my vision and my voice. WES: You often work with a regular group of actors at the Romea theatre in Barcelona. Youve used a repertory of performers to stage both Macbeth in Catalan and Castilian-Spanish and Threepenny Opera in Castilian-Spanish in 2002-03. Here too you are returning to work with George Anton with whom youd collaborated in Life is a Dream. He was also your assistant director on the Castilian-Spanish version of Life is a Dream, which was staged in 2000. CB: Whenever I stage a piece I am only one part of the production. Its always a team effort that brings together the designers, assistant director, lighting designer and of course the actors. George Anton is my favourite actor. Hes my alterego on stage. People always think that its because we are both bald, but thats not the reason! I didnt watch the production on opening night and George came up to me after Act 4 and told me that he was trying new things in response to the audience. And thats wonderful because its evidence of an actor who is working with the audience. Hes discovering things 75

and isnt scared to try something new. Hes always willing to change things. George is effectively my captain in the company. With the actors you always have to ensure that the extreme situations of Hamlet or Life is a Dream are credible to an audience. Its as if this might be us. WES: There is this sense of the audience as confidantes in the production, co-conspirators who Hamlet embroils in the games of deception that mark out the play. This is a play about deception and masking and you realize these motifs in highly visual ways through the production, often through a recourse to dramatic lighting effects that seem to suggest an influence of anti-realist film directors like David Lynch and a heightened, highly physical performance style. CB: Everybody has to work with a high level of energy. There is an investment in the project and this involves a willingness to try out other theatrical registers. Theatre is not like real life. Im not anti-realist but that which is understood to be realist theatre belongs in the past century and not in the present one. I think that actor-audience interrelations are the most important thing. You cant pretend theyre not there. WES: This production of Hamlet involves both dramaturgical reworking and a clear scenic location. Youve played around with the order of the play, relocated certain scenes and speeches: To be or not to be, for example, is addressed by Hamlet to Polonius corpse that hes slumped into a chair opposite him. You take this epic sprawling world and position it within what seems to be ostensibly a single location, its almost as if youve reframed the Bards epic narrative within the classical unities of time and place. CB: My style has evolved. I dont do Shakespeare the way that I first approached it fifteen years ago. Ive tried the epic approach in the past. When I staged King John in 1995 it was epic, in an open setting. Now however, I think you have to be specific in locating these plays. So I think it works well if you have a contrast between the text and a very specific world on the stage. You have to be clear about the world you want to convey to an audience. A lot of productions arent clear. They recite the text but the environment and costumes are a mixture of modern and the old-fashioned and youre not sure as an audience whether its now or

not now or sometime in the past that isnt too precise. Ive done this in the past. But now Ive moved towards specificity. Partly this has to do with a sense that Shakespeare was specific. That he was working in a context where the audience and actors knew what was going on, where even with the historical plays, he was dealing with the politicians of his period. You have to ask yourself questions about what the context of the plays is. So with Hamlet, I asked myself what a monarchy means now, especially in Europe. And a royal family today is splashed all over the pages of celebrity magazines like Hello!. And reading Hello! I began to see the microcosm of the court. I wanted the Royal Family of Elsinore to inhabit the world we recognize from Hello! magazine. At the beginning of rehearsals I wanted to try for a very political reading of the play but then I began to realize that to do this Id have to have Fortinbras as an American general coming in at the end with a particularly cynical comment (as Fortinbras language is). But I felt that this was in the newspapers on a daily basis and this might actually prove too specific. Then I really considered that this is a play about lies and deceptions. This is obviously the terrain of politicians but not exclusive to them. So it became about a family who are governed by political intrigues. This is a family psycho-drama; theyre lying to each other all the time. Its like Montaigne said, to philosophise is to learn to die. This is what the piece is about. Its talking about all the things we ask ourselves when were alone. The speeches are so difficult to understand but thats part of what makes them so fantastic. WES: Of course Hamlet is a political play and you provide an acutely political reading but this is balanced by a marked concentration on establishing the court as a familial milieu. This is a domestic unit at war with itself. CB: Hamlet is, for me, a piece that works on three levels: the familial, the political and the philosophical. I wanted to arrive at the political through the family. Shakespeare was in a privileged position, he belongs, like Cervantes to the last generation of the Renaissance and to the first generation of the baroque. Its about watching man walking into darkness. This production is about the corruption of the body, which means death. When I started to think about the production I had a lot of political 76

images in my mind of the corruption of the contemporary world but I think that this is something that the audience dont need to see so directly from my reading; so instead I came to the political through the philosophical and the familial. Hamlet is a huge piece. Its like Don Quijote. When youre directing the play you have to lose things. Its impossible to be as big as the piece. My work has three steps. The first is researchan investigation of the play; I always feel that its as if Im at university again preparing a thesis. The second step is about translating that to an audience now. This is where I begin the work with the teamassistant director, designers. The third step brings the actors in. We have to remember that the most important thing in theatre is the actors; theyre more important than directors; they can do the piece without me. Its always a 50/50 process. I have a certain set of specific images in my mind; sometimes they work, sometimes they dont. But whatever happens theyre always part of the process of creating these images. Its the same in opera as in theatre. I expect my singers to perform and to ask the same questions and take the same risks as actors. Ive recently staged Il Trovatore at Hanover State Opera and this is a piece about death. Verdi was obsessive about death and the horrors of death. Im not interested in masking things in pretty costumes. Im not interested in providing a staging that audiences partly sleep through. With La Traviata Verdi spoke about provoking an audience. It was a response to being judged for living with Guiseppina Strepponi who was seen as a whore because they were living together and not married. Sometimes you see La Traviata and you dont realize that shes a prostitute or that shes dying from TB. There might be the odd cough in there but its certainly not tuberculosis. Im not saying that mine is the only way to do it. But you need to be very careful that youre not just sanitizing the opera or play, making it about beautiful people suffering sumptuously. Thats a betrayal. I really didnt want to talk about theatre in this production. The references Shakespeare makes to theatreas with the beginning of Act 3 when Hamlet is lecturing the actors on how to produce playsare specific to his period. I also have a prejudice in not really liking productions that talk about theatre; it all seems rather self-obsessed. Even when I was staging the play within the play, which is an essential part of the action, I didnt want to

Diane Fletcher as Gertrude and George Costigan as Claudius in Calixto Bieitos production of Hamlet, for the Edinburgh International Festival with Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Photo: Robert Day

make a statement on theatre and what it must be. I wanted to use it to lift the energy of the piece. Hamlet is constantly interrupting the actors, telling them what to do, so I thought why doesnt he play his mother?. It liberates the character from the clichs of twentieth century stagings. Thats important otherwise youre just giving the same reading or variations on the same reading. You need a Hamlet for every generation. The audience has to connect between their lives and whats on stage. The opening night of each Hamlet must feel like you are seeing the play for the first time. Its like Picasso painting Las Meninas.. Hes not repeating Velzquezs painting. Glenn Goulds Bach Goldberg Variations dont sound like anybody elses. Is as if youre hearing the piece for the first time. Hamlet says that theatre is the mirror of life, and I think that is true. This is what I try to do with my opera and my theatre. Its not a provocation in a negative way. I am only trying to provoke thought and emotion. WES: Part of the way you seem to do this 77

is through musical underscoring. Music sets the mood for the piece and provides a commentary on the action, sometimes working in counterpoint with the musicality of Shakespeares language. Youve talked about David Lynch being an influence on the look of this production. Indeed lighting designer Rick Fisher has spoken about the sharp, stabbing types of light redolent of a David Lynch film that you suggested to him. But the musical accompaniment also reminded me of Lynchs work. There are also references to Buuel in the production Gertrudes piano playing during Ophelias suicide is clearly a nod to his 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The middle-class keep on performing their rituals of social propriety and decorum even as the society crumbles around them. CB: Buuel is always there, in everything I do. The pianist plays on while the world falls apart. Music was very intuitive. I wanted a pianist from the beginning in the production. I wanted to use very different styles of music all played live. The first song came from my assistant

director, Carlos Wagner. I needed a song to open the action. And He aint heavy, hes my brother just seemed right Claudius obviously cant sing Im a killer. This song seemed to set the right tone. The music was used to lift the text, to provide an extra energy to take you to another part of the piece. The music often acts as a contrast with more brutal moments of action. It sometimes underlines points also. Its about creating an atmosphere with a lot of different sounds. I wanted to create a sense of anguish. Anguish is a lot of what the piece is about. WES: And yet the music also interestingly relaxes an audience. Im thinking in particular of the opening here with Horatio providing some easy listening for an audience. Its as if were entering a nightclub and not a theatre. The opening is very soothing. He presides over the court and as well come to realize at the end, seems to oversee its very

disintegration. CB: Yes, I was trying to relax the audience. Audiences sometimes come to see my productions with a whole series of preconceptions; that the work is aggressive, angry, violent. I wanted to go into the piece very softly and smoothly. If the audience is relaxed it can listen better. Thats what the opening was all about. WES: And did you always know that your pianist would be Horatio? CB: No. But I always knew that the pianist would be an important character in the drama. He would be like a surreal butler. Then it came to me that Horatio should be the pianist because hes the audience. Indeed hes the imagination and the music. Directing theatre is like life. You need a lot of work and a flicker of intuition.

78

Belgian Theatre Making a Comeback: Four Plays and an Opera

David Willinger Following a somewhat slack season last year, the Belgian theatre appears to have rebounded in a big way. Everywhere is evident the consummation, whether conscious or not, of Antoine Vitezs dream of an elitist theatre for the masses. One fine example is that of De Toneelhuis, the Flemish national theatre of Antwerp. There, the director, Luk Perceval, formerly co-founder of the brilliant experimental company, De Blauwe Maandag, was put in charge one of the three principal national theatres of Flandersthe former K.N.S. What had been the seat for a traditional state repertory company, became a secure sandbox n which Perceval and his cohorts were given free reign to try this and that. At first taken aback by the companys audacity, both artistic and moral (dabbling in such dangerous subjects as child pornography and flying in the face of far-right values gaining ascendance in Antwerp), the former K.N.S. public, essentially a middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-brow consituency, has little by little become innured to bare stages, gutted texts, and naked bodies. But that is to put what is unquestionably a marvelous state of affairs in a falsley negative light. In fact, the aging, traditional theatre-going crowd in the gorgeously renovated Bourla Theatre now rubs elbows with a hip younger contingent, and both seem well pleased with what theyre being offered as theatre; in fact, both are getting their moneys worth, seeing works by the best contemporary Flemish playwrights, Peter Verhelst and Tom Lanoye, as well as savorous radical collisions with the classics. I had the good fortune to see Stefan Percevals (brother of Luk) revisioning of Peer Gynt. The sprawling 19th century episodic drama which Ibsen wrote is here reduced to an hour and fifteen minute reverie, which is yet possessed of extraordinary narrative density. For anyone who has seen five or six traditional Peer Gynt s wouldnt take umbrage at the liberty this riff on the modern

Stefan Percevals production of Peer Gynt at De Toneelhuis. Photo: courtesy De Toneelhuis.

79

Stefan Percevals production of Peer Gynt at De Toneelhuis. Photo: courtesy De Toneelhuis.

classic represents. A quintessential Peer, looking an imp, a tinker, and a dreamer, laboriously drags his mothers dying body across the forestage on a foam rubber mat. She, with heavily miked voice, drones her monologue as he pulls her. We become aware that the entire stage floor is flooded with water, so Peer slowly picks his way, slopping the whole time. The lethargic rhythm of the movement, the pauses, the emptiness of the stage, and the disembodiment of the womans voice recalls less Ibsen than the Beckett of Footfalls or Not I. And in some respects we remain in that world for the duration. Once Peer and his mother have arrived down center, a wedding party commences a stately, measured passage upstage. This lot consists of a marshall with a huge baton, dressed all in black with dark glasses, the bride, a huge, obese woman in flowing white gown, her groom, a fidgety, thin elderly man, and the father of the bride, a bruiser, wearing tie, shoes and socks, but no pants. They advance with painful slowness, and the bride casts many a rueful glance at her own bodice, appearing abashed if not downright put out. What at first glance appears to be a pastoral grouping out of The Seventh Seal, eventually is revealed 80

to be the stuff of nightmares. The Father regales the others with a list of expenses and prices incurred for the wedding (cf. Schitz later). On several occasions, the procession comes to a stop and the groom, orates one or another elaborate, lengthy sick joke, one about Ali Baba in a desert oasis, another about a foul-mouthed parakeet. The anecdotes, which are disproportionately lengthy, are yet brilliantly related by this disfunctional character, a mass of nervous tics, in a heavy accent from the Flemish Campine thus quaint and primitive. The jokes, cribbed who knows from the internet, relate very obliquely to episodes in Ibsens drama The wedding leader shakes Peers hand, but the shaking escalates into a kind of torture as Peer is repeatedly dragged down into the water by the stronger hand-shaker. Peer ultimately silently challenges the bride to a mating dance of sexual one-upsmanship. They strip off parts of their clothing and revel in flinging them around in the water in dionysian frenzy. The bride, who we now see has a mature beard growing on her second chin, is a male actor with a high voice. This surprise is one of several transformations where, as in a nightmare, when something looked one way, it turns out to be another. A voice we presumed to be emanating from a

loudspeaker turns out to be coming out of the mouth of the leader of the procession; his mouth was hidden by the shadow of his giant staff. Such simple theatrical sleight of hand effectively achieves the transformational surprises we experience in dreams. The father of the bride has his own erotic moment with his daughter, and she, recuperated by the wedding party, denounces Peer in a short shrill self-justification. The wedding party, that runs rectangles around Peer, 4 times in all (he sometimes managing to halt its progress, they once stepping over his and his mothers sodden bodies, etc.), finally leaves him to complete attendance on the soggy death of his mother. So Perceval encapsulates the Norwegian classic as a struggle to bury the mother even as sexual temptations and violent ambivalence assail the dreamer of this lugubrious task. This Peer is essentially a drama of separation. One could do a lengthy comparison with the original text to uncover the sources of Percevals intentionally distorted and compressed version. One would discover that the mother, Ases death scene actually occurs in Act III, scene 4; that it is very much dialogue between her and Peer, and not a monologue; that the bride is Inge, whom, on being asked by the groom to liberate his reluctant bride from the locked room where shed hidden away at the wedding, Peer abducts and bespoils; that there are many scenes at sea (hence the water) and scenes in the Middle-Eastern desert, hence the joke about Ali Baba; that many birds are mentioned, but not a parakeet. The French-language Thtre National, provisionally at the Palace Theatre until they can move into their new permanent quarters, is playing host to lEnvers du Thtres production of Kasimir and Karoline by Odon Von Horvath, directed by Michael Delaunoy. This company from Tournai seems also devoted to the twin aims of building bridges of accessibility and insisting on great theatrical sophistication. They are aided and abetted by the innate theatricality of the Palace Thtre, which is infinitely more immediate than was the old Thtre National, boasting a raked wooden stage that actively moves in on the audience space. Delaunay, using a different method than Perceval, sticks faithfully to the authors text, illuminating this wonder of Neue Sachlichkeit from within. He makes the most of the carnival setting, using carnival lights liberally both on the set and in the costumes, making the most of the rhythmic pulsation of saturated pools of color to support dramatic 81

moments, and liberating the actors to be dressed like and perform with the abandon and pathetic farce of clowns. Delaunoy has a great pictorial gift and culls his imagery from great artists from the time of Von Horvath who also mirror the spirit of the play. The narrator character is realized as a cartoon from Georg Grosz, where the German caricaturist seats a soldier mutilated in the Great War, in a spiffy, pointy side-car, as though the cells of the human and mechanical bodies had merged. Later on, traps pop open in the stage floor and Ensor-like masks appear to watch the various sideshows and mock the passions of Kaspar and Karoline. Kaspar, a small-town loser (dressed to resemble the French rock star, Rnaud), is escorting Karoline to the fair, where, in an access of unwarranted jealousy, he provokes her into taking up with other men. Kaspars pique is aided an abetted by his misogynist buddy Franz (gotten up like Elvis, crammed into overtight pants and boots, with thick black pommaded hair cantilevered over his brow), another loser, but one with more self-assurance. Franz not only abuses his own girlfriend, but convinces Kaspar that he can get along very well without Karoline. The latter takes up with a dorky clerk, but also with the clerks industrialist boss, who springs for many rides on a horsey for Karoline, but clearly intending to cash in his chips for sexual favors before the night is over. Delaunoy establishes a kind of Brechtian style with direct address to the audience and a selfcritical outpouring of emotional moments that work well. Von Horvaths play dramatizes how romantic relations among the poorer classes are poisoned, even foredoomed, by the skewed economic set-up. There is a 5-piece brass band that plays pleasingly discordant music, omnipresent in a large pit carved out of the center-stage area. Often an actor will open wide a cloak their wearing, revealing an enormous collection of sundry objects sequestered inside, and stand there representing the upstage wall of a fairground tent. In this way, without changing the set, a variety of locales in the fair are evoked and the stage reconfigured. It must be admitted that this show has the weakness common to francophone Belgian theatre the actors push too hard in their moments of rage and brio, which undermines their authenticity and diminishes the possibility of the empathy Von Horvath has built in to his only somewhat Brechtian masterpiece. At the Flemish state theatre in Brussels, the K.V.S., is also in between permanent homes, and

l'Envers du Thtre's production of Odon Von Horvaths Kasimir et Karoline, at Thtre National in Brussels. Photo: courtesy l'Envers du Thtre and Thtre National.

is provisionally housed in De Bottelarij (a real live bottling plant) where I saw a rendition of Schitz, a recent work by an Israeli playwright who died young in 1999, Hanoch Levin, and directed by David Strosberg. The play, named after the family under scrutiny, is a four character social comedy which includes a father, mother, daughter of marriagable ageall obeseand a Romanian suitor. The play, a critique of materialism, follows a schematic courtship, marriage, separation of the daughter and her beau from the parents lives, neardeath of the father, real death of the son-in-law. The production is set on an absolutely bare platform. There is a door by which the characters squeeze through to make their entrances, but after which goes unused, and four chairs. Thats it. The characters address each other, but just as often address the audience directly, unashamedly revealing their most avaricious and rapacious motives, of which there are many. The mother wants her daughter to marry so she can have grandchildren. The father wants his daughter to marry so he can have less of a financial burden. When the suitor arrives, he makes no secret of his lust after the fathers part interest in a steamroller, and negotiates himself a nice hunk of it, along with many perks, including an apartment and car. 82

His lust for the daughter, which is vivid enough, can be sacrificed if any of his conditions go unmet. Once married, the daughter, who has after all been spoiled and pampered by her parents, effectively curses them and bids them good riddance, cementing her triumphal departure from their society. She also dangles the promise of a suitor in Los Angeles before the mother, who would love to profit by the possibility, but for the obstacle of a living husband. The unloved and unlovable father eacts respect from all based on the amount of money he has forked over for each of them. The play hits its stride when the father chokes on a coveted sausage (he is passionate about sausage), but just as the family, leaning over the corpse, prepares to exult over his demise, he vomits up the sausage into their faces. His resurrection is undercut by a debilitating stroke. Now that he is useless, the wife prepares for that life in Los Angeles and the son-in-law builds steadily on that original part-share in the steamroller to where is now the proud owner of many steamrollers. The son-in-law, however, dies in place of the father, the father recovers, the daughter informs her mother there never was a suitor in Los Angeles, and the play ends with the father unexpectedly taking over all the dead mans assets. He who was everybodys cash

cow, in the end, outwits them all. Evidently this display of 4 distasteful, characters driven by the most bestial of human drives, for whom the most elevated moments of life are instance of reducing to their basest, most material components, is an unflattering image of the Israeli middle class, if not the international middle class. The actors maintain a fresh, even appealing, playing style so that even if we despise their characters, we wind up liking them a lot, and they certainly succeeded in winning over the K.V.S. audiencewhich was packed. The director has added no personal touches, only stripped away; and yet there was a satisfying evening of theatre in its most elemental form. While these elite theatres for the masses take giant steps forward, the glamorous Monnaie Opera House, put on the international map by Roland Mortier, whose adventurous policies in repertoire and theatrical innovation are being upheld by Bernard Foccroulle, is more taken by masses of upper classes and elite from the European Community. In any case, it was on opening night. The occasion was the premire of a revival of

Robert Wilsons production of Glucks Alceste , which was a co-production that originated at the Thtre du Chtelet in Paris. This opera had all the brightness and sharp edges of a genuine prmire. The struck me as extremely restrained and tasteful, and Wilson has mined the play for its essential classicism and sharpened that classicism with a contemporary edge, all the while evincing absolute respect for the baroque world. There is a limited palate of blues for the cyc and red for Alceste . When she is symbolically separated by her sad destiny from other humans a transluscent drop, whose rough brush strokes of its black and white vertical stripes are reminiscent of the monumental Gordon Craigs stage designs, comes down. Otherwise, a series of equally monumental, minimalistic black columns provide definition for the chorus of dancing maenids. A threedimensional die hovers overhead, revolving in perpetual motion. In each of the four acts, the die appears in an everlarger variant in proportion to the deepening level of tension, till by the fourth act it occupies so much space that it is only partially visible and can no longer move. Alcestes destiny,

Robert Wilsons Thtre du Chtelet production of Glucks Alceste at Monnaie Opera House. Photo: courtesy Thtre du Chtelet and Monnaie Opera House.

83

which had been in the balance, has been decided by she herself, and all that remains is for her to descend to the underworld in sacrifice for Admte. This simple theatrical idea is extremely effective. Around these minimalistic scenic elements, the characters move from one hieratic pose to another. Either they move slowly in counterpoint to the tripping music, or they stay still. When the principals sing, they strike a pose, reminiscent more of Egyptian statuery than Greek, and when they hit a pause for a breath, yank their arms around into a suddenly assumed new pose. Many of these poses come back and contain, or seem to contain, fascinating hermetic meanings. Wilson saves his greatest scenic voodoo for the climax, in which two successive dei ex machina appear. The first, a blackgarbed Infernal God, shoots up from below the

stage, his fifty foot long robe trailing after him, making him look like a poltergeist hanging in the air. Once his aria is done, white-clad Apollo descends from above, directly over his head, thus seeming to force the priest back down into the earth. The singers are absolutely comfortable with what Wilson has gotten them to do, and the charming Katarina Karnus, particularly, as Alceste gives an extraordinarily powerful and memorable performance of great purity and conviction. In all four production I saw, the performers shared a tendency to incarnate their roles and stand outside them as commentators. Brechts theories for alienated acting are being happily applied and adapted, and the result is far more entertaining than students of theatre history might have imagined.

Robert Wilsons Thtre du Chtelet production of Glucks Alceste at Monnaie Opera House. Photo: courtesy Thtre du Chtelet and Monnaie Opera House.

84

Contributors
ERIK ABBOTT is a student in the Ph. D. in Theatre Program at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Managing Editor for Western European Stages. MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. BARRY DANIELS is a retired professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French Romantic Theatre. His book, Le Dcor de thtre lpoque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la Comdie-Franause, 1799-1848, was recently published by the Bibliothque nationale de France. He is currently working on a study of the Thtre de la Rpublique, 1791-1799. MARIA M. DELGADO is Reader in Drama & Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London. She is co-editor of the Routledge journal Contemporary Theatre Review. Her most recent publication, Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the TwentiethCentury Spanish Stage, was published by Manchester University Press in 2003. STEVE EARNEST is an assistant professor of Theatre (acting/directing) at California State University, San Bernardino. He has previously published articles and reviews in WES, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theater Journal , The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Symposium. His book, dealing with the Hochschule fr Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, was published by Mellen Press in 1999. WILLIAM GRANGE is a professor and director in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Nebraska where he has done research into German language theatre in America. Awarded a Fulbright Grant to teach at the University in Cologne in the summers of 2000 and 2001, he was also distinguished with the Mellon Prize from the University of Texas. His books include Partnership in the German Theatre and Comedy in the Weimar Republic. ALLAN GRAUBARD is a poet, playwright and critic. His last theatre work, For Alejandra, made its New York and Washington, DC premieres, summer 2002, and its European premiere at the Karanetena Performance Festival, Dubrovnik, summer 2002, with a more recent performance at the Sibiu International Theater Festival, Sibiu, Romania, summer 2003. He has written for the journal Slavic & Eastern European Performance, and appears frequently in literary and cultural journals internationally.

85

THOMAS IRMER is a journalist, writer and scholar in Berlin, whose latest book is Die BhnenrepublikTheater in the GDR. He has also created a film together with Matthias Schmidt. JANELLE REINELT is Associate Dean and Professor of Drama in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at University of California Irvine. Additionally, she is President of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and Vice President for Research and Publications of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is the former Editor of Theatre Journal. Her books include After Brecht: British Epic Theatre, Crucibles of Crisis: Performance and Social Change, Critical Theory and Performance (with Joseph Roach), The Performance of Power (with Sue-Ellen Case), and The Cambridge Campanion to Modern British Women Playwrights (with Elaine Aston). Her current project is Public Performances: Race and Nation in the Theatre of Our Time. JOHN ROUSE teaches in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, San Diego, and in the Ph.D. program offered jointly by UCSD and UC, Irvine. He has written widely on German theatre for publications ranging from Western European Stages to Theater der Zeit. LYDIA STRYK completed a Ph.D in theatre at The Graduate Center of CUNY. She is a playwright and teacher. She lives between Berlin and New York and is currently teaching playwriting at Hunter College. Her play, The House of Lily, (Lilys Haus), is now in repertory at Schauspiel Essen. JOAN TEMPLETON is Professor of English at Long Island University, her book chronicling the women in Henrik Ibsens life and art, Ibsens Women, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 and has recently been issued in paperback. The author of 25 articles in refereed journals, she has received two Fulbright Grants and has been named National Endowment for the Humanities Research Scholar, and American Scandinavian Foundation Research Scholar. She is president of The Ibsen Society of America and editor of Ibsen News and Comment . DAVID WILLINGER was the recipient of the Prize of Dissemination of Literature from the Belgian Service of Literature and Letters. He has edited five anthologies of Belgian plays in English translation, one of which, Theatrical Gestures of Belgian Modernism , was republished by Peter Lang in 2002. His articles about Belgian theatre have been published widelyin The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama , Symposium, and many others. He has directed plays by Belgian playwrights Maeterlinck, Ghelderode, and Kalisky, and in 2000, staged his own adaptation of Paul Willems novel The Wound, at LaMama ETC.

86

Robert Wilsons production of Leonce und Lena at the Berliner Ensemble [see page 35]. Photo: courtesy Berliner Ensemble

87

88

89

90

91

92