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WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 24, Number 1 Spring 2012

EditorMarvin Carlson

Contributing Editors

Christopher BalmeMiriam D'AponteMarion P. HoltGlenn LoneyDaniele Vianello

Harry CarlsonMaria M. DelgadoBarry DanielsYvonne ShaferPhyllis Zatlin

Editorial Staff

Alexandra (Sascha) Just,Managing Editor

Kalle Westerling, Editorial AssistantBenjamin Gillespie, Circulation Manager

Staffan Valdemar HolmPhoto: Sebastian Hoppe

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2012ISSN # 1050-1991

Professor Daniel Gerould (in memoriam), Director of PublicationsFrank Hentschker, Executive Director

Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration

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To the ReaderIn this issue we mark the passing of three long-time associates and supporters of this journal. Two tributes

are posted below, that of Rosette Lamont, a founding editor and frequent contributor, and Jean Decock, a long-timereporter on the Off Festival in Avignon. We also note with deep sadness the loss of our colleague Daniel Gerould,editor of our companion journal, Slavic and East European Performance. Before his death, Professor Gerould

began negotiations with another outstanding scholar of Eastern European theatre, Allan Kuharski of SwarthmoreCollege, to assume editorship of SEEP, but insufcient funding and staff support prevented those plans frommoving forward.

The editors of WES, which has also experienced funding cutbacks in recent years, have opened discussionswith Professor Kuharski about combining the two journals, so that the important work of both can continue. Asidefrom nancial considerations, this would also acknowledge the fact that Europe, clearly divided into an East and aWest a quarter of a century ago when these two journals were founded, is now a very different and far more uniedand interlocked continent, and a combined journal would much more clearly reect contemporary cultural reality.We hope that within the next year we will have organized this new structure. We will, of course, keep our faithfulreaders informed as the situation develops and hope that they will be as supportive of us in the future as they have

been in the past.In the meantime, WES will continue its current orientation, and we welcome, as always, interviews

and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possiblecontributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate

Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, or mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

Western European Stages is supported by a generous grant from the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies.

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Journals are available online from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstractsvia 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 ofLearned Journals.

Rosette C. Lamont 1927-2012

Rosette Lamont was one of the foundingeditorial board members of Western EuropeanStages, and a frequent contributor on contemporary

productions in Paris during the rst twelve yearsof the journal, when she contributed over twenty-ve witty, insightful, and informed essays. She alsowrote regularly for the New York Times, TheaterWeek, and The New York Theatre Wire. A leadingscholar on the post-war French theatre, she was theauthor of two books on Eugene Ionesco, of whomshe was a personal friend. She received many awardsand decorations in both the United States and inFrance. She was a brilliant speaker and a mentor totwo generations of students, rst at Hunter Collegeand the CUNY Graduate Center, and subsequentlyat Sarah Lawrence College. Rosette Lamont leaves

behind a tremendous legacy as a teacher, a scholar,and a critic.

Marvin Carlson

Jean Decock, 1928-2011

Who can ever forget Jean Decock, seatedin the front row of theatres in New York City, at theAvignon Festival, in Paris, and anywhere else hehappened to be? With his white hair pulled back in a

ponytail, taking copious notes with his tiny pen andclearly engrossed in what was happening on stage,he was always a gure of note. Even in his seventiesand early eighties, he would see at least two shows aday, a concert, or a lm. And in Avignon, I marveledat his ability to crisscross the town on foot, in the

broiling heat, as he sought out the latest OFF Festivalshows (at least four a day.)

Along with his love of theatre and lm,Jean was known for "his kindness, his culture, hischarm, and his humanity," to quote Regis Philippi,the owner of the hotel where Jean stayed duringevery Avignon Festival. He will be greatly missed

by all who knew him and shared his enthusiasm forthe arts.

Philippa Wehle

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Table of Contents

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Roy Kift

Brian Rinehart

Marvin Carlson

LeGrace Benson

David Willinger

Maria M. Delgado

Joan Templeton

Phyllis Zatlin

Steve Earnest

Charlott Neuhauser

Volume 24, Number 1

Going Europe...The Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus 2011-2012

One, Two, Three, and Already Over:The Theatre of Uli Jckle

Berlin in Spring

Report from London, January, 2012

Guy and IvoTwo Directors, Two Cities, Two Intersecting Paths

Barcelona Theatre 2012: Mismatched Couples, Capitalism under theScalpel, and the Ghosts of the Past

Frank Castorf'sLa Dame aux Camliasat the Odon,Paris, January 7- February 4, 2012

Parisians Love to Laugh

Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2011

The BibleNow a Play in Three Acts

The Index to Western European Stages, Volume 23

Contributors

SPRING 2012

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William Shakespeare'sHamlet, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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The Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus (Ds-seldorf Playhouse) has three main stages: the main

auditorium and the studio (both at Gustaf-Grnd-gens-Platz in the city center), and the Young People'sTheatre a few kilometers away in a converted fac-tory building in the suburb of Rath. It has a total staffof over 300, and an ensemble of forty-four actors.At the moment it enjoys an annual grant of around21,000,000 to cover a total budget of 25,000,000 .

The origins of the Dsseldorf Schauspiel-haus go back to 1747 when a foundry in the citywas converted into a theatre building in honor ofthe local Prince, Karl Theodor. From 1794 to 1815Dsseldorf was in Napoleon's hands, but when itreverted to Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm II., thetheatre was handed over to the city in 1818, and ac-cordingly named the Dsseldorf Stadttheater, or Mu-nicipal Theatre. Its initial director was Josef Derossi,an actor from Austria. But it was only after 1834,when the direction of the theatre was taken over bya lawyer and writer named Karl Leberecht Immer-mann that the theatre began to gain a reputation foritself. In 1873 work began on a new theatre buildingnear the city's central park, the "Hofgarten," and thenew building was opened two years later. From nowon, however, the Stadttheater was mainly dedicatedto opera productions.

The Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus wasfounded as a private theatre on 16 June 1904 bythe actress Louise Dumont and the director GustavLindemannthe two later marriedand less than ayear later they inaugurated a new theatre building(audience capacity: 950) with a production of Heb-

bel's biblical tragedyJudith, written in 1840. At thetime the city of Dsseldorf was expanding fast andalready boasted a nationally renowned Academyof Arts. In the nineteenth century its music life had

been enriched by the presence of Robert Schumannand Felix Mendelssohn, who also conducted the cityorchestra. Dumont and Lindemann had ambitious

aims to give the city a similarly high theatrical repu-tation by presenting avant-garde productions at thecutting edge of modern theatre, and it was not long

before the theatre began to earn a name for itselfwell beyond the immediate city boundaries. Con-temporary dramatists were engaged as dramaturgs,a fortnightly magazine Masken was launched, andSunday matinees were staged, one of which featur-ing a reading by Herman Hesse in 1909. Not content

with this, Louise Dumont set up an acting schoolattached to the theatre. In the 1920s, however, the

theatre fell into nancial difculties, partly becauseof its challenging program and the more popularrepertoire presented by the Stadttheater, and partly

because of the general economic situation. Aftera break in productions between 1922 and 1924 itsexistence was nally secured with the help of a"society of friends." Financial problems once againcame to the fore at the start of the 1930s, and Lin-demann was forced to nd a partner in the region.But the collaboration with the Cologne MunicipalTheatre only lasted for one season (1932-33). In1932, Louise Dumont died at the age of seventy,and one year later, Gustav Lindemann, who wasJewish, was forced out of ofce by the Nazis. TheSchauspielhaus was integrated into the DsseldorfMunicipal Theatre, and Lindemann withdrew fromtheatre life completely. Fourteen years later, duringthe Second World War, the municipal theatre wasalmost completely destroyed by allied bombs andhad to be completely rebuilt after the war. In 1947,the direction of the municipal theatre was taken over

by Gustaf Grndgens, who had himself been bornin the city and was one of Dumont's former actingstudents. On 10 April 1951, theatre productions wereseparated from opera and transferred to an existing

theatre building in Jahnstrasse. From now on thiswas to be known as the Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus.During his eight years as artistic director (Intendant)Grndgens took the reputation of the theatre to fur-ther heights. His own production of Goethe's "Faust"(in which he also played the main role) has gonedown in history as one of the legendary productionsin the German theatre and it was even recorded ongramophone records.

After Grndgens departure for Hamburg in1955 his successor Karl-Heinz Stroux continued hiswork in a similar tradition with a company whichfor a time included such great names as Elisabeth

Bergner, Fritz Kortner, Maria Wimmer, and PaulaWesely. In 1964, Stroux's production of Ionesco'sThe King Dies!was invited to the Berlin Theatertref-fen as one of the most outstanding productions of theyear. By now the theatre in Jahnstrasse was provinginadequate for the job, and plans were made for anentirely new building. The current Schauspielhauson Gustaf-Grndgens-Platz opened on 16 January1970 with a production of Georg Bchner'sDanton's

Going EuropeThe Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus 2011-12

Roy Kift

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Deathto an invited audience only. Mass protests atthe exclusive nature of the event ended in police in-tervention, twenty arrests, and several people beingtaken to the hospital. Stroux was followed as Intend-ant by Ulrich Brecht (1972), Gnther Beelitz (1976),and Volker Canaris (1986). With the arrival of AnnaBadora in 1996 the reputation of the Schauspielhaus

began to decline. Ten years later she was succeededby Amlie Niermeyer, who in turn left to take overthe theatre department of the Mozarteum Universityin Salzburg in summer 2011. Niemeyer's reign had

been nondescript, to say the least, and the city fa-thers were desperate to restore the reputation of theGrndgens era. By now however, Dsseldorf was nolonger considered a leading address for top Germandirectors. Thus, it was that they turned their attentionabroad for possible candidates.

Their solution was Staffan Valdemar Holm,the former artistic director of the Royal DramaticTheatre in Stockholm. At the rst press conference

to announce his rst season, Holm declared that itwas his aim to orientate the theatre more towardsEurope. With his new team of directors, dramaturgs,and actors he aimed to promote both tradition andexperiment. His young directors were to be respon-sible for the experiments and "I shall do the boringstuff" he joked. The new era was to open in Octoberwith a new production ofHamletby Holm himself.

To underline his international ambitions

and introduce new authors and directors who wereto work under his aegis, the season opened with a

program of guest performances from Tokyo, Berlin,Santiago de Chile, Weimar, Antwerp and Brussels.One of Dsseldorf's new team of directors was

Nurkan Erpulat, who had been responsible for theimmensely successful Crazy Blood [WES, 23. 3,Fall 2011]. His entertaining review Clashfeatured agroup of young amateur actors from Berlin who haddevised their own scenes in which they questionedthe relevance of traditional German values in an in-tercultural society shaped by religious diversity. An-other new young director Nora Schlcker presentedher Weimar production of Sartre's Dirty Hands.There was a crazy trio of pieces by Toshiki Okadafrom Japan; a very wordy two part evening calledVilla/Discurso on the traumatic fate of Pinochet'storture victims in Chile, written and directed byGuillermo Caldern; and a truly magnicent pieceof theatre from Holland called Sunken Red.

Based on an autobiographical novel byJeroen Brouwers's Sunken Redplay tells of the closerelationship between a young boy and his mother,more particularly of the traumatic years they spenttogether in a women's concentration camp during theSecond World War in Japan. When the play openswe see an old man picking obsessively at his toenails alone in a room: shades of Beckett's Krapp.Indeed, there is a grotesque thread running through

Dsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Photo: Courtesy of Roy Kift.

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the play which continually threatens to turn tragedyinto farce. The solo character, whose name we neverlearn, recounts in painful detail the horric experi-ences he endured in Japanese captivity with hismother, his aunt, and grandmother. The long agonyof hunger and torture appeared to have come to an

end when the Japanese capitulated to the oncomingallies and wagons full of fresh food arrived in thecamp: only to be brutally destroyed by the Japanese

before the eyes of the starving prisoners. Back home,the shattered mother nds it impossible to care forher son and has him sent away to a school. Theseagonizing experiences affect his whole life and theresulting irrational resentment against his mothermakes it impossible for him to have any satisfactoryrelationship with other women. Trapped within hislonely psychological and physical cell he relives allthe hatred he has suffered and feels. But what beginsas a settlement of a debt with his mother ends ca-thartically with an urgent declaration of love. Sunken

Redproved to be one of the most amazing theatre ex-periences I have had. Indeed, it was so powerful thatI returned the next day to gaze again in awe at themasterly performancein English!of the Dutchactor Dirk Roothooft as the tormented victim. At adiscussion after the rst night Roothooft revealedthat he has been performing the play for years, also

in French and Spanish, but never in England andonly once in New York where it received mixed re-views. Perhaps it has developed since then: but thenagain perhaps European audiences have a differentcultural receptive framework for such subject mat-ter. If you think the theatrical world is dominated by

English and American actors, grab a chance to catchthis show and you'll experience one of the best act-ing performances in recent history.

Holm originally intended to open his Ds-seldorf era with his own production of Shakespeare's

Hamlet. However, he had scarcely begun rehearsalson the play than he was hit by a bombshell: renova-tions to the main house, which had been going onfor almost a year, would not be completed on time.Hence the October opening would have to be post-

poned until the start of November. Thus shows in theYoung People's Theatre and the Studio would haveto kick off the season. Whether deliberately or bycoincidence, both the opening shows were adapta-tions of novels. The Danish writer Janne Teller's

book, Nothingis Important, has been describedas the twenty-rst century equivalent ofLord of the

Flies. It tells of a school class in a country town inDenmark and its reaction to a fellow student, Pierre,who stands up one day and announces that "Noth-ing is important anymore," before walking out of the

Jeroen Brouwers's Sunken Red, directed by Guy Cassiers, Toneelhuis Antwerpen. Photo: Courtesy Dsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.

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school and climbing a tree in his garden from wherehe proceeds to bombard his contemporaries with

provocative statementsand plums. Almost imme-

diately it is clear that the book is both realistic anda parable. The class mates decide to try to prove toPierre that life does indeed have a meaning, and thatthis consists of things we value and love. The prob-lem is how to demonstrate this palpably. The group'snave response consists of each of them having tosacrice an object which is important to them and

building all the objects into a sort of "installation"embodying the concept of meaningfulness. After aninitial attempt to bring along their "valuable" objectsto a deserted old hut in the country, they realize thatthey have to be much more stringent in their sac-rices. What starts harmlessly with favorite comics

soon becomes a hazardous venture whereby certainmembers of the class demand specic sacricesfrom others, for example a brand new bicycle ora pet hamster. The distress of having to submit togroup pressures leads in turn to "revenge" demandswhich become increasingly drastic. Eventually therecomes a point of no return when one of the class

breaks into the local cemetery, opens up the grave ofhis baby brother, and steals the cofn. Another mem-

ber steals a crucix from an old church, someone'sdog is decapitated, a girl has to sacrice her virginity(how is not specied but a blood-stained cloth serves

as evidence), and nally one of the ring-leaders hasto submit to having the top of his index nger cut offbecause this is one he most needs in order to playhis guitar.

Inevitably this nal act of bloody mutila-tion leads to their being discovered, the police movein, and cordon off the "installation" and the class isduly reprimanded. But by now the local press hadgot hold of the story and, when a television reportgoes global, art experts from around the world de-scend on the hut. This culminates in the installation

being greeted as a major work of art and the classagrees to sell it for a seven gure sum to the Museum

of Modern Art in New York. But when the groupconfronts Pierre with their success he can only scoffin contempt at their having sold their meaningfulinstallation so easily. Indeed, their action has only

proved his point: nothing is important. The class isso enraged by his reaction that they fall on him andkill him. By any measure of realism the book fallsapart once the police intervene, because the instal-lation would certainly have been screened off and/

Janne Teller'sNothing, directed by Marco torman. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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or dismantled almost immediately to be used as evi-dence. But it is the parable behind the book whichholds it together, because it embodies a burningquestion for young people today: how to give theirlives a meaning.

Unfortunately neither the ofcially ap-

proved adaptation of the book, nor the productionitself managed to live up to the original. The adapta-tion was stymied from the start by a compulsion tofollow the events and dialogue in the novel almostto the letter, with no attempt to rethink it in possi-

ble theatrical terms. The production aggravated thisfurther by not only discarding the potential horror inthe book but setting the play within the frameworkof an entertaining disco run by Pierre. Thus, far from

being a shadowy distant provocateur, Pierre becamea mocking happy-go-luck DJ. The nal, fatal er-ror in the show was to invite the audience to leavetheir seats at the end to examine more closely theunveiled installation, here a banal piece of artworkwhich inevitably failed to live up to anything wemight have imagined in our heads. If the idea wasto involve the audience more directly in the murderof Pierre, it only succeeded in turning pathos into

bathos. Because of the book's controversial popular-ity in Germany, the adaptationlike Erpulat/Hilje'sCrazy Bloodhas been taken into the repertoire ofmany other theatres throughout the country.

Happily the premiere of Nothingwas fol-lowed shortly after by an impressive production ofFranz Grillparzer's Medea written in 1819 as the

third part of a trilogy entitled the Golden Fleece.Under the skilful direction of Sarantos Zervoulakos,the evening turned out to be one of the highlights ofthe season. Despite the fact that the production wasaimed at young audiences there was no attempt toimpose any directorial tricks: no pop music, discoeffects, or modern text interpolations, nothing butthe text and the story. In the hands of Zervoulakos,the potentially thorny mythical material proved to bea truly original imaginative and gripping theatricalexperience. At the start the audience is confronted

by an empty stage, apart from a large rectangular pitsurrounded by a low wooden frame. Four actors ar-

rive and hoist a huge sail made of thick plastic stripswhich they then move slowly back and forth to cre-ate the sound of wind and the rushing sea. A hose

pipe leading to the pit in front of the sail releasesfog into the air, and for a few minutes with the lightsgoing on and off at regular intervals to indicate the

passing of the days, we are sunk in the atmosphereof wind and cloud and the long journey of Jason andthe Argonauts to the Greek city of Corinth.

Here, after years of exile Jason (AleksandarTesla) and his wife Medea are taken in by KingCreon (Dirk Osig) and the framed pit becomes notonly a metaphor for the self-enclosed royal court

but also a play area for children. Creon looks kindlyon Jason, but prejudiced by tales of Medea's magic

powers and her "barbarian" background he refusesto accept her into his court as an equal, despite herinitial efforts to integrate. Tensions are aggravatedwhen Jason meets up once again with his childhoodsweetheart, Creon's daughter Creusa, who shows a

particular interest in his two children. Medea's in-securities are aroused and she reacts with a displayof hostility, which in turn only shuts her off evenmore from social contact. Thus the play becomes thestory of an outsider in a foreign country, a criminalfrom the other end of the world, utterly unable toadapt to the norms of a "civilized" society. WhereasCreusa is slim, young, and beautiful, this Medea isa stocky, red-haired woman packed in a parka, asif to protect her not only from the wintery climate

but the coldness of the social surroundings. StefanieReinsperger gives an imposing and utterly convinc-ing performance as Medea. She is simultaneously

powerful and fragile, proud and full of self-doubt,sensitive and hard, driven by elementary emotionsand tortured by her observations. When her childrenare taken from her she throws herself on the ground,out of her mind with fury and grief. Inconsolable.In the Dsseldorf production the inevitable step to-wards killing her own two children is then realized

in a highly concentrated and unexpected manner.Instead of the expected bloodbath she simply takeone baby in a basket under her arm and the other,a young boy dressed in a sailor's cap, by the handand leads them quietly from the stage under thelight of a harsh sun. When the spotlights go out, itis clear that she has killed them and the world has

been turned into eternal darkness. Rarely have I seensuch an uncompromisingly concentrated productionon a young people's stage. This was not simply out-standing theatre for young people, it was outstandingtheatre which might have found a more tting homein the adult studiotheatre.

Instead, the studio theatre opened withThe Map and the Territory, the latest novel by thecontroversial French writer, Michel Houellebecq inan adaptation by the German dramatist and drama-turg Falk Richter, who also directs the show. The

play is a cynical satire on the art world: all surfaceimage, modern, and modish. The stage is full ofcameras, photographs, sketches, and drawings,videos, reecting the contrast between content and

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Franz Grillparzer'sMedea, directed by Sarantos Zervoulakos. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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presentation. The protagonist, Jed Martin, is a starartist whose works sell for millions, and who brokethrough to fame and fortune with an obscure seriesof photographs of Michelin road maps which osten-sibly demonstrate that the map is more importantthan the territory itself. Unsure as to whether he is

a genuine talent or simply a hyped-up media charla-tan, Jed moves overnight from an object of obscurityto become the darling of the art world who can do nowrong. He immediately cashes in on his new-foundfame with a series of photographs of media giantslike Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and rich artists likeJeff Coons and Damien Hirst (sic!) whom he cannotseem to capture to his satisfaction.

The absurdity of the art world is shownhere as a farce. Everything is self-conscious perfor-mance and self-presentation. None of the charactersseem able to communicate with each other, whetherthey be Jed's lover Olga (complete with exaggeratedRussian accent), his press agent Marylin stretch-ing herself out on a sofa in a lascivious fashion, orhis vain gallery owner Franz. They either speak ofthemselves in the third person or directly to the audi-ence via a microphone. Almost inevitably the mostinteresting gure in the show is not the millionaire

painter and photographer Jed, who has retired intoself-imposed exile into a country estate and nowdevotes his time to pictograms and videos to giveexpression to his contempt for the art world and theworld in general which he sees as falling apart. Ina piece of self-mirroring absurdity, Jed (a thinly-

disguised authorial alter ego) asks none other thanthe reluctant Houellebecq to write the forword to thecatalogue for his latest exhibition, and from now onit is Houellebecq himself who takes over the show: asmoking, boozing, self-indulgent cynic who knowsonly too well that he can behave how he likes, bothartistically and socially because "I'm all the rage."

The shock comes at the end of the even-ing when Houellebecq himself is mysteriously andsenselessly murdered, and by the end of the play theworld is reduced to slapstick with caricature detec-tives directly out of The Pink Pantherwalking intowalls and falling over chairs. If this all sounds a lit-

tle like comedy science-ction, it is: what starts in2012 ends in 2048. If nothing else, the productionshowed that nihilism can be fun. And that itself wasan achievement.

At the start of November renovations tothe playhouse were nally completed and the thea-tre world waited expectantly for Staffan ValdemarHolm's dbut production: Shakespeare's Hamlet.The curtain rises on an utterly empty golden cage

(design and costumes, Bente Lykke Mller) to thesound of soft rock music from the Danish band "SortSol." At the furthest corner of the stage stands thetiny thin gure of Ophelia, a teenager in a plain

black dress and high heels, lost in a (disco?) dream.Facing her across the vast expanse of emptiness is

another teenager in a formal black suit and tie (as areall the male characters in this production), Hamlet.They hold their hands out towards each other, nger-ing the air but keeping their distance as they circleslowly round the periphery of the cage to the soundof the music, desiring to come nearer to one another

but simultaneously afraid of doing so. EventuallyHamlet breaks out of the formal dance, and whenthey move into the center of the stage the dream is

broken by the entrance of an older man standingbehind Hamlet so closely that he can breathe downhis neck: "I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a cer-tain time to walk the night Revenge this foul andmost unnatural murder." Thus in the space of therst ten minutes, Holm establishes the parametersof his production. This is a love story between twonave teenagers that is destroyed by the murder ofHamlet's father and a categorical order to wreak amurderous revenge. All illusory innocent dreamsare now destined to become nightmarish realities ofguilt and self-accusation. This Hamlet is no tragichero but a boy forced to become a man before histime, whose sharp awareness of his own inadequacyleads him from one disaster to the next as he triesto avoid the inevitable. Stripped of the Fortinbras/

political element the play thus becomes a highlypersonal drama of two families: Hamlet's family,broken and ruined by the murder of his father andthe remarriage of his widow Gertrude (a masterful

performance by Imogen Kogge caught between herrole as queen and mother), to his uncle Claudius theusurping King.

Over against this Holm gives us anotherfamily: that of Polonius, a man split between his du-ties as a courtier and his responsibilities as a caringfather. Sven Walser's Polonius, is no doddering fool

but a worried realist concerned about the future ofhis son, Laertes, once he returns to his student life

in Paris. Laertes, in turn, seems to know only toowell the lures of the esh and, before he leaves, triesto warn his sister Ophelia against falling too muchfor Hamlet. His concerns are reinforced by his fatherwho is highly agitated that the Prince might misusehis daughter for his adolescent lust and then discardher at will. But the damage to Hamlet's relationshiphas already been done. Compelled by the order fromhis ghostly father he is no longer able to pursue the

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relationship for which he strives so ardently, andhis seemingly harsh rejection of Ophelia takes on atragic logic. The world is out of joint and everythinghas become a play of "seeming" and "being." "Thiscan't be real" we seem to hear him say. In Holm's

production it is and it isn't. He drives this home evenmore powerfully by having an elderly actor andactress play Guildenstern and Rosencrantz respec-tively. However in this production they are not onlyRosencrantz and Guildenstern, but also the players,clowns, sailors, and gravediggers. In the centralscene wherein Hamlet hopes to catch the "con-science of the King," the two play out the murderof Hamlet's father. As Hamlet's father (a woman asthe father!) dies, she suddenly breaks out of the playand announces she can no longer act and speaks anexcerpt from Ingmar Bergmann's Fanny and Alex-ander, in which an aging actress tells the ghost ofher son that being an actress has ruined reality forher, and that she has given up trying to repair theworld. At the same time she questions the reality ofGertrude and her husband, and throws the play ontoa meta-level where Hamlet, according to Holm inthe program "might be a prince another guy might

be a dead kinga fair lady might be a queen. Or is itImogen Kogge?" etc.).

From now on, the stage world is thoroughlyout of joint and the phantasmagoria on stage are un-able to prevent the external reality of a privilegedsociety in a golden cage from collapsing like a houseof cards. Driven insane by Hamlet's rejection, the

innocent Ophelia haunts the court, dancing and sing-ing to the pop music she hears in her head whilstoffering herself as a topless whore to whomever sheapproaches, including even her father whose fearshave now turned into nightmare reality. Claudius'sguilty conscience, pierced by the players' playwithin the play, comes to the surface and, in RainerBock's magnicent interpretation, the usurping kingdescends from being a banal, technocratic decision-maker to a babbling alcoholic wreck in shirt-sleevesand open-neck vainly attempting to repent a crimeto a God whom he despises. This is the great scenewhere Hamlet is nally given the ideal opportunityto full his father's command and take revenge: onlyto talk himself out of it on the grounds that he can-not murder a man at prayer. In Holm's productionit seems at one point as if Hamlet might just ham-mer his uncle to death with his bottle of schnapps.Instead, he pours the remaining alcohol over theunwitting drunk and runs from the scene.

Powerful as the staging might be at this

William Shakespeare'sHamlet, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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point it is surpassed in the graveyard scene wherenot only Ophelia but the golden world itself is turnedto dust. As Laertes and Hamlet tussle for the ashesof Ophelia, the urn is broken open, and the stage/world covered in a cloud of ashes which reduces thetwo young men into helpless grey ghosts, horried

and acutely embarrassed at the consequences of theirdispute. Lea Drger's fragile, nave Ophelia makesa wonderful contrast to Aleksander Radenkovic'svolatile young intellectual Hamlet, played with stun-ning clarity and schizophrenic wit. The magnicentcast is completed by the two clown-players eerilyand at times grotesquely performed by MarianneHoika and Winfried Kppers: and Taher Sahintrkin the role of Laertes who, in the course of the play,matures from a cool modern student to a courageousand movingly mature man of dignity as he learns ofthe death of rst his father and then of his belovedsister. The play opens with the words "Who's there?"and after three and quarter hours of compelling thea-tre, in the nal tableau Horatio (a weird interpreta-tion of a character who didn't seem to t in the playat all) takes leave of all the characters lying dead onstage with the words "the rest is silence."

The premiere of Holm's production re-ceived mixed reviews, since many critics saw it asconventionally old-fashioned. The highly respectedand generally conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine

Zeitungeven perversely dismissed it out of hand asbeing a piece of hack work. Another critic remarkedthat this would be the production to send your chil-

dren to, as they would be able to follow the story.Since most of today's young people, not only in Ger-many but around the world, are highly unlikely tohave become acquainted with the story during theirtime in school or even university, one might reason-ably think this remark might be a compliment. InGermany where Shakespeare can be cut up and puttogether to t any postmodern deconstruction theo-ryand let's face it, the non-English theatre worldhave a hugely liberating advantage here in that theyhave access to continually new translations becausethe outdated language of Shakespeare's English andits status as an almost sacred text undoubtedly ham-

pers any attempt to "contemporize" the Bardthecomment was probably intended to be neutral at themost and more likely, negative. And herein, perhaps,lies the real problem for German critics: too manydrastic modern reinterpretations of Shakespeareseem to have made them insensitive and unrecep-tive to the virtues of text over performance. For me,Holm's modernyes, modernconcept was notonly clear in its intentions, but utterly coherent and

sensitive to the original text. The few changes andinsertions he made only served to heighten his vi-sion of the play and to shed a fresh light on a veryold masterpiece. One nal comment, this must be theonly play production I have witnessed which pro-ceeded from start to nish without a single piece of

furnitureno curtains, no beds, no thrones, no bat-tlements, no makeshift stage for the playerseveryreality is left to our imagination from start to end.Peter Brooke's "empty space" indeed!

In her novel TheLacuna, the Americanwriter Barbara Kingsolver quotes a tale about Stalinas related by his rival Trotsky. When asked whathe liked best in life, Stalin replied "To choose yourvictim, to prepare everything, to revenge yourself

pitilessly. And then to go to sleep." It would be verydifcult to nd a better motto for the eponymous

protagonist in Richard III, Holm's second Shake-speare production of the season. Once again thevirtues of the "empty space" were invoked in thedesign by Lykke Mller. This time the empty boxwas black as a blackboard and scribbled in chalkwith the names and family trees of all the charac-ters in the play, an immense help for anyone like mewho has difculty retaining the precise relationshipof Shakespeare's casts. Around the edge of the stagewere plain wooden chairs where the actors in mod-ern dress sat throughout the performance when theywere not involved. And when a character was mur-dered one of the actors struck out the name on thewall with a piece of chalk. The play has no less than

thirty-six characters and Holm elected to produce itwith a cast of ten, all of whom except Richard andthe four women characters doubled. At the start ofthe evening the actors take their seats and begin tomutter segments of text against a musical rhythm.Still seated they transform into a pack of dangerousdogs howling at Richard's ankles as he springs to hisfeet to order them to bring them to silence and be-gin one of the most famous opening monologues inthe Shakespearian canon: "Now is the winter of ourdiscontent made glorious summer." The massivegure of Richard in a worn out tee-shirt and shabbytrousers is anything but regal in his aura. This lout

clearly relishes his role as the ugly outsider and fromtime to time emphasizes his alien nature by hunchinga shoulder or putting on a limp la Laurence Olivier.The fact that he only does this occasionally empha-sizes the fact that he knows only too well that he is

playing a role in a power struggle where anythinggoes in his ambition to grab and keep the throne.Here Rainer Galke runs the gamut of possibilities,exploiting to the full the "actorly" features of the

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character who has a sort of beastly sensual attraction.Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the rest ofthe cast who were not only extraordinarily colorless

but utterly undifferentiated in the various roles theywere asked to adopt. Taner Sahintrk is a potentiallyexceptional actor. His Laertes inHamletwas highly

convincing and as Clarence, Richard's brother andrst victim in the Tower he again puts in a persuasive

performance. But when it came to portraying sevenother characters in the play they all seemed to be thesame, a feature which was not helped by the fact thatSahintrk and the rest of the cast retained exactly thesame clothes for all their characters.

By contrast the women in the play seemedto have been caught up in a bout of collective hyste-ria. Karin Pfammater's Queen Margaret in particulardid nothing but scream endlessly at the top of hervoice, which made me more concerned about thestate of her vocal chords than of the character herself.Indeed, screaming at the top of the voice seemed to

be the principal means of expression throughout theplay, with the overdone histrionics of Claudia Hb-becker as Queen Elisabeth, who gave the impressionless of being a queen than an immature twenty-ve-year old ex-private school student. The overallimpression of the production was not helped by theseries of murders, the vast majority of which were

lengthyand I mean minute-longthrottlings. Inthe face of an onslaught of screaming, drawn-outdeaths and an utter lack of characterization, the ac-tors were completely unable to spark the int of the"empty space" to re the audience's imagination.The upshot was that an initially irritating evening

slowly descended into tiresome monotony and end-less repetition. Thanks to the continual crossing-outof the names, the one clear fact put across by the

production was the huge amount of persons who hadfallen victim to Richard's brutal tyranny. Perhaps thiswas one of the points the production was trying tomake: that in a world of naked power politics murderis nothing more than a cold bureaucratic procedure.Tick them off and they're dead and forgotten. Thismight also explain why they were all so faceless andinterchangeable. Whatever the case, it was difcultfor me to discern why Holm had chosen to presentthis particular play at this particular time to this par-ticular audience, a view conrmed by almost all thecritics who reviewed the show.

By contrast with the lukewarm receptionfor Richard III, Nurkan Erpulat's reinterpretation(one might also say re-writing) of a modern GermancomedyHerr Kolpertwas greeted with considerablecritical enthusiasm. The play by the German authorDavid Gieselmann was originally premiered in an

William Shakespeare'sRichard III, directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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English translation at the Royal Court Theatre inLondon in 2000 and has since made its way aroundthe stages of the world from Australia to the UnitedStates via many Eastern bloc countries. The blackcomedy la Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolftells of a

bored young couple, Ralf and Sarah, who decide tohave a joke at the expense of their guests, a stiff non-drinking architect named Bastian and his wife Edith,

by telling them that they have strangled a colleagueof Sarah and Edith named Mr Kolpert, and lockedhim in a trunk in the lounge. Taking as his starting

point a reference to a seemingly unmotivated pos-session of a gun in Alfred Hitchcock's lm Rope,the author builds his tension on the question as towhether there might indeed be a corpse in the trunk,especially since knocking noises seem to be com-ing from beneath the lid. Edith makes the situationmore confused by conniving in the hosts' story and

confessing that she once had a brief sexual encounterwith Herr Kolpert in the lift at work. Bastian is ap-palled at the news and even more at the incrediblebad taste of the whole story, and cannot decide tobelieve it or not. Since Sarah and Ralf have forgottento buy any food for the evening meal they order fourtake-away dishes from the local pizza restaurant. Thedrinking has already begun and when Ralf tries to

phone through individual orders and extra requests

this produces a chaotic series of misunderstandingswhich inevitably result in the delivery man arrivingwith the wrong order.

In the meantime, the chaos has reachedsuch a level that Bastian takes it into his hands to tieup Ralf and open up the trunk for himself. It tran-spires that the trunk is empty. But later in the play,after playing a chaotic identity game called Celeb-rity Guess, the body of Herr Kolpert falls out of acupboard. By this time, Ralf, Sarah, and Edith arehopelessly drunk and the pizza man arrives back onthe scene with the correct order only to nd himselfin the middle of a crime scene. Edith and Sarah bun-dle the body of Herr Kolpert into the trunk and pilethe protesting Bastian on top of him before slam-ming tight the lid. The pizza man attempts to leavethe apartment but is foiled by Edith who butchershim to death with a knife as an act of liberation to put

herself on the same level as the other two murder-ers. The three of them pile the pizza man on top ofBastian who, in attempting to escape from the trunk,is then knifed to death by Ralf and Sarah. As a nalact of emancipation Ralf, Sarah, and Edith all stripnaked and stand there weeping.

Whatever you make of the text of this farce,it does at least have its own internal slapstick logic.An English director would probably say that to make

David Gieselmann'sHerr Kolpert, directed by Nurkan Erpulat. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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the play really funny it has to be played extremelyseriously. In Germany, the culture seems to be en-tirely different and the school of thought goes thatto make a play even more funny than it is, you haveto exaggerate it to the limit. This is the approachtaken by Erpulat. He not only ignores the level of

menace inherent in the references toRopebut pref-aces the play with his own invention, whereby Sarahand Ralf are two well-heeled Dsseldorfers lookingout onto the outline of the city and congratulatingthemselves on their own success. As soon as the

play starts all four characters start mugging it up,and when the pizza man arrives Erpulat decides tomake this even more absurd by adding an interludeduring which he sings and dances to a crazy rocksong before delivering the food. The play containsmany slapstick scenes which need precise timing inorder to work. Unfortunately, on the night I attendedthe show, there was neither timing nor technique,simply a series of effortful mistimed messy gags.With no interest in the characters, the

play rapidly deteriorated into a tediousdisaster. For some reason known onlyto himself, Erpulat ducked the nudeending in the script and substituted it

by having the three drunken survivorsclean up the apartment before show-ing the skyline of Dsseldorf gradu-ally collapsing into rubble as if a 9/11disaster had hit the whole city. Perhapsthis was the meta-message: life and

the world is a senseless disaster. Fairenough, but unfortunately in this casethe production was too. And this fromthe young director who had given usthe theatrical hit of the previous sea-son with his precisely realistic and ut-terly compelling production of Crazy

Blood.Two days after the premiere

ofHamlet, the main stage played hostto the premiere of Gerhart Haupt-mann's Einsame Menschen ("LonelyPeople") written in 1891 and said to be

his favorite play. Hauptmann himselfonce wrote: "There is nothing so grue-some as the alienation of those whoknow each other" and this seems to bethe theme behind his drama. It tells ofthe intrusion of an outsider, a student

by the name of Anna Mahr, into theenclosed life of a middle-class familyin Berlin in the late nineteenth century.

She arrives unheralded to nd herself caught up inthe midst of a family party to celebrate the baptismof the son of Johannes and Kthe Vockerat. The fam-ily welcomes her with open arms and invites her tostay for as long as she likes. Her original plan wasto make contact with one of the guests, an artist by

the name of Braun, but soon she and Johannes ndthemselves mutually attracted to one another. InHauptmann's text this seems to be for intellectualreasons. But in Nora Schlcker's production theyseem to be more interested in splashing about in thelake bordering the family estate than discussing phi-losophy. Correspondingly, the productionlike somany others in Germanyis set unoriginally amidsta huge mass of water in which people are continually

paddling and even swimming. At one point the twomaids even pile up chairs and tables in the middleof the water which gives the whole production asurreal avor. Days turns into weeks and tensionsin the family grow. Johannes' wife can only gaze on

David Gieselmann'sHerr Kolpert, directed by Nurkan Erpulat. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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helplessly at the newly-found meeting of minds, hisparents can only pass disapproving comments, andJohannes cannot bring himself to decide whetherto stay within the family boundaries or break out tofreedom. In the end Anna departs once again to herlife as a "single," Johannes's wife breaks down andJohannes wades off to drown himself in the lake.

Ironically, enough the outsider-familyconstellation in the play has some similarities withthe Medea I describe above. But, unlike Medea,despite some good performances, especially fromTina Engel and Hans Diel as Johannes's parents, the

production and the fate of the characters never re-ally grip. In an interview about her production, NoraSchlcker says that the play interested her because itquestioned traditional middle-class ideas of the fam-ily and that here the characters are perpetrators andvictims alike. Their desires to realize their deepest

potentials and live a life of personal freedom stand

in direct contrast to the cage of a conventional fam-ily life. A good theme, which is perhaps even morerelevant today than it was in the nineteenth century.The question is why this play and not, say, an equallygood play on the same theme by Alan Ayckbourn oranother modern author.

Productions on the main theatre stage con-tinued with a hermetic chamber play by the Norwe-gian author Arne Lygre entitledDays Beneath, writ-

ten in 2006 and rst performed in Norway in 2009.Ostensibly, it tells the story of a man who collects(kidnaps?) people from the street and shuts them upin his underground bunker. The play, however, hasnothing to do with the gruesome news stories of kid-nap and incestuous rape that have been coming outof Austria and Belgium in recent years. Despite the

fact that the bunker is a sort of prison, the play hasless to do with physical than intellectual control. Itopens with a middle-aged man (Udo Samel) stand-ing opposite a woman in the bunker. "I am nothing,"he says. "I am nothing," she repeats. "I have you," hesays. "That is a dream," she replies. The parametersof the play are set. Language can create and dictatereality. Especially when here, the characters talkabout themselves in the third person and even speaktheir stage directions before carrying them out. Sohow real is this reality? And if it is nothing but alinguistic construction, or a dream, dreams can also

turn to nightmares. This is a world of security andinsecurity, certainty and uncertainty, freedom andcaptivity, loneliness and togetherness.

The man seems to have kidnapped thewoman in order to heal her, and she appears to havefallen into a state of collusive dependence. For whenhe indicates he wants to return her to the outsideworld she resists to the hilt, despite his threat to cuther ngers off. And when he does succeed in send-

Gerhart Hauptmann'sEinsame Menschen, directed by Nora Schlocker. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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ing her back into the world she soon returns of herown free will. The two are joined by a young man,Peter, and a nameless "girl," whom the woman seesa possible rivals who can "break everything apart,"despite the fact that both seem to have been capturedagainst their will. Half way through the play, with-

out warning, the kidnapper dies and disappears fromthe scene. The back wall of the bunker opens out to

become a sort of huge empty window and the threecaptives are left to their own devices in what is de-scribed as an "existential ping-pong." There are su-

percial resemblances here to Sartre's Huis Closinwhich two women and man nd themselves trappedfor eternity in a claustrophobic hell. But whereasSartre's characters are caught in an emotional tangleof sexual desire and rejection, Lygre's remain blood-less and cold. And as confused as most of the audi-ence. After one and three quarters hours without a

break, the play closed with the words, "My story isempty." At least that was honest.

Perhaps the most fascinating of the newplays in the season was Kevin Rittberger'sPuppen("Puppets"): not only for its content but its form.Presented in the studio theatre, this is an ambitiouslyabsurd piece of surreal nonsense whose subtitleifit were pompous enoughmight be "Desperate Peo-

ple in Search of the Meaning of Life." Indeed it doeshave something of a hint of Monty Python, althoughits humor never reaches such heights of inspired

madness, nor probably aspires to do so. This is clearfrom the start in Rittberger's own staging (its Vienna

premiere in 2011 in the hands of another director hadreceived only a lukewarm reception) where the text

becomes the central part of a triptych, prefaced onone side by a twenty minute orchestral prelude, and

rounded off on the other by a series of almost still-life videos of solitary urban landscapes accompanied

by a laconic commentary.The author-director describes his show

more as an installation than a play, and this is clearfrom the stage which is almost bare apart from two

pieces of scaffolding, one a rectangle in black, andthe other a three meter high tower on wheels cov-ered in red cloth. The show starts with the entranceof a cellist who begins to play a harsh waltz, before

being joined by a drummer and eight other musi-cians (strings, wind instruments, and a pianist) allclad in outlandish uniforms reminiscent of Chineserevolutionaries. Indeed, the music has something ofBrecht-Eisler's martial power mixed with overtonesof Mike Oldeld's Tubular Bells and the music ofJohn Adams. After about ten minutes you start towonder if you are in a play or a concert. The musi-cians stop intermittently, then stubbornly take up thetheme again in all its variations as if to emphasizetheir determination to create something new. Butwhen they come to a triumphant end a trapdooropens and they silently le off into the bowels of

Arne Lygre's Tage unter, directed by Stphane Braunschweig. Photo: Elisabeth Carecchio.

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the earth.It is at this point that the play begins: it has

no ongoing narrative, no conventional dialogue and

no traditionally rounded characters. Instead, we areconfronted with a series of scenes announced by analien gure in red shoes (the same strange actor who

played Horatio in Hamlet), involving a hairdresserwithout clients, a greasy-haired grubby young mancalled "Clandestino" (a term currently used to de-scribe an illegal immigrant in Europe), a butcherwithout customers, and a "women who falls prey toattacks of giddiness." The young hairdresser is ob-sessed with her own "beautiful hair" and constantlyrehearses the way she wants to present herself to theoutside world as if she is a model in a fashion showor a television star. She is interrupted by Clandestino

who wants his hair cut but has no money to pay forit. After telling her a wild story of his life includingdrug dealing in Amsterdam and crossing borders il-legally, he promptly announces that only half of itis true anyway. In the emptiness of the encounterthey fall into each other's arms and desperately at-tempt to nd some meaning in sex, only to end upin a farcically unfullling tangle head to toe on theoor before deciding to separate and go their own

ways. This is all accompanied by odd snatches ofthe music heard in the prelude, but now reproducedand distorted through a synthesizer by a performer

standing at one side of the stage.No sooner has this scene ended than thenext is announced by the man in the red shoes. Aneatly dressed middle-aged "woman who falls preyto attacks of giddiness" tells us in an almost hysteri-cal burst of enthusiasm of her feeling of solidaritywith her fellow human beings, fueled by her par-ticipation in a mass protest. For or against what wenever nd out, but when her energy burns out, we seean exhausted, lonely disorientated gure who keepscollapsing to the oor like a puppet cut free of itsstrings. Clandestino attempts to pull her to her feeton several occasions and, just as we have dismissed

his efforts as a hopeless venture, she begins to danceand soar around the stage like a prima donna. Onlyto keep collapsing once more when her energy runsout. She is then reprimanded from the audience by athird character, a brute of a man in a gray butcher'sapron and gloves. At one point he claims to have

been the latest in a long line in a family business go-ing back to the last century; and at another he tells ushe has no idea of the butchery business at all. Indeed,

Kevin Rittberger, Hauschka and Stefan Schneider'sPuppen, directed by Kevin Rittberger. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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it becomes clear after a time that his life consists ofstanding behind an empty counter waiting for cus-tomers who never arrive. In desperation he decidesto work on making a huge sausage with which to

feed the world, another senseless attempt to give hisexistence a meaning. Needless to say he never even

begins to realize this ambition, and at the end of theplay he is surrounded by the orchestranow knownas the "army of people who are getting rid of work"),

placed on a platform with a white sign hanginground his neck (shades of the Cultural Revolution)and hammered into non-existence by abuse fromthe chorus. The playtext ends with the chorus linedup like jobless workers trudging off the stage intoan empty future and Clandestino confronting thehairdresser once again with a short comment on her

beautiful hair. Happy end or no happy end? Hopeand mutual help, or hopelessness and helplessness?How much are people in charge of their lives any-more? How real are their lives? How meaningful? Isit possible to give life a meaning in a disintegratingworld spinning free of values and orientation? Theseare the questions which Rittberger seems to be ask-ing.

By this time, not only I, but I sensed the

majority of the audience was as confused and frus-trated as the characters we had been witnessing onstage. But before we had time to digest what wehad seen so far, a huge white screen covering the

whole of the stage dropped down from the ies,and a man in a dark suit behind a podium began todeliver objective descriptions of a series of almoststill-life videos of realyet seemingly unrealur-

ban landscapes taken in Dsseldorf. The sense of un/reality was heightened further by the fact that theonly characters seen in the videos were those fromthe play. The hairdresser stands forlornly at a drabwindswept crossroads beneath a railway crossing,the woman subject to fainting ts walks tentativelyalong a disused rail track trying to keep her balanceon one of the rails. The butcher knocks continuallyon a warehouse door in a deserted industrial estate

before disappearing slowly down another empty rail-way line, and the whole cast are vaguely glimpsed ina martial arts studio tucked away between an arrayof ofce blocks and run-down apartments. The la-conic commentary on this last video ends with thewords "almost all of the windows and doors have

just been closed." So what to make of this hermeticexperience? Pretentious crap or pioneering genius?

Kevin Rittberger, Hauschka and Stefan Schneider'sPuppen, directed by Kevin Rittberger. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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Perhaps a little of both. Nowadays the likes of Io-nesco and Beckett seem utterly conventional, butat the time they burst onto the Parisian stage in the1950s, they were regarded by most people as utterlyincomprehensible.

Back in the Young People's Theatre, I waspresented with the German premiere of a group playfor audiences of ten years old and upwards, devisedin Holland by Jetse Batelaan and his company fromRotterdam. The Raised Fingerrefers to the gestureused by adults to warn their children to behave them-selves, but here it is the adults we are asked to ob-serve around a children's playground sandpit. Beforethe play starts, the children are separated from theadults in the foyer and ordered not to utter a squeakduring the performance but to observe the goings-onand discuss them afterwards. The children are thentold to occupy the front rows with the adults sitting

behind them. The result was disturbingly the quietestatmosphere I have ever experienced in a children's

theatre show. The eighty-minute show displays thevarious antics of four parents, Sarah, Rosa, Alex,and Lukas who are supposed to be supervisingtheir children at the public playground. Although

the parents address their children, reprimand them,offer them food, clean them off etc., we never seethe children themselves. Instead, our attention is fo-cused on the shenanigans of the parents who, here inan improvised situation, seem to behave even morechildishly than their offspring. Lukas tries to escapeas quickly as he can to play on a PlayStation with afriend but tells his daughter he has to go off to work.Rosa, a middle-class prig lays out half a library fullof children's books in the sandpit for the kids to read,alongside an array of fresh fruit and vegetables inTupperware boxes. Sarah order her son around thewhole time whilst irting with her new boyfriendAlex, who can't wait for his ex-wife to arrive andtake away their handicapped child. Sarah starts aheavy irt with Lukas, and Rosa in turn with Alex.As a former houseman myself, I failed almost en-tirely to recognize any reality in the situations or thecharacters who were played in an utterly exagger-ated manner. At the end of the play a projection on a

screen at the back of the stage orders the children toshout to the actors to shut up and stop the show. Theydo so, following which the cast ask the children toanalyze what they had seen and give their comments.

Jetse Batelaan'sDer erhobene Zeigefnger (The Raised Finger), directed by Daniel Cremer. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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Unsurprisingly enough, the day I was there the kidscould say nothing particularly enlightening about theshow except that it was "funny" or "My parents aremuch better than that." For me the message, apartfrom the fact that adults aren't perfect, was disturb-ingly authoritarian: sit there, shut up, and watch till

we tell you to say something. Weird.The most distinguished guest director of

the season was Andrea Breth, who in her time hasproduced some quite breath-takingsorry aboutthe unintended pun. It only works in Englishallof which are noted for her love of detail and psycho-logical nesse. I shall long treasure the memory ofher production of Pirandello's nal play The Moun-tain Giants in Bochum around twenty years ago,a mythical tale about a company of actors whichthe author never managed to complete before hisdeath, and which Breth transformed into a cosmicfable about reality and illusion, life and death. Sincethen Andrea Breth has been a xed star in all themajor theatres in the German-language world, mostrecently at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Originally shewas scheduled to direct a play by Jean Anouilh inDsseldorf, but out of the blue and without explana-tion this was changed to a play by the Russian writerIsaac Babel:Marija. Originally from Odessa, Babel,a Jew, wrote the play in 1935 as a biographical mem-oir and a testimony to the self-deluding lies whichserved to shore up Communist rule under Stalin.

Not surprisingly since its completion it has neverbeen performed in Russia and only seldom abroad.

As late as 1936, the French writer Andr Gide wasextolling Russia as the freest of all countries. Tragi-cally, around the same time Stalin had begun hisgreat campaign of terror against any opponents realor imagined, which ended in Babel being arrestedand subsequently murdered in 1940.Marijais set inPetersburg around 1920. We never meet the epony-mous heroine because she is ghting for the cause ofthe socialist revolution at the Polish/Russian front,as we learn from her letters. Unfortunately her ideaof the glorious workers' revolution is countered bythe harsh reality back home. The city has been redu-The city has been redu-ced to poverty and hunger and all traces of morality

seem to have disappeared. Even Marija's own familyare not spared. Her father, a retired Czarist generalcan only react in cynical amusement and fury toMarija's letters, whilst her sister Ludmila is reduced,like so many other respectable middle-class womenat the time, to prostituting herself with rich parve-nus in order to survive. In this respect the declineof Marija's family serves as a metaphor of the time.They are caught in the middle of an epidemic of

moral corruption, raw manners, liquidation, spying,black marketing, whoring, boozing, and racketeer-ing. After eight sharp scenes of the brutal life inthe city the play ends with the general's apartment

being renovated for "people from the cellar" underthe command of a socialist commissarwho neither

knows nor cares where the family has now disap-pearedto the sound of a military band outside ac-companied by a parody of goose-step marching froma cleaning woman, whilst a gaunt, heavily pregnantwoman perched in a wooden chair utters silenthowls of agony as the birth of her child approaches.As might be expected Breth gives us a panoramaof individual scenes, so psychologically nuancedand naturalistically presented in three dimensionalsets that one could be forgiven for thinking Germantheatre had not moved on since the 1950s. Indeed, Iwas caught between sheer admiration at the depthof characterization she had dug out of her ensembleof twenty-two actors (particularly outstanding herewere Peter Jecklin as the general and Imogen Koggeas the housekeeper) and wonder at the boldness ofher "anachronistic" approach.

But as Holm said during an interview inthe middle of the season, perhaps this is all the morerevolutionary because it goes against the trend of

postmodern performative values which have had theupper hand in Germany for the last thirty years orso. Would such a production be invited to the BerlinTheatertreffen in May, I wondered? It wasn't. But itshould have been. The last show I saw before the

WESdeadline forced me to an abrupt halt, was oncemore directed by Falk Richter, who was responsiblefor the Houellebecq show. Rausch (Rush: as in afeeling of ecstasy) is a collaborative project with theDutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk and a mixedcast of twelve dancers and actors. It's all about the

problems facing young people today: the impossi-bility of nding a satisfactory relationship, virtualfriendships on Facebook and their disappointing re-ality, the confusion arising from the huge amount ofchoice available to them in all areas, their reactionsto traditional political parties, the Catholic Church,the turbulence on the nancial markets, the rich and

the royal.The two main protagonists played by Alek-

sander Radenkovic and Lea Drager (Romeo andJuliette!) are mired down in discussing every detailof their relationship and its inadequacies, instead ofliving it to the full. Something is missing in theirlives to make them completely happy, and no matterhow they try they cannot nd it. They even have acouple therapist whose interest, predictably enough

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in an age where everyone is looking for their ownpersonal gain, is not so much in helping them as inleeching from them as much money as he can. Thestage, designed by Katrin Hoffmann, bare apart from

a gold and black oor consists of just a few sofas,scaffolding towers, and spotlights. The dialogue,which mainly consists of monologues spoken eitherto the audience or at (rather than to), each other isinterrupted at intervals, or accompanied simultane-ously by the dancers who hurl themselves to and froagainst each other in a desperate and helpless attemptto establish a stable relationship with each other. Allthis to the accompaniment of loud electronic music

by Ben Frost. About an hour and a quarter into theninety-minute show the cast discover the occupymovement, and proceed to move into an open-aircamp where they nally seem to nd a reason forliving. At this point, I half expected them to breakinto the great hit fromHairand wouldn't that have

been great! But no, this was not the re-dawning ofthe age of Aquarius at all. Far from it. In the 1960s,most of the protesting youth had had nothing handedto them on a plate by their parents and were lookingforward to building a brighter future for themselves.But today's generationin the prosperous parts of

the West at leasthas been brought up to have it allon demand, and is now watching in fear as the worldappears to be dissolving down the plughole into anon-existent future. None of this, is of course new.

And had the evening consisted solely of the text itwould have been nothing more than a series of un-digested regurgitations of contemporary issues per-formed in a deadly serious manner. There was morethan enough pamphleteering in the text, but whereoh where was the lightness and the irony? And whenwill German writers ever learn that they don't haveto be serious to be serious? Nonetheless, with theextraordinary choreography and the music, it turnedout to be an entertaining, indeed provocative, pieceof theatre. Interestingly enough, on the night I wasthere, only around thirty per cent of the audience atthe most, was under fty!

How to sum up Holm's rst season, whichfor deadline reasons, I was not able to see to theend? Compared with the vast majority of theatresall over the world, Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus, likemany others of its size and reputation in Germany,is swimming in money. This enables it to take riskswhich would be unthinkable in English and NorthAmerican theatres which are much more dependent,

Isaak Babel'sMarija, directed by Andrea Breth. Photo: Bernd Uhlig.

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if not entirely dependent, on the box ofce for theirsurvival. The result is that it can afford to presenta huge repertoire of productions from the classicaltheatre to the modern, in an unheard-of amount ofstyles. Not everything in Staffan Valdemar Holm'sopening season in Dsseldorf has been a success.Far too many of the new shows over-rely on out-front monologues, and supposedly postdramatictechniques like an avoidance of characterization,

psychological exploration, and simply story-telling,all those virtues longed for by actors whose talentsare being reduced to the status of performativemouthpieces. Not to speak of what the generallyconservative Dsseldorf audiences might want. It issimply not good enough to alienate old establishedseason-ticket holders in the expectation that they

will automatically be replaced by new, younger au-diences. As Peter Zadek once slyly asked the youngChristoph Schlingensief during a public discussionin Bochum: "What have you got against older peoplein the theatre? Don't they have as much right to bethere as the young?" Nonetheless, new and provoca-tive elements have to be present if any theatre is toremain alive, and it was good to have the opportunityto view the works of hitherto unknown Europeandramatists.

If Holm sticks to his policies, whilst check-ing out some of his new play projects a little moreclosely before letting them loose on the general pub-lic, the Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus might just be onthe edge of a very exciting future. I wish him well.

Falk Richter'sRausch (Rush), directed by Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe.

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With an impressive record of successfulproductions in some of the most prestigious theatresin the country, director Uli Jckle has become a ris-ing star in German theatre. His latest, a productionofDie Odyssee(The Odyssey) premieres this Springat The Deutsches Theater in Berlin. HisOdysseeis ahighly physical deconstruction of the classic poem,and it features a cast of average, everyday Berlinerswho answered the call to audition. Jckle is distin-guished primarily by his success at working withsuch non-actors. Two productions in 2011 featuredhis distinctive approach to playmaking, Die groe

Pause, and Eins, zwei, drei und schon vorbei: EinSpiel vom Anfang und Ende der Dinge.

Die groe Pause

Using his company, Theater Aspik, and thetownspeople of Freiburg, Jckle created and staged a

production titledDie groe Pause(The Long Break)in the Spring of 2011. The play was a site-specic,audience-interactive form of "trekking theatre," inwhich the audience is taken on a literal and gurative

journey through a specically chosen performance

space; in this case, an abandoned clock factory. Thecollagestyle text of the play was pulled from thirtyyears of the factory's newspaper, published everyweek, from poems to sports editorials, all written byemployees of the factory.

The performance was divided into twoparts. In the rst, the audience sat outside andwatched a recreation of a soccer game played de-cades earlier by the factory and one of its rivals. Thegame was played by children from Freiburg, dressedin the same clothing the men had worn at the time(to scale), with fake beards and other facial hair. Inthe second part, the audience was taken inside thefactory and encouraged to walk around freely. Using

the various interior spaces of the building, rooms,hallways, stairwells, kitchens, lounges, Jckle cre-ated a collection of performance installations, eachone reecting the experiences of the workers whospent so many years there. In a kitchen area, therewas a room covered in aluminum foilfoil thatemployees had wrapped their sandwiches in for de-cades. In another room, thirty years of data-printoutswere piled into the center of a gigantic space once

One, Two, Three, and Already Over: The Theatre of Uli Jckle

Brian Rhinehart

Die groe Pause, created and directed by Uli Jckle. Photo: Theater Aspik.

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occupied by hundreds of employees.Each installation allowed for audience in-

teraction. They could touch the materials, speak tothe performers and engage with the performanceitself. Because Jckle's style puts the audience incharge of its own artistic experience, they were al-

lowed to linger with one particular installation ormove rapidly throughout.Because many of the townspeople in the

cast and in the audience were returning to the factoryfor the rst time in two decades, the performancewas deeply emotional and very well-received. The

production was both a critical and personal successfor Jckle, whose father had worked at the factoryfor thirty years, and for the community that had beendevastated by the loss of an industry in that it tooksuch pride.

Track work

Jckle has a unique approach to play-

making, an approach that keeps different "tracks"separated, most notably the visual, aural, and textualtracks of a performance. Separating a performanceinto tracks enables him to explore the ways in whichdifferent onstage media, sign systems, and modesof expression interrelate to produce meaning for thespectator. Jckle dismantles the basic elements oftheatre (such as movement, gesture, dialogue, music,sound, etc.), and then re-arranges them into new and

surprising congurations. The effect on the audienceis analogous to that of Cubism in the visual arts,wherein the viewer is called upon to reorganize thereality of the vision on the canvas, and in doing so,he or she becomes an integral part in the creation ofits meaning. Jckle's process stands in opposition to

the theatre of realistic illusion, in which the specta-tor passively observes the objective reality onstageas a spectator of ne art would look at a portrait byRembrandt, all the work having been done for himor her by the master.

Track work turns viewers into collabora-tors, each of whom must analyze and arrange thevarious tracks on the stage to t their own sensibili-ties. Each audience member thus creates a meaningthat is singular and different from that of everyoneelse. Rather than attempting to create a seamless andillusory version of reality onstage, Jckle dispenseswith the fourth wall and invites each spectator to

participate in production of meaning within whathe calls the "third room." For him, the theatricalmoment does not happen in the room on the stage,or in the room of the audience's imagination, butin a "third room," a transitional space between thetwo. By rearranging the tracks in unpredictable andsurprising ways, Jckle creates a complex, theatreopen to multiple interpretations that takes place inthis space of fantasy between the objective reality of

Die groe Pause, created and directed by Uli Jckle. Photo: Theater Aspik.

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the stage, and the subjective reality of the spectator'simagination.

Everyday People

In November 2010, Jckle staged the pro-duction of Eins, zwei, drei und schon vorbei: EinSpiel vom Anfang und Ende der Dinge (One, Two,

Three, and Already Over: A Play About the Begin-ning and End of Things) at the Dresden Staatss-chauspielhaus, to rave reviews. The play was thensubsequently staged at the Braunschweig Staatss-chauspielhaus in June of 2011.

Eins, zwei, drei is a play about the begin-nings and endings of life. It consists of a collectionof interviews with thirty-ve residents of Dresdenyoung girls and boys (ages nine to sixteen), and oldermen and women (ages fty-eight to seventy). Theinterviews, conducted by Jckle's writing partnersCarsten Schneider and Suzanne J. Hensel, were de-signed to be as evocative and emotionally engagingas possible. The three of them then combined thoseresponses into a dramatic collage. The loose framefor this collage was a series of voice-overs contain-ing interview prompts about the performers' lives inten year increments, such as "Finish this sentence: Atten years old I want(ed) to be...," or "At twenty,"and so on through seventy years old.

The use of everyday people and not profes-sional actors gives the performance a sincerity that isoften missing from professional productions, a senseof realness that invites the spectator to participatein a deeper, more meaningful way than that of con-

ventional theatre. Though they lack the smooth so-phistication of professionals, the non-actors ofEins,zwei, drei seemed to have less guile, less to provethan professional actors, which relieved the pressureon the audience to somehow form a judgment abouteach "actor's" performance. Absolved of objectiveresponsibilities, the audience was free to immersethemselves in the experience of realpeople, sayingrealthings about the most important subjects of all:life and death.

Jckle believes that when using non-actorsthe most compelling material, and that of which it iseasiest for them to speak honestly and truthfully to

an audience, comes from them: stories about theirlives, about who they are, who they were, who theywant to be. Using specic details of those stories,Jckle creates affecting and rich portraits of humanlife.

Working with non-professionals to createa performance from the ground up, using the sensi-tive material of the actors' lives, demands a complexinter-relational approach from the director. There is

a need for a far more intimate relationship with thepeople involved than in a traditional theatre setting,where professionals come together, usually for amonth, to perform an already written and polishedtext. The conventional director's situation is evenmore transient as he or she swoops in, barely getting

to know the cast and crew, and then, as soon as itopens, ies out to direct the next show. In contrast,Jckle's rehearsal process sometimes takes as longas six months. An environment of safety and non-

judgment must be created in order for the cast to feelcomfortable enough to share their intimate personaldetails with him. For this reason, he must take farmore time getting to know each person in the cast,earning their trust, helping them to open up, so thatheand the audiencecan experience the truth oftheir lives.

One, Two, Three

The opening segment of Eins, zwei, dreiincluded a voice over based on the responses to theinterview prompt, "Finish this sentence: At the endof my life I want" The answers were played whileone of the elderly women in the cast crossed to thefront of the stage (a thirty by thirty feet elevated plat-form), sat down, and inexplicably drank the contentsof a large bottle of water without stopping. Some ofthe interviewees' voice-over responses during thisevent were,

To have an acting and singing career inHollywood.To still be t. Be cheerful. Be happy

and have no problems.Not to be in a nursing home. To diein the circle of my family.That I can still say goodbye to everyone.That they say only good things about me.That I can say: "My life was worth it."To say: "It was a nice life, and nowI can go in peace."A beautiful death. To die with dignity.

Jckle thus establishes the logic of his pro-duction at the outset, especially his willingness todismantle the "tracks" of conventional theatre. The

fact of the woman's unpredictable gesture was medi-ated, turned into something new by the voice-over'slitany of specic, highly personal statements aboutthe end of life. It was a complex moment of theatre.The woman's act, with its clear beginning and end,

became a striking metaphor for the production itself.Following this moment, the stage became

a kind of battleground as the older members of thecast took it over, but were immediately frightened

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away by the children who, as the lights shifted frombright to eerily dark, rose up ominously from behindthe stage and advanced downstage in slow motionto a heavy rock score. Suddenly the music broke,the lighting shifted back to normal, and the children

gleefully shouted their responses to the interviewprompt, "I look forward to," with answers rang-ing from "my birthday," to "ski-camp in the seventhgrade."

The children then leapt energetically off thestage and it was left empty. Slowly, cautiously, oneof the women mounted the stage. A light piece of in-strumental music began; she came downstage to theaudience and said, "The most beautiful thing is,"and then started to dance joyously by herself. One

by one, the other adults joined her, until they wereall onstage, mirroring her choreographed move-ments. Weaving his way between them, one of the

boys began to speak the responses to the interviewprompt, "Old people." As he delivered lines suchas, "Old people like to eat cake," and "Old peoplecan be wonderful and awful," the elderly perform-ers danced gleefully and vigorously around him. Inkeeping with Jckle's track work style, he remainedunaffected by the other people onstage, the perfor-mance tracks (dance, character, narrative, gesture,

and emotion) having been re-congured to create aspacethe third roomfor the audience to ll withits own subjective meaning.

As this segment ended, chairs were broughtto the stage for the older performers by the children,

and all sat and listened to a voice-over, "At eightyears old," and "At nine years old." When a

performer's recorded response was being spoken inthe voice-over, they would raise a hand, acknowl-edging their voice and their contribution to that mo-ment. Toward the end of the voice-over, the elderly

performers seemed to age dramatically, slumping intheir seats, appearing to lose consciousness, as one ofthe young performers danced a short choreographed

piece of ballet at the front of the stage.The next, rather lengthy segment began

with the voice-over prompt, "My rst...," which in-cluded responses such as, "My rst memory was ofmy mom," and "My rst time I was already engaged,

but my parents didn't know it yet," as well as com-ments about rst cars, rst ghts, and rst kisses.Several "My rst" monologues followed. A boytold the story of his rst love; a young girl spoke ofher rst love letter, and at the end of her monologue,a boy entered and told the story of his traumatic rsthaircut. In this segment, Jckle again created a dense,

Eins, zwei, drei und schon vorbei, directed by Uli Jckle. Photo: David Baltzer.

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multi-layered collage of tracks. As the boy describedhow his tension over the unwanted coiffeur rose, aheavy rock score began, and he was forced to screamout the words. The adults then quickly took the stageand began to dance behind him. During this action,a girl entered the stage and started to dance opposite

him, facing away from the audience, with a mon-ster mask on the back of her head. As his vociferousnarrative began to wind down, several of the older

performers removed the mask from her head andescorted him off the stage. The girl then danced a

ballet as the voice-over delivered a list of interviewresponses to the prompt, "At ten years old."

When the voice-over was nished, thedancer told the story of how, at ten years old, shehad become interested in the harp. As she spoke hermonologue, several of the men and women placeda harp onstage and she sat down and started play-ing. Soon she was joined by a man, who sang therepetitive lines, "Little monsters, big monsters playall day," while the rest of the cast accompanied themon recorders.

Several segments then featured young castmembers responding to such emotionally provoca-tive prompts as "At the end of my life, I want,"

and "I will die when," which were followed by akick-line style dance with men and women wearingadult diapers. As the line broke up and he scampereddeftly among the admiring women, he delivered alengthy monologue about death, in which he listeda multitude of colorful euphemisms and substitute

phrases for the concepts of death and dying, from"bite the dust," to "chat with the mealworms."

As the monologue and the dancing ended,the men and women exited and the children wererevealed at the back of the stage in the middle of a

birthday party, twirling plates and watching a puppetdance on the edge of the stage. Both children andadults then marched joyfully around the perimeterof the stage, blowing noisemakers in birthday cel-ebration style. A blackout changed the atmosphereabruptly. The sound of the marching turned ominous,

became resonant of jack-boots, and in the dark, oneof the women delivered a tense and emotional mono-logue about the Dresden rebombing of 1944.

When the lights came up again, a younggirl spoke the responses to the interview prompt, "Iwill never."

Eins, zwei, drei und schon vorbei, directed by Uli Jckle. Photo: David Baltzer.

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I'll never eat sh again.I will never ride on a bicycle again.I will never disappoint others.I will never again wear a wedding dress.I'll never go back to kindergarten.I will never again start from scratch.

I'll never be young again.

As she nished the litany, the men andwomen gathered upstage behind her. Marion Black'ssong "Who Knows" began to play, and they startedto dance and sing the lyrics. The children enteredthe stage from the back, mixing in with the adults.A lighting shift occurred (from bright to eerily dark),and they all started to advance in slow motion to thefront of the stage. When they arrived, a blackout sig-naled the end of the show.

Jckle's production illuminated the vulner-abilities and strengths of both youth and age, fromthe pangs of rst love to the comfort of a life-longrelationship. Formally innovative, yet warm and ac-cessible throughout, this unpredictable and surpris-ing new work created a powerful and deeply affect-ing portrait of human life. It also forged a rare andsignicant connection between a divergent group of

young and old people, each from completely differ-ent backgrounds and life experiences. Through their

personal stories and their unguarded willingness toexpose themselves night after night, they were ableto share that extraordinary connection with receptiveand appreciative audiences throughout the run of the

show.The secret to Jckle's success at creating

such plays with non-actors is that he insists that hisperformers matter more to him than the productionsthemselves. He never wants them to feel exploited orthat their lives are only important to him as "mate-rial" for the stage. He treats them with compassionand sensitivity, but he treats them just as he wouldmore experienced actors, with professionalismand condence in their ability to accomplish whathe asks of them. He trusts them with a great dealof responsibility and takes their contributions in re-hearsal very seriously. Jckle deeply appreciates thefresh perspective that non-actors bring to the pro-cess, and never tries to turn them into slick, polished

professionals. To him, the skill that they acquire inpreparation and rehearsal isn't nearly as important asthe truth a