Die Gelbe Tapete – Schaubühne

[written for Exeunt]

This last of the three Katie Mitchell shows I saw in the past fortnight only serves to underline again what a remarkable talent has been largely lost to Britain, due in large part to the sheer philistinism of the mainstream press, successive governments’ arts funding policies, and perhaps even our largely moronic theatregoing public. Well, mainland Europe has pretty much got her now: the critics love her, better funded theatres offer greater resources, and the work receives the large appreciative public it actually deserves. Perhaps it’s all for the best; the British can grunt and get back to watching funny musicals, the mainland gets one of the best directors in the world largely to itself, and Mitchell gets to make work the way she wants for people who adore it. (The only tiny bright side: getting to Berlin is quicker and cheaper from London than getting to, say, Glasgow.)

What’s also remarkable about Die Gelbe Tapete (The Yellow Wallpaper, after the 1892 American novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), is its total difference again from each of the other two (totally different to each other) pieces. Premièred in mid-February this year, it is the most recent of her “camera pieces” for theatre. I am kind of assuming that the majority of readers here will have seen at least one – possibly the Barbican transfer of her first camera show for the Schaubühne, Fräulein Julie, or going back further to her first, Waves, at the National in 2006. Just in case not, let me quickly describe the set-up:

For Die Gelbe Tapete, we the audience are looking at the wide main stage of the Schaubühne divided into three large rooms. The room to our left is viewed through a wide glass window. It is lit with cold, blueish, businesslike strip lighting. In it one woman, unfussily dressed in what are probably her own clothes stands in front of a table, faces a monitor, there are microphones, a sound desk, a computer, etc.

The room to our right starts off completely obscured from view by a black wall. When this is raised into the flies, we see what looks like a tatty store room. Largely empty, except for various flats and screens on castors.

In the central room is an inch-perfect naturalistic replica of a bedroom. A door off upstage left into a hallway and upstage right into a bathroom. There are two curtained windows, a wooden-boarded floor, a bed, a couple of chairs, a desk. The walls are covered in the titular yellow wallpaper.

The first thing that happens is that the cast and crew bring on the cameras. I think there are between three and five. The crew are mostly dressed in black. They set up and the “action” begins. No. Sorry. Before that, possibly before all of that, there’s a (pre-recorded) video projected onto the large screen that hangs above the rooms of a young couple with their baby and a nanny, Tania (Iris Becher).

The young couple (Anna (Judith Engel) and Christoph (Tilman Strauß - Jean in Fräulein Julie)) and nanny from the video are moving into the room. They’re trying to get an annoyingly shaped iron cot-frame out of an unhelpfully solid door. The action is filmed and projected onto the screen above. This live video is pretty much perfect. And it cuts between camera angles as often as a “regular” film would.  It’s not feverishly jump-cut-ty, nor does it compromise in any way. If you just watched the film which plays on the screen above the stage and couldn’t see it was being made live, then you’d be perfectly happy to assume it was a cinema film or TV movie.

All at once, you notice that the sound effects are actually not coming from the room, but are being created by the foley-artist in the left-hand room. And immediately this becomes compelling too. Watching her unwrap a similar bunch of flowers to the one which Christoph has just brought into the room suddenly becomes fascinating as you try to watch the noise being made while watching the thing that is supposedly making the noise.

– there’s an interesting thing: I think part of the excitement of watching is to check for the slippage between these different realities. You can watch just the screen and listen, or you can look at the real flowers (pre-film) being unwrapped, and try to cast your eyes across at the same time to watch the foley artist, Cathlen Gawlich (plainly a genius) doing the noise with her fierce concentration on the live-filmed image she's watching –

At the same time, you can watch the camera operators (the credits are for Andreas Hartmann, Stefan Kessissoglou, but actors who aren’t in shot also take on camera duties, often passing them to each other as they switch from in-front to behind).

Lyndsey Turner’s *version* of the text (translated into German by Gerhild Steinbuch, so I really couldn’t tell you if it’s all an edit of words-from-the-book or an original script) is delivered in a second sound-booth – between the centre and right rooms – by Ursina Lardi with such precision, energy, and expression that it could almost certainly stand alone as an effective, evocative radio play. Similarly, the visual treatment of the story is so clear and detailed that it could easily work as a silent – or rather, wordless – film/or performance (and in my case, probably did to a greater or lesser extent).

On one level, as has been observed by everyone seeing one of these shows for the first time, just the intricacies of this process are enough to keep you happily watching for hours. The seamlessness and the technical achievement going on from minute to minute is just ridiculously satisfying to watch for itself. But this isn’t just a virtuoso display of technique, there’s also a whole tonne of content here.

The Yellow Wallpaper is one of those texts which has taken on an enviable life of its own after publication. I have no idea whether Perkins Gilman intended it as the piece of proto-feminist literature it has become or simply as a psychological thriller about a ghost (and it’s been so long since I read it that I can’t remember how much clue the book gives).

Here, as confirmed by the Schaubühne blurb, Mitchell’s take on the piece suggests a sound basis in the psychological reality of post-natal depression. (In this it forms one of the growing corpus of Mitchell’s work dealing with depression and suicide; from Wunschkonzert, through Pains of Youth, up to Small Hours in 2011 and the forthcoming Wunschloses Unglück in Vienna.) However, this production has its cake and eats it. In the story a woman becomes obsessed with the figure of a woman she thinks she can see behind the pattern and cracks in her yellow wallpaper. I don’t think it’s ever necessarily/entirely clear in the book whether or not she’s right to believe this. Here Mitchell has made the choice to show us what the woman, Anna, sees. (How brilliant, also, that the woman is called Anna.) As such, we are presented at once with both a serious psychological condition and a manifestation of that condition which could at once be either a physical manifestation of a metaphor or an actual stage “ghost”; suggesting that Anna isn’t crazy at all. That there really is something there – in that way like in horror films where no one believes the person who can see the nightmarish figure until it’s too late.

I think there’s something in the slippage between all the modes being used to present the story as well which furthers this ambiguity. That we can effectively be watching every possible explanation *at the same time* – all the while knowing that *everything* is (obviously) just an illusion. But an illusion that speaks to at least one reality.

There’s also something brilliant in the choice of Luise Wolfram as the woman behind the wallpaper. She has a kind of unearthly beauty which renders her just standing there in the corner of the room – or else, standing in the other room, being filmed and projected into the room where Anna is – actually unnerving. The effect of the woman behind the wallpaper is rendered using yet more clever digital video trickery – sometimes so the two women being filmed in different rooms can only meet on the screen above them.

Melanie Wilson and Gareth Fry’s sound design and score adds increasingly to the kind of vertiginous feeling of madness engulfing everything on the stage – even as cool logic can still be seen making the sound effects and using the cameras.

The final moments are shattering and then, just after it’s all stopped, leaving a ringing in your ears, there’s a final cruel, “before” video like the one shown at the start, which suddenly makes the bitterness of the piece all the more profound.

To be honest, I was never a big fan of the novella. This, however, is just about as perfect a piece of theatre as you are likely to see this year (or next, it’s definitely still running in January, and will probably go on well beyond that. Miss Julie from 2010 is still going, after all).

all photographs © Stephen Cumminsky

[and that concludes my two weeks in Germany in November 2013]

Atmen – Schaubühne

[written for Exeunt]

In my review of the UK première of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs, I suggested: “It is interesting to consider Lungs in the light of Katie Mitchell’s Ten Billion, which I don't think has had nearly enough praise for the game-raiser it is as regards theatre's dialogue with the impending global catastrophe that is climate change”.

The German-language première of Lungs (Atmen) is directed by Katie Mitchell and it also makes precisely this connection. It also presents one of the most elegant syntheses of Anglo- and German theatre thinking that I’ve ever seen, marrying British new writing with German conceptual staging in about as evocative way as is possible to imagine.

If you didn’t see Lungs on tour here (or in one of its US versions), or catch the version on Radio 3, it’s a two-hander about a couple which starts with the man asking the woman if she wants to have a baby. Scenes cut into scenes, time and place jump forward, but throughout it’s just a couple carrying on a conversation. They agonise over whether it is responsible to have a child, adding to the world’s ballooning population. They worry about the possible future their putative child will have. She gets pregnant. They have to adjust their expectations and habits. Then she miscarries and they are devastated. They break up. They get back together. She is pregnant. They have a child. Then – briefly at the end, In a bit I don’t remember *at all* from the original production – they get old and die.

It’s small, bittersweet, thoughtful, truthful, insightful and probably quite harrowing for anyone without children.

The central conceit of Mitchell’s production is that both the actors are on bikes. Placed on top of Chloe Lamford’s beautifully designed, functional charcoal plinths, with a further “plinth” hanging empty above them, recalling, variously: Rachel Whiteread’s Fourth Plinth design, the original set for Thomas Ostermeier’s staging of Crave, and perhaps the greyscale version of those blocky equal marriage symbols everyone had as Facebook profile pics for a while.

The reason they’re on bikes is that the entire show is run on electricity generated in the room during the show. As a result, there are also four other cyclists ranged round the shallow concrete cyclorama, pedalling throughout. The performers control their own lights, the others I think the sound, sound desk and video projection (the sound design by Ben and Max Ringham – the whirring wheels of the bikes amplified, is superb). It is breathtakingly simple brilliance. *Of course* they’re on bikes. *Of course*. What better way to remind us continually of the world and the anxieties they’re talking about. The video projection shows one of those clocks which shows the world’s population increasing. Over the course of the show, it has gone up by well over 10,000. The show is a bit longer than an hour.

What’s lovely about the concept, however, is that beyond this eco-purpose, it also feeds back brilliantly into other aspects of the play. At one point I found myself noticing how apt it felt that they were getting absolutely nowhere no matter how hard they cycled, which felt like another possible critique of the play’s wider theme of life under capitalism: the protagonists are set on this on possible course and they never quite think to get off, or change anything. They just keep pedalling to keep the lights on.

Then there was also the effect that the cycling had on their performances. The performances – by Lucy Wirth (last seen by me in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) and Christoph Gawenda – are both excellent, btw.

But it’s fascinating to see Wirth, much more than Gawenda, seeming to find it tough going (of course, this could also be acting); her lights dimming more often, as the physical demands of the piece make themselves felt. Neatly, this also lend her character a kind of vulnerability which the character’s external toughness and cleverness refuse.

I’m not exactly sure how I’d describe the performances or where I’d situate them, in terms of national theatre cultures. They both emote far, far less than any British actor would, faced with the same emotional journey. But then so would any German. And the language lends itself to emoting less. There’s a plainness and a directness to it, instead of being this fabric of ums and ahs and “tact” and intonation with which English communicate. But there is a truthfulness and a concentration to the performances. And that is the crucial thing. You find yourself convinced by the truth of what they’re saying, which is interesting, since actually, in the play, the characters are sometimes lying to each other, or at last being evasive or unsure.

I did find myself wondering how much of Duncan’s script, just in terms of the way the two spoke to each other, might come across as sheer science-fiction – all the locations have been swapped for roughly equivalent German ones, so this is now definitely a play about two Germans, not two Germans performing a play about an English couple. (And, talking to the Nachtkritik editor afterwards, possibly reflects a way of thinking more common in Britain than here – perhaps in large part because of the also catastrophic cost of bringing up a child in London compared to Berlin.) Actually, it *feels*, in the room, at the time, like it is being listened to and felt with remarkable attention. For a very funny play (in English), I was also reminded again how nice it is to watch plays with people who don’t feel the need to laugh loudly at every single joke to signal approval. Smiling is an acceptable substitute in Deutschland and it interestingly makes for a much more pleasant atmosphere.

By any measure, though, national or international, this is a splendid production of this excellent chamber play. And it’s one which a) will be in rep for some time, I suspect, and b) it’s not one which it would be impossible to imagine happening here. So if you’re after an idea of what Germany makes possible that perhaps England makes difficult, then this might be a good place to start. You can find the script easily enough in English, I imagine, or find the radio version online, and then marvel at the way that an elegantly conceived concept doesn’t *interfere* with a play, but simply just compliments it beautifully, adding additional layers and amplifications to an already rich texture.

Es sagt mir nichts, das sogenannte draußen – Gorki Theater

[written for Exeunt, although the writing is a bit meh, if I'm honest]

If anyone had any lingering doubts about whether Sebastian Nübling is a misogynist or not, this show ought to pretty much remove all trace. The text is by Sibylle Berg, the hardcore German feminist, novelist (of whom we have (un)surprisingly little in translation over here), Spiegel columnist and theatre type. And the staging, well, the staging is four women (possibly graduates of the Junges Theater in Basel) of various races and appearances, all dressed roughly the same as the single-voice narrator. They perform her in chorus (pretty much perfectly) as duets and in solos. At the same time, they own the stage with movement created by choreographer Tabea Martin.

The text itself (shown here with surtitles in line with the Gorki’s “inclusion” policy of surtitling all home-grown shows in English – I’m not sure of the extent to which the JTB is involved as this is definitely a Gorki production – how amazing) tells the narrator’s-eye-view story of a girl-gang member who used to go out beating up men, who gradually drifts away from her gang, into more mainstream society, and generally despairs about the state of the world.

The style of the text is emphatically German, however. I was incredibly surprised by the reaction of the audience with whom I saw the piece on Friday night, who responded as if they’d seen a really angry, searing piece of social realism. I suppose, in theory, they had. But this felt like a real cultural gap for me (although my (German, theatre-agnostic, though perhaps a bit Anglophile, feminist) friend was also non-plussed by the cheering that happened alongside the inevitable year of applause.).

But, discussing the show the next night with Nachtkritik editor Anne Peter she, like Nachtkritik’s reviewer (who wrote: [Google-Translated] “Why is this such a way that a kick in the auditorium of sweat on the forehead, vibrate the muscles, the pulse races, as if someone had just driven himself seventy-five minutes high performance sport, at least to Fight Cup level?
Because these four furious chorus speakers make up there on the boards relentlessly pace, driving beat and hook not only play themselves into a frenzy, but also the floor above which the hall light has been started.
It’s out the tirade of a young woman from our own four walls, against the eroding female “role models”, in the political, erotic, consumer-economic, digital, artistic, whatever promise of happiness, against almost anything and almost everything. Switch via Skype, text messages and phone in close timing her friends, her half-sister, her mother, it without that they would gain presence. There is only a brief bucking in the monologue of the protagonist, then resting on the discourse Ticker. Such is life 2.0: manic, hyper reflects virtually.”), suggested that the piece itself exerted a real sense of physical, tangible rage.

I confess, sat not so far from the stage, I didn’t really feel it. I read it. And granted, reading something with the voice in your head while some people talk in a foreign language which, because you’re reading, you’ve stopped trying to understand, is a bit of a secondary experience. But I don’t think it was this that was the problem for me. I wonder, a bit, if it was that there was something about the general culture here that you can be told a thing in stark terms and you take that thing seriously as a result. Just as a result of the being told. Whereas in Britain actors might tend to bend over backwards and shout themselves hoarse to prove it to you physically, because of the way that the British tend to treat language generally – as a medium for wit or diplomacy (or “lying” as a German ex- had it), yes; as a tool for ernst or echt-ness, not so much. I wondered, in short, if me not really feeling it was more a consequence of not feeling German stage conventions keenly enough for them to have a real emotional impact on me. For everyone else in the room, it was apparently like watching Credible Likeable Superstar Role-model. (And I wonder whether they’d conversely have found BK’s CLSR a bit needy and demonstrative, what with all the nearly actually crying and so on...).

It’s tricky. Because I don’t want to pass any kind of definitive judgement here. I can only say what I felt and what I thought. And I don’t believe in fudging the issue with a kind of halfway house synthesis of what I was meant to think or feel, or how I imagine I might have felt if I was someone else and passing that off as “a review”. So all I can do is relate as carefully as possible what I actually did feel and let people try to pick out of that what they find relatable.

So, yes. There was demonstrable talent. But partly I suppose I was also missing (again) Nübling’s more epic production style. I suppose this I also unfair of me. To see two things by a director (Pornographie and Three Kingdoms) and to want everything else he does to do something similar. And that style wouldn’t have necessarily suited Es sagt mir nichts... anyway. So, yes. I was probably the wrong person for this show much more than there being anything wrong with the show per se. If other reviews and colleagues are anything to go by, this was pretty searing stuff. But I didn’t feel any of it. Or especially find the half-narrative/half-analysis especially convincing. I did spend a lot of time noticing national differences in the way the story was told however. I wonder if that is another dimension which distracted me – an unacknowledged wedded-ness to the national style of storytelling of the country of my birth – although I’d again say not, part due to my German friend, unprompted, saying much the same things that I was worrying about, and part due to the fact that it doesn’t work as a truism across the board.

So ultimately I’m not sure why me and Es sagt mir nichts... didn’t click, but we didn’t.

In der republik des glücks – Deutsches Theater

[seen 28th November]

This isn’t so much a review as an extended apology to Dominic Cooke. It’s also not a review because I happened to catch the Deutsches Theater’s German language première of Martin Crimp’s In The Republic of Happiness – of which I’d somehow been unawares when I planned my recent trip – as the guest of a director friend rather than on a full press ticket. As a result, neither she nor I felt sufficiently compelled to return for the second half of the production after the interval. So I can really only talk about the first half and why I couldn’t bear a second... (I wasn’t the only one, it seems. Even the polite Nachtkritik kritik says: “Dann ist Pause. Man möchte davonlaufen.” (Then is interval. You want to run away.))

In my review of the world première production at the Royal Court I remember being quite stand-offish about both play and production.

Of Crimp’s text I worried: “ it suggests nothing so much as a man who has been forced to spend all the time since his last play locked in a room with copies of the Daily Mail with a bit of Jeremy Kyle and Celebrity TV or biographies for light relief. On one hand, it does a good job a skewering these imagined truisms that apparently litter modern society. On the other hand, it almost feels like it has bought into one too many Daily Mail myths about “therapy-speak” and the “therapy society” etc.”

And of Cooke’s production I said things like: “I sat in the stalls mentally redirecting, or at least wondering what what else might have been.” and: “It’s much more the whole conceptual framework [that is lacking here]. [It] feels like The Path of Least Resistance. I don’t think it would be controversial to suggest that Dominic Cooke’s metier isn’t experimental theatre. Almost too inevitably, I couldn’t help wishing Katie Mitchell had been free to direct this. And Miriam Buether’s set isn’t one of her best. The first scene is more or less *right*. But where the obvious *massive* scope for interpretative freedom kicks in, then Cooke seems to more or less side-step it completely. Part two is more or less a chair-for-chair staging of Vicky Featherstone’s production of Crave...”

The most valuable thing I took from last Thursday’s performance was just how much greatness I take for granted in British theatre. Reading myself saying Cooke’s staging of the first scene is “more or less right” now strikes me as horrifically churlish in the light of Thursday night. Indeed, even without Thursday, it’s a pretty harsh judgement on a production which (despite what the above sounds like) I’d also included in my top ten productions of 2012 and of which my memories are much fonder a year down the line.

The fact is, I now remember the first scene in Cooke’s production as being nigh-on perfect. Certainly a more-or-less infinite improvement on Rafael Sanchez’s production for DT. As someone who regularly argues for interpretative freedom for directors, my using the notion of “perfect” should obviously be attended with the appropriate scare marks. I don’t think Cooke’s production was the only way to make this scene work. In fact, if anything, what was most irritating about Sanchez’s version was that it was more-or-less just the same thing, just set in a different room: albeit with infinitely less precision as regards the text, no apparent appreciation of the humour, and absolutely no observable dynamics between any of the characters speaking.

The different room was, of course, interesting. What Janina Audick had knocked up might be regarded as being as typical a German family living room in the same way as Miriam Buether’s was a “typical” English dining room – perhaps both slightly stylised (Buether’s more than Audick’s). The different ways that each set sat in relation to the auditorium was also interesting. After wondering slightly about the way that the transfer of the small black-box staging by Nübling of Stephens’s Morning suddenly found itself bearing down on the audience in a large, much lighter room, here I found myself initially fascinated by the change of dynamic between Cooke’s high-stage, dark room version of Scene One (“THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY”), here became a largely, airy, open-plan white room on stage in front of a large, democratically ordered single raked audience (by “democratic” I mean: I think all seats have the same price and relatively speaking the same view – you could choose to be nearer or further away from the stage according to preference, but it’s not a big enough space for that to make a substantial difference, unlike, say, the upper circle at the Royal Court).

As such, this initial picture of what “family” means for each production starts off in a radically different place. In Britain, it’s almost a cartoon of barely-out-of-the-Victiorian-period awfulness and awkwardness. In the German reading it feels like the “issue” of a family starts off in a slightly less loaded place. No reason for this to be a stumbling block, of course – God knows that Germany has lived with pretty much the heaviest inter-generational questions in Europe for the last 70 years, although that period must now be coming to an end, at least in the West. But, in Sanchez’s production none of this seems to be of interest to the director. The lines are delivered clearly, but the reactions to them – to everything that anyone says, in fact – well, the lines seem to appear in the space and then disappear again without making the faintest difference to anyone. Of course, this could be – must be? – a directorial decision. But coupled with a cast who seem to be sleep-waking through the thing, with no apparent enthusiasm or energy... Well, it might all be deliberate, but it didn’t seem to be working as an approach for me, my friend, or anyone else in the auditorium (we certainly weren’t the only ones to duck out at the interval, and those who stayed to the end didn’t seem especially pleased to have done so when they left).

Glanz und Elend der Kurtisanen – Volksbühne

[seen 27/11/13]

Placeholder until I've had a chance to do the reading that this piece deserves prior to any sort of a meaningful review.

[will be: written for Exeunt]

Das Schottenstück. Konzert für Macbeth – Volksbühne, Berlin

[written for Exeunt]

If you think you like German theatre, go to the Volksbühne. To my mind the Volksbühne is almost completely unlike any other theatre in Berlin. The work there feels more more politically committed, more dramaturgically difficult, and just more out-and-out alien to the British mindset. Deutsches Theater? Piece of cake. Schaubühne? Walk in the park. Volksbühne? Ah.

Part of the reason might the longstanding intendant-ship of Frank Castorf, who has a reputation for being a difficult Communist with a preference for destroying Chekhov over the course of five hours rather than say, making a nice watchable production which leaves time for a post-show supper. But it’s hard to say for sure. After all, the Volksbühne is effectively the Berlin home of Gob Squad, and they’re likeable enough fluffy nonsense. And even René Pollesch – Castorf’s second in command – is a bit more visually and temporally user-friendly.

So why does it feel like there’s a kind of Volksbühne aesthetic which permeates into more of the work here than it should? Perhaps it’s the dramaturgs, perhaps it’s the auditorium, or perhaps it’s just my imagination.

I’ve seen bits of David Marton’s work before. I adored his Die Heimkehr des Odysseus, I was pretty impressed with his Das wohltemperierte Klavier too. But these were both takes – admittedly incredible takes – on extant works. Heimkehr, an opera with a a plot, and Klavier, at least a single cycles of music grafted onto a single book. The approach here is much more similar to the Extreme Jukebox Musical style of Christoff Marthaler’s Meine Faire Dame (which remains one of the best, most life-and-mind changing things I’ve ever seen as regards the possibilities of theatre) – essentially taking any piece of music at all and using it because it feels dramaturgically correct for telling the story.

[I will fill in the rest of the review bit ASAP, but my hostel has YouTube blocked on the wi-fi to stop da kidz uploading porn of themselves, apparently – ah, the modern world – so I’m just filing the whole playlist in a coffee shop to check it works.  Still, well worth a listen.  Some amazing stuff and the links, leaps and contrasts tell the story all by themselves really...]

Henry Purcell - The Queen's Funeral March



Henry Purcell - Canzona



Arnold Schönberg - Suite for Piano Op 25 Trio



Arnold Schönberg - Red Mass



Ludwig van Beethoven – Come fill, fill my good fellow



Jón Leifs – Vögguvísa



Geoffrey Burgon – Nunc Dimittis


(yes, really. That made me sit up and take notice, I can tell you)

Johann Sebastian Bach – Passacaglia in C-Moll



Béla Bartók – Miraculous Mandarin



Johann Sebastian Bach – Partita II C-Moll BWV 826, Sinfonia



Pietro Locatelli – Cappricio



John Cage – Experiences No 2



Henry Purcell – Funeral Sentences



Henry Purcell – Thou knowest Lord



Cream – Strange Brew



Nina Simone – Tomorrow is my turn



Eugène Ysaye – 2. Sonate



The Shaggs – Philosophy of the World



Giovanni Battista Pergolesi – Stabat Mater



The Doors – Shaman’s Blues

Morning – Gorki Theater, Berlin

[written for Exeunt]

May 2012 suddenly feels like an awfully long time ago. From here – late November 2013 – even August 2012 is starting to feel like a different era in British theatre. I mention those two months in particular, since the former saw the British première of Sebastian Nübling’s astonishing production of Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms; and the latter saw the slightly less trumpeted World première of his subsequent play, Morning, directed by Sean Holmes with the Lyric Theatre’s Young Company, at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh.

A year and a half later Three Kingdoms has pretty much become legendary. It’s already been written into the theatre history books as a kind of revolutionary wake-up call to British theatre (much to the irritation of some radical British theatre-makers, since they were already making work that influenced Nübling (Forced Entertainment) or were just as radical already (too numerous to mention)). I think the real game-changer, however, was seeing that work on the main stage of a “mainstream” theatre. And knowing that it was “mainstream” for the other theatre cultures from which it came (Germany and Estonia).

All of which is far too much set-up for whatever Nübling did next. As it happens, I’d already had my first post-Three Kingdom’s Nübling encounter with his production of Volpone for Bochum Schauspielhaus, which I hadn’t much gone for. And, brace yourselves, folks: I’m not sure I was such an enormous fan of t/his Morning either.

As a compare and contrast exercise, the the difference between Holmes’s Morning and Nübling’s are instructive. Visually, where Holmes’s (designed by Hyemi Shin) was cluttered, messy and visceral; Nübling’s (“visuals Philip Whitfield”) is spare and stark. It has two basic elements flour and wood. The wood is all lent against the back wall in rough, unfinished planks. The flour is everywhere. Starting off in the performers pockets, or replacing the liquid in beer cans, the piece kicks off like a gig stand-off between Death in June (a single drummer beating violent rhythms on a lone snare – albeit a drummer who looks exactly like Fotherinton-Thomas) and Fields of the Nephilim (a goth band mostly famous for covering themselves in flour. Man, I have got to get me some more recent cultural references). The rest of the aesthetic looks much more like a hip-hop advert for All Saints.

Nübling’s production is for/with the Junges Theater in Basel (effectively one Swiss version of the Lyric Young Company). As such, the other two key-notes of the production beyond wood and flour are the company’s extreme youth and, interestingly, in the context of choice of music, their extreme whiteness. Where Holmes’s production not inaccurately represented the social and racial make-up of Hammersmith in West London, I imagine Nübling’s does much the same for Basel. As such, the appropriation of urban music feels somewhat strange. Now, (as the Fields of the Nephilim reference above makes clear) I know next to zip about urban music, and even less about the socio-economic and ethic mix of Basel. For all I know the kids in this production are all working class (Switzerland must have some sort of working class somewhere, right?) and the British/American accents they’re appropriating here for the rapping might be a more-or-less direct transfer. On the other hand, it might be a bit more like what it looks like, which would be like Barnes Youth Theatre making a show about “Thug Life”. You see my discomfort?

Similarly – and I’m pretty sure this is a grotesquely unfair judgement – the business of the company’s performance of youthfulness looks a bit more top-down than the Lyric company’s. Actually, since I’ve read Ashley Scott-Layton’s brilliant account of the Basel rehearsal process I know that denying the young people’s own agency in the work would just be incorrect. So instead I have the difficult job of explaining that what they’ve creating in collaboration with Nübling looks, (a bit, from the outside), like that kind of “grown-up’s version of what young people are like”. My (German, feminist, theatre-agnostic) friend who I saw it with mentioned Skins, and I knew what she meant.

There’s also the tricky problem of gender. Coming to this straight from Katie Mitchell’s Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino, moade for a stark contrast. Whatever else it does, Alles weitere... presents a version of women-on-stage that is utterly, fiercely, perfectly feminist. (Although I prefer the word “right” to the word “feminist”. Feminism shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the norm.) By contrast, the way that the women exist on stage here feels less progressive. Now, given that this is a collaboratively devised show, it would be idiotic to lay “blame” for this at Nübling’s door. On the other hand, he and his dramaturg (Uwe Heinrich) might have thought to come up with more elegant solutions to presenting the world.  (And I still wouldn't call Nübling a misogynist; possibly more of a provider of equal-opportunities objectification in an unequal world. Although here, with the additional youth of the performers, it did feel at once more worrying: but it also felt more insolent on the part of the young people, all of them, so maybe telling them how to stage themselves isn't my business.)

The issue is, though, that the young people are creating a vision of the world of the play, and its social context, largely through physical theatre. In many ways, I feel that I must have been spoilt by the quality of what I’ve been seeing recently that I’m not just immediately rolling over and letting this staging tickle my tummy. I mean, it is bloody amazing, don’t get me wrong. However, even within the world of amazing, we have to ask tough questions. And the question here is: does the Basel production of Morning fall into a rather rudimentary trap by – in seeking to delineate the blank, sexualised world of “youth culture” in which Stephanie, Cat and Stephen live – reproducing the tropes of that world, twerkin’ ‘n’ all, on stage? Here, unlike in Homes’s production, Tabea Buser’s Stephanie is a pretty relentless, screamin’, shoutin’, “sex bomb”. Cat, by contrast, is so much of a wallflower here that she literally spends whole scenes sitting against a wall playing videogames on her phone.

Beyond the shouting (of which I could have lived with less), there’s also the interesting sub-question of whether where one sits and the audience’s relation to the stage to take into account. If this Morning felt a bit more oppressive than Sean’s, then possibly partly this might have to do with the fact that Nübling’s actors towered over us on the Gorki’s strange thrust stage, rather than being surveyed way beneath us and far away as performers tend to be in the main space of the Traverse.

But what got me, and what confused the hell out of me, really, was that fact that despite – obviously – having completely rejected naturalism, the tropes that Nübling/the company were employing kind of brought the “realism” back in through a side door. This is a tricky idea to articulate, but in the Lyric production it felt more like Stephanie was allowed to remain partly as a symbolic, hypothetical set of propositions about the world. In the Basel version, she seemed more like a slightly unevenly written “real character” – in spite of the non-naturalistic playing. It perhaps didn’t help that Nübling has removed the Marx from Morning (and perhaps less significantly changed the going-to-university catalyst of change between Cat and Stephanie to going to a posh boarding school).

So, all this worrying aside, I should say that this production is actually pretty incredible. That I spent a lot of time wondering about these various aspects of it possibly just reflects the amount of time I’ve been spending in theatres recently, and the incredibly high-standard of that work, that mere brilliance of staging and sparks of energy and genius are no longer enough. Now I want purity of ideological expression and content as well. And in that respect, this production of Morning left me with a lot more niggling doubts than positive questions and propositions.

Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino – Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg

[written for Exeunt]

[this review contains a few errors of analysis, which I've left in due to a misplaced sense of honesty]

Martin Crimp’s new play Alles weitere kennen sie aus dem kino (The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from The Cinema) is an adaptation of The Phoenician Women by Euripides, which in turn is a version of Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus.

Katie Mitchell’s staging of it is possibly the best piece of theatre she has ever made. It is probably one of the best made things I’ve ever seen in a theatre full stop.

There’s an interesting thing going on with Katie Mitchell’s growing body of work: as piece follows piece the complete oeuvre feels like it’s gradually taking on an almost solid form of its own, a kind of over-all dramaturgy. Piece by piece it gradually returns to previous themes and ideas and re-explores them. Her productions of the classics more and more explore plays with a female perspective (Ipheginia at Aulis, Women of Troy, Idomeneo, this). Her choices of new plays and original work reflect a growing horrified concern with the future of the environment (Ten Billion, Lungs). At the same time, stagings of other texts – Waves, Reise Durch Die Nacht, A Woman Killed With Kindness, Pains of Youth, Written on Skin – experiment with different possibilities of staging.

Much as Reise Durch Die Nacht felt like the apex of her work with video so far, Alles weitere... feels like the absolute best of her non-video work (although I started late on this with Women of Troy). What also feels exciting, though, is the extent that you can see the traces of so many previous stagings in this one. The most notable elements are the “scene-change Scene of Crime Officers” adapted here from Pains of Youth, the “opening the fourth wall” lighting and sound effect that I first saw in Women of Troy, and then there’s the best example yet of the “people walking backwards” thing that definitely featured in, again, Women of Troy, but also Written on Skin and I think much else in between.

However, theatre criticism isn’t a matter of just seeing a lot of someone’s work and then listing the familiar elements which recur from previous productions. These elements are distinctive, strong and important to this new work. It is significant that there is such a strong, increasing through-line to Mitchell’s work now. The idea of a theatre director as an artist in such control of their body of work is something that we should all get excited about. Of course theatre is a collaborative art-form, but one gets the impression that it is not unreasonable to credit Mitchell as the intellectual driving force behind the series of pieces that she has directed.

Being a British critic writing about a British director directing a British writer, it is of course sacrilege to suggest this. How have I got three paragraphs in and not mentioned Martin Crimp? Inconceivable!

Being as Alles weitere... premièred in German, in Germany, I got the theatre’s press office to send me a copy of the play ahead of the performance. Interestingly they could only send me a copy of the German translation, because the English version – the original – isn’t licensed. Which is as fascinating as it is insane – how can me translating what Crimp wrote in English back to English possibly be an improvement on what the German translator (Ulrike Syha) was handed to translate in the first place? Y’know? On the other hand, I think it does admirably make the point that this play had its world première in German. And that the German text is A Thing in its own right. (Also, being in Germany, it was nice to not be the only critic reading the play before seeing it. Being English, however, I only read the first half, so I could have both experiences. And because I didn’t want to spoil the ending...) But, we want to talk about the play...

It’s a testament to the distinctness of Martin Crimp’s voice that you can run a German version of one of his plays through Google Translate and the English version comes out looking and sounding recognisably like the work of the man who also wrote Attempts on Her Life, In The Republic of Happiness and In The Valley. I mention these three specifically as, like Mitchell, Crimp also has his own growing body of work and Alles weitere... is definitely also an expansion of his own themes and motifs. The text basically alternates between two modes. One, reminiscent of Attempts... or part two of Republic ... – and with changes in speaker signified by the same dashes – has the chorus of Phoenician women musing on their situation with non-sequiturious digressions into reflection on the modern world. These alternate, however, with scenes where the named characters of the Greek tragedy engage each other in dialogue which runs close to the general thrust of the original, discussing the deeply strange situation in which they’ve found themselves.

(In brief: in this version of the Oedipus story, Jocasta hasn’t committed suicide, and Oedipus has been bundled off out of Thebes, which leaves his sons Polyneices and Eteocles to take over the city. However, Eteocles has seized complete power and now Polyneices is outside with an army. Old favourites like Tiresias, Creon and Antigone also all put in appearances. It almost feels like a Greek Tragedy’s Greatest Hits album.)

Now, what’s fascinating about having read half the text before seeing the show is that I had a pretty good mental picture of what Crimp was driving at. No. Mental picture is wrong. I had no particular visual sense of how the thing would look, but I could hear the voices very strongly. The voices – possibly even a range of different possible voices – from an imaginary English version. What comes – came – across most strongly in the reading is the impression of the sardonic exercising of power on the parts of the men waging the war. And of Jocasta, actually. And Antigone. The sense of them as arrogant upper-class rulers. Very English upper-class rulers, in fact.

Mitchell’s production takes that assumption and forensically shreds every last scrap of it. Here we are in a draughty looking, semi-abandoned-looking old upper-class home or perhaps some sort of asylum or other similar institution (beautifully designed by Alex Eales). (It is wonderful to notice that as well as there being a discernible continuity within Mitchell and Crimp’s work, there is also a satisfying dramaturgy in Karin Beier’s opening season, with this production making a neat pairing with Schwarze Augen, Maria, and Beier’s own projected three-part Trojan War sequence which would have included her own (re-mount?) of Die Troerinnen (Women of Troy). Here again is Tiresias surrounded by peeling paint...). The Phonician women (we assume) are dressed in severe black dresses with high necks and no arms. They have a clinical, military air about them. The dramatis personae of the play are also mostly dressed in black, but like the Trojan women of Mitchell’s production, they look more like they’ve been taken out of a black-tie dinner (the men are indeed mostly still wearing black ties).

But what’s remarkable, the entire extra element that the production adds to the written text, is that this chorus seem to have all the named characters held prisoner. Rather than re-staging a world which leaves unchallenged that miserable lot of these women held prisoner Mitchell has rewritten the balance of power so that the unnamed women exert observable power over both the men and women of the play.

So, the way the action runs is thus: the women deliver their “chorus” bits. They do so facing front, mostly. They then detach from one another and in a series of pre-planned (in the world of the play) movements, they disappear off through the many doors leading out of the main room (the set also has two floors, a grand staircase, and one cutaway upstairs room), reappearing with glass cases such as you might find in museums, containing authentic-looking ancient Greek artefacts – the props of the story the characters are involved in, in fact.

The actors of the story are brought in and are apparently made to deliver their lines under duress. The chorus of women don overcoats to “pretend” to be the women from Phoenicia, but they plainly never lose control. Even when they’re “in character” the named players remain observably terrified of them.

This also has an interesting impact on the way the characters speak. Rather than delivering their lines with whatever sort of level of contempt or bravado appropriate to their status as rulers of ancient cities, they now instead speak with the hysterical fear of a prisoner in a beheading video. It seems likely that every time they are taken off the stage again when they parts are done they are being tortured in some way in the unseen rooms. They don’t come back on bleeding or anything, but you can imagine that they are perhaps being forced to listen to disorientating white noise á la that brief but haunting scene in film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. When they have been positioned by their chorus captors, that brilliant lighting effect of an iron being raised from in front of the stage plays out every time, so we also get a sense that they are now being shown to us.

The effect this has on the “meaning” of the piece as a whole is fascinating. It is at once distancing and makes the entire thing feel somehow incredibly more present and plausible. Instead of asking us to directly relate to the pre-historic troubles of Mediterranean aristocrats, we think of the modern world and the horrors of war that are still being perpetuated. In the reading which I made on Sunday night there was a sense of this being an examination of what happens to the losing side in a war. These meta-theatrics creating a situation very similar to the one in The Trojan Women. A series of Nuremberg Trials or Truth and Reconciliation Committee being played out well beyond the boundaries of international law by infinitely more vengeful inquisitors.

The other effect that this style of staging has is the purely aesthetic. On one level, quite apart from and beyond the contents (which is a stupid thing to say, but bear with me), Alles weitere... is one of the most beautiful-to-look-at pieces of theatre you will ever see. As well as all the action being superbly choreographed, there are also sequences where scenes “rewind”. So, a scene will take place, and then when it is finished, or perhaps because it didn’t go as planned, or... to be honest, the precise logic of why a particular scene might re-play or simply be reversed is largely opaque – but opaque in a way that makes you think about the possible reasons it might have re-wound. Is it to do with the title – a modern idea of history where all events spool forward as in a cinema, but can be recalled and re-written or re-imagined? The way that subsequent generations re-write and now even re-film history? That all history is just a series of framing devices and relative understandings and post-fact justifications? All this seems possible and present. (So, even while I say “apart from the contents” an element I was about to position as entirely aesthetic does in fact create meaning.) However, these rewind sequences, beyond the additional possible meanings they create, are also just astonishing to watch. The precision with which the actors perform all their actions in reverse is more akin to watching contemporary dance (coupled with the vast room-setting, I was most reminded of Two Cigarettes in the Dark). The first time it happens it’s impressive enough, but there is at least one sequence where an entire scene rewinds – for what feels like minutes (in a good way). I was conscious that my jaw had actually dropped. It really is that impressive. And also beautiful. But also strangely painful and troubling.

The more I write, the more I feel like I’m completely failing to really deliver either succinct enough analysis, or clear enough description. This is one of those pieces which I think might be termed a “two review show”. i.e. to really do it justice, one would probably have to write about it more than once. One review probably just gets the froth in your mind out of the way. Perhaps later, down the line, a better, more thoughtful, more precise analysis might be possible, once the immediate excitement has died down a bit. At the moment it feels a bit like trying to describe why a rollercoaster was great just after getting off. Moreover, this is certainly the sort of thing I’d really want to watch again and again in an ideal world.

For the time being, though, suffice it to say that if you can possibly get to Hamburg before this run closes, then you must. Otherwise, pray that it gets picked up by TheaterTreffen and that the Barbican (or someone else) brings it over to Britain. In a British context, this is the most revelatory and revolutionary piece of theatre since Three Kingdoms. And this time we won’t have to argue about the feminism.

Hedda Gabler – Thalia Theater

[written for Exeunt]

What’s you impression of the first ten minutes of Hedda? Probably not much, right? A pretty run-of-the-mill expository conversation between Jörgen Tesman’s aunt, Juliane, and his housekeeper Berte. Here, in Jan Bosse’s brand new staging for the Thalia, it is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on stage all year. The curtains (a kitschy effect in themselves) open onto a large brown room with the ugliest wallpaper you’ve ever seen. Berte, played here by Julian Greis, looks more or less exactly like Mark Gatiss playing Joan Sanderson, while the short, serious, Patricia Hayes-y Karin Neuhäuser as Juliane is wearing a brown and orange top with such extravagantly frou-frou-ed sleeves that you’re giggling before they even start speaking. There is such an elaborately overdone atmosphere of camp and bad taste that it’s very hard not to just keep laughing out loud. When Tesmaan (Jens Harzer) arrives, he looks, from where I was sitting, like a young Bruno Ganz doing a John Cleese impression, with added bits of Tommy Cooper.

Something you notice when such broad comedy is inserted into this scene is how cleverly Ibsen makes you want new stuff to keep happening. This whole set-up – campery or otherwise – is all about setting the audience up to regard Hedda in something like the same light as the other characters on stage: this idea that she is so beautiful, that she exercises such a fascination for and control over the other characters; that they are all in her thrall.

And Patrycia Ziółkowska (completely unrecognisable from Die Brüder Karamasow) takes set-up and absolutely knocks it out of the park. Where all the other characters seem to be stuck inside their mad physicalities in a 70s sitcom, Ziółkowska stalks in like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. It really is an astonishing performance. She strikes exactly the poses, widens her eyes, exaggerates facial expressions in that silent-movie acting style, that whole lost language of expressionism is suddenly reborn. It’s just amazing to watch. And hilariously jarring with the rest of the set, characters and concept. Tesman is wearing a dressing gown so brown that when he stands too close to the wallpaper his body seems to disappear, chameleon-style. Ziółkowska’s Hedda, meanwhile shimmers in an iridescent black and silver gown.

Richter Brack (Daniel Lommatzsch) is a dead-ringer for a young Derek Jacobi playing a metrosexual David Beckham-alike, in a red, raw-silk, seventies-cut suit. Perhaps slightly disappointingly, Lövborg is also dressed up in a seventies suit, a bit scruffier, and more down-at-heel than the others, perhaps ironed into this conformity by Marina Galic’s slender, brown velour trouser-suited Frau Elvstedt.

Another fascinating aspect of the production is the energy with which all the characters are attacked. I’m a bit used to seeing Fr. Elvstedt written off as a bit of a cardigan-wearing frump, often as a deliberate visual contrast to a more conventionally “glamorous”, “pretty”, or “beautiful” Hedda. Seeing her also played by such a striking actor, albeit one who still contrasts totally with Ziółkowska, is a bit of a revelation. But every character here seems to be playing the most attack-y reading of their lines possible. Immediately Hedda and Elvstedt are fencing, not hedging; Brack is entirely, overt with his sexual designs on Hedda from the get-go; and all the while Greis’s Berte glides about like a ghostly, disapproving Mrs Danvers.

This renewed attention to physicality also creates a real sense of how Hedda’s body itself is a site of conflict. In an early conversation when they are alone, Brack very violently and deliberately puts his hand between Hedda’s legs. The effect is completely shocking and appalling. It even works without textual support as Ziółkowska’s face registers Hedda’s mortification, shame and disgust, and parallel realisation that there’s nothing that she can say to anyone, while Brack carries on as if nothing has happened.

I’m not fully convinced it *all* works. There are moments when the pace drops, and then the mind wanders slightly (more possible and less helpful if listening to a second-language on which one needs to concentrate to understand). But part of me wonders if one can ever really recapture the thrill of seeing Hedda Gabler performed for the first time (without even knowing the plot, in my case). And after that, well, there a bit where you maybe find yourself thinking, yes, yes, this bit. Go on, get to the next bit. Is that bad? Can anything be done about that? What? (honest, open-ended questions). Some other bits, though – bits you equally know are coming – are still great, although I suppose I should admit that I found the bits which had been given a precise new bit of visual language the most satisfying: for example, when Hedda burns Lövborg’s manuscript she does so by dropping the pages through a trap-door in the stage followed by their burning cover. We then watch the orange light play on her face as the unseen flames eat the book.

I did wonder *slightly* about the conceptual frame: yes, it’s bloody funny, and it makes you look at the play again, and it makes you appreciate anew the fine-tuned mechanics of Ibsen’s plotting. At the same time, I’m not sure it says anything desperately profound about the world of the play. It’s strange. It at once feels a bit like an attack on the piece, and like some big Regietheater konzept, but at the same time like mostly just an enormous amplification of what’s already there, and no so very much critique. But maybe it’s not meant to be, and that would be fine. And, as I say, the beginning works so beautifully that you fall in love immediately.

Act by act, walls from the set are flown out. So, from the closed room in which the play begins, the stage gradually becomes a vast empty(-ish) expanse by the final scene. The back wall covered by a low-hanging, hilariously tacky, airbrush-art picture of a pine forest that looks like it’s only missing a wolf from a biker t-shirt. The string quartet which accompany the action with edgy, staccato modernist stabs is visible. And to kill herself Hedda simply slips out under the hanging picture. While this is a lovely visual effect, I wondered if it really reflected the play terribly well. Is Hedda Gabler a play in which all the walls disappear? Isn’t it the precise reverse? Don’t more and more walls spring up until she can see no way out other than to shoot herself? On the other hand, perhaps, a) it would be crass to precisely mirror the narrative structure with the set, and, b) isn’t there also an attendant process of desolation going on for Hedda herself? Also, c) it does basically *feel* like the right decision. Perhaps not an at an intellectual level, but somewhere earthier.

Ultimately, the production feels incredibly clever, but not quite clever enough. However the acting, the performances, the design, the music, even the lighting, are first class. And I reserve the right to come back in a week, once I have spent more time thinking about this production, and claim that actually it is doing something incredibly clever indeed, which I haven’t yet worked out because I’ve been too busy describing it to think about it. If I don’t, however, let the above stand as testament enough to my preparedness and desire to do so.

Revolver Traum – Thalia Gaußstraße

[placeholder/work-in-progress]

It opens with a woman wearing a short shift dress and a rabbit head singing ‘Can’t Get You Outta My Head’ incredibly slowly into a vintage microphone which is suspended from the ceiling.

[Good. There have been far too few animal heads (previously none) and nudity (still none) this week. Even the big tellies and microphones have been in short supply. I was starting to worry that this wasn’t Germany at all.]

[Actually, I entered Revolver Traum under a slight misconception. I was only familiar with the writer Lola Arias as a collaborator with Stefan Kaegi and Rimini Protokoll, so from the vague blurb on the site (lovingly rendered meaningless by Google Translate thus: “Behind the title “Revolver dream” to hide the same three pieces of the Argentine. Three stories about life, love and death. You draw people in a big city in search of refuge, people who want to understand why they are unhappy, why love is broken or can not come, they want to understand what keeps them alive, what makes life valuable. At the end they find themselves in an eerie dream again, is played in the Russian roulette. They all vie for a ball to put an end to her life. Maria Origin tells these stories as tender and touching evening of theater in which the stage continues to rotate, 32,000 sequins coming up at the end to the fore: strung lovingly flickers the dream past us.”) I suppose I was still vaguely expecting something Rimini Protokoll-y involving “real people”, non-performers (“experts” as RP call them).]

[Turns out, as well as collaborating with futuristic theatremakers, Arias also writes *proper plays*. If she wasn’t originally Argentinian, I’d have finally found some *German New Writing*!]

[Anyway, I should stop pissing about and tell you about it.]

After the brief rabbit-headed lady singing, Revolver Dream *proper* (ha!) opens with a man and a woman sitting on a low bed pushed against a coldly lit concrete wall. Upon entering, the man has slipped a small revolver under the mattress of the bed.

It is nearly pitch black. The man is in his boxers and a t-shirt. The woman is wearing the same light green embroidered slip- dress as the rabbit-woman. The man flicks his lighter compulsively. They are talking. They plainly don’t know each other very well. They’ve only just met. What they’re saying, well, what they’re saying could be approached any number of ways – playful, flirtatious, languid, erotically-charged... – here it’s blank and blunt, deadpan. They’re not really saying anything of consequence. It’s reminding me a lot of the opening of Blasted. But somehow less pointed. They talk *a lot* about animals. She talks about a chicken she used to have as a child? He talks about a dream he has about a pony sitting in his bed? (man, I could be getting this wrong.) She explains that her mother is dead, and how her father didn’t want a chicken in the house because they’re dirty. He talks about playing Russian roulette. At some point she reveals that she is only 16. He is 36. He springs off the bed like he’s been burnt. Her dad isn’t much older. She turns more challenging. What’s wrong she wants to know. Suddenly she’s pointing the gun at him. The conversation has suddenly turned to “love” and she’s got a loaded gun...

Then the scene changes. The solid-looking concrete walls at an oblique angle to the audience suddenly turn out to be fold-able so that the man and woman are now divided by a wall pointing straight at the audience. Microphones are brought on. As the performers walk round and round this short right angle the man meets another man, hands him the revolver and the second man remains. It’s a bit like a theatrical version of that thing that happens in recent David Lynch films where a character suddenly becomes another character, or rather the same character, but a different actor, and a different person. Oh, you know the films. You explain it.

In this next bit (which seems like it might be Arias’s piece “Striptease”, if descriptions elsewhere are anything to go by), sees two parents conduct (what is described elsewhere, if it is Striptease as) a telephone conversation while their child cries in between them. This isn’t signposted anywhere in the performance, however. They might still be intended here as a later version of the same couple, perhaps. Same, but, thanks to the change of male actor, different. And, similarly, the microphones, while possibly standing in for telephones, might equally just represent a distance between the characters or a desire by director Maria Ursprung to amplify their voices so that they can speak very quietly and we can hear the texture of the quiet voice amplified.

The third section, which follows another scene change – this time with the flexible “back” wall (it’s actually cutting off quite a lot more of a much deeper stage/room) being straightened right out and then revolved several times on a central pivot in an effect similar to Gotscheff’s staging of The Persians. The wall turns out to have a spangly giant-sequined reverse to its concrete side. And it comes to rest with this facing us. In front of this big bronze shining backdrop is plonked a dowdy sofa, a workaday coffee table, and onto the coffee table, a cushion with the placed revolver on it like a crown.

On the sofa sit three larger-than-life puppet humans. From left to right a fat, ginger man, a hollow-cheeked, dead-eyed woman and then an older, bald “schauspieler” with an expression of continual disbelief, disgust and incredulity on his big, immobile, papier mâché face.

These three types are asked a series of questions, big questions about life, love and death, and they all have stabs at answering. There seems to be some level of jeopardy. Perhaps the one who answers wrong first is going to have to pick up the revolver and Russian roulette themselves (let’s face it, it’s a TV format waiting to happen)...

Anniversary Postcards

[a big thank-you]

Today is the sixth anniversary of the first blog I wrote after returning from the 2007 SpielArt festival in Munich. The first of the eight festivals I attended as part of the Festivals in Transition Mobile Lab for young European critics. That year changed my outlook, my perspective, my practice, my writing, my “criticism” and my life. And I’d like to say thanks again to Lyn Gardner for recommending me for it (“I worry I’ve ruined you for England forever,” she suggested when we bumped into each other at The Roman Tragedies a couple of years later) and also to LIFT co-founder, Rose Fenton, who organised the whole thing and who was a great friend and inspiration throughout the year. I should also thank the other brilliant tutors we had, especially Rok Vevar and Max Ryynänen, who between them made me question every assumption I’d ever had about how a theatre “review” should look or what it might do.

It seemed fitting that six years later, this September, I saw the first piece that we saw in Munich, Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge, again (see “cover photo”). This time at the Ruhr Triennale, albeit in its installation incarnation, rather than as the sit-down performance that we saw on that first night six years ago (17/11/07). Yesterday I also went and hung out with one of my Mobile Lab colleagues who lives in Hamburg and her new baby. And then, in the evening saw Revolver Traum: a play written by Lola Arias, one of the other artists whose work I first came across in Munich (in the form of Soko São Paulo, a collaboration with Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll. Of whom I’d also never heard before.)

When I was writing that chapter of Modern British Playwrights: 2000-2009 (a book about which one day I might shut up and stop plugging), I kept on realising that I only really date my “career” – such as it isn’t – from 2007. And that, problematically for the book, much of my early career felt like one long stint of critical evangelising about the work being made on the other side of the North Sea. Or else, often unwittingly championing the artists who would end up going over there to make work.

For example, perhaps the earliest marker of when I thought my reviews might actually be being read and were plausibly of any use to anyone at all was – as I’ve said before – when the National Theatre used a quote from my CultureWars review of Katie Mitchell’s production of Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life on their website. Tomorrow evening I’m seeing the world première of Martin Crimp’s newest play, The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from The Cinema, directed by Katie Mitchell. In German. In Hamburg.

About a year later, in October, it was in Nitra, Slovakia, thanks to Festivals In Transition that I first saw Sebastian Nübling’s production of Pornography. And first met Simon Stephens. Roughly three full years before the world première of Three Kindoms at the Münchner Kammerspiele.

So, yes. Apologies for the sentimentality, but it’s been an amazing six years, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have experienced them. And I just wanted to say a big thank you again, especially to Lyn, Rose, Rok and Max, but also to Andreja, Anna, Anna, Ewa, Eva, Dária, Goda, Gundega, Inta, Madli, Marta, Martin, Mark, Miriam, Monika, Ott, Patryk, Pete, Pilvi, Pippa, Riina, Toms, Vilmantas, Zane and Zane.

Don Giovanni. Letzte Party – Thalia Theater

[written for Exeunt]

[Well, my run of extraordinary good luck with what I’ve been seeing in Germany had to run out sooner or later. And nothing ever looks as bad in the cold light of morning. But...]

It isn’t original to suggest that theatre is a bit like a machine. All the parts need to be functioning correctly in order for it to work. Sometimes theatre’s total reliance on all the parts functioning every time a piece is performed seems incredibly stupid. All of which is to say: it’s depressing to watch a piece of theatre malfunction. Even more annoying when it seems that the piece of the theatremachine malfunctioning is its audience.

Last night [21/11/13] Don Giovanni. Letzte Party played to an audience of the too-old and the too-young. The elderly chuntered to themselves and occasionally made loud jokes to amuse their friends, the young meanwhile contented themselves with talking through the whole thing and checking their phones. Once in a while what was happening on stage actually shut them up. In conditions like these, it’s difficult to imagine whether in different circumstances the thing actually works. It was shortlisted for TheaterTreffen’13, so someone somewhere liked it, once upon a time...

The piece kicks off with over ten minutes of Leporello (Mirco Kreibich) leading an audience-participation singalong. Five-note scales, breathing exercises, that sort of thing. He does so with an air of Oh-what’s-the-point? – Imagine Forced Entertainment doing a pantomime. No bad thing in itself, but the audience’s reticence-bordering-on-outright-hostility was an early marker of the shape of things to come.

The next section turns this aesthetic around completely: a huge lighting ring of three concentric rings descends from the flies as smoke fills the stage. When it rises again (the sections can move independently, and can tilt all the way up to vertical. It’s bloody great. Every theatre should have one...) the figure of Don Giovanni (Sebastian Zimmler) is revealed, having snuck up through a trap door in the stage. The band appears – eight women dressed as kind-of goth version of Dangerous Liasons – all beehives, backcombs, fierce fringes and rock‘n’roll attitude. One is briefly tempted into believing that all Mozart should have a pounding Mo Tucker drumbeat and be played on bass sax, keyboard, two acoustic guitars, and trumpets.

Briefly, I think I’ve got a handle on the territory. It’s an amphetamine-fuelled version of the David Marton thing, right? Take an opera, get it performed by actors who can sing a bit, deconstruct and dramaturg the hell out of it, and then call it theatre and reap enormous acclaim.

Except here the intent seems a bit more tricky to discern. There’s certainly an anarchic punky spirit to it. This Don Giovanni looks like a cross between Robert Smith and Russell Brand, and the sound of the band, well... Put it this way, this ex-goth was happiest when it turned out that they seemed to be making the overture into Ennio Morriconi’s ‘Harmonica Man’, as covered by Fields of the Nephilim crossed with Bauhaus.

So, yes, for the first half an hour or so, I was pretty much prepared to be racing home to write the rave of the century. And it’s hard to work out where it all started going wrong. Over the following hour and a quarter I think it’s fair to say that the company had a pretty bad night. Arguably the pace drop was an artistic decision. Similarly, the stoppy-starty, house lights up, house lights down interplay with the audience was obviously on purpose. The problem is, if the audience doesn’t play ball when asked to participate, and won’t bloody stop joining in when there’s no room for them, then you’re looking at an artistic endeavour in danger of complete capsize.

The piece pretty much burlesques its way through the plot of Don Giovanni, however, the real coup of the piece comes 1hr40 in (of 2hr30). As Don Giovanni throws his party, he invites “100 women” from the audience onto the stage. It’s hard to tell whether the (plausibly actually 100, probably fewer) young women (six-form age, mostly) who do leap up are actually bona fide punters or plants. I doesn’t matter at all, but I’d be curious to know. Once on stage, the iron comes down. A door in it is opened so we can just about see into the party and there’s a half hour interval, while the party rages (the live band play cover versions of stuff like ‘Sex Bomb’, ‘Word Up’, ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ (!) and ‘Purple Rain’). Eventually, and boy are the company going big on that whole “contempt for the audience vibe – the boldness and extent of which I actually rather loved, and in this instance also thought totally justified (maybe they play nicer with nicer audiences) – the iron is raised once more and the finale plays out rather like a ramshackle curtain call on the last night of a show when people keep stopping proceedings Kanye-style to make their own speeches. And, instead of ending with Giovanni being dragged to hell by an evil robot, he is instead taken off by the sad, sassy old diva dressed in black who has been intermittently singing Eartha Kittsy takes on arias throughout, like some dark angel waiting to take her prey.

And that’s that, really. Instead of a feeling of retribution, ...Letzte Party seems to propose that in a Godless universe where we can fuck our way through everyone we meet, irrespective of what we do, we all die anyway and that’s kinda sad, but kinda inevitable. The days of enormous ghostly cosmic punishment are long gone.