Postcards aus Theatertreffen I

[written in transit between Berlin and Brussels, via London. No sleep. Apologies for likely errors]


Having read Meg Vaughan and Holger Syme’s (admittedly incomplete) dispatches from the first week of Theatertreffen, I was already slightly regretting not having made a proper plan sooner. Bloody cash-flow. Still, I was excited to be going.

It seems that the second full week of TT is duds and misfires week. Well, no, that’s not even remotely fair. I flew in too late to see Miet Warlop’s astonishing-sounding Mystery Magnet on the Monday night, but everyone was raving about it when I caught up with them the next day. “Like an hour-long action-painting”, helpfully suggested.

Still, I was excited to see both Chris Thorpe be interviewed by Simon Stephens and to then see him perform in his play There Has Possibly Been an Incident. I’ve already written a review of the actual performance for the Guardian, but its worth returning to the wider context and its reception. As it turned out, Thorpe’s piece wound up being something of a sacrificial lamb at this year’s Stückemarkt. The whole deal with Stückemarkt had, in previous years (possibly as many as the previous 53 or so years), been a competition open to any writer (under 35?) with an unperformed play. Ten German writers and ten international writers would win opportunities to have their winning works given a rehearsed reading, and the winner of this would get a production(? Published?). So, y’know, quite a major part of the new writing ecology in Germany.

This year, for the first time ever, apparently with no warning, and with only a somewhat shaky-sounding conceptual rationale, the powers-that-be decided to completely change the direction of Stückemarkt – this year there were only three chosen/selected works, each was already a full production, and each was chosen by a single/sole “celebrity” sponsor. Simon choosing Chris, Katie Mitchell choosing Warlop and Signa Köstler (of SIGNA frame) choosing Mona el Gammel. Now, apparently the main reason for this was wanting the new Stückemarkt to better reflect different possibilities of “authorship” – devised work, installation work, and so on. And I think the powers-that-be knew what they were doing when they selection Mitchell, Köstler and Stephens. Each artist has a signature style, there was an element, I suppose, of them “annointing” someone working in what they saw as a similar vein, but pushing the envelope more. This was certainly the tenor of the selected candidates – Köstler’s choice offered the installation HAUS//NUMMER/NULL, Miet Warlop – although perhaps the least obvious choice by a judge – offering a piece of work eeriely complete and closed-off in a way that one might imagine appealled to Mitchell’s own rigorous ways of working,combined with an originality and artistry that Mitchell also clearly prizes.

Stephens’s choice of Thorpe makes perfect sense to me. In a lot of ways they’re both remarkably similar and completely different. Thorpe isn’t just a writer, though, he is also a deviser and a performer, solo, in ensembles, and sometimes even as a “proper actor”. What might have been unfortunate in terms of positioning was the fact that Sam Pritchard’s production of There Has Possibly Been an Incident – pretty much universally praised in Edinburgh last year – takes more-or-less the exact form of a rehearsed reading. The actors hold scripts. They sit on chairs. They speak into microphones. Indeed, the first bit of ...Incident I ever saw – Thorpe reading just the Tienanmen Square section at Forest Fringe, only a day or so before Headlong released their video trailer for Chimerica, ironically – had pretty much the exact same set-up, albeit in a much smaller room, with a smaller audience, and none of the other bits. But in terms of actual performance mode, very similar.

In Britain, I think we account this sort of thing very *pure*, very *theatre*, very *stripped-back*. And, hell, I agree. I love this show. More Germans than I’d have liked seemed to have reservations, though. It was hard to tell if the reservations were really with the script, the production, or the unwelcome intervention into Stückemarkt that it represented. Certainly the more hostile reviews seem to take all three pieces together as an opportunity to grumble about the format-shift.

On the other hand, there were others who wondered if such a *direct* approached played off the text enough. Its literary qualities just being baldly stated rather than cunningly revealed. The text alone, some seemed to say, isn’t enough. You need something to counterpoint a piece this direct, otherwise the real pleasure of the text, and the facts of its difficulty, get glossed over, and it looks more agit-proppy than it actually is.

Obviously, being a reasonable man, I could see how a different production would bring out different qualities in the text. At the same time, I did feel slightly irritated and let-down. After all, God knows I spend enough time in Britain writing about how we need to expand our frame of theatrical reference and try to understand that other countries have different ways of doing things, and that just planting a Union Jack in *Theatre* and saying “this is how it must be done” is idiotic. So it saddens me when a load of Germans turn round and start sounding like the equivalent of Michael Billington at his least tolerant.

What was interesting was the extent to which I’d thought of ...Incident as quite “European” friendly in terms of its aesthetic. It was useful ans salutary to remember that “looking a bit like...” isn’t the same as “being plugged into the same set of thinking underpinning a production”.

This question of similarities and differences seemed to be a fascinating recurring theme throughout the week, possibly following on from my piece about British companies doing translated foreign plays, I found myself also thinking a lot more about foreign companies doing or even just watching British work, and wondering if German demands for opposition to the text and more irony were things we would actually benefit from importing. I was much less sure than I felt about the issue of trying to make European texts work in a British context.

I want to look at this further in my next post, where hopefully I’ll discuss the International Forum programme of discussions which took place the day after ...Incident.

Hyperion. Briefe eines Terroristen – Schaubühne

[seen 17/05/14]

Well, I don’t mind admitting, this had me well and truly stumped when I saw it on Saturday night. Admittedly seeing it with a hangover remedied by a pre-show glass of wine or two possibly wasn’t, in hindsight, the best way to approach a play of dense symbolic language (with frustratingly positioned surtitles) staged by former “enfant terrible” of the European stage, Romeo Castellucci. But even with no hangover and no wine, I think I’d have struggled with this.

Yes, there’s a basic problem of opacity. The staging opens with a modern flat having its door kicked in by armed police. Rooms are searched and them pretty much everything in the flat – furniture, books, appliances – are all chucked into a large heap in the middle of the room.

Not a word is spoken. And then we’re all kicked out of the theatre for ten minutes while they re-set the stage. Admirers of wilful perversity will be in their element. And I confess I was quite taken with the chutzpah, even if I could have lived with sitting in the theatre while they changed the set. But, obviously that’s not the point. I think the gesture is as much about the inconvenience to us as an audience as the thing we’d just watched.

It’s worth noting that I did quite wish the police had been directed a bit more thoroughly. Ideally by Katie Mitchell. It was quite clear that they were throwing stuff into the middle of the room because that’s what the performers had been told to do. There wasn’t any coherent sense of what they were doing in the flat or why. That could easily have been taken care of, so, yes, bit sloppy.

Anyway, once we return to the theatre we’re greeted with a big white/off-white box. More like the room for, say, Castellucci’s London than the ultra-realism of the last set, which we might associate more closely with, say, the first bit of Purgatory.

This is Castellucci’s take on Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion. And I think this is where the problems really start. Hölderlin is a German Romantic poet of the late 1700s onward. The problem with German Romanticism is, put bluntly, how much of it sounds like Nazi rhetoric. All that beauty of nature and connection to the landscape stuff, that arguably found its fullest, most violent realisation in the Blut und Boden movement.

This resonance – easily discerned even just reading the surtitles, and yet more clearly listening to the words in German – is something that Castellucci has either ignored or else it simply didn’t resonate with him. Of course, being an Italian – whose fascism was a very different, futurist beast in the main – the resonance might just not have occurred at all. So it seems like I might be being unfair for having dwelt on it so strongly during the performance and immediately afterwards.

I think it may have been more helpful instead to have fixated upon the appended title – Briefe eines terroristen (letters of a terrorist). Here it seems that Castellucci is casting the central character of Hyperion – here “played” by an older woman and a naked younger woman painted white with her back to us, successively – as the titular terrorist. The basic story (summarised here by a director friend who also saw the show on Saturday) is: a guy loses everything, he looks again at what he used to love to find no beauty in it. Everything he thought was meaningful has become lifeless and formless. So he doubts beauty, he begins to hate men. And when you hate the world you either want to make it better or to kill it.

So on one level, you have this staging which could otherwise be a study of depression, here being co-opted for a dynamic dialogue – albeit at a snail’s pace stage-time-wise – with the concept of terrorism. It was not clear to me whether the terrorist is the state or a “proper” terrorist. Or whether it is a chimera, ineffectually combated with much trumpeting and alarum, but little discernible effect. The concept is infinitely more interesting in the re-thinking, post-fact, than it was to watch in the theatre, for me.

Indeed, the show spawned about several really fertile conversations:

Peter M. Boenisch noted: “It might confirm that he engaged more from a Hölderlian perspective with the Hyperion myth, not the context of H. BUT he makes the link to the 9/11 bombings and prints a manifesto by Muhammad Atta there. So it links Hölderlin’s aesthetic absolutism with contemporary fundamentalist terrorism, leaving the C20th out. There is also a detailed and articulate statement by the dramaturg. One of those cases where some would say you need the programme to explain, but I’d rather suggest that performance and programme book are two streams for articulating a shared underlying idea. And here, it’s got a lot to do with beauty as the ultimate and absolute. So for our discussion, it comes in with further arguments and ammunition for both sides...”

While, in a wider discussion of the fascist aesthetic apparently at play, in response to Jana Percovic’s suggestion that thanks to the different character of Italian fascism from German Nazism, Holger Syme offered that: “In visual art, there isn’t really the same link between avant-garde and fascisms in Germany as there is in Italy (or in England). But in poetry, there is – it’s not like Brecht et al. dominated everything. There's a lot of Nationalist, hyper-aestheticized, quite cultish stuff happening in German literature in the 1920s and early 30s – the Stefan George circle being a major breeding ground for all that stuff, and I think a lot of poets saw the Nazis as a necessary cleansing/productively destructive force...”

On the other hand, it looks to me, like Castellucci really just hadn’t felt the same resonances as I had. Perhaps another thing to take into account was the question of how the show might have felt in a different context – i.e. if I’d seen it directed by Castellucci for, say, Avignon. And maybe not in German. Would I then have felt the same deep and real discomfort as I did in the heart of West Berlin on Saturday?

Are we seriously to take Castellucci’s appropriation of the German romanticism as a key to depicting Islamist fundamentalist terrorism, and the equal and opposite terrorism deployed against it by the drone-deploying militaries of “the West”, even as it overlooks the topography of terrors played out throughout the C20th? Perhaps it makes a sort of sense. War is different now. Militarism is different now. Even power and control, and their ideological underpinnings are now practised differently. *Perhaps* Castellucci *is* onto something. I’m not sure. I still found the text difficult to take in the actual moment. And the staging too elliptical to offer any immediate key. But, perhaps that level of difficulty is also something to be cherished.

Ultimately, I don’t feel up to making a judgement call on it. I will be interested to read further perspectives on the piece.

Peter Boenisch offers this jumping off point: “For Hans-Thies Lehmann, this production even exemplifies the future of tragedy – as (post-dramatic) experience of the spectator, not mere dramatic collision of a fiction conflict (and we see where the cover painting of Lehmann’s new opus magnum Tragödie und dramatisches Theater was inspired by, for German readers the Hölderlin chapter in there goes well with this production)... Not sure whether I’d go that far, mainly for my doubts about the aestheticisation of what Andrew identified as nascent bud of fascist desire in Hölderlin’s idealism. Lots more to think through. Let's see what [Castellucci] comes up with next year, same place...”

Which I think is hard to improve upon. So, yes, plenty to think about. Let’s see what happens next...

Ohne Titel #1 – Volksbühne

[“Der Spaß am sinnfreien Herumblödeln kennt aber keine Theorie” – Stefan Bock, Freitag]

Once in a while I guess it’s healthy for me to see something in Germany that I absolutely loathe. And obviously fate had decided that the effects of Don Giovani. Letzte Party and the Deutsches Theater’s catastrophic German language première of In der Republik des Glücks last year were wearing off and I needed a top-up.

Herbert Fritsch, who is also responsible for last year’s Theatertreffen show Murmel Murmel – which I had previously been quite keen to see – has this year made a wholly original show from scratch. (Yes, sure, when the only “text” for last year’s performance is an art text where the word “murmel” (marble) is repeated a number of times, there’s not much distinction, but...).

He’s called what he’s made “an opera”. And in the sense that an episode of Teletubbies *could* be called “an opera”, he’s absolutely right. No, that’s not quite accurate. It starts off a bit more like a slapstick pastiche of, well, possibly of something. Plastic be-wigged and heavily made-up glittery musicians enter the pit and make as if to start. There’s some pissing about with a piano stool, then a lot of earnest-seeming squeaking, honking, and banging. Worryingly, it’s not not reminiscent of Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl). After this silly intro, the “orchestra” skip off to reappear as the on-stage cast in new, equally hideous costumes.

For possibly up to the first half hour I entertained the possibility that this could be the most elaborate, sustained and savage satire of Robert Wilson outside his own work. Gradually, as the thing turned into a series of solo-pieces, cameos and gurning – all performed to grim Latin lounge music accompaniment – this possibility looked increasingly unlikely. (Is it even worth mentioning that Ruth Rosenfeld (above) could out-Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus in the sticking-her-tongue-out stakes? No.)

The programme of Theatertreffen describes the show thus:

“A squeaky wooden tone throws the orchestra and its conductor Ingo Günther for a loop. But then they start making their sounds, with crinkled-up cellophane, electric guitars, percussion, recorders or a triangle. They tinkle, clunk, cha-cha and rattle. A 1950s saloon orchestra, decked up as for a revue. The twelve performers are lounging on a settee – this thing from another (art) planet. They are resilient and refractory, like their inventor Herbert Fritsch. The only prop is this couch of so much more than human scale. The fidgeting creatures are sitting on it, hanging from it, stuck to it, they push off from it or crack their skulls on it. Fritsch, son of nonsense and primal creator of chaos, offspring of Chaplin, Valentin and Vaudeville, deploys his actors like mechanical bodies. This is captivatingly puzzled out, organized and staged: Nonsense, yes, but certainly not stupid. These children of buffoonery are certainly no conformists; they are original sex maniacs and players, driven by the directions of the music and of Fritsch, this worker of theatre-miracles.”

Which will do, except for the way it fails to note that it is the most knuckle-whiteningly irritating thing in the universe.

I’ll concede that is purely a matter of taste. A lot of people round me (German people, the traitors) were chuckling and guffawing happily away. God knows what at or why. The feeling that it was a satire or pastiche of something never quite fully evaporates. But it seems mostly to be a postmodern defence – a parody of itself. A half-assed refusal to commit even to its own paltry “fun”.

In conclusion: a slightly executed 90 minutes of mugging-without-conviction to dreadful music.

Except that this was somehow deemed better by someone somewhere than Alles Weitere...

So, y’know, not German theatre’s finest hour.

TBH, if it didn’t feel necessary to demonstrate that sometimes I have a really strong reaction against stuff here as well as sometimes loving it I think I’d have happily forgotten I ever saw it within about five minutes of having seen it. That said, we did find a bar within ten minutes stroll of the theatre selling two glasses of red wine for €3.60 (cheapest round *ever*?), and which gave us all (a group of four) some rather nice veggie curry. For free. So Berlin pretty much redeemed itself immediately. Still, odd piece. I guess I should take the advice of that bloke in the Guardian and try to understand it better, except there didn’t seem to be anything to understand. Just a sense of humour you either have or don’t have, I guess.

I might have a read round some reviews and try to fathom what the hell anyone else saw in it before the end of the weekend, but I don’t hold out much hope.

Die Letzten Zeugen – Haus der Berliner Festspiele

[seen: 14/05/14]

Die Letzten Zeugen (The Last Witness) is a verbatim piece from Vienna's Burgtheater about Holocaust survivors, made by its recently disgraced artistic director Matthias Hartmann and Doron Rabinovici. What marks it out from many other such pieces is the fact that sitting on stage are seven survivors of the Holocaust.

On one level, this puts the piece “beyond criticism”.  At every other level, however, it intensifies the need for scrutiny. It is not enough to put some survivors of the Holocaust on a stage and to call it theatre. Indeed, it feels incredibly suspect to do so. Of course, that's not what Hartmann and Rabinovici have done, so it's worth describing in detail what is present.

The stage is hung with two large cinema screen-style gauzes. One large one toward the front of the stage, and a smaller one toward the rear. In between these two gauzes a woman (periodically) sits at a table writing on an endless sheet of paper that runs left to right across the whole stage. Occasionally a live-feed video camera trained on the paper shows us what she is writing projected on the fore-screen.

On the right hand side of the stage, four actors from the Burgtheater ensemble are seated. At the right hand front of the stage is a simple, wooden lectern. In the centre of the front stage is a similar perspex stand.

At the very back of the stage, behind the second gauze, are eight chairs in which the seven remaining Holocaust survivors are seated. One chair is now empty, marking the fact that one of the original cast has died since the production began last year.

How the piece works is that the actors take it in turns to stand at the lecturn and read the intercut testimonies of the survivors, while a(nother) live feed video camera scrutinizes the present-day face of the person whose testimony, with the sharply lit result projected, in black and white, onto the rear gauze screen. On the fore-screen an assemblage of personal and stock archive photos show scenes of pre-Anschluss Austria, Nazi soldiers on the streets, and later the familiar “Arbeit Macht Frei” signs and striped uniforms of the concentration camps.

In this, it is a staggeringly muted production. Of course, in the abstract “muted” sounds like it might be (could be, should be?) the only possible register. What need is there for flashy stage effects or emoting? Except, there are those effects – two screens worth of live-feed, the woman at the desk, even the foregrounded pretence of the actors “reading” the testimonies. All these are effects designed specifically to signify everything from the unimpeachable truths on show, to the degree of reverence for them required. It's no accident, perhaps, that the lectern recalls a pulpit. On the other hand, given the subject matter, it also feels inappropriate.

For my money, there kept on being these strange, small semiotic misfires. Like the fact that the survivors were seated at the very back of the stage. Like the fact their faces were painstakingly scrutinised in extreme close-up by an unblinking camera. Like the fact that their words had been wholly appropriated and were being spoken by Austrian actors. One of whom especially – Peter Knaack (last seen by me playing Peter Handke in Katie Mitchell's Wunschloses Unglück) – happened to be tall, broad-shouldered, and chisel-jawed: handsome, with his fair hair side-parted and short at the back and sides. You see what I'm driving at here? You see why it maybe felt a little problematic?

Of course, disconcerting Aryanism notwithstanding, the main reason for this was expediency. The six remaining survivors are aged between 80 and 100, and are now mostly frail. It would be impractical – impossible even – for them to each deliver their entire testimony live every time the piece played.

In the latter half of the piece, one by one, the survivors come to the centre-stage lectern and deliver some words themselves. A personal reflection on the here and now, and a message to the future. They are then led off by one of the actors. Even this has the unfortunate effect that everyone Jewish on stage being removed, one-by-one, by someone Austrian.

Appalling as it sounds, I felt left quite cold by the production. I'm sure it's partly cultural, but the delivery to me just seemed almost impossibly matter-of-fact. The stage-craft far too staid, and uninspiring of anything at all. And the placement of the Holocaust survivors felt suspect and troubling.

But then, there's also the question of context. No matter how many pompous pieces I write for the Guardian about trying to go out of our way to understand other national traditions better, the one thing I was never going to be in that theatre on Wednesday night was German or Austrian. There is a shared history, an inheritance, which I will never really be able to experience. I can sit there, British and comparatively guilt-free, and cavil about dramaturgy and stage-craft, but I know what my grandparents were doing during WWII, and it wasn't this. That's the blunt end game here. This material, no matter how it's presented, had an astonishing effect on the majority of those present. I don't think I've ever seen a German audience give a standing ovation before. And this wasn't simply an act of approval or applause, it was about a profound gratitude for the gesture made by these survivors of unimaginable horror, that they would stand up in front of the children and grandchildren of their torturers and murderers and offer something that is ultimately a message of hopefulness, even as they observe that Austria is still riddled with anti-Semitism and citizens largely failing to take any responsibility for the country's part in the Holocaust.

There Has Possibly Been an Incident – Haus der Berliner Festspiele

[written for the Guardian]

My review of Chris Thorpe's play/Sam Pritchard's production, remounted at Theatertreffen.

Staging translated plays: appendix

[mostly a description of what I'm talking about extracted from David Barnett's briliant chapter Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why Post-Brechtian ≠ Postdramatic in Postdramatic Theatre and the Political]

Oddly, I'd had the piece which I wrote for the Guardian in my mind for a while before they asked me to write something on precisely that subject. The impetus for that, however, had come frm the book I'm currently reading (for “reading” read “dipping in and out of when I get a moment”), Postdramatic Theatre and the Political.

I had been thinking I'd either wait until I reviewed the book, or else would use this below passage in blog-bound version of the piece that ended up being written for the Guardian. But now it seems to make sense to just publish it as a really excellent example of what I mean by “a different way of approaching the text”. The extract is from David Barnett's chapter, Performing Dialectics in an Age of Uncertainty, or: Why Post-Brechtian ≠ Postdramatic.

I've skipped straight ahead to the description (and the one bit of bold is mine):

I shall first discuss a production of [Brecht's Mr]Puntila [and his man Matti] at the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Einar Schleef, which premièred on 17 February 1996, as an example of a post-Brechtian reinterpretation of the play...

Heiner Müller invited Einar Schleef to direct Puntila at the BE, something which initially left him nonplussed. Schleef was well known, at the BE at least, as the director of Wessis in Weimar (Westerners in Weimar) in 1993, a brutal confrontation between stage and auditorium in which large choruses bellowed texts on the subject of German reunification. His aggressive choral theatre appeared to have little in common with the dialectical humour of Puntila until he went to the archive and read one of Brecht’s first versions, written in 1940, that is, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Puntila was inspired by the stories of Hella Wuolijoki, but at this crucial historical phase Brecht also looked back to the end of the First World War in Finland.

At this time, the class struggle manifested itself in a bloody civil war between left-wing forces inspired by revolutionary Russia and right-wing militarists from Finland, the Protection Corps, who prevailed. Brecht’s early drafts, then, emphasised Finland’s traumatic and class-riven past and were thus no longer that light; by 1948, these references were much reduced.

Franz Wille notes: ‘Instead of the knowing comic look back to the victory over the disasters of war and Hitler in 1948–49, [one finds] the look forward from 1940 into the inescapable catastrophe’. Wille’s reading points to Schleef’s materialist aesthetics: for all the formal precision and abstraction in performance, which I will discuss presently, the starting point was concrete and historical. As Ute Scharfenberg notes: ‘Schleef ’s discovery of the play’s “language of the exile” offers him an important point of departure for his production’s rationale’. That is, the earlier version allowed Schleef the opportunity to disorientate the audience by uncovering impulses later expunged and making them the basis for a new approach to the material.

In addition, Schleef was interested in the treatment of the female characters in the earlier version. He was keen to counter Eva’s relegation as a mere appendage to the male leads in the later version and he contended that Eva was not always an Aunt Sally figure in the play: ‘Eva is a Miss Julie with high ambitions for her own education. [...] But Brecht turned all the women into idiots’. Schleef sought to reintegrate the female characters; he noted the importance of Puntila’s housekeeper, Hanna, in the earlier version and viewed her as a concrete antagonist to her master. He also insisted that the two other female members of Puntila’s staff , Fina and Laina, were on stage more frequently, oft en observing the action and maintaining their presence.

The other important change of emphasis, from a textual point of view, was the role of Matti, the usual antagonist. Gunther Heeg writes that this conflict was in fact a convenient way of demonstrating proletarian superiority in the later version: ‘The dialectic of master and servant is replaced by the cooperation between the author and a character who represents him in the play: Mr Brecht and his dramaturgical lackey Matti.’ Matti’s superiority is ideological and loads the dialectic in favour of the oppressed underdog. A part of the post-Brechtian impulse is a desire to retain the dialectic while opening it up in all its complexity beyond the reach of ideological pressures. Schleef thus underplayed and re-functioned Matti’s role as a privileged character. Eva and Hanna became more central figures, while Matti assumed a wholly different role.

The play itself was radically rearranged. Schleef divided it up into four sections, in which, for example, the first section included material from the standard version’s first, third, fourth and eighth scenes.
The diffuse texts ran into each other without a nod to the spectators and consequently assaulted them as text rather than as the basis for a coherent plot.
The logical unfolding of the Fabel gave way to the experience of the words, shouted or declaimed by Puntila for the most part or by the choruses. Such a presentation of the text opened it up for the audience – it became linguistic material, as one might expect in postdramatic theatre, yet here the dynamics of delivery were clearly demarcated; a power relation lay at their centre, and so the text did not float entirely freely as text, but was linked to the dialectical tensions at the heart of Schleef’s reading. The openness of the dialectic was also evident in the use of parataxis, the equal valorisation of the scenic action, a quality Lehmann also associates with processes of de-hierarchisation in postdramatic theatre.

The production had, for example, several finales, one was never sure quite when it was over. This extended to the encore when the cast, in strict formation, sang one of the songs from the play that did not appear in the production itself. One notes Schleef’s deliberate obfuscation of what belonged and did not belong to the production, something that was echoed in his portrayal of the Puntila figure, as we shall see.

Esther Slevogt found the following structure running through the production as a whole: ‘Every image gives birth to its own counter-image.’ Yet [this didn't just] offer a series of permutations to the audience; instead, the use of contrast highlighted the manifold possibilities of the dialectic that ran through the production.

Schleef’s return to the more historically painful text was signalled from the opening of the production. Eva delivered an anecdote, usually told by Sly-Grog Emma later in the eighth scene ‘Tales from Finland’, before the safety curtain. The conventional prologue to the play consists of a speech given by the Milkmaid, which sets the scene, and perhaps the first verse of the ‘Puntila song’, which introduces the main character. Instead Eva told the story in the first person, not the third as in the text, of her visiting Athi, one of the Communists kept in a prison camp but who refuses his mother’s food, despite his great hunger, because she had to beg for it from her mistress. It is clear that Eva is not the speaker of the text, because she herself is socially a ‘mistress’, and so the reliability of the signs onstage is destabilised from the very outset. That Eva delivers the speech, however, focuses attention on the character and confers an importance on her which she never loses. The short story also initiates themes that will recur throughout this version of the play: that social conflict has led to suffering, that class relations are defining categories, that the most wretched can still off er resistance.

Yet while Eva was important, Puntila was essential. Dressed in formal white tie, he controlled almost everything on stage with a series of gestures, dominating the production with roars and shouts. Consequently, even Puntila’s more sympathetic speeches sounded forced and insincere. Schleef himself played Puntila, after his first choice for the role had to withdraw through injury, and so the character Puntila was conflated with a real director, who, on occasion, would also give directions to the actors around him. In more conventional meta-theatre, levels are clearly demarcated, such as in the play-within-a-play in Hamlet or the consciously fictional figures in Six Characters in Search of an Author. This meta-dramatic addition created instability in the central character and the production as a whole, as the audience was never sure who was talking or, rather, shouting. The grotesque presentation certainly registered with reviewers: ‘Schleef performs himself. Not just as a loud mouth and a dry tee-totaler in a dinner jacket, [but] also as the generalissimo on the director’s collective farm’. The exaggerated figure acknowledged the reality of the theatre as well as the fictionality of the play in a portrayal that never settled in either place.

Puntila the individual was surrounded by choruses, as was often the case in Schleef ’s work. Matti was no longer one person but several and was presented as an instrumentalised extension of Puntila’s will. At the beginning of the second section, the Mattis performed vigorous physical exercises which reviewers, and doubtlessly spectators, identified with Nazi military training camps for young people. The Mattis dutifully obeyed, were visibly tired, fell over from time to time, and offered the audience the experience of real exertion that lasted for several minutes. ‘Matti’ was no longer Puntila’s opponent, but traced a brutal masculine arc across class boundaries in which the worker was not imbued with an implicit immunity to his ‘class enemy’, but could be canalised for violent action.

However, with the opening monologue in mind, we note that Schleef offered the audience contrasting positions and did not suggest an inevitability to the dialectic of servitude and defiance. The women also formed choruses. In the first instance, they declaimed the speeches normally given by the women of the local area, but they also contributed, like the male chorus, to other dialogues, conveying collective power which, depending on the speech, may either support Puntila or act as a counterpoint. Both male and female choruses were also carefully choreographed so that a gestural language emerged, whose precision made it readable, in the same way as Brecht intended his Gestus to function. Yet here, the gestures did not necessarily have a referential relationship to reality. Instead, the language developed from the production itself, provoking the audience to make connections between the elements of a sign system that had been carefully formulated.

What emerges from this consideration of the production is that Schleef was very much concerned with political issues as articulated in dialectical terms. However, the components of the dialectic were given great freedom to show their myriad possibilities, something located in Schleef ’s systematic demolition of denotation in favour of connotation. This had the effect of withdrawing onstage value judgements from the performed material.

More negative reviewers believed that Schleef was paying lip service to the far right: ‘Brecht’s Volksstück has become an antique and fascistic motorway pile-up on a grand scale in a freestyle of Greco-Roman forms.’ [Michael Berger in Die Woche] Schleef did not limit the power of the fascist imagery he employed, but this was hardly a tacit expression of support. Instead, he allowed the full implications of such barbarity to be presented on stage. While one reviewer noted that ‘somehow, somewhere, everything’s connected to class consciousness and the class struggle’ others were more specific. Brecht expert Ernst Schumacher wrote that he considered the production ‘the most radical realisation of an epic theatre [...]. In all [...], this production demands in the strongest of terms that one think anew about Brechtian performance, a task to which no other theatre is more especially called than the Berliner Ensemble’.

___ENDS___

See what I mean about a radically different way of treating a text? And this was 18 years ago. What I find fascinating, though, is that way that the “academic” reading of dialectics in the production doesn't seem like a fanciful imposition, but a thoroughgoing understanding of what's already at play. This is something else I wanted to bring out when I talk about how translating just the words isn't even halfway toward translating the culture from which they sprung along with them. Not only do you lose the original “poetic” resonances, you also lose the cultural resonances, and the way the words operate together in a (relatively) shared public understanding.

Funnily (or unsurprisingly), it's been a conversation I've been having over and over again here at Theatertreffen, which I think will probably merit another blogpost – probably starting to think about translations travelling in the other direction – out of English and into German...


Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be any footage of the production on YouTube (1996, innit – the year David Hare's Skylight at the National Theatre Cottesloe and the Wyndham's won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, for a bit of make-you-spit context), so here's an extract from Schleef's seminal world première production of Elfriede Jelinek's Ein Sportstück (1998). Enjoy.

Guardian: staging translated plays

[written for the Guardian]

Piece I wrote for the Guardian wondering about the difficulties of directing domestic (British) productions of texts from foreign theatre cultures.

Ingenting av Mig – Stadsteatern, Stockholm

[written for the Guardian]

My (English) review of the Swedish world première of Norwegian playwright Arne Lygre’s latest.

NSDF'14: Editorial #4 – Auf Wiedersehen

[written for Noises Off]

Farewell editorial piece.

NSDF'14: Editorial #3 – Why Bother?

[written for Noises Off]

Basically a short piece about the value of criticism.

NSDF'14: Nothing – Spa Centre, Scarborough

[written for Noises Off]

Review of Barrel Organ's astonishing production of Lucyna Raczka's new play.

Photo: Guilia Delprato

NSDF'14: Punk Rock – Performing Space 2, University of Hull, Scarborough Campus

[written for Noises Off]

Review of ArtsEd 6th Form's production of Simon Stephens's Punk Rock.

NSDF'14: Editorial #2

[written for Noises Off]

An op-ed piece about contrasting productions of Road, Jerusalem, and the new musical Americana.

NSDF'14: Road – College Hall, Scarborough

[written for Noises Off]

Review of Warwick University's superlative production of Jim Cartwright's Road.

(photo: Guilia Delprato)

NSDF'14: Three of the Best

[written for Noises Off]

A thing about seeing A View From the Bridge, Birdland and Charles III.

NSDF'14: Your Fragrant Phantom – SJT, McCarthy

[written for Noises Off]

Review of White Slate Theatre's new play about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

NSDF'14: Duck Pond – Holbeck

[written for Noises Off]

Review of withWings's new devised show.

(photo: Aenne Pallasca)

NSDF'14: Editorial #1

[written for Noises Off]

The editorial for the first edition of Noises Off.

King Charles III – Almeida

[the best week ever in British theatre: part III]

If the English want to tell you something really serious they’ll tell it as a joke. And Mike Bartlett’s new play, King Charles III, is very funny indeed. It is also like experiencing a lurching intellectual vertigo. Every time you think you’ve pretty much got the measure of it, it races off in a new direction. Formally, it’s like a genius mash-up of Shakespeare’s best bits, fashioned into an absorbing, compelling political thriller, heart-wrenching family drama, and bleak portrait of modern Britain, and all entirely newly-written with modern speech and idioms bent to iambic pentameter or blank verse. There are echoes of Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Othello, threaded through Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II and King Lear. Christ, it’s fucking clever. And incredibly satisfying. And crucially, rather than seeming self-satisfied about its own cleverness, it all feels like this great big incredibly generous present just the for audience.

And then, stone me, there’s the production: it’s got a flawless ensemble; beautiful, clever, understated design; and original music so gorgeous in places that I worried that I might have a bit of a cry before anyone had even spoken.

What’s brilliant about the production, and its relationship to this, the play’s première, is that it is completely, perfectly, in tune with and responsive to the demands of the text to an almost meta-textual level. Director Rupert Goold is (perhaps unfairly) renowned for throwing *a lot of stuff* at productions. Here, the incredibly clever conceit is playing this new “Shakespearean play” as a modern-dress production of Shakespeare. The first scene especially – where as an audience we’re asked to take an awful lot on trust, to take in a lot of ideas, and to tune in to hearing modern language chopped into early-modern rhythms – functions almost like a totally sincere, pitch-perfect parody of just such a production. Perhaps it works all the better because we know Goold so well as a director of Shakespeare. Maybe those who saw it are even slightly reminded of the recent King Lear directed by the former Almeida artistic director Michael Attenborough (also designed by Tom Scutt, perhaps not entirely coincidentally). After all, this is – in part – a play about succession. About a successor’s need to prove his own brilliance and make his mark. (One idly notes in passing that all the posters for productions from the previous regime, which used to hang around the Almeida’s bar, are also gone.)

Really, though, pinning down what this new play is “about” is about as pointful as trying to say what Hamlet’s about. You could relate the plot. Or you could draw up a load of the different *themes* to which it speaks. It is about the monarchy, but it’s also about parliament, the conduct of the press, Britain’s unwritten constitution and various conceptions of "the British spirit". Alongside these it does brotherhood, love, treachery (of many different stripes), ambition, identity...

For my money, it also ultimately delivers an incredibly bleak, damning picture of Britain now, as broken, supine, and powerless. Sold off by successive Conservatives (the irony) until there is nothing whatsoever left to conserve. Midway through, there’s a brilliant scene where Prince Harry (Richard Goulding) slips his minders to go and get himself a late-night kebab (“a bit of Harry in the night” indeed), the kebab shop owner, however, as well as recalling those British soldiers in Henry V also serves like the gardeners at the heart of RII. The kebab-shop owner’s metaphor, obviously influenced by his own trade, imagines a Britain that has had strip after strip cut from it: “If you cut the Royal Mail, and then you cut the NHS and then you cut...” (i paraphrase)  And we imagine the nation as a rotating side of meat, ruthlessly being shaved until nothing remains.

That makes it sound like an evening of high, po-faced seriousness. And it isn’t. Early on, Bartlett even chucks in a perfectly observed Shakespearean comedy messenger in manner of Dogberry or Osrick – a preposterous royal under-butler, perfectly done by Matthew Robertson, in one of a series of perfectly judged cameo roles.

It says something about the play that you could give an incredibly full account of how it works and what it says just by detailing the minor scenes. But the fact is it’s also got a whacking great plot going on (alongside a touching sub-plot involving Prince Harry meeting and falling in love with an art student who doesn’t believe in the monarchy). Now, you could spend an entire review worrying about how *likely* the plot is, in the worst prose imaginable, but that would be kinda stupid, and would entirely miss the point. The plot is this: following the death of E II R, Charles III (Tim Pigott-Smith), before even being crowned, is required to sign into law a bill restricting the freedom of the press: fine in the hands of a nice, trustworthy Labour government, but potentially a charter for licenced corruption further down the line. He is reluctant. He is visited by the Tory leader (Nicholas Rowe), who not-too-subtly suggests that he could simply refuse to sign. This he does, setting the scene for a massive clash between monarch and parliament, with echoes the English civil war of the 1640s.

 The politics here are played as principles and broad brush-strokes rather than detailed appraisals of press legislation. The real question is whether we (the audience, and by extension the British,) are happier with the idea of an unelected conscience acting in our best interests, or with our elected representatives’ feckless idiocies. Into all this strides Kate Middleton (Lydia Wilson), who hatches her own plan for Charles to abdicate and herself and William (Oliver Chris) to be jointly crowned in his stead. A plan the politicians can get behind because her basic rationale is that she and William won’t be any trouble.

It might not sound like much when laid out so starkly, but – and bear in mind all this is running alongside the Shakespeare references, and the jokes, and the brilliant, brilliant performances – it’s an almost perfectly weighted moral and political difficulty. There really is no right or wrong side. There’s no straw man here, no obviously flawed argument. Granted the word “referendum” never surfaces, but generally it’s a play that actually makes you think about what you really believe.

Writing this review (or at least this bit of this review) five days after press night, it’s slightly difficult to resist the idea that it couldn’t possibly have been as good as I remember it being. All I can do is report that press night had one of the best atmospheres I’ve ever experienced, with audience and critics alike all suffused with an enormous sense of happiness and, well, a sense of actual, physical pleasure at witnessing such an astonishingly ambitious and intelligent play far exceed expectations.

*Of course*, there are aspects at which one could bridle: being a play about The Establishment (and mostly a male establishment at that) it reproduces that class privilege in its casting, mostly providing parts for posh white men – although there are probably twice as many parts for women and half as many for men compared with the nearest Shakespearean parallel, which I guess is progress, if not equality. There is also the slightly strange feeling that somehow Bartlett has become the David Hare, Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppards it’s ok to like, all rolled into one. Which makes this play sound a tonne more conservative than it actually is. I mean, I guess it isn’t actually calling for the throats of the monarchy to be ripped out and a people’s republic to be established (a pity), but at the same time, it is so fiercely intelligent, witty and and questioning that I think it is hard to hold that against it.

So, yeah. Another play and production that it is impossible to do justice to from last week’s extraordinary sequence of plays. If it doesn’t get a West End transfer, I will eat my hat. And, once/now that word is out, I can imagine it having multiple casts and running for a long time to come, perhaps even unto television. In many ways it feels like the most remarkable new play for an incredibly long time (at least, if we leave aside the out-and-out art-house hits like Alles Weitere…, Wastwater, The Author, The Events, There Has Possibly Been An Incident and so on, which somehow feel like they inhabit a different category of brilliance). Best most alternative mainstream play, perhaps.  

Birdland – Royal Court

[Rock‘n’Baal Creation]

The problem with knowing Simon Stephens quite well is that it gets more and more difficult to write about his plays from the usual critical perspective. You know: turn up, be surprised, try to figure out what it all means, write it down.

So: I think I first came across “Birdland” talking to Simon about the possibility that he might do an adaptation of Brecht’s Baal. He also told me that Sebastian Nübling had suggested to him that he write an adaptation-for-stage of Mötley Crüe’s rock‘n’roll memoir, The Dirt. Birdland is the bastard offspring of these two impulses. Possibly six months or a year later I read an early finished draft of the play – still, then, vacillating, between the titles “Birdland” and “Cocksucker Blues” (the title of a bootleg Rolling Stones film).

And so that was the information with which I watched it, too.

To be honest, I also went in with a fair amount of trepidation. Reading the script, I hadn’t really been able to imagine Andrew Scott in the title role (ha! How wrong can I be? Totally wrong!), and – with the possible exception of Blurred Lines – most of the work I’ve seen by director Carrie Cracknell had tended toward toward beautifully realised realism, which I worried might cause problems to a more fluid script (I really should have more faith). Also, watching Birdland the night after Ivo van Hove’s A View From The Bridge, well, you don’t expect to get quite that lucky twice in a week, so I was expecting some diminished returns. Good, but... kinda thing.

Again, wrong.

Birdland is just bloody amazing.

Just as with a rock band, it’s impossible to really pin down where the real driving force is coming from. Is it Cracknell’s endlessly inventive staging? Ian McNeil’s constantly moving, changing stage design? Is it Stephens’s restless, relentless take on the Stationendramen? Or is it Andrew Scott’s tour-de-force performance as Paul, the frontman of an unnamed, unheard band as they make their way back across Europe from Moscow to London in the last days of a global tour?

(And, yes, the ensemble, the light and sound design, and doubtless the invisible-but-flawless stage-management.)

Because I knew this script was based on Baal, I think I might have worried much less about “the plot” than other critics (and, indeed, having read it anyway, like some sort of German, knew what was coming). Knowing there’s *source material* is an interesting experience. The end of Baal is a bit of a mess, it sort of just trails off, as if, after an initial burst of gusto, Brecht tired of his character and started letting him just drift a bit. On the other hand, that’s how this sort of trajectory operates. I have a bit of a thing where I far prefer the first halves of biographies where whoever worth biographizing is putting together all the things that make them great. The second half where they inevitably fuck everything up always appeals far less to me. Ironically, this is *all* second half. In theory. Actually, being a play, Paul/Stephens has to pull a load of stuff together in the first few minutes of the play in order to make us care about what we have to stick with for the next two hours (no interval). And he does, the situation is admirably set up, Paul is greedy, capricious, and very, very rich. He can do what he likes. And he’s fucking bored. His guitarist friend Johnny (who seems to be both Johannes and Eckhart from the original) is looking on annoyed. (And a bit annoying, with his new girlfriend who he’s mooning over.)

It’s perhaps where Birdland departs from Baal that it’s at its most interesting and significant. Stephens has added a scene where Paul is reunited with his ageing father. It’s arguably one of the most emotionally charged scenes of the play, and it’s, of course, where Paul has returned *home*. His father’s small pride that his son’s latest record has received a four-star review in the local paper is almost devastating in its simple pathos; his father’s debt of a thousand pounds which his son dismisses as “nothing”, a sudden slap of normal reality in the face.

The way Stephens wraps up the ending is also interesting. There’s a kind of minor-ex-machina, sent by the wronged Johnny, who [spoiler] means Paul is suddenly facing statuary rape charges. His record company point out to him that – as in so many rock biog-catastrophes – actually, he’s not rich, it’s their money, and he’s quite profoundly in debt. (As Stewart Pringle memorably puts it in his review: “Paul’s decline could almost be a metaphor for the entire banking crisis… he is unwittingly an investment, he is rotting into the subprime. ”.) However, [more spoiler,] unlike Baal, Paul doesn’t die at the end. Stephens points to a world in which the sociopathic, the psychotic, and the charismatic can probably just keep on dodging the final curtain. That there can and will be a second, and most likely a third and fourth act for Paul. He’ll be able to keep on getting *something* (“what he wants” is wrong, because either he doesn’t know what he wants, or there’s nothing he really wants, or whatever he wanted he got sick of/from a long time ago) for a long time to come.

Cracknell’s production is an interesting proposition. I happened to watch from the front row of the balcony, which I’m tempted to claim (despite not having sat anywhere else) is the ideal vantage point. The choreography of the first few scenes especially – with all the players sat in blue plastic wheeled chairs – is beautifully realised, and it is immensely satisfying to watch the patterns their movements describe from high above. The whole is a gradual slide from slickness to mess, with the stage gradually being submerged in the inky black water with laps round its edges from the start, while scene-to-scene a golden flat-arch moves forwards and back to create different settings.

On one level, it manages to convince in the moment as the only possible way of doing it. On the other hand, there is a surprising total lack of any live music whatsoever. Admittedly, the script is the story of a rock star with *everything but the music*. But, y’know, they could have stuck some in anyway. Granted, music is plausibly even more devisive and theatre styles, and so deciding what Paul’s music sounded like could only really have alienated *some people*. But, well, hell, I like loud guitars and drums and I don’t think there’s much which isn’t improved by their presence. I wasn’t ever exactly sure how I felt about the bright blue leather jacket which Paul wears at the start, either, or some of the rather dance-y music played in the breaks, but, y’know. That’s just personal taste.

Cracknell’s staging is interpretative in much more interesting ways than this, however. In casting Andrew Scott, the production has foregrounded the charisma, charm and, let’s face it, good looks of Paul. Scott’s performance dwells on the contemptuous and the louche. Scott also turns out to be a pretty impressive dancer – a kind of Pina Bausch version of Ian Curtis crossed with Michael Jackson – in a few scene breaks. I could have watched a lot more of that. On the other hand, his cold stare eradicates the other aspect running through the script; the idea of Baal/Paul’s insatiable hunger. He is always eating. More and more. Other characters comment on it. The amount he eats, the way he eats repulses them. He’s putting on weight (Scott, really, really isn’t). He’s got fat. We go through the play watching the ghost of the original Paul in an environment that gets corrupted. We could equally have gone through watching the end result arrive at his final destination – and in a landscape of clinical modern hospitality suite after clinical modern hospitality suite. I’m not for a moment saying that would have been better – you pretty much can’t take your eyes off Scott, he is properly mesmerising and flawless as a performer, and the staging is sublime – but it’s interesting to observe that this is in no way a *definitive* production.

Beyond being a staging and an adaptation, though, what Birdland really is, is an evisceration of modern values and life under late-capitalism.  Of course, this is (ironically) where Stephens continually deviates most from Brecht. The trajectory and plot may be borrowed, but the conversations had in those situations are, even if mildly equivalent, entirely new.  In Paul, I think Stephens has found his most eloquent spokesperson yet. Because, obviously, having a character *actually talk about capitalism* – either saying what the author thinks, or otherwise – is a bit, well, *obvious*. Whereas having a narcissist who is obsessed with their money... Well, talking about *money* is different. And the way Paul talks about money is at once familiar and horrifying – at one point explaining that his music is now better because more people pay higher prices to see him play it. The logic of both bloated stadium rock and Tory arts policy in one dumb equation.