OSTERMEIER: (english edition)

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Mister Ostermeier, where have you just come from?

From Venice, where we were doing a guest performance of An Enemy of the People.

And where will the next trip take you?

To Zagreb, with Death in Venice. Later in the year we’ll be going to South America with An Enemy of the People once again, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. We’ll be doing a guest run in New York with the same play, for a week. In between there is Rome, Hedda Gabler. And I almost forgot – St Petersburg is also on the schedule.

The Schaubühne’s international guest performances

And in the last few months you were in Lausanne and Lyon, in Montreal and Quebec, among other places… It’s truly a crazy schedule that you and your company have taken on, across countries and continents. Every season the Schaubühne is on the road with more than a hundred guest performances. I’m very keen to talk about this right at the outset of our discussion – about the incredible international activities of the Schaubühne, the full extent of which only really became apparent to me when I started preparing for this book. I believe the same goes for others as well. Because ultimately, despite the countless guest appearances, the Schaubühne still offers a full programme in its home port of Berlin day in, day out, often multiple productions in parallel. Is there any other German theatre that comes close to this kind of international workload?

Only dance companies come to mind – Pina Bausch, Forsythe.

Some of your major Ibsen productions, Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People, but also Hamlet with Lars Eidinger, tour throughout the world. You yourself always take part in these guest tours whenever possible. With the Schaubühne’s amazing presence and representation it’s hardly surprising that DIE ZEIT described you some years ago as the face of modern German theatre in the world. Does that fill you with pride?

Giving a face to the new bourgeoisie

I don’t deconstruct, I reconstruct

No, in fact I have difficulties with that kind of label! I’m quite capable of assessing myself. I know that I still haven’t made truly great theatre history – like Marthaler, Castorf or Schlingensief, for example, who have made a significant aesthetic impact. The only aesthetic impact that my work to date may have made is in giving a face to the new bourgeoisie with productions such as A Doll’s House, Hedda and An Enemy of the People. I think people draw a connection between the glittering, design-obsessed surfaces of the new middle class and my theatre work. But there’s also the crazy Hamlet with the upturned crown on his head. The fact that I am so successful abroad is above all due to my narrative style. A lot of what we here consider the last word in modish avant-garde is impossible to communicate abroad as a relevant theatre aesthetic. In America and the UK they call it Eurotrash. I am, if you will, the little brother of the Deconstructionists – when the big brothers have torn everything apart, someone has to collect the pieces and put them together again. And that’s what I do. But always in the hope that the joins between the pieces are visible. In Japanese culture they have an expression for it – Kintsugi. A ceramic object is only truly beautiful after it has been broken and put back together again. Making the joins visible is the goal of the aesthetic. I don’t deconstruct, I reconstruct. And I’m telling stories again. Cultures that are oriented toward narrative, particularly the Anglo-Saxon world, they simply skip the generation of my big brothers, who don’t even get invited – and come directly to me. And that’s how you (laughs) become the face of German theatre all of a sudden.

That makes sense to me – your story-telling realism is comprehensible throughout the world, while some peculiarities of Germanregietheater are met with incomprehension beyond our borders… The whole world is shaped by Anglo-Saxon culture, cinema thrives on Hollywood stories. The North American novel is an important reference point in literature. And thematically, too, a lot of what someone like Castorf works with – post-socialism, the East German experience, and so on – is almost impossible to export. But the role of women, issues around the family, the happiness promised by our bourgeois society – these are issues that are of interest to everyone.

France, a second home

When did your guest performance activities actually start?Very early on, while I was still training at the Ernst Busch acting school, 1995. We went to France with Alexander Blok’s The Unknown Woman. We were invited to perform at the Festival en mai in Dijon – that’s where I established my first major links with France.

You have a particular affinity with France. Does that have anything to do with your family background?

On my mother’s side, my family comes from the Saarland, on the border with Lorraine. My grandparents met in the household of a Jewish doctor in Metz. My grandfather, who spoke the Saarland variety of French, was the chauffeur for the doctor’s family, my grandmother was the femme de ménage – she had to hangout the washing with white gloves, that became a legendary anecdote for us.

So you were familiar with French from an early age?

No, no, I only learnt it a lot later on! I didn’t have the kind of background where you grow up with things like that.

These days you are almost at home in the country. You regularly do guest performances and direct in France. You’re president of the German-French Cultural Council and in September 2013 you attended the ceremony in Oradour to commemorate the SS massacre there, along with presidents Gauck and Hollande. In France they’ve given you all sorts of honours and awards, including the order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres. They’ve offered you directorship of the Odéon theatre in Paris and the Comédie-Française, and leadership of not just the Avignon festival, where you were appointed artiste associé in 2004, but also the Festival d’Automne in Paris. And the French cities and theatres can’t get enough of the Schaubühne. In Paris you could just about set up a subscription.

Yes, year in year out we have at least 20,000 visitors. And it’s no different outside Paris – every theatre, big and small, from Normandy right down to Marseille, they all want us in their programme at least once…

Why do the French love your theatre so much?

I believe for one thing it’s the great respect for narrative, for this realistic story-telling, another reason is their idea or (laughs) illusion of modernity. The French find our theatre to be highly physical, highly radical. I myself often get labels like enfant terrible, provocateur, social engagé… But above all they’re fascinated by our actors.

This enthusiasm for the Schaubühne – doesn’t it also point to a deficiency within French theatre?

It takes an ensemble to create an identity

Yes, absolutely! The biggest and at the same time most banal deficiency – they have far less money than we do in Germany. That means that the whole spectrum of set design, aesthetics, the constant search for new forms and investigating how spaces determine the behaviour of actors – none of that can really develop there, they don’t have the budgets or the workshops for it. The second decisive point is that when you think of people like Peter Stein or Frank Castorf, the major developments in the theatre have always been associated with ensembles and with the fact that those ensembles developed over the course of years and cultivated their own language. It’s only when you maintain a permanent ensemble that you can build up that kind of identity. They don’t have that in France.

Not at all?

Ariane Mnouchkine

Well, at the Comédie-Française they do. And Ariane Mnouchkine does as well, with the Cartoucherie. Which I have to say is the most significant ensemble theatre in Europe, I’m convinced of that. There is no national or city theatre in Germany that functions as perfectly, as an ensemble, as Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil! It functions as a theatrical undertaking – and, still, as a theatre community.

We know that facts and figures are no criteria for art – and yet the audience statistics for the Schaubühne are so impressive that I have to ask you again: how many visitors does the Schaubühne reach overall with its international engagements?

80,000 visitors a year outside Germany

As a rule of thumb, about 80,000 visitors a year. And it’s a part of our theatre work that we take extremely seriously. Certainly a lot more seriously than any other German-language company. And there’s another factor here, which as a critic of neoliberalism I really shouldn’t be saying out loud – we are an extremely lean operation. We orient ourselves toward international troupes like Jan Fabre or Jan Lauwers & Needcompany. It’s something our partners appreciate.

If I understand you correctly, the international tours are not just a change of scenery for your company, but a constitutive part of your theatre work. Are there financial reasons for that?

Indeed. The Schaubühne now has a fixed revenue target of two million euros from guest performances. Otherwise we would never be able to stick to our business plan – we get twelve million from the city, up to two million from revenue at home, and then two million from international revenue. So we have 16 million in total, and 25 per cent of that is our own revenue – no other publicly funded theatre in Germany brings in that much.

But finances are surely not the only reason?

No, of course not. Internationalism is absolutely self-evident for me, I can only think internationally. That was clear when I came on board here. A globalised world – you know, it’s actually a wonderful idea! To me it recalls the dream of international solidarity. But then this idea was trampled on by the Chicago Boys! You can’t just leave globalisation to the economy and to economists.

Culture for the global market?

Aren’t you at all worried that cultural globalisation might lead to nothing more than an international, globally compatible cultural mix? There are already groups today that don’t have a location in any true sense of the word and only exist to service the global market.

It’s a charge I’m familiar with and one I take seriously. But we’re not making a global mush! We play in New York or in Paris and, this amazes a lot of people, we perform in German for a whole week! International festivals are purchasing a Berlin identity from us. An Enemy of the People is the best example. This hipster culture, which comes across as vegan, engaged, enlightened and critical but then, when it comes to the crunch, retreats to the private sphere – this hipster culture is more concentrated in Berlin than anywhere else. It’s an issue that is understood throughout the world, because our ways of life are aligning.

Motivation for the whole company

You’ve mentioned money and you’ve mentioned the programme. I am sure that there is a third factor – all of this travel must be extremely important for the emotional well being of the Schaubühne, the whole ensemble, the individual actors – and also for your own motivation. Because it’s obvious that you are far more successful internationally than at home, in Germany and in Berlin.

Yes, that’s true. When I went to the French Embassy to receive the order that you mentioned earlier, I said in my acceptance speech, and it still applies today – if we hadn’t been successful internationally, I would have finished with the Schaubühne! I would never have been able to put up with all the hostility, especially in the early years. So many people who wanted to piss all over me, so much envy among colleagues and among the critics.

But today the tempest of envy is behind you! You’ve long enjoyed terrific success among Berlin audiences, the company is buzzing, performances are sold out.

And yet there are still many who are rankled by the fact that the company is doing so well financially, and in terms of audience figures. But don’t get me wrong – I’m not at all frustrated here. When we come back from a successful international tour, it’s not like we say, oh God, here we are back in Berlin where it’s all so blah, where is the enthusiasm of Paris, or Sydney, or New York? No, we have a really fantastic, young audience here!

What’s behind the company’s enormous international success?

But success isn’t measured in audience numbers alone, but also in public opinion. It surely can’t be a matter of indifference to