WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 19, Number 3 Fall 2007

Editor Marvin Carlson Contributing Editors Christopher Balme Miriam DAponte Marion P. Holt Glenn Loney Daniele Vianello Kevin Byrne, Managing Editor Harry Carlson Maria M. Delgado Barry Daniels Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff Benjamin Spatz, Editorial Assistant

Katherina Wagner. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Professor Daniel Gerould, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration Frank Hentschker, Director of Programs Catherine Young, Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2007 ISSN # 1050-1991

To the Reader
Our annual Fall issue foregrounds, as usual, spring and summer theatre festivals throughout Western Europe, with reports from the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Ruhr Triennale, and the festivals in Avignon, Bayreuth, Recklinghausen, Barcelona, Bregenz, Salzburg, and Edinburgh. We are sorry to report that illness has prevented Jean DeCock from offering his usual report on the Avignon fringe. We wish him a speedy recovery. Among other reports we are pleased to offer information as usual, from Barry Daniels on the current scene in Paris, on the Nouveau Clowns, on a recent experimental production of Dostoevsky in Milan, on the Cascais theatre of Portugal, and on two notable offerings in London: Kushners Angels in America and a performace at the Old Vic celebrating Ira Aldridge. We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, or mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

Addendum
The name of the translator was inadvertently omitted from the interview with Luc Perceval, Theatre and Ritual, conducted by Thomas Irmer, which was published in our Winter, 2007 issue (19:1). The translator was Nicola Morris. We apologize for this omission.

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

Table of Contents
Volume 19 Festival Reports 2007 Festivals in Salzburg and Bregenz........................................................................................Glenn Loney The Sixty-First Avignon Festival July 627, 2007...................................................................Philippa Wehle The 2007 Theatertreffen...........................................................................................................Marvin Carlson A Climate Change of Quantity and QualityRecklinghausen 2007...................................................Roy Kift Katherina Wagners Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth....................................................................Glenn Loney A Grec of Transition............................................................................................................Maria M. Delgado The 2007 Edinburgh Festival.......................................................................................................Glenn Loney Other Reports Paris Theatre, Spring 2007.........................................................................................................Barry Daniels Jango Edwards and Nouveau Clowns............................................................................................Ben Carney Playing with I giocatori.............................................................................................................Janice Capana Summer 2007 at Teatro Experimental de Cascais in Portugal....................................................Graa Corra Angels in America, Lyric Hammersmith, London July 2007.......................................................Ken Nielsen Ira Aldridge at the Old Vic......................................................................................................Marvin Carlson 61 67 71 73 79 83 5 17 25 37 47 53 57 Number 3 Fall 2007

Contributors............................................................................................................................................................86

Hector Berliozs Benvenuto Cellini, directed by Philipp Stlzl. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

2007 Festivals in Salzburg and Bregenz

Glenn Loney

SalzburgSalzburg
This is the first season Jrgen Flimm has served as Intendant of the Salzburg Festival, but he is no newcomer. In fact, several seasons ago, he created the Young Directors Project for the festival. For many years, Flimm was the adventurous Intendant of Hamburgs prestigious Thalia-Theater, whose innovative productions have been seen at BAM in Brooklyn. His recent Ring staging at Bayreuth was one of the most interesting productions of the demanding epic in years. Before taking up the challenge of running the Salzburg Festival, Flimm was Intendant of the Ruhr-Triennale. He followed Gerard Mortier in that post, which Mortier had more or less created for himself, after he departed from the Salzburg Festival. In strong contrast to the previous Salzburg Festivals Mozart-ian sweetness and lightprogrammed by then-Intendant, Peter RuzickaFlimm decided to choose works that would explore a contrasting view. He chose as the festival theme NachtSeite der Vernnft: the Dark Side, or the Nocturnal Side, of Reason.

Benvenuto Cellini Benvenuto Cellini As stage director for Berliozs challenging Benvenuto Cellini, the multi-tasker Philipp Stlzl had already made his markand his nameas a very successful producer-director of music videos for the likes of Madonna and Mick Jagger. He has also won acclaim for his TV advertising videos and just completed his second film, Nordwand. Nor is he exactly a newcomer to opera production, having mounted Der Freischtz in Meiningen, home of the famed Theatre-Duke. For the Ruhr-Triennale 2006then under the Intendancy of Jrgen FlimmStlzl staged Rubens und das nichteuklidische Weib. In a free-wheeling interview in the Salzburger Nachrichten, Stlzl noted the interesting mingling in Berliozs Cellini score of melodrama, operetta, and even Wagnerian grandiosity. From the various versions on which Berlioz toiled, its clear he never quite came to terms with the work that he really wanted to create. This is probably the main reason Benvenuto Cellini is so seldom revived.

Carneval choristers in Benvenuto Cellini. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

Berliozs Benvenuto Cellini. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

Nonetheless, for Stlzl, Berliozs remarkable music activates tremendous theatrical scenes: Roman Carneval; a potentially fatal duel; a workers strike; and the climactic casting of a great bronze statue for the Pope, Cellinis masterwork. Thanks to Stlzls saturation in pop culture, he didnt search for his thematic concept in Renaissance art history. Instead, he thought immediately of the world of adventure comics. Batman was his inspiration for the postfuturistic Rome of Benvenuto Cellini: the darkly threatening atmosphere, the murky mysteries, the oversized melodramatics, the heroics, and the balancing forces of good and evil. These are all in Berliozs score as well as in the Barbier/de Wailly libretto. Indeed, the opening scenes of Stlzls Cellini occur on the neo-baroque rooftop of a great nineteenth-century building in the heart of Rome. Futuristic helicopters and other spacecraft zoom by. The roguish rascal/genius/seducer Cellini (Burkhard Fritz) drops down on the parapet from a helicopterlike Batman, but with no Robinto romance the lovely Teresa (Maija Kovaleska), daughter of the Popes Treasurer, Balducci (Brindley Sherratt), who has, of course, forbidden their union. As the action is on the roof, audiences

do not get to see the great Carneval Parade down in the street. Only the balloons float high enough for spectators to get a sense that something wonderful is going on down there, out of sight. But they do get to hear Berliozs Carneval music. This does not have the virtue of saving money on costumes for the very large chorus, as some of the choristers still make it up to the top floor. And there is the additional expense of Teresas immense wardrobe of gowns; she is continually slipping offstage to return in yet another ravishing designer creation! Stage director Stlzl has, however, been sabotaged by his set designer. In order to suggest the ornate rooftop, the entire front of the stage is raised and painted a dull black. As the initial scene occurs at night, matters are made even more murky, especially when Cellinis rival for Teresas hand, Fieramosca (Laurent Naouri), is scrambling over the parapet or diving down chimneysone of which he runs across the stage wearing. The raised stage is in effect a visual barrier, and it remains in place for other changes of scene. What is more awkward, however, is that it limits the open stage space in which the director can move his large choral forces around. The result is chaotic crowd scenes, in which stage movement is constricted, minimal, or

non-existent, with some banal gestures suggesting caricatures of chorus characterizations. Other crowded scenes are also awkward, even counterproductive of dramatic effect. It may well be that producing Madonna videos has not prepared Stlzl for deploying large groups of artists on an actual stage. But as he is just beginning as a stage director, its to be hoped he will explore what other resourceful drama and opera directors have done to solve such movement problems. Opera staging is not simply a matter of traffic management, although that is exactly what it used to be at the Met, Covent Garden, and the Vienna State Opera. How to use crowdsespecially non-speaking, non-singing supernumerariesis a special directorial skill! Nonetheless, that raised stage front is not the only problem Stlzls set designer has created for him. Before the opera opens, the audience has to stare at a strange dark brown design that seems to represent Roman scenes, although it is much too dark and depressing to be either interesting or worth looking at for very long. This may be the Batman effect, but the darkness, the brownness, continues through successive scenes. Fortunately, the often colorful costumes of designer Kathi Maurer do help to enliven some otherwise over-dark scenes. Duane Schulers lighting also helps, but not enough. All this is the more surprising as, in fact, Stlzl is his own set designer! Stlzls experiences as a producer of videos and MTV specials are doubtless the inspiration for a variety of media effects in Benvenuto Cellini that are unusual and of some passing interest. Art Deco film clips in the background of streamlined trains speeding high overhead look like borrowings from H. G. Wells. They make an effective initial impact, but seeing such footage over and over and over becomes visually tiresome. It becomes a bore to see the same classic Roman Temples burning and burning and burning over and over. The great casting of the Popes statue, into which Cellini throws all of his other masterworks as the molten metal runs out, is historically supposed to be of Perseus. But from the model on his workbenchwhich the Pope (Mikhail Petrenko) accidentally knocks overthe subject seems to be something rather different. The production poster actually shows The Winged Victory, but she of course is marble and not from Cellinis foundry. In fact, scattered around his studio are such statues as Rodins The Thinker, but this is clearly all in fun

and it was amusing to spot the various famous sculptures around the studio. Naturally, this being a Salzburg Festival production, all the principals sang very well, but I was especially impressed by both the voice and the acting abilities of the unfortunate Fieramosca, Laurent Naouri. Being rammed down chimneys and generally abused, he nonetheless projected a strong comic sense and a real zest in performance. Not just a knockabout clownalthough there was something of Groucho Marx about himNaouri also commanded a certain respect for his character in love. Adam Plachetka was also interesting as the rogue Pompeo, whom Cellini slays, earning the Popes wrath. The big news is that Valery Gergiev conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in Stlzls Cellini. Armida Armida Director Christoph Loy surprisingly chose to mount Joseph Haydns intimate Armida on the vast expanses of Salzburgs former Spanish Riding School, carved into living stone for the worldly Prince Archbishops of Salzburg. Although there are only six characters in Armidait could be quite impressively performed in a small renaissance private theatre, for instanceLoy chose an arena wider than football fields are long. Set designer Dirk Beckers major problem then was how to fill this vast space with something: something in the nature of big set pieces, since the three architectural rows of arched viewing-boxes, carved in the native stone behind the action, are already very much there. Actually, Becker tried to suppress the architecturally repetitive power of these arched colonnades by closing them off with graystone-colored blinds. But, at one point, they all opened simultaneously to reveal a bright blue painted sky studded with fleecy clouds. Unfortunately, this was still exposed when the lyrics made reference to dark, threatening skies of war. The nominal action of Haydns fuzzy plot occurs centuries ago, during the siege of Damascus, when Christian Crusaders were trying to free the Holy Land from its domination by Muslim warlords. Loy has wisely avoided the temptation to update Haydns opera into a CNN special from the war-torn Middle East. In any case, this modern Christians versus contemporary Muslims concept has already been used several times, as in Mozarts Abduction from the Seraglio, also a Salzburg Festival staging not so long ago.

Joseph Haydns Armida, directed by Christoph Loy. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

For this Armida, at the extreme stage left side of the Riding School, Becker has constructed a huge wooden wall that may represent the mystic Myrtle tree, important in the relationship between the captivating Muslim sorceress Armida (the ravishing Annette Dasch) and her lovelorn captive Rinaldo (a stocky Michael Schade). On the stage right boundary of the action is a steeply inclined plane or ramp. There are two chairs secured to its surface, for gravity-defying seating effects. The surface must be a mixture of glue and sand, to keep the performers from slipping. At least this adds a bit of visual tension to an otherwise banal exercise in exploring some perhaps undeservedly forgotten Haydn arias and duets. As a chorus, cohorts of what look like casually uniformed adult skateboarderssans actual skateboardsrush across the vast stage, up this incline, over the top, and then drop down out of sight, like hordes of lemmings. This is the nonsinging Armida chorus, choreographed by Jochen Heckmann. They seem to represent both the Crusaders and Damascus warriors, wearing red tshirts as Muslims and blue jackets as Crusaders. This very interchangeability suggests the senselessness of their military clashes, as they are driven on to death by impervious leaders. Haydns more martial melodies issue from a Nazi-style loudspeaker in the center of the stage. The insidious Idreno (Vito Priante, in excellent voice) has caused Armida to use her magic

arts as well as her considerable feminine attractions to ensnare the weak-willed Crusader-hero Rinaldo in a web of amorous entanglements. He cannot seem to pull himself free until the Crusaders Commanding General Ubaldo (Richard Croft) buzzes onstage in a motorized wheelchair, to rally Rinaldo to the Christian cause. A more genuine and honest loveperhaps intended as a counter-balance to the artificially enhanced love affair of Armida and Rinaldodevelops between Zelmira (Mojca Erdmannn) of Damascus and a captured Crusader, Clotarco (Bernard Richter). Almost the only really visceral physical action of the entire production occurs when Idreno brutally beats, kicks, and generally mistreats the naked-to-the-waist and bleeding Clotarco. This gratuitous violence is almost sexual in its intensity, recalling the choreographed mayhem of professional wrestling. Another powerfully physical moment occurs when the stricken Armida collapses on the inclined plane that seems to be an all-purpose Damascus, rolling over and over all the way to the bottom. Such gymnastics provide a strong contrast to Loys less demanding staging moments, such as that when Michael Schade sits comfortably front and center on a modern blue sofa, singing Haydn arias. This sofa and a modern floor lamp are supposed to represent the Christian encampment. The really strange thing about Haydns Armida is that it looks and sounds like three takes on the same basic theme. There is really no

through-line, as in other operatic versions of this story. After three heart-wrenching attemptsin fairly glorious songfor the lovers to separate, to remain together, or to reunite, the opera comes to an unresolved close. Nonetheless, that dedicated Baroque opera specialist, Ivor Bolton, conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra from the cembalo with every bit as much enthusiasm as he musters in Munich for David Aldens sometimes surreal opera seria stagings. DerFreischtz Freischz Der Falk Richter, the stage director of Carl Maria von Webers very Grimm fairytale, Der Freischtz, is young and good-looking. He obviously watches a lot of television, and this shows both in his stage production and in the recent interview he gave Austrias theatre magazine, Die Bhne. To give the ancient folktale of the diabolic magic bullets new potency for a modern audience, Richter thought he had to find some kind of postEnlightenment touchstone that would help his Salzburg audiences respond to this Gothic peasant fable. His touchstone proved to be Twin Peaks, and his own diabolic inspiration came from no less a fiend than David Lynch! Twin Peaks showed Richter how it is possible that evil can indeed be released into a contemporary community. As Richter explained to Die Bhne: The pressure on Max is enormous; it has pushed him so far that hes almost running amok, because he can no longer achieve a goal that is expected of him. Richter conceived the ideasuggested by Lynchs darker imaginings about peoplethat diabolic impulses are not confined to a dark fairytale past but may already exist within us, only to get the upper hand over our behavior when we have negative feelings and fears. To make this work onstage, he thought he needed to revise the original libretto, replacing it with a somewhat newer text of his own. This is one of those disputed areas in the great debates between traditionalists and renovators. The adjustment does not always work, of course. The new or revised libretto still needs to connect with the tempos, tonalities, Leitmotifs, and emotional tempests at work in the music. Unfortunately, Richters updating is not really successful. One thing that seemed to annoy the Salzburg audienceand not only the traditionalistswas his odd decision to have the usually terrifying Samiel leave his dark world, put on a natty white suit, and stroll amongst the villagers, func-

tioning as a sort of hammy narrator. Richter also invented two entirely new characters: Samielgehilfe (Samiel-helper) 1 and Samielgehilfe 2. These two insidiously sexy lads spoke the darker, fearful inner thoughts of others. This idea fortuitously demonstrated the Salzburg Festivals 2007 theme, but it pulled Webers opera quite out of shape, virtually turning it into a knock-about Singspiel with a lot of unsung overheated German verbiage. Nonetheless, Richter was surely quite right to suggest to Die Bhne that there were probably many in Salzburgs wealthy, powerful, and elitist audience who had already made their own deals with the Devilor his modern equivalentto attain their hard-won status, position, and acclaim. What is more, says Richter, Today, we absolutely recognize the pressure that is put upon a young man to achieve certain goals Basically, Max is simply in love; he wants to be with his Agathe, but to win her, he has to show the entire village that he is a good marksman, that he can attain all the concealed goals, that he can take over all the functions of Agathes father, and in such a tense situation not be nervous. Thats when the Samielgehilfen begin to function as Maxs inner voices, pushing him toward the dark side. Richter saw something of Twin Peakss Laura Palmer in Agathe: the blonde-beauty whom everyone finds a bit crazy. There are still such women today, who want to get married, who are still religious or at least believe in Conservative values, and are true. For Richter, Agathe is not nave, but she has been brought up to believe in God and that there is justice in the universe. Richter sees her as an opposing force to all the dark power in the world. As for the lair of evil, Richter finds the Wolf Glen scene and its music unbelievably powerful: A dream scene for any stage director. One can stage Hell, a place where the undead appear, overlooked from the latest war. What the Freischtz audience sees initially is a clinical white box, which looks like the empty space Peter Brook conceived for his now-legendary Royal Shakespeare Midsummer Nights Dream production. It has an Art DecoFuturist look to it, thanks to the ingenuity of set designer Alex Harb. The upstage wall is actually two panels, with a huge stylized target circle in the center, divided into alternate black and white quadrants. The panels slide aside to reveal a lot of loutish modern villagerscolorfully and casually dressed by costume designer Tina Kloempkeneagerly awaiting the outcome of a marksmans contest. At the close of the production, the target has disap-

peared from the panels, to be replaced by narrow slits which form a cross as they slowly close. The Holy Roman and Apostolic Church has triumphed over ignorant peasant superstition, thanks to the holy hermit and the state censor! Instead of the stocky, perhaps a bit overweight, Max (Peter Seiffert), Webers rich peasant Kilian, now a lively young sexpot (Alexander Kaimbacher), wins the contest. He struts like a rock star. The audience doesnt have to wait until the Wolf Glen scene to see Samiel (Ignaz Kirchner). The Villagers freezeand Olaf Freeses lighting changesas a man in a white suit strides out, working like a cabaret MC, backed by his two Samielgehilfern, to fill in plot and provide forecasts of coming events. This is where the music stops and the rhetoric begins. German-speaking audiences are used to this kind of dramatic delivery, but it is alien to Anglophone ears. Nonetheless, Samiel and his helpers (Rafael Stachowiak and Sven Dolinski) do it very well, even stylishly. Compared to Philipp Stlzls awkward staging of crowd scenes the previous evening, Richter handles groups rather well. But that may be because he has the aid of choreographer Simone Aughterlony. The white box is both the frame and the container for all the operas scenes. A few modern metal benches, foot lockers, and cabinets serve as furniture and props. But this very bareness and

simplicity proves a problem now and then. Agathes ancestral portrait cannot fall off the wall, for example, as there IS no wall. So Agathe (Petra Maria Schnitzer) and her lively cousin nnchen (Aleksandra Kurzak) struggle to set up a movie screen on a shaky tripod, upon which a bizarre image will be projected. As the girls fumble to extend the screen, it collapses and Agathe is hit on the head. Some omen! Like Stlzl, Richter has obviously been greatly influenced by TV in general and MTV in particular. When Agathe, nnchen, and the bridesmaids gather, the downstage side panels of the white box are flooded with a moving montage of slick bridal magazines and fashion shots. Suddenly a black-and-white video upstage shows greatly enlarged maggots slithering about, more a tacky distraction than a visual enhancement. For that matter, the descent of the malignant Kaspar (John Relyea) and Max into the Wolf Glen has its own set of side panel black-and-white videos. Chief among them are some very jumpy shots of what seem to be basement stairs. Occasionally, one sees a dancing spider suspended from a rod skittering above the stairs, perhaps to suggest evil. Fortunately Richter pulls out all the visual stops in his hellish Wolf Glen organ concerto. There is a naked witches Sabbath, complete with a Black Mass, celebrated by the Devil wearing a cardinals red robes. With the cast-

Carl Maria von Webers Der Freischtz, directed by Falk Richter. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

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Wolfgang Anadeus Mozarts Le nozze di Figaro, directed by Claus Guth. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

ing of the magic bullets, all hell bursts loose, as Kaspar is surrounded with tongues of flame and great surging belches of flame almost engulf the white box. As for the final shooting contestif there were any question of an American linkage to shooting, armies, and warthe test seems to be taking place at Annapolis on Graduation Day. Both the men and the women of the chorus are in summerwhite Navy uniforms. Max looks like a Naval Chief Petty Officer. Duke Ottokar looks like a very selfassured and nattily dressed young CEO, and the role is very well played and sung by Markus Butter. It must be emphasized how vocally and dramatically strong were all of the principal and character roles, thanks to an outstanding roster of talent. Even the rock star hermit Gnther Groissbck made quite an impression. He looked like fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, only dressed in white instead of black. Markus Stenz conducted the Wiener Philharmoniker with devilish relish. Le nozze didi Figaro Le nozze Figaro This summers Figaro was announced with Diana Damrau, who had been so delightful the previous season in Mozarts Ascanio in Alba, as Susanna, but when I attended, illness prevented her from appearing. I feared that the last-minute replacement would be a disaster, since the video of

the production showed that Claus Guths complicated stage direction had obviously required detailed rehearsals, but the new Susanna, Jennifer OLoughlin, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, was excellent. Not only was she equal to the roles vocal challenges but also to the rigors of the actions designed by Guth. She made an eager conspirator with the deeply disappointed Countess Almaviva (Dorothea Rschmann), who was seeking to recover the philandering Counts love. As a handsome, commanding Count, Gerald Finley was impressive, not only musically but also athletically, as he managed to have a winged Cherubim (Uli Kirsch) jump on his shoulders from time to time without them both falling over. Luca Pisaroni, as Figaro, was also primed for action, as well as for arias and duets. In this production, the entire stage is filled with an immense stairwell, in a very grand country mansion. From the performance level, where Figaro is expected to set up his marriage bedwith entrance doors leading offstage left and an immense white-curtained window stage rightsome broad stairs lead up to the next level, with doors opening into the Almavivas private chambers. A continuation of these stairs turns upstage right, connecting with a long flight of unseen stairs, only their white underside being visible to the audience. When characters disappear around the corner, one can assume

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they are going to a higher floor. This basic set, designed by Christian Schmidt, who also created the generally attractive non-period costumes, could be varied for other scenes by dropping in a white neo-classic wall with doors, or by opening up the floor to provide an immense flight of stairs to the level below, only glimpsed as characters go up and down them. But when amorous intrigues are turning everyone upside-down, this section of staircase suddenly appears in an effectively mirrored image, even with inverted door frames, matching those above. This startling visual effect was also used by Claus Guth in his remarkable re-interpretation of Wagners Der fliegende Hollnder at the Bayreuth Festival. Not only was this a stunning and astonishing physical production, but Guths re-vision of Wagners libretto and score actually made much more emotional and psychological sense than the original fable. In his re-vision of Figaro, something similar has been achieved, not only by stripping away a lot of the customary neo-Baroque production details but also by focusing more sharply on the currents of amorous attraction invisibly pulsing between and among the various occupants of the Almaviva household. Some of the cutenesses could have been deleted with no harm done to the elegant simplicity of this production. Among them, the projected chalk drawings of the currents of amorous attraction, represented by changing arrows of intercourse. The lively Daniel Harding conducted with a playful spirit, encouraging the efforts of Martina Jankov (Cherubino), Marie McLaughlin (Marcellina), Eva Liebau (Barbarina), and Franz-Josef Selig as Dr. Bartolo. Guth is set to stage both Cos fan tutte and Don Giovanni for the Salzburg Festival, so it will be interesting to see how he re-visions the other two pillars of the Da Ponte/Mozart Triad. Midsummer Nights Dream Midsummer Nights Dream I had already been to Bregenz and was at Salzburg when the Bodensee, or Lake Constance, Midsummer Nights Dream premiered, so I have only the comments of critics who actually saw it as a guide. But the production of Jorinde Drse seems to have had the audience shaking with mirth. Thanks to Oberons (Robert Hunger-Bhler) appearance as a long-haired, drug-damaged, Indian freak out of the 1970s, an orgiastic time was had by allincluding the Pyramus play-rehearsing rustics. Puck even appeared wearing a parka!

This approach did not mesh well with Oberons Burgtheater-style of Shakespearian delivery. Some Austrian critics taxed Titania (Corinna Kirchhoff) for the same fault. Fortunately for this duo, after Salzburg the production is destined for Vienna and the actual Burgtheater, though it began life as a production of the widely admired Schauspielhaus-Zrich. There was a time when all the Salzburg Festival productions were created in and for Salzburg. Now, production costs really have to be shared around, as state and city subsidies are in decline. The unquestioned star of this production is the estimable Michael Maertens, whose nerdy, prissy, self-important Bottom was immensely enjoyable, not least because it was not a star turn. He was just another one of the foolish rustics, rehearsing a play in the Athenian woods. The fact that Maertens had recently married the productions Hermia (Mavie Hrbiger) was duly noted by both critics and gossip columnists. She is an Austrian TV and film star and a descendant of one of Austrias premiere theatre dynasties. Unfortunately, stage director Christian Weise had the un-original idea of dressing the two pairs of young Athenian would-be lovers in British school uniforms. This may have been hilarious in Zrich, but it has been done before and adds nothing to the amorous mix-ups. For that matter, Miriam Wagners Helena was more interesting than Hermia, but that is also in Shakespeares text, here reworked by Jrgen Gosch, Angela Schanelec, and Wolfgang Wiens. For once, Puck was not played by a young woman. He was a charming puppet who, in a kind of prelude, alluded to festival founder Max Reinhardt. He was animated by his creator, HansJochen Menzel, along with a black-clad Bunraku puppet handler, Johannes Benecke. Perhaps so that everyone could be in pairs, there was also a female elf puppet, animated by Claudia Acker and Oscar Olivo in Bunraku-black. Instead of Peter Brooks famous white box for this play, set designer Volker Hintermeier offered a black box with a similarly empty stage. Entrances and exits were occasionally made through trapdoors in the stage floor. What troubled me most about this staging was Weises decision to encourage choreographer Stephen Galloway to turn the productions background into a constantly gyrating quasi-balletic festival. In Shakespeares original, the quarrel between Oberon and Titania develops over the possession of a small Indian boy. In Weises ver-

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sion, he is a black man, danced by Galloway. As some of the fairies are truly grotesque, to watch this crew in constant motion-mutations was very distracting indeed. Nonetheless, many in the intimate audience of the Fellner and Helmer Salzburg Landestheater were convulsed with laughter much of the evening. I feared the young husband in front of me would pull up the screws holding his seat to the floor, as he rocked back and forth in helpless mirth. But all decorum was not lost. Some older, wiser, and more self-controlled spectatorswho realized that they were watching Shakespeare, after all!were better able to control their emotions, letting a simple smile suffice.

Bregenz Bregenz
From its beginnings back in 1946, the centerpiece of the Bregenz Festival has always been the Spiel auf dem See: an opera, operetta, or musicalcomedy mounted on a stage over the Bodensee. This summer the great stage was filled with a monumental Movable Eye for the ingenious new staging of Puccinis Tosca, but a significant portion of the festival programming was related to both Britain and Benjamin Britten This was certainly inspired by Bregenzs current Intendant, Britains own David Pountney, who won artistic spurs with innovative productions at the English National Opera.

The most impressive of the various stagings offered this past summer was not produced by the Bregenz Festival but by Brittens Aldeburgh Festival. This was Brittens operatic-version of Thomas Manns Death in Venice. Unlike John Neumeiers Hamburg Ballet choreography of Death in Venicein which the protagonist, a celebrated author, is changed into a rigidly disciplined choreographer on the verge of a nervous breakdown Brittens favorite librettist, Myfanwy Piper, has remained largely true to Manns famed novella. The inspired stage director Yoshi Oda and his brilliant designersTom Schenk for sets, Richard Hudson for costumes, and Paule Constable for lighting have conjured up an Edwardian Vision of fin de sicle Venice that is also very Asian in its shimmering golden simplicity and spareness. Nine long textured golden panels form the stages backdrop, centered with a slightly protruding rectangle that shows images and videos evoking Venice, Lido Beach, summer, the languor of upperclass tourism, and even the looming threat of a cholera epidemic. At times, this revolves to reveal its mirrored verso, which then reflects actions on the stage below. Over a shallow pool of water, suggesting the lagoon of the Serenissima, are simple platforms and gangways that can be moved about to evoke changing scenes. A leisurely ride in a gondola is easily suggested by a chair placed before a plat-

William Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, directed by Christian Weise. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival

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form, with two travelers attendants moving long black poles in the water serving as gondoliers. These visible stagehands also stretch a long brown cloth in front of the stage structures to suggest the Lido Beach, much in the manner of some Asian theatre traditions. This can be rapidly gathered up for the seamless changes of scene, as there are no painted wings or borders, and no props aside from tourists suitcases. What distinguishes this production visuallymoving or posing against the beautiful but spare set-environmentare the mostly mute characters, impressively dressed by Richard Hudson. Silent women in long white skirts, elegant blouses and jackets, and topped with immense wedding cake Edwardian hats that evoke an era which was swept away by World War I. The lively youngsters sporting on the Lido are all mute, as are their doting mothers and fathers. In fact, Tadziothe forbidden object of Gustav Von Aschenbachs long-repressed libidoand his friends are young dancers, not singers. At the center is the remarkable Alan Oke, as the widely honored but emotionally emptied author Von Aschenbach. Slim, dignified, with a certain hauteur, elegantly suited in white, Okes Von Aschenbach is obviously accustomed to command and having things as he wishes them. But on this his last and fatal visit to the Serenissimasomething is not quite right: neither with Venice, nor with him. Britten has written a fascinating vocal line for him, often unsupported by the orchestra, in which Von Aschenbach conducts a kind of ongoing Sprechstimme soliloquy: an internalized self analysis, which he is effectually not sharing with anyone around him nor with the audience. We are, in effect, eavesdropping. As he is seized by longing, as he becomes increasingly irritable and desperate, as he has his cheeks rouged to seem younger, as he begins to succumb to the plague, Von Aschenbachs vocal line echoes these changes. As Von Aschenbach contemplates Tadzio with cautious longing, he occasionally hears the voice of Apolloincarnated by the liquid countertenor of Will Towers. But, aside from Alan Oke himself, the real heavy lifting has to be done by bass/baritone Peter Sidhom. Sidhom is adept in many roles: Hairdresser; Cosmetician; Mysterious Tourist; Procurer; Old Gondolier who has seen it all; Hotel Manager, eager to suppress rumors of cholera as most of the tourists flee the Lido; and also as the Voice of Dionysus! Damian Thantrey is also effec-

tive as the honest and earnest young Englishman, working for a Venetian travel bureau. Paul Daniel conducted the Wiener Symphoniker and cued the singers with a rare sensitivity for the fragility of this tragic/nostalgic achievement in Musik Theater. Aldeburghs Britten Festival Chorus, under the leadership of Philip Sunderland, not only sang Brittens Venetian choruses, but also played various small roles, mostly mute. Daniela Kurz devised the choreography for the young dancers of Tanztheater Nrnberg, but the entire productionthanks to Yoshi Odas directorial genius for movement and characterutilized a wonderfully evocative choreography. Tosca s Tosca sAll-Seeing All-SeeingEye Eye The major premiere at the Bregenz Festival this past summer was an astonishing new vision of Giacomo Puccinis Tosca. It was so innovative Puccini himself might not have recognized his own work. The three potentially overpowering settings for the three acts of Tosca were obviously very important to Puccinis Verismo vision of the operain-performance. The first act was set in the historic Roman church of Santa Maria del Valle, the second in a luxurious chamber of the Palazzo Farnese. The most powerful scene of all, however, was on the very summit of the Castel San Angelo, with its great looming Angels Wings spread out over the execution of Mario Cavaradossi. The distraught and desperate Floria Tosca jumps over the crenellated parapet of the great round castle-prison to her death in the swiftly flowing River Tiber! But anyone who has been a Bregenz Festival regular for at least a decade knows not to expect the usual, the conventional, the traditional, the historical, or the realistic. Thanks to the combined ingenuity of director Philipp Himmelmann and set designer Johannnes Leiacker, the production is all about oversightthe visual centerpiece of the entire production is a giant eye! It is a symbol both of Toscas prying jealousy about possible contenders for Marios affections, as well as a symbol of the police state in Rome, embodied in the sadistic Baron Scarpia. Although the painter Cavaradossi has been commissioned to paint a large portrait of St. Mary Magdalene on a wall of Santa Maria dell Valle, in the Bregenz production he seems to be concentrating on creating an immense eye at the center of a large rumpled canvas. In order to reach the Magdalenes eyebrow, Mario rides high on an win-

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Giacomo Puccinis Tosca, directed by Philipp Himmelmann. Photo: courtesy Bregenz Festival

dow cleaners bridge. This also later serves as a kind of podium in the sky for Police Chief Scarpia to direct his brutal henchmen in repressing and executing political dissidents. As elsewhere in MittelEuropa on many opera stages today, these killing squads are in modern battle dress, with AK 47s to terminate their prey. Instead of Puccinis clerical procession up the nave of Santa Maria for the Te Deuma great visual and musical moment in Toscain this innovative staging, the immense eye moves smoothly forward and upward from its painted surroundings, thanks to a huge and powerful crane. In what now may be considered the empty eye socket, two sliding stages, laden with lavishly frocked clergy, come together for a Te Deum virtually aloft. And from the murky waters of Lake Constancebetween the spectators and the stagean immense steel cross rises up! In the second act, the eye descends with the crane making it parallel to the stage. On this slightly sloping roundel, with barely seen security wires around it, Scarpia confronts Mario and Tosca, ordering Mario to brutal, but unseen, torture. Marios tormentas well as Toscas reaction to hearing his screams of painare relayed to the audience via live video, projected on a kind of electronically shimmering iris now filling the eye-socket void. In effect, this crane-controlled eye-stage is symbolic of the Palazzo Farnese that is customarily seen in Tosca stage representations. This makes the eye a strong contrast to more conventional stagings, burdened with opulent decoration. It also focuses atten-

tion on the raw brutality of Baron Scarpias rule in Rome. The stark nakedness of the eye strips the strong passions of the trio of Tosca, Cavaradossi, and Scarpia down to their elemental essences. After Tosca has stabbed the lascivious Scarpia, she flees the eye-stage. Its surface then begins to slope forward, with Scarpias body sliding off the edge into the darkness below! In the final scene the eye has become vertical once more, but this time the black pupil opens out and downward to form an even smaller stage. It is on this small circle that Mario writes his last letter to Tosca, is blindfolded, and is shot to death by snipers standing in the auditoriums aisles. As the pupil stage opens out and downward behind the larger iris, the entire back wall of the set folds backward to reveal four sets of two-storied cages crammed with Scarpias prisoners, who are all gunned-down after Marios death. To suggest Toscas suicide leap from the castle wall, she suddenly ducks down behind the eye, and a wispy video on the eyes surface then shows her fluttering descent. Cavaradossis cadaver slides over the edge of the pupil-stage, but, unlike Scarpiawho merely seemed to slide into darknessMarios corpse (played by a stunt double) plunges into the cold waters of Lake Constance! Because the principal roles are so taxing and because Tosca is performed almost nightly during the short festival seasonthe major roles are triple-cast. Tosca is also performed by Karine Babajanyan and Tatjana Serjan. Scarpia is also sung by Claudio Otelli and Peter Sidhom, with Mario being doubled by Andrew Richards and Brandon

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Jovanovich. For the principals, costume designer Jorge Jara provided appropriate contemporary attire: more formal for Scarpia than for Mario, and more elegant than both for Tosca. Davy Cunninghams lighting design was of major importance in heightening the effects of the wandering eye, as well as illuminating the squads of supers and chorus onstage at various times. Wolfgang Fritz was credited with the acoustic design, with Evita Galanou, Ueli Nesch, and Thomas Wollenberger responsible for projection design, which included images of Tosca and Mario singing and suffering on a slowly rotating eye-projection. None of these elements of production would

have worked so well, had it not been for the oversight of Gerd Alfons, Bregenzs ingenious technical director. Alfonsa trained engineer who worked at Bayreuth before Bregenzworked out all the details of the amazing machine that is now Bregenz Tosca. In the early days of the festival, singers voices could be lost in the strong winds blowing down on Lake Constance. Today, the in-house evolution of the BOAor Bregenz-Open-Acoustic has made possible a clarity and power of both vocal and orchestral sound that should be the envy of any open-air arena.

A scene from Tosca. Photo: courtesy Bregenz Festival

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The Sixty-First Avignon Festival July 627, 2007

Philippa Wehle but presented at different times of the day and In 1947, the poet Ren Char introduced evening. It was possible to attend an exceptional Jean Vilar to Christian and Yvonne Zervos, art dealevening with Jeanne Moreau and Sami Frey reading ers who were planning a Semaine dart en Avignon Heiner Mullers Quartett in the Honor Court at 10 (A Week of Art in Avignon). They invited Vilar to p.m. and also Romeo Castelluccis Hey Girl! at 1 join them and to re-mount his award-winning proa.m. in the Celestine church. Audiences could chose duction of T.S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral between Rodrigo Garcias raucous carnaval comwhich had played to critical reviews in Paris in plete with barbecue, hip-hop dancing and singing at 1945. Instead Vilar presented them with an adven10 p.m. in the Carmes cloisters or Congolese writer turous program of three new productions. Thus the Dieudonn Niangounas haunting monologue perfamous Avignon festival was born, thanks to a great formed by the author at 11 p.m. in the garden of the poet whose centennial is being celebrated throughRue de Mons. One could take in Sasha Walzs new out France this year. The festival is paying homage dance piece at 7 p.m. or 10 p.m. way out in to Char in Avignon with an exhibit of his poems and Chateaublanc or stay close to the center of town to letters and two productions. The first of these is his see Tendre Jeudi, Mathieu Bauers stage adaptation 1948 play Claire, directed by Alexis Forestier and of John Steinbecks novel Sweet Thursday, at 6 p.m. presented in a number of towns around Avignon. Established stage directors such as Ariane The other, an original piece, directed by this years Mnouchkine and Frank Castorf were on the proAssociate Artistic Director Frederic Fisbach, is a gram along with emerging French artists Christophe dramatized version of Chars Feuillets dHypnos: Fiat and Eleonore Weber, and experimental dance 237 thoughts, letters, poetic texts and aphorisms that shared billing with hybrid performance work. he wrote between 1943 and 1944 while he was in the French Resistance. This years poster, with its Festival directors Vincent Baudriller and Hortense Archambault, along with Artistic intriguing black, red, and green hieroglyphs which, Associate Frdric Fisbach, clearly took chances when deciphered, turned out to be aphorisms from when they programmed works representing such a Feuillets dHypnos, was also a tribute to Char. wide aesthetic range, since it was not readily clear This years official festival covered an what they might have in common. According to unusually wide variety of theatre experiences, them, a number of program choices were based on spread out not only throughout the city and beyond

Romeo Castelluccis Hey Girl! Photo: courtesy Avignon Festival

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The 2,500-seat Honor Court theatre. Photo: coutresy Avignon Festival

an interest in the work of artists collectives and the importance of community in general. In program notes and interviews they spoke of the urgent need for a collective dialogue at a time when there is less and less place for art and culture in political debate or in the media, and, with a nod to Jean Vilar and his ideal of a popular theatre, they added that there is a need to make culture accessible to the largest possible number of people. In light of this stated objective, it was interesting that the directors decided to open the festival with Valre Novarinas Lacte inconnu, in the legendary Honor Court which seats close to 2,500 people. The theatre of Novarina, master of the verb, inventor of resplendent language, author of such extraordinary plays as Le Drame de la vie with its 2,587 characters, is not usually seen as accessible to large audiences. Surely this was taking quite a chance. Happily, Lacte inconnu, a delightful two hours of circus, ballet, classical tragedy, comedy, drama, puppets, and an amazing appearance of twenty-two accordion players all dressed in white, as well as an astonishing whirlwind of newly minted words and phrases, was well received. The set, designed and painted by Novarinathree pyramids,

two large ones at either end of the vast stage, and one smaller one in the middle, joined together by a long red stripe on a white carpetseemed the perfect space for Novarinas parade of strange and wonderful characters (the Non-Stop Talking Machine, the Spiral Lady, the Nihil Fellow, the Unbalanced Acrobat, and the Queen of Spades among them). There are twelve actors in all, dressed in colorful costumes, one in a half red, half black outfit, another in yellow pajamas with one black shoe and one red shoe, a man in blue encased in a rectangular board and the man in a red suit and red shoes who begins the show carrying a large wooden plank across the stage. They are the chosen ones, chosen to celebrate life, this unknown act. Whether they perform a dance in the subjunctive mode or sing an opera in German, they affirm and reaffirm their belief that death must be conquered, shouting Mort la Mort! their voices echoing throughout the gigantic Honor Court, inviting all to join them in their celebration of life. Rodrigo Garcias Cruda. Vuelta y vuelta. Al punto. Chamusada (Raw. Rare. Medium Rare. Burned to a Crisp) was also an affirmation of life

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and the need to celebrate no matter how harsh the circumstances. His celebration takes the form of la Murga, a carnival that takes place every year in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Garcia brought fourteen young murgueros, dancers and musicians from the slums, to recreate their carnival on the stage of the Clotre des Carmes with the help of Juan Loriente, one of his favorite actors. And what a carnival it was: noisy, rough, and messy. To a background of loud drums and whistles, sausages sizzling on the barbecue (in a film projected on a large screen stage rear), images of emaciated dogs roaming the garbage-filled streets of their Argentine neighborhood, the murgueros, bare-chested and in cut-off jeans, somersaulted, stood on their heads, threw sand and water at each other, and invited the audience to join them in clapping along with their songs, and that was only the beginning. Before long they brought out several mattresses, wrapped themselves in the mattress covers, and then proceeded to saw them into pieces, leaving a mess of mattress innards on the stage. Victor, Pablo, and the others told stories of their childhoodtheir alcoholic fathers, a mother bruised and beatenfamiliar stories that resonate with those of other poor families. This was followed by throwing pizzas around and squirting each other with shaving cream until the

entire cast was slipping, sliding, and falling down in the muck and had to be hosed down. Behind them, a series of questions appear on the screen: Why dont we shout more often and whats the purpose of all this polite cordiality? Garcia asks. Osez vivre dans la pauvret! (Dare to live in poverty!) he concludes, as if to say that at least these youngsters from the slums know how to have a good time. At least they know how to subvert the poverty that surrounds them. While Rodrigo Garcias work was rough and chaotic, Frdric Fisbachs staging of Jean Genets Les Paravents (The Screens) could not have been more clean and meticulously put together. Fisbach tackled the problems presented by Genets complex tale of rebellion, treason, and death with its 120 characters by alternating live actors with small puppets from Japans famous Yukiza Puppet Theater, their voices provided by actors placed on the side of the stage. This would have been an interesting concept if only the theatre had been smaller, but Fisbachs Les Paravents took place in Avignons grand Municipal Theatre. To make sure that the audience could follow the moves of the tiny puppets, we were given opera glasses when we entered. This might have worked for some, especially those sitting near the stage, but anyone sitting farther

Rodrigo Garcias Cruda. Vuelta y vuelta. Al punto. Chamusada. Photo: courtesy Avignon Festival

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Live actors and small puppets in Jean Genets The Screens, directed by Frdric Fisbach. Photo: courtesy Avignon Festival

away or in the balconies found it disruptive and disturbing to have to constantly resort to using these glasses. Much was lost in attempts to follow the many actions of the play. I left at intermission. Krzysztof Warlikowskis interpretation of Tony Kushners Angels in America should have been one of the memorable moments of the festival, in my view; and indeed it was for a number of French critics and audience members, but Americans, myself among them, seemed to agree that Warlikowskis production of Kushners great American tragedy was disappointing. In his version Warlikowski plays down the issues of AIDS in America in the 1980s and life in the Reagan era, focusing instead on character development and personal relationships as well as the problems that Polish homosexuals face in todays ultra-conservative homophobic Poland. This is not to say that Kushner must be reduced to just one interpretation, but Angels in America is also a Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and Kushner stresses the need for magic and the supernatural in his description of some of his characters. The actor playing Prior, for example, Tomasz Tyndyk, as good as he was, seemed to be in excellent health throughout the sixhour show, despite his battle with AIDS. It was hard to believe that his body was ever ravaged with the plague. As for the Angel of Priors visions, described by Kushner as wearing a magnificent pair

of silver wingsshe was played by a small pretty blond actress (Magdalena Cielecka) with a limp. Where was the magic that Kushner calls for in his stage directions? Where were Priors apocalyptic visions of a larger-than-life angel descending from the heavens to announce to Prior that he is a prophet? Where were his terrifying hallucinations, his confrontation with an entire group of angels, or his encounters with the ghosts of his ancestors? Those fantastic prior Priors? There are clearly no angels in Poland. Faustin Linyekulas Dinozord: The Dialogue Series III, performed by an extraordinary group from the Democratic Republic of Congo, composed of storytellers, dancers, singers, musicians, and a video artist, was a much more powerful evocation of loss and mourning than Warlikowskisand not only the loss of friends but also the loss of a homeland, a name, an identity. On the one hand, Dinozord is a beautiful requiem to the memory of Linyekulas close childhood friends Richard Kabako, who died of the plague, and Vumi, who is still in prison waiting to be put to death. On the other, it is Linyekulas attempt to capture the history of his country, formerly known as Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Composed of a collage of texts by Kabako, Vumi, and Linyekula, fragments of memory and possible answers to the question What are your dreams?

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that Linyekula wanted to explore when he returned home, the narration follows Linyekulas trajectory from the day he returns home for the burial of his friend Kabako in 1960 to the day that Laurent Desire Kabila became president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May 1997. Dinozord is danced and sung on a large, mostly bare, stage delineated by bright red lines. The narrator, Faustin Linyekula, sits at his console. There is a long rectangular screen in the rear, a television screen, a red trunk in front, and a typewriter stage right. As the dancers approach, one with his face and chest painted red and another with his face painted black with one white eye, they are accompanied by whooping-like sounds that grow louder and louder. The ritual has begun. A young boy is at the center of the ceremony. He is Dinozord, a nineteen-year-old hip-hop dancer, the last of his race. The dancers begin to color his back with white paint, then his shoulders and arms, and finally they paint the number six on his back. When they turn around, they all have white numbers on their backs (a reminder of Linyekulas youth when he and his friends played soccer and couldnt afford uniforms so they painted their numbers on their bare bodies). #3 carries the boy across the stage and places him upside down against the wall. When he falls off the wall, #3 puts him back up again. Finally, #2 picks up his head and feet, turning and dropping him as the ceremony continues to a backdrop of songs and recitations in Latin, sung by a chorus or by Serge Kakudji, an eighteen-year-old, self-taught counter tenor whose rich voice adds texture and beauty to the ritual. Shuffling, shaking, and falling down, the dancers move across the stage, making their way slowly over to the mysterious red trunk just like the one in which Kabako kept all of his writings. Like wild animals they crawl around the trunk, growling, sniffing at it, and pushing it around. The trunk is Kabako; it is his coffin. Like pallbearers, they carry it with his typewriter on top along with Linyekula typing Kabakos words, the words of a dissident among dissidents whose names now appear on a large screen. One of the dancers paints a white line down the front of each dancer and extends it out in front of them, and they stand while photographs of the prison where Vumi has been tortured flicker on the screen above. What is your dream? Linyekula had asked those who had stayed in Kisangani. His answer in Dinozord is clearly to pay tribute to those who have died in order to move on.

Attitude Clando, written and performed by Dieudonn Niangouna, a playwright, actor, and director who makes his home in Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, is equally forceful in its depiction of a life lived outside of the ruling powers. It takes the form of a long monologue that traces the wanderings of a man forced to live permanently underground, a clando or clandestine figure, a hunted beast surrounded by frontiers, barriers, and definitions. Yet, as he explains, clando refers not so much to the person hiding as it does to his attitude, the attitude of a man who wants to be free, a man without a label, a free man in a world without borders. Not only is his story fascinating but his performance is riveting. Seated in bleachers in a semi-circle around a pit of burning embers, the audience awaits the arrival of Dieudonn Niangouna, the author and narrator of this fascinating monologue. At first he is a disembodied voice in the dark, a vague form in the middle of sparks flying up from the coals. His language is the language of the streets: Moi suis atteri dans ce bled. Peux pas tuer un pte. Moi suis pas un type reglo. (Me landed in this hole. Cant kill a pal. Me not a regular guy.) His words, delivered with urgency and anger, define his attitude in contrast to those who live by the rules, the reglos who carry mild cigarettes, polish their shoes, and smoke only in their cars; whereas he has no telephone and he never goes to the supermarket. He is a man who refuses everything that could identify him: credit cards and passports. He doesnt even have a name, for as soon as you say your name, they know where you come from. The action described by Niangouna takes place in a hospital, or maybe a prison, an internment camp, or a psychiatric asylum. In any case, it is a place surrounded by barbed wire and white walls. Barely visible in the dark night, Niangouna spits out his memories and shares with us his desire to be a free man in a world without borders. The embers are dying. Regardez-moi (Look at me), he entreats us as he disappears into the night. The French-Austrian artist collective Superamas added a note of serious levity to the festival offerings with their Big 3rd Episode Happy/End, the last part of the trilogy they have been developing since 2002. As with their previous work, Big 3rd Episode is a sort of modern vaudeville made up of fragments that are repeated, disrupted, and repeated again. One fragment is composed of two skits, one performed by a group of

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Artist collective Superamass Big 3rd Episode Happy/End. Photo: courtesy Avignon Festival

musicians rehearsing with their guitars, drums, and cymbals; the other (clearly a send-up of Sex and the City), depicts a group of women in the dressing room at a gym, swapping stories of who they slept with the night before and the benefits of bio-danza, the latest fad in workout routines. The stage is divided in two halves (rehearsal space for the band and gym locker room with exercise bike, mirror, and a place to hang clothes for the girls) with a platform in between. Video screens, large and small, hang here and there. One of the guys plays the guitar while a pretty girl sings Nobody knows how much I cry, how much it hurts You left me alone. The guys drink beer and share confidences. James tells them: Grace stayed overnight. If my wife hears about this Freeze. Zoom to a film of a party at someones house somewhere. A good time is being had by all, two guys are kissing, a woman and a man are eating out of a dog bowl, a couple is making love on the rug. A guy is sitting on the couch, with a hockey stick. Others are walking around drinking and talking. Freeze. Return to James story of Grace who stayed overnight and what if his wife hears about it. On to New York City where the Superamas are auditioning their new work. Here they are on the Staten Island Ferry, with Claude Wampler and Cake the Dog, whooping it up in Times Square and their hotel room. And back to the girls in the ladies room at the gym and talk of bio-danza. Back to the film of the party where a strange woman is teaching the

guests the dance of liberation. Repeat the girls arriving at the gym, same conversation, same actions, slightly different each time. Freeze. One cant help but wonder what the purpose of all this is. The show is entertaining; yes. Its like watching a soap opera with its short episodes and freeze frames at the end of each fragment. Everyone seems to be having fun, and the title tells us theres a Happy/End. But of course there is more to it than that. Big 3rd Episode is a spoof of our media-laden society, a commentary on the inanity of our behaviors and the superficiality of our discourse. And happiness, in any case, is not the goal. A quote from Jacques Derrida at the end of the show says it all: we know all this will end very badly! There is no way to reach the absolute good. Presence is always divided, split and the absolute good would be identical with death! Ariane Mnouchkine and Le Thtre du Soleil returned to the festival this year with their most recent work, Les Ephmres, eight unforgettable hours composed of small personal stories imagined, improvised, and worked out collectively by Soleil company, eight wonderful hours spent with Ariane and the company, not just watching the show but talking with them, eating with them, and experiencing an authentic community dedicated to making theatre accessible to all. In contrast to their last piece, Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odysses), which told horrendous stories of the fate of refugees and dealt with mans

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inhumanity to man, Les Ephmres deals with individual histories, specific French families, some real, some imagined, and focuses on beauty and human kindness rather than the harsh realities refugees must endure. There are twenty-nine vignettes in all, ordinary scenes of family life, some happy and some sad. The audience is seated on wooden bleachers on opposite sides of a long corridor with curtained entrances and exits on either end. Tiny lights decorate the partitions. Jean-Jacques Lemetre, the Soleils resident composer, is seated in a gallery at one end, surrounded by his extraordinary array of musical instruments. As in Le Caravanserail, scenes take place on platforms mounted on wheels that are pushed in and out by company members. Les Ephmres is divided into two recueils, or parts, composed of twenty-nine stories, twenty-nine mini-worlds, each identified in the program by names such as Un Merveilleux Jardin, La Lettre Tant Attendue, or Une Nuit lHpital. Short scenes alternate with longer ones, and certain characters are introduced and reappear while others we meet only once. As the first scene begins, a platform is rolled in. On it we see a rug thrown over a sofa and a chair. We watch the performers build the set on the platform. They add another table and another chair. They nail the pieces of furniture to the floor of the platform, add flower pots, a window, a telephone,

books and lamps, and finally some papers spread on the floor. The scene is set and they push it out the other end at the same time that another platform is pushed in. This one is a gate with ivy on it, grass on the ground, and a For Sale sign. Jeanne Clement goes in the gate which is then pushed away and the living room comes out again. Now there are packing boxes scattered here and there. No words are spoken. The gate returns and a man on his cell phone is telling his mother that he and his wife have just had a baby girl, Anna. He is clearly thrilled. Seeing the For Sale sign, he rings the bell and asks to see the house. Jeanne shows him around and tells him that her mother died a month before. This evokes memories of her mother and how much she loved her garden. The garden now appears on two separate platforms with Jeannes mother on a ladder in the tree picking fruit. We feel Jeannes sadness in contrast to the new fathers happiness as he buys the house; one life ends and another begins. In the next scene, a mother is having her hair and nails done at the beauty parlor run by Gaelle. Shes the mother of a bride and is getting ready for the ceremony which will take place at 10 a.m. in the Mayors office. Again every detail is perfectly selected, down to the little butterflies on the back of the mothers shoes. We can even smell the hairspray. As Gaelle looks into the distance, remembering her childhood as the daughter of an abusive father and husband, the scene shifts to her living

Le Thtre du Soleils Les Ephmres. Photo: courtesy Avignon Festival

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room and to Gaelle as a young girl treating her mothers wounds from the latest beating. From this sad scene we move on to a doctors office. Dr. Nelly Altunian (we learn her name later in the show) is taking a break eating yogurt while waiting for her next patient. In comes what looks like a bag lady off the streets, with a plaid skirt and an artificial white flower in her messy gray hair giving her a bit of a jaunty air. The woman whose name is Perle is clearly not in her right mind. She thinks she is pregnant but it is clear to the doctor that she has something very wrong with her, cancer no doubt. In scene after captivating scene, we meet new characters or recognize ones we have already met: Eleonore de Nercy, an aristocratic woman who loses her son in an accident; Nadia and Toni Belloch, who are about to be evicted from their apartment; Luna, a little girl whose mother has died and whose father is grieving; a grandmother teaching her granddaughter to ride on her back; Gaelle whom we revisit several times; and so many more. Each interiorliving rooms, kitchens, cafes, a doctors office, a hospital roomis meticulously designed, each object chosen by the Soleil cast to evoke a particular atmosphere or a particular person. Moving from a beach in Spain to the home of a former school teacher, the transitions seem effortless as with all the scene shifts. Yet it is clear that these platforms are lower and heavier than the ones used in Le Caravanserail and the pushers have to keep turning them so that all angles of each story are seen by everyone. Who can forget the marvelous scene with Dr. Altunian and Perle in Perles hospital room,

dreaming together of a trip to Mesopotamia that theyll never take? Or the moment when Sandra, who has had a sex change, makes a cup of tea to comfort Lunas father, who has told his daughter never to see Sandra again? By the time Les Ephmres has ended, we feel we know these people and their familiar stories. We have shared brief moments in their lives and recognized ourselves in them. We too have known divorce and bereavement, loss of a family member, happy times with family and friends and sad times as well. As Mnouchkine says, these moments, these ephemeral moments, which she and her company have recreated, transformed, and enriched so beautifully, are tributes to the people in our lives who have left their mark. By all accounts the 61st Avignon Festival was a huge success. Even before the festival began, there were no more tickets available on the official website. This situation was not just for one or two must sees but most of the offerings in this years program were sold out. Some of the companies were able to add extra shows, but still people were turned away. Ninety-three percent of the seats in the official festival were filled. Such good news was no doubt comforting for the festival directors even though, as they told a reporter from Le Monde, it was disheartening to turn people away and explain to them that in order to maintain balanced houses, tickets are reserved according to quotas: a certain number for professionals, another for the press, internet bookings, the FNAC, and groups. In any case, this situation must have made the organizers of the Off-Festival happy. Their 930 shows offered an alternative to 700,000 happy spectators.

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The 2007 Theatertreffen

Marvin Carlson plays, having brought her Das Werk to the Long-time patrons of the annual Berlin Theatertreffen three years ago. Jelenik encourages theatre festival, the spring Theatertreffen, had a surdirectors to work freely with her sprawling, poetic prise at this years opening in the Festspielhaus. For dramatic texts, and Stemann has done so, cutting the the first time, a performance was presented there original text almost in half, radically altering lines with supertitles in English. This innovation clearly and sequences, and adding new material. Even so, marks the increasing internationalization of the the dense, evocative Austrian German of the origiTheatertreffen audience, but it also had a particular nal can present problems even for Berlin speakers of usefulness on this occasion even for the Berlin pubGerman, so the supertitles are useful not only for lic that has always formed the core of this audience. foreign guests. The production was of a new play by the Austrian German theatre, unlike American, has no Nobel Prizewinning author Elfriede Jelenik, one of hesitation about engaging in serious political questodays leading German language dramatists. The tions, indeed often in quite abstract terms, and play, Ulrike Maria Stuart, combines, as its title sugUlrike Maria Stuart illustrates this admirably. gests, one of the enduring classics of the German Jelenik converts Schillers opposed queens into the stage with another much more modern political historical RAF members Ulrike Meinhof (Susanne saga, that of the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, whose Wolff) and Gudrun Esslin (Judith Rosmair), whose image still exerts a powerful influence in the debate concerns the dynamic of the revolutionary German imagination. process, Gudrun dismissing the ideal of a popular The production was created at Hamburgs uprising and Ulrike insisting, perhaps overly romanThalia Theater by Nicolas Stemann, a leading young tically, on the necessity of relating to the people. director who is particularly associated with Jeleniks

Elfriede Jeleniks Ulrike Maria Stuart, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair

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Between the two stands the other bestknown RAF figure, Andreas Baader (Peter Maertens), a cynical, foul-mouthed figure with angels wings who holds women revolutionaries in general, and especially the idealistic Ulrike, in sexist contempt. There is thus, as in all of Jeleniks work, a significant feminist element, and indeed a figure representing the authoress herself appears from time to time presenting what is introduced as a vagina monologue, dressed as a huge vagina. Jelenik and Ulrike are also conflated in their parallel concerns with representation, political, personal, and literary, and the struggle of representation against repression is another central theme of the performance. If all of this sounds heavily abstract and philosophical, Stemanns production converts it all into spectacular theatre. For Stemann, born in the revolutionary year of 1968, Meinhof is an almost mythic character, representative a time when terrorism had a personal dimension, almost unimaginable in the cool, abstract postmodern era. He seems intent therefore in restoring something of the visceral quality of that fading era, creating a wild review style production that features not only talking vaginas, but a drag queen chorus of three Princes in the Tower (Andreas Dhler, Felix Knopp and Sebastian Rudolph), recorder duets by the Queens, film and live jazz sequences and, in its most extreme moments, an invitation to the audience to throw water bombs at cardboard figures on stage representing political figuresa sequence that turns into a melee as the actors in turn assault one another and the first several rows of the audience with water guns. The production is filled with intertextual references, not only to Schiller and to German political history and theory, but to other plays and other performances. I was certain I heard echoes of Marat/Sade in some of the Queens debate over the dynamics of death and terror, and an orgy of variously colored substances slathered over the nearly nude bodies of the drag queen Princes called up inevitable memories in Theatertreffen audiences of last years memorable Macbeth. Clearly the more cultural material an audience brings to Ulrike Maria Stuart the more richly the production reverberates, but its range of reference and theatrical style is sufficiently broad to fascinate any theatergoer and hopefully to stimulate, as it clearly seeks to do, reflections on terrorism, representation, and political action in this new postMeinhof century.

As Ulrike Maria Stuart suggests, the German theatre, unlike the American, is deeply committed to sociopolitical concerns, but especially in recent times tends to treat these with a dark humor and cool irony that is also quite alien to American taste. The second Theatertreffen offering, of Sartres Dirty Hands, provided another clear example of this approach. This production also came from Hamburgs Thalia Theater and was the work of Andreas Kriegenburg, whose stagings have been featured in five of the last ten Theatertreffens. The last major German revival of this play was by Frank Castorf in 1998, when Sartres Balkan state of Ilyria was reimagined as contemporary Serbia, and the production, though full of wit and irony, grimly suggested that current political reality. Kriegenburgs is a more post-political reading, with all positions played for their comic or ironic potential. Sartres story somewhat suggests Brechts political parable, The Measures Taken, in that a rather foolish young idealist has to learn that his own interests and even his humanity must be sacrificed for the greater good of the party and the collective it represents. In an era when neither personal idealism nor collectivity retain much cultural weight, Kriegenburg plays out this parable as an exercise in pure theatre, converting its political posturing (as the play itself from time to time suggests) into theatres own play of illusions. The setting, by Ricarda Beilharz, is simple and open. Plain but elegant wooden walls surround the acting area, with opening slits in the rear and an inclined stage. Above hangs a suspended metal gridlike ceiling with a hole in the center for a small circle of glittering plastic bands to descend to the floor. When beds, desks, chairs, or tables are necessary, they are quickly pushed in from the sides of the stage by the actors. This creates a fast-moving, cinematic feel, quite suitable to a memory play. The action moves rapidly and often has a revue-like feeling, emphasized by the caricatured presentations and vaudeville routines. This is especially the case with Slick (Daniel Hoevels) and Georges (Jrg Koslowsky), the two bodyguards of the politician Hoederer (Jrg Pose) that the party appoints young Hugo (Hans Lw) to kill. Their elaborate bananaeating routine is a show-stopper and not a few reviewers likened their comic/serious presentation to the clowns of Beckett. They also effectively play (in masks) the establishment powers with which Hoederer seeks to strike an underground deal. Lw also blends tragedy and farce beauti-

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Jean-Paul Sartres Dirty Hands, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair

fully as the tormented, ineffectual youth, although Poses presentation of the all-too-familiar selfassured politician moves to the center of the production. Interestingly, and effectively, Kriegenburg steps back from his generally comic, even farcical, tone for the lengthy obligatory scene where these two, with intensity but little action, present their competing arguments for idealism and practicality (including the reference for which the play is named). Sartre traditionally uses two contrasting women to represent the forces working on Hugo, the cold revolutionary Olga (Paula Dombrowski) and the warm sentimentalist Jessica (Judith Hofmann). Olgas character is written closer to a stereotype, which director and actress exploit, but this also makes Jessica a considerably richer and more interesting stage presence. Supertitles were again used in this production, and not very effectively. For extended exchanges, often of major importance, they totally disappeared, and often they would blink on and off so rapidly that they were impossible to read. I am sure that even non-native speakers of German, like

myself, soon found them more distracting than helpful and focused their attention on the stage action. Director Klaus Bachler of the Vienna Burgtheater has made Shakespeare a specialty of that house during his fifteen years there, and never more so than in the current season, with six such productions announced. On the whole this has not been a particularly brilliant project, but one of its high points was the production of Much Ado About Nothing by a newcomer, Jan Bosse. Bosse worked from 2000 to 2003 as a director in Hamburg and has since done a series of guest productions, including a stage adaptation of Goethes Leiden des jungen Werthers at Berlins Maxim Gorki Theatre. This was also invited to the Theatertreffen this year but has already been reviewed in WES [19.1]. Bosses Much Ado is extremely contemporary and innovative. It runs, like many German productions today, about two hours without intermission. Obviously many scenes and small characters are cut, and the action focused on the two major concerns of Don Johns plot and the BeatriceBenedict romance. In these latter roles, the unques-

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William Shakespeares Much Ado about Nothing, directed by Jan Bosse. Photo: Georg Soulek

tioned stars of the evening are Christiane von Poelnitz and Joachim Meyerhoff, whose sharp banter, carried on both onstage and out into the auditorium, and delightful shifts in manner, expression, and bearing when they shift from adversaries to lovers, are richly imagined. One odd but surprisingly effective choice was to have the conversations meant to be overheard by this pair played so that Beatrice and Benedict were actually standing intimately in the middle of the conversation, but ignored by both speakers. The other romantic pair is adequate but much less interesting: Claudio (Christian Nickel), a rather passive lovesick figure until his cruel turn to violence (he actually throws Hero off the stage into the audience), and Hero (Dorothee Hartinger), an even more passive figure of desire in white miniskirt with long blond hair. Only four other players completed the cast: the evil black-clad Don John (Jrg Ratjen), lurking in the wings for most of the play, his cohort Borachio (Michael Masula), a crude and swashbuckling Don Pedro (Nicholas Ofczarek), and a much put-upon Leonato (Martin Reinke). The play is staged as if in rehearsal. The house lights remain on for most of the evening, the production begins with stage hands swarming all

over the stage putting final touches on scenery and lighting and ends with the actors lined up downstage giving their final lines while the setting is taken apart behind them. This conceit is reinforced by a casual, quasi-improvised air throughout. The dark undertones of the play are never forgotten, either in the often violent acting or in unexpected images of death. The opening sequence is particularly striking in this respect. Instead of celebrating soldiers returning from the war, the stagehands bring in three lead caskets, and only when they have made their effect on the grieving Leonato and his household do Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedict emerge, thinking this a capital joke. On the whole the setting is a very simple one, an unadorned white circular walkway, stage level at the front and tilted up to several feet high at the back, surrounding a low central playing area. For the wedding scene, however, this is converted into an elaborate kind of Club Med wedding palace, with stagehands bringing on palm trees, an artificial pond, a rock garden, an outdoor table sheltered with palm fronds, and even an incongruous totem pole! As a final touch, a semicircular arrangement of tubing provided a water curtain backdrop upon which was projected first a night sky with rising moon and

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then a blue sky with clouds. This modern transformation scene was dazzling and drew enthusiastic and well-deserved applause from the audience. The highly effective setting was the work of Stphane Laim, admirably supported visually by the contemporary, campy costumes of Kathrin Plath and the inventive lighting of Friedrich Rom. It suddenly occurred to me when watching the production of Ferdinand Bruckners Krankheit der Jugend (Sickness of Youth) from the alternative e-werk space of the Weimar Nationaltheater, that every one of the five Theatertreffen productions I have so far discussed could be considered explorations of this theme. I do admire the comparative youthfulness of German theatre audiences and leading directors, although this does seem to result in a bit more adolescent self-preoccupation and angst than I would myself select for consideration. Tilmann Khler, the director of Krankheit, epitomizes this orientation. Like the great majority of Theatertreffen directors in recent years, he is early in his careerhe was born in 1979. Like many German directors he studied at the Ernst Busch Acting Academy in Berlin, and since 2005 he has been a house director in Weimar, his native town.

His career has taken off this year and shows a strong connection to the concerns of his own generation. His production of Tine Rahel Vlkers Die Hhle vor der Stadt in einem Land mit Nazis und Bumen, is, like the Bruckner, a study of tormented German youth in the early twentieth century, and just opened at Berlins Maxim Gorki Theatre. His productions were also selected this year for two major festivals of youth theatre, the Berlin Jugendtheatertreffen and the Munich Festival Radikal Jung. Krankheit der Jugend was the only Theatertreffen piece this year offered in a small experimental space, the well-known Sophiensaele, which specializes in such productions. The audience was seated on four sides of a sunken playing area, surrounded by railings and with a tile floor rather suggesting a drained swimming pool. One of the most striking sequences of the evening was the first, which made literal the obsessive interest in selfexamination of Bruckners youthful generation and todays. The central character, Marie (Eve Kolb), is stretched out, dead, on a rolling metal table (the productions only scenic element) in the center of the stage, while her fellow actors, her life companions, swarm intimately over the nearly nude body,

Ferdinand Bruckners Sickness of Youth, directed by Tilmann Khler. Photo: Maik Schuck

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that Desiree advocates but none of them fully understand. The play is largely composed of two-character confrontations, and the young company not only brings to these an impressive range of emotion, but they add a critical extra dimension to the performance by, five times during the evening, leaving the acting area and positioning themselves among the audience on all four sides of the stage to create a live band with five instrumentalists and two vocalists and to produce powerful songs from the band Tocotronic with themes directly relevant to the manipulative, destructive and selfcentered action, headed by Am Ende bin ich nur ich selbst (In the end I am only myself) and Alles was ich will, is nichts mit Euch zu tun zu haben (All I want is to have nothing to do with you). Although this years Theatertreffen, as usual, emphasizes the work of comparatively young directors, the two notable exceptions in recent years have been Jrgen Gosch and Dimiter Gotscheff, both born in 1943. Gosch has been invited each of the last four years, and Gotscheff three of them, while their once far more famous contemporariesPeter Molires Tartuffe, directed by Dimiter Gotscheff. Photo: Arno Declair Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus smelling, tasting, and closely examining it, as if desPeymann, all still quite activeare today never perate to achieve some sort of connection with and seen at the festival. Gotscheffs contribution this understanding of it. year was a radically reworked Tartuffe, yet another These are people who lived together with from the Hamburg Thalia Theater. Marie and who shared with her a fruitless search for For almost the first quarter of the two-hour meaning in their lives. Each offers a different, but production we hear not a word of Molire, although unacceptable, perspective, from the desire for selfwe are clearly on the margins of his play. In an annihilation of Maries closest friend Desiree (Antje extended monologue, the maid Dorine (Judith Trautmann) to the ruthless self-gratification of Rosmair), a crippled and apparently illegal servant Freder (Matthias Reichwald), whose sadistic domiwith a thick Bulgarian accent (doubtless in part a nation of the servile Lucy (Julischka Eichel) projoke about the directors own Bulgarian backvides some of the most painful sequences of the proground), introduces us to the well-off but decadent duction. Other charactersIrene (Ina Piontek), world of her Boss Orgon and his family. At the Petrell (Thomas Braungardt), and Alt (Paul Enke) end of this introduction, the back wall of the empty each seek only to utilize Marie to satisfy their own stage rises and reveals all the family (except Orgon concerns, driving her at last to embrace the death and Mme. Pernell) in cartoonish contemporary

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dress and posed as if for a photo. They walk down to the footlights and sink into studied poses of relaxation which they maintain for several minutes while what seems to be the normal family entertainment fills the stage: explosions of confetti, fireworks, rapidly changing colored lights, multicolored streamersall the visual extravaganza the theatre can offer (the design is by Katrin Brack)accompanied by baroque festival music by Sir Henry, fills the stage behind them. When all is again quiet, the stunned and dazzled audience applauds and Molires play proper begins. Orgon (Peter Jordan) arises from an upstage trap, already isolated from his family, and we do not have to wait long for Tartuffe (Norman Hacker), who comes in literally from our own world through a stage door at the extreme rear of the stage. He is a recognizable modern revivalist, full of Biblical quotations, but not a Bible-thumper. His style is a much more invidious one, full of quiet menace. Orgon, swept away, joins him in singing the American revival hymn Oh Happy Day, which the enthusiastic Orgon carries out into the audience itself. Soon after, Mme. Pernelle (Angelika Thomas) appears also from Orgons trap to support them, all in black and brandishing a large cross

above her head. With all this reworking, Gotscheff allows most of the familiar scenes to gain their effects with traditional, although sometimes rather exaggerated rhythms. So we have, for example, the Poor fellow sequence, the comic quarrel between the lovers Valre (Ole Lagerpusch) and Mariane (Anna Blomeier), the unproductive rages of Damis (Andreas Dhler), the equally unproductive attempts at sweet reason by Clante (Helmut Mooshammer), and of course the famous table scene with Elmire (Paula Dombrowski)although the latter is played without a table, only with Tartuffe and Elmire lying against the backdrop speaking intimately far upstage while Orgon, half buried under the confetti downstage, listens to them. The end of the production is as radical as the beginning. A serpentine M. Loyal (Christoph Rinke) enters from the trap and calls in a gang of thugs to take over the house. When Tartuffe himself appears before the cowering family, even Mme. Pernelle is at last convinced of his evil intentions and she attacks him with her cross. Coolly, he draws a knife and apparently slits her throat, dismissing the family as sheep for slaughter. Obediently, they all turn into sheep, crawling toward the audience,

Molires Tartuffe. Photo: Arno Declair

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A scene from Dido und Aeneas, directed by Sebastian Nbling. Photo: Sebastian Hoppe

baaing piteously, and disappear into the orchestra. Tartuffe, the cool terrorist/fundamentalist, has found them easy prey and remains alone in the space he has conquered. He concludes the evening with an apocalyptic text not from Molire, and certainly not from the Bible, but from the dark Excurs ber den Schlaf der Metropolan of an author who has spoken most directly to the troubled modern German consciousness: Heiner Mller. Gotscheff has thus cut the Gordian knot which has proved so difficult to most modern directors of this playhow to find an acceptable interpretation of the intervention of the Kingby frankly recognizing that today there is no king to intervene, and Tartuffe triumphs. I found this an unsettling, but acceptable, contemporary interpretation, though the use of Mller seemed to me indulgent. Gotschoff built his reputation on Mllers work, and so loves it and knows it intimately, but it seems excessive to expect the audience to share this passion. Tartuffes entrance is effective, though probably few recognized it as a visual quote from the premiere of Mllers Der Auftrug. The table scene did not gain much from Tartuffe and Elmire utilizing lines from Mllers Quartet, and the Excurs is so odd and unfamiliar that it had to be reproduced in the program so that

the audience would know the source of this strange ending. I did not agree with Peter Hans Gpfert, the critic of the Berlin Morganpost who called this production the low point of the Theatertreffen, but something a little closer either to Molire or to Mller would, I think, have done better service to both. Sebastian Nbling is a director who has emerged only in the new century, but has been represented at the Theatertreffen in four of the last six years. His major base has been the Theater Basel in Switzerland, which produced this years offering, his Dido und Aeneas, though his first Berlin production, Ibsens Ghosts, opened this year at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz. Up until 1960 Nbling directed only drama, but in that year he began doing opera as well, creating a Carmen for Stuttgart. Dido und Aeneas shows both interests, being developed out of a collage of material from the Purcell opera and Christopher Marlowes tragedy on this subject. Nblings designer, Muriel Gerstner, has created a most unconventional setting for this unconventional experiment. The audience is divided into two large sections, with a long rectangular space between. At one end of this is a platform upon

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which is seated the Baroque Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, nine musicians who will provide the instrumental side of the Purcell work. At the other end of the space are two tables full of cooking utensils, bottles, pots, pans, small ovens and everything necessary to prepare a festival meal for some fifteen persons, for whom a large table has been prepared running lengthwise in the center. As the audience enters, the kitchen staff, all in contemporary dress, are frantically and comically preparing the meal under the rather overwhelming directions of a flamboyant master chef/Jupiter (Andrea Bettini). Jupiter insists upon testing his best creations by licking them off the bald head or belly of his middle-aged Ganymid (Lars Wittershagen, who is also co-music director), much to the ongoing irritation of fussy Juno (Barbara Lotzmann). The orchestra warms up as the guests arrive for the regal banquet in Didos palace. Except for Dido (played by two performers, the actress Sandra Hller and the soprano Ulrike Bartusch), Aeneas (Sandro Tajouri), Iarbas (Klaus Brmmelmeier), Belinda (Rahel Hubacher), and Askanius (Yasin Kourrich), all of the guests are played by members of the Basel Hochschule fr Musik, providing, along with the orchestra, a solid musical base for the performance. Their repeated choruses of Purcells When monarchs unite, how happy their state to accompany banquet toasts are particularly effective. The doubling of Dido is also quite impressive, Hller having enough singing ability and Bartusch enough acting skill so that they can not only effectively double each other but from time to time sing and act together. Tajouri does very well as an actor with Aeneass songs, but the double Dido is no match for him. Only in their late singing argument when Aeneas decides, temporarily, to remain and defy the gods and Dido urges him to leave do they seem vocally well balanced. All in all, the blend of music and drama, as well as of the baroque and the contemporary, works surprisingly well, and Didos final song, as she sits in fading light at the head of the now empty table, Remember me, but ah forget my fate is as moving as I have ever felt it. Gpfert, the Morgenpost critic who called Tartuffe the low point of the Festival, with similar discretion hailed Jrgen Goschs Zurich production of Yasmina Rezas Der Gott des Gemetzels (The God of Carnage) as the high point. For me, on the contrary, the Tartuffe was original and daring, even when I did not agree with its choices, and the Reza

was by far the least interesting (though by no means the least well done) of any of this years offerings. It is clear to see what appeals here to critics like Gpfert. The Reza is a safe production. It takes no chances, rather it presents a well-made contemporary boulevard drama (with a dark edge) with a group of excellent actors and absolutely no controversial directorial choices. For an American audience, only the setting would seem surprising, since instead of the detailed realism that we would utilize (think Virginia Woolf or Delicate Balance, which this play obviously imitates), the setting (by Johannes Schtz) consists of three blank walls and a glowing ceilngno decorations, no furniture (except for some modern metal chairs, some stacks of books, a few cups and saucers, and two large vases of tulips that will be, totally predictably, torn to pieces by one of the characters as a climax). This sort of empty stage is today as common in Berlin as the simplified realism of New York designers. Indeed it is much the same setting that Gosch used in his production at the Deutsches Theater a few years ago of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? One keeps coming back to Albee, Rezas obvious model. An incident of small violence starts the action. An eleven-year-old schoolboy knocks out two teeth of a school companion, and the two sets of parents meet to discuss the situation. Their awkwardly polite conversation soon turns to questions of the Art of maintaining civilized society and then on to increasingly ruthless attacks between husbands and wives and between men and women, where social banter becomes deadly warfare. An undertone of violence is always present, from the initiating playground conflict to the involvement of the major characters in such concerns as writing about Darfur and following the process of an erupting pharmaceutical scandal on a mobile phone. Even the seemingly most easy-going and pleasant of the characters, Michel (Tilo Nest), once abandoned the family hamster to its death on a Paris highway inviting extended commentary on the situation of the vulnerable individual in the modern world. (Matthias Heine in Die Welt, much less unqualified in his reaction than Gpfert, suggested as an alternative title for the play, Whos Afraid of Hedda Hamster?) What makes the production so attractive, aside from its extremely modish subject and presentation, is the outstanding performances of the four actors. Corinna Kirchhoff won especially high praise as Annette, the mother of the aggressive boy,

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a writer who specializes on conflict in Africa. For some years Kirchhoff has been rightly considered one of Germanys leading actresses, and her energetic and imaginative character here was very impressive. Most spectators I spoke to thought she was truly memorable, although asking her to spend most of her time onstage in highly realistic vomiting seemed to me not the best use of her formidable talents. Drte Lyssewski as Vronique, the other mother, does very well in an even more thankless role. Michael Maertens plays Alain, Vroniques husband, very effectively portraying a character that was surely inevitable on the modern stage but which I experienced here for the first time, one whose primary attention is directed for most of the performance not to his onstage companions but to his more significant conversations on his mobile telephone. The final production of this years Theatertreffen was, along with Tartuffe, one of the most controversial. This was a second offering from Andreas Kriegenburg, Chekhovs Three Sisters from the Munich Kammerspiele. Kriegenburgs previous work has included a number of radical restagings of classic texts, such as a Munich Oresteia in 2002 which included a modern satyr play involving George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Cassandra, and Angela Merkel. Three Sisters includes no such striking interpolations, but its visualization is if anything even more unconventional. The most obvious effect is that all of the characters for a significant part of the action wear large doll heads which are distorted, rather Tim Burtonlike caricatures of their actual

features, with distinctly melancholic expressions. The effect is disturbing, distancing, and yet somehow powerfully evocative of their immobility, the almost obsessive repetitiveness of their enclosed lives, and of their entrapment in a kind of nightmarish childhood. No program credit is given for the masks, but the costumes are by Andrea Schraad, and are simplified suggestions of period wear, all in tones of beige and white, with the single exception of the famous green belt of Natalya (Tanja Schleiff), which makes it especially striking and out of place. Kriegenburg also designed his own setting, which, according to the prevalent German fashion, was essentially a featureless box of unpainted wood, but with features especially suited to this production. Each act began with a short prologue before the iron curtain, upon which an act title was projected, such as I remember everything for act 1 or To Moscow for act 4. The first of these prologues, between two actors, suggested Goethes theatre prologue to Faust, but the others were taken from the play: a conversation between Andrey (Oliver Mallison) and Ferapont (Walter Hess), or the goodbye embraces and kisses of the departing soldiers. Then the curtain raised to reveal each act, all in the same setting, but with a strong visual build. In the first act the setting was almost empty, no furnishings, a window to the left, a door at the back and two others to the right. The most distinctive feature was a ceiling chandelier and decoration in the form of a huge, and somewhat menacing open flower, rather like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. The

A scene from Yasmina Rezas Der Gott des Gemetzels. Photo: Arwed Messmer

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official rememberer is Olga (Annette Paulmann), who gives much of this first act as an extended monologue, incorporating the memories of all, during which she cracks and eats nuts from a bag she wears on her waist. When she seems to be running low on nuts, the overhead flower obligingly dumps on her head a huge pile of them, providing a floor coating where other actors can crunch on nuts with their shoes and occasionally sample them for the rest of the act. It is Olga who drags on a trunk, presumably of family toys and memories, but also containing the first mask, which she puts on. Then for the first time the other characters appear in similar masks, headed of course by Masha (Sylvana Krappatsch) and Irina (Katharina Schubert). Near the end of the act Irina pins up on the wall a sheet of paper containing a wish for the future, which provides the visual motif for the second act. This time, when the curtain rises, every wall is completely covered with similar sheets of paper, the countless unfulfilled desires of this house. Each act added to the visual layering. In the third, the papers remained, but a mountain of white sheets,

the material collected from the fire, was piled up against the back wall, providing a space for characters to sit, climb, and when necessary, visually disappear from the scene by covering themselves with the sheets and blending into the background. For the final act, the pieces of paper had multiplied, and the stage was filled with white balloons, light enough to rise almost to head height, but unable to rise further because of the weight of the paper tied to the end of each string and resting on the floor. The actors thus literally moved through a kind of forest of unfulfilled wishes, unable to take flight. The general acting style, as the masks and setting suggest, was a mixture of naturalism and expressionism, at some times suggesting a puppet show, at others a much more conventional sequence of detailed psychological realism, though on the whole the more abstract and physical approach dominated. Laurent Simonetti provided an on the whole subtle but almost continuous musical score, but Kriegenburg also included (as in very common on the modern German stage) some American pop songs sung in English. Most striking was The

Anton Chekhovs Three Sisters, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair

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Beatless Yellow Submarine, first introduced as a love duet between Masha and Vershinin (Bernd Grawert) and repeated at the end sung by the sisters as an expression of their half-nostalgic, half-utopian escapism. Chekhov at the moment dominates the German repertoire, with at least one of his plays being offered by almost every major house, and Three Sisters is by far the current favorite. Something in its melancholy, its preoccupation with

the complex cross-purposes of interpersonal relationships, and its troubled position between a fading past and an uncertain future, seems to speak deeply to this generation, similarly entering, somewhat fearfully, an overwhelming new century. Obviously, not everyone approved of Kriegenburgs iconoclastic approach to this now rather over-presented classic, but unquestionably he challenged audiences to view it with fresh eyes.

Chekhovs Three Sisters. Photo: Arno Declair

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A Climate Change of Quantity and QualityRecklinghausen 2007

Roy Kift well-heeled promotersseemed to make a couraJanuary 2007. Weimar, the German culturgeous break with tradition. This year the honor went al capital par excellence, once the residence of both to the British theatre-maker, Simon McBurney, and Schiller and Goethe. Where better to announce the his group Complicit, which he founded in 1983. In forthcoming Ruhrfestspiele festival in Britain, Theatre de Complicit has a long and fine Recklinghausen? Warm weather. Unseasonably so. record of creating self-made shows from nothing, Almost summer, one might be tempted to say, were and even when McBurney is asked to tackle more it not for a certain sense of unease. Far too early to traditional material (e.g. The Caucasian Chalk celebrate Circle and Measure for Measure at the National The Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen in Theatre) he usually comes up with vibrant new 2005 and 2006 saw record attendances. Intendant readings. His new show, a co-production with Frank Hoffmann not only reversed the disastrous Recklinghausen, the Vienna Festival, the Holland one-year regime of Frank Castorf (2004) and wiped Festival, and the Barbicanbite 07 was rehearsed and out a horrendous debt in as single stroke, his new opened at the Theatre Royal Plymouth just a few programme for 2007 promised to maintain and weeks before it came to the festival. improve this trend. Sunny prospects indeed. The narrative of A Disappearing Number Following seasons dedicated to Lessing and concerns an Indian mathematical prodigy named Shakespeare, Hoffmann announced to the expectant Srinivasa Ramanujuan, a self-taught genius who press that this years festival was to concentrate on was brought from India to Cambridge by professor the indisputable giant of German literature, Goethe, G. H. Hardy in August 1913, and who, on his return supplemented by a record number of new plays and to his native land seven years later, established himpremieres, and a huge fringe festival. What more self as one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of could an ardent theatregoer wish for? Especially mathematicians. If this has a touch of pathos about when the opening showtraditionally a star-studit, it is entirely intended. For Ramanajuans search ded number to satisfy the assembled politicians and

A Disappearing Number from Theatre de Complicit. Photo: Robbie Jack

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concerned an inquiry into the great universe of infinity, and how numbers can disappear both backwards and forwards in a growing dynamic of their own. Accordingly the opening scene takes place in a lecture room where a young woman, Ruth, proceeds to give her listenersin this case, the audiencea rundown on numerical theory complete with endless mathematical equations scribbled on a blackboard which, whilst utterly incomprehensible to most of us, clearly possess a logic and beauty pointing to worlds of reality beyond our grasp and which, like chess (there are analogies here), give rise to fanatic obsessions and emotions. But it is not so much Ruths mind but her person which fascinates one of her students, Alex (played by McBurney himself), who promptly falls in love and begins a relationship with her. Whereas he proposes they have a child together, she is more obsessed with her career and her pursuit of Ramanujuan who died an early death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-twoand his beautiful, if erroneous, theory on infinity. When this leads Ruth to travel to Bombay, Alex finds himself accidentally locked into the lecture room (a finite space) for the night, connected to infinite space only by his mobile phone. The show proceeds to give us a labyrinthine tapestry of unexpected global juxtapositions, from the disappearance of a honey bee in America to the closing of a call-center in Bombay, and moves us backwards and forwards in time and place across three continents with the help of video projections, simple theatrical images like a crowded train in India, shadow play, and original music by the composer Nitin Sawhney. The final impression left by the show, which is clearly in a constant stage of development, is to partially lay bare a universe of creativity shared equally by mathematics and art, both of which are fuelled by emotions and unconscious impulses which can be set alight by unexpected flarings of the imagination. If the measure of intelligence is the ability to throw up novel correlates, this is a very intelligent show indeed, with a lot of sensual and theatrical pleasures attached. The only blatant failure in the project is the program, a typical British product that provides endless biographical information on the creators right down to the assistant stage manager, costume supervisor, and sound assistant, and none whatsoever on the subject matter, the historical figures, or the ideas behind the show. A hugely disappointing waste of paper. The ninety-three-year-old George Tabori has been a regular guest at Recklinghausen over the

last few years, and it was with great pride that Hoffmann announced that the premiere of his latest playco-produced by the Berliner Ensemblewas to take place at the festival. Taboris swansong, Gesegnete Mahlzeit, is a 100-minute farce divided into three parts: breakfast, lunch, and (last?) supper. The play is introduced by a dramaturg (played by Berliner Ensemble dramaturg Hermann Beil) in a chefs cap and a dwarf-like waiter, with the words Imagine when all this comes to an end one day, upon which the curtain is drawn back to reveal an old man lying on his deathbed amidst a chaotic pile of manuscripts. The Endgame begins and time ticks away at the side of the stage as the hero, Dirty Don John, rehearses in detail the procedures of the day in Beckettian manner; from his full bladder, to the kitchen noises, to the morning tea, to the cutting of his toenails, and above all to the first cigarette. If, as the text says, Every night is a rehearsal for death, then every day is a struggle to imbue flickering life with meaning. Tabori infuses Don Johns monologue with a long Jewish joke about Jonah and the whale, and cannot resist contrasting this with a tale of a holocaust experience given by his servant, a red-robed Lady Milena. The potpourri of Taboris biographical and literary associations continues over lunch in a restaurant, which is taken up by contractual negotiations between Dirty Don and a film mogul, satirizing the absurd legal hagglings over ownership rights and artistic freedom in Hollywood. Finally Dirty Don invites a prostitute, Amanda Lollypop, to supper for a death ceremony in Venice, with passing references to Wagner and Thomas Mann, where the nearest thing the impotent old man can get to satisfying sex is the desire to crawl back into his mothers womb and be born again, thereby out-tricking death in the end. Gesegnete Mahlzeit is a strange and exhausting comic strip, a last-gasp series of sporadic in-jokes which only really make sense if you know Taboris life and biography. As I write, the grand old man is lying in bed waiting for the end. I wish him well. Given the state of the world, God could do with a new scriptwriter. One things for sure: for all its aging weaknesses, Gesegnete Mahlzeit displayed more vigour and dramatic talent than the majority of the other new offerings presented this season in Recklinghausen. Best-selling author Henning Mankell, whose excellent crime novels sell in the millions all over the globe, is also the director of the Teatro Avenida theater company in Maputo, Mozambique. As such, I was very much looking

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George Taboris Gesegnete Mahlzeit. Photo: Thomas Aurin

forward to seeing his play Lampedusa which, he claimed, was an attempt to throw new light on Islam and people whom we almost never see on the stagein this case, an intellectual Muslim. Quite rightly, Mankell claims that we are making a fundamental error when we automatically associate terrorism in the world with Islam, for terrorism can be found in all great religions apart from Buddhism. But how does he put this into theatrical terms? The action of the play takes place in the anteroom of a television studio where a young Muslim woman, Titania, a refugee from Zambia, has been invited to take part in a talk show. The presenter, Anna, is clearly only interested in discussing Islam in terms of terrorism, whereas Titania wants to talk about her lesbian relationship. What might have been an interesting confrontation between two cultures, and between authentic experience and inauthentic media distortions, very quickly disintegrates into clichs and stereotypes, and a debate whose intellectual level culminates in Titanias response to Annas Islam equals terrorism insinuations with the reply, That is not my religion spoken directly to us the audience as if to say Got the message? Here, as elsewhere, the evening was made even worse by a

young director, who shall remain unnamed here, whose only talent seemed to be in exaggerating the clichs and reducing the characters to such unbearable one-dimensional comic figures that it became impossible to disentangle the incompetence of the production from the patent inadequacy of the performers. But even had these been excellent, this would never have been enough to rescue a palpably weak text. In the program, Mankell asks rhetorically why Lampedusa is the title and hopes that all will become clear at the end of the seventy-minute play. It doesnt. If it helps, Lampedusa is the name of an Italian island south of Sicily to which thousands of African refugees regularly attempt to flee. I was lucky enough to be able to flee the theatre after a few good drinks in the bar, trying in vain to figure out how on earth this show had arrived in Recklinghausen. Lampedusa was the opening shot in a mystifying phenomena which was to recur time and time again this year: Why was such a manifestly incompetent text/production invited to the festival? Solely because of the names involved? If Mankell was ostensibly the box office draw for Lampedusa,elsewhere it seemed to be the reputation

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and popularity of certain German actors. How else can you explain why a second-rate American play by Dennis McIntyre entitled National Anthems was invited to make a guest appearance from Hamburg? Uwe Bohm is without a doubt a popular and talented young actor. He is, however, no Kevin Spacey. And if Kevin Spacey failed to bring this superficial metaphor of American society to life in London, it is not difficult to imagine its fate in Germany. National Anthems tells the story of Ben, who gatecrashes the home of his new Detroit neighbours, American DINK couple Arthur and Leslie. Arthur is a lawyer and Leslie is a teacher, and their life seems to revolve around the collection of status possessions like a Bang und Olufsen stereo unit, a walkman (shouldnt it be an iPod now?), and a ludicrously expensive wristwatch. The author clearly intends Ben, a working-class fireman, to be the catalyst who will expose the cracks in the American dream through a series of competitive challenges whose low point is reached in a crudely contrived replay of an American football match between the two men. When Ben wins the contest, Leslie, for reasons known only to herself and the author,

switches her affections from her husband to the young fireman, and from there on the play disintegrates into a drawn-out decline whose emptiness is only matched by that which it is intended to expose. National Anthems was presented by the St. Pauli Theatre in Hamburg, which had given us a rollicking production of Brechts Threepenny Opera the previous season. Its unfortunate follow-up, the musical Cabaret, proved to be a lifeless version whose most prominent feature seemed to be the playing down of the Nazi threat in order not to disturb the audience too much. Deprived of the looming political menace in the background, this Cabaret quickly became little more than a series of greatest hits. In Germany at least, this is simply not good enough. Not content with National Anthems and Cabaret, the St. Pauli theatre gave us a third production in the form of Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Ben Becker, a highly talented and popular actor, in the role of Stanley. Needless to say, this was sold out within hours of the opening of the pre-booking period. Although I am a great admirer of Becker, having

Henning Mankells Lampedusa. Photo: Kirstin Schomberg

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worked with him once on a film, here I was more interested to see how the play had held up over the years. What I had failed to take into account was the inevitable loss of tone and atmosphere in translation. Much of Tennessee Williamss power, like many English authors, stands and falls on factors like class, period, and setting; and all these features suffer in translation. (As do Brecht productions in English, by the way.) When playwrights like Tennesse Williams are translated into German, it is impossiblefor me at leastto hear any difference between Blanche and Stanley, or to get any feel for the Deep South and the sleazy side of New Orleans. The result was that, despite Beckers heroic and vain strivings to emulate Marlon Brando, the play came over as a rheumatic wreck, and it was only when I picked up the text that I realized it still is really rather goodin the original. This production, however, by the aging Wilfried Minks, a former designer with Peter Zadek, was quite simply tired and unconvincing, apart from its ability to put bums on seats. The German premiere of Tom Stoppards Rock n Roll also suffered in this respect. Much of the plays tensions come from the contradiction of a bourgeois intellectual left-wing milieu in Cambridge University and the Czech student Jan, for whom politics is boring and whose only enthusiasm is for rock n roll. Back home in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring has been brutally put down by Russian troops, and Jan discovers that his favourite Czech pop group, The Plastic People of the Universe, has been banned from appearing in public. In the light of these events and a police raid on his flat in which his entire record collection is destroyed, Jan is forced to take up a political stance. The skeleton of the play sounds ideal for a good intelligent dramaindeed it was a huge hit in Englandbut here not only were the class accents inevitably missing, but neither the director nor the actors seemed interested in mediating any idea of the atmosphere of either Prague or Cambridge, nor of that very typical upper-class English academic atmosphere and body-language. Thus neutralised and generalised, the production ended up by being little more than an anthology of ear-blasting renderings of 60s pop hitsah, nostalgia!complete with giant videos interspersed with seemingly endless intellectual discussions. I came out of the production thinking that I should simply stick to German-language plays in the future; only to be fatally refuted by what was

probably the worst play I have seen in my life, Der Alptraum vom Glck (The Nightmare of Happinessnomen ist omen!). Probably, did I say? Certainly. The playwright, Justine del Corte, is a young woman of Mexican and German origin. The pre-publicity informed us that she has worked as an actress in several German theatres but has little experience as a writer. I was all the more curious, then, to learn that the distinguished Bochum Schauspielhaus had decided to award her play a full-blown production with a cast of sixteen actors directed by the Intendant himself, Elmar Goerden, who had recently directed the premiere of a tired work by Roland Schimmelpfennnig, currently flavor of the month in the German-speaking theatre. The presentation in Recklinghausenat whose instigation, Mr Hoffman?was to act as a sort of preview of the premiere scheduled for late October 2007 in nearby Bochum. The play, if it can be graced with such a compliment, is no more than a string of disparate hysterical scenes, dreams, and memories, all served up in a banal broth of obscenities. A woman smashes a bird against a window every seven years, upon which she is visited by a stranger who forces her to marry him and whose chauvinism she accepts without hesitation. A group of supermarket workers exchange crude banalities on sex and religion. A woman is subjected to rhymed insults from her husband (rough translation: Your tits hang flopping much too deep, your arse-like face robs me of my sleep), upon which they embrace. Oh, how she loves to be insulted! A third womanthis time thankfully alonedefines her existence purely from the articles she buys in supermarkets, which she recites in a suitably depressing manner. Another deflowers herself with an artificial penis made of frozen plasticine, in order to deprive any man of the pleasure (!). A fourth is so disgusted by sex that she washes out her vagina with acerbic cleaning fluid. Another has nightmare visions of being raped on her wedding night, during which blood-stained tampons are hung around her neck as a garland. From time to time, an actor playing a theatre director rises from his place in the stalls to protest in violent terms that the people being presented to him are more than inadequateupon which I was hard put to prevent myself from jumping up in vociferous support. These outpourings of verbal diarrhoea are regularly accompanied by every variation of sexual abuse and cursing, so that I began to wonder whether I was insane to remain in my seat, how these derisory pre-

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pubescent fantasies could possibly have been accepted by a press, and if so, how on earth the published text got past the eyes of supposedly trained dramaturgs, director, and actors without a single person standing up to protest that the whole endeavour was, if I might be allowed to attempt to give you an idea of the verbal range of the author, a rotting pile of worthless fing shit which should be stuffed up the authors own c..t and left to fester. (Please cut out and quote in the advertising!) I might add that the night I was there the audience was distinctly under-whelmed and all the reviews I have read to date, including and especially those written by women, share my opinion entirely. I might also add that Justine del Corte just happens to be the wife of Roland Schimmelpfennig. But of course this fact could not possibly have played any role in the affair. If Mr Schimmelpfennig did have any influence in getting this shameful farrago on stage, what was his motive? To destroy his wifes reputation for good? Apparently not, as Ms Del Cortes next work is being directed by Mr Schimmelpfennig at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. Back in sunny January this had all looked so interesting. But thankfully, even in a cold, rainy May, things were not all bad. Indeed I have to report that the festival threw up one or two gems amongst the dross, and one unforgettable Goethe production that will long live in the memory alongside Peter Brooks legendary Midsummer Nights Dream and King Lear. Before I move on to Goethe, however, I should like to mention a fascinatingly radical interpretation of Molires classic Tartuffe, the tale of a religious hypocrite who worms his way into a middle-class household and proceeds to win over the patriarch before attempting to violate his wife and take over the deeds of the house. Since religious fanaticism is the hot topic of the day, the play is being presented in several theatres in Germany at the moment. And why not? The play was first presented privately in 1664 before the Court of Louis XIV but roused so much antagonism amongst the false dvots of Paris that it was not presented in public until 1667 and then only under the subtitle The Impostor, a good indication that Molire was more interested in ripping off the mask of religious hypocrisy than in attacking religion as such. Indeed the most likely source for the character of Tartuffe seems to have been a man named Charpy who lived in the same street as Molire, and who also insinuated himself into a household and won over the patriarch who,

despite warnings from his wife, insisted that Charpy was the best friend he had in all the world. Whatever the case, some scholars maintain that, had it not been for the king, the play would never have been presented at all. Because of the public dispute, Molire made at least two versions of the play. The one which has come down to us in the standard text ends with Tartuffe being arrested on the orders of a wise prince who is an enemy of fraud. Molire clearly knew to whom he owed his survival! In this production the Bulgarian-born director Dimiter Gotscheff chose to make yet another version, which can be best described as a loose improvisation on a theme by Molire. This is made clear from the start when the curtain goes up on the maid, Dorine, delightfully played by Judith Rosmair as a shrewd immigrant refugee from Eastern Europe, limping round the stage trying to bring order to a large delivery of champagne glasses imported from China. During this action we learn that she has only been permitted to stay in the country because of the influence of her employer, head of

Molires Tartuffe, directed by Dimiter Gotscheff. Photo: Arno Declair

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the house Orgon, who exploits Dorines dependency to the full by paying her as little as possible. When Orgons family finally make their appearance they do so in full as a formal presentation, strutting forward toward the audience to a background fanfare of music, like professional models showing off their designer clothes and their affluent status. Once they are settled in their positions downstage Orgon only has to snap his fingers casually to produce a riotous cannonade of fireworks and an orgy of tinsel and confetti which floods the stage and remains there for the rest of the evening. The image is extraordinarily powerful, and the night I was present parts of the audience mistakenly thought they were witnessing one of those extravagant event productions which pass for theatre nowadays. A more concentrated view of the stage would have revealed the blas reception given to this extravagance by Orgons household who, assembled decoratively around the stage, seem to regard it as just another unexceptional attempt to relieve the boredom of a life filled by luxury and empty consumption. This is the strength of a production which takes a very radical view of the middle-class society portrayed by Molire. Whereas in Molires original, apart from Orgon the family seem to be decent folks who can see through Tartuffe, here they are reduced to a group of mindless egotistical nincompoops whose only opposition to Orgon and Tartuffe is grounded in their own brutal self-interest. Within such an inauthentic society, Tartuffe, played with intense and genuine conviction by Norman Hacker, does not have to act at all. Indeed, apart from the astute Dorine who sees through them all, he is the most true to his own being as an impostor. So when Tartuffe proclaims his faith in a quiet manner, his phrases are taken up by Orgon and transformed into a hysterical bornagain chanting, an outward display of emotional religious devotion which only highlights the emptiness within. As the evening progressed the production took on a critical aspect whose effect was clearly not lost on sections of the well-heeled members of the audience, some of whom left long before the end. Othersalmost unheard of in Germany abandoned their seats in hasty silence as soon as the final curtain came down. Whatever you think about directors theatre in Germanyand very little of Molires original dialogue seems to have been retainedthis was a remarkable production which gave the play back its offensive power. More importantly, it talked about the dangers and poten-

tial hypocrisy behind Christian fanaticism. [See also the review of this production in the article on the Berlin Theatertreffen in this issue.] Which brings us at last to this years featured author, Goethe; honored presumably because this year was the 175th anniversary of his death. I have to confess that I saw an extremely tedious adaptation of his Elective Affinities in Bochum a few years back. In addition I have always thought that if authors think their material is better suited to a particular genre, why should we try to prove them wrong or ourselves more capable? As a result I decided to give the adaptation of The Sufferings of Young Werther a miss, despite the fact that it had been invited to this years Berlin Theatertreffen. On the other hand, Torquato Tasso, Goethes play about the Italian renaissance poet, provided festival director Frank Hoffmann with an ideal opportunity to make up for his disappointing Taming of the Shrew last year. In this respect, as in his exceptionally clear and entertaining production of Minna von Barnhelm two years ago, he did not let us down. Its a difficult play to stage because there is so little obvious physical action. The poet Tasso depends on the patronage of a rich prince, the Duke of Ferrara, to be able to pursue his art. The Princes summer residence at Belriguardo offers Tasso an ideal opportunity to pass a few pleasant days with his patron and his patrons two sisters. The seeming idyll is destroyed by the arrival of a hard-headed politician, Antonio, who confronts Tasso with a few social truths: Art does not really connect society with life. For most people it is merely a substitute for life or a lighthearted decoration and poets are deluded when they think they can change society by aesthetic interventions. Or are they? This was Goethes dilemma and probably the main motivation behind his writing his very wordy play. For, apart from a few preliminary flirtations with the sisters, during which Tasso bathes in their admiration, the majority of the work is devoted to intellectual discussion. Despite this, Hoffmann and his actors, particularly Wolfram Koch (Germanys actor of the year in 2005) as Tasso, for the most part succeed in engaging our interest, especially at the end when the defeated Tasso is put under house arrest and sits depressed in the middle of a fountain pool conducting an imaginary orchestra. Here he is joined by Antonio, and the two jointly recite Tassos text whilst embracing. Hoffmann seems to be saying that even the most calculating of politicians are in need of art if they are to survive as human beings. All the same I could

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not rid myself of the uneasy feeling that nowadays this would make a better radio play. What can one say about Faust? Germany has lived for decades with the legendary Hamburg production by Gustav Grndgens in 1957, and the subsequent film in 1960 starring Willi Quadflieg as Faust and Grndgens as Mephisto. Since then all further productions have had to live in the shadow of what was considered to be an almost definitive interpretation. Jan Bosses production, also from Hamburg, triumphantly sets a new benchmark likely to remain for decades to come. I was expecting the worst when I was presented at the box office with an unnumbered ticket and instructions to sit on the stage. As it happens this turned out to be a blessing because, when I entered the auditorium, I saw that the front of the traditional stage had been removed and had been replaced by a one-meter high, round, black, empty stage from designer Stphane Laim. The seating behind it began at approximately the same height and I was lucky enough to get the last remaining empty seat in the front row. For the majority of the show this empty stageall the stage is a worldwould remain so, apart from an occasional stool and, later, a small

yellow tent. But this is to jump ahead. From my position I had a magnificent view of the remainder of the audience seated in the customary auditorium and to the right and left of the new stage. All the more so because during the performance the lights were never completely dimmed and, as it turned out, the actors moved throughout the whole theatre. Thus the boundary between the stage and the audience was removed and we were left looking on to each other and the dark empty world in the midst of us all. A tall, dark, bareheaded figure in a black leotard and tights appears, wearing a pair of black wings. He climbs on the stage and ties a black blindfold around his eyes. He stretches out his arms to the heavens and utters a long wailing cry before slumping sideways under the stage with arms and legs outstretched. The stage begins to turn and the Falling Angel Mephisto begins a desperate deal with the voice of God within hima breathtaking piece of desperate negotiation made brilliantly clear by the actor Joachim Meyerhoff as he twists and turns on the revolving stage. At the end of the monologue there is a blackout, and when the lights go up once moreon us allthe stage is empty once again. At which point a

Johann Wolfgang Goethes Torquato Tasso, directed by Frank Hoffmann. Photo: Birigit Hupfeld

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grey-haired middle-aged man in a worn grey suit and nickel spectacles sitting to one side of me in the auditorium turned to the lady sitting beside him and began to unload his worries about life and work. Faust himself. One of us. Sitting amongst us. Standing amongst us. Walking amongst us, talking to us intimately. The boundary between actors and audience is further blurred during the production by the chorus, individual members of the audience sitting scattered throughout the auditorium and reciting their text in extraordinary unison at little more than whisper. They not only recite, they hum together and even at one point sing excerpts from Mozarts requiem quietly in the background. And when the other characters appear, they do so from among the audience before coming together either in the audience or at the middle of the stage. This is not merely a formal trick, a directors bright idea. First it throws us, the audience, into direct contact with characters we tend to regard as distant and literary. Second, the personal, conversational character adopted by the actors forces them to abandon traditional German-theatre declamation and actually think through what they are saying. Never has classical German been so clear to me as in this production. Third, we were invited, almost automatically, to take part in this deliberate staging of Faust. For example, when Faust arrives at well-known passages from the play, aware that a huge number of the audience are acquainted with the verse, actor Edgar Selge stops and conducts them in speaking the text with him or finishing off a rhyme, like a pop singer at a concert. And suddenly we are playing Faustthe play and the character. But as with Othello and Iago, the real director of the show is not Faust but Meyerhoffs Mephisto, with a charismatic and irresistibly evil charm. Oh the pleasure he takes in thinking up his next piece of trickery, and oh the delight we have in going along with it, although we know it is going to lead to some human disaster or other. Faust is caught in his machinations like a mesmerized rabbit, so that when Mephisto gives him back his youth in a simple theatrical gesture it does not take much convincing for him to seduce the innocent young Gretchen, played by Maja Schne in plaits and white blouse and miniskirt. Despite this appearance her performance is anything but a clich. Ms Schne is so emotionally caught up with Faust that when she is rejected by him, she becomes a sort of Ophelia wandering amongst the audience begging for our help in quiet desperation. The performance is so authentic and

moving that at times members of the audience offer her their hand, caress her cheek. At others the confused girl attempts to sit on their laps and embrace them in search of consolation. It is no accident that this productionas usual, only the first of the twopart work is performed hereends with the words Sie ist gerichtet (Shes done for); here the audience immediately recognizes that this cannot be so and spontaneously substitute Goethes own final words, Sie ist gerettet (She is saved). Thus, by refusing to go along with the production, the audience dislocates itself from the idea running through the evening that there is no salvation in a world which has long since abandoned Christian ideology, and separates itself from the actors in order to applaud them with standing ovations. This Faust is an unforgettable evening of great imagination and wit, powerful acting, unalloyed pleasure, and painful torment. The director is Jan Bosse. He also directed the adaptation of The Sufferings of Young Werther. What did I miss?! [Werther was reviewed in the 19.1 issue of WES.] I also missed the great majority of the fringe programs, apart from a disappointing Russian play, a much-praised but for me second-hand mixture of Oblomov and Hamlet, inadequately played and presented by the Deutsches Theater, Berlin. The Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, on the other hand, arrived with a much more interesting study of adolescent desperation, norway.today by Igor Bauersima. The play takes as its starting point an online chat between two characters in which a young woman is looking for a companion with whom to commit suicide as a protest against the senselessness of existence, and finds a similarly aged boy. Together the two travel to Norway where they camp on a mountain overlooking a fjord, into which they intend to leap to their deaths. For the most part the play is an accurate and sympathetic reflection of adolescent problems. It starts to lose impetus, however, when the girl Julie almost accidentally slips to her death and the two begin to have second thoughts about the enterprise. Will they or wont they? At this point the author obviously found himself having to prolong the proceedingsthere is a lot of video performing by the two protagonists emphasising the unreality of it allin order to make it into a full-blown theatrical evening. As a result, a promising start slowly dissolved into a lengthy end, which I shall not reveal. It only remains for me to note that the Recklinghausen festival came up with another tri-

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umphant evening of dance in the form of a trilogy entitled Centaurs/Annunciation: Sunday Farewell, produced by Ballet Preljocaj from Paris. The evening opens with a duet between two female dancers based on the annunciation from the Bible, where the Angel Gabriel reveals to the Virgin Mary that she has been divinely elected to give birth to the Son of God. The piece is danced to music by Vivaldi, a perfect reflection of the peace and harmony between the two characters, who seem at times to melt into one. The style was a mixture between classical dance and Pina Bausch: the matching precision of the two dancers was breathtaking. This was followed by a male duet whose gender contrast could not have been more brutal. Whereas the women emanated love, care, intimacy, and togetherness, the two males were more concerned with antagonistic competition and a fight to the death. (Music: Ligeti).

The second half of the evening was danced by the complete company in an extraordinary orgy of sensuality inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausens Sunday Departure. This non-stop Dionysian frenzy of attraction and rejection, pairing and parting left me as exhilarated and exhausted as the company must have been. Magical. I have to report that festival director Frank Hoffmanns third season once again pulled in a record attendance. The quantity of shows offered at Recklinghausen is immenseI havent even mentioned the series of cabaret evenings, readings, and other one-man shows because I simply had no time to see thembut if the festival is going to stay successful perhaps he and his program planners should seriously consider reducing the quantity of shows and becoming more stringent in terms of the quality of those they elect to present. Oh, those new plays!

Igor Bauersimas norway.today. Photo: Arno Declair

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Katherina Wagners Die Meistersinger at Bayreuth

Glenn Loney popular Bayreuth starare eager for him to be In recent summers at Beyreuth, the quesnamed by the overseeing Gremium as next in line. tion of who will be the next Intendant of the festival His Bayreuth curtain calls are usually greeted with has been a regular theme. On August 30, 2007, the standing ovations, notably for his conducting in the current and longtime chief, Wolfgang Wagner, was current Ring. But being a General Music Director is eighty-eight years old! There is no mandatory retirenot the same as being an Intendant, for most GMDs ment age for Wagners unique post. Indeed, at one are more concerned about the orchestras they conpoint Wolfgang asked for and received a lifetime duct and their choruses than they are about choosing contract from the Gremium that nominally oversees talented actor/singers, brilliant stage and costume the festival. He has invoked this contract whenever designers, and ingenious Regisseurs, as well as there have been moves to select a successor. One of installing technical innovations and even filling the these candidates was a daughter by his first marseats of the opera house. riage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier. She graciously withOf course, at Bayreuth, the season lasts drew when it became clear that her father had no only five weeks, unlike the standard ten-month seaintention of yielding his Intendancy to anyone but sons of most European theatres and opera houses. Katharina, his daughter by his second marriage. Nonetheless, other major festivals in Europe are selThis past summer, a number of newspapers dom more than five weeks long; some are even and commentators renewed the successor question shorter. Even so, complex festivals such as those of with incremental eagerness, not only because of the Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Bregenz all have an known preference of Wolfgang Wagner for Intendant on hand, not phoning in from time to time. Katharina Wagner but also because age seems to be In any case, the very mixed reception that taking its toll. Recent photos show an elderly greeted Katharina Wagners Bayreuth directorial Wolfgang Wagner supported by a cane. He may also debutwith her great-grandfathers Die have had a medical incident, as some report his Meistersingerhas made the questioners even speech is now somewhat slurred. Fans of the distinmore insistent, as some dont believe her avantguished conductor Christian Thielemanna very

Richard Wagners Die Meistersinger, directed by Katherina Wagner. Photo: Jrg Schulze

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garde staging approach qualifies her for the post of Intendant. Interestingly, Katharinain one of the many interviews she has given recentlypoints out that the talents required for an Artistic Director are not the same as those needed for a Regisseur. Whether one is an effective stage director or not, she insists, has no real bearing on the arts management skills needed by an Intendant. Indeed, some of the most effective Artistic Directors today have never staged a play or an opera. Gerard Mortierformer Intendant of the Salzburg Festival, now chief at the Paris Opera and soon to take the helm at New York City Operais a strong example. For many Wagner devotees, the control and continuation of the artistic heritage of Richard Wagner should remain in the family and in the Festspielhaus. But even when Wolfgang Wagner finally does retireor time takes its tollthere is no shortage of family candidates, and the most obvious is Katharina, who for many years has learnt all aspects of the festivals operation from both her father and her mother, Gudrun Wagner, who has a firm hand on management of the festival. And Katharina has been able to work as an assistant to the famous opera directors working at Bayreuth. Nor is her fiercely debated Bayreuth Meistersinger her first staging. She has staged Der fliegende Hollnder for Wrzburg, Lohengrin in Budapest, Lortzings Der Waffenschmied at Munichs Grtnerplatz-Theater, and Puccinis Il trittico for a Berlin debut. This October, she will stage Richard Wagners seldom-seen opera Rienzi for TheaterBremen and she is planning for the next Bayreuth Festival to revive her fathers 1989 Bayreuth Parsifal, rebuilt and re-rehearsed after her fathers original plans and conceptions. The Bayreuth Festival Archive has preserved all the records: plans, models, and photos. Shortly before Katharinas Bayreuth debut, the media was flooded with a series of extremely glamorous photos of the young stage director and heir-apparent. In previous years, she was usually seen in a group photo with her parents and distinguished Bayreuth guests. This press barrage suggests an organized campaign to further her cause as her fathers Nachfolger. And it has been very effective: not only is she a striking beauty, but her astute and often witty replies to reporters questions indicate both a keen intellect and an off-beat sense of humor. Possibly part of the Katharina Campaign is Dagmar Krausss film documentary on the creation

of the new Meistersinger. Frulein Wagner permitted Krauss to follow the entire process, video camera in hand. Krauss says Katharina Wagner never asked her to turn off the camera, even in tense moments. Everything has been captured. This could well be because Krauss is no Bayreuth outsider. She was once one of the Blue Maidens, who tend the auditorium doors and check the tickets of worshippers at Richard Wagners shrine. She has also been both a Dwarf and a Nibelung in the Ring! In the six or seven weeks of Meistersinger rehearsals, Krauss was able to record some eighty hours of the process. This she has edited down to a twenty-four-minute documentary for Sat 1 television. Krauss documentary can be seen on Sat 1s website: www.sat1bayern.de. Even with this impressive preparation, however, the lusty chorus of boos which engulfed her great-grandfathers famed Festspielhaus auditorium as Katharina came before the great curtain at the productions conclusion was daunting indeed. There was something almost savage about some of this roar of disapproval, coming from an obviously well-educated and well-heeled audience, although Katharinaher long blonde hair setting off her sleek black gownwas remarkably gracious as she bowed, taking the boos in stride. Possibly she and her production team view this as an entirely predictable reaction to anything new or non-traditional on the sanctified Bayreuth stage. Some of the best directors and designers have also been booed here, as was Patrice Chreau for his Bayreuth Centennial Ring way back in 1976. Yet Katharina Wagners new staging offers few clues to the story that Richard Wagner had actually intended to unfold on stage. Those spectators who had Wagner text books in handor who had seen this work in different productionswere surprised to discover that Katharina, her dramaturg Robert Sollich, and her designers Tilo Steffens and Michaela Barth had conceived a highly unconventional vision of Wagners. The words and music remained just as Wagner created them, but were accompanied by a quite different visual plot-line. In Wagners original version, Veit Pognera wealthy and well-respected Nuremberg guildsman and chief of the Master Singers, who are guildsmen-singers from various crafts and trades is offering the hand of his beloved daughter, Eva, to the bachelor Master Singer whose original lyrics and melody win the annual song contest. That man could be Hans Sachs, the Master Shoemaker, who is

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also a local poet and playwright. He is an older man, but still a bachelor, and he has always loved Eva from afar. The real competition for Evas hand however is between the town clerk Beckmesser and a young outsider, Walther von Stolzing. Beckmesser is a rather pathetic, laughable local character, always fussing about the rules of creating a song worthy of the Master Singers, as if rules could produce a work of genius. Naturally he insists that Walters song in the competition strictly follow these rules, and keeps track of the errors in Walters glorious but unstructured song on a noisy chalkboard. It seems the sympathetic Walther is doomed to failure, but Hans Sachs takes him in hand, and helps him restructure his song to make it worthy of the prize. Although Beckmesser purloins the revision and tries to present it as his own, he lacks the skill to deliver it effectively, and Walther wins the contest and Eva. Katharina Wagners visual re-writing bears almost no relationship to the original. Not that Wagners text has been significantly changed, nor his dynamic original score. To the ear then these remain intact in this new staging, although what the eye is offered has been drastically altered. All Richard Wagners operas are set in the past, the distant past, even the legendary past though the central characters were often already known to Wagners audiences through old sagas and tales, as well as history. So it is sometimes unsettling when a young director with a reputation to makeor even an aging enfant terribledecides to update a Wagner opera, often changing the original site of the story as well. At Bayreuth, there have already been some stunningly powerful updatings and re-imaginings of Wagners original conceptionswith absolutely no damage done to Wagners lyrics nor to his sublime scores. Despite the initial protests of the Perfect Wagnerites, most Wagner fans who saw the Chreau 1976 Ringor videos of that productionnow agree that it was seminal. In more recent years, the innovational Bayreuth stagings of Harry Kpfer and Jrgen Flimm have been both powerful and influential. In fact, Claus Guths Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth (only recently retired) has been one of the most striking. Such productions must surely have been on the mind of Katharina when she decided to take a new look at Die Meistersinger. She is certainly more familiar with the libretto and score of this opera than almost any other young director, espe-

cially after working closely with her father on his marvelously evocative Meistersinger for a number of seasons at Bayreuthbut her vision is not that of her father; her grandfather, Siegfried; nor in any way that of her great-grandfather, Richard. Her Walther von Stolzing is no longer the artist-outsider, whose genius is sharpened by a study of the poetic rules of the master, Hans Sachs. In fact, he is no longer a poet all, but a handsome young modernist painter and something of a lounge-lizard. No, the real artist-outsider is Beckmesser, whose stolen lyrics are viewed by Wagner and her team as an avant-garde forerunner of Dada! When the great gray curtain opens, we are not in a Nuremberg Church anymore; we seem to be looking at the imposing interior court of a pre-Nazi Academy of Art. The school uniforms of the young student/acolytes enrolled look like 1920s English Public School outfits. The three-storied stage structurewhich remains in place for all three actshas a central covered court, backed by three levels of three rooms each, making a total of nine. In one room there is a grand piano, from the bowels of which Walther von Stolzing makes his first languid playboy appearance. There is also a fabric black and white keyboard that can be used as a trendy scarf, as the piano is not functional. On the top level of this construction is a metal scaffold, atop which a mural artist and his aide are painting a ceiling fresco. This seems to be a period costume imagematched by two others in the two adjoining ceiling-cells. Flanking this central construction are two three-story side-galleries with ornamental guardrails. On each side, busts or small statues of famous German authors and artists are on display. Naturally, Richard Wagner is one of these greats, along with Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Bach, Beethoven, and others, In the first act, they are only sculpted figures, but in act 2, they are replicated as humans who silently interact, and in act 3, the heads have grown into monstrous bobblehead caricatures, as they loll about in the poorly-lit rooms of the central structure. Meanwhile, down below in the central courtwhich later serves as a kind of cafuniformed students march in to offer up what seemed to be symbolic sabers in front of some kind of easel icon. As Walther is now actually a painteras well as a musicianhe engagingly paints some sophomoric white swirls on a cello and lowers it on a rope to the ecstatic girls below. In the court, a functionary in a trim business suit is busily xeroxing copies of

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the Meistersingers rules. The art students set up tables for the meeting of these worthies, who all now seem to be Professors of Art at the Akademie. Instead of undergoing a singers trial to join the Meistersingers and so win Evas hand in marriage, Walther now seems to want to be admitted as a student in the art school. In any case, some of the outraged professors cover the breasts and labia of one of his unrolled works with their mortar boards. Instead of Walther being judged for his song alone, he is subjected, instead, to an art competition, possibly intended as an innovative prelude to the climactic song contest in the last act. Two great easels are set up downstage right and left. Working from a copy of a Medieval woodcut of Nurembergwhich is a visual icon throughout the productionWalther and one of the professors vie in assembling jigsaw puzzle pieces inside great black frames. The professor gets the pieces into the right places. Walther, on the other hand, places them upside-down or randomly, reminding us of the difference between then and now, as well as the necessity of breaking with tradition. In the second act, all hell breaks loose in the wake of Beckmessers avant-garde serenade. Nurembergs Citizens throw down a hailstorm of white sneakers on the stage. Both the second act finale and the third act finale degenerate into visual squalor and chaos. The stage is awash in cast-off stuff, but this, unfortunately, is not artistic clutter. As for Hans Sachs, he is no longer a master shoe-

maker but a serious painter, poet, and professor of art who tends to slouch about the stage in a casual shirt and pants, chain-smoking. By his modern white desk stands one of Sachss recent paintings, looking like a piece from the Museum of Modern Art. When Sachs wants to be alone with his thoughts, he draws down a sheer white curtain. When it subsequently flies up out of sight it reveals an immense set of bleachers rising slowly up to the top level of the Academy. The Bayreuth Chorus smartly dressed in formal attire, the womens gowns standing out in regimented color patternsis prepared to watch the song contest between Walther and Beckmesser! The production costs for this new Meistersinger must have been staggering. The costumes alone would wipe out a Broadway shows budget. Having a basic set frame helps somewhat, but there are so many odd props and other novelties that one would hate to have to work this show as a stagehand or a dresser. Although the song contest has nothing to do with the Oscars, nonetheless two life-sized golden statues rise out of the floor at either side of the stage! While the preening Walther is behaving rather like Paris Hilton at the Beverly Hilton, the virile Beckmesser is stretching his sinews, like Jake LaMotta before a fight. He even wears a t-shirt with the legend: BECK IN TOWN. Once again, he does not actually play his lute; instead, he drags onto the forestage a large wheeled container, with strings of colored balloons floating

A scene from Die Meistersinger. Photo: Jrg Schulze

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above it. As he powerfully mangles Walthers verses, he pulls the containers panels open, revealing not only more balloons, but also a flood of green apples, which roll out over the stage. Also in the box is a naked man, who may symbolize Adamhence, the apples? Eve, however, is a pink plastic blowup doll with balloons attached. As Beckmesser then pulls a three-foot-long pink rubber penis from his flyrotating it lasciviously, evoking strange sexual delightsthis seems indeed to be the point. In the event, this doll is torn apart, amid general confusion, echoing the riotous behavior of the act 2 Serenade Night. And again the stage is littered with detritus. To conclude, the bobbleheads also come forward, in their Calvin-Kleins, to parade on stage, forming a kind of kick line. The wonder of this production is that the actor/singers were as good as they proved to be. Not only did they make Katharinas strange stage directions and character visions their ownnot at all easybut they certainly did Wagners music justice vocally. The new Beckmesser concept would not have worked at all had not Michael Volle been so able vocally and histrionically. And Klaus Florian Vogt was equally able, though entirely different in manner, as Walther. Norbert Ernst was certainly earnest as the nerdy David. Franz Hawlata was a world-weary, chain-smoking Sachs, clacking away at his typewriter instead of at his cobblers bench. His Sachs gained in vocal authority as the production progressed. Artur Korn was Veit Pogner, somewhat eclipsed by this staging, as were the other Master Singers. The remarkable Bayreuth Chorus, under the magisterial direction of Eberhard Friedrich, was excellent, even when they were singing unseen. Sebastian Weigle conducted, but he must have been overwhelmed by the requirements of this production. Usually, when I see a Meistersinger production, I cannot help feeling sorry for poor old Beckmesser and how shabbily he is treated. But this time, my sympathies were with Amanda Mace, whose Eva was too light to carry on the Festspielhaus stage. She wasnt off-key and did all the jumping up and down required of her in the frumpy costume Michaela Barth designed. Nonetheless, she was difficult to hear, balanced against Sachs and Walther. The result was that, at her solo curtain call, she was roundly, soundly booed. She kept a brave face, but this must have been an awful moment for her. Why Katharina Wagner decided this opera

could or should be transformed into an indictment of academic traditions in the arts in general is still a mystery. Dramaturg Robert Sollich offers some insights into the production teams thinking about the opera: It is not mere chance that Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg is considered to be THE artists drama par excellence. Hardly any other work in the entire operatic repertoire has its act so together thematically as this work singers sing about the art of singing, after all, and the function of art and its role in society is musically debated It is a question of the legacy of tradition, and how one is to deal with this issue; whether the sacrosanct nature of art, therefore, lies confidentially in opposition to tested conventions and the constant reenactment of classically aesthetic values. Or, however, if living art, on the contrary, may only originate in the break with tradition, i.e. from the critical conversion therefrom, and may draw its strength from the very differentiation toward accepted postures of expectation. At least this provides a general idea of the artistic intention. The Wagnerites who were appalled by this unconventional interpretation but still wedded to the idea of a Wagner at the head of the famous theatre have, fortunately for them, other alternatives. Katharina Wagner is by no means the only possible candidate. Her half-sister Eva is an experienced Intendant, currently advising the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Evas brother, Gottfried Wagner, is out of the running, as he has long been leading the attack against the Bayreuth Festival for alleged antiSemitism and its former affiliation with Adolf Hitler. He also has obvious issues with his father: they are not on speaking terms. But another strong candidate is Nike Wagner, Wieland Wagners brilliant daughter. Not only is she a respected musicologist, critic, essayist, and dramaturg, but she is also currently Intendant of the admired Weimar Festival. She does not stage operas, but she certainly knows who can do that job with genius and imagination. Back in 2001, when it first seemed that Wolfgang Wagner might step down, Nike Wagner was a candidate to replace him. She and her cousin, Wieland Lafferentzson of Verena Wagner-Lafferentz, sister to Wolfgang and Wielandhad suggested an entirely new look for the Bayreuth Festival, to the horror of the traditionalists and the delight of many other Wagner fans. Because of the very limited five-week run

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of the festival, even some Wagnerites who are members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde Bayreuth (Society of Friends of Bayreuth) or on the lottery list have to wait as long as ten years for a ticket. Nike Wagners tentative suggestion that the season could be extended, possibly even to ten months which is the standard season for most Central European theatres and opera houseswould certainly break this audience barrier. This would also make possible the production of other Richard Wagner operas never seen on the sacred stage: Rienzi, Die Fen, and Das Liebesverbot. Other possibilities are offered by the rather simplistic operas of Wagners beloved son, Siegfriedsuch as Sonnenflamme, Brenreiter, and Blame It All on the Little Hatnow virtually forgotten. Nike Wagner might give them an airing, at least. In any case, it is not a given that only Richard Wagners operas can be performed on his stage: during the US Armys occupation of southern Germany in the wake of World War IIwhen Wolfgang Wagners mother Winifred had to undergo Nazi hearingsthe troops produced American musicals and cabarets in the Festspielhaus! A new Intendant could continue the Bayreuth Werksttte traditionbut in a new senseby also producing other forgotten or neglected operas. The actual Bayreuth Workshops for building sets, making costumes, and other technical concerns should be the envy of any repertory theatre in the world. Yet they are in service of a short fiveweek season only. Years ago, when I questioned Wieland Wagner about this, he explained that it was the very limited season that made Bayreuth so very special. The fact that it was so difficult to obtain tickets made the festival even more unique. Wieland thought that the fact That thousands of ticket requests had to be turned down also validated the work he and his brother were doing. He had another point, however, that Wolfgang Wagner has also repeatedly stressed: the remarkable Bayreuth orchestra and choruschosen from outstanding European artistscan only be assembled when other opera houses are closed for summer holidays. Of course, if the Free State of Bavaria were willing to provide an attractive subsidy, the future Intendant could probably contract an excellent orchestra and chorus for a ten-month Bayreuth sea-

son. Leading Music Schools are churning out thousands of talented musicians and singers, after all. What this could do for local hotels, restaurants, and shops can only be imagined. The idea of the worlds first opera festival having been founded as a small family business and remaining that way for virtually a century almost defies belief. How could Wagners widow, Cosima, and Siegfrieds widow, Winifred, have maintained control of the festival over the years, without having to close it down or have the state take it over? That is, of course, a book in itselfand several have been written on this subject. Central to family control, however, was the fact that the Festspielhaus and Wagners historic home, Villa Wahnfried, were family property, thanks to the generosity of Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The priceless Wagner scores, manuscripts, and letters as well as the performance rightsalso remained in the family. But production financing was so difficult that the festival was sometimes celebrated only once every two years. Cosima was tireless in seeking patrons, as was Winifredwho found her patronof-all-patrons in Hitler. To the end of her days, she insisted she remained Hitlers true friendto the understandable distress of her children, especially Wolfgang. With such a history, its understandable that the Bavarian Statenot to mention the many Wagner fans worldwidewanted to establish the Bayreuth Festival on a much more stable basis, without removing talented Wagner family members from involvement in the festival. So the Wagner real estate as well as the Wagner manuscripts and memorabilia were bought by the Bavarian State to add to the rich cultural heritage of Bavaria and a festival ruling board was established. Four of its twentyfour votes belong to the Wagner family, another five each belong to the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Bavaria, and the rest are divided up among various political and cultural organizations. This board is to meet soon, and whether it will leave the ailing Wolfgang Wagner in place, replace him with his younger daughter, or most radically move outside the family altogether, has excited a lot of interest. And not only in Bavariathe world is watching!

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A Grec of Transition
Maria M. Delgado Theres been a lot of discussion about the Leontes; Jordi Coca directed Krapps Last Tape at Grec, Barcelonas annual summer festival, in the the Sala Beckett, Barcelonas premier new writing Catalan press. The Grecs previous director, Borja venue that, not insignificantly, takes the Irish playSitj, was a Catalan, born and bred, who had cut his wrights name; Josep Maria Mestres premiered teeth at Madrids Centro Dramtico Nacional and Handbag at the Catalan National Theatres Sala the Odon-Thtre de lEurope during the late Petita in a new translation by Joan Sellent; La Fura 1980s and 1990s. At the latter institution he was dels Baus brought their own brand of in-yer-face appointed by Llus Pasqual but continued under theatre to the Mercat de les Flors with Imperium; Georges Lavaudant. He showed himself a wily surand lex Rigola premiered his version of Roberto vivor in more ways than one. During his seven Bolaos novel 2666 at the Teatre Lliure. years at the Grec, he attracted over a million visiOver the past couple of years Rigolas protors, with his final festival enjoying a number of ductions with the Lliure company have proved sellout shows and a healthy average attendance of amongst the most exciting work premiered at the just under seventy percent. Grec. While much of it has gone on to play at a later His successor at the Grec is not a Catalan, date and for a more extended run at the Lliure, the but the Argentine producer Ricardo Szwarcer, who Grec has proved a fertile training ground for Rigola, came to the Grec via the Opra de Lille and Buenos much as it was for Calixto Bieito before him. Airess Coln Theatre. Szwarcer has shown himself Whereas Arbusht, his 2006 collaboration with Paco to be an astute promoter whose consultancy work on Zarzoso, was not vintage Rigoladespite some outprevious Grec festivals under Sitjas direction standing performances from Arquillu and Joan demonstrated a strong visual sense, impeccable Carreras2666 shows an impressive return to musical credentials, and an excellent knowledge of form. Based on a set of five novels that Chileanthe Argentine performing arts scene. As Jonathan born writer Roberto Bolao was working on when Mills has found out this year at Edinburgh, its he died in 2003, and published posthumously as a never easy taking over an international festival. single work, Rigola and co-adaptor Pablo Ley have You inherit commitments and projects that might kept the same title for their stage version of the not be part of your new vision for it; you are faced novel. Presented in Castilian Spanish, it gravitates with tight deadlines; you are eagerly observed by around the murders taking place in a border those who supported your appointment and suspiMexican town, and at five hours is as epic as ciously regarded by those who had hoped for other Bolaos own narrative work. This is ensemble thecandidates. atre on a large scale. El Pass Marcos Ordez This has been a tough festival for drew parallels with Lepages Seven Streams of the Szwarcer. The knives appear to be out from part of River Ota (14 July 2007), and 2666 certainly shares the Catalan critical establishment, and for the life of the ambition of both this work and Lepages me I cant work out why. Is it personal grievance? A Dragons Trilogy. The five parts of 2666 respect the particular vendetta? Is it because they favoured a different sections of the novel: in the first, a band of Catalan candidate for the job? Give the guy a critics dissect an enigmatic German writer, Beno chance! From the outside, it appears to me that the von Archimboldi; in the second, the surreal festival has much in common with those promoted Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a dead ringer by Sitja over the past seven years. Szwarcer has for Ciudad Jurez, provides the location for an acaencouraged imaginative co-productions and prodemic philosopher to encounter his ghosts and grammed the work of Catalan locals. As such, demons; in the third, a reporter is sent to cover a Lliure associate director Carlota Subirs came boxing match in the town but is marked by the together with actor Gonzalo Cunill on an adaptation seemingly arbitrary murders of women taking place of John Bergers novel King (at the Catalan Library, there; in the fourth, the dead women of Jurez rise the Biblioteca de Catalunya); Ferran Madico up to haunt the landscape; and in the final section, brought Reuss Centre dArts Escniques to the the German writer returns along with a past marked Grec in a co-production of Shakespeares Winters by the spectres of Nazism. Tale with Pere Arquillu heading the company as When Rigola first mentioned the project to

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The dead women of Ciudad Jurez are evoked in lex Rigola's 2666. Photo: Ros Ribas, courtesy of the Teatre Lliure

me I thought it a practical impossibility, a venture that could only ever partly succeed in finding a theatrical language that might make sense of a sprawling narrative that is never easily contained or controlled. The closest analogy might be an adaptation of Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita or Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ley and Rigola have defied the odds and found a structure that allows the fevered madness of the novel to find a stage language. It is a language marked by excess certainly, but each of the five parts presents the events through a particular visual discourse that distinguishes it from the sections that frame it. It is thus five plays, each lasting around an hour, composed into a larger quintet. The pseudo-conference of the first section meets its antidote in the fierce kitsch of section twowhich Rigola has defined as having something of David Lynch about it. The film noir of section three meets with the oratorio of section four. The cast moves across the forty-something different characters with ease and without resorting to easy stereotypes, so often the problem with Arbusht. The

interweaving of the different fragments of the tale is beautifully realized, and the result is a canvas as striking as Hieronymous Boschs Garden of Earthly Delights. Rigola is never one to forget about a production once it has opened, and when it returns to the Lliure in November (and from there goes on a tour of Spain) there will be shifts and changes, finetuning and rethinking. 2666 made an auspicious debut at the Lliure; I look forward to catching up with it later in the autumn on the next stage of its journey. The international productions brought to the Grec this year may not be as starry as in previous years but there was certainly a sense of wanting to bring some hidden gems from less dominant theatrical cultures to Barcelona. Perhaps not surprisingly there were some Argentine offerings: Sarah Kanes 4.48 Psychosis, directed by Luciano Cceres in a translation by Argentine dramatist Rafael Spregelburd, and Thtre des Lucioless treatment of Copis texts including Eva Pern. The New Theatre of Riga brought Long Life, a piece about old age, and Chekhovs Seagull was deliciously

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reworked by Brazils Enrique Diaz and Daniela Fortes. Llus Pasqual revisited Goldonihed staged One of the Last Carnival Evenings in 1985 with the Lliurewith a production of La familia dellantiquario (The Antiquarians Family) realized as a co-production of three Italian theatres. This is one of Goldonis most acerbic comedies and here Pasqual tells the tale of an aristocrat falling on hard times who marries his son to the daughter of a prosperous bourgeois gentleman in the hope of guaranteeing the familys future. Needless to say, the snobbish mother-in-law does not approve of her new daughter-in-law, and the battle that ensues proves both entertaining and exhausting for all concerned. Pasqual makes the production as much about a shifting society as about the fortunes of the two families and their coterie of servants. There is much to admire here: the commedia dellarte touches in the gestural language of the production, the deft movement and lively pacing, and the witty Venetian dialect exquisitely delivered by the experienced cast. The production may have been commissioned to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Goldonis birth, as it had its premiere at the Venice Biennale a week before opening in Barcelona, but it is a comment also on Pasquals earlier Goldoni production for the Lliure realized over twenty years ago and now acknowledged as one of the companys most emblematic stagings. Pasqual shifts The Antiquarians Family from its eighteenth-century location to a time frame that moves from 1780 through nine different periods including the present day. There are masks and overt commedia dellarte for the opening scene, high romanticism for part 2 (1820), melodrama for the third part (1870), fin de sicle culture for part 4 (1900), high antics for part 5 (1920), austerity meets Hollywood noir in part 6, the advent of pop culture for part 7 (1960), punk into grunge for part 8 (the 1980s), and the discourses of high technology and reality television for part 9 (the present). These changes happen in the most delicate of ways, providing a game with time that operates through scenic moves, shifts in performance vocabularies, subtle costume changes, and a score that moves from harpsichord to hip-hop. By the end of the production we have shifted from commedia dellarte to the horrors of confessional reality television that La Cubana dissected in Mam quiero ser famoso (Mummy, I Want to be Famous) (2005). Last year Pasqual returned to the Grec with Hamlet and The Tempest, presented at Lliures new

Sala Fabi Puigserver. Here too the subject of time passing becomes a central organizing motif for the staging. Pasqual makes The Antiquarians Family as much about theatrical time and staging conventions as about historical time that ages and withers. Pasquals fluency with the Italian culture and language is evident in the games of the performers and the production marks a superb return to form for a director eclipsed in recent years by the international success of his one-time assistant Calixto Bieito. Bieitoabsent from this years Grec chose to present his version of Aeschyluss Persians, adapted by dramatist Pau Mir, at the outdoor festivals in Mrida and Perelada. Another classic opening at Mrida, Phaedra, adapted by Madridbased dramatist Juan Mayorga from the treatments of the myth by Euripides, Seneca, and Racine, closed the theatre program of this years Grec. With singer-actress Ana Beln in the title role, expectations were high. Jos Carlos Plazas production, however, failed to deliver on a number of fronts. The set design by Plaza and Francisco Leal provided a blood-red backdrop to the action, where the shadows of gnarled trees bode of the dangers to come. There was nothing subtle here, nothing left to the imagination. The mood of doom was spelt out in all too obvious ways. Belns Phaedra begins huddled in pain and embarrassment, unable to face the outside world as her nurse Enone (a wizened Alicia Hermida) attempts to dispense comfort and advice. This is no matronly Phaedra but an attractive woman hopelessly in love with her stepson Hippolitus. Belns Phaedra has large emotions: there is much sweeping of the gown, grand hand gestures, and spectacular changes of attire. She never looks less than immaculate, hair perfectly groomed, whatever the emotional challenges. The production is overly dramatic, wanting to underline, very forcefully, every change of mood. Fran Perea is a darkly handsome Hippolytus, but one that lacks bite. His father Theseus, played by Chema Muoz, is placed in a very unflattering wig and Demis Roussos-type gown, and struggles to achieve any real sense of authority. There is not much of the warrior about him as he preens and prances across the stage. Indeed, El Pass Begoa Barrena made the observation that he looked as if he had arrived not from war but from a performance as a human statue on Barcelonas Ramblas Avenue (3 August 2007). This is not a production that makes the mythin an age where families are regularly com-

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posed of step-children and step-siblingsat all contemporary. Rather, Plaza and his performers position it as reverent theatre, to be observed from a distance and witnessed with something approaching awe and terror. So if the highs of the festival included Rigolas 2666 and Pasquals return to Goldoni, there were also novelties that announced Szwarcers desire to attract new audiences. A circus night had a plethora of small acts across the Grecs surrounding gardens where clowns, trapeze acts, and puppeteers played to the intimacy of small numbers. The later show in the Grec auditorium, bringing the audience together, may have been pitched at adults, but the pleasures of seeing different generations in the 2000-seat house showed the possibilities of the Grec speaking beyond its usual base. The hip-hop night brought a breakdance championship to the venue as well as urban poetry in both Catalan and Castilian. Romeo and Juliet was realized with puppetry and Prokofiev, and other circus events merged popular Catalan vaudeville with street arts, trapeze, and clowning. There were imaginative partnerships in the music programMaria del Mar Bonet and Miguel Poveda, Peter Greenaway and DJ Radaras well as stars of world music from Omara Portuondo to Hossam Ramzy, and performance artists/musicians who defy generic pigeonholing, such as Laurie Anderson and Vinicio Capossella. Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan proved the hit of the dance program with a collaboration that demonstrated a rich partnership between these two artists that wasnt fully realized in their previous collaboration. This has been a Grec of transition: trying out new ideas, bringing back veteran acts and directors, forging eclectic partnerships, and thinking through how the Grec might reflect and comment on the changing face of the city. It has had its highs and its lows, but attendance numbers are upan encouraging signand an investment in home tal-

ent has reaped ample rewards. Finally, running alongside the Grec at the MACBA (Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona) was an exhibition that examines the relationship between theatre and the visual arts. A Theater Without Theater traces this relationship through particular performative, paratheatrical, and metatheatrical acts. There are street manifestations and protests, minimalist performance acts, and interrogations of modes of perception. The usual culprits of twentieth-century performance are here: Antonin Artaud and Tadeusz Kantor, Vsevelod Meyerhold and Samuel Beckett. The exhibition interrogates the primacy of the text, but it does so in rather obvious ways. Visual documents are presented without proper contextualization. This is a rough guide to performance that jumps from futurism to Dadaism without appropriate explanation. There is some terrific material here, but without apposite contextualization it becomes largely decorative, a supermarket shop through live arts links to the visual arts. There is no real justification for the artists chosen. Why Dan Graham and not Carles Santos? Why Bruce Nauman and not Bill Viola, whose collaborations with Peter Sellars offer fertile examples of the interdisciplinary links that purport to be at the heart of the exhibition? The lack of criteria for selection thus serves to further obfuscate the lines of the exhibition. When I saw A Theater Without Words in late July there was no exhibition catalogue. A full two months after the exhibitions opening, and just six weeks before it was due to close, it was rather problematic to see no sign of the catalogue and no indication from staff at the MACBA as to when it might be published. There are some gems in this exhibition, as with the late Juan Muozs The Prompter (1988) and Daniel Burens Photo-souvenir (1996), but they are gems suspended in a rather undefined environment.

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The 2007 Edinburgh Festival

Glenn Loney Arriving in the midst of the Edinburgh Happy 400th Birthday, Monteverdi! Festival the third week of August, I missed this Jonathan Mills, the Edinburgh Festivals show shocker, which later moved to London. It is new Directorwho comes to the Scots Capital from certain to turn up in New York, either at BAM or on Melbourne, Australiadecided for his first season Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre, where to salute Claudio Monteverdi and his early opera Cumming is a frequent guest. LOrfeo. As Monteverdi and his compatriot composers and librettists were fascinated by the ancient The Tiger Lillies Salute Claudio Monteverdi in Greek myths, this permitted Mills to revisit the clasTheir Very Own Way sical past as well as the Italian renaissance. So The Tiger Lillies, those malign and merry David Greigs new version of Euripides The minstrels, have already made their mark in New Bacchae was the opening weekend world premiere York. Their worldwide touring success, of the 2007 festival. But the really big news was that Shockheaded Peter, was first seen on Broadway at it featured Scottish actor and Broadway star Alan the New Victory Theatre, followed by a London Cumming in a slinky gown as Dionysus! Tony West End engagement at the Piccadilly Theatre. Curran, seduced into wearing womens attire by the After touring, it returned to 42nd Street at the New vengeful god, was the rigid but doomed King Schubert. Then they were over at St. Anns Pentheus, torn to pieces in a wild Maenad orgy of Warehouse in Brooklyns DUMBO district last seaBacchante passion by his own mother, Agave. She son, just after helping Vienna celebrate Mozart-Jahr was played by the appropriately named Dionysiac, with their hilarious salute to Wolfgang Amadeus Paola Dionisotti!

Claudio Monteverdis LOrfeo, directed by Jonathan Mills. Photo: Antoni Bofill

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Mozart and his gang of Weber-Women. At a press conference prior to their onenight stand at Edinburghs staid Usher Hall, the Lead Lilly, Martyn Jacques, jauntily admitted that the group knew very little about Claudio Monteverdi. But an invitation is, after all, an invitation! His merry colleaguesAdrian Huge and Adrian Stoutexplained how the trio functions, inspired by Jacquess often acidic lyrics and deceptively simple tunes. Jacques noted that Shockheaded Peter was actually constructed around the Tiger Lillies, rather than the trio merely being a bizarre form of accompaniment. At the actual concert, the Tiger Lillies were preceded by Concerto-Caledoniaa Scots baroque-music ensembleas a kind of warm-up curtain-raiser. David McGuinness is its director, so he was responsible for making sure Monteverdi was not overlooked in the lyrical scuffle that ensued. What is more, he and his group were able to support the New Zealandborn countertenor David Lewis in two authentic Monteverdi arias, one from il ritorno dUlisse in patria and the other from Lincoronazione di Poppea. These were performed with plaintive zest by Lewis in garish white face makeup, providing a kind of visual bridge to the trademark makeup favored by Martyn Jacques. The real substance of the evening was Jacquess raw, brutal songs: Of Love and War. His savage satire of il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorindaanother one of those Crusader/Saracen Romances, so beloved in the European West, when the Turks still occupied most of Eastern Europestresses the motto: Make Love, Not War! Although the Christian Crusader Tancred has fallen in love with the beautiful and brave Muslim Warrior, Clorinda, as Jacques retells the tale: They slashed each others flesh with swords until they lost their lives. Of course, after such noble sacrifices and courageous deaths everything has to be made right in Heaven. Not so for the Tiger Lillies: They fought their holy battle then went to God above/Well God he said Youve fucked up bad, I am a God of Love. This bracing lyric was followed by more in the same vein: most of them condemning war, with a few of them supporting love. Jacques and the Tiger Lillies are having none of this fatal patriotic nonsense. In his savage songs, Jacques even suggests that the leaders who so easily send thousands and thousands of young men and women off to die or be hideously maimed for their various nations, political ideologies, or religions,

are cynical and even evil men who would never put themselves on the front lines. In a sense, Jacques is an anti-war heir of Bertolt Brecht, as the TigerLillies are all descendants of Brechts composers, such as Paul Dessau and Kurt Weill. Three US Groups on Offer I never arrive at the Edinburgh Festival until the third week of August, since Bayreuth and Salzburg come first. So, when the Festival Program arrived in March, I was a bit chagrined to see that no less than three of the major productions that week would be provided by American groups, two of them from New York! Who but the now legendary avant-garde director Elizabeth LeCompte and her Wooster Group would have thought to combine one of the first operas, Francesco Cavallis La Didone, with Mario Bavos 1965 Terrore nello spazio, one of Italian cinemas first grade-B sci-fi epics? Actually, this works very well, even as a kind of spoof, for the exaggerated passions and heroics of the fateful encounter in Carthage of Queen Dido and the illegal immigrant Aeneas. Their story provides a semi-serious quasi-tragic counterpoint to the hysteria of spaceship cadets whose bodies are being invaded by vampire-zombies in the Italian film. Kate Valk is frantic and often funny as spaceship crew member Sanya. As she is not Deborah Voigt, she has no Cavalli arias, but she does get to move into the operas alternate universe as the Shadow of Dido. Queen Dido herself is splendidly sung by Hai-Ting Chinn, who also plays Tiona, a character in Bavos film. Clips of this stylish movie are shown on pairs of giant plasma TV screens. Alternating between heroic opera seria armor and futuristic NASA-style spacesuits, other cast members also proved to be outstanding actor/singers and desperate rocketeers, most notably John Young as Aeneas, Ari Fliakos as Cupid/Ascanius, and Andrew Nolen and Kamala Sankaram in several roles. The second American production was Lee Breuers Dollhouse, his imaginative re-vision of Henrik Ibsens A Dolls House. Since this had a long and highly publicized run in New York and has toured around the world I need say little about it here other than that its surprising twists on conventional Ibsen productions were well received by festival audiences. The third American offering was Rinde Eckerts Orpheus X, created in Cambridge,

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Rinde Eckerts Orpheus X. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Massachusetts, at Harvard Universitys Loeb Center. Eckert, who plays Orpheus, provides some contemporary thoughts on the ancient tale by presenting the antique Apollonian singer as a playedout rock star. Eurydice is not, however, the love of his life. Instead she is a would-be poet, unknown to him, who suddenly steps off the curb and is struck by Orpheus limo on the way to the airport. She dies, cradled in his arms. At the hospital, thinking he must be her significant other, he is given her few possessions. He becomes obsessed with this lost woman and her surviving objects. He cannot move, he cannot act, he cannot think. He must see Eurydice again, having known her only in the hour of her death. Fortunately his agent has obtained instructions for entering Hades and finding Eurydice! When he successfully returns with her, she tears away the blindfold given him for his entrance into the world of shades and looks him full in the eyes. They embrace, but all is already lost for Orpheus. She does not love him. They didnt even know each other on earth. Suzan Hanson was a fascinating Eurydice, fading into nothingness in Hades, forgetting even

her poems. She was also in excellent voice, tremendously and tremulously moving at times. The award-winning John Kelly was both Orpheuss agent as well as a sedate no-nonsense Persephone. Eckert has written both music and text for Orpheus X, as he did for his recent Horizon at the New York Theatre Workshop. He is also at the center of his creation, often singing at the top of his lungs and moving with great power and determination. One has to admire his tremendous determination, focus, intelligence, energy, and vision to continue building and performing such a distinctive body of work. He seems a force of nature in performance. Nonetheless, his charisma as a performer does not match his apparent intelligence and obvious passion as the deviser of his unique form of performance art. Would Horizon or Orpheus X have been more compelling if performed by someone other than Rinde Eckert? Even more Orpheus, plus some Oedipus Although the Orpheus and Oedipus legends are much, much older than the 400-year-old Monteverdi, there is certainly a classical connec-

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tion. The birth of operain which Monteverdi was intimately involved, if not an actual midwifewas a direct result of classics-loving Renaissance scholars attempting to reconstruct the practical circumstances of ancient Greek performances. They understood that the Greek choruses actually chanted, sang, and danced their heroic odes and modern opera. Thus it was entirely in keeping with the festival theme to have Igor Stravinskys ballet music for Orpheus and his opera oratorio Oedipus Rex combined in Usher Hall for a concert of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra along with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. These splendidly realized works were strongly conducted by Finlands own Susanna Mlkki. Performed in Latin, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, the major characters in Sophocles original drama were interpreted by Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Oedipus), Natascha Petrinsky (Jocasta), Terje Stensvold (Creon), Matthew Rose (Tiresias), Andrew Kennedy, and Neal Davies. The Oedipus myth was narrated in English by Simon Russell Beale, who unfortunately was not miked and so could not be clearly heard. Benjamin Bagbys Beowulf For a quarter of a century, Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton presided over the medieval music ensemble Sequentia in Kln. Now he and Sequentia are based in Paris where, in addition to his performances, he is also on the faculty of the Sorbonne, specializing in the performance practice of medieval music. For reconstructed performances of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, Bagby had to dig deep into the records of early medieval music and lyrics. He also created a six-stringed harp based on remains of an instrument excavated from the grave of a seventh-century nobleman. Of course the meter and alliteration typical of these ancient Bardic sagas and eddas could make for a rather sing-songy evening, but Bagby avoided that by using deft changes in volume, emphasis, pacing, and even facial expressions and body language to indicate the medieval Scops savoring of

this tale of valor, courage, and physical prowess. Dressed simply in black, seated with his hollowbodied harp, Bagby performed animatedly, flanked by thick guttering yellow wax candles and two video screens with English translations. No Time for Fringe Firsts or for the Traverse Theatre For over half a century, I have always made a point of also seeing as many shows as possible on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as the headliners programmed in the regular festival. Over time, as there are now literally hundred and hundreds of these shows, I came to choose only those that had won Fringe First awards. Now there seem to be scores of such winners. Indeed I was to learn this year that there were almost 2,500 different Fringe productions on offer! So, in recent summers, I have begun to focus on the innovative productions of new native plays shown at the Traverse Theatre, which is part of the Fringe during the Festival and is a regularly producing and much-admired Edinburgh theatre for the rest of the year. With the recent inauguration of the Brits on Broadway seasons at Manhattans 59E59 Theatre, checking out the Traverse seems no longer necessary, since the best of the Traverse is now sure to come to 59E59. For the record, however, here are some of the Traverse Theatres Festival Fringe offerings (not all of them actually produced by the Traverse, however): Night Time by Selma Dimitrijevic, Damascus by David Greig, Believe by Matthew Hurt, Game Theory by Pamela Carter and Selma Dimitrijevic, The Human Computer by Will Adamsdale, Ravenhill for Breakfast by Mark Ravenhill, Long Time Dead by Rona Munro, Is This About Sex by Christian OReilly, Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live by Stewart Lee, An Audience with Adrienne by Adrian Howells, Pit by Megan Barker, Stoopud Fucken Animals: a Suffolk Western by Joel Horwood, and The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh.

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Paris Theatre, Spring 2007

Barry Daniels costumes, were not very effective dramatically. One The Classic Repertory tended to watch the mechanics of their manipulaDominique Pitoisets staging of The tion, partly because the puppeteers did not succeed Tempest at the Ateliers Berthier (Odon, Thtre de in making the characters vivid. The Italian actors, lEurope) was a mlange of ideas that, although Ruggero Cara as Trinculo, Andrea Nolfo as Caliban, occasionally interesting, never came together to creand Mario Pirello as Stefano were responsible for ate a coherent vision of the play. The production the most successful scenes in the production. The was created at the Thtre national dAquitaine in broad comic style of Cara and Pirello was distinctly Bordeaux where Pitoiset is artistic director. The cast Italian and their scenes together were very funny. was made up of actors from various countries who Nolfo, a dwarf, was energetic and spiteful as performed in their native languages. Prospero and Caliban. Houda Ben Kamlas Ariel was also very Miranda were French; Stefano, Trinculo and theatrically effective. She is a tiny woman (perhaps Caliban were Italian; Ariel was a Tunisian woman a midget). She scuttled about the stage and spoke in who used Arabic and French. Alonzo, Antonio, a high-pitched squeaky voice that was reminiscent Ferdinand, Gonzalo, Adrian, and Francesco were of the munchkins. Her performance was the most three-quarter-scale puppets. The puppeteers spoke original and the most affecting element of the prothe text of these characters in German, although I duction. should note that Ferdinands lines were cut. Director and actor Pitoiset also designed Although this may sound like an interesting idea, the rather uninteresting set. It consisted of low walls the result was very uneven. The performance of enclosing the space with an entrance upstage center. Pitoiset as Prospero was bland and Sylviane Rsli The stage floor was covered with sand and shipping was an unfortunate choice for Miranda. Plain and crates were scattered about the space. Stage left was chunky, she made the character seem loutish. a large desk next to which was a bookcase with Although attractive as objects, the puppets, Prosperos books. The surface of the desk became designed by Kattrin Michel, who also designed the

Puppets and their shadowy Bunraku handlers in William Shakespeares The Tempest, directed by Stuart Seide. Photo: Frederic Desmesure

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Molires The Doctor in Spite of Himself, directed by Jean Liermier. Photo: Pacome Poirier

luminous during scenes of Prosperos magic. It is possible that Pitoiset wanted to make a positive statement about Europe and the unity of the diverse nations. If so, this was at the expense of a coherent and poetical vision of the text. The play was mostly lost among the disparate elements of the staging. In sum, a shipwrecked production, graced with some good Italian clowning and a magical Ariel. American-born director Stuart Seide has been working in France since 1970. He is currently head of the Thtre National/Rgion Nord based in Lille, where he also heads the acting conservatory. His production of John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore, using students from the conservatory, was brought to the Thtre Nanterre-Amandiers. He cut all the plays subplots and concentrated solely on the incestuous relationship of Giovanni and Annabella. He began the play with one of Prosperos speeches from The Tempest and incorporated occasional quotations from other Elizabethan texts. The set, by Seide with the collaboration of Charles Marty, consisted of a large banquet table flanked by elevated platforms at the two sides of the

stage: one was used as Annabellas bedroom and the other had a throne for the Cardinal. The top of the table was also used a platform for the staging of some scenes. The audience was placed on opposite sides of this central stage. Fabienne Varoutsikos provided theatrical Elizabethan costumes. Seides staging was generally crisp and fast-paced, although the interpolated texts were a bit confusing. The acting was, however, uneven. Although handsome and vigorous, Azeddine Benamara was not convincing as Giovanni. With two exceptions the other performances were simply adequate. Chlo Andr gave a strong and emotionally mature performance as Annabella, and Anna Lien was a dazzling and sinister Vasquez. Molires The Doctor in Spite of Himself is a rollicking farce that depends on the actors ability to create comic business to bring it to life. Jean Liermiers staging of the play at the Thtre Nanterre-Amandiers was only partially successful in this regard. He chose to set the play in the postwar Italy of Fellinis early movies. This worked well enough. Designer Philippe Miesch placed the first act on the barren field near an embankment of a highway where Sgnarelles shack was located. The

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desolate and squalid set was a suitable background for Sgnarelles quarrels with his wife Martine. The last two acts took place in the dark middle-class interior of Grontes home. Distinguished actor Alain Pralon was not terribly funny in the role of Gronte, whose daughter Lucinde feigns illness so as not to have to marry the old man her father has chosen for her. Most of the rest of the cast were also fairly lackluster. Marie Druc, however, was hilarious as the obstinate Lucinde. Eric Elmosnino, who is a gifted actor, was very fine as Sgnarelle. His comic turns with his bicycle in the first act were amusing and his performance as the doctor in the rest of the play was wonderfully daft. It is hard to deal with Lukas Hemblebs staging of Molires The Misanthrope at the Comdie-Franaise. Hembleb seemed totally uninterested in the play and its characters. Filled with arbitrary directorial choices, the production was never very funny. A number of my friends, who consider the play to be Molires masterpiece, were outraged that such a staging was permitted in the theatre where many students are first exposed to Molires work on the stage. It is difficult to comment on the actors other than to blame the director for their work.

Thierry Hancisse played a whiny, sniveling Alceste with no variety to his characterization. MarieSophie Ferdane was a graceless Climne. Her famous portrait scene was staged as an elaborate game between her and the fops Acaste and Clitandre. All three leapt about the stage screeching their lines and giggling. A sexual build to climax was an unfortunate choice for the scene between Alceste and the false prude, Arsino. The evening was simply lugubrious. Carlo Goldonis The Fan is slight but charming play which presents a group portrait of the residents of a village near Milan. Evaristo is in love with the widow Gertrudes niece, Candida. When, startled by Evaristo, she drops and breaks her fan, Evaristo decides to buy her a new one. He gives the new fan to the servant girl Gianna to take to Candida. Complications ensue as Candida is led to believe through gossip that Evaristo has given the fan to Gianna. The fan passes through several hands in the play before being returned to Evaristo who gives it to Candida with his offer of marriage. A subplot concerns Gianna, who loves the cobbler Crespino but whose brother Moracchio has promised her to the innkeeper Coronato. Crespino and Coronatos jealousy is sparked when they see Evaristo give the fan to Gianna. Candida is also

Carlo Goldonis The Fan, directed by Luca Ronconi. Photo: Vincent Pontet

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courted by the Barone del Cedro with the aide of the pandering and impoverished Conte di Rocca Marina. Luca Ronconis production of The Fan for the Piccolo Teatro di Milano was brought to Paris and performed in Italian at the Odon, Thtre de lEurope. The production was part of the celebrations honoring the sixtieth year of the Piccolo Teatro and was in part an homage to its founder Gorgio Strehler. Margherita Pallis set consisted of bare walls painted a warm grey and representing abstract houses facing the square. Wooden tables and chairs were moved about to create the various shops opening on the town square. Gabriele Mayers beautiful eighteenth-century costumes were made of pastel colored silk. Ronconi used odd musical pauses early in the play and staged the last act in a windstorm that eventually blows away the walls of the set revealing a back wall of large warehouse-like windows. Although these effects seemed gratuitous, they did not really disturb the genuine pleasure of the performance. What was thrilling in the production was the acting. Although clearly working within longstanding conventions in Italian acting, each performer managed to breathe life into his part. This mix of stylized conventions and real emotion was enchanting. Raffaele Esposito (Evaristo), Gianluigi Fogacci (Coranato), Simone Toni (Crespino), and Giovanni Vaccaro (Moracchio) were all suitably passionate and hot-headed as the young men in the action. Giovanni Crippa was haughty and arrogant as the self-centered Barone. As the impoverished Conte, Massimo de Francovich was very effective in his hair-brained belief that he could untangle the lovers problems. Guilia Lazzarini was gracious as the kind and gentle Gertruda. Federica Castellini was lively as Gianna. But what was important was that no single actor stood out from the others. The Fan was truly an ensemble creation that brought to life the world of Goldonis play. The Marquis de Sades Philosophy in the Bedroom is an account of the introduction to the pleasures of the flesh of Eugnie, a young virgin, by the libertine Madame de Saint-Ange, her brother the Chevalier de Mirvel, and the notoriously debauched Dolmanc. Christine Letailleurs theatrical adaptation of the text was both witty and sexy in her staging at the Thtre de Gennevilliers. Letailleur, who co-designed the scenery with Stphanie Cosserat, used a series of bright red curtains which were placed in different positions

around the stage to create a visual variety for the evening. The cast wore white eighteenth-century lingerie. Nudity was discrete and simulated sex was non-pornographic. Charline Grand (Eugnie) quickly and enthusiastically abandoned her innocence. Stanislas Nordey was virile and sexy as Dolmanc who disdains the vagina in favor of the little hole. Valrie Lang was delightfully lubricious as Madame de Saint-Ange. Towards the end the cast declaimed a remarkable diatribe entitled Frenchmen: You need to work harder if you wish to be Republicans. In it Sade condemns religion and demands liberty of acts, sexuality, thought, and of the press. He also calls for the abolition of the death penalty. The production thus moves from a rollicking sex romp to philosophy and manages to embody Sades various interests. Sade can often be tedious in his sexual fetishes. Lestailleur and company successfully avoided this negative aspect of his work. They focused on the remarkably modern and liberating aspect of his work in a production that was both witty and stylish. Modern Texts Paul Claudels Break of Noon is set in China in the early twentieth century and concerns a married woman, Ys, who leaves her children and her husband for another man, Mesa. Pregnant by him, she drops him for another suitor, Amalric. Mesa succeeds in locating her at Almarics plantation which is about to be stormed by rebels. Mesa has a pass which would allow its holders to escape. He offers it to Amalric. Ys chooses not to flee with Amalric, and the play concludes with the implication that she and Mesa will be killed by the rebels. The play is known for its exalted passions and poetic language. I have to say that its exalted portrait of the mysterious and fickle Ys was a bit dated and unconvincing. At the Comdie-Franaise, Yves Beaunesne has staged the play as a vehicle for Marina Hands, whose mother Ludmila Mikal had played the role in a memorable revival. Hands became famous this year for her award-winning performance of the title role in the film Lady Chatterleys Lover. The staging was attractive with simple but evocative sets by Damien Caille-Perret, beautiful lighting by ric Soyer, and elegant costumes by Patrice Cauchetier. A single sail and ropes evoked the deck of the ship for act 1. For the Chinese cemetery of act 2, the ropes were reconfig-

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ured as trees, bronze lanterns were flown in, and rumpled cloth covered the stage floor in a way that created meandering paths. A wall of reversed flats upstage was the set for the bedroom of the plantation in southern China in act 3. Lighting was effectively used to isolate spaces on the open third-act set. The plastic aspects of Beaunesnes staging were excellent: stage pictures were generally interesting and often beautiful. Unfortunately, Marina Hands was disappointing in the role of Ys. Her child-woman of act 1 was unsupportable and she didnt improve much in the subsequent acts. The men, however, were all quite good. Herv Pierre was forceful as Amalric and ric Ruf performed the difficult role of the impassioned Mesa with great skill. Albert Camuss rarely performed The Just Assassins (1949) was revived at the Thtre de lAthne in an excellent staging by Guy-Pierre Couleau. The play is based on an actual assassination of a nobleman by terrorists in Russia in 1905. In the play five fervent revolutionaries are planning the murder of the Grand Duke. The poet, Kaliayev, is both ardently religious and passionately devoted to the overthrow of the aristocracy. He is placed in opposition to Stepan, recently released from prison, who is both cool and ruthless. Stepan believes that revolutionary ideals transcend all human concerns. He disdains Kaliayevs failure to throw a bomb because he saw the Grand Duke had two children in his carriage. Dora represents a kind of medium between the two extremes. She is an ardent believer in the revolution but, despite the fact that she makes the bombs, she is ambivalent about the use of violence. She has fallen in love with Stepan. Annenkov, the leader of the cell, is level-headed and realistic. Voinov, the youngest member, looks to the others as his family. After the failed assassination attempt, he realizes that he cannot participate in terrorist violence and leaves to work in non-violent ways for the revolutionary cause. The play questions the use of revolutionary ideals to justify terrorist acts without drawing any easy conclusions. Camuss skill is that he creates interesting human characters and a compelling action to embody his ideas. The great virtue of Couleaus staging is the excellent performances of his cast. Frdric Cherboeuf was spirited and expansive as Kaliayev. Sbastien Bavard was cool and contained as Stepan. Anne Le Guernec brought a touchingly human fragility to the role of Dora. The Just Assassins was a provocative and theatrically compelling produc-

tion that seemed quite relevant given the ever-present threat of terrorism in our world today. The Thtre de la Colline had a kind of miniThomas Bernhard festival this spring with concurrent productions of his The President (1975) in the large theatre and To the End (1981) in the small theatre. This latter work is a sardonic portrait of a mother who dominates her daughter. The play is set in Holland. In the first act the women are packing their luggage for the move to their summer home near the ocean. They await the arrival of a successful young playwright whom the daughter has invited to join them in the summer home. The second part of the play takes place on the terrace of the house overlooking the ocean. Bernhards writing is dense and filled with repetitions. The mother is horrifyingly cruel and vain. Bernhard uses the role of the playwright to make acerbic comments on the theatre. But the focus of the play is on the mothers desire to control her daughter. In the second part a struggle for influence over her develops between the mother and the playwright. In the role of the mother velyne Istria gave a tour-de-force performance in the first part which is virtually a monologue. She seemed to tire as the play went on and her performance in the second part was less pointed. Unfortunately PierreFelix Gravire was not very interesting as the playwright so the second part was less than compelling. Guillaume Lvques staging was adequate at best. Blandine Savetiers production of The President was more successful. The play is set in a European dictatorship, the day after a terrorist attempt to assassinate the President has occurred. The first scene is virtually a monologue by the Presidents Wife, who is more concerned were the death of her dog than with that of the colonel who was with them. In the second scene the President is on a holiday with his mistress, a would-be actress. The brief final scene is the funeral for the President, who has been assassinated. As with much of Bernhards work, the play develops through a series of monologues. Dominique Valadi was quite wonderful as the Presidents Wife in the first part. She provided of vivid portrait of the vanity and brutality of the character. ric Guerins performance of the President was less forceful than Valadis performance, so the second part seemed weaker than the first. He was clearly trying to imitate the center-right French presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkosy (who was subsequently elected).

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Savetiers staging was efficient without being striking. Emmanuel Cloluss sets were simple but not terribly attractive. Two large screens with portraits of the President and his wife backed their respective dressing tables in the first part. Art Deco chandeliers set the tone for the luxury hotel of part two. The Presidents large coffin was set in the center of the stage for the final scene. In this scene the Presidents Wife appeared while the stage descriptions of the ceremonial procession were heard through loud speakers. The prolific contemporary Swedish author Lars Norn has been particularly popular in Paris the last few years. His 1991 play Clinic was performed on the main stage at the Thtre NanterreAmandiers in a staging by the theatres artistic director and longtime champion of Norn, JeanLouis Martinelli. The play, set in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, is virtually plotless. The audience is offered portraits of the various patients in the clinic. These include an aggressive young man, Roger (Zakariya Gouram); a catatonic, Markus (Emmanuel Faventines); a publicist, Martin (Abbes

Zahmani), a family man who became chronically depressed after being diagnosed with AIDS; Mohammed (Charles Bnichou), whose wife was raped and murdered by Bosnian Serbs; Sofia (Agathe Molire), a suicidal teenager with an eating disorder; Maud (Sylvie Milhaud), a fifty-two-yearold woman who cannot find meaning in life; and Erika (Caroline Proust), a manic-depressive in her manic phase, constantly concerned with her appearance and her wardrobe. Martinellis cast was very successful at creating vivid portraits of these characters. Martinellis staging, however, failed to find the rhythms in the text, an important aspect of Norns writing. Although the actors worked in a realistic manner, odd surrealistic touches occurred in the staging. A piano is pushed through a wall; a smoking area purportedly outside the set was placed on a low platform within it. It was hard to tell what Martinellis interpretation of the play was, and it was not clear exactly what Norn intended the work to mean.

Thomas Bernhards The President, directed by Blandine Savetier. Photo: Marthe Lemelle

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Jango Edwards and Nouveau Clowns

Ben Carney I first encountered Jango Edwards and the annual clown master class in Cannes, France and Friends Road Show in 1974 at an experimental thethen come to Barcelona to see some of his performatre festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Friends ances. I did both in the summer of 2007 and found were a collective of clowns and street performers myself immersed in the robust world of contempobased in Amsterdam who were beginning to form a rary European Nouveau Clowns. group in Ann Arbor. A large audience moved around In Cannes the week following the film festo various performance locations in a huge ballroom tival, Jangos master class and performances were in the university library, watching the Friends do part of the citys annual Performance dActeur sketch comedy routines and laughing hysterically at Festival, mostly for European stand-up comedians. Jango Edwards. All the master class participants lived in the same He was in his early twenties, dramatically little hotelthirty students, eight teachers, and me. handsome, long-haired, charismatic, and a fountain Most were professional performers: clowns, actors, of energy. He played a wacko master of ceremonies for a collection of supposedly world famous, one-of-a-kind acts (e.g. a man in a boxing match with himself and a man who mimed playing baseball and golf with his penis). He introduced all the acts in character and performed several gags and sketches of his own, sometimes interacting with the others. He wore a big fake nose, a baggy bathing suit, colorful sneakers, and several different hats. The show was two or three hours of hilarity and delight. I remember it ended with the Friends Roadshow band playing bluegrass music while Jango broke Pat Boone records over his knee and threw the pieces into a trashcan. Thirty-two years passed. As I began a years sabbatical, I thought of Jango and decided to find out what had become of him. I knew he had been a founder of Amsterdams Festival of Fools and an organizer of Clowns sans Frontiers, a company of clowns who traveled to places in South America, the Middle East, and Africa where poverty and war were the normal state of affairs; but I hadnt seen him perform since 74. When I reached him on the telephone, he kindly invited me to participate in his thirteenthJango Edwards in character. Photo: Ben Carney

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or solo skill artists (juggler, magician, etc.) We were women and men, old and young, Italians, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Swiss, and Australian. Jango and I were the only Americans. During breaks from intensive workshops, training sessions, and rehearsals, I soon learned that Jango was famous in Europe as a performer, producer, and teacher and that clowns are enjoying a renaissance. Clubs, theatres, and performance spaces are full of them. They call themselves nouveau clowns, members of a genre, a global community, a new generation of performers who want to make people laugh. Jango is often called the king of nouveau clowns. Nouveau may be a misnomer. I think the nouveau clowns are more like the reincarnation of early and mid-twentieth-century clowns like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, and others. Their shows resemble what I think burlesque and vaudeville must have been like. The performances are physical, gag-filled amalgams of old-fashioned comedy routines, acrobatics, magic, sight gags, sketch comedy, audience participation, food fights, pratfalls, mime, music, and dance. The forms and styles the nouveau clowns employ are examples of tried and true comedic formulas and archetypes; gags as old as the hills that are still guaranteed to make you laugh at exaggeration, incongruity, or surprise (smashing a paper cup against your forehead, losing an arm momentarily inside a sleeve, miming the first man on the sun, etc.). Jango and the others arent circus clowns (although they might happily take a good circus job, if offered). They have no central persona who does clownish things but rather play a new character in each routine or gag. In thirty years, Jango has created hundreds of distinct comic characters. Theyre certainly not stand-up comics; there are few, if any, verbal jokes in their acts. Nor are they serious performance artists, with aesthetic or artistic agendas. They just want to get the laughs. They arent improvisers, either. Every routine is carefully scripted and rehearsed. So what kind of clowns are they? Someone has said, The storyteller serves the story. The fool serves the moment. The shaman serves the tribe. Well, Jango and the nouveau clowns serve all three. They serve the moment because their shows are intended only to entertain, to produce laughter. No two shows are alike because an evenings performance usually includes new routines. Jango tailors and modifies routines, even

replaces them sometimes so he can get laughs whatever the circumstances. But its also true that every performance includes at least one narrative, one story, often more. Some of them are great stories, some more pedestrian. The stories are painstakingly acted and mimed, very carefully told for humorous effect. The characters, music, and props amplify the particular or thematic significance of the story. Also, nouveau clowns are no exception to the tradition of clowns poking fun at authority and self-importance. Clowns have apparently always lampooned the powerful and pretentious. Their shows are full of political satire and social criticism. Such performances surely serve the tribe (the audience and the culture). Clowns, fools, comedians, whatever you call themin Europe they are popular and their numbers are growing. The Cannes master class ended with public performances by all the participants in a theatre near the beach. Jango demonstrated one of his classic characters, Weazer, whom I remembered in a youthful incarnation at that Michigan festival thirty-two years ago. Weazer is a man who needs terribly to pee and is prevented from doing so by myriad comic complications. He was so funny the entire audience soon shared his plight. In Barcelona the next week I saw four evenings of clown comedy produced by and starring Jango. The first two were at Almazen (alma equals soul, zen equals zen), a popular and hip tapas bar with a 125-seat performance space in the back. Almazen is near the University of Barcelona, in the medieval quarter. It reminded me of clubs on the lower east side in Manhattan: youngish, multi-ethnic audiences of artists and students, an underground atmosphere, transgressive or nontraditional programming, not mainstream but the place to be. I saw two completely different shows at Almazen. In the first, Cabaret Cabron, Jango and a small company of the Barcelona network of clowns performed for two hours. Jango presented some of his classic routines: an over-the-top mime of the song Great Balls of Fire with the original Jerry Lee Lewis music, a routine called The Safecracker, and a medley of songs including Jangos own Blow Me. A different set of clowns appeared with Jango at the second show, including a very funny Cristina Baras, who was Jangos partner in several sketches, and Vicky Sois, who got entangled in a folding ironing board, an old Lucille Ball routine. Jango also produced two shows that week

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at Antilla, a more mainstream nightclub, still downtown but in a more upscale neighborhood. Here, in Cabaret Gonzalez, Jango and Baras played Edwardo and Lily Gonzalez, a famous lounge act team, as hosts of the show. Yet a third company of clowns joined them. Just as at Almazen, the show was hilarious, loud, and fast-moving. The audience of 150 was convulsed all evening. As a wackily self-important magician, Jango did a Pick a Frankfurter routine with an enthusiastic volunteer from the audience. Its a clownish version of the magicians pick a card trick. Dont show it to me! Jango screams, hiding his eyes, as the volunteer chooses one of the identical-looking franks. The volunteer shuffles the franks and Jango triumphantly finds the chosen sausage. Everybody applauds. Its the characters enthusiasm for the trick and his pride and confidence in his ability to know which frank the volunteer secretly chose thats funny. Jangos character is a volcano of clichd magician lingo and theatrical mannerisms. (He shoots his cuffs. One sleeve hides his hand. He screams, My hand! He finds his hand, greatly

relieved, then goes right back to the volunteer and the hot dog trick.) All the characters he creates are characterized by rapid transformations of affect and attitude in response to comic incongruities and exaggerations. Jango again performed The Safecracker. Wearing a fedora and double-breasted gangster suit, with white-painted clown lips and white gloves, accompanied by B-movie suspense music, Jango enters stealthily and does a few gags (losing his gun, being frightened by a loud noise, being startled by his own cigarette lighter). He mimes breaking into an apartment. He bangs his finger on something, puts one had over his mouth, and runs outside the apartment where he screams in pain. Back inside, he finds a wall safe behind a painting, moves the painting, and opens the safe. He steals the jewels, shuts the safe, puts the painting back over the safe, and starts to leave. He stops, turns around, looks, adjusts the paintings alignment. He steps back, looks, and adjusts it again. He takes down the painting and hangs it on another wall. Satisfied, he starts to leave. He gets to the door, stops, turns around, looks, grabs

Jango Edwards as his character Weazer. Photo: Ben Carney

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a brush, and starts repainting the artwork. It was both the absurdity, of course, and also Jangos performance of the character that made us all laugh so hard. A safecracker aesthete who delays his escape in order to redo a painting might always seem funny, but the comic manner of the characters absurd behavior is probably just as crucial for getting the laugh. Most of the nouveau

clowns are wonderful actors, playing multiple comic characters believably with commitment, focus, and skill. Jango Edwards is both the central figure and the funniest of the nouveau clowns. Many of his students are now headliners, as clowns have once again become respected and popular performers for a large and growing audience.

Fydor Dostoyevskys The Gambler, adapted by Paolo Rossi. Photo: Enrico Vallin

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Playing with I giocatori

Janice Capuana Freely adapted from Fydor Dostoyevskys he spoke to the audience. The Gambler, I giocatori, the brainchild of capoCasting himself as Alexei/Narrator/Puppet comico Paolo Rossi, who also acted in and directed Master, he is the one who controls, or tries to conit, deconstructs the narrative text and frames the trol, the actions of the actors; a technique we have work as a play within a play evoking Brecht, seen before in the work of Tadeusz Kantor. Rossi Kantor, and Pirandello while maintaining spontaneimmediately asserts his authority and his dominance ity via a liberal dose of improvisation. Working with in the space while seducing the audience with funny Maria Consagra as co-director, Rossi has constructstories and confidences about his own personal ed a theatrical spectacle using brash colors, lights, habits and demonsall apparently improvised and and music that evoke the seductive world of highdelivered with a quick wit and a rapid staccato style. stakes gambling, all the while inviting the audience Even when he is in character he speaks the words to actively play along with him and his actors. The ironically, maintaining a distance from the text result is an evening of theatre that delights and chal(evoking a Brechtian style of acting) while keeping lenges you. his primary relationship with the audience. The production features actors and musiMeanwhile, the ensemble generally performed in a cians from two different companies, Milans much more exaggerated style, in which the actors BabyGang and Triestes Pupkin Kabarett, and was persona would often shift as he or she put on differproduced by Agidi in collaboration with ent masks: in one instance, playing the character, in Bonawentura Teatro Miela. First presented and nuranother, a version of the actor, but always under the tured as a work in progress in July 2006 at the dominance of the Puppet Master. Mittelfest in Cividale Del Friuli, it was then transAt one point, an actor attempts to establish ferred to Milan and the Teatro Studio from May 8 the same direct relationship to the public that Rossi to May 27, 2007. With its horseshoe shape, the theenjoys, by breaking from the action and appealing atre seats 407 on wooden benches on either side of directly to an audience member for sympathy. Rossi the stage, and it vertically stacks three tiers with pulls the actor back to the established playing space only one row each. Chairs were placed in the cenand informs him that he is not allowed to talk to ter and back of the open space on the ground level them. Reminiscent of Pirandello, the play within the and the playing area was separated from the audiplay follows the story of these actors who have been ence by red tape across the floor, minimizing the compelled to remain in this space and perform this separation between the actor and the audience. The story under the Narrators instruction. During interintimacy of the space provided a perfect environmission the actors dressed as casino patrons try to ment for what became an interactive experience as escape through the back door of the auditorium, but actors freely moved between the playing space and are stopped by the dealers. Other cast members the audience space. attempt to hide amongst the audience, sitting in peoThe story follows Alexei Ivanovitch, via ples laps, but they too, as the play resumes, are the literary device of a diary, to the gambling mecca forced back to finish the performance. Three actors of a fictitious German spa town called run up the winding stairs to the first tier, looking for Roulettenberg. Alexei, who works as a tutor for the a place to hide, and, unsuccessful, run back down. General, finds himself caught up in a world of arisThe Narrator informs these actors that nobody tocrats, nobles, and social climbers all vying to leaves without paying. improve their status and fortune at the roulette table. The capocomico Paolo Rossi, well-known Considered a farce by Dostoyevsky, the novella crein Italy for his work in theatre, film, television, and ates unsympathetic characters who are slaves to cabaret, began his career as a comic in the local their addictions. But in the re-worked play, this narcabarets of Milan, but quickly moved to acting. His rative often stops and is interrupted by Rossi who first stage appearance was in Dario Fos 1979 procomments on the action, interacts with the other duction of LHistoire du Soldat. He continued workactors on some aspect of the play, or expounds on a ing in theatre directing and creating his own proworld ruled by peoples bad habits. In several ductions which were often based on adaptations and instances, he would freeze the action onstage while re-interpretations of classic works of Shakespeare

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and Moliere: Rossis experiments often centered on pushing the limits of improvisation in performance. In addition, Rossi is an artist who is known for his gags and ironic anecdotes, usually accompanied with music, that satirize Italian society and politics. Often the victim of censorship, in 2003, RAI, Italys state public television, prohibited him from reciting Pericles on a popular television show. The text, a speech on democracy taken from Thucydides, was a veiled indictment of the practices of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy from 2001 to 2006 and the owner of two of the three RAI television stations. The incident prompted a great uproar in Italy, and soon after Rossi delivered Pericles in concert shows around the country. I giocatori begins as the audience enters the Teatro Studio. An old Italian song plays from the speakers, while several actors, already onstage dressed as casino dealers, walk back and forth setting up chairs and gambling tables; they perform these tasks while playfully chasing each other back and forth and laughing. Meanwhile, the stage begins to resemble a casino with three gambling tables, a huge roulette wheel, and upstage center a large muted and slightly distorted mirror; while from above, three chandeliers are flown down over the tables. In the stage right corner stand a piano, a bass, and a guitar. Composed of different age groups with a large number of young people, the audience is lively and the atmosphere in the theatre takes on a festive quality as people chat with each other and even with the actors. Before I giocatori begins, a playful relationship is set up between the actor and the spectator. The rest of the ensemble enters from the back of the auditorium dressed in extravagant latenineteenth-century attire with cartoonish and exaggerated make-up. These are the patrons of the casino come to make or break their fortunes. One of the actors dressed as a gambling dealer steps forward to

explain the premise of the play. Immediately after, Paulo Rossi emerges from the wings on a motorcycle, wearing black dress pants, a Hawaiian shirt, a fedora, and no make-upa distinct contrast from the rest of the ensemble. The audience immediately breaks into loud applause: a clear recognition of Paolinos immense popularity. The capocomico states in the productions playbill that he was inspired to adapt Dostoyevskys novella while visiting a bar-tabaccheria in Milan: a locale that closely resembles a miniLas Vegas with its slot machines and lottery tickets. There, Rossi was reminded of the similarity between that nineteenth-century world of high rollers and our own, where nothing is done for nothing and where you meet people that are always ready to take from others. He describes the text as a tragicomedy because it discusses profound issues while using gambling as a pretext. Similarly, Rossis production uses gambling as a pretext to critique many of the ills of Italian society. Towards the end of the production, Grandma, the matriarch of the family, gambles away everything she owns including her children and grandchildrens inheritance. In the next scene, the characters are in Paris engaged in an orgy: blackout, lights up, the actors in various stages of undress. Societal norms and limits are suspended as everyone onstage plays for higher stakes; compassion and love, even familial love, are absent. Life resembles a merry-go-round with players alternately winning and losing. There is no real ending to the story. Rossis last speech waxes poetic about the similarities between life and the stage, something we have all heard before, but he also lays bare some of the problems society faces today. The production does not provide answers; however, it never intended to do so. Rather, it peered into the dark crevices of our desires and obsessions, while it maintained a playfulness that engaged us and made us laugh.

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Summer 2007 at Teatro Experimental de Cascais in Portugal

Graa Corra independent theatre companies in Portugal. It introThis summer at Cascais was theatrically duced innovative staging techniques and created a eventful, since its sole professional theatre compawide-ranging repertory of polemical dramatic works nyTeatro Experimental de Cascais or TEC long before the democratic revolution of April 1974. decided to produce three contemporary plays, runIn spite of the prevailing censorship during Salazar ning nearly simultaneously, as well as present a and Caetanos autocratic regime, the group mancomprehensive exhibition on one of Portugals aged to present dramas that were manifestly contromajor twentieth-century philosophers, Agostinho da versial, including The Maids by Jean Genet in 1972, Silva (1906-1994). For those unfamiliar with as well as allegorical works with political implicaPortuguese geography, the city of Cascais is located tions clearly aimed at celebrating anti-totalitarian thirty kilometers west of Lisbon, on the Atlantic revolutionary idealsthe most memorable of which coast. It has been a fashionable beach resort for the were Cervantess Don Quijote (1967), Yvonne, affluent since the 1920s, and is still famed for its Princess of Burgundy by Witold Gombrowicz mansions and luxurious gardens, even though it is (1971), and Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega (1973). now practically a suburban extension of the Thus, after forty-two years of steady work, Portuguese capital. TEC is the longest existing independent theatre When director Carlos Avilez and actor Joo Vasco (in conjunction with other young actors company in Portugal (independent meaning ideoand university students) founded TEC in 1965, the logically and programmatically autonomous, even troupe was predominantly dedicated to experimentthough subsidized by the Ministry of Culture), having produced over 120 different plays. These ing with avant-garde staging methods on both new include Portuguese and European classics (Gil and classical plays. The mission continues to this day, since TEC is considered one of the prominent Vicente, Antnio Jos da Silva, Lus de Cames,

Jean Genets The Blacks, as performed by Teatro Experimental de Cascais. Photo: M. Lusa Gomes

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David Hares Amys View, directed by Carlos Avilez. Photo: Susana Paiva

Almeida Garrett; Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molire, Racine, Schiller, Bchner, Ibsen, etc.), Japanese Noh plays, and a varied range of modernist and contemporary playwrights. While the latter are mostly European (Fernando Arrabal, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Copi, Natlia Correia, Jorge Guimares, Ronald Harwood, Yves Jamiaque, Marie Jones, John Osborne, Miguel Rovisco, and Bernardo Santareno), there are also a few from the United States (Tennessee Williams, Terrence McNally, and Moises Kaufmann). Although the company is best known for its highly theatrical and presentational style in elaborate performances involving large casts (such as the complete works of Genet and Gombrowicz, which were produced in this fashion), it has also staged many smaller-scale dramas within the conventions of psychological realism. This summer, for instance, Avilez directed a play that he had been planning to produce for quite a whileDavid Hares Amys View (1997)which opened in early June at the companys home theatre (Teatro Mirita Casimiro) with scene and costume design by

Fernando Alvarez. Hares play explores the tension between two contrasting worldviews, that of a fairly successful theatre actress of Londons West End venues, Esme Allen (played by Irene Cruz), and that of young critic and aspiring film director Dominic (interpreted by Renato Godinho). While Esme is proud of her lifelong dedication to theatre and values this mediums communication through verbal language above all, Dominic asserts that theatre is no longer relevant to his generation, and believes that criticism is more creative than the art it allegedly criticizes. These two unlikely conversationalists (Hares text is highly talkative) are brought under the same roof through Amy (played here by Vanessa Agapito), who is Esmes only daughter and Dominics wife. The plays title, in fact, refers to a self-published periodical that Amy wrote as a child, proposing a worldview of unconditional love in which all human beings can get along despite their individual differences. Within such a moral framework suggested by the plays title, it soon becomes clearthrough Amys unexplained death, among

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other factorsthat love unconditionally is but a fallacy. Throughout the period of the play, Esme loses most of her assets due to the ill advice of her financial counselor and caring neighbor, an ambiguous figure played admirably by Joo Vasco. Meanwhile, Dominic becomes the successful producer-director of violent action films. Due to her financial ruin, Esme is compelled to sell the estate of her deceased husband, the painter Bernard Thomasa house in which two of the three acts of Hares play unfold. At one point in the performance, I was gripped by the figure of Esmes mother-in-law, Evelyn Thomas, brilliantly played by Anna Paula, one of TECs most celebrated actresses. As she awkwardly walked into the living room in act 2, simply asking after her late son Bernard (Where is Bernard? Where is Bernard?), the emotional despair and destitution conveyed by the actress made her resemble the ghost figure of a symbolist play. This brief occurrence provided me with a clue to better understand Hares tale. He seems to be speaking of a modernist world that is (was) vanishing, a world most likely unaware of its privileges and biases, but which nevertheless had an aesthetics and held ethic values other than the acquisition of money and personal power. This contrast in ethical viewpoints is particularly noticeable in the performances last scene, when we see the actress Esme completely stripped of make-up, preparing herself for a performance in the dressing room of a London Fringe venue some months after having lost her daughter. In a most intense and heartbreaking way, Irene Cruz expresses Esmes transformation and epiphany, not only when she transmits the secrets of her acting technique to the apprentice actor (Gonalo Carvalho) but also when she refuses the shoebox filled with money offered by Dominic as a consolation for the irredeemable loss of Amy. As a result, the performance unquestionably echoes some of the present debates on the conditions of theatre work in Portugal, namely the disappearance of company structures due to a scarcity of subsidy funds, the impossible competition between theatre wages and television remunerations, and the unresolved ideological and aesthetic gap between generations of theatre artists. To this day Avilez likes to state that his theatre work has always combined two major traits: a rigorous discipline combined with an almost mathematical breakdown of a text; and an ever-intuitive approach of always being open to chance. In fact, at

the time TEC was created, Avilez was a university graduate in mathematics, which he taught for many years alongside his directing career. Additionally, in his youth, he worked as an actor for eight years with the Lisbon National Theatre D. Maria II company of actress-manager Amlia Rey Colao, from whom he learned the worth of organizing an eclectic repertory, as well as an awareness of the importance of discipline in every theatre capacity. While an actor at the National Theatre, he worked with different directors, among them Spanish director Jose Tamayo, in the 1961 production of Ramon del Valle-Inclns Divinas Palabras, and was fascinated by the intuitive and emotionally telluric quality of his staging work. Thus, these two apparently contrasting qualitiesthe scientific and the intuitive informed his directing work from the start. In 1972, with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Avilez undertook an internship at the Paris International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT) with Peter Brook; and in 1973 he trained with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland. However, the theatre artist he most admires and takes inspiration from is French director Ariane Mnouchkine, not only due to her talent in directing/moving actors but also to what Avilez terms her irreverent approach to texts and themes. Coincidentally, Avilez decided to stage Arnold Weskers The Kitchen this summer (a play Mnouchkine directed in the early years of her career, and for which she became internationally known), in a production that combined actors from TECs resident company (among them Teresa Crte-Real, Santos Manuel, and Joo Vasco), with students graduating from EPTC (Professional Theatre School of Cascais). The Theatre School of Cascais, of which Avilez is the artistic director (Laura Gromicho is the co-director), was created in 1992, and is now one of the most recognized and successful theatre education institutions in the country. Its curriculum comprises intensive training in the theatre with concentration in acting (in seminars and workshops conducted by permanent members or regular collaborators of TEC) as well as courses in science, arts, languages, and humanities. Since at graduation most students are very young (late teens/early twenties), many end up pursuing successful acting careers, for they are already highly qualified to perform not only in theatre venues but also in Portuguese-produced television dramas and soap operas, which have been soaring in the ratings for the past ten years. More recently, some graduates

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Arnold Weskers The Kitchen, directed by Carlos Avilez. Photo: Susana Paiva

have also applied for scholarships and enrolled in university theatre programs in Portugal, France, England, and the United States. In preparation for Weskers The Kitchen (1957), Avilez had the young graduates undergo professional training as cooks, chefs, and waiters at the facilities of the school of catering and tourism nearby (Escola Superior de Hotelaria do Estoril). The day I met him at the theatre before a performance of Amys View, he was amused with the idea that they would be cooking next days lunch at the acting school (as a final test) but was still teasingly unsure of whether he would himself taste their delicacies. One of Avilezs distinctive traits as a director is this quality of openness to anyone who collaborates with him, regardless of any difference in age or experience. He is proud of mixing creativity in the theatre with all sorts of details from everyday life, envisioning theatre not just as a profession but as an all-embracing and truly existential activity. In The Kitchens staging, Avilezs formalistic vein for exploring spatial and movement relations between performers was manifest. Both the action and numerous cast were suited for the purpose, since the play depicts the frenzy of preparing and serving meals in the kitchen of a large restaurant and involves thirty diversified characters (waitresses, chefs, cooks, dishwashers, porters, and handymen) of different nationalities (English, French,

Italian, Cypriot, etc.) in the context of a world in turmoil. Seething with love, hatred, and violent action, Weskers kitchen is clearly an analogy to the world, and its performance by TEC resonated with a statement against our hectic everyday living. Throughout the performance, Weskers dialogue became relevant for our own times, by expressing the difficulty of real communication under oppressive material circumstances, and by conveying the identicalness of dreams of money, love affairs, and prospective jobs when freedom of movement and personal choice are practically nonexistent. Avilezs extremely productive career as a director includes opera productions, as well as the artistic management of Portugals representation at exhibitions such as Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan and presentations at international festivals in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In 1993 he was appointed Director of the National Theatre D. Maria II, which he administered until October of 2000. During those seven years, many artists in the profession praised him, although some criticized him for what they viewed as a lack of an aesthetic approach to the repertory of a national company. Yet it was precisely Avilezs artistic eclecticism that made the National Theatre bustle with theatre artists from all over the country; and busy not only with theatre productions but with musical recitals, performance art, exhibitions, and educational events. Rather than

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Jos Jorge Letrias A Rainha do Ch: Catarina de Bragana, directed by Carlos Avilez. Photo: Susana Paiva

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directing most of the companys productions with a signature style (as some directors had done in the past), Avilez invited artists of different political ideologies, nationalities, and tastes to supervise or collaborate in productions performed in various theatre spaces. In fact, so as to multiply its activity, the National rented vacant theatre houses in Lisbon and made performance spaces available within the main building that had been rarely used for that purpose. These performances attracted massive and diverse audiences, as with the production of King Lear in 1998 directed by Richard Cottrell, during which the line for the Nationals box office was so long that the queue could be seen circling the large Rossio Square in front of the building. Having worked as dramaturg, director, and scene designer in productions at the National Theatre during that period, I witnessed an incredibly enthusiastic working atmosphere. Furthermore, I finally saw a younger generation of theatre artists given the chance to present their work, for Avilezs administration coproduced many of their projects. Yet another of Avilezs qualities, noticeable during those years at the National and practically unparalleled by any living director, is his dedication to the staging of Portuguese texts, many of them unpublished and never produced before. It is significant that at least half of TECs productions are of Portuguese plays, in a country whose cultural policy seldom cares for its national dramatists, either classic or contemporary. This summer Avilez staged Jos Jorge Letrias A Rainha do Ch: Catarina de Bragana (Queen of Tea: Catherine of Braganza, 2007), which opened concurrent to Amys View at the eighteenth-century palace that houses the Museum Castro Guimares in Cascais. Portuguese Infanta Catarina de Bragana became the queen consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1662 to 1685, through her marriage with Charles II of England. Being a Roman Catholic at a time of religious strife, she was at first unpopular both in court and with the people, and was even accused of being involved in the Popish plot of 1678. Moreover, since she did not provide the king with an heir, there were many pressures compelling

him to annul the marriage. Letrias play vividly captures the inner dilemmas of this historical figure, both politically and emotionally. Consisting largely of a dialogue between the queen and her Maid of Honor (convincingly played by Teresa Crte-Real), the performance was set in the beautiful tiled room of a real palace, and showed how, as a female consort, the queen became the target for displaced anxieties about her husbands politics. In the role of the queen, Fernanda Nevess depiction stood out for expressing the self-possession and restraint of a woman brought up under the rigid decorum of the Roman Catholic Portuguese court, the emotional outbursts at the neglect of her libertine husband, and her cultural isolation in a foreign land. The play, however, focuses on her unabated resilience and on her eventual victory at winning the affection of her English subjects, after which she became something of an historical trend-setter. Most notably, it was Queen Catherine who supposedly introduced the custom of drinking tea in Britain, or that at least made it a fashionable and widely consumed beverage (it was already the Portuguese courts favorite drink in the 1650s). Combined with the fact that she gives away her ship Saudade (an untranslatable Portugese word for both yearning and homesickness) so as to help her royal husband, Letrias play also seems to celebrate the centuries-old cultural alliance (since 1387) between Portugal and England. Close to the end of Amys View, upon learning that the director of the play she is performing in is not coming to the theatre that night, the actress Esme states, Fair enough, then. So were alone. Perhaps still under the spell of Hares play, Avilez confided to me: Theatre is like an all-demanding god, we have to sacrifice everything to it. Although it seems that we keep each other company in the theatre, we are all truly solitary beings. Judging from his rehearsal process and final productions, this sacrifice seems both joyful and rewarding and he definitely never leaves his actors alone. Every single night, during the entire run of TECs productions, standing inside the lighting booth, he is there to watch them play.

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Angels in America, Lyric Hammersmith, July 2007

Ken Nielsen More than a decade ago Tony Kushners history plays meditating on the meaning of epic meditation on America, Angels in America, America(n). At this period in time, mid-2007, while swept the world. The two plays, Millennium all the Republican candidates for the American presApproaches and Perestroika, performed together as idency try to cloak themselves in Reagans costume, Angels in America, were widely heralded as rethe Reagan doctrine seems to have become the shinimagining the American theatre. With vast imaginaing light in the current Republican darkness. And tion and a combination of Marxist theory, history, with several so-called gay scandals in the and AIDS narrative, performances all over the Republican party involving closeted gay men, this world created a new theatricalized version of midrevival of Angels in America serves as a reminder of 1980s America. In both the American and the worldthe consequences of this ideology. Without overdowide reception, Tony Kushner was described as ing or even overtly pointing out the similarities either saving or revitalizing the US theatre by combetween the 1980s and today, the performance of bining solid theatrical entertainment with political the two plays at the Lyric Hammersmith in London indignation. Angels in America functioned as a re-imagines Kushners re-imagined America from much needed meditation on what it meant to be two decades ago. American in a new decade. After the fall of the Sren Kierkegaard said that life can only Soviet Union and international communism the be understood backwards but must be lived forworld was in a new chapter of history where the wards. The same is true for Angels in America, I Cold War seemed to be won and America had believe, and so the epilogue becomes crucial for our become the worlds leading superpower. understanding of the performance, where, at the Historicizing the then recent past, the plays at once very end of Perestroika, after seven-and-a-half captured and created the zeitgeist of renewed optihours of the show, we reach Priors closing speech. mism and a possibility for social change. As perThe transformed characters have entered a new formed in the early 1990s, Angels in America staged decade: the aimless and, at least then, hopeful early the 1980s and the Cold War as a tragic memory with 1990swhere the established order of the Cold War Roy Cohn as a central symbol of its ideology and has been overthrown and blown away like dried hypocrisy. At the same time the plays looked toward leaves in the first fall storm, and the possibility for a future of a better America in the ending scenes and change seems real. The characters are gathering epilogue of Perestroika, an America in which proaround the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and gressive social change could (if not would) indeed Prior, the plays unwilling prophet, gets the last happen. After all, Angels in America does believe in word, as is only fitting. As written by Kushner, he progress. prophesizes that [t]he world only spins forward. This summer I traveled to London to see We will be citizens. The time has come. This the Headlong Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, and progress-will-make-us-citizens-despite-sufferingCitizens Theatre Glasgow co-production of Angels and-death epilogue is central to the play by the light in America, the first revival of both plays in Britain it sheds backwards on the hours of theatrical rhetosince the initial production. On my way to the theric we, as audiences, have moved through in foratre I asked myself if the plays would seem dated ward motion. The epilogue serves as a political when seen from the millennium so rapidly commentary on the individual actions performed by approaching at the time of their writing. Is Angels in the characters throughout the performance and the America in essence an American history play about transformation these actions lead to in the interthe Cold War and its consequences for a variety of twined lives of the characters. It makes the critique American identitiesethnic, religious, or sexual? Is of Reaganism, and the dark consequences of the it a dated meditation on Reaganism and the tragedy individualist American dream voiced in the perof AIDS, I wondered? The answer turned out to be formance, systemic and not just personal. It also yes, with certain modifications, to both questions. structurally mirrors the function of the two proThe plays are dated, but they are not outdated. They logues. are at once time-specific to the 1980s and completeThe first prologue, to Millennium ly relevant. And, yes, the plays are in many ways Approaches, concerns the private sphere. Rabbi

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Tony Kushners Angels in America, directed by Daniel Kramer. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Isidor Chemmelwitz, performed by the excellently versatile Ann Mitchell, speaks at the funeral of Louiss grandmother and points to her personal history, the grand journey from the old world to Concourse Avenue in the Bronx, and this journeys consequences for her ancestors and the fabric of America. Such journeys no longer exist, the Rabbi tells us, as we, ironically, set sail for exactly such a journey searching for the American identity. The second prologue, which begins Perestroika, is a funeral for a system. Through the words of the worlds oldest living Bolshevik, Aleksii Antediluvianovich Prelapsarianov, likewise performed by Ann Mitchell, we attend the funeral of the Soviet Union: the funeral of the dream, or what Prelapsarianov calls the beautiful theory of Marxism. This second prologue, bemoaning the collapse of Marxism, is systemic. It concerns the ideological systems under which we live and, by consequence, all those systems or world orders that are falling apart without any obvious replacements. Like the angels roaming around in the heaven that

God abandoned, we are left drifting in the wind from paradise. However, through Priors rejection of the Angels demand, the world keeps spinning forward, and the gathering at the Bethesda Fountain in the epilogue thus offers us closure by pointing to the future and thereby showing us the political ramifications of the play. The performance at the Lyric Hammersmith, however, cuts much of this epilogue. As Perestroika nears its end, all the actors are onstage with debris from the previous scenes. Harper is suspended in midair, temporarily stopped in her transformation, and Prior steps out on the apron to tell us, the audience, that we are fabulous creatures each and everyone of you. However, without the theory of progress and the visible proof that characters can indeed changeHannah is the clearest proof of this in the epiloguethe great work that can now begin is limited to us working on our fabulousness. Director Daniel Kramers decision to cut the epilogue ends up undoing the political perspective of the play. It lets the private remain private and leaves the audience suspended mid-air

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in the personal quagmire of life. Harper is going to San Francisco and Priors work begins, but we as spectators are ultimately left wondering what that work actually entails beyond survival. Without the epilogue to guide us we are left wondering if history really did crack wide open. Apart from the consequential mistake of shortening the epilogue, Kramers direction of the plays is swift and elegant, with a great understanding of the serious humor and the politics of camp integral to the plays. Most brilliantly, he highlights the connection between the real and the fantastic, the earthbound and the cosmological. The Angel is obviously the central character to fulfill this function along with the other apparitions such as the prior Priors and Ethel Rosenberg. Kushner imagines the Angel as steel-gray, at least when her first feather falls down, but in London this angel, played with extraordinary sensuality and power by Golda Rosheuvel, is a strong woman with cropped hair in a black leather dress. She is a dominatrix without much actual power left. She is sexuality embodied, but with little strength. She makes the tragedy of an angel left by God visible, but carries her scars with dignity and optimism, even when injured and falling apart. She is after all the American angel. Upon her orgasmic arrival into Priors life her presence makes the air smell of raw sex and beauty. She is gracefully clumsy in exercising a power that is no longer completely within her reach; a broken seraph longing for a healing she believes will come from stopping the mad forward rush of the world. However, dealing with the resistant prophet turns out to be hard work and this angel is not to be messed with. Her speech is a combination of sonorous singing and declamation and in her mouth the repeated words I, I, I suddenly take on the function of exerting herself as authority while opening the door to the possibility of several Is within the usually categorically singular notion of personal identity. In many ways, the I, I, Iwhich when performed by less skilled actresses can seem pompousbecomes central to the performances articulation of hope. Though inherently singular, we as individuals can become many. We have possibilities for several Is and the Angel is, against her own wish, here to remind us that change is necessary. As we see through her sexual encounter with Hannah Pitt in Perestroika, despite being weakened she still has the power to instigate change through sex. Hannah finds something she had never dared to know in the encounter with the Angel. Unfortunately, because

the epilogue has been cut, the audience never gets to see this transformation fulfilled. We can only guess that Hannah does indeed become a different person from her late-night meeting with this particular American angel. The performance and excellent costuming (by Mark Bouman) of the Angel indicate this is a highly visual and playful interpretation of Angels in America. The at once practical and aesthetically pleasing set design by Soutra Gilmour combines a black shining wall with doors in the middle and on either side, reminiscent in some ways of classic Greek theatre architectures use of doors with props and movable design elements being wheeled in and out allowing for swift changes of scenery. This obviously accommodates Kushners cinematic use of short and split scenes. The latter were not mechanically divided in the London production, as the separate worlds visually and physically mixed and overlapped, fostering the fruitful confusion and comparison that is intended. The bedroom scene where the separate couples Harper (played with both vulnerability and strength by Kirsty Bushell) and Joe (played with sympathy and a strong underlying sexual tension by Jo Stone-Fewings) and Prior

Kushners Angles in America. Photo: Manuel Harlan

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(Mark Emerson with sarcasm, camp, and a heart of gold) and Louis (Adam Levy playing the conflicted liberal Jew with such compassion that we, like Belize, even follow him through his rants of soliloquy proportions) are arguing completely melted together. As the beds were rolled right next to each other they became one, and the two bedrooms, the two couples lives, became intertwined. The bedroom scene became a threshold of revelation by its design. At one point all four characters were in what looked like one bed, visually underlining the interconnectedness and interdependedness of these individuals. Here the visual and physical choice obviously also carries significant weight thematically. The same was true, with even greater thematical consequence, in the split scene with Louis and a stranger having sex in the Rambles in Central Park, and Joe and Roy Cohn (played by Greg Hicks with creepy strength, repressed sexuality, and diction as bitter as a warm gin and tonic) having a conversation in a hotel bar. Roy and Joe stand by two bar stools talking while Louis and the stranger are getting it on behind them. As the stranger and Louis move into the sadly hilarious sexual act, Louis pushes his way in between Roy and Joe and grabs them as if they were trees. They of course carry on their conversation since Louis and the stranger are not physically there. While this, to the audience, remained two distinct scenes and conversations, the sex physically taking place in between Roy and Joe made it obvious that the relationship between the two of them is no less sexual than the one happening in the park. Likewise, the self-destruction involved with Louiss actions in many ways mirrors the psychological masochistic dimensions in the relationship between Joe Pitt and Daddy Cohn. The use of space in the performance in general progresses, as do the plays, from a certain degree of order into a more chaotic and less struc-

tured version of the world. As the world falls apart, along with the characters, in Perestroika, and reality and imagination, history and fiction, life and the process of dying merge, the set slowly fills up. The characters start remaining onstage after their scenes are done. The props, furniture, and other design elements also start cluttering the stage. In an important decision by the director and the design team, the debris of history keeps piling up around the characters who themselves become part of the trash gathering around the Angels feet. Just as Walter Benjamins angel flies through space with the fragments of history around her feet, we as audience members are taken through the performance while debris accumulates. This is an excellent choice, combining the theoretical background of the play with the visual reality of the physical performance. Daniel Kramer, along with the design team and the hard working and wonderful cast (Obi Abili playing Belize, the ex-ex-drag queen confidante, with heartfelt sincerity and ice-cold camp, remains to be mentioned) carry us from the breakdown of the well-ordered world of Millennium Approaches into the chaos and darkness of Perestroika and then to a certain degree of hope for a new normality toward the end. The production captures with strength the profound, and in many ways quite inexplicable, combination of great loss and even greater hope in Kushners writing. The hypocritical, ravaged, and plundered America of Roy Cohn, McCarthy, and Reagan, is also the America of Prior Walter: the Prior Walter who refuses the weight of his inherited, non-functional, victimized, and singular identity and ancestry; the Prior Walter who embodies the hope of a new morning in a new millennium through his rejection of stasis. The world slowly spins forward while we look backwards, trying to make meaning of chaos.

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Ira Aldridge at the Old Vic

Marvin Carlson forums, and conferences all over Britain. This year marks the 200th anniversary of The Aldridge bicentenary itself has also the death of Americas first great black actor, Ira generated a series of performances, workshops, disAldridge, but in death as in life, to the shame of his cussions, and exhibitions. These are in large part native country, his achievement is being honored being developed and coordinated by the Ira and recognized abroad while the bicentenary of his Aldridge Bicentenary Project, a collaborative partbirth remains, to the best of my knowledge, totally nership between actor, playwright, and director unremarked in the United States or even in his Shango Baku of CETTIE (Cultural Exchange native New York. Through Theatre in Education, devoted to promotIn Lodz, Poland, where he is buried, an ing equal opportunities in the cultural and educainternational symposium was held on the actual tional fields); historian Oku Ekpenyon; Carol anniversary of Aldridges birth, July 24 of this year, Dixon, a specialist in projects encouraging equality but the major Aldridge celebratory events have been and diversity in Londons Museums, Libraries, and taking place in Britain, where his first great triArchives Council (MLA); and Leon Robinson, umphs occurred and where the significance of his leader of the London-based dance and multimedia achievement is reinforced by the fact that his birth company Positive Steps. year also saw the passing of the Abolition of the A central event in the Aldridge bicenteSlave Trade Act in Britain. This closely related nary project was a one-evening celebrity event, bicentennial has inspired its own series of events, held Sunday, July 8 at the Old Vic, the theatre including special exhibitions, performances, films,

Lonne Elder IIIs Splendid Mummer, directed by Malcolm Frederick. Photo: courtesy Old Vic Theatre

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which, then operating under the name of the Royal Coburg, hosted the first London appearances of Ira Aldridge in 1825, playing the role of Oroonoko in Revolt in Surinam; or, A Slaves Revenge. No venue could be more appropriate to house this commemorative celebration. The central presentation of the evening was a staging of Lonne Elder IIIs play on the life of Aldridge, Splendid Mummer, first presented at the American Place Theatre in New York in 1988. The play is admirably suited to this occasion as it is essentially a monologue whose actor, representing Aldridge, recounts the history of his life and performs several short selections from the Aldridge repertory. Shango Baku, playing Aldridge, had a striking physical presence, and his first moment, isolated in a steep spotlight, was stunning, but his vocal range and power was much less than that of Charles Dutton, who created the role in New York, and surely was not comparable to the legendary power of Aldridge himself. When scenes expanded out from the spotlight onto the full stage, the production made good use of the setting already in place for the ongoing Old Vic production, Patrick Hamiltons Gaslight, whose nineteenth-century interior provided a reasonably accurate period feel for Aldridges domestic interiors. The play itself, directed by Malcolm Frederick, was presented as a series of brief scenes,

between which a number of performers, historians, and critics appeared at a microphone at the side of the stage to expand upon the importance of Aldridge to the British stage in general and to the encouragement of diversity in British acting in particular. This allowed the information in the Elder play to be supplemented by further historical and cultural background, including selections (both disturbing and amusing in their overt racism) from the British press of Aldridges time, and a listing of Aldridges many international honors and decorations (from, among others, Haiti, Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, and Switzerland). The high point of this series of presentations was surely an interview conducted by Oku Ekpenyon of Earl Cameron, born in Bermuda in 1917 and generally considered one of the first black actors to break the color bar in the United Kingdom. Cameron in fact worked in his apprentice years with Amanda Aldridge, the daughter of Ira Aldridge and a well-known opera singer, teacher, and composer in her own right. Amanda Aldridges recollections of her father, as told to Cameron, provided a fascinating and moving human connection to the actor being celebrated, and, on the stage where Aldridge had himself appeared, brought together memories, traditions, bodies, and space in an event that most appropriately marked the highlight of the bicentenary celebrations.

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Contributors
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. His most recent book is Speaking in Tongues (Michigan, 2006). JANICE CAPUANA is a Ph.D. student in the theatre department at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She also has Masters Degrees in Education and in Dramaturgy. Her area of study is Italian theatre and culture from the Risorgimento to Fascism. BEN CARNEY is an actor, director and teacher. He recently performed his solo show, Homeland Insecurity, at the American Place Theatre and on tour. He is a professor at Bronx Community College. Married to filmmaker Christine Noschese, he produced her award-winning documentary Keep On Steppin'. GRAA CORRA is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is an architect (Lisbon's UTL), and holds an M.A. in Directing from Emerson College, Boston. She has worked professionally for the National Theatre D. Maria II and for other major theatre companies in Portugal as director, dramaturg, translator, and designer. She is the author of a number of plays, four of which were produced, and has published essays on dramaturgy and stage design. BARRY DANIELS is a retired Professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French Romantic Theatre. His book, Le Dcor de thtre lpoque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la ComdieFranaise, 1799-1848, was recently published by the Bibliothque nationale de France. He is currently working on a study of the Thtre de la Rpublique, 1791-1799 and an exposition on this topic at the Museum of the French Revolution at the Chteau de Vizille from April 20 to July16 2007. MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts at Queen Mary, University of London and co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her books include "Other" Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage (2003), three co-edited volumes for Manchester University Press, and two collections of translations for Methuen. Her study of Federico Garca Lorca's theatre will be published by Routledge in 2008. ROY KIFT is a British playwright living in Germany. His play Camp Comedy, on the fate of the German artist and film director Kurt Gerron in the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt, premiered at the SUNY-Geneseo in the spring of 2003. www.roy-kift.com GLENN LONEY is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is Senior Correspondent of NYTheatre-Wire.com and of NYMuseums.com, and Founder/Advisor of Modern Theatre.info, based on his chronology of British and American theatre, Twentieth

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Century Theater (Facts on File). His fifty-year archive of art, architecture, history, and design photos is now online at INFOTOGRAPHY.biz. His digitally-preserved audio-interviews with performing arts personalities will soon be online at ArtsArchive.biz, along with press photos of major theatre, dance, and opera productions. He is the author of numerous books, including his latest, Peter Brook: From Oxford to Orghast. KEN NIELSEN holds an M.A. in Theatre Studies from the University of Copenhagen and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center where he is writing his dissertation "Exporting American Queerness: Theatre, Gay Masculinities, Commodification, and Cold War Discourse in North America and Western Europe." PHILIPPA WEHLE is the author of Le Thtre populaire selon Jean Vilar and Drama Contemporary: France and of the upcoming Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. A Professor Emeritus of French and Drama Studies at Purchase College, SUNY, she writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance. She is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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