WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 22, Number 2/3 Fall 2010

Editor
Marvin Carlson
Contributing Editors
Christopher Balme Harry Carlson
Miriam D'Aponte Maria M. Delgado
Marion P. Holt Barry Daniels
Glenn Loney Yvonne Shafer
Daniele Vianello Phyllis Zatlin
Editorial Staff
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2010
ISSN # 1050-1991
Pamela Thielman, Editorial Assistant Sascha Just, Managing Editor
Howard Barker. Photo: Courtesy of Howard Barker.
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
Barrie Gelles, Circulation Manager
1
To the Reader
Like many institutions the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which has generously
supported and housed this journal from its establishment more than twenty years ago, has been forced to cut back
as a result of the current financial climate. While we are attempting to adjust to a decrease in our support we will
only be publishing two issues per year as we did in the early years of the journal. The current issue then is 2/3
and combines our spring and fall issues.
Because this issue includes some backlog of articles, we will depart from our usual policy of emphasiz-
ing festival reports in the fall issue, but are here presenting instead a more general issue, with material on theatre
in London, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and Oslo as well as interviews with Howard Barker, Jon Fosse, and Liv
Ullmann. We will then devote all or most of the winter issue to festival reports. We thank you for your patience
and support.
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 10016, or
mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.
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.
2
Table of Contents
Volume 22, Number 2/3
Report from Berlin
Report from Vienna
Forum Heersum
Report from Munich
Big Questions on the London Stage
Jerusalem
Danton's Death
Howard Barker Day
Interview with Howard Barker
Vegard Vinge and Ida Mller's The Wild DuckPart 2 Director's Cut
Interview with Liv Ullman
Interview with Jon Fosse
Contributors
Fall 2010
5
15
33
41
49
57
61
63
67
71
79
83
87
Marvin Carlson
Dan Venning
Brian Rinehart
Marvin Carlson
Joshua Abrams
Joe Heissan
Marvin Carlson
Duka Radosavljevi
Duka Radosavljevi
Andrew Friedman
Stan Schwartz
Stan Schwartz
3
4
Christian Friedrich Hebbel's Die Niebelungen, directed by Michael Thalheimer. Photo: Arno Declair.
Since the opening of the new century, the
Deutsches Theater has held the pre-eminent position
among Berlin theatres, a position which has not
altered with the arrival of a new director, Ulrich
Khuon two years ago. The recently remodeled
house, the outstanding company, and productions
directed by many of the leading names in today's
German theatre, make this a necessary goal for any
visitor to Berlin with a strong theatre interest. The
German repertory system allows such a visitor in
the city for a week or two to spend almost every
open evening at this theatre, as I did this spring, see-
ing a different production every night and experi-
encing an excellent selection of current German
work. An unusually cold and wet May made the city
in general rather less attractive than it normally is at
this time of year, but the theatre remained, as
always, varied and exciting. The season end was
approaching and several major productions were
been given their last performances until the fall,
among them several I had previously seen, such as
the brilliant Wild Duck of Michael Thalheimer, the
elegant Prince of Homburg of Andreas
Kriegenburg, the Uncle Vanya of the late Jrgen
Gosch, and the contemporary Mary Stuart of
Stephan Kimmig, transferred here from Hamburg
after its success two years ago at the Berlin
Theatertreffen.
Two productions were also closing that I
had not seen, and since both were by directors I usu-
ally enjoy, I began with those, although the critical
reaction to both has been not very favorable. My
first evening at the Deutsches Theater was to see the
recently opened production of Hebbel's Die
Nibelungen directed by Michael Thalheimer.
Although Thalheimer is probably the most highly
regarded of the current DT directors, this particular
production has not been enthusiastically received,
and I must admit that I too found it distinctly less
impressive than previous works by this director I
had seen, including his Faust, his Oresteia, his Rats
by Hauptmann, and my own favorite, his Emilia
Report from Berlin
Marvin Carlson
5
Die Niebelungen. Photo: Arno Declair.
Galotti, which toured to BAM in New York.
Thalheimer is particularly associated with
a process of radical cutting of classic texts, much
diminishing their richness according to his detrac-
tors and revealing their essence according to his
more numerous supporters. In this respect Die
Nibelungen was atypical, running more than three
hours with an intermission instead of the more cus-
tomary intermissionless hour or two. In other
respects, however, the production was unmistakably
in the Thalheimer style, far too much so in the opin-
ion of many.
First of all there was the simple but monu-
mental setting by Thalheimer's usual designer Olaf
Altmann. In these settings the actors often appear
trapped or overwhelmed by vast inhuman blocks of
material, through which they must find a precarious
way. In this production a small forestage extends out
beyond the fire-curtain, which at the opening of
each act is lowered to within a few feet of the floor,
leaving a small opening through which the compa-
ny crawls in order to line up, seated, across the
stage, to present the opening scene directly facing
the audience. When the curtain rises, it reveals a
massive platform sloping upstage toward a dark
background. In the course of the evening, the front
of this platform often rises, as if a giant book, lying
on its side, were opening toward the audience.
Characters can then perform either in the space thus
opened below or (more frequently) on the space
above, although usually only on its front edge, since
the higher it rises, the less visible they become to the
auditorium. Some of the most effective scenes use
this division to isolate a character below, as when
Kriemhild (Maren Eggert) remains alone there in a
pool of light while Siegfried (Peter Molzen) is killed
out of sight at the back of the platform above. His
blood-soaked body is then dragged to the front of
the upper platform and into view of the audience,
and the platform slowly lowers, closing down on
Kriemhild below, who stoops and moves steadily
forward until she joins the corpse of her lover down-
stage center, with his murderers, all now revealed,
looking on. Bert Wrede, another regular Thalheimer
collaborator, provides a subtle but powerful musical
score that underlines the action with muffled drum-
beats and occasional sharp bursts of discordant
sound.
Visually and musically, the production
compares favorably with other Thalheimer works,
but it is in the overall concept that problems arise.
The story is of course the one made familiar by
Wagner's Ring, though in Hebbel played out on a
much more domestic level, focusing upon
Die Niebelungen. Photo: Arno Declair.
6
Siegfried's wooing of Brunhild for Gunther, the rev-
elation of this deception by Siegfried's wife
Kriemhild, the killing of Siegfried by Gunther and
his cohorts Hagen and Volker, and, years later, the
revenge upon them by Kriemhild and her subse-
quent husband Etzel.
There is a distinct primitivism in Hebbel
which this production emphasizes, not only in the
crude physicality (often in the later part of the
evening the stage is literally awash in blood), but in
the primitive costumes designed by Katrin Lea Tag
for many of the characters, especially the heavy furs
worn by Gunther (Ingo Hlsmann) whose appear-
ance, slouching, and roaring caused several review-
ers to describe him as a Neanderthal. The blood-
drenched stage inevitably recalled Thalheimer's
recent and much praised Oresteia, a production pro-
viding similar gore and an equally unredemptive
view of the human condition (neither production
offered any hope for a cessation of the unremitting
violence). The Nibelungen, however, often seemed
little more than an extension (at twice the length)
and rather crude repetition of the devices of the pre-
vious, more powerful work. When late in the play
the murderers Gunther, Hagen (Sven Lehmann),
and Volker (Felix Goesser), strip down to their
underpants and cavort for an extended period,
laughing hysterically, under a torrential rain of
blood upstage, the evening threatens to descend into
a kind of grotesque self-parody.
Even at its most self-indulgent, however,
the production is often redeemed by the work of the
Deutsches Theater ensemble, surely one of the best
today in Germany. While Ingo Hlsmann's rants
become rather tiring, the always impressive Sven
Lehmann is continually effective as a quieter and
more troubling villain. Maren Eggert presents a
moving and nuanced Kriemhild. Her high emotion-
al confrontation with Natali Seelig, who as Brunhild
is seen for much too little of the production, pro-
vides one of the clear high points of the production.
Anything that this outstanding company does is well
worth seeing, but they have clearly been much bet-
ter served by Thalheimer in other productions.
Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards was
theatrically more innovative but still somewhat dis-
appointing. There is, not surprisingly in view of the
current global economic crisis, a great interest on
the German stage in works with economic themes
and especially those produced during the last great
international economic downturn, during the 1930s,
which had such devastating results especially in
7
Bertolt Brecht's Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthfe, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair.
Germany. So, two works from 1929 led off this
year's Theatertreffen and Brecht's 1930 parable of
rampant capitalism opened in December of 2009 at
the Deutsches Theater. Nicolas Stemann, known for
his cool postmodern interpretations of classic texts,
may not be the best director for such a project at this
point in time, however, and his detached, ironic, and
highly technological rendering of Brecht's play
aroused little critical enthusiasm.
Stemann has reduced the major speaking
roles to five, three men and two women, with a
twenty-three member chorus. At the opening, four
of these five are seated downstage before a white
curtain in elegant, glittering costumes like the hosts
on a rather tacky TV game show. All are holding
scripts of Brecht's play which they arise to read,
stage directions and all, into a downstage micro-
phone. The sole woman, Katharina Marie Schubert,
reads Joan, but the three men (Andreas Dhler,
Felix Goeser, and Matthias Neukirch) dispute the
role of Mauler, and continue to do so throughout the
evening. Although this clear separation of actor and
role seems strongly influenced by the Brechtian
concept of alienation, it in fact in considerable
measure undercuts the dynamic of the play. When
Joan is challenged to identify the real Mauler, in
Brecht's variation of the famous scene in Schiller,
she delivers Brecht's line about the one with the
bloodiest face, but there is clearly no distinction to
be made. Brecht's Mauler, a ruthless exploiter with
a sentimental edge, has disappeared, to be replaced
by a more modern image of corporate power, an
anonymous group any of whom might emerge to
claim credit for positive results and each of whom
can blame the others when things go badly.
The fifth individual, Frau Luckerniddle,
beautifully performed by Margit Bendokat, one of
the pillars of the company, comes from a different
dramatic world altogether, and one much closer to
the Brecht tradition. She first appears as one of the
three Maulers, still enacting Brecht's text, puts on a
wig and takes her role in the scene where she
appears, asking for her husband killed in a factory
accident. As he begins the scene, Bendokat sudden-
ly shuffles on stage, as if summoned up like one of
Pirandello's six characters, to expose the foolish
artificiality of the dramatic world the onstage actors
have so far created. In baggy trousers, a ragged
sports jacket, and bearing two huge plastic commer-
cial bags, she is the image of the modern urban dis-
possessed, and throughout the rest of the play she
serves as a strong counterpoint to the glittering tech-
nological world of the main actors, far more so than
the rather ineffectual chorus, who from time to time
express collective dissatisfaction from far upstage
or hidden behind projected images of mass crowds.
Stemann's production makes impressive
use of the considerable resources of the Deutsches
Theater stage. The huge turntable spins about, car-
rying with it bits of scenery, banks of lights, live TV
operators, posed scenes of homeless people huddled
over open fires, and large illuminated symbolsa
red star, a dollar sign, a cross. Snow falls from
above. Scale model buildings of a combined
Berlin/Chicago are projected onto huge screens
along with protesting crowds, piles of meat and the
inevitable ribbons of stock market quotes and other
figures and statistics. Only once does one of these
innumerable images strike a moving note, when
Joan calls the attention of the three quarreling
Maulers to a large upstage projection which reads:
"925 people have died of hunger since the beginning
of this performance." As they watch in silence, the
number slowly increases: "926, 927, 928," and so
on. It is a stunning moment, like the entrance of
Frau Luckerniddle, but is similarly soon swept away
by a rush of other material.
In the end this seems to be the message, if
any, of the production. Neither Joan nor
Luckerniddle, with quite different trajectories, are
able to overcome the Mauler machine.
Luckerniddle's failure is the more traditional. In
vain she unfurls the red banner and tries to rally the
crowds, only to fall defeated upstage in a rattle of
machine gun fire. Joan instead pursues the path of
accommodation and is gradually co-opted, resum-
ing her glittering opening costume and joining the
three Maulers in a final sparkling production num-
ber, backed by the malleable chorus: "Sing a hosan-
na to wealth and power." The lights fade, leaving
Joan in a single spotlight at the downstage micro-
phone, where she closes this dark vision of the mod-
ern corporate world with a single syllable: "Huch,"
a sigh of relief close to the English "whew."
The Kammerspiele, the smaller experi-
mental stage of the Deutsches Theater, provided as
great a variety of offerings as the main theatre and
several among these were among the theater's most
popular. I managed to get tickets to two which often
sold out the small house, Kriegenburg's Hamlet, cre-
ated with students of the leading Ernst Busch drama
school, and Jorinde Drse's restaging of the Tom
Waits's/Robert Wilson's Woyzeck. I also attended a
disturbing but fascinating work now in its third year
8
that I had not yet seen, Elfriede Jelinek's ber Tiere
(About Animals). The "animals" in question are
young Austrian women, so referred to in the found
text that is the basis, like much of the Nobel-prize-
winning author's work, of a series of poetic, amus-
ing, and sometimes shocking and disturbing varia-
tions.
This found text was the recorded telephone
conversations between patrons of a prominent pros-
titution ring recently exposed in Vienna and the
middlemen in charge of arranging the sexual
encounters. As is so often the case in such scandals,
public interest was heightened by the social and
financial prominence of some of the patrons
involved, by the sordidness and crass materialism of
the negotiations, by the interest in unusual sexual
practices, and by the involvement among the "ani-
mals" of children and captive young women.
All of this might have resulted in the hands
of another playwright or another director (here
Nicolas Stemann, the frequent interpreter of
Jelenik's dramas) in a lurid Genet-style exhibition of
contemporary decadence, but the production moves
in a different, and more complex direction. True, it
opens with a sequence of scenes close to the origi-
nal material, with Sebastian Rudolph and three
women (Nora von Waldsttten, Almut Zilcher, and
Regine Zimmermann) seated at separate tables with
microphones and bottles of water, carrying on the
disturbing conversations about the marketing of
desire chronicled in the recordings. Very soon, how-
ever, the tone becomes more complex, when the
other male performer, the leading Deutsches
Theater actor Ingo Hlsmann, in drag costume and
presenting a character more like Charley's Aunt than
a figure in a performance dealing with a serious
social problem, engages Rudolph in a wide-ranging
discussion of the complex dynamics of sex, love,
and desire.
In the middle part of the production, comic
tinged reportage gives way to a theatricalized infer-
no, when dark red curtains pull aside to reveal a
caged young actress screaming in a SM-inspired
inferno. This extreme image is however undercut
with a variety of conflicting views of sexual prac-
tice. Projected on the wall behind, and from time to
time on a lowered curtain, is a clichd super-8 film
of two hippie lovers locked in an embrace that end-
lessly promises but never quite results in a passion-
ate kiss, while Barbara Steisand's "Evergreen" pro-
Elfriede Jelinek's ber Tiere, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Iko Freese.
9
vides an appropriate musical background. On the
stage itself, the actors create images that never
explicitly represent actual sexual activity, yet con-
tinually refer obliquely to it in comic, ironic, and
occasionally quite moving ways. Perhaps most
graphic is a repeated sequence in which the two
male actors fill their mouths with water, stand on
either side of an actress and bounce rapidly up and
down with her, a movement ending in an exuberant
simultaneous expulsion of the water from their
mouths. A subtler repeated sequence is offered by
the actress Almut Zilcher, whose commentary on
her career as a would-be beauty queen and actual
call girl is echoed by a projection of her own lips
which follows her about on the stage floor. From
time to time she steps into the lips and is apparently
swallowed, only to reappear later and continue, giv-
ing a surprising new meaning to the phrase often
repeated in her lines and in the originating text,
"coming in the mouth."
A very different perspective on the subject
is offered by the magisterial Margit Bendokat who
first appears here, as she does in Saint Joan, to lift
the performance to a new level, both in terms of
subject and of stage power. In both works she brings
a new depth of feeling and authenticity, supported
by the weight of her long career on the Berlin stage.
Here, she appears as an aging woman still devoted
to the passion of love, which she sees as one of the
highest expressions of human feeling, almost a reli-
gion. In vain the men attempt to cover her presence
in the depth of a large upstage bed. She repeatedly
re-emerges and continues her championship of her
own erotic vision, so different from either the com-
mercialized dealings of the sex industry or the sen-
timentalized media presentations of film and popu-
lar song. All, however, contribute significantly to
the complex meditation on contemporary sexuality
created out of the scandalous source material by
Jelinek, Stemann, and the gifted actors of the
Deutsches Theater.
I cannot remember previously seeing
another director's restaging of a Robert Wilson pro-
duction and so attended with much anticipation the
new version of his much-praised Woyzeck created at
the Kammerspiele by Jorinde Drse, especially
since this is currently the most popular offering of
that theatre. In its original version, which I saw at
the Berliner Ensemble, the staging was unmistak-
ably Wilsonbackdrops awash in color, pinpoint
Georg Bchner's Woyzeck, directed by Jorinde Drse based on Robert Wilson's staging. Photo: Arno Declair.
10
control of lighting, jagged, expressionistic move-
ments, and fragmenting of the visual field, and an
overall impression of grotesque dark comedy, a
tonality reinforced by the jauntingly grim music of
Tom Waits. Of all this, only the Waits music and a
touch of Wilsonian grotesque in the costumes and
bearing of the Captain and the Doctor remain of the
Wilson conception. Director Drse has wisely and
successfully reconceived the material in a form
much more suited to the smaller and much more
modestly equipped Kammerspiele.
Most fundamentally, this production, while
visually striking, does not rely primarily upon visu-
al effects as Wilson so often does, but much more on
physical movement. Here the three dimensional
stage (designed, along with the costumes by
Susanne Schuboth) dominates the production the
way lighting does for Wilson. There is no Wilsonian
cyclorama; the stage is open to the back and side
walls. In the center of the perform-
ance area there is a small raised
circular platform with side and
back banks sweeping up from it, so
that the audience seems to be look-
ing at a small version of a form
suggesting a classic Greek theatre,
seen from the stage, with the circle
as a small orchestra. A kind of
thrust extends out from the circle
into the first two rows of the actu-
al auditorium and areas on either
side of this thrust provide a kind of
forestage in front of the Greek
half-circle. At the rear of the stage,
partly hidden by the raised Greek-
style slope, is the seven member
orchestra.
This complex and flexible
space, which changes little in the
course of the evening, allows
director Drse to achieve an
impressive variety of stage compo-
sitions, rather conventional ones
on the forestage and more unusual
ones on the various slopes and lev-
els, and occasionally even out into
the audience. Perhaps most strik-
ing is the repeated motif of
Woyzeck (Moritz Grove) running
full tilt in a circle around the slop-
ing upstage area, a move motivat-
ing the advice for him to slow
down from the Captain (Matthias Neukirch) in their
first scene. The Captain and the Doctor (Helmut
Mooshammer) are both familiar figures at the
Deutsches Theater and both have an excellent gift
for grotesque comedy, here well employed. In cos-
tume (also designed by Schuboth), gesture, and bod-
ily movement they, along with the long-haired and
top-hatted Announcer (Markus Graf) come closest
to the distorted style of the original Wilson produc-
tion. Woyzeck, Marie (Maran Eggert), Andres (John
Anders), and Margreth (Pia Luise Hndler) are pre-
sented much more realistically, with a real human
warmth. The Drum Major is presented by Christoph
Franken in a rather unconventional, but highly
effective manner. Normally this character is shown
as a somewhat pompous, even arrogant figure,
endowed with a tall and attractive physique that
allows him to assume a power over the opposite sex.
Franken is rather short and stocky, looking a bit of a
Woyzeck. Photo: Arno Declair.
11
bumpkin, but he nevertheless maintains the tradi-
tional self assurance, even if it has little basis in
reality. He is all glitter and show. He wears a tinsel
boutonniere and often tosses sparkling confetti into
the air to herald his entrance, He also has a special
relationship with the orchestra, and cues them to
provide appropriate music when he needs it. The
contrast between his unprepossessing physical
appearance and his effect on Marie is both amusing
and pitiful.
The twelve Tom Waits songs presented (in
English) in the course of the evening obviously do
much to establish the tone, one of dark cynicism
shot through with flashes of humanity. The titles of
two key songs establish clearly enough the world of
the play "Everything Goes to Hell" and "God's
Away on Business." The latter is delivered almost as
a statement of philosophy by the materialist doctor
as he pops his signature peas both at other members
of the company and even at the audience. Framed by
these two dark statements is one of the shows clos-
est things to a love song, as Woyzeck expresses his
attraction to Marie on the still rather hard-edged
"Coney Island Baby." The production's signature
tune, however, is presented by the sinister
Announcer both at the opening and the close,
"Misery is the River of the World," which contains
the thought so grimly repeated in the original play:
"You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it
always comes roaring back again."
Finally, the lively and imaginative inter-
pretation by Kriegenburg of Hamlet, also at the
Kammerspiele, proved one of the highlights of my
Berlin visit, made all the most pleasant by the fact
that the audience was composed almost entirely of
young and extremely enthusiastic theatre-goers.
This may have been in part due to the extensive
involvement in the production of students from
Germany's most prestigious center for actor train-
ing, the Ernst Busch school in Berlin (all the roles
except Gertrude, the Ghost, and Polonius were stu-
dents), but in addition the interpretation was clearly
pitched to engage a youthful audience. The play was
interpreted as a clown show, with all the characters
in exaggerated clown makeup and broad physical
action, not infrequently suggesting circus routines,
Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair.
12
commonly employed. Key to the reception were
two particularly exaggerated clown figures (Aenne
Schwarz and Marco Portmann, Henning Bosse and
Sergej Lubic), somewhat reminiscent of the singers
in Peter Brook's Marat/Sade, who normally inhabit-
ed small boxes downstage left and right, heralded
scene openings and closings as well as important
moments with the striking of small tap-bells, and
provided not only an introduction to scenes, but
often a running commentary on the action, almost
entirely in highly colloquial English, such as "Now
it's going to get much more spooky," or "this bit
always makes me cry."
Eventually these two figures enter the
action, now speaking German, as a grotesquely
comic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As such they
echo another clown pair, the two gravediggers, who
first appear as a comic team to introduce the action
as the guards on the ramparts. Throughout the pro-
duction they function as general utility men, provid-
ing and removing props and most importantly, rear-
ranging the basic elements of the setting. This set,
designed by Julia Kurzweg, is composed entirely of
open wooden crates, most of them cubes about three
feet on each side, but with a few fastened together to
form larger units. At the opening these completely
cover the stage. The actors emerge from and disap-
pear into them and move about the stage either by
stepping from box to box or, much more precari-
ously, balancing on their upper edges. This results in
more than a few comic falls, even from Ophelia
(Maria Wardzinska), in full ballet costume along
with her clown makeup, who for the most part
shows an appropriate balletic poise. The Ghost
(Markwart Mller-Elmau) spends much of the
evening tromping about from box to box upstage
until he is called upon to don his obviously fake
cardboard cuirass and helmet to appear to his son.
As the production continues, the gravedigger utility
men use these boxes to construct a makeshift stage
for the play and a large cross for the prayer scene,
then remove most of them for the climactic grave
Hamlet. Photo: Arno Declair.
13
scene and duel.
An irreverent but highly theatrical
approach has characterized all of the evening, but
the production departs most fully from convention
in its extended closing sequence, beginning with
Ophelia's mad scene. Hamlet (Thomas Halle) has
never gone to England (none of the actors ever real-
ly leave the stage, even Laertes (Tom Radisch) ,
who journeys to France by putting up a sail on an
upstage box and remaining in it until he returns to
Denmark). Instead he passively watches the scene
from the side, leaning on the sword with which he
killed Polonius, and with cloud of black balloons
hovering over his head, a mark of gloom he bears
throughout the production. Ophelia gives him her
farewell bouquet, interspersed with kisses, before
going upstage to climb into a somewhat taller than
usual box containing a tank of water, where she is
discovered by the Queen (Natali Seelig).
The gravediggers' scene is announced with
wild enthusiasm by the chorus, who assure us that
we are about to see the play's most famous and
bloodiest scene. The gravediggers vainly try to live
up to this introduction, providing a sequence of prat-
falls, jokes in Danish, and other strained attempts at
humor to which they attempt to gain a response by
tossing confetti in the air and pausing (in vain) for
applause. In desperation they pull the body of
Ophelia out of her box and manipulate her as a pup-
pet, still without the response they are seeking. The
court enters and sweeps them aside, but they are in
turn pushed upstage to be replaced by two grotesque
figures in crude oversized masks. These are in fact
the Player (Arndt Wille) and Polonius (Michael
Schweighfer) who play out the final sequence tak-
ing on the various parts by shifting masks and duel-
ing with forks. The main characters themselves line
up quietly across the back of the stage and as each
is dispatched, the clown gravediggers throw up in
front of him or her a cloud of confetti, then lead the
actor off to a waiting box upstage. Not even Laertes
is spared, but allowed to share Hamlet's poisoned
cup. Hamlet is the last major player to go, with an
usually large and elaborate display of confetti and
streamers. The stage still must be cleared, however,
and the efficient gravediggers do not stop their work
until the puppet figures and even the two framing
chorus figures are killed. After completing this wild
grand guignol version of the play's "most famous
scene," they finally take their own bows before an
enthusiastically applauding audience. Clearly this
hip and contemporary Hamlet has struck a respon-
sive chord in its predominantly youthful audience.
14
Vienna is a city devoted to its art: posters
abound, both in the central city and the outskirts,
advertising collections at the Leopold and Albertina,
and theatrical offerings at the Burgtheater,
Volkstheater, and Operas. Even Viennese television
seems attuned to the city's artan adaptation of
Stephen King's Misery was about to be presented at
the Volkstheater, and the film version was frequent-
ly playing on a local television channel while I was
there. Over eight days in early June, I was able to
explore many of these artistic offerings; in addition
to visiting seven museums and many tourist attrac-
tionsfrom the Prater and Danube to Schnbrunn
Palace and the nearby city BratislavaI was able to
see six theatrical productions. Five of these shows
were part of Vienna's annual Festwochen and the
last was a production of the Volkstheater.
Unlike the Berlin Theatertreffen, which is
presented less than a month before the Festwochen
begins; the Vienna festival invites productions from
around the world. The festival, which ran from 14
May to 20 June, included a wide variety of offer-
ings. The musical programs centered on the works
of Alban Berg, and included concerts and produc-
tions of Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu. Dance per-
formances included works such as US-based chore-
ographer Meg Stuart's Do Animals Cry and Alain
Plaitel's Out of ContextFor Pina. Several of the
theatrical offerings also toured to the United States,
either before or after the Festwochen: Robert
Lepage's Lipsynch had been shown in New York at
BAM in 2009 as part of the Next Wave Festival,
Young Jean Lee's The Shipment premiered in New
York at The Kitchen in 2009, and Peter Stein's I
Demoni came to Governor's Island as part of the
Lincoln Center Festival a month after the
Festwochen.
During my time in Vienna I attended pri-
marily German-language productions, or at least
works created by German and Austrian directors. I
saw Peter Stein's production of I Demoni; Luc
Bondy's production of Euripides' Helena; Hass, a
work conceived and directed by the young Austrian
director Volker Schmidt; Stein's production of
Report from Vienna
Dan Venning
15
I Demoni, adapted from Dostoyevsky's novel The Devils and directed by Peter Stein. Photo: Andrea Boccalini.
Berg's Lulu; and Frank Castorf's Nach Moskau!
Nach Moskau!. I also visited the Volkstheater,
where I saw Hiob. Although I did not find these six
productions equally to my taste, they aptly dis-
played the rich variety of theatrical offerings avail-
able in Vienna.
I Demoni
The first show I attended, on my second
day in Vienna, was an eleven-and-a-half hour per-
formance, staged in Italian with German supertitles:
Peter Stein's I Demoni, which Stein adapted from
Dostoyevsky's novel (sometimes translated as The
Demons or The Devils, but more frequently as The
Possessed). This epic performance based on a liter-
ary text is in keeping with Stein's aesthetic: his 2000
production of the complete Faust ran around twen-
ty-four hours, and in 2007 he produced Schiller's
complete Wallenstein trilogy, which lasted eleven
hours; Stein is known, in contrast to many of today's
German directors, for possessing a reverence for the
original text that leads him to produce such monu-
mental theatrical events. The performance included
six breaks: four fifteen-minute intermissions and
two hour-long meal breaksso audience members
never had to sit for longer than an hour and a half;
during the second of these, dinner was provided. I
Demoni was first presented at Stein's mansion in
Umbria in 2009; its 2010 world tour included per-
formances at festivals in Milan, Vienna,
Amsterdam, Naples, Ravenna, Athens, and New
York. At the Vienna Festwochen, it was presented in
Halle E in the MuseumsQuartier, a massive audito-
rium for performances in the heart of the cultural
complex that also houses Vienna's Leopold Museum
and Museum Moderner Kunst (MoMuK).
Because of the nature of this show, it is
worthwhile to begin with a rather extended plot syn-
opsis. Set in a provincial Russian town around 1870,
the story I Demoni is expansive, and includes a
broad range of characters. The most central charac-
ters are the widow Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, her
companion the widower Stepan Tofimovich
Verkovensky, and their sons (from their earlier mar-
riages), Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Pyotr
Stepanovich Verkhovensky. At the opening of the
play, Varvara, played by Stein's wife Maddalena
Crippa, holds her own in discussions of history, lit-
erature, and philosophy with Stepan, who used to be
a professor and the family tutor. Stepan (played by
Elia Schilton) is an idealista liberal and early
socialist, he hosts an intellectual circle in Varvara's
household, where the members toast the "Grand
Idea" of a liberal future. Stepan and Varvara are also
clearly in love, like an old married couple of retired
academicsbut the widow refuses to acknowledge
Stepan's romantic attentions.
Varvara's and Stepan's householdand the
entire townis disrupted by the return of their sons
from abroad. Varvara's son, Nikolai, is an intensely
charismatic man (skillfully played by Ivan Alovisio)
who no sooner returns than he engages in a brawl
with one of Stepan's circle, gets challenged to a
duel, and passes out, drunk. Varvara wants to marry
Nikolai to the rich and beautiful Liza, the daughter
of a friend. Varvara's solution is to tell Stepan to
marry Darya. Stepan is crushed by this, since he
thinks of Darya as a child and loves Varvara, but she
threatens to throw him out if he doesn't accept.
Another complication is that Liza is herself in love
with the Swiss officer Mavriky. Stepan writes to his
son Pyotr to try to escape the marriage, but Pyotr's
return is equally disruptive to this society. While
Stepan is a liberal intellectual, Pyotr is a revolution-
ary firebrand (played with zeal by Alessandro
Averone), who betrays his father to Varvara, and at
first refuses to even speak to Stepan. Stepan's
impending marriage to Darya is indeed disrupted,
and the old tutor is forced to leave the house of the
woman he loves. Varvara offers Stepan an annuity,
but he refuses it. Pyotr's break with his father is over
differences in political philosophy; he despises
Stepan's "pompous words and confused ideas."
Pyotr isn't just rejecting his father, but the entire old,
intellectual idea of what Russia is and was.
As the play progresses, we meet more of
the community: Kirillov, a nihilist who extols sui-
cide as the supreme proof of man's freedom; Shatov,
a liberal student and former serf; the new town
Governor, von Lembke, and his wife Julya, who
begins an affair with Pyotr; Lebjakin, the alcoholic
brother of Stavrogin's secret wife Marya; and oth-
ers. Stavrogin fights his duel and wins; instead of
shooting his opponent, Gaganov, Stavrogin fires
into the air. Gaganov demands that the duel be
repeated twice, and each time, Gaganov misses and
Stavrogin refuses to shoot at his enemy. Stavrogin
shows honor here, but while drunk, pays a former
convict to murder his disabled wife Marya and her
brother. Meanwhile, Pyotr founds an organization of
students and revolutionaries. Pyotr's unruly "Group"
cannot even agree on goals or a name, and Shatov,
who had joined, soon leaves the Group. Pyotr accus-
es the Group of being essentially a literary circle
16
like Stepan's, and demands that, to prove their revo-
lutionary spirit, they murder Shatov. Pyotr desper-
ately wants Stavrogin to join his Group, but Nikolai,
who is blessed with charisma, prowesswhether in
a fistfight or a dueland the quality of leadership,
lacks any real ideology or purpose in life, and isn't
interested. The reasons for Stavrogin's dissoluteness
are revealed when he confesses his sins to the priest
Tikhon (played by Stein): Stavrogin admits that he
had sinned constantly, simply to prove that he could,
his greatest crime being the seduction of an
extremely young girl who subsequently committed
suicide. This confession was staged in a striking
fashion: first Stavrogin gave a letter with his con-
fession to Tikhon in an alcove in the far upstage left
corner of the stage, and as Tikhon read silently,
Stavrogin came far downstage and spoke the con-
fession directly to the audience. This scene thus
became a moment of intense communion between
Stavrogin and the audience.
The final parts of the play show the unrav-
eling of this small society. Cholera is ravaging the
countryside, and the closing of a local factory leads
to riots; von Lembke orders the police to suppress
troublemakers. Attempting to alleviate the situation,
the Governor throws a house party, where Stepan
gives a lecture about learning and the arts. Liza,
despite her love for Mavriky, leaves the party to
sleep with Stavrogin. During the end of the party,
and while Liza and Nikolai are together, a fire
breaks out in town. After the fire, a group of ruffi-
ans murder Mavriky and Liza, calling her
"Stavrogin's whore." Shatov reunites with his (pre-
viously unmentioned) wife, and then is promptly
murdered by Pyotr and his Group. Pyotr convinces
Kirillov to take the blame for the murder, and then
Peter Stein's I Demoni. Photo: Tommaso Le Pera.
17
kill himself. Varvara finds Stepan in the ruins of the
city, and takes him in, and the two finally declare
their mutual love as Stepan dies. As he is dying, the
pair quotes from the Gospel of Luke, and cannot
stop philosophizingfinally agreeing on their
mutual faith in God. As their scene plays out down-
stage, Stavrogin appears in a pool of light upstage,
places a gun to his temple, and shoots himself.
Other stage versions of Dostoyevsky's
novel existthe most notable is by Camusbut
Stein chose to create his own. This was probably
because the other versions eliminate more of the
plot to focus on certain aspects of the story, usually
Nikolai Stavrogin and his personal demons. Stein,
on the other hand, seemed to be trying to do with
Dostoyevsky what Chekhov did in shorter, more
discrete plays: give a snapshot of life in Russia at
the end of the nineteenth century. Like Stoppard's
trilogy The Coast of Utopia, the play is wide-rang-
ing in its discussions of philosophy and literature,
including liberalism (Stepan), anarchy (Pyotr), and
nihilism (Kirillov).
The actors were universally terrific.
Alovisio was supremely energetic and charismatic;
it was clear why his Nikolai Stavrogin was desired
by all the women, and why Pyotr so desperately
wanted Nikolai to join the Group. Schilton and
Crippa were especially affecting as Stepan and
Varvara; their scenes were charged with love, and
helped to anchor the emotional world of the play. As
Pyotr, Averone effectively portrayed the most dan-
gerous sort of man: one who is filled with revolu-
tionary fervor, but essentially without any guiding
ideology or sense of morality. The supporting cast
was equally talented, and all were supported by
Ferdinand Wgerbauer's stage design and Anna
Maria Heinreich's costumes. Wgerbauer's set was
sparse, consisting of white walls, a black curtain in
back, and a few sofas, chairs, desks, or platforms as
needed. Locations and situations were suggested
instead of represented: during the scene of
Stavrogin's duel, the floor of the stage was strewn
with leaves to suggest a forest, and after the fire, the
stage was covered with overturned chairs. This bare
set allowed the audience to focus more clearly on
the actors. Heinreich's costumes effectively differ-
entiated the characters; her opulent dresses and rid-
ing gear for Irene Vechio as Liza were particularly
effective in highlighting the young heiress' wealth
and beauty. The only two design misfires were a
fog-and-lighting effect employed during the fire and
Lize and Mavriky's murder that made these dramat-
ic scenes verge on the ridiculous, and the makeup
for Pia Lanciotti as Marya Lebjadkina, which made
Stavrogin's mad and handicapped wife look almost
like a circus clown.
While the performances were universally
strong and it was a rare treat to experience such an
expansive theatrical event, it seems to me that The
Demons was not an ideal theatrical performance.
Simply put, Chekhov's plays, taking at most a third
the length of time as Stein's production, present an
equally detailed image of the characters and philos-
ophy of late-nineteenth century Russia. Stein's pro-
duction felt more like an experiment than a play
can a massive novel be staged, in nearly its entirety?
My impression was reinforced by the fact that Stein
introduced the play, and, after each interval, every
new act, with a brief talk. During these talks, he held
in his right hand a well-read copy of Dostoyevsky's
novel, emphasizing his source material so emphati-
cally that it was almost comic.
Part of Stein's project is clearly to allow the
audience to spend a full day not just at, but with the
theatre. Towards this end, Stein came out to join the
audience during each interval (he signed my pro-
gram and posed for a picture with me, and also told
me during this time that he felt the play worked bet-
ter when staged in nontheatrical spaces, like a bas-
ketball court where it had been presented in Italy).
According to an interview with Stein in the pro-
gram, the dinner break was intended to include
"spectators and actors eating together [so that] a real
theatrical community is created where actors and
spectators can make conversation, share the
moment, get to know each other during a whole the-
atrical day." Unfortunately, other than Stein coming
out during the breaks, this didn't seem to be the case:
I did not see any actors eating with the audience
during dinner.
Dostoyevsky's novel obviously can be
stagedespecially with the talents of such skilled
actorsbut whether it should be is another ques-
tion. The production was a success, and at least to
some degree I felt Stein effectively did create a day
"with" the theatre for his audience. But the perform-
ance also felt like it came from a novel, not a play-
text; it did not feel designed for the theatre as much
as for a reader's imagination. I left wondering if
Stein's monumental productions that came from the-
atrical texts (like Wallenstein or Faust) were more
effective.
18
Helena
The second show I saw as part of the
Festwochen was Helena, translated from Euripides
by Peter Handke, and directed by Luc Bondy, who
was also serving as Intendant for the Festwochen.
Helena was a local production that will also be part
of the 2010/11 season repertoire at Vienna's
Burgtheater, Vienna's former imperial court theatre
(which features four tiers of seats, and where the
grand staircases are famously decorated with friezes
by Klimt).
Euripides' play is a reimagining of the
myth of Helen of Troy: what if Helen was not Paris'
mistress, nor even adulterous at all, but instead a
faithful woman who remained deeply in love with
Menelaus? In Euripides' version, Helen never
absconded with Paris to Troy; she was transported
to Egypt where she remained a captive of the
amorous King Theoklymenos, who desperately
wanted her to marry him. The Helen at Troy was in
fact a phantom spirit created by the gods. After the
Trojan War, Helen learns that Menelaus has landed
in Egypt, and the two reunite and plan to escape. In
order to leave, Helen, with the help of the King's sis-
ter Theonoe, convinces Theoklymenos that
Menelaus is in fact a messenger bearing news of the
death of Menelaus. Helen promises to marry
Theoklymenos after she and the "messenger" sail
out to sea to perform funerary rites for Menelaus.
Theoklymenos agrees, and Helen and Menelaus sail
away together. Theoklymenos is enraged and plans
to kill his sister, but Castor and Pollux arrive as the
twin dei ex machina and prevent him from carrying
out this murder.
Bondy's production remained faithful to
Euripides' story, but did so within the framework of
postmodern design including a set that seemed to
come out of a dreamscape. The curtain was open
when we took our seats, displaying Karl-Ernst
Herrmann's extravagant stage. The set was excep-
tionally deep, and the stage was divided vertically
by a shallow trough. Stage left was painted yellow
to look like sand, with piles of dirt upstage and
downstage, and the front of a small boat protruding
from left-center, as if it had run aground in the sand.
Stage right, in contrast, looked institutional: the
floor here consisted of gray wooden boards, and
nine sets of desks and chairs were positioned from
the upstage wall to the front of the stage. At center-
right was a tall, vertical pillar filled with ancient-
looking books; a small wooden ladder allowed
access to the books. Downstage center was a square
Euripides' Helena, directed by Luc Bondy at the Burgtheater, Wien. Photo: Ruth Walz.
19
pit filled with six tiers of steps.
As the play opens, Helen appears. Played
by the beautiful and powerfully emotional Birgit
Minichmayr, she is clearly naked under a slight yet
elegant white dress (one of Milena Canonero's many
gorgeous costumes), which constantly threatens to
reveal too much, and also highlights Minichmayr's
red hair. Minichmayr's Helen is a woman who could
indeed have launched a thousand ships. Helen
climbs the ladder, takes down a map from the book-
case, and begins telling the story of her birth, the
judgment of Paris, and her kidnapping and trans-
portation to Egypt. When she tells the story of her
conception (Zeus' disguise as a swan and rape of
Leda), she bangs one fist into her other palm, as if
to say, "oh well, yes, that happened."
As she tells her story, the seats at the desks
are taken by a chorus of schoolgirls, some in black,
and some in white, all reading books. It is clear that
they are reading her historyand the false history
that includes her infidelity with Paris. Minichmayr
portrays Helen as a powerful woman, extraordinari-
ly angry not only at the way she is objectified by
both gods and men, but also at the way she is being
betrayed by history. The girls in turn ridicule and
console Helen throughout the play; some behave
innocently, others lasciviously. They envy her, but
also pity her, want to be her, to be with her, and to
punish her. In other words, for these girls, Helen is
the ultimate "It-girl."
When Menelaus (Ernst Sttzner) arrives,
he brings with him his false "phantom" Helen (also
played by Minichmayr), who doesn't speak.
Menelaus delivers a monologue on the Trojan War
and his travels, while his false Helen, the silent
opposite of the outspoken protagonist, listens and
leaves. Menelaus meets the real Helen, and after
realizing he has been deceived by a phantom, the
two reunite in an emotional scene; they seal their
plan to escape by gently touching hands in a gesture
that is more familiar than a handshake, but more
tentative and distant than an embrace. After meeting
with Theone, who is played by Andrea Clausen as a
bald-headed, tattooed, pain-stricken woman who
has lost the use of her legs and must drag herself
around the stage, the reunited couple rehearse their
plan for Theoklymenos, interrupting each other with
deep kisses. Menelaus lies in the downstage pit,
while Helen leaves to change into robes of mourn-
ing.
Euripdies' Helena. Photo: Ruth Walz
20
21
Theoklymenos, played like a very danger-
ous beast of prey by the energetic Johann Adam
Oest, enters, all in black, sporting dark sunglasses,
sharp mutton chops, and facial tattoos. He paws at
the terrified chorus girls, and reveals a weapons
closet hidden stage left, filled with many types of
guns. Laughing, he plays Russian Roulette twice
with a revolver. Helen arrives, and when
Theoklymenos hears that Menelaus is "dead," he
offers his sympathy and then immediately proposes.
To get what she wants, her escape with Menelaus,
Helen has to essentially seduce Theoklymenos. This
is the central scene, because Helen must professin
front of the disguised Menelausher love for
Theoklymenos and the end of her love for her
"dead" husband. In other words, she must perform
the role of the false woman that she is believed by
the world to be. This performance must be good
enough to fool Theoklymenos, and throughout this
performance, Minichmayr's Helen is painfully
aware of how this performance must appear to
Menelaus. In order to assuage his fears, she kisses
him passionately each time Theoklymenos isn't
looking.
Finally, Theoklymenos allows Helen to
leave. A silhouette of a sail appears on the upstage
wall, and slowly fades away. Theoklymenos realizes
he's been fooled, and prepares to kill his sister with
a switchblade. Castor and Pollux, the dei ex machi-
na, are staged as two giant orbs that fall from the fly
space, crashing through the floorboards and flashing
with lights as their monologue resolving the action
is played over the speaker system, in a jarring, echo-
ing fashion. Theoklymenos, not sure which orb to
address, apologizes, and, in a moment of unexpect-
ed kindness, picks up his sister and puts her in a
chair. The chorus returns, and they begin to read
silently. In the final moment, the phantom Helen
runs on. The suggestion is obvious: she is exactly
the sort of woman Theoklymenos in fact desires,
and the only kind of woman such a violent man
could possibly deserve: one who is passive, silent,
confused, and promiscuous.
Bondy's staging of Helena was a visually
striking and emotionally fulfilling performance.
Although clearly Minichmayr's play, the perform-
ance became markedly more engaging after Oest
entered the stage as Theoklymenos; however, this is
partially due to the text, not Bondy's production,
since the King of Egypt provides the majority of the
conflict in the play. The central scene between
Helen, Menelaus, and Theoklymenos was electrify-
ing. Herrmann's set aptly reinforced Bondy's stag-
ing: this was a play about the way stories are told,
and how narratives, and the ways they are con-
structed, can have a direct effect on human lives. Yet
despite the fact that I found the performance thor-
oughly satisfying, during the extended, almost oper-
atic curtain-call there were a very few loud boos that
could be heard throughout the auditorium, especial-
ly as Bondy took his bow. In fact, costume designer
Canonero unfortunately tripped and fell during the
curtain call, suggesting that Hermann's set may in
fact have been a bit too complex, and that perhaps
similar effects could have been achieved more sim-
ply.
Hass
Hass (Hate), an environmental play staged
at the old gas works in the northeastern outskirts of
Vienna, conceived and directed by Volker Schmidt,
a young Austrian actor and director, was the
strongest piece of theatre I saw during my week in
Vienna, and one of the most affecting works of the-
atre I saw this entire year. The performance truly
began when the audience boarded busses in down-
town Vienna. The busses drove through the central
city, directly past the Burgtheater where I had seen
Helena the night beforeas if to say "this isn't
where our show is being presented." They then
drove us over the Danube, and into an industrial dis-
trict. While on the busses, we were divided into
three groups, to be separated when we reached the
performance site.
As we approached the gas works, the
busses stopped and were boarded by masked young
men, telling us to put away our cell phones, put our
hands forward, and listen. They told us how they
were oppressed by police, and as the busses pulled
into the gas works, we were greeted by the sight of
youths rioting against the police. After the riot, an
actor stepped forward to tell a pseudo-joke: "This is
a play about a man falling from a tall building. As
he falls, he keeps saying, 'So far, so good. So far, so
good.' But it's not about how you fall, it's about how
you land."
We were then met by the three central char-
acters, Karim (Karim Cherif), Daniil (Daniel
Wagner), and David (David Wurawa), who each
took one of the groups on a "tour" of the neighbor-
hood (each group got to go on all three tours, and
thus to meet all three central characters). Daniil,
stocky and fun loving, was Russian, and gave his
introduction in Russian as a stagehand translated.
Karim, who was North African, French, and
Serbian, an angry man who lived with his mother
and younger sister, spoke in French and German.
David was from Zimbabwe and spoke English; a
former drug dealer who had opened his own gym,
his German was less strong than that of the other
characters, and thus throughout the play he was
often silent, watching the action but saying little.
These tours revealed that the derelict buildings of
the gas works stood in for the derelict buildings of a
housing project, and that the rioting we had seen at
the opening had left a friend of the trio in the hospi-
tal, Karim in possession of a lost police firearm, and
David's gym destroyed.
After these three separate tours, all three
groups came together at the rubble-filled building
that represented David's destroyed gym; we
watched the remainder of the play together. This
consisted of a day in the life of these three young
men and their neighborhood. Like the introductory
tours, the rest of the play was staged as a procession
as we followed the actors from one area of the gas
works to another. We saw them visit friends, get
turned away by police as they tried to visit their hos-
pitalized friend, or get accosted by news agents in a
fancy car who were trying to make a story out of the
poverty of the projects and the aftermath of the riots.
The trio seemed to be looking for a purpose, but
finding none: Karim wanted to use his gun to shoot
a policeman in revenge for his friend while David
argued about the futility of violence and Daniil
mediated between the two.
In the play's most upbeat moment, the
actors and audience entered a building which had
been transformed into a dance club: audience mem-
bers were given free beers or bottles of water as the
actors began dancing. A break-dancing contest
began, accompanied by loud rap music, but was
interrupted by the entrance of the police. But instead
of arresting or beating up the youth, one of the
policemen joined in, competing with (and besting)
one of the break-dancers. This temporary dtente
was ended when a shot rang out: the police sprang
into action, breaking up the event. Although it was
unclear where the shot had come from, Karim found
himself face to face with a policeman; Karim drew
his gun. David and Daniil barely managed to pull
Karim away, and the trio escaped into a bathroom.
Their argument there was interrupted by the loud
flush of a toilet, and an older man in a three-piece
suit appeared, having heard the trio discuss Karim's
near murder of a policeman. Instead of taking
action, the old man told a story; the trio and audi-
ence hoped that he might be a sort of "deus ex toi-
Hass, conceived and directed by Volker Schmidt. Photo: Theresa Rauter.
22
let," but instead his story, about a dead friend of his,
was worthless. Karim, David, and Daniil were left
on their own.
The trio then went to visit a friend, Asterix,
who was high on cocaine, sporting nunchucks, and
then David and Daniil were detained and beaten up
by some policemenluckily Karim, who had the
illegal gun, managed to escape. Daniil and David
went to a late-night show at a fancy gallery, where
they were kicked out after Daniil failed miserably at
impressing a girl. The three hotwired a car and lis-
tened to music, which was interrupted as the radio
tells them of the death of their hospitalized friend.
This was staged in a spot where the audience was
looking past the trio towards the beautiful hills of
the Vienna Woods, symbolic of the sublime beauty
from which these young men constantly found
themselves barred. The sun, setting over the hills,
stood in for the sun rising in the morning as the
men's day was almost over.
Just as they prepared to go home, a group
of skinheads attacked, and the trio got the upper
hand. Karim pulled out his gun, and finally even
David urged him on to violence: he argued that if
Karim truly wanted to shoot someone, surely a
racist skinhead deserved it. But despite all his rage
and his earlier speeches, Karim was unable to pull
the trigger, and let the skinhead run away. He gave
his gun to David, and the trio prepared to separate.
At this last moment, a policeman appeared and
grabbed Karim, then, obviously accidentally, shot
him in the back. David returned and leveled the gun
at the policeman, who pointed his back. Yet neither
shot, and both slowly lowered their guns as the
ensemble arrived to deliver the epilogue: "This is a
story about a society that is falling. And it says to
itself, 'So far, so good'" Each of the eighteen
actors in the ensemble repeated the words "so far, so
good" in a different language.
Schmidt's play, which is rather closely
adapted from Matthieu Kassovitz's 1995 French
black-and-white film La Haine (Hate), was most
striking because the theatrical scenes succeeded at
representingor ghostingreal locations or
events. Through an act of surrogating, these derelict
buildings stood in for real or imagined neighbor-
hoods that most visitors to Vienna (including
myself) avoid and never see, or perhaps ignore
when they do pass through them. Imagination made
the spaces more vivid, made empty and graffiti-cov-
ered buildings seem like the paradigm for decrepit
housing complexes, or an actual sunset feel like a
Hass by Volker Schmidt. Photo: Theresa Rauter.
23
sunrise after a long night. The work also succeeded
because all three of the central actors were very
strong, especially the young Cherif, who was a
member of the Vienna Burgtheater ensemble from
2005 through 2009, and whose rage fueled the unre-
lenting energy of Hass.
One crucial difference between Kassovitz's
French film and Schmidt's Austrian play (other than
the obvious differences of artistic medium between
environmental theatre and film) was the multilin-
gual aspect of Schmidt's play. While Kassovitz's
film emphasizes multiculturality through the out-
sider status of the central characters (in the film they
are named Vinz, Hubert, and Sad, and are a Jew, a
black man, and an Arab), all three are French-born
and speak French throughout. Schmidt's play is
about the outsider status of immigrants, about those
whom globalization does not only exclude, but also
pushes down whenever they gain a foothold in a
new country; at least a dozen languages were spo-
ken throughout the performance. The play is partic-
ularly trenchant in Austria, with its strict immigra-
tion policy.
The one major weakness of the show,
which is also a weakness in the source material is
that while Hass purports to deal with an angry and
excluded underclass of youth, it in fact really deals
only with masculine youth. The company of eight-
een actors included only three women, and made me
wonder how deeply Schmidt had thought about the
ways these social problems affect women in lower-
class neighborhoods. I was riveted by the produc-
tion, finding it both moving and socially incisive,
but left thinking that it might have been a stronger
adaptation had Schmidt decided to make one of the
central characters female. This would have been a
striking departure from his source material, but he
had already revealed his ability to make such
changes by broadening his scope from the residents
of the slums of one city to the global underclass of
immigrants in any city.
Lulu
The fourth production I attended at the
Festwochen was Alban Berg's opera Lulu, which
was staged at the Theater an der Wien. Berg did not
Alban Berg's Lulu, directed by Jean-Romain Vesperini based on Peter Stein's interpretation. Photo: Armin Bardel.
24
live to finish the opera, which he adapted from
Wedekind's plays The Earth Spirit and Pandora's
Box, and so the third act was completed by Friedrich
Cerha, who was in attendance the night I went to see
the performance. Peter Stein created this production
of Lulu for La Scala in 2009, but was not involved
with the revival, which was rehearsed by Jean-
Romain Vesperini; according to a fellow audience
member, Stein purportedly considered asking for his
name to be removed from this revival, but decided
against doing so.
The opera begins with a prologue, staged
in front of a curtain decorated with circus images
from around the world. A lion tamer and clown
introduce a set of dangerous animals: a tiger, a croc-
odile, and Lulu, who is carried out like a wax stat-
ue. The opera then follows the plot of Wedekind's
plays relatively closely: Lulu is married to Dr. Gll,
but having an affair with an artist who is painting
her portrait. Gll dies of a heart attack, and Lulu
marries the painter, who himself commits suicide
when he discovers Lulu is having an affair with Dr.
Schn. Lulu emotionally blackmails Schn into
marrying her, but has many admirersan acrobat, a
gymnast, an old man named Shigolich who may be
Lulu's father, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, and
even Alwa, Schn's son. When Schn discovers
Lulu's infidelity, he gives her a revolver and orders
her to kill herself, but she shoots him instead. In an
interlude accompanied by Berg's music, projections
reveal that Lulu is arrested and convicted, but trans-
ferred from prison to a hospital after purposefully
contracting cholera. After escaping from prison,
Lulu seduces Alwa, and, although almost betrayed
by the acrobat and a Marquis, she escapes with
Alwa, Shigolich, and Geschwitz to London, where
she becomes a prostitute. In the final scene, she
meets with three clients: a strange professor, a
"Negro," and finally Jack the Ripper, who murders
Lulu and Geschwitz.
Stein's production was staged like we were
looking at a framed work of modern art in a muse-
um: the proscenium revealed small but elegantly
decorated sets (designed by Wgerbauer, who also
created the sets for Stein's I Demoni) dominated by
the colors white, red, and black (Lulu's house even
Lulu. Photo: Armin Bardel.
25
featured a white tiger-skin ottoman). Moidele
Bickel's costumes also featured the same colors, as
did Lulu's portrait, which made an appearance in
each act. Lulu's house, which was the setting for the
entirety of act 2, was dominated by a large black and
white staircase, curved at the top, slightly reminis-
cent of the curved architecture of the Guggenheim
Museum. Lulu herself, as played by Laura Aikin,
was something like a black-haired Columbina
dolla nearly emotionless and almost childlike fig-
ure, appearing unable to comprehend the way her
actions wreaked havoc in the lives of everyone she
touched. Yet, paradoxically, Aikin's Lulu was not
innocent since she clearly understood how men per-
ceived her: as a play-toy, a sexual animal. This Lulu
knew exactly what men wanted from her, and was
willing to exploit them in turn.
Although Daniele Gatti's music direction,
the orchestra, and singing were terrific (especially
Aikin as Lulu, Thomas Piffka as Alwa, and
Natascha Petrinsky as Geschwitz), Berg's music is
simply not to my taste. I was unable to follow a sin-
gle melodic line throughout the first act, and even
after I learned to find them in later acts, Berg's
music still seemed to be something of a traumatic
cacophony, filled with randomness punctuated by
sudden sparks of horns or drums. In fact, my
favorite music came in the third act, which Cerha
completed after Berg's death. Additionally, the
opera almost requires blackface, since the three
clients in the third act are played by the same actors
who portray Lulu's three husbands. The second
client, the Negro, is played by the same actor who
plays the painter (Roman Sadnik, in this produc-
tion), and the blackface employed seemed to me to
be a jarring and dated racist stereotype. Finally,
Stein's concept of staging Lulu like a piece of mod-
ern art on display in an ultramodern museum
seemed somewhat precious, a way of trying to find
a way to make the work more palatable. I left wish-
ing I had seen Wedekind's plays instead.
Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau!
The final show I saw at the Festwochen
and during my week in Vienna was directed and
conceived by Frank Castorf, who has served as
Intendant of Berlin's Volksbhne since 1991 and is
known for radical leftist reworkings of canonical
texts that make him a controversial figure for audi-
ences. Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! (To Moscow!
To Moscow!), a co-production of the Festwochen,
Volksbhne, and International Chekhov Theatre
Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau!, directed by Frank Castorf. Photo: Thomas Aurin.
26
Festival, which premiered 25 May 2010 in Moscow,
fell fully within Castorf's established aesthetic.
Castorf's production, which was an adapta-
tion and amalgamation of Chekhov's play Three
Sisters and short story "Peasants," was staged in
Halle E in the MuseumsQuartier, where I had seen I
Demoni six days earlier. The set, designed by Bert
Neumannwho also designed the costumescon-
sisted of two wooden-frame buildings; at stage left
was an open deck with a few chairs and staircase
leading down to the floor, while stage right was a
small hovel, with a metal stove and some pallets
lying on the ground. Behind these structures was a
wire-frame device used for video projections and
supertitles (actors spoke in both Russian and
German; when they spoke in one, the other language
was projected). Far upstage was a painted back-
ground of a forest.
The plot of Three Sistersthe story of the
three Prozorov sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina, who
live with their brother Andrey and the local regi-
ment of soldiers in a small backwoods town, and
dream of someday going back to Moscowplayed
out on the stage left platform. Castorf apparently
had no sympathy for the Prozorovs or their dreams,
staging the sisters as lazy, dilettantish, pedantic, and
petty. When Natasha (Kathrin Angerer) first
entered, an ingenuous country girl hoping to
impress, Olga (Silvia Rieger) literally screamed at
the top of her voice at the girl for wearing an out-
landish green belt. Throughout the play the sisters
constantly changed costumesfor example, at the
beginning of the play Masha (Jeanette Spassova)
was wearing a white dress; in the second act she
wore a frilly pink dress with fancy high heels; in the
third act she had a small black slip covered with a
billowy white robe, a pearl necklace, and an expen-
sive-looking gray scarf; in the fourth act she wore
an Art Nouveau-inspired black dress, with little
hints of gold. The other sisters changed with equal
frequency. The implication was that these were
women with nothing better to do than buy clothes
and complain about their privileged lives. Vershinin
(Milan Peschel) and Masha's affair was staged not
as a romance, but as the effect of a mutual boredom;
the two did not even seem terribly attracted to one
another. Castorf's suggestion was that these privi-
leged bourgeois women were not worthy of their
dreams, and that Natasha's usurpation of their
household was both inevitable and a positive out-
come.
Chekhov's short story "Peasants" deals
with a community of former serfs in a small town in
the backwaters of Russia. Nikolai Chikildeyev, a
waiter in a Moscow hotel, becomes ill and loses his
job, and must move with his wife Olga and daugh-
ter Sasha back to his native town of Zhukovo, where
the family moves in with Nikolai's impoverished
parents, Nikolai's alcoholic brother Kiryak and his
wife Marya, who Kiryak routinely beats, and
Nikolai's promiscuous sister-in-law Fyokla. During
the course of their time there, a fire breaks out
destroying much of the town, Fyokla is raped by a
group of ruffians and sent home naked, the family's
only valuable possession, a samovar, is taken by a
local inspector in lieu of taxes they can't pay, and
Nikolai dies after being treated by a quack doctor.
Olga and Sasha leave to return to Moscow and find
Olga's sister Klavdia Abramovna, who is a prosti-
tute. To survive their journey, they turn to begging.
In Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau!, Castorf
imagined that the town in which the Prozorovs and
Chikildeyevs lived was one and the same. At first
glance, the two stories seem diametrically opposite:
one deals with wealth, love, and philosophy, the
other with poverty, lust, violence, and sordidness.
Yet the two plots both include a fire in town, and
both also include characters who passionately desire
to return to Moscow. Castorf reinforced these con-
nections by double-casting most of the roles: Maria
Kwiatkowsky, who played Irina in Three Sisters,
played Sasha in "Peasants"; Angerer (Natasha in
Three Sisters) was both Fyokla and Klavdia in
"Peasants;" Lars Rudolph, who played Tuzenbach
in Sisters, played Nikolai in "Peasants," and Trystan
Ptter (Andrey in Sisters) played Kiryak. The
actions carried out by these characters paralleled but
was in stark contrast to that in Three Sisters: their
part of the play took place primarily in the small
hovel stage right, as opposed to the expansive space
used for Three Sisters. While the costumes for Three
Sisters were period and often ornate, those used in
"Peasants" were contemporary (tank tops, tee shirts,
miniskirts, hooded sweaters), worn, dirty, and dam-
aged; several characters in "Peasants" sported visi-
ble tattoos.
Although the two plots were parallel, for
the most part the characters operated in entirely sep-
arate worlds. Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! was less
an amalgamation of these two works by Chekhov
than a juxtapositionthe plot of Three Sisters
would be entirely interrupted for scenes from
"Peasants." The one exception came after the fire: in
Chekhov's short story, two wealthy young women
27
come to the poor district to watch the fire get put
out. They do not help, but afterwards give a coin to
the young Sasha. In Castorf's production, these
women were Masha and Olga Prozorov, visiting the
fire-stricken slums in their fancy clothes.
Many aspects of Castorf's production were
simply bizarre or off-putting. While Neumann's cos-
tumes for the sisters and peasants were excellent, he
inexplicably costumed the soldiers Vershinin,
Solyony, Tuzenbakh, Fedotik, and Doctor
Chebutykin identically, making them hard to tell
apart. For some inexplicable reason, Masha's hus-
band, Kulygin, played by Sir Henry (who also
designed the production's music), spoke in English
throughout the play, in a robotic monotone. At one
point, Irina, played by the immensely physically tal-
ented Kwiatkowsky, began jerking her body around
like a zombie. The live-feed camera was often inter-
estingsuch as when it captured, in close-up,
Andrey's face during a sexual encounter with
Natashabut in general, it felt derivative of The
Wooster Group, which I feel did a more satisfying
cyborg version of Three Sisters with its Brace Up!,
last staged in 2003. Occasionally, bizarre choices
worked: the musical choices, such as frequent
refrains from the Scissor Sisters' "Return to Oz"
were striking and effectively reinforced the action
on stage. In general, the sections adapted from
"Peasants" were clearer and more engaging, despite
the fact that this section did not come from a text
originally designed for the stage. Perhaps this was
because Castorf had slightly more sympathy for the
poor characters than for the spoiled and boring
Prozorovs. Much of the audience seemed as unhap-
py with the play as I was: there was a constant trick-
le of audience members leaving the theatre through-
out the production, and after the intermission, the
audience was a shell of what it had been before.
In a post-show discussion, Castorf called
Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! a democratic show,
protesting against totalitarianism. He argued that the
frequent Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavski-
influenced productions of Chekhov's playswhich
are, in Castorf's mind, also Stalinist versions, since
Stalin was a supporter of Socialist Realism and
Stanislavskiget Chekhov entirely wrong. Castorf
argued that the plays must be presented as come-
dies, and also claimed, citing Heiner Mller and
Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! Photo: Thomas Aurin.
28
Chekhov in one breath, that he is intensely devoted
to the text. Yet, these statements were not borne out
by his production. Castorf seemed to view the char-
acters of "Peasants" and Three Sisters with almost
equal disdain, suggesting that people who do not
change the world for the better are animals or zom-
bies, no matter with what resources they are born. If
this was intended to be a comedy, it was a very bit-
ter one indeed. Moreover, it struck me as ironic for
a high-concept director to argue against totalitarian-
ism, since Castorf's own productions that are so
intent on destabilizing the original texts are, in their
own way, creations of an artistic authoritarianism.
In short, while I found the juxtaposition of Three
Sisters and "Peasants" fascinating and illuminating,
and was highly impressed by the actors and most of
Neumann's design, on the whole I found Castorf's
production didactic, overly long, derivative of The
Wooster Group, and rather unpleasant to sit through.
Hiob
Hiob (Job) was actually the second pro-
duction I saw during my week in Vienna, but I dis-
cuss it at the end of this report since it was not a part
of the Festwochen, but an independent production
of the Volkstheater, directed by Michael Sturminger,
Artistic Director of the Volkstheater. The
Volkstheater frequently performs works by Austrian
authors, and Hiob is an adaptation by Koen Tachelet
of novel of the same name by the Jewish Austrian
author Joseph Roth.
Hiob is a modern take on the biblical story
of Job, the man who loses his family as part of a test
from God. Mendel Singer, played by Gnter
Franzmeier, is a Jewish teacher in a Russian shtetl.
He lives relatively happily with his wife Deborah
(Maria Bill), sons Jonas (Patrick O. Beck) and
Schemarjah (Till Firit), and daughter Mirjam
(Andrea Brderbauer). The play opens with a small
group of onstage musicians playing melancholic
klezmer music, as Mendel and Deborah have a
fourth childtheir son Menuchim (Arne
Gottschling). (All of the Singers' children were
played by adult actors, not children.) Menuchim is
developmentally disabledepileptic and probably
also mentally challenged. When the other children
play with him, he can't even effectively move his
own body, so they treat him like a living doll.
Koen Tachelet's adaptation of Joseph Roth's novel Hiob, directed by Michael Sturminger. Photo: Lalo Jodlbauer.
29
Mendel desperately wants to teach his youngest son
the Torah, but all Menuchim ever manages to say is
"Mama."
Mendel's family slowly disintegrates.
Jonah decides to go off and join the army, and
Shermejah leaves to make his fortune in America.
Mirjam is turning into a nymphomaniac, sleeping
with many local Cossackswhile out walking one
night, Mendel sees her from a distance. He and
Deborah are desperately lonely, feeling they have
lost their children. Suddenly, Shermejah sends a let-
ter and ten dollars from America. Shermejah is now
"Sam," and wants his parents to join him in New
York. Yet Mendel does not want to leave the Shtetl;
it is his home, even if America holds more promise
for them. However, Mendel, Deborah, and Mirjam
go; they must leave behind the
mentally unfit Menuchim.
The first act ends as "Sam"
greets his parents, saying:
"Vater, Mutter, welcome to
New York!"
In New York, things
begin to look up. Sam has
earned $15,000; they are rich
compared to how they used to
live. Deborah and Mirjam
begin to dress more elegantly,
and Mendel starts to learn
English. A letter arrives from
Menuchim: he appears to be
recovering, can now speak,
and may soon be able to come
to America. Mirjam starts
going out with Mac, Sam's
American friendwho is not
Jewish. But Mendel, no car-
toonish Tevye from Fiddler
on the Roof, is extremely
devoted to his family, glad as
long as his daughter is happy
and safe, whether or not her
boyfriend is Jewish.
Franzmeier's Singer would
never renounce his children:
at times he shouts, curses, and
resists the way the world and
his life are changing, but he is
ultimately filled with love.
But then the war
breaks out, it becomes impos-
sible to communicate with
Menuchim, and Sam and Mac
both join the American army. Both of Mendel's sons
die in the war, and Deborah shortly thereafter dies.
Mirjam resumes her obsessively promiscuous
behavior, even trying to seduce her father; Mendel
is forced to commit her to a mental hospital, where
she too dies. Mendel renounces God, burning his
yarmuckle in a scene hauntingly lit primarily by the
fire consuming the primary sign of his lost faith.
Mendel's friends and the spirits of his family come
to tell him to keep his faith, and remind him of the
story of Job who was tested by God and lost his
family, but Mendel insists he is no Job.
Mendel tries to make the best of life,
begins teaching again, and finally goes to a Seder,
although he, unlike his companions, wears nothing
Hiob. Photo: Lalo Jodlbauer.
30
on his head. But when he goes to open the door for
Elijah, Menuchim appears. Menuchim takes Mendel
to an elegantly decorated apartment, all in white,
and tells his father that he recovered and has
become a successful orchestra conductor.
Menuchim leaves for a performance, and Mendel
remains in the apartment. Mendel appears to know
that this beautiful, white dreamland is indeed either
a fantasy or heaven, not reality, but he chooses to
believe in this happy ending, whether or not it is
only in his imagination. Mendel once again covers
his head. Ultimately, the ending of the starkly-
staged Hiob was about one man's self-fashioning.
Mendel knows that he, unlike Job, will not receive a
new family, that Menuchim didn't really survive the
war, recover from his illness, and prosper as a musi-
cian. But by believing in this obviously imagined
falsehood, Mendel makes it true for himself. The
play ends with what the audience sees can only be
Sartre's concept of "bad faith": genuine belief in
what one knows to be false.
Through this production, Sturminger read-
ily displayed his skills as a director. He staged the
production using only seven actors: one actor
played each member of Singer's family, while the
versatile Thomas Kemper played all other roles (a
doctor, a rabbi, a Cossack, Mac the American, and
others). Ralph Zeger's set was simplistic, consisting
primarily of two moveable platforms and a back-
ground of stars on a black background (which
turned into flashing lights for New York in the sec-
ond act), but very effective in allowing the actors to
dominate the play, and providing varied and engag-
ing levels throughout.
Before seeing the show, I attended a talk by
the production's dramaturg, Hans Mrak, who also
put together a fascinating program filled with
poems, writings by Roth, and photographs both
from the production and from the 1930s in Russia,
Austria, and New York. Mrak spent most of his talk
discussing Roth's career as a writer, and how Hiob
fit into this; when talking about the Volkstheater
production, he also stressed the music, influenced
by early twentieth century Jewish klezmer music.
Yet although the text, music, and set were all a part
of making the production a success, the greatest
praise must go to Franzmeier, who made Mendel
Singer compelling and believable as a man of
absolute moral and personal integrity. Great credit
must also go to Sturminger, who, through his subtle
Hiob. Photo: Lalo Jodlbauer.
31
direction, allowed Franzmeier to create such a stun-
ning performance.
If there was one real downside to the per-
formance, it was the casting of Andrea Brderbauer
as Singer's daughter Mirjam. Brderbauer, although
a skilled young actress, unfortunately did not man-
age to look Jewish in the least: she had bright red
hair and Teutonic features. This is perhaps the one
downside to the ensemble system of theatres such as
the Volkstheater: the limited number of actors avail-
able means that at times the actors in the company
may not be ideal for the roles available. On the pos-
itive side, the ensemble system ensures that the
actors have developed a strong connection with one
another, as was the case in Hiob.
Concluding Thoughts
In addition to displaying the variety of the-
atre available in Vienna, the six productions I
attended seemed connected by a few common
themes. One of the more obvious was that of stylis-
tic reimagining or adaptation, taking the old and
making it new. This is part and parcel of the German
Regietheater (director's theatre), dominant in
Germany and Austria since the second half of the
twentieth century, in which directors have often rad-
ically altered or adapted texts to make the work their
own, instead of placing the primary authority with
the author or the text itself. In Regietheater, the
director claims the role of creator, devising a work
of theatrical art that is distinct not only from previ-
ous productions, but from the text from which he or
she draws. The productions that I saw were all, to
some extent, adaptations. Stein adapted
Dostoyevsky's novel for I Demoni, as Tachelet and
Sturminger adapted Roth's novel for the
Volkstheater's Hiob. Schmidt's Hass was an adapta-
tion of Kassovitz's film, and Castorf's production
radically re-envisioned Chekhov's play and short
story. Berg's Lulu is itself an adaptation of
Wedekind's "Lulu Cycle" plays. Perhaps Helena
might be called, out of these six, the production
most "faithful to the original," despite its opulent
and extreme set design, although here Euripides
himself totally altered older Greek myths.
Another through-line connecting all of
these plays was the theme of human beings treated
likeor turning intoanimals. I Demoni depicts
how easily lofty idealism can be corrupted into ani-
malistic violence: both the Group's murder of
Shatov and the gang of ruffians who kill Liza and
Mavriky were staged like beasts of prey bringing
down unfortunate victims. In Hiob, the young men-
tally ill Menuchim was literally called "ein Tier"
("an animal") by his siblings and other members of
the Russian community. Helen, in Euripides' play, is
a powerful woman who is mightily pissed off at
being treated like a creature that can be bought,
sold, or kept at the whim of gods and kings. In
Stein's staging of Lulu, Lulu was explicitly com-
pared to a circus animal through the prologue, in
which she was described as more dangerous than
the trained tiger or crocodile. Hass and Nach
Moskau! Nach Moskau! both depicted the potential
for bestial behavior in an ignored or oppressed
underclassin Hass there was the unchecked vio-
lence of the opening riots and the mindless savagery
of the skinheads, while in his adaptation of
Chekhov's short story, Castorf portrayed the peas-
ants as almost literally animals: growling, barking,
hooting, hissing, biting. Olga and Sasha in Castorf's
play drank milk from pails like cats. This common
theme seemed to reflect an overarching anxiety, per-
haps shared by these directors, about the role and
status of human beings in society, and whether
humans will continue to be differentiated from
beasts or are cogs in a wheel in an increasingly eco-
nomically divided world.
As a final thought, I wanted to note that
despite seeing many shows, I was also reminded
throughout my time in Vienna of several produc-
tions I had hoped to see, but could not, since my
week was already packed with theatre. I unfortu-
nately had to miss a production of Das weite Land
(The Undiscovered Country), which was playing at
the Theater in der Josefstadt; the play is by Arthur
Schnitzler, one of Vienna's most notable play-
wrights. The Burgtheater was also presenting Alfred
de Musset's epic Lorenzaccio, directed by Stefan
Bachmann and staged with only ten actors
My theatre-going in Vienna was exception-
ally fulfilling, even though I did not enjoy the final
two productions I attended, Lulu and Nach Moskau!
Nach Moskau!, as much as the earlier works. All six
showed the richness of theatre available in Vienna
in the spring, and I expect that many of these
Festwochen shows will continue to achieve success
as they continue to tour the globe.
32
A People's Theatre
Populist approaches to theatre have deep
roots in German culture, from the Volkstheater at
Worms in the 1880s, to Erwin Piscator's experi-
ments with political theatre in the 1920s, to Brecht's
monumental achievements in the 1930s and 1940s.
The motivations for such an approach are multifold,
whether stemming from a desire to decentralize the-
atre, to move it to the outer provinces and away
from the elitist audiences of the urban centers, or
from an effort to generate social change and galva-
nize a population into revolutionary action, the idea
of a people's theatre movement has been a popular
one in Germany for the last 130 years.
Advancing this tradition, and falling into
the category of those theatre companies that are try-
ing to decentralize, or de-urbanize theatre is the
work of Uli Jckle and his company, The Forum for
Art and Culture. Founded in 1990, Jckle promotes
his company's annual productions as the "other"
national theatre, and every year for the past fifteen
years, they have devised and performed a show in
the Lower Saxony region of Germany, near the
remote village of Heersum.
But, what makes this event so interesting is
that the majority of the village (sometimes as many
as 300 people) participates in the production every
year, as actors, as set-builders, as costume assis-
tants, as truck driversalmost everyone contributes
in some way. It is a "people's" theatre in the best
sense of the word. Forum Heersum embraces all
classes, ages, and types of people, the oldest being
eighty, and the youngest being six.
Forum's approach to devising plays is a
collaborative dream. They choose the ground
together, as a company, and then they all meet in an
ancient house in Heersum: producers, composers,
musicians, director, designers, and actors all come
together to brainstorm for several weeks. Once a
sufficient number of ideas have been generated,
they are turned over to the company's resident play-
wright, Carsten Schneider, who creates a baseline
script, which is understood to be open to changes,
adjustments, additions, and subtractions during the
rehearsal process. Then the professional and many
of the amateur actors from the village take that
script and rehearse with it for several weeks, some-
times embellishing it, sometimes deconstructing it.
They take what is useful to them and discard what is
not, until they gradually have a working script,
though that script continues to change even through
the run of the play. The company is proud of the fact
that every year they start this project with no idea
how it will end.
The Landscape
Heersum productions incorporate the land
itself into each play. Because of its communal and
site-specific approach to creation and performance,
Jckle calls this type of theatre "Landscape
Theatre." The location is chosen first, and then the
play is written and developed for that place specifi-
cally, incorporating regional folklore, local current
events, and popular themes into the narrative.
Forum tries very hard to make each location instru-
mental to the action of the play. 2009's Heinde Park,
for example, was set in a local waste processing
facility. The play, a satire of German eco-politics,
follows hapless Dieter Kasupka and his long suffer-
ing wife on a journey to claim his inheritance, a rat-
infested hotel called "Heinde Park," located "im
Arsch der Welt," the ass of the world. The garbage
dump backdrop served as the perfect representation
of the ass of the world, while at the same time it was
instrumental to the plot of the playDieter goes
there in the first scene to throw his trash and old
belongings away. The fact that he doesn't recycle is
what fuels this satire about consumer waste and dis-
posability.
Trekking Theatre
Jckle seeks to break down the barriers
between performance and spectator in various ways.
He frequently has the actors move through and
speak directly to the audience. He also gives the
audience the freedom to walk around during the per-
formances, to get as close to or as far from the
action as they wish, rather than stuffing them into
the pre-assigned seats of traditional theatre. Thus
the audience gets to choose how, where, and from
what distance they will experience the show.
Some have termed these Forum shows "Trekking
Theatre," because the audience walks from playing
area to playing area during the course of a produc-
tion. In the case of Heinde Park, the audience tra-
versed over three kilometers of terrain, beginning in
a waste processing plant and then moving around,
atop, and to the other side of a huge garbage moun-
Forum Heersum: Uli Jckle's Landscape Theatre
Brian Rhinehart
33
tain. According to Jckle the walk must neither be
too short or too longtoo long and people become
tired, too short and they are unable to experience the
relaxed atmosphere of people undergoing a theatri-
cal experience together. To keep things lively and
entertaining on the walk, several live bands play
along the wayone group of musicians (costumed
as garbage flies) was made up of children, ages
seven to eleven. Jckle also believes strongly in
controlling the size of the audience, keeping it under
500 in order to preserve the delicately balanced
interaction between performer and spectator. He
insists on not using microphones or any type of
sound amplification equipment unless it's absolute-
ly necessary, the central aim being to "provide
warmth and nearness between the performers and
the audience." He also proclaims his productions to
be independent of the weather. On the day of the
premiere the weather was far from clement. It was
windy, cold, and rainy, and the crowd was huddled
together to stay dry and warm, while the actors,
many of them volunteers from the village, many of
them children, stood out in a torrent of rain and per-
formed as if the conditions were ideal. His approach
to working with non-actors is singular; Jckle
believes that it doesn't make sense to try and turn
amateur actors into professionals, but it does make
sense to take what makes each individual special
and unique and utilize those attributes to the maxi-
mum theatrical effect. According to Jckle the ama-
teur actors from Heersum have boundless enthusi-
asm, dedication, and energy, so trying to control the
process in a micro-managing way is to work from a
place of fear and insecurity; therefore, he mixes the
amateur cast with the professionals to give them a
point of orientation, to help them to take risks, and
to give them a model for success. And then he just
lets them be themselves and have fun.
The Plays
Forum plays subvert any expectation of
linearity or cohesion with loosely connected sub-
plots, fragmented characterizations, songs, dances,
and outrageous visual spectacles. In Heinde Park,
for example, there were giant earthmovers, cranes,
and dump-trucks chasing actors through a garbage
dump. The texts are full of puns, rhymes, and vari-
ous plays on words, and the tone is whimsical, play-
ful, and humorous. In addition, there is always a
musical element. Many of the songs are original and
Uli Jckle's Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
34
written by composer Jochen Hesch, whose group of
musicians travels from Berlin every year to partici-
pate in the production. In addition to using original
music, Jckle and his collaborators liberally sprin-
kle popular American and German songs into the
show, some retaining the original lyrics, and some
whose lyrics have been transformed to fit the cir-
cumstances of the dramatic moment. For instance,
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone," by Joan Baez,
and Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man," are
used in their entirety, with the original words, but
Peter Fox's song, "Haus am See" ("House by the
Lake") is transformed almost completely. For exam-
ple, the lyrics of the song's chorus
And the moon shines bright on my
house by the lake
Orange tree leaves are on the way
I have twenty children, my wife is
beautiful
All come over, I need never go out,
(Fox)
are changed to:
And the moon shines bright on the
garbage in the lake.
Sheets of toilet paper lying on the road.
I have twenty children, my wife is
beautiful.
All come over, I need to go out before.
Jckle takes a populist approach to theatre and has
no reservations about utilizing spectacle to purely
entertain an audience. He prefers that the props and
set pieces of Forum productions be as big and awe-
inspiring as possible, sometimes shockingly so.
Heinde Park's visuals included a huge rocket ship
made of wood and canvas (that actually lifted off a
launch pad), cranes, earthmovers, and seemingly
out of control dump trucks, all of which were
designed to thrill and amuse the audience.
Dieter Kasupke
The Kasupke family are the frequent pro-
tagonists of Forum productions. The plots of these
plays are fairly predictable, and they almost all uti-
lize the classic device of the "journey," in which a
hero embarks on an epic journey, encounters various
trials and tribulations that test his body and spirit.
Finally, after a great struggle, he pushes through
these obstacles and achieves his goal. Typically,
along the way he experiences a significant and sat-
isfying moral progression. But Forum productions
Uli Jckle's Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
35
turn this mythic hero convention on its ear, sup-
planting the exalted and noble heroes of antiquity
with the bumbling, hapless Dieter Kasupke and his
family of clownish misfits. The Kasupkes first
appeared in Forum's early productions (staged in a
beer hall) as a family living in the small village of
Heersum, who yearned to go to the big city of
Hildesheim (thirty-two kilometers away), but who
somehow always missed the bus. They appeared
again as central characters in Forum's 2005 produc-
tion of Der Sympate, in which Dieter Kasupke tries
to drive his Ford Granada to Italy, but gets lost. The
family ends up in Heersum and soon gets in trouble
with the German mafia. After a series of misunder-
standings are corrected, all ends happily. Their next
appearance was in 2007's production, Die
Runkelritter, in which Dieter mis-programs his car's
navigation device, and it magically places them in
the eleventh century, where he has to battle a knight
in a jousting competition. After much struggle with
the navigation device, the family manages to return
to their own time, and again it's a happy ending.
Heinde Park also utilizes this epic-journey model,
with Dieter chasing his inheritance all the way to the
"ass of the world." Finally, his childhood bed, which
he had thrown away at the beginning of the play,
shows him a vision of the consequences of his flip-
pantly wasteful, environmentally irresponsible
lifestyle. With this new understanding, he agrees to
change his ways and become a better, more respon-
sible person.
Station 1: The Waste Processing Plant
Heinde Park takes place over three kilo-
meters and a series of eight "stations," to which the
audience walks in sequence. At the first station
everyone in the audience is given an orange and yel-
low safety vest, of the kind that is worn by the
employees of the waste plant. The vests serve both
a practical and a theatrical purpose; they're practical
in that they keep the audience visible and thus safe
from the rumbling trucks and equipment, but they
also serve to ensure an interactive environment
between the audience and the performance. As a
theatrical device distributing the vests makes the
audience a "part of the action," they bind individu-
als together within the communal experience of the
show, connecting them in a way that conventional
theatre does not. After donning their safety vests,
the audience walks up an incline, into an elevated
waste processing facility. Along the way they pass a
large open door and are privy to the spectacle of a
Uli Jckle's Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
36
giant earthmover destroying automobiles. Once the
audience has settled in and gotten comfortable on
portable chairs in the parking lot of the building, the
play begins. A group of environmental activists
enter, all of them chained to a large prop anchor (to
protest against environmental atrocities such as seal
and whale killing), and they are quickly chased off
by an employee of the waste plant. Evel Knievel
then roars up in a red, white, and blue car, takes out
a bullhorn, and establishes himself as the narrator.
He begins to tell the story of the Kasupke family,
who arrive soon after, pulling an old trailer full of
their garbage. As part of their grand "cleaning day,"
Dieter begins to throw away all of his old, unwant-
ed possessions: a broken hair dryer, barbells, and a
weight bench, a love letter he once wrote to his wife
Rita, and various other items. His son throws away
his Luke Skywalker action figure, and his two
daughters dispose of a book of fairytales. While
Dieter is squabbling with Grandpa Kasupke, Rita is
convinced by one of the waste employees to recycle
the family car for money. Afterward, from within
the compact wreckage, Dieter finds a letter saying
that he has inherited a hotel in the "ass of the
world." He determines to go there and claim his
inheritance. Meanwhile Dieter's twin daughters and
son have been accidentally carried off by one of the
bulldozers at the waste plant. Rita and Dieter pur-
posefully abandon Grandpa and take off in a
garbage truck to find the children and the hotel.
Grandpa asks Evel Knievel for a ride, and they roar
off in search of the family. The audience then leaves
Station One, and on its way to Station Two passes
the great doors to the waste processing facility.
Again they witness the giant plows and cranes
destroying cars.
Station Two: The Blue Angel Abduction
The somewhat complicated sub-plot is
introduced at Station Two, and it is here, among the
giant containers that the audience meets many of its
characters, including Heinde Park's central antago-
nist, "Yellow Sack," who kidnaps one of the "Blue
Angel" children from their mother. The Yellow Sack
is, in German waste management parlance, a type of
general garbage bag used throughout the country,
into which many people erroneously put recyclable
materials, making it less than eco-friendly, and a
Uli Jckle's Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
37
Blue Angel is a symbol put on products to indicate
that they are made with progressive, energy-saving
technology. After Yellow Sack has taken one of the
tiny Blue Angels, the fairytale characters (from the
book thrown away by Kasupke's son) creep out of
one of the containers and discuss their plight with
the Blue Angels. They agree to help each other find
what is dear to themthe Blue Angels want to find
their little one, and the fairytale characters want to
find the Kasupkes. Both groups then exit up the hill
toward the garbage dump. The audience follows. On
the way to the next station the Blowfly Band plays
for the audience by the side of the road.
Station Three: The Throwaway Society
This satirical sub-plot is developed further
at Station Three, where the audience watches a
meeting of the wasteful, pollution-prone
"Throwaway Society." The president of the
Throwaway Society forms an alliance with Yellow
Sack, and they make plans to shoot the world's
garbage to the moon, then sing a song about garbage
and their hatred of recycling. They are then met by
Dieter's son Kevin's discarded Luke Skywalker doll,
who joins in the song and afterward volunteers to
pilot the mission to the moon. They leave and the
audience again follows. On the way to the next sta-
tion, the audience is approached by the eco-activists
of Station One, who attempt to persuade them to
join their movement. As the audience passes them
on the way to Station Four, the eco-activists begin
singing and marching off in another direction.
Station Four 4: Rocket to the Moon
Seated on a hill about 200 meters away
from the performance, the audience looks down on
a large collection of garbage containers surrounding
a rocket-ship. During the devising process, it was
discovered that the containers, when struck, gave
off a deep booming sound, so the company created
a drum-song, played by the Garbage Society at the
beginning of the scene. The effect is a totally sur-
prising and unique theatrical experience. The char-
acters are too far away to hear any dialogue, so their
lines are spoken, as if relayed to the audience, by
two actors in rabbit costumes, who are perched on
the side of the hill, speaking through megaphones.
Dieter and Rita arrive in their garbage truck and are
witness to the launch of The Throwaway Society's
first garbage rocket to the moon. At the last minute
they realize that their children are aboard the rocket
and react with trepidation. The eco-activists assault,
but are quickly packed into vans and removed from
the scene by The Throwaway Society. The audience
then climbs to the top of the hill.
Station Five: Therapy Session
Station Five is again staged on the side of
Uli Jckle's Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
38
the hill, but the audience is much closer to the
action, ten meters or so. The audience watches a
therapy session for the domestic waste that Dieter
has thrown away. The everyday objects are played
by actors dressed in exaggerated and whimsical cos-
tumes: a toilet-flushed hamster, a hairdryer, a tire, a
dresser, a lamp, and an old Teddy Bear are all gath-
ered around a Dieter look-alike dummy. They kick
and yell at the dummy, as instructed by a radio ther-
apist costumed as a huge radio. Grandpa Kasupke
enters and tells the domestic waste how to exact
their revenge on Dieter. He tells them that they must
find his childhood bed, where he is vulnerable and
compelled to say only the truth. The domestic waste
exits to find Dieter's child-bed, and the audience fol-
lows.
Station Six: Heinde Park
The audience walks to the top of the hill
and finds the hotel, Heinde Park. Soon after the
audience arrives, so do Rita and Dieter. They find it
to be infested with rats, so they call on the Cleaners.
The Cleaners (people from the village costumed as
detergents, brooms, mops, and so on), after singing
a medley of cleaning product jingles, clear out all
the rats and present Rita and Dieter with a huge bill.
Soon after the Cleaners exit, the eco-activists enter,
and Dieter gives them all jobs at the hotel. Rita, is
disgusted by the situation, and after learning of the
fairytale characters' plan from Grandpa, leaves
Heinde Park (after singing "Stand By Your Man") in
search of Dieter's child-bed. When Dieter realizes
that she has left him, he goes wild with grief and
Evel Knievel has to knock him unconscious to keep
him from hurting himself. The rats see this as their
opportunity and re-invade the hotel, chasing the
eco-activists away. The audience moves on to the
exposed top of the hill.
Station Seven: The Moon
Station Seven is set on the moon. The audi-
ence sees huge digging machines, bulldozers, and
cranes, ostensibly used to process the great amounts
of waste being shipped there from the Earth. All the
machines are operated by Werner von Braun. They
chase Dieter's children across the moon until the
Luke Skywalker doll intervenes and saves them.
Under the control of von Braun, the Little Princess
Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
39
takes Skywalker and the Kasupke children prisoner
.
Break Station
The audience is then taken to a refreshment
area, where they can purchase food and drink. After
twenty minutes the show begins again, as Yellow
Sack and the President of The Throwaway
Societystanding on a balcony above the crowd
plot to take over the world. The audience then
leaves for the final station.
Station Eight: Dieter's Transformation
At the final station, the Blowfly Band
entertains while the audience enters and takes their
seats. All the characters are now present: the
Kasupkes, the Blue Angels, The Throwaway
Society, Yellow Sack, Evel Knievel, the discarded
domestic waste, and the fairytale characters. Dieter
has been invited onto a television show to tell his
success story, but it's a trap. The television studio is
fake, and once Dieter sits down for his interview,
the domestic waste spring their trap, bringing on his
childhood bed and forcing him to lie on it. As he
does so he sees visions of how selfish and irrespon-
sible he has been with both his family and his waste.
Dieter describes these visions in vivid detail to those
gathered around him and then denounces Yellow
Sack and the Throwaway Society. He ends the play
by pronouncing that everyone and everything is
important and should be treated with respect, and by
swearing to give every person and every piece of
garbage a true and useful place in his life. Thus,
Forum uses humor, spectacle and a well-chosen site
to address an issue that confronts the lives of every-
one in the community, that of consumer waste and
individual responsibility. Their productions are an
inspiring vision of how a theatre company and a
community can collaborate to create productions
that are affordable, accessible, and meaningful to
all. Forum's intent is not merely to produce a com-
mercial product, one prepared by a group of theatre
professionals for passive consumption by an experi-
entially disengaged audience, but, on the contrary,
their goal is to create a dramatic art form that direct-
ly involves the community in the creative process,
from the first idea to the last performance. The peo-
ple of Heersum, Germany can truly say that each
year's production is their own, from start to finish.
40
Heinde Park. Photo: Courtesy of The Forum for Art and Culture.
41
In Munich for the final week of the 2009-
2010 season (July 19-25) at the state theatre, the
Residenz, I was nevertheless able to see a wide
selection of offerings from the current repertoire,
thanks to the German custom of mounting a differ-
ent production each evening. I began with a well-
known but still infrequently produced classic of the
German Expressionist theatre, Georg Kaiser's From
Morn to Midnight, directed by Tina Lanik. Lanik
has been a house director at the Residenz since
2002, although she has also mounted works at the
Berlin Deutsches Theater, the Vienna Burgtheater,
and elsewhere. For the Kaiser she and designer
Stefan Hageneier have created a striking, highly
stylized, almost cartoonish set using for the most
part simple geometric forms in bold red with black
and white accents. Always present is a large
Brechtian upstage sign composed of bold letters that
are sometimes illuminated, sometimes backlit,
sometimes toned with different colored light,
"GELD VERSCHLECHTERT DEN WERT"
(Money corrupts value). The pudgy, mustached
Lambert Hamel is a perfect visual representative of
the doomed cashier of the play, who steals money to
help an attractive woman (Juliane Khler) who
comes to his bank in the opening scene, is rebuffed
by her and then enters into a wild day of dissipation
leading to his final encounter at midnight with the
police and with death.
The visual style is firmly established in the
opening sequence, showing the main hall in a small
bank. Three windows are open in a blank orange-red
wall above which appears the "GELD"-sign. The
cashier occupies the center, engaged in apparently
endless repetitive stamping, sorting, and stacking of
papers. Three chairs to one side are for waiting
clients, who are shown in by a grotesque porter
(Dennis Herrmann) whose various limbs seem to be
continually moving in different directions. The lady
is among the various clients served, but the most
striking is a slight female figure whose lower face is
covered by a scarf above which appear a pair of
heavily made-up eyes. Only near the end of the
scene does she remove the scarf to reveal her entire
face, a heavily made-up death mask. This death fig-
ure (Anne Schfer) will appear in each of the
Report from Munich
Marvin Carlson
Georg Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, directed by Tina Lanik. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
scenes, so that the cashier is literally accompanied
by death throughout his journey, beginning as a
maid, and moving through a member of the cashier's
family to become at the end a Salvation Army girl.
Probably the most elaborate and visually
impressive scene is the fifth, when the cashier
attends a bicycle race and uses this as one of the
occasions to throw away part of the money he has
stolen. Against the usual red, white, and black back-
ground, a set of identical bicycle riders, their hel-
mets, machines, and tight-fitting body suits all in
glowing green, take up their positions downstage
and ride rapidly in place as the cashier and judge
watch from above. Two other particularly impres-
sive scenes are those that follow. The next shows the
cashier seated alone in an expensive restaurant,
served by the angular Denni Herrman and sampling
a series of grotesque women, somewhat in the man-
ner of the Tales of Hoffman, from display cases in an
upstage line. The final Salvation Army scene pro-
vides a very amusing parody of modern testimonial
stagings, from reforming alcoholics to religious
revival meetings, with a small boy in the back-
ground lifted from time to time from the ground by
a mass of white balloons, each one bearing the word
"soul," and requiring someone to pull him back to
earth. At the end of this scene the disillusioned
cashier throws his money about and as the Salvation
Army members scramble for it, he retires upstage
where, in a small pool of light, he shoots himself.
The policeman who finds the body rifles through it
and pockets the last bits of cash to provide the pro-
duction's final image.
The next evening the Residenz presented
Molnr's Liliom, best known to English-speaking
audiences as the basis for the musical Carousel. The
director, Florian Boech, who has been a house direc-
tor at this theatre since 2001, updated the action
from turn of the nineteenth century Budapest to a
contemporary night club, where Lilliom (Michael
von Au, who also joined the permanent Residenz
company in 2001) plays not a carousel barker but
the lead singer of the club, who in the course of the
action has the opportunity to show off his vocal skill
with four or five numbers. The carousel is visually
invoked by placing the action on a turntablesur-
rounded by three basically neutral walls with arched
openings and sketchy, clearly painted scenes
behindwhich during the night club scenes rises
about a foot to reveal a series of lights that blink on
From Morn to Midnight. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
42
and off around its perimeter. The setting and serv-
iceable but not particularly striking costumes are by
Dorothee Curio.
Aside from the visual updating, Boesch did
not make a really innovative adjustment to the play,
and it seemed as a result a bit flat and predictable,
except for the dynamic presence of von Au and the
warmly sympathetic Julie of Anne Schfer, playing
a very different sort of role from her death maiden
of the night before. The final scenes after Liliom's
death, which move into the realm of Expressionism,
seemed to me particularly thin. The set was con-
verted into heaven by lowering a rather flimsy and
tacky red gauze curtain to partly cover the walls,
along with a spinning disco style light globe in the
center. Perhaps the idea was to suggest a rather
tacky heaven, but the effect was still a pretty thin
one. At the end, the carousel night club returned
with dancing couples circling the stage.
Berlin director Michael Thalheimer has
had a very significant effect on the German direct-
ing of the new century, and his influence could be
seen, to a greater or lesser extent, in several of these
current Munich productions. Thalheimer's is a dis-
tinctly minimalist style, praised by his supporters as
revealing the core of a play and condemned by his
detractors as removing essential elements. In any
case, he and others have set the current widespread
German style of presenting even large and sprawl-
ing five-act classic dramas in one and a half to two
hours without an intermission. Strikingly, four of
the five productions I attended in Munich, all works
of the classic European repertoire, had been cut to
fit this pattern.
The result was much more effective with
Gerhart Hauptmann's Rose Bernd, the next play I
saw, a classic of the German naturalistic theatre that
I last saw in Berlin some twenty-five years ago
where it ran a solid four hours or more, as was com-
mon in the German theatre in those days. This stag-
ing, by Enrico Lbbe, clocks in at a mere ninety
minutes. This is Lbbe's first production in Munich,
most of his work during the past decade having been
in Leipzig, where he was house director. Not only in
the severe cutting of the text, but in the minimalist
setting and acting the director, at least in this pro-
duction, faithfully follows the Thalheimer model.
The striking setting, by Hugo Gretler, consists
essentially of a large earth colored platform, tilted
toward the audience and open on three sides to
blank walls. Its only decoration throughout the
evening is a group of perhaps thirty aluminum milk
buckets collected in a seemingly random group far
upstage to the left. In the striking beginning of the
Ferenc Molnr's Liliom, directed by Florian Boech. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
43
production (in a sequence repeated near the end), a
female scream echoes across the empty stage and
the prone body of Rose (Lucy Wirth) pushes
through the buckets from some upstage void. As she
does so, several of them tip over, releasing a dark
oily liquid, which surrounds her body and soils her
crude flower-print dress as she slides downstage
with the flowing tide.
The simple, strongly presentational style
heavily emphasizes the isolation and self-centered-
ness of the individual characters in Hauptmann's
stark Silesian peasant tragedy. Rose, unwed and
pregnant with the child of Flamm, a married neigh-
bor, is the projected object of desire of almost all the
other characters in the drama, not only farmer
Flamm (Dirk Ossig) but as a replacement for her
dead children by the grieving Frau Flamm (Juliane
Khler) and as a sexual object by the Dionysian
rogue Steckmann (Marcus Calvin, complete with
bunches of ripe grapes as aides to seduction), and
the awkward bookbinder Keil (Thomas Grle) who
loses an eye to Steckmann's violence in one of the
play's most shocking physical moments. After the
brief opening sequence Rose stands in a pool of
light downstage left and the remaining characters
appear in a frozen line silhouetted upstage against
the wall of rough stone that serves as a backdrop,
rather suggesting the figures in a medieval dance of
death. Above them on the wall is carved in Gothic
letters the text "Tue Recht und scheue niemand,"
(Do the right thing and fear no one), an expression
of the rigid morality of the peasant village which
haunts and at last destroys Rose. I was also struck at
seeing two Residenz productions in three nights
with this sort of Brechtian legend dominating the
evening's offering. One by one the other characters
come downstage from the line, beginning with
Rose's father (Ulrich Beseler). Frequently they take
up a position downstage opposite that of Rose and
like her primarily address the audience. What seems
in the description flat and artificial take on, as
Thalheimer discovered, a considerable intensity,
especially if the actors are capable of generating this
without the normal interplay. Moreover, the scenes
are varied with more intimate encounters between
Rose and Frau Flamm, more erotic encounters
between Rose and Streckmann, and more violent
encounters between Streckmann and Keil. When
Rose announces, near the end of the play, that she
has killed her baby girl to spare her from the sort of
existence Rose herself has led, the production
comes full circle. Again rose screams and collapses
Gerhart Hauptmann's Rose Bernd, directed by Enrico Lbbe. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
44
in the despoiling muck on the stage floor, this time
rising with a darker stain around her genitals, as if
she has in fact aborted her destroyed child.
The production I enjoyed the most this
week was a most original reading of Much Ado
About Nothing by Jan Philipp Gloger, a new direc-
tor who received his degree as recently as 2007.
Gloger takes as the key to his interpretation the fact
that Messina is located in Sicily, indeed is some-
times called the "gateway to Sicily." This informa-
tion is projected onto a blank wall center stage at the
opening. Then the wall turns to reveal on its far side
four hooded, black-suited Mafioso, holding pistols
aloft at the ready. As they remove their hoods they
are revealed as the arriving guests, Don Pedro
(Stefan Wilkening), now a "don" of a very different
sort, Don John (Frank Siebenschuh), Claudio
(Andreas Christ), and Benedict (Shenja Lacher).
They move around the turntable as it rotates again
and brings them into a welcoming party in Messina.
One of the pleasures of a repertory house is to see
something of the range of abilities of particular
actors, and it was a delight to see Lucy Wirth, so
heavy, dark, and doomed the previous evening as
Rose Bernd, here appear as a charmingly bouncy
and empty-headed Hero, quite unable to hide her
fascination with the macho moves of the sleek-
haired Claudio, in his black leather jacket with its
flashy scarlet lining.
The action, cut down to a speedy two hours
without intermission, moves along rapidly, aided by
the simple but efficient design of Franziska
Bornkamm, which consists simply of a high wall
splitting the turntable into two equal parts and often
moving quickly around to cut back and forth
between parallel scenes. The wall is blank, but as
the evening goes on it is gradually covered by graf-
fiti the characters scrawl on it (all in Italian, of
course), and occasionally by other material as
wellthe wedding cake thrown in fury against it by
this disillusioned Claudio, or the blood of Borachio
(Thomas Grle) when he is shot (multiple times)
first by Don Pedro, then by the furious Claudio. His
treacherous plot, by the way, is discovered by his
own loose tongue, Shakespeare's Dogberry and
Verges having been excised from this stripped-down
version. In one of the production's most striking
mixtures of mood, Hero discovers his bloody corpse
and with much effort pushes it into a slumped posi-
tion against the wall, smearing herself with blood in
the process. She then dips a rag in the blood and
scrawls in large letters on the wall VENDETTA,
with an arrow pointing down to the body. Never has
Shakespeare been more Sicilian. Balancing such
grim or at best ambivalent moments, however, is a
great deal of effective comedy. Stephanie Leue is a
winningly hoydenish Beatrice, and although she
rather overshadows Lacher as Benedict, he blos-
soms as a comic figure when he decides to dress up
in foppish suit and perfume as the dedicated suitor,
much to the delight of his macho friends. At the end
Don John is announced as having gone off into the
Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jan Philipp Gloger. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
45
hills to gather supporters and plan new villainy, and
Don Pedro and his followers, snap out and hold aloft
their pistols to take up the challenge. The table
revolves a final time to reveal Don John with a
small band of black-clad followers raising their
guns in similar challenge. The blood feud will clear-
ly continue.
The final production of the week and of the
season was Schiller's popular Maria Stuart, directed
by Amlie Niermeyer. Niermeyer has been since
2006 director of the Dsseldorf Schauspielhaus, but
her connections with the Munich theatre go back
more than twenty years, and her first important suc-
cesses as a director were there in the early 1990s. It
has become common on the contemporary German
stage to present Schiller's play set in the present or
near future, with Elizabeth's advisors the familiar
contemporary bureaucrats of international politics.
Niermeyer and her costume designer (Stefanie
Seitz) push this approach even further, dressing both
queens in attractive but casual contemporary cos-
tume and showing them both young, sexually attrac-
tive, and much aware of their sexuality. Elizabeth
(Juliane Khler) is particularly surprising in her
relaxed physicality, seemingly undisturbed when
subordinates, even Davison, sit in her presence, and
engaging in casual, even distinctly erotic contact not
only with Leicester (Thomas Loibl) and Mortimer
(Marc-Alexander Solf) but even with the normally
stiff and no-nonsense Burleigh (Rainer Beck). The
normal contrast between the cold and calculating
Elizabeth and the warm and vital Mary (Anna
Schudt), central to the dynamic of the original play,
is thus largely lost, to be replaced by a struggle for
power and romantic victory between two rather sim-
ilar erotically charged young women.
The setting, by Alexander Mller-Elmau,
is also distinctly modern, though abstract, essential-
ly two towering walls converging at the rear, with
large industrial-style lamps hanging above.
Regularly during the evening large video projec-
tions appear on these walls, almost always showing
actors who are just off stage, either having just left
the stage or preparing to enter it. The exact purpose
of these images, although they make up an impor-
tant part of the visual effect of the production, is not
particularly clear. They are not, like the off-stage
images in several recent works by Flemish director
Ivo van Hove, scenes of the actors relaxing offstage
in dressing or green rooms, but are confined to the
oddly liminal wings. The actors normally simply
walk through the space on their way on or off stage,
or briefly pause there, either preparing to enter or
relaxing after an exit. No actual part of the action
takes place there, nor does any clearly counterpoint
the action. After a time one learns simply to ignore
Much Ado About Nothing. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
46
these images and concentrate on the onstage action.
The other most distinctive feature of the
production is that some characters rarely leave the
stage at all, but remain quietly seated in one of sev-
eral groups of chairs scattered about the performing
area while other actors are performing. Sometimes
they follow the action while at others they seem
indifferent to it, even sitting quietly facing upstage.
There is no clear pattern as to which actors so
remain on stage and which leave, although the
minor characters, like Hanna (Jennifer Minetti) and
Davison (Marcus Calvin) seem rather more likely to
remain than major ones. Nevertheless Elizabeth
remains on stage for most of the final act, apparent-
ly watching, but not reacting to, the final moments
of her rival. Certainly her influence is clear in all
these scenes, but her physical presence seems more
distracting than useful.
Perhaps the most unconventional of these
onstage presences is an organist, who during most
of the play sits at a small downstage right organ pro-
viding occasional musical accents for certain
moments or scenes. The other actors are from time
to time aware of his presence or at least that of his
instrument since Mortimer, Burleigh, and others
briefly appropriate the organ to make what they
consider to be appropriate musical accents. It was
rather a shock when the hitherto unidentified organ-
ist (Gerd Anthoff) abruptly entered the play as
Mary's friend the priest Melvil, in the closing
scenes. As with a number of the directorial choices,
this seemed a striking but not at all coherent effect.
I could not help but wonder whether we were to
assume Melvil had been "in character" all evening,
simply onstage like several others awaiting his
scene, or whether we were to take this as some
important shift in the conventions of the production.
Although these rather odd aspects of the
production were not I felt helpful to a deeper or
richer experience of the play, they did not seriously
disrupt the effect of the strong acting, especially of
the leading characters, the two queens, Khler and
Anna Schudt, Leicester, Mortimer, and Burleigh.
Ulrich Beseler, though one of the leading actors of
the Residenz, was rather subdued and not entirely
effective as the wise Shrewsbury, but Oliver Ngele
as Paulet, Jennifer Minetti as Hanna, and Marcu
Calvin as Davison offered very effective support in
their roles. On the whole it was an effective evening,
but the credit most go primarily to the players, who
achieved their success despite a highly unconven-
tional and largely unconvincing production
approach.
Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart, directed by Amlie Niermeyer. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
47
48
Maria Stuart. Photo: Courtesy of the Residenztheater.
Although I suggested in these pages a year
ago that the financial crisis was seeming to cast a
long shadow over the British stage and as I write
this the state of the British government is uncertain,
there have so far been very few ramifications on the
theatrical season. I wrote elsewhere recently (see
PAJ 95) of a rise in "state of the nation" drama, but
the only other noticeable change has been an
increase in the length of theatrewhile in recent
memory, the ninety-minute, no-interval-evening had
seemed prevalent, over the past six months to a year,
more and more the standard has seemed to return to
the two-and-a-half to three-hour performance, with
at least one intermission. Perhaps this is a desire to
"give you your money's worth," or perhaps it
evinces a need for prolonged escapismthe sus-
pension of disbelief providing a longer holiday from
daily reality. The performances I discuss here are a
brief snapshot of the 2010 London season, and in a
scene that continues to be so vital and vibrant as
London, there is no clear overall sense of shape to
the mix of performances. I focus instead on several
major spaces, looking at the mix of performances
they have staged this spring.
The Young Vic
One of the most vital and exciting per-
formance spaces in London continues to be the
Young Vic, under the stewardship of Artistic
Director David Lan. They continue for the third year
their partnership with the English National Opera ;
this has been an incredible run (the previous years'
stagings included Daniel Kramer's production of
Punch and Judy, Diane Paulus's Lost Highway, and
Katie Mitchell's After Dido) and 2010-11 will see
exciting Australian director Benedict Andrews
directing Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria). This year,
Fiona Shaw, who made her operatic directing debut
for the ENO with Riders to the Sea in 2009, staged
Hans Werner Henze's 1961 work, Elegy for Young
Lovers in the Young Vic's main house.
One of a few London acknowledgments of
Henze's eightieth birthday, Elegy is a beautiful, if
rather cluttered, chamber opera that tells the story of
a poet, Gregor Mittenhofer, whose writings vampir-
ically borrow from those around him. The first of
those subjects is Hilda Mack (here sung with fine
coloratura by soprano Jennifer Rhys-Davies), a
sixty-year old widow in the Alpine inn where the
story transpires. Having come on her honeymoon,
her husband set off on a hike up the nearby
Hammerhorn, never to be seen again; she has faith-
fully waited for his return and Mittenhofer returns to
the inn repeatedly to copy down her hallucinations
and turn them into poetry. The evening opens with a
beautifully staged reminiscence of the Macks' jour-
ney to the inn forty years prior, with the younger
Hilda entering in a fabulous period-inspired dress
architecturally boned up the back of the skirt, while
her older doppelganger crosses the stage on the rope
alpine bridge that flies overhead amid blue and sil-
ver swirling projections crisscrossing the stage.
Mittenhofer is surrounded by a support
staff who cater to his quirks as assiduously as any C-
list celebrity's hangers-on today, in particular the
Countess Carolina, who serves as his private secre-
tary (Lucy Schaufer) and his physician, Dr. Wilhelm
Reischmann (William Robery Allenby). Both are in
fine voice here, as well as being fine actors, a cru-
cial issue in such a small space. The second of
Mittenhofer's sources, to whom he turns after the
discovery of Mack's husband, frozen in the glacier,
brings an end to her waiting and to her hallucinato-
ry imaginings, is the sudden love between
Reischmann's son Toni (Robert Murray) and
Mittehnhoffer's mistress Elisabeth (Kate Valentine).
Mittenhofer, seemingly giving of himself to honor
young love, sends the two off into the mountains to
collect some Edelweiss (as an American, one won-
ders if there's a swipe at Rodgers and Hammerstein's
use of this motif two years earlier) when a sudden
blizzard traps them on the mountain. When local
guide Josef Mauer (a non-singing role played by
Stephen Kennedy) stops by the inn to ask if anyone
is on the mountain, Mittenhofer pauses a moment
before saying no. The tragedy of their death pro-
vides both the most beautiful moment of the opera,
as the two lovers, huddling together on a precari-
ously angled mountain shelf, imagine their lives
together fifty years into a future they will never
have, and the titular work, an elegy which
Mittenhofer delivers before a projection of a grand
opera house in celebration of his own birthday.
Tom Pye has designed a set that truly
evokes the Alpine location, playing on the clutter of
Henze's music and the book by W.H. Auden and
Chester Kallman. The bridge overhead leads to a
raised platform for the twenty-three member orches-
Big Questions on London Stages
Joshua Abrams
49
tra, which includes mandolin and flexatone. The
main stage platform splits and cracks ominously,
crevasses yawning as the evening unfolds. A large
screen upstage holds video artist Lynette
Wallworth's evocative video designs and larger than
life images of the characters at different times
throughout the evening, notably Mittenhofer's final
birthday performance and the frozen, glacially
entombed body of Herr Mack. Various appropriate
furniture fills the stage at different times, including
a dining room set, garden bench, animal skulls, a
bearskin rug (worn by Mittenhofer at one point),
and a bathtub, but the key piece is a large double-
eagle capped grandfather clock carved from ice that
melts throughout the first two acts and that
Mittenhofer shatters across the stage (and the first
row of the audience as well) at the end of the second
act. Shaw's direction is strong and detailed, playing
up the comedy throughout (notable especially in the
first act), and the music (conducted by Stephen
Blunier) certainly leads the evening at a steady pace.
Impressively within the small space, the powerful
lyrics of Auden and Kallman, with their complex
internal rhyme scheme are well enunciated by the
strong cast, led by noted Gilbert and Sullivan bari-
tone Steven Page as Mittenhofer. The opera is per-
haps a bit long at nearly three and a quarter hours,
but an excellent chance to see this rarely performed
mid-century work.
Although not presented in any of the
Young Vic's publicity material as paired with their
earlier spring production in a mini-Austrian season,
one wonders whether the choice to do Schnitzler's
Sweet Nothings (David Harrower's new adaptation
of Liebelei) in the same season as Elegy was intend-
ed as a conscious pairing. Directed here with cold
clarity by Luc Bondy, the production is strong and
bears a striking resemblance in plot to the much-
fted recent British film An Education, but the play
itself seems a period piece with little contemporary
relevance. The first act takes place on a slowly
revolving elegantly glossed red and black raised cir-
cular stage, an art deco "loft" apartment, with a bar
down a small flight of steps, a chaise longue and
two tall windows that purport to look out over cen-
tral Vienna. Two young wealthy men, Theodore (the
dashing Jack Laskey) and Fritz (the more subdued
and romantic Tom Hughes) wait for their evening's
Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, directed by Fiona Shaw. Photo: Catherine Ashmore.
50
dalliancesthe good-time girl Mitzi (Natalie
Dormer) and das se Mdel Christine (Kate
Burdette). The evening devolves in drunken revelry,
the boys' homoerotic banter paving the way for the
beginnings of an orgy that is rather abruptly ended
by the entrance of what appears to be a melodrama
villain, but turns out to be the husband of another
woman with whom Fritz is having an affair. The
second act takes place in the same space, now pure
white and converted into the bedroom/sitting room
of the youthful and somewhat naive Christine as we
watch her receive a series of visitors, from her nosy
neighbor and well-meaning father to her dream-
lover Fritz and ultimately Theodore, there to tell her
that Fritz was killed in a duel over the married
woman and she was not even invited to the funeral.
Bondy's direction is clinically precise and
the four youthful leads are attractive and capable
performers, although the two standout turns in the
evening are by Hayley Carmichael as Christine's
upright and disapproving gossipy neighbor and by
David Sibley as Christine's well-meaning violinist
father. These characters tempt us to think that there
is more to this play than the sexual play of the four
leads. Harrower's adaptation is provocative,
although oddly anachronistic, nowhere more notice-
ably than in Theodore's description of his relations
with women as "wham, bam, thank you ma'am."
The class-based interplay between the wealthy men
and working-class women is fraught with hedonistic
restlessness and a desire for escape from the reali-
ties of life, regardless of where one finds oneself in
the structures of fin-de-sicle Vienna. Yet pointedly,
no one succeeds in this, the play frustrating all these
dreams. The stage's revolve seems perhaps a nod to
Schnitzler's more famous La Ronde, the merry-go-
round of life and love here perhaps more stultifying
and hard-edged.
The final production I wish to discuss from
the Young Vic's spring season is a remounting of
their 2009 production of Kursk, the dramatic
retelling of the 2000 Russian submarine disaster.
The piece was written by Bryony Lavery and ably
produced by Sound and Fury, a collaborative theatre
company directed by Mark and Tom Espiner and
Dan Jones. This production, in the smaller Maria
theatre, might best be described as immersive (or
rather submersive). The audience enters from
above, circling the theatre on a metal walkway and
then clambers down a metal staircase to enter the
quarters of a convincing military submarine. The
piece is described as promenade theatre, although
audience members must choose between standing
above on the catwalk and looking down into the act-
ing space or standing on the stage floor, inside the
"submarine" itself, which at least on the day I saw it,
was so cramped (not uncomfortably) as to discour-
age much movement by the audience members.
Arthur Schnitzler's Sweet Nothings, directed by Luc Bondy. Photo: Ruth Walz.
51
Given the stakes of the actual story, the production
is remarkably non-dramatic; our focus for the
majority of the performance is on the relationships
between the five actors who (along with sound and
light board operators cleverly seated at control
desks within the space) make up the crew of Royal
Navy submariners on exercise in the North Atlantic
tracking Russian war-gaming. These are remarkably
human relationships and go a long way towards
connecting us to their counterparts on board the
Kursk, from new father Mike (Tom Espiner) whose
daughter's crib death forms one of the key plots as
the captain (Laurence Mitchell) decides not to tell
him when it happens since he wouldn't be able to get
off the ship to the older coxswain and distance-
learning poetry student Donnie (Ian Ashpitel) to the
set of Matrioshka dollsnicknamed Ivan, Ivan,
Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, and little Igorwho
have stowed away 'as spies' but later stand in for the
lost crew of the Kursk.
The play is remarkable for its pressure
cooker atmosphere and the realistic feel of the sub-
marine; by the time of the explosion on the Kursk
towards the end of the play, we sympathize with the
potentially trapped crewmembers of the "enemy"
vessel. When we are plunged into darkness as we
hear the Kursk breaking apart and sound effects of
rushing water begin to flood the space, I for a
moment feared that with a quick costume change,
we were about to find ourselves aboard the doomed
Russian sub, but the company has cleverly avoided
this gimmickry. Merely finding ourselves inside the
British submarine for its voyages is theatrical coup
enough, as this filmic space to which we are accus-
tomed is incredibly powerfully turned into 'site-spe-
cific' theatre, but one hopes that an enterprising fes-
tival programmer will pair this with the Wooster
Group's recent remounting of North Atlantic.
The National Theatre
When not directing for the ENO, Fiona
Shaw is lighting up the stage as Lady Gay Spanker
in the National Theatre's current production of Dion
Boucicault's London Assurance. Directed with
verve and humor by National Theatre Director
Nicholas Hytner, Boucicault's first work appears
positioned (as it is in time as well) directly between
late Restoration Comedy and Wilde's social come-
dies. The stars of the show are unquestionably Shaw
as the horse-riding, fox-hunting countrydwelling
Spanker and a nearly unrecognizable Simon Russell
Beale as aging London fop Sir Harcourt Courtly.
Beale is in fine high camp form here as the fish out
of water when transported from his elegant
Sweet Nothings. Photo: Ruth Walz.
52
Belgravia home (Mark Thompson's set is as stun-
ning in its detail and clearly spared little expense) to
the Gloucestershire home of the 18-year old Grace
to whom he is promised, by a cruel bequest on the
part of her father. Michelle Terry, who has made
quite a name for herself on stage recentlylargely
at the National and RSCis delightful as the young
and practical Grace who falls in love with Courtly's
son Charles (Paul Ready), while he is 'disguised' as
Augustus Hamilton. Richard Briers, too, is excellent
as Adolphus Spanker, Lady Gay's much put-upon
husband and Nick Sampson's portrayal of Cool
(Courtly's valet) is exquisite. Indeed, though, a spe-
cial note of praise must be given to the remote-con-
trolled rat that scuttles onto the stage twice during
the evening, startling both Courtly and much of the
audience.
This type of production is perhaps the per-
fect opportunity for the National Theatreit is a
large play that unquestionably works today, yet not
one for which there are necessarily compelling rea-
sons for production. Hytner has assembled a first-
rate cast and created a delightfully entertaining
evening that seems to truly echo nineteenth-century
acting in its degree of scenery-chewing and star
turns. The only glaringly wrong note is the casting
of Junix Inocian as the moneylender Solomon
Isaacs. Added language that appears clearly (and
yet obliquely) anti-semitic"Is he...," "with a name
like that...," "from the east..." is 'defused' by
Inocian's appearance as a stereotypical, Fu Manchu-
moustachioed, Asian money-lender, yet this ulti-
mately turns the minor character of Isaacs into a
bigger presence that is simultaneously anti-Semitic
and Orientalist.
Barbican Theatre
Yukio Ninagawa's Musashi which I saw in
the same week as London Assurance continues what
I hesitate to call a trend of animatronic props.
Rather than the oversized rat in the former, here it is
a severed and bloodied arm, cut off of one of the
characters in a duel that lies centerstage with its fin-
gers flexing disturbingly for the rest of the scene.
Written by Ninagawa's frequent collaborator
Hisashi Inoue, who sadly passed away on 9 April,
the play is a contemporary comedy, drawing strong-
ly on noh and kyogen traditions to reimagine the
aftermath of a legendary Samurai battlethe duel
of Ganryu between Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro
Sasaki in 1612. Although historically according to
legend, Musashi killed his rival, this play imagines
that he had shown mercy and allowed his opponent
to live, seeking for him and training until they meet
Bryony Lavery's Kursk, produced and directed by Sound and Fury. Photo: Keith Pattison.
53
up six years later. The production opens with the
duel staged on a mostly bare stage, in front of a
sheet with rippling water and a large sun. After a
brief blackout, an elaborately choreographed scene
change with whirling trees and large walled corri-
dors settles into a beautiful temple set, with a center
piece strongly based on a Noh stage. Musashi (the
excellent Tatsuya Fujiwara), along with two
Buddhist priests, the shogun's tutor/fighting trainer,
and the two female patrons of the temple prepare for
a retreat to inaugurate the temple, when Kojiro (a
very strong Ryo Katsuji) appears. The two agree to
put off their duel for the duration of the retreat, but
establish an uneasy detente. The other characters
attempt to broker peace through a series of comic
interventionsnotably a scheme devised by the
tutor (Kohtaloh Yoshida) to tie the ankles of the five
men together, with the two impetuous swordsmen
each sandwiched between two others, a story about
lost children that causes Kojiro to believe he is eigh-
teenth in line to the imperial throne, and a complex
plot involving the younger of the two women
(played by Anne Suzuki) seeking retribution for her
father's murder at the hands of a local swordsman.
The women (and a comical servant) ask to be
trained in sword fighting for a duel to which they
have challenged the gang, led by Jinbei Asakawa.
As they are not familiar with challenges, the lan-
guage (and indeed the time and place of the duel)
were copied directly from the challenge that Kojiro
had laid to Musashi. The training montage, in which
Musashi eventually decides to use the "non-strate-
gic strategy," is a delightful scene resembling chore-
ographic training, that ultimately becomes a group
tango. Musashi notes this suggesting that without
swords, this is just "noh dance," although I'd note
that tango is not the typical accompaniment. The
scoring includes traditional noh instrumentationa
shakuhachi and woodblocksalong with a cello
and organ and the characters frequently break into
noh song, relying on a couple of shaky excusesthe
older woman (Kayoko Sharaishi) was a temple
dancer/prostitute, and the tutor is writing a noh play,
"The Filial Badger." The play is structured as
Mugen Noh (fantasy noh), with a fabulous twist at
the end, as it turns out that other than Musashi and
Kojiro all the characters are ghosts trapped in the
world who need to get people to listen to them about
valuing life (and forgoing retribution) and have
decided to do that in this instance in dramatic form.
This produces a fabulously theatrical evening, with
strong acting throughout and a full sweep of emo-
tions and theatrical style, from low comedy to high
philosophical meditationstruly a stunning pro-
duction by Ninagawa and a fitting tribute to Inoue.
The final two productions I wish to dis-
Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Photo: Catherine Ashmore.
54
cuss, both on international tours, and both at the
Barbican in London, offer incredibly powerful med-
itations on the aging body. The first of these, also a
tribute to a great talent, was Tanztheater Wuppertal's
remounting of Pina Bausch's Kontakthof. Performed
on alternate nights by two casts of "non-dancers,"
one of "Teenagers over 14" and one "With Ladies
and Gentlemen over 65," Bausch's 1978 master-
piece produces an incredibly elegiac sense, espe-
cially with the more mature cast. The piece, set in
what looks to be a high school gymnasium, begins
with the twenty-six performers each coming down-
stage and using the audience as an invisible mirror
as they prepare for what might be a high school
dance, opening their lips to check their teeth, patting
down insistent curls, adjusting themselves. The rest
of the three hours is a dance of flirtation, pairing up
and splitting apart, group dances, solos and duets
playing out all possible permutations of seduction
(although almost entirely within a heterosexual
framework). These are knowing bodies, the flesh
containing histories and telling stories, but they
behave in ways we might more associate with the
teenage cast. Elements that might be disturbing with
a younger casta scene of men pawing at one
woman, for instancecarry a different tone with
this strong cast, one of poignancy and life that might
with teenagers have more visceral connotations of
gang rape. The movement is classic Bausch: small
shuffling, fast moving feet with still upper bodies,
rapid darting across the stage, farcical use of doors,
microphones and various props. The choice to do
this production with these aging, knowledgeable
bodies is stunning, their vitality and presence on
stage a powerful reminder of life and, seeing this
less than a year after Bausch's death, of its fragility
as well.
In his own meditation on life and death, I
Went to the House But Did Not Enter, German
music theatre composer Heiner Goebbels has cho-
sen to set four major twentieth century texts
Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
Blanchot's "La folie du jour," Kafka's "Excursion
into the Mountains," and Beckett's "Worstward
Ho"to music. Three elaborate settings frame the
song cycle, all sung beautifully by the four member
Hilliard Ensemblecountertenor David James,
tenors Rogers Covey-Crump, and Steven Harrold,
and baritone Gordon Jones. For Eliot, the four,
dressed in gray coats and hats ritualistically pack
and then unpack a gray room, wrapping white china,
black flowers, white horsehead vase, and tablecloth,
Hisashi Inoue's Musashi, directed by Yukio Ninagawa. Photo: Courtesy of Barbican Theatre.
55
56
I Went to the House But Did Not Enter, directed by Heiner Goebbels. Photo: Mario del Curto.
taking down curtains and cross-stitch portraits of
dogs, and placing them all into a shipping carton,
moving the table, rolling up the carpet and vacuum-
ing the floor. They unpack a similar box, and rebuild
the room, only this time the china, flowers, and vase
have switched colors. The second and third numbers
are first inside and then in front of a generic, but
incredibly realistic setting of the exterior of a boxy
beige house; for Blanchot's intermingling story, the
different men, now dressed individually appear and
disappear behind different windowsan office, a
dining room, in a garage/workshop, in what might
be a kitchen, but seems ultimately to be a chemistry
lab, and then for the Kafka, the four gather around a
bicycle in front of the house. The final setting, for
Beckett, is an overly pink hotel room, where they
look both out the window and at projections of
childhood vacations cast on the wall, trapped in
their own lives and memories, no longer partici-
pants, but observersthe echo of Sartre is palpable.
These four settings offer meditations on aging, from
Prufrock's imagination of aging"Let us go then,
you and I... When I am pinned and wriggling on the
wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the
butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I
presume?" through Blanchot's middle-age, "I am
not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys.
That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life
gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about
death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will
feel immense pleasure," Kafka's joy in middle age "I
do not know, if nobody comes, then nobody comes.
I've done nobody any harm, nobody's done me any
harm, but nobody will help me" and ending with
Beckett's morbidity, "On. Say on. Be said on. . . .
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. . . . Nohow on. . ."
This is a stunning meditation and a beautifully pow-
erful evening, striking in its simplicity and depth of
emotionality, set to Goebbels's dissonances and
psalm-like music.
London remains at the moment spoiled for
choice in terms of exciting theatrical production.
With doubt mounting over the next government and
finances both domestically and globally casting a
shadow of uncertainty on the place of the arts, the
continuing presence of vital theatre asking and
addressing these big topics is of crucial importance.
As the house lights come down in the
Apollo Theatre, the sounds of drums, pipes, and
accordions seem to signal an approaching battle. A
teenage girldressed in what looks like a home-
made fairy costume inspired by Henry Fuseli's
paintings of A Midsummer Night's Dreamflits
onto the forestage and stands in front of the main
curtain on which is painted a gigantic Cross of St.
George. Carvings of mythical woodland creatures
decorate the proscenium arch, and overheadin
large lettersare the words "English Stage
Company." As the girl stops to stare into the audi-
ence, she begins to sing a William Blake hymn
about Jerusalem and England:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic--
But before she can finish the second verse of the
hymn, the lights go black, and the theatre is filled
with the deafening beat of contemporary dance
music. In the darkness the curtain rises, and flashing
lights reveal an Airstream camper, woods, and what
seems to be a bacchanal. Before anyone can get
used to the surprise and the humor of the scene,
there is another blackout and silence. Soft morning
light slowly begins to fill the stage while birdsongs
greet the dawn. The sunlight reveals that this mobile
home may be somebody's lair, but it is certainly not
moving anywhere soon. In fact the old sofa, the live
chickens in a coop, the old refrigerator, decaying
bathtub, smashed-up flat-screen TV, and remains of
the evening's revelries littering the patio area sug-
gest that somebody has been living in these woods
57
Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth at the London Apollo Theatre
Joe Heissan
Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. Photo: Simon Annand.
Jerusalem. Photo: Simon Annand.
58
for quite a while. So begins Jerusalem, a raucous
and bawdy dark comedy written by Jez Butterworth,
which transferred from the Royal Court Theatre
home of the English Stage Companyto the Apollo
Theatre, London, on 10 February 2010.
Ostensibly this is a play about land rights,
a contemporary issue that seems to be plaguing
some English law enforcement. (During my visit to
London, stories of squatters and illegal homes being
built in the country popped up in a several newspa-
pers.) Mr. Butterworth, though, is concerned with
more than just some issue of the week. Lest you had
any doubts from the giant Cross of St. George, or
the words "English Stage Company" displayed over
the action, or William Blake's hymn, Jez
Butterworth has written a state-of-the-nation play,
and the nation is in for some tough times.
The playwright uses the tale of St.
Georgethe patron saint of Englandand the
dragon as an inspiration for Jerusalem. In fact, the
story of St. George is a motif that informs the entire
production. According to legend, St. George was a
knight who came upon a city plagued by a disease-
carrying dragon. To appease the dragon and protect
themselves, the townspeople offered up their sheep
to be eaten and laterby lotterytheir children. On
the day that St. George arrived, the local princess
was the next on the list of those to be sacrificed. In
the end, the knight rescued the princess, slew the
dragon, and in the process converted all of the
townspeople to Christianity. Butterworth turns the
legend on its head, exposing some of the not-so-hid-
den plagues befalling England today.
Butterworth's hero is a charming monster,
a man named Johnny "Rooster" Byron who has
been squatting illegally in his camper in the woods
on the edge of a town in Wiltshire, England, and not
paying taxes for more than twenty-five years. As
portrayed by Mark Rylance, this character of
Shakespearian proportions is part court-jester, part
warrior-poet, and part beast, but overall a local leg-
end. Storytelling is at the heart of this play as much
of it involves the incredibly funny (tall) tales that
Johnny tells about his pastincluding a fantastical
birth, his resurrection from death after a motorcycle
accident, sexual escapades with minor celebrities, a
failed kidnapping by four Nigerians, and an
encounter with a giant who built Stonehenge. What
Jerusalem. Photo: Simon Annand.
59
60
makes this outsider character so appealing are the
contradictions that Mr. Rylance brings to the per-
formance; he is both an ogre and a pied-piper. This
witty Lord of Misrule reigns over a cohort of
delightful outcasts, leeches and undesirables created
by a fine ensemble of actors who play off of each
other like a jamming rock band. To the local gov-
ernment officials Johnny Byron is a threat, not only
to public safety and morality, but to businessespe-
cially the New Estate that wants to expand the reach
of its housing development into the land where
Byron lives. To his mates, though, Johnny is a
source of illegal drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and
shelter when they need to hide from life or escape
the pressures at home.
If Johnny is the dragon in this retelling of
the St. George legend, then the role of the knight is
filled by the offstage presence of those local gov-
ernment officials, representatives of the "Nanny
State" that wants to drive out all of the wildness and
defiance that Johnny embodies. Their ultimate
weapon against Johnny is local property law.
Though we never see these authorities, they send
two constables as their emissaries to deliver the
final eviction notice to Johnny in an early scene, and
a last warning for him to clear out near the end of
the play. Johnny may treat these messengers with
humorous disrespect, but the power behind them is
very real; their threat is made all the more menacing
because we never see them. Instead we hear stories
about their world of closed-circuit TVs, emergency
crisis meetings, and county court convenings. Even
the offstage fair that these officials have organized
in honor of St. George's Day is tinged with the
threatening sounds of flyovers from military planes
that have been invited to perform stunts.
So where is the princess in all of this?
Early in the play Johnny's mates tell him that the fif-
teen-year-old Phoebe Cox is missing. As she is last
year's May Queen, it is her responsibility to pass on
her crown to the new queen at the St. George's Day
Fair. Phoebe's stepfather, Troy, comes looking for
her at Johnny's encampment, but she is nowhere to
be found. When no one gives Troy the answers he
wants, he attacks Johnny verbally in front of his
friends with vile insults and threats of physical vio-
lence. Johnny strikes back by suggesting that
Phoebe may be staying away from home because
Troy's interests in her are more than fatherly. Troy
counters with a story that delivers a deep psycho-
logical blow. The previous summer Troy's brothers
horribly abused Johnny while he was intoxicated
and unconscious. Some of Johnny's mates helped
the brothers film the assault, and others passed the
degrading images on via the Internet for everyone's
amusement. It is obvious from the pained reactions
of Johnny's crew that Troy's story is true. Johnny
reacts by cutting himself off from his friends, and so
they leave him to attend the fair.
When Johnny is alone, Troy returns to the
encampment with two other men. It turns out that
Phoebe was the young fairy in the opening of the
play, and has been hiding out in Johnny's trailer all
along. In the ensuing mle with the three men,
Johnny puts up a valiant struggle, but he is over-
come and dragged inside the camper. In a scene of
shocking violencemade all the more disturbing
because we can only hear what is going onJohnny
is assaulted by the men with a hot branding iron. As
the men leave Johnny battered and broken on the
patio, sounds of the townspeople cheering at the fair
drift onstage to give their seeming approval of what
has been done.
The play ends with the rumble of bulldoz-
ers and beams from their headlights approaching the
stage. Again, the sounds of warplanes are heard
overhead. But, Johnny "Rooster" Byron is not beat-
en, and he will not back down. Setting the campsite
on fire, Johnny delivers an apocalyptic curse upon
the local government officials and anyone working
with them. Johnny's final act is to summon the
ancient creatures of the British Isles to his aid by
pounding out an alarm on an old drum that he
claims was given to him by a giant. As the deep, per-
cussive sounds fill the theatre, Johnny incants the
names of his ancestors, giants, spirits and devils in
an attempt to bring down a reign of destruction on
his enemies. If this were performed by a less skilled
actor, the moment could come off as desperate or
foolish, but the brilliant Mark Rylance makes you
feel that one thing is certainJohnny Byron's army
most definitely is coming.
In London in late July, I was able to attend
the 22 July opening of a major revival of a conti-
nental classic at the National Theatre, Georg
Bchner's Danton's Death, in a new adaptation by
Howard Brenton. The adaptation is a sleek and
intelligent one, and as one might expect from
Brenton, the political debates and addresses of
Robespierre, Danton, and Saint-Just are powerfully
captured. There is also a good deal lost in a much
cut version that runs under two hours with no inter-
mission. The most obvious loss is the epic scale of
the original. Brenton has not actually converted
Bchner's sprawling Shakespearian work into a
chamber play, but he has clearly moved it in that
direction, most obviously by removing all scenes
involving the citizens of Paris. The critical scenes in
the Assembly and the Tribunal could hardly have
been cut, but director Michael Grandage has never-
theless given them a surprisingly and, I think, inef-
fectively intimate feel by reducing the bodies on
stage to a bare minimum. The Olivier is a very large
stage, and when it is totally open as it is for the
entire production, eleven bodies simply do not make
a convincing mob to be aroused by Robespierre,
addressing them from an upper platform.
The other loss is Bchner's quirky but rich
imagery, not wholly lacking here, but considerably
domesticated, all the way from the obscene jokes in
the opening scene to the vast images of dying gods
in the empty heavens in the elegiac final prison
scene. The dialogue tended to be flattened out and
driven by the plot and the politics, with little time
given to much else. Director Grandage seems faint-
ly embarrassed by the love of language in the play,
as we see almost at once in the interchange of obser-
vations among Danton and his friends about the
dynamics of revolution. Their interchange is played
not like a serious debate but rather like a set of char-
Danton's Death at the National Theatre
Marvin Carlson
61
Georg Bchner's Danton's Death, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo: Courtesy of the National Theatre.
62
acters of Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde exchanging
clever bon mots in a salon. In an almost choreo-
graphed sequence each dances across the stage
lightly touching the others as he delivers his set
piece, then fades away as someone else repeats the
process. Not until we get to the main drive of the
plot, the confrontation of Danton and Robespierre,
does the delivery of the dialogue take on a truly seri-
ous tone. Even so, the moves and counter moves of
Danton and his prosecutors came so quickly in the
last quarter of the play that even following the
action became quite difficult.
The most commendable aspect of the per-
formance was the uniformly high quality of the act-
ing of the leading characters. Toby Stephens is a
memorable Danton, totally convincing in the full
range of this fascinating character, from the world-
weary indifference and resignation of the opening
and closing scenes to the fiery rabble-rouser of the
committee hearings. Elliot Levey is equally impres-
sive as the incorruptible Robespierre, cool, distant,
and yet demanding attention whenever he is on
stage. He is so formidable a villain that I was quite
surprised and a bit taken aback to hear the some-
what staid National theatre audience heartily boo
him during the curtain calls, just as if they had been
watching an old-fashioned melodrama. Among the
rest, Alec Newman stands out as the dark lieutenant
of Robespierre, Saint Just. Barnaby Kay is less
striking as the somewhat mercurial Desmoulins, but
he provides useful support to Stephens. The women
are less well developed by the drama and director
Grandage has de-emphasized them even further, but
Judith Coke still manages a moving interpretation of
Julie, Danton's wife, especially in her still-preserved
soliloquy (though her key final scene has been cut);
and Rebecca O'Mara does well with what is left of
the role of Desmoulins' wife, Lucie.
The setting by Christopher Oram serves
the flow of the play well, despite its already noted
emptiness. The main playing area is a slightly raked
open space with six identical door openings at the
rear, three benches (a center table is brought in for
several scenes), and a few wall sconces. A narrow
balcony runs all the way across an upper level, and
provides a highly effective rostrum for Robespierre
to address the crowds below or for the final elevat-
ed guillotine scene. From time to time it is much
less effectively used for small groups of actors to
visually bridge scenes by dashing pointlessly across
it carrying torches. Behind this balcony, a series of
tall, thin shuttered windows reach upward toward
the flies. Usually they are closed but when one or
two of them are opened, with light from them
throwing a long rectangular pattern on the stage
floor (lighting by Paule Constable), they provide an
extremely effective visual accent.
Grandage (and perhaps Brenton) has
decided not to retain the ending of the play, which
returns to Julie's defiance of the Revolutionary
authorities and the doom this will inevitably bring
upon her as well, to present an ending more in line
with the production's emphasis upon the men and, I
assume, the director's sense of the theatrical. The
four condemned Dantonists, in striking white shirts,
line up on one side of the upper balcony, give most
of their final lines there and then are led, somewhat
awkwardly, to another holding area somewhat
upstage of the guillotine, which has been erected in
the most prominent position in a tall inset stage in
the middle of this upper balcony. They are then
brought forward one by one and beheaded in the
most graphic manner, with the falling heads drop-
ping into a basket facing the audience. The final line
is Danton's actually reputed rebuke to his guard,
"You cannot prevent our heads kissing in the bas-
ket." The effect of this grim final jest is considerably
reduced, however, by Grandage's apparent misun-
derstanding of its context. The story is that Danton
and Camille sought to make a final embrace on the
scaffold and when they were forced apart by the
guards, Danton responded with this mot. Grandage
however, possibly wishing to emphasize the pathos
of the situation, allows everyone to embrace at
length before even approaching the guillotine. As a
result the critical final line is decontextualized and
more than a little gratuitous. Like much in this sin-
cere but occasionally troubled production, it misses
or blurs the impact of the complex and powerful
original.
In the breaks between the three perform-
ances on Howard Barker Day at Riverside Studios,
I was reading an essay which incidentally contained
this quote by Herbert Blau: ''Of all the performing
arts, the theater stinks most of mortality." Blau prof-
fers this view in the context of contemplating the
notion of actor's presence and absence and the
inherent possibility of his performance of death on
the stage, in front of us. No other playwright seems
to capitalize more successfully on this metaphysical
and ritualistic potential of the theatre art than
Howard Barker himself. Following the success of
his repeatedly reprinted theoretical volume
Arguments for a Theatre, in 2005 Barker published
a much anticipated second book of essays Death,
the One and the Art of Theatre which is entirely
dedicated to the links between those key terms. In
addition, Heiner Zimmerman has identified five
facets of Barker's oeuvre concerning visual repre-
sentations of death and the interrelationship of eros
and thanatos in them. These include "the meshing
of death and love, the necessity of a consciousness
of death for a full experience of life, the role of
death as a doorway to survival as myth, the life-giv-
ing and life-taking ecstasy of martyrdom, the erotic
relationship between the executioner and the vic-
tim or the work of mourning as emancipation
from the power of the dead" as illustrated by the
examples of Judith, Ursula, Und, The Last Supper,
Ego in Arcadia, and Victory: Choices in Reaction.
The most recent of these examples, Und, was pre-
miered by the Wrestling School in 1999.
Although Barker's work and the Theatre of
Catastrophe more or less retained an interest in all
of those themes throughout the 2000s, the plays
became a lot more broken down, distilled, and
uncommunicative in that period. The Seduction of
Almighty God in 2006the year of Barker's sixtieth
birthdaywas, for example, a stark and desolate
take on the 'ecstasy of martyrdom' set in the
Reformation period. If the works listed above could
be seen as theatrical equivalents of Renaissance
paintings, the latter example would have been clos-
er to a book of etchings.
The year that follows the twenty-first birth-
day of the Wrestling School is also the second year
Howard Barker Day
Duka Radosavljevi
63
Howard Barker. Photo: Courtesy of Howard Barker.
of the company's existence without any state sub-
sidy and under the patronage of an anonymous
benefactoran arrangement which is highly unusu-
al in the British theatre system. The company's
annual allowance enables them to stage one big-
scale and one small-scale play, and this year they are
doing both at the same timebarely six months
after their big production of 2009, Found in the
Ground. Barker's productivity has often shown that
age can hardly wither him or custom stale his infi-
nite variety, although mortality, coupled with sacri-
fice, is once again a prominent theme of his work.
The large-scale show of this year Hurts
Given and Received concerns poetic prodigy Bach,
a thirty-three-year old landowner, and a genius
(played by Tom Riley), whose wilful arrogance and
daring despotism eventually leads him to a kind of
crucifixion by those he has injured. Physically par-
alyzed and seemingly comatose from a beating he
has received, Bach is suspended above the banality
of daily proceedings for the last third of the play.
His genius is thus forced to find channels in ran-
domly chosen acolytes through which he can com-
municate the rest of his unfinished masterpiece, past
page one which he had completed before his ordeal.
The Christ-motif is clearly seen here once again,
and the play's setting is not far from being compara-
ble to a Chekhovian dacha. Director and long-term
associate of the Wrestling School Gerrard McArthur
in collaboration with Barker's alter egos, the com-
pany designers Tomas Leipzig and Billie Kaiser, has
given Bach an outsized schoolboy's desk which he
has to climb when inspiration calls; though his dis-
tractions from his task are many: an old servant who
tenders his resignation so that he can go to die, a
Lauren Bacall-like spurned lover, the best friend
Detriment who kills himself to spite him. Tall and
statuesque Penelope McGhie who plays the best
friend's mother and Bach's older lover has the
taskby now a trademark of a Wrestling School
productionof disrobing and displaying her mes-
merizing vulnerability as a means of both mourning
and self-sacrifice. However, the actual shock factor
of this piece is potentially contained in the taboo-
Barker's Hurts Given and Received. Photo: Courtesy of The Wrestling School.
64
breaking encounter between Bach and the 'lovely
liability'school-girl Sadovee, his eleven-year-old
seductress, compellingly portrayed by Issy Brazier-
Jones.
Offering some interesting insights into the
subjects of why poetry is beautiful, the nature of
humanity, and the artist's fear of 'irrelevance,' Hurts
Given and Received concludes with the revelation
that "Bachs must exist as wars must," adding per-
haps one more layer to Barkerian dealings with
deaththat of the im/mortality of the poetic genius.
Symmetrically counterbalancing this
piece, the Barker Day actually opened with a read-
ing directed by the author of a play called Worship
and Wonder in the Dying World. Belonging perhaps
to the strand of the oeuvre that concerns odd house-
holdssuch as for example A House of Correction,
this is essentially a four-hander with a chorus of the
'mortally ill' which reflects on the difference
between neglect and decay and proposes that "the
dying are not dialectical." A paraplegic daughter
who moves around this establishment on a mechan-
ical bed and just as smoothly schemes against her
mother is an unlikely protagonist of this piece which
also features a compliant chauffeur, a dwarf, and
frequent fetishizing of an "amber car with off-white
upholstery." The blurb tells us that this play is about
the necessity to apologize juxtaposed with a poten-
tial loss of integrity, and I would say, that this is pos-
sibly the closest that Barker ever gets to writing a
farceespecially if we take the definition of farce
as being "a tragedy with trousers down." In addition
to some really good humor, this lively and watch-
able reading offered an imaginative approach to
chorally produced sound effects and some unex-
pectedly delightful quirkinessnot least because it
ends with "a rain of dogs and rabbits."
My favorite piece of the day was the small
scale production of Slowly, directed by Hanna
Berrigan, which incidentally also nestles very com-
fortably and smartly into the set for Hurts. Featuring
four women, dressed in black Elizabethan dresses
and with vampirically white faces, the piece is an
elegant and almost Beckettian exploration of the
potential of suicide as a political weapon "to
obstruct or delay the inexorable law of decay." More
specifically it is the "process of disappearing" taken
from the first century BC Greek geographer Strabo
that forms the thematic focus of this play's explo-
ration of death and sacrifice. In Berrigan's produc-
tion, movement is brought to an absolute indispen-
sable minimum, which therefore makes all the
kinaesthetic reactions to panic and fear all the more
theatrically valuable. The setting of a rat-infested
65
Barker's Found in the Ground. Photo: Courtesy of The Wrestling School.
66
subterranean chamber in a fortification besieged by
barbarians, is conjured up subtly and effectively
through an echoing amplification of the actresses'
voices and a very focused lighting design. At about
the length of forty-five minutes, Slowly is therefore
a seductively moody and provocative piece which
shows the journey of four princesses from dignified
decorum to potentially becoming "one willing
whore, a whore who whores reluctantly, a suicide
and a subject of an atrocity." This is Barker at his
absolute best and one can easily imagine this piece
as following in the footsteps of Judith and The
Possibilities to become a frequently revived text
among university student companies.
The fact that the Wrestling School's 2010
season ultimately shows resourcefulness, imagina-
tion, rigour, and a sense of humor in the face of
financial adversity can only be good news when it
comes to alleviating any fears concerning the com-
pany's own future. For in the case of this company,
as long as the playwright continues to explore such
depths of human experience and tragic possibilities
with such irresistible poetry, the work is very much
alive and kicking.
The Wrestling School as a theatre company
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: The Wrestling School
has recently had its twenty-first anniversary as a
theatre company. When you look back on this peri-
od, what would you say have been the most signifi-
cant stages of the company's development?
HOWARD BARKER: The most significant stage
without question was my assumption of the role of
director with Judith in 1995. This remains one of the
company's outstanding productions. It was as if all
my frustration at the aesthetic cul-de-sac into which
my work had been driven initiated this new style.
Much of this can be seen in Ivan Kyncl's memorable
photography. It was rich in images. The perform-
ances were first rate, also. Everything came togeth-
er. Other stages reflect alterations in my ambitions
as a writer, the assumption of control of the whole
visual aspect (excluding the lighting), and the aural
aspect into a whole. But all this was pretty well
there in Judith.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: Could you name the
key members of the company (past and present) and
what they have individually brought to the evolution
of the Wrestling School as an entity and an ensem-
ble?
HOWARD BARKER: The three members of the
Judith cast remain deeply embedded in the compa-
ny. Melanie Jessop and Jane Bertish particularly.
Jane had worked with Kenny Ireland on my plays
and before. Few of the actors of that phase came
into my period, but for these two women. The major
figures that followed were Victoria Wicks, Sean
O'Callaghan, Julia Tarnoky, and Justin Avoth. More
recently, Suzy Cooper has entered to play leading
and less-leading roles. They bring a quality of per-
fect diction, perfect rhythm, perfect physical bal-
ance, all vital to me. They could each follow the
syntactical and emotional complications of the later
work. They master it by instinct. Instinct is every-
thing, training rather little, I now think.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: How are new collab-
orators and members of the company selected and
initiated into the working/creative process?
HOWARD BARKER: I prefer to work always with
the core ensemble, adding new individuals, usually
in minor roles to begin with. Interesting young
actors appear, some of whom go on to huge reputa-
tion. We employed Tom Burke and Philip Cumbus
directly from drama school in Gertrude and The
Fence In Its Thousandth Year respectively. They
wanted to work with the Wrestling School; many,
many people do. For a company with no state
finance and constantly ignored or attacked, this is
remarkable. We are, as I have said before, a rumor.
We are immune to hostility. But I have to say, I look
for qualities in actors, and these qualities of preci-
sion, of presence, of joy in articulation, are rare.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: How has the Arts
Council funding cut in December 2007 affected the
present operation of the company?
HOWARD BARKER: The brutally political deci-
sion made by the drama panel of the Arts Council to
eradicate the company failed. It was a political deci-
sion; I am not indulging in hyperbole. The criteria
for funding grants are nakedly sociological, and
Soviet in content (benefit to community, raising
community involvement, addressing gender or race
issues etc...). Quality was not identified as a reason
for subsidy. (This alone succinctly makes my point.)
We were out of action for a year, and in that year,
following a reading of I Saw Myself, an individual
unknown to us came forward, invited me to break-
fast, and provided funding at an enhanced level for
three years.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: What plans are in
place for the near future?
HOWARD BARKER: This funding runs out after
the 2010 season. I am however, ready to initiate the
2011 season with new work (The 40, Wonder And
Worship In The Dying Ward, and our first film, A
Dead Man's Blessing).
On the style and its origins
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: The recent memoir
authored by yourself and an alter ego highlights a
very interesting model of authorship that has
emerged around your own work more recentlyfor
example the idea of crediting imaginary artists with
various aspects of each production (costume and set
Interview with Howard Barker
Duka Radosavljevi
67
design etc). Could you explain how and why this
has come about? Does Howard Barker ever come
into conflict with Thomas Leipzig or Billie Kaiser?
HOWARD BARKER: Heteronymity isn't unknown
in artistic careers. But there are good reasons why
my set and costume design integrate the style of the
Wrestling School. I am a painter and photographer.
I have learned what kind of decor suits my texts (not
entirely a matter of economy) and provides both a
setting for voice (the chief factor) but also a distinct
statement of non-realism. The images are by
Eduardo Houth, another alias. In all this, a single
eye on the production creates the distinctive mode
for which we are now known. When I speak of 'we'
I talk first of myself and the actors, but I also talk of
the assistant directors, the lighting designers, and
the financial manager. On certain occasions, direc-
tors are used who have been actors deeply involved
in the company's work, for example Gerrard
MacArthur, or assistants I feel have come close to
my sense of values.
68
Barker's Slowly, directed by Hanna Berrigan. Photo: Courtesy of The Wrestling School.
69
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: In the book you con-
fess to a "dread of the collective" and yet your work
(like most theatre work) is produced collectively.
You often write epic plays for big casts. What chal-
lenges do you encounter in this way and how do you
resolve them?
HOWARD BARKER: The Wrestling School, let me
state clearly, is not and has never been, a collective,
nor is it an actors' company, as some mistakenly
believe. It is a company for one writer-director.
Decisions rest with me, the texts are mine, and the
artistic policy is my own. Naturally, there is discus-
sion, but rather little. We are peculiarly efficient and
our long history proves how much can be done with
a small amount of bureaucratic equipment.
Furthermore, given the huge ambition of these plays
(think of Found In The Ground), it is unimaginable
that such things could be created by any other body
in four weeks with such poor financial resources. If
there was friction, factionalism, sub-division, it
could never be achieved.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: In the conversation
we had last year you mentioned the analogy of
working with the ensemble as if it were an orches-
tra. You also discuss the idea of "text as music" in
your book. Could you say a bit more about the
importance of rhythm in relation to meaning which
you attributed to Nietzsche on that occasion?
HOWARD BARKER: Nietzsche's insight that
meaning and rhythm were synonymous is borne out
by all my experience with actors. When an actor is
bluffing, for example, saying something the mean-
ing of which he has not got, it is immediately obvi-
ous in the handling of the inner pace of the speech.
(We are talking of a highly-developed and poetic
form here.) You are born with this sense of rhythm.
It is a gift of God. The overall meanings of plays is
unknown to the actors because it is unknown to me.
All they require to know is their emotional condi-
tion in each scene.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: You have noted that
one characteristic of Howard Barker's work is that it
keeps changing and the style keeps developing.
Could you pinpoint its evolutionary stages and the
direction it is moving in at the moment?
HOWARD BARKER: Here are some stages;
Victory, a semi-political picaresque history play,
with a language metaphorical and coarse. The
Possibilities, a string-quartet of related but separate
stories mythical and semi-historical. The Last
Supper, a revisiting of a religious story broken up by
parables acted by the company. Seven Lears, a spec-
ulation on a Shakespeare classic, as is Gertrude:
The Cry. Found In The Ground, a balletic, imagistic,
anti-linear series of dreams and chorus. The 40,
forty scenes of despair with only one sentence in
each, entirely dependent on its spatial organization.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: Could you describe
any rehearsal room rituals that may have emerged
with the Wrestling School way of working? Or
alternatively, what kind of a spiritual experience
does the work aim to invoke between the actors and
the audience members?
HOWARD BARKER: There are no rituals, nor any
methods peculiar to us. I spend no time at all at a
table but begin moving the actors in space immedi-
ately. I discourage discussion of meaning or pur-
pose, nor do I permit political argument, or newspa-
pers, in the space, which while I do not make a
fetish of it, I regard as sacred to the work, and want
to exclude extraneous influences. We work amica-
bly, I mean by this, there is tremendous respect for
one another's talent. But the director must direct. I
cannot work with people who want to collaborate,
they mustand dogive themselves over to my
direction because, quite simply, they trust me. This
trust works both ways. I know their powers, or they
would not be here. And we do no research whatso-
ever. The very idea is anathema to me. As for the
audience, it does not enter into my calculations. I
aim for the realization of the text. The spiritual
value of theatre relies on its absolute integrity. This
integrity means, frankly, ignoring what might please
or reward the public. This is not contempt for the
public, but the opposite.
Current work
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: Last year Gerrard
McArthur directed one of the two annual Wrestling
School works. This year he has been given another
directorial opportunity while the companion piece
has been entrusted with Hanna Berrigan.
Considering that as directors they would bring their
own collaborators into the process, this seems like a
significant departure from the previously estab-
lisheddistinctly monolithicway of working.
Could you say a bit about why this has come about
and what it means for the further development of the
Wrestling School?
HOWARD BARKER: These directors do not bring
their own collaboratorsas you persist in calling
theminto the work. They use our existing people,
for example, Thomas Leipzig, Billie Kaiser, Ace
McCarron, a long time lighting designer. Nothing is
altered in the fundamentals, how else could we be a
school? It's not a free for all. The style is not up for
negotiation. Hanna Berrigan has assisted me three
times and is ready to do her own play. I wrote this
short piece for her. She understands the demands of
the work. Am I saying there is only one way to do
Barker? No. But in the Wrestling School, we have
one style, and this develops organically. As for your
remark about the company being monolithican
implied criticism, I thinkit is a company created
and developed out of one writer's distinctive work.
This work has very particular demands, which must
be realized. Where these demands are not realized,
the productions have been imperfect (we see this all
over the world). In other words, we have set a very
high standard for presenting Barker texts.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI: Are you pleased with
how the "21 for 21" initiative has gone, and has this
created any new interesting opportunities for the
internationalisation of the company's or your own
work?
HOWARD BARKER: My work has always been
international, at least since the 1980s, and this has
coincided with the attempts made to eliminate me
here (successful attempts, it must be said). The situ-
ation in which I find myselfand the company
finds itselfis unprecedented in theatre. We persist
in spite of vicious journalistic reviewing, a collec-
tive (yes, here there is a collective) decision by all
the national companies to cease performing my
plays (new and old), but yet we enjoy a powerful
subterranean reputation. In May there is a major
conference in New York devoted to Barker studies.
If you can think of any artist who has undergone
such a strange fortune, I should like to hear of
him/her. But it's not important. The fact is, no one in
the National Theatre, the Royal Court or the Royal
Shakespeare Company would know how to direct a
play like Gertrud: The Cry or The Fence In Its
Thousandth Year, nor could Iwithout the compa-
nyhave ever written them. It works out in the end.
70
The theatre work of Vegard Vinge and Ida
Mller was the focus of great debate at the 2009
Bergen Festival where the duo premiered their high-
ly stylized interpretation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.
The central talking point of the scandal was the pro-
duction's running time. Nightly the show exceeded
its advertised length by hours and, as a result, the
festival's director, Per Boye Hansen, halted each
evening's performance. While Vinge and Mller
maintain that they never agreed to the posted run-
ning time and Hansen defended his interruptions as
necessary for the contracted laborers working the
theatre as well as local noise ordinances, the scandal
threatened to overshadow Vinge and Mller's stun-
ning attempt to brutally and beautifully re-imagine
the father of modern drama.
Vinge (director, performer) and Mller
(scenographer, costume designer, performer) began
their exploration of Ibsen's works in 2006, present-
ing a controversial version of A Doll's House at
Oslo's experimental venue Theatre of Cruelty
(Grusomhetens Teater). The production focuses on
Nora's three children, depicting them as abandoned
casualties who rebel violently against their mother's
emancipatory action. Ivar decapitates their mother
with a chainsaw, Emmy commits suicide with a
kitchen knife, and Bob destroys the entire hand-
painted set to reveal the show's second act: a free-
form, apocalyptic vision of the Helmer's broken
home. In 2007, Vinge and Mller presented a child-
centered version of Ghosts at Oslo's Black Box
Teater. The production featured two Oswalds.
Mller played the son of the staged drama while
Vinge, as the second, sat in the theatre commenting
upon, directing, and interrupting the action as both
the show's fictional and actual director.
These performances featured what has
become the artists' signature aesthetic of hand-
made, cartoonishly artificial designs, masked actors,
and a flexible performance structure (whole sections
of their shows are improvised and rarely is the
length of the piece determined beforehand).
Aesthetically, they take cues from splatter-films,
opera, puppet theatre, melodrama, and renaissance
painting. Their interpretations follow numerous the-
matic threads, but are primarily concerned with the
children in Ibsen's texts, addressing ideas of nation-
al, theatrical, and familial heredity and inheritance,
while affirming the family as the locus of dramatic
conflict. These domestic clashes often result in
excessive, but clearly fictional violence. Characters
abuse, mutilate, and sexually and physically assault
one another through mimed gestures to gruesome
non-realistic sound effects. The actors spray them-
selves with squeeze bottles full of fake blood,
vomit, semen, and excrement, never attempting to
conceal the artificiality of their actions. Their fetish
for hyperbolic and gory representations of the body
reveals an indebtedness to performance artist Paul
McCarthy, while their irreverent takes on classic
Vegard Vinge and Ida Mller's The Wild DuckPart 2 Director's Cut
Andrew Friedman
71
Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, reimagined and directed by Vegard Vinge and Ida Mller. Photo: Magnus Skrede.
texts and broad cultural sampling bears the imprint
of German theatre pioneer Frank Castorf. What dis-
tinguishes Vinge and Mller's work from its
sources, however, is that they coherently shape
these disparate influences into a fully developed
aesthetic universe governed by stylistic fanaticisms
and performative rules, which they call a "total rad-
ical fiction." The phrase is a catchall for the ideals
that ground their theatrical process and performanc-
es in an overtly alternate reality, designed to be anti-
thetical to rationalized and technocratic methods of
performance and art production. Vinge claims that,
"we need this place [the theatre] to project. When
you look at these masks, you see yourself.
Everything today is a demystification of the world,
everything should be taken away and categorized
and you know everything and then there's nothing
left to project into. They've even taken the gods
away. That's why fiction is important to me because
it's about fairytales and dreaming. Something bigger
than life."
In May 2010, Vinge and Mller staged a
new version of their Wild Duck at Oslo's Black Box
Teater with the subtitle, Part 2 Director's Cut. The
venue gave a carte blanche to Vinge and Mller,
allowing the artists to present their work without
any of the time restrictions they encountered in
Bergen. Ticket holders were simply informed that
the production would last a minimum of twelve
hours. The two performances I attended easily
exceeded the minimum, one lasting for over thirteen
hours and another seventeen hours. More than a
simple extension of The Wild Duck's plot or theatri-
cal gimmick, the open-ended running time of the
production is both a challenge to contemporary the-
atre going and dramaturgically necessary to Vinge
and Mller's aesthetic.
The production unfolds slowly, according
to Vinge, as a means of "getting under the audience's
skin" as contemporary culture finds it "dangerous if
you spend too much time on something because the
energy [between you and it] becomes strong." In
their fictional world, "just opening a door and shut-
ting a door could be a whole play," and so Vinge and
Mller set out to lovingly develop miniature three
act dramas from everyday events. Mundane
moments of showering, opening the blinds, setting
the table, or preparing breakfast become character
sketches played at length to loops of Purcell,
Wagner, and Mozart. The leisurely pace of their
work is highlighted in the opening scene of their
performance. The show begins in a seatless black
box theatre in which a video of two Neanderthals
clearing a forest plays on the back wall. Vinge,
The Wild Duck, directed by Vegard Vinge and Ida Mller. Photo: Magnus Skrede.
72
dressed as Gregers, walks into the room fifteen min-
utes into the film and in a digitally altered voice
welcomes us to the "total radical fiction." As the for-
est is depleted behind him, Vinge opens the door to
let two naked men, masked as the Neanderthals in
the video, into the room. The two actors menacing-
ly glare at the audience until one of the video
Neanderthals murders the other, unleashing a vol-
cano of blood into which a single duck flies, as the
show's title explodes onto the wall in a blast of
sound. Taking their cue from the film, the live
Neanderthals engage in a violent and protracted ax
fight as Vinge coats them and the walls in buckets of
fake blood (they are kind enough to spare the audi-
ence). Only after the actors are too fatigued to con-
tinue is the audience led across the bloodied stage
into a larger theatre where the rest of the show is
performed. Whether the Neanderthals of this thirty
minute prologue are Cain and Abel or Werle and
Old Ekdal is left unclear and, ultimately, secondary
to the sheer sensory overload of the scene. Vinge
and Mller's theatre is first and foremost imagistic,
allowing meaning to arise from the interplay of
stage pictures rather than narrative continuity.
Once in the main theatre, the performance
runs without an intermission, but uses a system of
short on-air/off-air breaks between scenes. When
the curtains close at the end of a scene, a red light
bulb in the theatre and lobby indicates that it is safe
to exit and reenter the theatre. The duration of each
break, of which there are roughly three-dozen, is
never made explicit and can last anywhere from
thirty seconds to ten minutes. During the longer
interludes, Vinge and other members of the cast
dance to pop and techno music, while encouraging
the audience to join them. These pauses create a
welcome and particularly contemporary informality
within the theatre. Audience members came and
went throughout the night, if only for the free coffee
and soup provided by the theatre, and new waves of
curious spectators arrived after the bars closed,
while about a third of the hundred and fifty patrons
hunkered down for the entire performance.
If you get caught in the lobby during a
short break you are likely to miss something beauti-
ful or shocking, but it is nearly impossible to miss
something important. Vinge and Mller's The Wild
Duck is not so much an analysis or singular inter-
pretation of the play as a free-associative re-imagin-
ing that time warps across the cultural spectrum.
Scenes are rearranged nightly, the length of which
are determined during performance, and many of
The Wild Duck. Photo: Hkon Windsland.
73
the events unfold without regard to Ibsen's original
plotting. On both nights I attended, I was treated to
scenes not used during the other performance.
Unwritten or traditionally unstaged events figure
largely within Vinge and Mller's performance of
the text. Werle and Gina's affair is an explicit sex
scene played to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go
On" and Hedvig's suicide repeats to the Days of
Thunder theme song "Show Me Heaven." These
associative digressions often lead away from the
original events of the play, but towards more famil-
iar and, perhaps, meaningful contemporary expres-
sions of the play's themes and characters.
Overseeing the onstage fic-
tion is one of two Gregers, played
by Vinge, who both directs the
action on stage and serves as the
master of ceremonies. Seated in the
sound booth, Vinge spends most of
his time speaking to the actors
through a microphone, which broad-
casts throughout the theatre. In a
digitally altered, high-pitched voice,
he instructs the performers in carry-
ing out tasks or coaches them
through their fictional lives. During
the short breaks, Vinge speaks
directly to the audience, encourag-
ing us not to give up or leave, as the
best parts are still to come. At times
he leaves his perch to dance to the
pop music playing between scenes
or join in with the onstage action.
His performance is part rodeo
clown, willing to sacrifice his body
to titillate and appease the audience
(inserting a paintbrush in his anus to
paint the floor, urinating in his own
mouth to spit it back like a fountain,
or swim in a puddle of his own
vomit), and part tyrannical director
who joins the onstage action to
assassinate his characters or douse
them with fake blood as they pum-
mel one another.
The shockingly real acts of
Vinge are contrasted by the hyper
artificiality of Mller's scenic and
costume design. The performers,
dressed like cartoonish puppets,
wear rubber fright masks at all
times. Each character's mask is dis-
tinct, with brightly painted lips, ears,
and raccoon-rings around the eyeholes, with a
uniquely colored and styled head of hair. Dr.
Relling's mask, for instance, has a longish pointed
nose, sharp angular features, spiky, short blond hair,
and sickly green rings around the eyesockets to
match a pea-green lab coat. Only the performers'
eyes are visible through the show's hefty costume
design, making them appear entombed by, rather
than performing their character.
The show's dialogue is prerecorded and
processed into distorted voices for each character.
Ibsen's text, when used, serves as epigrammatic
The Wild Duck. Photo: Hkon Windsland
74
headlines of a scene's conflict,
while succinctly caricaturing its
speaker. The actual voices of the
performers are never heard, rather
they gesture with their hands and
heads to their own unique audio
track cued from the sound booth.
Hjalmer speaks with a comic, dig-
ital stutter, Werle intones in a bass-
heavy menacing drawl, and
Hedvig hisses and whispers non-
sense. The performance amounts
to a full-bodied "lip-synching,"
with much of the dialogue drasti-
cally cut to repeated haiku-like
exchanges (Gregers and Werle's
conflict is effectively reduced to
the phrases "father," "no," and
"mine") or rendered unintelligible
due to the heavy processing of the
recordings.
The characters' actions
are highlighted through a series of
cued sound effects, brilliantly
designed by Vinge and Mller's
long time collaborator Trond
Reinholdtsen. As if in a video
game, every motion made by the
performers and inanimate objects
is accompanied by exaggerated
non-realistic sound effects. Doors
creak, glasses break, toilets flush,
and bodies make a litany of belch-
es, gags, coughs, and moans. Each
character is assigned their own
footstep effect, matched to the per-
former's physical movements.
Every high-stepped stride of
Gregers is followed by a creaky
floorboard sound, while Werle's
feet fall with an authoritative thud. These distin-
guishing sounds, like the masks, take the place of
actor generated characterization.
This highly concentrated artificiality pre-
vents the performers from conveying anything that
might suggest their own personality. Instead, they
function as puppeteers operating ghoulish exoskele-
tons. These choices have a dichotomous impact on
the viewer. The absence of onstage personalities, at
once, aids in totalizing the work's "radical fiction."
By shielding the audience from the performers'
faces and voices, the audience is given room to proj-
ect onto the artificial and anonymous image or to
speculate about the actors' interiority. But the "fic-
tion" also occasionally, perhaps deliberately, fails to
be "totalizing." Over the course of seventeen hours,
the performers display signs of frustration, confu-
sion, and fatigue. It's during these moments, when
the fiction collapses, that one is hauntingly remind-
ed of the live performer anonymously laboring to
create the theatrical fantasy. In the context of such
an overarching artifice, the ultimate inability to sus-
tain the fiction reflects Vinge and Mller's fetish for
the real to be as powerful as the fictional.
Perhaps the most central feature of the fic-
The Wild Duck. Photo: Magnhild Nordahl.
75
tion is Mller's massive set. The Werle's mansion is
a fantastically designed two-story, six-room diora-
ma house, hand-painted in black and white mono-
chrome, and made entirely from cardboard. On the
backside of the structure is the Ekdal's home (which
we don't arrive at until about ten hours into the per-
formance), a bright and trippy swirl of psychedelic
colors, of which only the living room and attic are
shown. The other four, fully designed rooms of the
Ekdal home, I was told, are utilized by the perform-
ers, but never seen by the audience. The centerpiece
of the home rotates to reveal an additional two
sides: a smoking Ibsen hell mouth, Hjalmar's fabled
invention, a tropical island getaway, and an under-
water cavern that suggests the depths to which the
wounded wild duck dives in the original text.
Stylistically, the sets are rendered in high contrast
colors and patterns recalling the pulpy graphic nov-
els of Frank Miller.
The scenography and costumes are
designed by Mller, but collectively made by the
performers, giving the design a rough texture.
Vinge contends that, "amateurs are the best painters
to use on the set because you feel there is an inse-
curity, that there's something not one hundred per-
cent controlled in the stroke and that's beautiful."
His assertion held true for me while watching the
production, as the lack of uniformity in the design
allowed my eye to find endless details in the stage
picture, while being simultaneously awed by the
magnitude of labor necessary to create each individ-
ual item on stage.
The Wild Duck. Photo: Magnus Skrede.
76
More than an aesthetic choice, the collec-
tive creation of the scenography is essential to
Vinge and Mller's physical dramaturgy. The eerily
puppet-like performances are more than a simple
masking of the actors. There are no auditions and
trained actors are rarely used, instead, it is important
to Vinge, that participants "have invested with their
bodies in the sets" as "it's not about playing perfect-
ly, but if you've painted your own set and your own
floor, then it's just about being, it's not about perfec-
tion." Imperfections crop-up throughout the produc-
tion: sound cues are missed, set pieces malfunction,
blocking, exits, and entrances are, at times, con-
fused and, I was told, one evening's lengthy scene
change was the result of an actor falling asleep
backstage. These imperfections, rather than distract-
ing the viewer, highlight the challenges of attempt-
ing to play for upwards of thirteen hours with ever-
changing scenes and set pieces. What we experi-
ence, instead of a sleek and uniform interpretation,
is the real-time struggle of artists attempting to
arrive at a destination they've yet to discover.
Despite the production's cultural refer-
ences and thick layers of artifice, the story is fairly
straightforward. All of the play's characters are fea-
tured, but their relationships to one another have
been radically altered. Like their versions of A
Doll's House and Ghosts, Vinge and Mller center
the drama on the plights of the children, Gregers and
Hedvig. The action begins in the Werles's home, but
years prior to the start of Ibsen's text. Gregers, wear-
ing a red t-shirt featuring Richard Wagner's image
and name, is a sullen boy imprisoned in the Werle's
mansion of soulless and drunken dinner parties.
When Werle, a cigar smoking, champagne drinking
Capitalist in a pinstriped suit, announces his inten-
tion of passing on the family business to his son, the
two become locked in a struggle over Gregers'
future.
Dr. Relling, a staple at the mansion, pre-
sides over the marching concentration camp-like
employees of the Werle Corporation, while fascisti-
cally preaching the doctrines of Capitalism from a
podium or, more frighteningly, genetically engi-
neering babies for the workforce, and disposing of
the noncompliant children through a meat grinder.
Pettersen and Jensen, Werle's servants, are their
boss' heavies dolling out misery on Old Ekdal,
answering the phones, and testing their employer's
cache of military weapons. Mrs. Srby, is a drunk
and giggling matriarch in a massive beehive wig,
who, when not printing mountains of money, col-
laborates on a series of shocking sexual fetishes
with Dr. Relling and the various dinner guests. As a
family, the Werle's are cold, brutal caricatures of
economic and patriarchal opportunism run rampant.
Gregers' idealism is re-imagined as a bur-
geoning anti-Capitalism. He lashes out against his
father's economic and social crimes by burning his
father's money and credit cards, or articulating his
theories through a recording of Slavoj iek's cri-
tique of charity. The conflict is finally resolved
(after some ten hours) when Gregers, fed up by the
immorality around him, beats his father into sub-
mission before murdering Mrs. Srby, Pettersen,
Jensen, and a half-dozen dinner guests. In a final act
of defiance, he tears apart the cardboard living room
to reveal the brightly colored wallpaper of the
The Wild Duck. Photo: Magnus Skrede.
77
Ekdal's family room.
The Ekdal family is portrayed, through a
series of 1970s sitcom vignettes, as ineffectual lib-
eral artists. Hjalmar works on his invention, a mas-
sive machine, which runs on his own blood and pro-
duces a brace of sacrificial ducks, while Gina keeps
house and shops for oversized name brand products.
Hedvig, the victim of her father's sexual abuse, is
the alienated adolescent double of Gregers.
Crippled by abuse and blindness, Hedvig escapes to
the attic to contemplate puberty and menstruation
with guidance from Britney Spears's pop single "I'm
Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman." The attic, in stark
contrast to the miniature nature preserve described
in Ibsen's text and Mller's other vividly designed
rooms, is a simple all white box. This barren setting
is gruesomely transformed by Hedvig's horrifically
comic battle with her own menstruation and later by
an endless repetition of her suicide, during which
she sprays herself and the room in fake blood, des-
perately shooting herself hundreds of times without
relief.
When Hedvig's paternity is finally
revealed, cleverly staged as a swarm of naked vam-
pire ducks descending upon the Ekdal's home, the
performance moves into Vinge and Mller's loose
structure of improvised scenes. Hjalmer's invention
is used to create actors playing ducks that march
around the stage before Vinge slits their throats. The
entire cast engages in a slow motion fight using
actual dead herring as weapons. Werle and Mrs.
Srby flee the planet in a massive rocket ship. These
pieces, like much of the show, are drawn from an
extensive list of scenes developed through the
group's lengthy rehearsal process. Prior to each
night's performance, a set list is created with scenes
swapped in and out as a means of experimenting
with different patterns as well as preventing any two
performances from being the same. As these seg-
ments change nightly and often involve different
characters with various results, (in one of the ver-
sions I saw, Dr. Relling murders Hedvig and stages
it as a suicide!) they are best appreciated as a series
of proposals rather than well-staked interpretive
positions.
What is clear, however, is that the scenes of
Hedvig and Gregers's suffering are key to Vinge and
Mller's interpretation of The Wild Duck. Among
the artists' many prodigious gifts, is their ability to
illustrate the drama in terms of clearly legible con-
flicts between children and their parents, reality and
an idealized future. Although these scenes are often
violent, excessive in length, and unsparingly cruel,
they are equally empathetic in their willingness to
imagine the unspoken, unseen, and frequently
unstaged injustices woven into Ibsen's work.
Gregers's myopic ideals are less irrational when
shown as the antithesis of Werle's fully realized
mercenary business practices. Hedvig's suicide is
changed from the act of a confused but dutiful
daughter into a resolute protest against the crimes of
her parents. In this respect, Vinge and Mller's pro-
duction takes on an air of a perverse fairytale, in
which the children avenge the sins of their parents.
Nowhere is this fairytale justice more clearly
articulated than in the production's final scenes.
Gregers arrives at the Ekdal's home in time to attend
Hedvig's funeral, during which she is resurrected by
Molvik's droning Latin sermon. In the show's most
touching moment, Gregers slowly washes the accu-
mulated dirt and blood from Hedvig before dressing
her in knightly armor. A man costumed as a horse
appears and carries Hedvig off to confront Dr.
Relling who rides atop a twenty-foot high dragon-
duck made of cardboard, inside of which her parents
are imprisoned. In one of Vinge and Mller's most
radical revisions, Hedvig is reborn, destroys the
mythic duck, frees her parents, and humiliates the
villain Dr. Relling. After seventeen hours of com-
plex associative imagery, assaultive sound and
lighting, and cups and cups of coffee, one's critical
faculties become feeble. What was indisputable,
however, were the fifty some audience members
cheering Hedvig's victory as if their own. For peo-
ple of the contemporary theatre, Ibsen's influence is
often ubiquitous to the point of invisibility. Vinge
and Mller's "total radical fiction" works to clearly
reanimate the father of modern drama from the per-
spective of his twenty-first century inheritors. In an
invigoratingly childish conflation of defiance and
reverence, Vinge and Mller honor the author by
simply letting his kids have the bloody, passionate,
and shambolic last word.
78
It's a busy time for legendary Norwegian
actress, writer, and director Liv Ullmann. Until
recently, she presided over the jury for the
International Ibsen Award, a prize given each year
to a person who, in the jury's estimation, best exem-
plifies the spirit of Ibsen. And just what that spirit is
has been the subject of much spirited debate over
the Award's three-year history. Jon Fosse, the
acclaimed Norwegian playwright and author, was
this year's recipient (see accompanying interview in
this issue) and was officially presented his award on
September 10 at Oslo's Nationaltheatret. But unlike
previous years, this year Ullmann could not attend
the festivities, and that was because she was on a
tour bus. After an absence of several decades, Ms.
Ullmann is acting on stage again, playing Mary
Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into
Night.
It's an audacious choice for a return. Mary,
one of the seminal roles in the repertoire, is the mor-
phine-addicted mother in O'Neill's searing, autobio-
graphical masterwork, and one of the supreme chal-
lenges for any actress of a certain age, even under
the simplest of circumstances. But this is not a com-
fortable run in a modern theatre in downtown Oslo.
The company in question here is Riksteatret,
Norway's national touring company, which means
the project entails nearly fifty stops over a period of
more than three months, finally winding up in
Stockholm's Dramaten, where the play had its world
premiere in 1956. Suffice it to say Ms. Ullmann,
now seventy-one, has her work cut out for her. But
it is clearly the familial aspects of good old fash-
ioned touring that has attracted her to the enterprise;
that and the chance to see again through a bus win-
dow the beautiful countryside of her native land.
There is no question that a bitter-sweet
ambivalence ever so slightly tinges Ullmann's out-
look regarding her return to the Norwegian stage
after so long an absence (and her absence from
Norwegian cinema has been even longer). Her
extraordinary career has taken place mostly outside
Norway, a fact which, ironically, very much is in the
spirit of Ibsen, given the formidable amount of time
A Conversation with Liv Ullmann
Stan Schwartz
79
Liv Ullmann in Eugene O'Neill's Long Days's Journey Into Night, directed by Stein Winge. Photo: Leif Gabrielsen.
the great Norwegian playwright also spent outside
the Norwegian borders. Still, Ms. Ullmann seemed
jubilant at our breakfast conversation the morning
after the tour premiere in Rros, a charming and
famous former mining town five hours north of
Oslo by train. Here are some excerpts from our con-
versation.
SCHWARTZ: So here we are in Rros, and in 1968
you made a film, An-Magritt, about the hardships of
a girl, An-Magritt, in Rros in the 1600s. How does
it feel to be back in Rros?
ULLMANN: It's wonderful. An-Magritt was one of
my favorite acting roles. She is famous, it is written
by one of our very best writers, Johan Falkberget.
She was very poor, and couldn't read. She lived a
life of shame because she was born outside of wed-
lock. But she wouldn't give up and she became a
folk hero. I also liked the film because Sven Nykvist
shot it and it was directed by Arne Skouen, one of
our foremost directors. This was one of his last films
and it was my last film in Norway, done in 1968,
which is a shame, very sad, because I could have
done a lot in Norway. I also liked it because I could
speak my own dialect. It was the only time in my
life I could, because normally I would have to speak
a Norwegian that wasn't really mine, or I had to
speak Swedish, which of course, isn't mine, or I had
to speak English.
SCHWARTZ: How did Long Day's Journey come
about?
ULLMANN: I was asked even before I directed
Streetcar Named Desire, and I said yes because I
wanted to do theatre with this theatre, Riksteatret
[Norway's national touring theatre company],
because I had an incredible memory from when I
was thirty years old and I traveled around the coun-
try and saw Norway. I've written about it in my first
book, Changing. And Norway is so beautiful. And
so when Riksteatret asked me, and I knew this
incredible cast, I said absolutely. There's no way I
would say no to that. And a little after Streetcar, I
got so many offers [as a director] to do West End, to
do Broadway. And just for a minute, I said, this is
bad timing. And then I thought, no, no, no, what I
really want and what is my life is to do this. And I
don't regret it for a moment.
SCHWARTZ: This is the first time you are on a
Norwegian stage in a really long time. How long?
ULLMANN: I don't know, twenty-three years or
something.
SCHWARTZ: Is there a particular reason for that?
ULLMANN: I don't really want to go into that. I
haven't filmed here since 1968, and I did do a lot of
theatre until twenty-three years ago. But it was also
the time when I decided I wanted to write scripts
and direct. The particular reason doesn't matter. We
have this thing in Norway, if you cross the border,
people don't like that. It has happened with far
greater people than me. It happened with Ibsen. He
didn't come back for thirty years, people didn't want
him. Munch, the painter, he was absolutely not wel-
come in Norway. And it has happened to musicians.
Yes, they don't like that. So for some reason, specif-
ically as an actress, I've always wondered. But it's
fine with me, because I got to do a lot of other
things. It really is fine with me and maybe it was
meant to be, so that I could do everything else.
SCHWARTZ: So how does it feel to be back?
ULLMANN: It feels so marvelous, I feel so happy
and so safe. And I am doing what I grew up doing,
being on a stage in an ensemble, although it is so
long since I've been here, so it's a little Ullmann-
tour, but not really. We are an ensemble. We are
together and that's where I started, so I am terrifi-
cally happy. And also, wonderful, from Streetcar,
Cate [Blanchett] sent wonderful roses and the
actress who played Stella, Robin [McLeavy], she
came all the way from Australia and she was at our
premiere in Oslo. And that also makes me happy
because the new intersects with the very old, with
me. It's a good way to say goodbye to the stage.
SCHWARTZ: I was about to say, you did say that
before
ULLMANN: I did say that, which is a reason I
haven't acted on the stage in Norway.
SCHWARTZ: Or anywhere.
ULLMANN: Or anywhere. Because I wanted to
direct, I wanted to write film scripts. So I said it
then, but this time I mean it. I don't want to be on
stage. I would direct stage, absolutely.
80
81
SCHWARTZ: So much of the attraction in doing
this was to be able to tour
ULLMANN: Can you imagine! We are going every-
where from here to far, far North, and we are sitting
on this bus and talking and looking out! I mean, I
am so privileged! And then we will play in Oslo and
then Dramaten in Stockholm.
SCHWARTZ: But isn't it exhausting? For your
return to stage, you could have done a smaller, eas-
ier play, say, at Nationaltheatret downtown and
taken a comfortable taxi back and forth, between the
theatre and your home. But this is hard work.
ULLMANN: No it's not. For me, it is to be Liv
again and be part of an ensemble, and to re-
encounter what I loved when I was young. And very
few people get to do that one more time and have
that incredible life in between. And I got to do that
and I am very grateful. No, no taxi for me! Actually,
my husband heard that we were going six and a half
hours from Oslo to here and he told me, "Oh, you
should have told me! I would have hired a car with
a driver." And I said, "What are you talking about?!
That's the last thing I want!"
SCHWARTZ: About the ensemblethis production
is absolutely not "The Mary Tyrone Show." It's very
much about the ensemble, and that's a joy to watch.
ULLMANN: I know, they are geniuses, all three.
SCHWARTZ: You often don't feel like the two
brothers are really, really brothers and here you do.
ULLMANN: That's a wonderful compliment. Also
because they look so different. They [Pl Sverre
Hagen and Anders Baasmo Christiansen, playing
Edmund and James, Jr., respectively] have made a
big effort in this to really emphasize the brother-
hood, the love, the hate, the jealousy and all of that.
And yes, we come from different ways of acting. I
haven't been on stage in more than twenty years.
The way of acting (nowaday) may be more impro-
vising. Yes, it's new for me. I had to adapt to that,
not them adapt to me. And that has been fantastic.
SCHWARTZ: Was it difficult?
ULLMANN: I like blocking, that's what I'm used to.
But I really loved this. My difficulty was speaking
fast. This director liked fast, fast, fastpause. Fast
fast, fastpause. And I, sometimes I want to go a
lot more into the text, but you can combine what my
feelings and thoughts were and still do it this way.
And I have to say that I have never, never in my life
worked so hard on a part; one, because it was a new
way for me, and two, (Mary Tyrone) has so much
text. At least I know I don't have Alzheimer's
because I could learn my text! And I also had to
work so hard because of the way O'Neill has written
hershe jumps from subject to subject and then
goes back. What was he thinking, why did he [write
her like that]?
SCHWARTZ: What is your connection with Mary
Tyrone?
ULLMANN: At first I thought she was really trying
to be the victim and angry, and I thought, "I'm real-
ly going to do a nasty woman." But when I started
working on it, and started to know why she says
[what she says], and sometimes she speaks the real
truth in her drugged state, I realized she is a really
good woman. Trying to connect, cannot connect,
tries to hide what is happening, but it's impossible
for her to hide it. And she is always saying, "I've lost
something, what am I am looking for? I don't know
what I'm looking for" And what she's looking for,
she says the Virgin Mary, she is looking for a high-
er power to help her. She says she lost it when she
didn't become a nun, she lost it when her son died
because she went on a tour. What is not in the play,
but we know from the biographies, is that years
later, [O'Neill's mother] finds her faith again. She
knows that she is forgiven for what she thought was
her sin, and she never takes morphine again. O'Neill
is talking about spirituality. So, I know her and I
understand her. And even in the end, when she is
completely into the drugs, I think she is also getting
to that place where she will once again get sober.
SCHWARTZ: It's interesting that in the final
moments, what she's retreated into is a childhood
state, so in connection with what you just said, per-
haps O'Neill is making a connection between child-
hood and spirituality.
ULLMANN: Exactly, and there is. That's when we
had innocence and that's when we were willing to
accept or allow maybe a higher power, or whatever
you want to call it. Instead of being grownup and
making a wrong choice because you can't stand it
anymore, that you feel guilty, or that people don't
connect with you, or as Mary always says, "I'm
lonely, I'm always lonely." She has taken thirty or
forty years to get out of that hell, but she makes it.
So I think the endingjust like I thought in
Streetcarshe's thrown out but she is also a free
spirit and she is somehow going to make it.
SCHWARTZ: I was wondering if there is some kind
of connection between Mary and Blanche
ULLMANN: I think there is. We can't help some-
times what life does to us, which makes us make
other choices so that it's not us anymore making the
choices.
SCHWARTZ: Any last thoughts about O'Neill
before we move on?
ULLMANN: It's my third meeting with O'Neill.
And each time it is different and I just enjoy it. I've
always worked with incredible actors when I work
with O'Neill, but I think part of why we can be good
is O'Neill himself, because he is a master. And I've
learned a lot about life doing this play. I've learned
a lot about myself. It's probably the most difficult
thing I've ever done in my life, but I found some-
thing within me that I didn't even know I had.
SCHWARTZ: Shall we talk a little about Jon Fosse?
ULLMANN: Yes. All of us [on the jury] agreed
and we had incredible candidates, I mean world-
famous candidates. We thought we must be careful
now, because since we're Norwegian they are going
to say that we gave it to a Norwegian. But then Leif
Zern made an incredible statement.
SCHWARTZ: I imagine he was a main force on the
jury. I mean, he wrote the book.
ULLMANN: He wrote the book, right. But you
know, we all, in our own different ways, had enor-
mous respect for Jon Fosse. And we did a voteand
we did another vote. And we kept narrowing it down
from the other candidates. And we really passed
over world-famous people. But he absolutely won;
the last vote was one hundred percent. It really is
fantastic, because he is the Nordic voice of melan-
choly. He wrote the way melancholy is. He says
something. Then he says it again. Then he says the
same thing just in another way. I love his rhythms.
SCHWARTZ: And always the images of the water
and the sea
ULLMANN: Absolutely.
SCHWARTZ: And it parallels the way the waves go
in and out.
ULLMANN: Absolutely. And I like wave people!
SCHWARTZ: Thank you Liv.
82
The International Ibsen Award is now in its
third year. This year, on September 10, 2010, the
award was given to the world-renowned Norwegian
playwright, poet, and author Jon Fosse on the main
stage of Oslo's Nationaltheatret. Although relatively
unknown and unperformed in America, Fosse is a
major force in European theatre, with more than
thirty plays to his credit and numerous awards. His
work has been translated into more than forty lan-
guages, including Albanian, Hebrew, Catalan,
Persian, Slovenian, and Tibetan.
Fosse's style is quite particular, marked by
an austere stripping down of language, a dramatur-
gical minimalism, and a stylized use of rhythms and
repetitions of language. As far as stylistic compar-
isons go, Pinter comes to mind, but with a differ-
ence. Whereas Pinter's ever-present sense of menace
seems utterly earth-bound, sometimes overtly polit-
ical, Fosse's minimalist angst
is infused with an almost
mystical Zen-like calmness,
all the more unsettling for
that reason. There is some-
thing distinctly ethereal in
the trance-like repetitions,
always musical in quality.
His roots in poetry are
unmistakable. Fosse writes
about loneliness, loss, dis-
connection, family relation-
ships. Ghosts and memory
are prevalent themes.
However sparse and stylized
the language may be, his
vision is imbued with a pal-
pable sense of Nordic melan-
choly. The sea is a favorite
and often recurring motif.
Fosse has a reputa-
tion for shyness, but I found
him to be utterly warm and
forthcoming in our breakfast
encounter the morning after
he received his award. Here
are some excerpts from our
conversation.
SCHWARTZ: How do you
feel about receiving the Ibsen
Award?
FOSSE: It is something like
the thirtieth award I've gotten
but I have never ever
received such a large amount
of money [approximately
$427,500.00]. This is without
doubt the largest [amount] I
A Conversation with Jon Fosse
Stan Schwartz
83
Jon Fosse receives the 2010 International Ibsen Award. Photo: sne Dahl Torp.
have had. To be honest, what is the most important
thing is simply the money. I am fifty by now and I
have written an enormous lot and I think by now I
have enough money so I don't need to write if I don't
want to write, and that is a great feeling.
SCHWARTZ: But don't you want to write?
FOSSE: Of course I do. I've been doing it since I
was twelve years old. So, of course I keep on doing
it. But the thing is now, I don't have to.
SCHWARTZ: Do you think that will make writing
easier or harder?
FOSSE: In the last two years, I have not written
anything new for the theater. I have written versions
[of existing classics] and translations and the like,
and I feel a bit tired. I like to write still, but what I
have written lately is a collection of poetry. I wrote
poetry before I started writing for the theatre, but
then I stopped. Because a play is, in a way, a poem;
to me it is. Somehow quite a long poem, but still a
poem. And it was great to go back to poetry again.
SCHWARTZ: So maybe the poetry can refuel you
to go back to playwriting later.
FOSSE: Could well be... I keep thinking that many
of my plays are, in strange ways, connected to my
poems, and they are. I wrote poetry for let's say fif-
teen years, and then I started writing for the theatre,
for some fifteen years, and when I think about the
plays now, I connect them to my poetry.
SCHWARTZ: The Ibsen Award is supposed to be
given to someone who somehow exhibits the spirit
of Ibsen. What does that mean to you?
FOSSE: It doesn't mean anything in a way. But it
was the bureaucratic and political way to say it,
when they initiated the prize, so they had to say it in
this or that way. It is an Ibsen prize so they had to
somehow connect it of course to what you say is the
spirit of Ibsen. To me, you can interpret that what-
ever way you want and the way that I interpret it is
that the spirit of Ibsen is the poetry of Ibsen, the
poetry of his writing, of his theatre. So it is a prize
for the poetry of the theatre, in a way.
SCHWARTZ: Theatre poetics.
FOSSE: In a way. Of course you have the politicians
who want Ibsen to be a very nice feminist kind of
thing, but of course he wasn't. I normally quote
James Joyce who said that if Ibsen was a feminist,
than I am an archbishop.
SCHWARTZ: Is there a particular reason why you
are not terribly well known or played in America?
And would you like that to change?
FOSSE: There are not many European playwrights
known at all in America and England. So Europe, in
a way, is one place, and America and England and
English-speaking theatre is another place. As a
European playwright, I am produced a lot in
Europe. And I think I've had five or six productions
in the United States, and that's a lot for a European
writer. And Patrice Chreau is directing I Am the
Wind in London.
SCHWARTZ: Would you like to be more well
known in America?
FOSSE: It would be great if it happens, but to be
honest, I am not too concerned because I have had
so many productions, so in a way, it is enough
already.
SCHWARTZ: You are known for a very particular
style. Why or how did you arrive at your style?
FOSSE: It is not a choice. I never chose to write like
that. It's more the other way around. This way of
writing chose me. When I was quite young, I was
very much into music and I played and played ...
guitar but I also tried to play the violin. And when I
quit playing, I started to write a lot and I tried to
bring into my writing something of what I had expe-
rienced in music. So the repetitions are a kind of
recreation of playing music.
SCHWARTZ: I have this feeling that you have a
particular take on how history and humanity works
which, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I would
call cosmic or mystical. Then I came across this one
short speech by the Boy in The Name which I found
quite striking:
"Because the unborn are people, too, of course,
Just as the dead are people.
If you want to be human
you have to imagine humanity
84
as being all the dead
and all the unborn
and all those who are living now."
(English translation by Gregory Motton)
FOSSE: It's a beautiful speech. But it's the only
speech in the whole play [like that]. It's all "yes" and
"no" and then you have this one thing. But you
remember the situation. [The character of the Girl]
is saying "you talk like a book..."
SCHWARTZ: But it struck me that the speech func-
tioned like a key to your entire universe, or am I
reading too much into it?
FOSSE: Yes, in a way. I try to avoid such statements
almost all the time. But for once, I didn't.
SCHWARTZ: I'm glad you didn't, because it seems
important to you. Can you talk about why?
FOSSE: It's very hard to talk about this. How do you
say it? If I call myself a mystic, it is all wrong, of
course, because that simplifies [it] too much. But if
I have to use a word, then I feel that as a writer, as a
kind of mystic. And that of course has to do with my
own experiences and what I have seen in my own
life. Even if in my own writing there are almost no
references to what I actually have experienced. I try
to avoid it. That has to do with my shyness and pri-
vacy. And also the way I write. If I reproduce my
life [in a literal way], the writing becomes too earth-
bound. It doesn't soar.
SCHWARTZ: It's clear that silence is very impor-
tant and has a special function in your plays. But I
also have the impression it is equally important for
you in real life.
FOSSE: Yes, it is very important for me. I almost
never listen to even music. And I don't watch televi-
sion. I prefer everything to be quiet, if possible. The
only noises I like, in a way, are the noises of my kids
in normal life! It wasn't always like that. When I
was a kid, I loved Jimi Hendrix and noisy music.
But I ended up like this. It just developed slowly. I
really have to have a quiet place to sit and work
by the sea. No traffic. The sea and the wind. I prefer
the sea.
SCHWARTZ: Can we talk a little about your sense
of time? There is an almost science-fiction-like
quality of multiple, parallel universes where the
past, present, and future are folded into one.
FOSSE: That's the possibility of theatre. And a
poem is also like that. You can experience this gold-
en moment in theatrea kind of eternal moment
with no past, future, or present in a way. That's what
I like, and the theatre makes this possible.
SCHWARTZ: That idea also seems a bit mystical.
Now I don't want to pry, but could you give us just
a little hint of your own experiences to which you
alluded earlier that might be characterized as mys-
tic?
FOSSE: Well, when I was seven years old, I nearly
bled to death. I was in an accident and was weak
because I had lost so much blood. And I remember
when my parents were driving me to the local doc-
torthis was in rural NorwayI remember seeing
myself and my parents, and everything. I saw
myself and the situation from there [indicating with
his hand a high up point].
SCHWARTZ: So you saw everyone sitting in the
car from a very high vantage point, looking down,
almost like from a spaceship.
FOSSE: Yes, and everything was completely
relaxed and beautiful. And that sense of distance,
that distance is the distance I see things from in my
writing.
SCHWARTZ: How strange. Here is something I
wrote in this very magazine two years ago, compar-
ing Eirik Stub's production of your play Someone
is Going to Come with his own production of Ibsen's
Rosmersholm in the 2008 Ibsen Festival here: "Both
productions... presented a[n] other-worldly ... realm
where the characters became objects of some
unbearably close but cosmic scrutinya giant cos-
mic microscope or magnifying glass?in which
their every syllable was being analyzed."
FOSSE: Yes. Leif Zern [the Swedish theatre critic
and author of a book on Fosse, Det lysande mrkret
or "The Shining Darkness"] called me an alien in the
world of the theatre. Somehow I am, of course.
SCHWARTZ: But something tells me that when
Leif calls you an alien, you probably take that as a
85
86
compliment.
FOSSE [laughing]: I do take it as a compliment!
And as a fact.
SCHWARTZ: Thank you Jon.
JOSHUA ABRAMS is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Roehampton University,
Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and the Vice President for Conference 2011 for the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education. His publications have appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR, and PAJ,
among other places. He is Vice President for ATHE Conference 2011 and is completing a book-length manuscript
on notions of Levinasian ethics in relation to performance.
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 Theatre is More Beautiful
than War (Iowa, 2009).
ANDREW FRIEDMAN is a Chancellor's Fellow and Theatre Ph.D. student at CUNY's Graduate Center. He co-
authored the article "'Let Our Freak Flags Fly': Shrek the Musical and the Branding of Diversity," which appeared
in the May 2010 issue of Theatre Journal. Most recently, he presented "Keeping Time with Culture: Playing
Gombrowicz's Operetta Across Borders" at the Graduate Center's 2010 (Re)Making (Re)presentation conference.
He teaches theatre history and acting at The City College of New York.
JOE HEISSAN is a graduate student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The Graduate Center of The City
University of New York. He is a Writing Fellow at The City College of New York, where he also taught acting,
directing and theatre history, and directed several Theatre Department productions. He is currently writing his dis-
sertation on devised theatre and Theatre de Complicite.
DUKA RADOSAVLJEVI is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent. She has pre-
viously worked as the Dramaturg at the Northern Stage Ensemble and in the Education Department of the Royal
Shakespeare Company. As a theatre critic, she has contributed regularly to The Stage Newspaper since 1998.
Having published academic articles on dramaturgy and adaptation, her current research is on "the ensemble way
of working."
BRIAN RHINEHART has worked as a freelance theatre director in Florida and New York City since 1994. In
2008 he served as assistant director of the Atlantic City production of the Broadway musical, The Wedding Singer,
as well as its first national tour in 2007. He was a member of the 2006 Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and
a Resident Artist of the Kraine Theater, NYC, from 2003 to 2005. Rhinehart has an MFA in Directing from The
Actors Studio Drama School and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. He is currently an Adjunct
Professor of Directing at the Actors Studio Drama School, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theatre at
Baruch College.
STAN SCHWARTZ is a freelance theatre and film journalist with a particular interest in Scandinavian theatre and
film. He lives and works out of New York City and has written for such publications as The New York Times, The
Village Voice, The New York Sun, Time Out New York, and Film Comment. In Sweden, he has written for Dagens
Nyheter, Expressen, and Teater Tidningen.
DAN VENNING is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has a BA in English and Theatre from
Yale and an M.Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His dissertation research
is on the popular reception of Shakespearean drama on the German stage in the nineteenth century.
87
Contributors
martin e. segal theatre center publications
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three
generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when was only
twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonias
leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive the-
atre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into four-
teen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Llusa Cunill
arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and
provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Mir is a mem-
ber of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical atten-
tion.
Josep M. Benet I Jornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty
works for the stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking
revitalization of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a com-
pelling tragedy-within-a-play, and Stages, with its monological recall of
a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important plays.
They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experi-
ments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made
him a major figure in contemporary European theatre.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US$20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
martin e. segal theatre center publications
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive catalogue of New York City
research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the indexed volume, each facility is briefly
described including an outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most
entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follows: Libraries,
Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations;
Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and Other.
Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, students, artists, and general readers interested in
the theory and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature
of comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy:
A Bibliography is an essential guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and publication data for over
a thousand books and articles devoted to this most elusive of genres.
Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish
by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He
is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the
international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration
of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and
formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
martin e. segal theatre center publications
The Heirs of Molire
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the
death of Molire to the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-
Franois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nricault Destouches, The
Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chausse, and The Friend of the Laws
by Jean-Louis Laya.
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals,
these four plays suggest something of the range of the Molire inheritance, from
comedy of character through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the mid-
eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Molire tradition for more con-
temporary political ends
Pixrcourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixrcourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of
Babylon or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher
Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of
Pixrcourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama,"
and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixrcourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Price US$15.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
David Savran, editor
Founded in 1989 and edited for fifteen years by Professor Vera Mowry Roberts and
later in collaboration with Professor Jane Bowers, this widely acclaimed journal is
now edited by Professor David Savran. JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative
work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the U.S.past and
present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the her-
itage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature
and the performing arts.
Slavic and East European Performance
Daniel Gerould, editor
Established in 1981, SEEP (formerly called Soviet and East European Performance)
brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and film in Russia
and Eastern Europe. The journal includes features on important new plays in per-
formance, archival documents, innovative productions, significant revivals, emerg-
ing artists, and the latest in film. Outstanding interviews and overviews.
Western European Stages
Marvin Carlson, editor
Established in 1989, WES is an indispensable resource for keeping abreast of the
latest theatre developments in Western Europe. Each issue contains a wealth of
information about recent European festivals and productions, including reviews,
interviews, and reports. Winter issues focus on the theatre in individual countries
or on special themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artis-
tic directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and
directorial interpretations.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.thesegalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Each journal is published three times a year
Price US$20 per journal per annum domestic/$30 international
martin e. segal theatre center publications
For information, visit the website at
www.gc.cuny.edu/theatre
or contact the theatre department at
theatre@gc.cuny.edu
The Graduate Center, CUNY
offers doctoral education in
Theatre
and a Certificate Program in
Film Studies
Recent Seminar Topics:
Middle Eastern Theatre
English Restoration and
18 C. Drama
Sociology of Culture
Contemporary German Theatre
Kurt Weill and His Collaborators
Opera and Theatre: Tangled
Relations
Performing the Renaissance
The Borders of Latino-American
Performance
Eastern European Theatre
Critical Perspectives on the
American Musical Theatre
New York Theatre before 1900
Transculturating Transatlantic
Theatre and Performance
The History of Stage Design
The Current New York Season
Puppets and Performing Objects
on Stage
Classicism, Root and Branch
Melodrama
European Avant-Garde Drama
Theorizing Post
Executive Officer
Jean Graham-Jones
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
telephone 212.817.8870
fax 212.817.1538
Affiliated with the Martin
E. Segal Theatre Center,
Journal of American
Drama and Theatre,
Western European Stages,
Slavic and East European
Performance.
Faculty:
William Boddy
Jane Bowers
Jonathan Buchsbaum
Marvin Carlson
Morris Dickstein
Mira Felner
Daniel Gerould
David Gerstner
Jean Graham-Jones
Alison Griffiths
Heather Hendershot
Frank Hentschker
Jonathan Kalb
Stuart Liebman
Ivone Margulies
Paula Massood
Judith Milhous
Claudia Orenstein
Joyce Rheuban
James Saslow
David Savran
Elisabeth Weis
Maurya Wickstrom
David Willinger
James Wilson