WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 21, Number 3 Fall 2009

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 2009
ISSN # 1050-1991
Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Director
of the National Theatre of Iceland.
Joseph Talarico, Editorial Assistant Sascha Just, Managing Editor
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Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
Tori Amoscato, Circulation Manager
To the Reader
Our annual fall issue foregrounds, as usual, spring and summer theatre festivals in Europe with reports
on the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Avignon Festival, the Ingmar Bergman Festival in Stockholm, the Festival Grec
in Barcelona, and Edinburgh and other festivals in the United Kingdom. Among the other reports we are pleased
to offer information, as usual, from Barry Daniels on the current scene in Paris and information on current offer-
ings in Berlin and Vienna. Our series of interviews with leading Western European theatre artists continues with
two interviews from Iceland by Steve Earnest, one with Magnus Geir, Artistic Director of the Reykjavik City
Theatre and the other with Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Direction of Icelands National Theatre.
We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe.
Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European
Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, or mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.
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.
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Table of Contents
Volume 21, Number 3
The 2009 Berlin Theatertreffen
Avignon 2009: A Festival of Absences
Avignon OFF 2009: A Year of Hard Knocks
Barcelona's Grec Festival and the Tail of the City's 200809 Season
The 2009 Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival
Not Simply Edinburgh: The Proliferation of Festival Culture in the UK
Paris Theatre, WinterSpring 2009
Report from Vienna
A Pair of Icelandic Theatre Dialogues
Berlin Report
Contributors
Fall 2009
5
21
35
43
55
61
69
79
83
91
103
Marvin Carlson
Phillippa Wehle
Jean Decock
Maria M. Delgado
Stan Schwartz
Joshua Abrams
Barry Daniels
Marvin Carlson
Steve Earnest
Marvin Carlson
3
Christoph Schlingensief's Kirche der Angst. Photo: David Baltzer.
4
The annual Theatertreffen, consisting of
the ten productions selected by a jury from those
presented in German-speaking Europe during the
past year, was held this year as usual in Berlin dur-
ing the first half of May. One of the ten, a site-spe-
cific production created in a Zurich hotel by
Christoph Marthaler, was long closed from its limit-
ed run and in any case could not be transported, and
so could be seen only in a film version. Only one of
the others was created in Berlin, Jrgen Gosch's The
Seagull from the Deutsches Theater, so a larger
number of offerings than usual were new to the
Berlin public. There were two from Vienna, two
from Switzerland, and one each from Hamburg,
Munich, Cologne, and the Ruhr Triennale.
The opening production was one of the
most unconventional, which was hardly a sur-
prise, as it was the work of one of the most
iconoclastic of contemporary German directors,
Christoph Schlingensief, best known perhaps for
creating a major scandal at Bayreuth by staging
Parsifal with voodoo rituals and video footage of a
rotting hare. His last presentation at the
Theatertreffen was in significant measure a med-
itation on that experience, called Kunst und Gemse
(Art and Vegetables) and like Schlingensief's stag-
ings in general, was part live action, part mixed
media, part docudrama, part slapstick parody, part
political, religious, and cultural commentary, and
part happening.
In many ways his new work, Die Kirche
der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir (The Church of
the Dread of the Foreign within Me) can be seen as
a similar construction, but a critical new dimension
is now present. At the beginning of 2008, just back
from a trip collecting images and concepts in
Nepal, the forty-seven-year-old, non-smoking
Schlingensief was diagnosed with advanced
lung cancer. After difficult and painful treatments,
and the removal of one lung, he is now in remission,
but still undergoing constant therapy and examina-
tion under the cloud of mortality. His new work is
thus above all a reflection upon his own mortality, a
non-religious, or even anti-religious mass for the
The 2009 Berlin Theatertreffen
Marvin Carlson
Kirche der Angst. Photo: Courtesy of Berlin Theatertreffen.
5
dead and the dying, filled with religious imagery
and the sounds of work like Faure's Requiem and
Bach's B-minor Mass.
Like Marthaler's hotel piece, Schlingensief's
production was site-specific, although in this case
arrangements were made to re-create its space in the
smaller side theatre at the Berlin Festspielhaus,
home of the Theatertreffen. The original production
was staged in an abandoned blast furnace in the for-
mer industrial park of North Duisburg, one of many
such now-deserted industrial sites in the Ruhr val-
ley. Within this huge and ghostly space,
Schlingensief recreated the interior of the sort of
provincial German church in which he once served
as altar-boy (indeed, to add to the autobiographical
layering, from the roof of the furnace one can see
Schlingensief's boyhood church, Herz Jesu in
Oberhausen). Perhaps also there was an implied
quotation of Max Reinhardt's famous theatrical
recreation of an ecclesiastical space for The
Miracle.
Entering the space, the audience found
themselves in a nave-like interior, with banners on
the walls, a central carpeted aisle, church pews
complete with kneeling benches for seats, and
everywhere religious icons, including a prominent
monstrance with Schlingensief's removed lung on
prominent, gory display. The front of the space was
curtained off and for the first twenty minutes or so
of the production served as a neutral background for
readers of appropriate texts from such figures as
Heiner Mller, Hlderlein, Joseph Beuys, the
Christian fathers, and of course Schlingensief him-
self, and, even more strikingly, for almost continu-
ous film images, which appear here and on a series
of side screens throughout the productions. These
images form a powerful running commentary on the
production. Most poignant are carefree boyhood
films of the author himself, playing with his parents
on the beach, playing soldier with a toy gun, bathing
his then still whole and healthy body. Most chilling
are the frequent microscopic films of the cancer
cells at work, often layered over and corrupting
other images and the live action. Particularly dis-
turbing is a reprise of the famous dead rabbit in the
process of rapid decay, almost an icon of
Schlingensief's iconoclasm for its use in Parsifal,
but now taking on shocking new meaning in this
theatrical meditation on the author's death. There is
a mock crucifixion and mock religious procession,
and scattered throughout, real and simulated film-
ings of "actions" by Fluxus, the avant-garde hap-
penings group with which Schlingensief clearly
feels a close affinity.
Important as this filmic level is, the pro-
duction places its primary emphasis upon living
actors, who are also engaged in a range of activities,
some modeled on Fluxus events, some recalling the
life and work of the author, but most derived from
visual quotations of high church ritual, subjected to
a Felliniesque exaggeration and distortion.
Impressive processions come up the aisle, headed
by a diminutive female figure in golden Papal
regalia and complete with priests and a variety of
choirsschoolgirls, children, and male and female
members of the black Angels Voices Gospel Choir.
Sometimes these enter in solemn church procession,
sometimes they enter running, sometimes they exit
rapidly, moving backward. They, and the two oper-
atic singers Friederike Harmsen and Ulrike
Eidinger, add a major musical element to the pro-
duction.
When these religious figures enter, the cur-
tains open at the front, revealing an on-stage chapel
with high stained-glass windows, which is the main
setting for most of the evening. Against this is
played a variety of parody religious scenes, includ-
ing funeral services, sermons, and celebrations of
the Mass, reconstructions of scenes we have wit-
nessed on the films, disturbing telephone calls from
Schlingensief's dominating mother (beautifully
played by Angela Winkler, one of Germany's most
honored actresses), visual presentations in front of
x-ray photos by medical technicians, and grotesque
hospital scenes. Schlingensief himself appears both
in a coffin and in a hospital bed, the two bearing a
grim resemblance.
It has often been remarked that death, the
most mysterious and universal of human experi-
ences, has been the central concern of much of the
world's greatest art. Schlingensief, has experienced
the "Angst vor dem Fremden" more directly than
most and has created a profoundly moving and hon-
est dramatic exploration of this experience, and yet
one which is continually shot through with a con-
soling wit, humor, and bravery.
By a grim coincidence the second director
represented in this year's festival, Jrgen Gosch,
was also diagnosed with advanced cancer during
this past year. Like Schlingensief, however, he did-
not allow this threat to diminish his artistic achieve-
ment. He was the unquestioned star of the 2009
Theatertreffen, the only director with two produc-
tions selected, and he was named this year for the
6
Berlin Prize for artistic achievement, a prize first
awarded in 1988 to George Tabori, and since,
among others, to Peter Stein, Claus Peymann, and
Christoph Marthaler. As was the case of most of
these, the prize was jointly given to the director and
the designer with whom he almost invariably works,
in Gosch's case Johannes Schtz.
Thanks to the contribution of Schtz, most
Gosch productions are instantly recognizable by
their visual style, just as are the settings of Anna
Viebrock for Marthaler. In the opening years of this
century, the Deutsches Theater, where Gosch was
based, has become especially associated with a new
minimalism, to which he and Michael Thalheimer
were the primary contributors. Among its character-
istics are very simple, unadorned geometrical set-
tings, few props, straightforward, almost flat light-
ing, and a strong presentational style of acting.
Gosch's Seagull this year was thus stylistically
extremely close to his award-winning Uncle Vanya
a year ago, not only because he utilized almost all of
the same leading actors, but also because the setting
and staging was almost identical. A huge blank wall
(black now, brown for Vanya) filled the proscenium
arch, leaving only a modest forestage at the back of
which a long, low platform ran across the stage at
the base of the wall, providing a bench for actors to
use when they were not in the current scene. The
house remained dimly illuminated, and the major
stage lighting was provided by a single huge flood-
light mounted on the front of the balcony. The only
other piece of scenery was a large, real rock, carried
in by two workers, which, downstage center, pro-
vides the acting area for Constantine's play.
Obviously such an approach puts primary
emphasis upon the actors and Gosch's company,
familiar with each other and with his approach, pro-
vide an ensemble of admirable depth and power.
The German press had much praise for the realism
and honesty of the characters. I found their work, in
comparison with the rather underplayed Chekhov of
America and England, often had a distinctly theatri-
cal edge, but this seemed perfectly suited, for exam-
ple, to Arkadina, played by Corinna Harfouch in a
dazzling performance that confirms her reputation
as one of Germany's outstanding actresses. The
range and intensity of her emotions, and especially
the rapid shifts from rage to tenderness in her deal-
ings with her son, were quite breathtaking. Perhaps
the clearest example of this was the scene in the
third act where she changes his bandages, which
was both as tender and as violent an interpretation
of this key scene as I have ever witnessed. Jirka Kett
as Constantine was rather overshadowed not only
Chekhov's Die Mwe, directed by Jrgen Gosch. Photo: Matthias Horn.
7
by Harfouch, but by the other extremely powerful
members of the ensemble, especially Peter Pagel as
Dorn, Bernd Stempel as the estate manager, Mieke
Droste as Masha, and most memorably Christian
Grashof as Sorin, whose rapid transitions from rage
to almost total physical collapse were both frighten-
ing and farcically comic.
The running time is long by contemporary
German standards, almost three hours (I still
remember the days when major productions were
expected to run four or five hours), and Gosch made
no compromise on that account, placing his single
intermission after the third act. This of course
emphasizes the time break in the play and places the
entire development of the Trigorin/Nina relation-
ship in the first part. Kathleen Morgeneyer has a
winning, delicate quality as Nina, and seems indeed
from another, perhaps more normal world
than the theatrical Sorin/Arkadina house-
hold. Still I found her, like Constantin,
dramatically less interesting than mem-
bers of that household. Alexander Khuon
played Trigorin very effectively as an
awkward adolescent, much younger than
the worldly Arkadina. This is especially
clear when he first begins to feel an attrac-
tion for Nina. It is an unusual, and to my
mind very engaging approach to this role.
"No theatrical tricks, no illusions,
only high concentration" were the sort of
praises often heard in the German press. I
would disagree, but not in concerning the
power or concentration of the work, which
often relied upon theatricalism of the
purest sort, especially in the acting, for its
effect. Nor were more directorial tricks
omitted, most notably the striking final
scene. Most of the company is gathered
stage right around a game on the floor.
Dorn pulls Trigorin aside and gives the
final line, that Constantine has shot him-
self. Suddenly the entire stage picture
freezes and there is a long tableau as the
house lights come to full strength, preserv-
ing this moment of illusion and play, the
artificial world in which the Sorin house-
hold has existed. It is a moving and mem-
orable moment, and pure theatre.
The third Theatertreffen offering
was an important international event, the
first production created in Germany by
one of Britain's leading directors, Katie
Mitchell. For over a decade her imaginative produc-
tions of classic and modern works have gained crit-
ical acclaim at the Royal Court and Royal National
theatres, and her career took a major new direction
in 2006 with her staging of Virginia Woolf's Waves,
which also toured nationally and internationally.
Her co-creator of this production was Leo Warner,
founder and artistic director of Fifty Nine
Productions, a pioneer organization in Scotland
developing the integration of video and digital tech-
nology with live performances. With the National
Theatre of Scotland they created Black Watch,
which like The Waves enjoyed a major international
success. Audiences in New York were fortunate to
have had the opportunity to see both.
Since 2006 Mitchell and Warner have con-
tinued to work together, creating some of the most
Virginia Woolf's The Waves, directed by Katie Mitchell.
Photo: Courtesy of Fifty Nine Production.
8
striking experimental productions in the mainstream
London theatre: Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her
Life in 2007 and Some Trace of Her, based on
Dostoevsky's The Idiot in 2008. Wunschkonzert
(Request Concert) based on a 1973 play without
words by Franz Xaver Kroetz, is the latest contribu-
tion to this series.
Audiences who have seen the widely tour-
ing Waves would find themselves in very familiar
territory with the new Mitchell/Warner production.
There is again a large screen above the stage which
displays the images we see being created and filmed
in various parts of the stage below. The basic alter-
nation throughout is between shots showing the sole
actress, Julia Wieninger, and close-ups of her phys-
ical surroundings and her hands in various activi-
tiestyping, preparing a meal, embroidering, wash-
ing dishes, washing themselves, and finally, laying
out the sleeping pills with which she ends her life.
Without exception all of these close-ups are created
not by the actress but by a busy group of five stand-
ins, whom we see creating these images in various
stations around the stage. The basic device is identi-
cal to that of The Waves, with a few important
changes. First, there is only a single actress, so she
is juxtaposed only with objects, not with other peo-
ple. Second, there is at the rear of the stage a TV-set
version of her apartment for scenes showing her
moving about there (although the front wall can be
raised and lowered, so that we sometimes see her
both alive and on the monitor screen above and
sometimes only on the monitor screen). Third, a life
string quartet provides the classical selections to
which she listens on a portable radio through most
of the play.
The action shows a lonely middle-aged
woman coming home from work, going through the
banal and repetitious routine of an average evening,
and then killing herself with an overdose of pills.
Part of the power of the original is its simplicity and
directness, which is distinctly compromised not
only by all of the production trickery, but also by
Mitchell's decision to introduce a series of apparent
flashbacks to a happier youth, involving such
actions as dancing in the leaves, collecting
seashells, and tentatively taking the hand of a young
man. We also see these scenes being created down-
stage on a neutral ground covering by members of
the technical crew, but they rather disperse the focus
of the main action. Similarly distracting are voice-
over thoughts of the woman which, although not
frequent, add little to the impact of Kroetz's idea and
in fact rather weaken its simplicity.
One could argue that The Waves provided a
means for visualizing a complex and multilayered
literary text, but that dynamic can hardly be said to
operate for this conception of Wunschkonzert, where
the straightforward original is replaced by an audi-
ence focus on the technical devices and the work of
the crew. The continuously repeated pattern remains
essentially the same. We see in the open apartment
upstage the actress performing some activity
washing dishes, for example. The screen then moves
to a close-up of this action, being created as we see,
by an actress at a downstage station, dressed in
black with only her arms in costume, providing the
image of the close-up in a freestanding sink at her
station. If water comes into the sink, presumably
from a faucet, we see the actress upstage turning the
faucet handle, but the water coming into the sink in
the close-up is provided by another crew member
pouring it from a pitcher into the field of vision. To
add to the phenomenological complexity, all sounds
are similarly visually generated, not only the live
string quartet, but the clink of glasses, the rattle of
dishes, the splashing of the water, and so on. Two
technicians at a table left create all of these sound
effects with a complex set of noise devices reminis-
cent of those used in the early days of radio (coconut
shells for horse hoofs, etc.). In order to precisely
coordinate their sounds with the images in the close-
ups, they must continuously and closely watch TV
monitors at their various stations.
The coordination is impressive, although
after about ten or fifteen minutes the technique is
clear and long before the eighty-minute production
ends has become predictable and not extremely
interesting. Critical reaction was divided. At a peri-
od when the minimalism of directors like
Thalheimer and Gosch is strongly favored, this
more consciously complex construction seems to
some a refreshing change. Others have noted that
only a decade or two ago German directors like
Castorf and Pollesch were using many of these same
techniques, and almost invariably in a more com-
plex and challenging manner. Can theatrical memo-
ries be that short? For myself, I have also wondered
why Mitchell's multimedia experiments have drawn
so much praise from mainstream critics in London
and New York, when the experimental work of
groups like Big Art in New York or Complicit in
London have for some time done similar work but in
a much more sophisticated way. Apparently at the
National Theatre, on Broadway, or among the jury
9
of the Theatertreffen, criticism operates in its own,
rather closed world.
When Christoph Marthaler began his ill-
fated directorship of the Zurich theatre in 2000, one
of his conditions for assuming that position was the
building of a huge new cultural complex in an aban-
doned industrial building, the Schiffbau. Since his
departure the major theatre in the Schiffbau, having
become something of the symbol of the financial
extravagance that caused Marthaler's dismissal, has
been rarely utilized. When, early in 2007, Jrgen
Gosch was invited to direct a production in Zurich,
he staged The God of Carnage by Yazima Reza in
the old city theatre, an enormously successful pro-
duction that was invited to the Theatertreffen.
Invited to return for another guest direction in 2008,
Gosch wanted to use the underemployed Schiffbau,
and asked Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of
Germany's leading contemporary dramatists, to cre-
ate a piece that could be performed only in a very
large open space like the Schiffbau. The result was
Hier und Jetzt (Here and Now), a typical
Schimmelpfennig piece combining the banalities of
everyday life with occasional bursts of violence and
of poetry. In this case what is seen is a wedding
party, with the guests assembled along one side of a
long banquet table facing the audience. Despite the
basically realistic conversation and the unchanging
setting, time slips about. The party begins in the
spring and seems to go on through several seasons,
and includes discussions of partial re-enactments of
various scenes from other times, most notably the
bride Katja's (Drte Lyssewski) affair with Martin
(Charley Hbner), driving the groom, Georg
(Wolfgang Michael) to bloody revenge.
Gosch's designer Johannes Schtz convert-
ed the interior of the vast main hall of the Schiffbau
into a scenic environment, covering the entire floor
with a thick layer of earth and building along
one side a series of terraces, also covered
with earth. The audience was provided with
plastic cushions to sit on these terraces.
Facing them is an elevated platform, placed
in the center of the open space, with the fes-
tival table placed on it. For the Berlin pro-
duction a large open hall was found, part of
the old railway complex around
Gleisdreieck, near the city center, but now a
largely deserted space. Here the Schtz set-
ting was recreated, complete with earth and
audience cushions, although the regular
rumble of passing trains provided an urban
touch not at all involved at the rather isolat-
ed Schiffbau.
Frankly, I considered the efforts
that went into creating the space and the dis-
comfort of sitting for well over two inter-
missionless hours on a plastic cushion and
an earthen terrace largely wasted. The cen-
tral platform, where almost all of the action
took place, could easily have been fitted
onto a conventional stage, the vast amount
of earth brought in was never seriously uti-
lized, and the huge side spaces were in fact
used only for three brief sequences, appar-
ently added to the original text by the direc-
tor. In each of these sequences two of the
wedding guests, brothers played by Fabian
Krger and Gottfried Breitfuss, carry out an
apparently ongoing feud which is perhaps
supposed to serve as a kind of parallel or
10
Roland Schimmelpfennig's Hier und Jetzt, directed by Jrgen Gosch.
Photo: Matthias Horn
parody to the Georg-Martin conflict. In the first and
last of these they strip off their clothes and one car-
ries the other nude up and down the earthen banks at
the left edge of the seating area. In the second they
carry on an extended and exhausting battle with
medieval broadswords in the area to the right of the
stage, ending covered in sweat and dirt, the only real
use of the earthen floor in the production.
Several reviewers evoked the tradition of
Ekeltheater ("theatre of disgust"), with which
Gosch is sometimes associated, largely on account
of his much-praised 2006 Macbeth, which made
extensive use of such Ekeltheater staples as male
nudity, dirt, blood, and other body fluids. Hier und
Jetzt almost seems to be making a minor and jocu-
lar reference to that tradition, however, with the
expendable brothers providing the nudity and
smearing with mud, and the blood provided in two
identical almost grand guignol sequences in which
Georg drags Martin behind the table and apparently
beats and stomps on him until Martin rises up, total-
ly covered in blood. Georg then knocks him down
again, seizes a folding chair and continues the beat-
ing, then returns to his seat. Martin, now a mass of
blood, arises, clearly somewhat stunned but appar-
ently bearing no ill will. After both attacks he stag-
gers behind Georg to upstage left, where he picks up
an electric guitar and leads the company in a song or
a dance.
A series of stories, arguments, toasts,
songs, and dances fills out the rest of the evening,
with occasional striking theatrical, but not clearly
relevant set pieces. In one a spring rain, provided by
one of the actresses with a hose, temporarily dis-
rupts the party. In another, when the script calls for
snow to fall, most of the cast climbs up on the table,
each carrying a colored laundry basket and creates
their own snowfall by throwing fistfuls of white
feathers into the air. Such sequences provide an
amusing theatrical expansion of the author's rather
straightforward, even banal text, but did not seem to
me integrated into any convincing overall experi-
ence. The company, which included a number of
excellent actors who have worked before with
Gosch, offered an amusing collection of off-beat
and yet quite recognizable characters, and this was
perhaps the most enjoyable part of the evening.
Aside from those already mentioned, I must note
Corinna Harfouch, a major talent rather wasted here
but showing a surprising skill on the accordion,
Johanna Schwertfeger as a world-weary teenager,
the doting mother Karin Pfammater and the unflap-
pable parents Georg Martin Bode and Christine
Schorn.
The generally acknowledged outstanding
production of this year's festival was a dazzling
stage adaptation from Munich of Kafka's The Trial,
the work of Andreas Kriegenburg, whose work has
Schimmelpfennig's Hier und Jetzt, directed by Jrgen Gosch. Photo: Matthias Horn.
11
been featured in five of the last ten festivals and
whose 2005 Oresteia remains one of my own most
treasured memories of those years. In addition to
directing this production, Kriegenberg also created
the design, an absolutely essential element in its
effect. When the curtain rises, the immediate
impression of the setting is that of a gigantic eye,
filling the entire stage. What is most striking about
this eye is the pupil, itself a circular stage, contain-
ing a small bed, in which an actor is lying, several
chairs, and two tables. At one a second actor is seat-
ed, typing, and at the other a third actor is drinking
a cup of coffee and speaking to the actor on the bed.
Sheets of paper are scattered across the tables and
floor. The scene is of Josef K. awakening one morn-
ing and finding himself charged with some mysteri-
ous crime. What is remarkable about this scene is
that it is vertical to the actual stage floor, so that we
seem to be looking down upon it. Moreover the cir-
cle slowly turns and the three actors are able to
maintain their positions on this vertical surface only
by careful positioning, supporting themselves in dif-
ferent angles on the pieces of furniture.
Throughout the evening this pupil will
remain at the center of the stage action, almost
always turning and in a variety of positions from the
vertical, where it begins, to various angles down to
a flat, more conventional turntable stage in the mid-
dle of the eye. Whatever its position, one or more
actors are normally moving about on it, sliding,
climbing, dancing, echoing its constant motion, in
carefully coordinated and often highly physical
demanding configurations.
The eight performers, as impressive as
gymnasts or dancers as they are as actors, four men
and four women (Walter Hess, Sylvana Krappatsch,
Lena Lauzemis, Oliver Mallison, Bernd Moss,
Annette Paulmann, Katharina Schubert, Edmund
Telgenkmper) are all identically costumed and
made-up, each in a black suit and tie, with short
haircut and clown white makeup with darkened eye-
brows and eye shadow and thin mustaches, men and
women alike. At one time or another each represents
Joseph K. and sometimes they represent him as a
group, moving in coordinated patterns and each
repeating the same series of gestures or variations of
them. Not only in their costumes, but even more in
their expressions, gestures, and movements they
continually evoke images of silent film comedy, and
especially of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
From time to time actors will step out of the ensem-
ble to play other characters from the novel, but nor-
Franz Kafka's Der Prozess, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair.
12
mally only by adding an additional element to their
basic costume, a priest's scarf or a cleaning woman's
apron. Occasionally one of the women will put on a
full dress, though without removing her white
makeup mask and mustache, creating a strikingly
grotesque effect.
At either side of the narrow main stage is a
door opening into a white wall suggesting a stone-
like surface, and much of the action is played on this
forestage or within the pupil, with the rest of the eye
forming a sloping transitional area, much less used.
The style throughout suggests a combination, as I
have suggested, of silent film comedy with more
than a touch of German expressionism and perhaps
Meyerhold's biomechanics. The whole suggests a
kind of grotesque dance theatre which provides a
highly effective medium for Kafka's disturbing
world. Among the many highly effective sequences
is the rambling and confused discussion of the vari-
ous forms of acquittal by the painter Titorelli, basi-
cally a bravura monologue lasting twenty minutes
or so, in which the painter wanders back and forth
on the forestage while a six-member Josef K. chorus
reacts to his speech on the constantly revolving iris-
turntable in a fascinatingly varied series of chorus
line configurations.
This is in the second part of the evening,
when the formerly brown pupil is now cold white,
with six short black poles protruding up from its
surface in a smaller circle. When Josef K. is visited
by the prison chaplain, the turntable moves up to an
almost vertical position, and around each of these
poles curls a Josef K. double in a fetal position, like
a small black larva, each little body slowly turning,
like cars on a ferries wheel, as the turntable
movesone of many stunning visual images in this
production. When Josef K. is at last executed, this
takes place with the turntable in its horizontal posi-
tion, and his body cannot be seen when the other
figures crouch over him. Then they depart and the
turntable slowly tips back up to nearly its original
vertical position with his splayed body at its center,
his chest bloody and supporting himself in an
almost upright position by placing his feet on two of
the black poles, a contemporary crucifixion.
The next offering of the Theatertreffen was
Nicolas Stemann's adaptation of Schiller's The
Robbers, from the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.
Stemann, like Kriegenberg, is a regular invitee to
the Theatertreffen, this being his fourth production
there since 2002. His reworking of the Schiller clas-
sic had an interesting feature in common with The
Der Prozess, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair.
13
Trialits famous, almost legendary protagonist
was incorporated by several actors, normally work-
ing as a group. In this case, however, while the four
young men who represented at one time or another
each of the Moor brothers and briefly, in the open-
ing scene, their tormented father, while in constant
motion did not emphasize their physical configura-
tions, but the spoken lines. These were sometimes
spoken by one of the four, sometimes by several or
all of them speaking as a chorus, and in various
combinations, as when a line would be begun by
one, then joined in sequence by each of the others
until all four were speaking. Sometimes lines were
repeated several times either in sequence or as leit-
motifs, giving the overall impression of a kind of
verbal music drama. There was actual music as
well, a series of songs in a sentimental pop style
sung by Karl Moor's deserted love, Amelia, Maren
Eggert, and several punk rock numbers delivered by
a small guitar and percussion band, especially to
underline the depredations of the robbers.
Aside from Amelia and the four young
men (Philipp Hochmaier, Alexander Simon, Felix
Knopp, Daniel Hoevels) and Amelia, the cast
included Christoph Bantzer as the father and Peter
Maertens and Katharina Matz as the faithful old
household servants. Aside from the sons, these all
were costumed (by Esther Bialas) in elegant upper-
class dress of Schiller's era, while the sons wore a
variety of costumes. When playing the evil son,
Franz, all wore contemporary slacks and pullover
sweaters. For Charles they removed the sweaters
until the second part when Charles comes home dis-
guised as a visiting Count, when they all put on ele-
gant, golden brocaded frock coats, lace and wigs, to
join the visual world of the other characters. Finally,
as members of the robber band, especially when
committing or planning their acts of violence, they
wear the dark hoods with eye and mouth openings
associated with contemporary terrorists.
The setting, by Stefan Meyer, was in
essence an empty stage, with the armchair of Old
Friedrich Schiller's Die Ruber, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair.
14
Moor in the center as normally the old property.
Much use however was made of video and film pro-
jections, sometimes on a downstage curtain, but
more often on the blank rear wall, which could also
open at critical moments to reveal banks of flood-
lights pointed directly at the audience. The videos
(by Claudia Lehmann) were at first quite simple
titles, portraits, a picture of what might have been
the Moor residence, but as the evening progressed
they became more fluid and more complex
impressionistic compositions of pine trees and snow
to represent the Bohemian forests and disturbing
collages of weapons and flowing blood to accompa-
ny the false report of Karl's death in battle. The cli-
mactic video sequence occupied much of the second
act, beginning with Karl's return to his home in dis-
guise and ending with Franz' suicide in the burning
home.
For this sequence an entire small village,
like those constructed for model railroads, is placed
on a table stage left, illuminated by a standard desk
lamp. When Karl returns to his home town in dis-
guise and wanders through its streets, recalling his
youth there, video assistant Hanna Linn Wiegel
moves a tiny camera through this setting, so that we
seem to see Karl's view of the buildings, streets and
trees projected onto the larger rear screen. We are
even taken into the Moor home, where Karl finds
the empty chair and assumes his father dead. Later,
when Franz' treachery is revealed and the mob is
setting fire to the city and to the Moor home, an
actual fire is set in the model village, so we see it
burning on the projection, finally reduced to burnt
out shells which resemble those of actual buildings.
For the final confrontation of the brothers,
the four actors indicate by changes in costume the
rapidly changing shifts of power between the two,
wearing their Franz sweaters when he dominates the
scene and removing them as Karl gains the upper
hand. Finally only one of the four is left to play the
increasingly isolated Franz. Surrounded by the
father he has wronged, the moralizing servants, and
his multiplied brother, with the mob raging outside,
he is driven to increasing desperation until, accord-
ing to Schiller, he strangles himself with the golden
cord from his hat. This stage direction, like many
previous ones, is spoken by the actors playing the
brothers, but in this production, the defiant Karl
refuses to kill himself. There is a frantic chase on
and off stage and a violent struggle at the end of
which the other three brother figures forcibly hang
him from a rope dropped upstage. Karl, agonizing
over all the suffering he has witnessed and caused,
departs in agony, leaving Amelia to sing a quiet final
Die Ruber, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair.
15
song of hopeless love for him.
The Vienna Burgtheater usually contributes at
least one production to the Theatertreffen, and this
year's offering was a particularly Viennese one, Der
Weibsteufel (The Woman Devil) by Karl Schnherr.
Schnherr is hardly a familiar name in the Anglo-
Saxon theatre, but he is a central figure in the mod-
ern Austrian drama, with certain similarities to both
Schnitzler and Strindberg. Indeed the production
program remarks that Schnherr "has long been
considered, after Schnitzler, the most important and
successful Austrian dramatist." The 1914
Weibsteufel is one of his best-known plays and a
good example of his perspective and his style. With
only three characters, two men and a woman, it
explores their developing web of emotional rela-
tionships, ending in a death struggle over the
women between the men. So far this could be the
basic situation of countless European tragedies, but
in direct contradiction to, for example, Strindberg,
the woman is seen to have the more sophisticated
and mature perspective, the men all too ready to
resort to confrontation and violence.
The role of the woman is thus at the center
of the play, and Birgit Minichmayr, one of Austria's
most beloved actresses, makes this role a triumph of
physical dexterity (on a difficult and demanding set-
ting) and emotional range and depth. Her return to
Vienna after several years of working abroad, most-
ly in Berlin, added to the significance of the pro-
duction at the Burg. It was also a homecoming for
director Martin Kuej and designer Martin
Zehetgruber, who, like Minichmayr, have been
recently working in Berlin. Kuej began his direct-
ing career in Graz with another Schnherr play and
has been working with Zehetgruber regularly since
1990.
Although Minichmayr dominated the
evening, she was ably supported by two familiar fig-
ures on the Vienna stage, Werner Wlberg, who
plays her husband, and Nicholas Ofczarek, the rival,
a young border patrol officer. The husband and wife
are conducting a profiting smuggling business, and
doing so well that they are planning to purchase a
comfortable Tyrolean home, when their trade is
threatened by the arrival of the young officer. The
husband suggests the wife distract the officer so that
the business can continue, a ploy that soon grows
Karl Schnherr's Der Weibsteufel, directed by Martin Kuej. Photo: Georg Soulek.
16
out of control. At the conclusion howev-
er, with the rather foolish husband dis-
patched by his rival, the young wife goes
off to enjoy the new home on her own.
Zehetgruber's provides a simple
and powerful visual statement. It is com-
posed of a mass of massive, cut down tree
trunks, no branches visible, like giant
rough tubes, laying in a heap across the
stage, some flat, others rather steeply
slanted, and each one large enough for
the actors to walk or sit upon. Although
its sometimes steep inclines and gaps
require a certain acrobatic skill on the
part of the actors, its stark and simple
configuration makes a fitting cadre for
the emotional confrontations of
Schnherr's drama.
The one-man autobiographical
reading has now become a distinct part of
the international theatre scene. First came
Spalding Grey in the United States, then
Philippe Cambert in France and now
Joachim Meyerhoff in Austria and
Germany. Recently the Vienna
Burgtheater began presenting small, usu-
ally one-actor pieces in the north
vestibule of this huge building, somewhat
similar to the platform performances in
the lobby of the National Theatre in
London. Here Ignaz Kirchner read pas-
sages from van Gogh's letters, Philipp
Hochmair presented a monologue based
on Kafka's The Trial, and various songs
and instrumental pieces were offered.
Then in the fall of 2007 Joachim
Meyerhoff presented something new to the Burg, a
monologue autobiographical reading, Alle Toten
fliegen hoch (All the Dead Fly High). This was such
a huge success that Meyerhoff continued to perform
it in Vienna and elsewhere and added in January and
April of 2008, two extensions of the work, moving
further into his life. When all three parts are done
together, as they were at the Theatertreffen, the per-
formance now lasts five hours.
Twenty years ago five-hour productions
were quite common in the German theatre, but
today even Ibsen and Chekhov often clock in at
around two hours without an intermission, and
Meyerhoff's marathon requires a real commitment. I
have much admired him in a number of productions,
as Benedict in the 2006 production of Much Ado
About Nothing, directed by Jan Bosse, as Ariel in
Barbara Frey's Tempest in Vienna in 2007, and in the
title role in Bosse's 2007 Hamlet, for which Theater
heute named him "actor of the year." Certainly he
brings an engaging and varied interpretation to this
new project, but I would much rather have seen him
again in an actual play. I felt much like one of the
Berlin reviewers, who complained about the selec-
tion of this work, noting that the Theatertreffen is
supposed to present the "ten best stagings" of the
previous year, but Alle Toten is not in fact a staging,
"but rather a reading."
Indeed, Meyerhoff provides little of the
pantomime that marks the French work of Caubere.
Much more like Grey he basically remains in a
chair, reading from his manuscript, with piles of let-
ters on it, from which he also occasionally reads.
17
Alle Toten fliegen hoch, directed by Joachim Meyerhoff.
Photo: Courtesy of Berlin Theatertreffen.
There is a second chair on the stage, but it is basi-
cally bare. A screen above the stage to our left
shows relevant pictures, mostly of the people
Meyerhoff mentions, but this is hardly a slide pres-
entationnormally the slides only change every fif-
teen minutes or so.
For an American, by far the most interest-
ing of the three sections ("America," "At Home with
the Psychiatrist," and "My Grandmother's Legs") is
the first, telling of Meyerhoff's high school years
with a host family in Laramie, Wyominghis
sports career there, his first romances, his trips into
the mountains, and his encounter with a German in
prison there who became a life-long friend (At the
end of the first section, Meyerhoff actually seats
him, a non-speaking but striking presence, in the
second chair). Meyerhoff was in Laramie in the late
1980s, long before the hate crime there brought it to
national attention, and so of course there is no refer-
ence to that, but I was nevertheless struck by the
coincidence that this small American town, far from
any major theatre center, has now become, for quite
different reasons, a familiar reference to theatre
audiences in both America and Germany.
The main "dead" person in the first section
is Meyerhoff's brother, killed in an automobile acci-
dent, whose death causes his return to Germany and
his first meditations on mortality in the evening.
Many others follow, most notably members of his
family. It is an often amusing and often touching
chronicle of a fascinating and richly considered life,
with, for an American viewer, an amusing and pen-
etrating view of heartland American culture by an
outsider. It remained, however, for me at least, dis-
tinctly less satisfying on the whole than most of the
actual theatre productions in the festival.
The festival's final offering was Marat.
Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden? (Marat,
What's Become of Our Revolution?), a major rein-
terpretation of Peter Weiss's drama by Volker Lsch
for the Hamburg Schauspielhaus. The general shape
and most of the key arguments between Marat
(Achim Buch) and de Sade (Marion Breckwoldt)
are retained, but this is on the whole a very free
adaptation, with the emphasis upon the ongoing
class struggle in contemporary times. Marat, Sade,
Coulmier (Hanns Krumpholz), and Jacques Roux
(Tristan Seith) make their first appearance in a
series of theatrical poses and in eighteenth century
dress, but from then onward they and their world are
solidly contemporary. Indeed, in one of the most
theatrically effective running jokes of the produc-
18
Peter Weiss's Marat. Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden?, directed by Volker Lsch. Photo: A.T. Schaefer.
tion, Marat appears, as the evening goes on, in a
variety of revolutionary guises, first as a bronzed
statue of Lenin, as a 1960s hippie to the music of
"Age of Aquarius," as Che Guevera, always promis-
ing to the ever exploited chorus imminent salvation,
which of course never comes. What the chorus gets
instead is a series of social palliatives and distract-
ing handouts by the ever-interrupting Coulmier. It is
a wonderful and highly effective extension of the
"Fifteen Glorious Years" sequence.
The two leading figures are excellent,
Marat in his constantly changing guises, and the
overweight, tousled, beer-swigging, flatulent de
Sade, striking reminiscent physically of Fellini's
Saraghina in 8 . The production's most radical
innovation, and the center of all critical commentary
upon it, however, was the twenty-eight-member
chorus. Choral work is undergoing a major revival
in German theatres at the moment, central in differ-
ent ways to three of the most highly praised works
in the Theatertreffen (The Trial, The Robbers, and
Marat/Sade) as well as in the recent Oresteia of
Thalheimer's and Ren Pollesch's tongue-in-cheek
A Chorus Makes Big Mistakes. Marat/Sade not only
contributes significantly to that trend, but also to an
interest in contemporary German experimental the-
atre (most notably by the group Rimini Protokoll) is
utilizing non-actors on the stage.
The entire twenty-eight-member chorus is
made up of such non-actors, drawn in fact from
street people and others among the poorest inhabi-
tants of Hamburg. During the major part of the pro-
duction they primarily inhabit a huge padded cell,
with rubber walls and floor at the rear of the stage,
bearing a huge ALDI logo (ALDI is the German
equivalent of Wal-Mart, with an even worse reputa-
tion for exploiting the poorer elements of the popu-
lation). Here they occasionally erupt in protest, to be
beaten down or pacified by the shoddy goods show-
ered on them by Coulmier and his assistants. Their
major moments, however come in the most signifi-
cant additions to the play, a major choric prologue
and epilogue.
The production opens with a single mem-
Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden?, directed by Volker Lsch. Photo: A.T. Schaefer.
19
20
ber of the chorus stepping downstage before the cur-
tain to address the audience. He is joined by anoth-
er, then another, each one continuing the spoken line
which thus becomes more and more a choric deliv-
ery. For perhaps fifteen minutes different combina-
tions of chorus members, from a single voice to a
full chorus, carry out an extended speech discussing
the living conditions experienced by themselves and
others like them throughout Germanylack of
work, lack of training for work, neglect of the poor,
the sick, the old, the pressures of rising prices and
shrinking services, the indifference of the state, the
official charities, and above all the wealthy, whose
excess possessions could so easily eliminate much
of this suffering. It is a powerful indictment, and
powerfully delivered, since the director and his
choric assistant Anselm Lenz, have brought these
inexperienced performers to a remarkable degree of
accomplishment in the delivery of these passages, as
Erich Hausmann has provided them with extremely
effective physical training.
Powerful as the opening sequence is, it is
quite overshadowed by the epilogue. After the lead-
ing actors took their conventional bows and left, the
stage remained empty as the applause continued.
Finally the chorus members appeared, lining up
across the stage, but not acknowledging the
applause. They took sheets of paper from their pock-
ets, unfolded them, and began to read over the
applause, which of course died out. They began by
announcing that as representatives of the poorest
inhabitants of Hamburg, they would like to address
their counterparts, the twenty-eight most wealthy
inhabitants of the city. They then begin, like a roll
call, the names and the assets, starting with Frank
Leonhart, 450 million euros, and Thomas Ganske,
550 million euros. The figures grow higher as the
list continues, and with each name the home address
in Hamburg is given, with pauses for the audience to
take notes. The effect is stunning and cumulative,
added to by the clear anger and frustration of the
readers themselves. A clearer and more devastating
proof of the continuing failure of Marat's revolution
would be difficult to imagine.
This, I thought, is truly effective agit-prop
theatre for the twenty-first century, and I could not
help thinking of the ending of the agit-prop classic
Waiting for Lefty, with its call for political action.
Not surprisingly, some of the Hamburg financiers
whose names, worth, and addresses were thus pre-
sented, were concerned that someone might in fact
heed what could clearly be considered a Lefty-like
call for social action, and attempted to have this sec-
tion of the play censored. Their protests were not
effective, however, since all these facts and figures
had been taken from a recently published and wide-
ly circulated financial journal in Germany and so
were a matter of public record, long a perfectly
acceptable source for the familiar German docudra-
ma. In its mixing of real life material and highly the-
atricalized elements, its powerful re-imagining of
the chorus, and its return to a challenging political
theatre after a decade or more tending to favor more
formal experimentation, Lsch's Marat/Sade
seemed to suggest some important shifts in the cur-
rent German stage, and certainly provided a power-
ful and memorable ending to the 2009
Theatertreffen.
The statistics are in. The sixty-third
Avignon Festival (July 7 to 29) was an overwhelm-
ing success. Forty-two shows, three quarters of
them premieres, and 125,000 tickets sold, which
represents ninety-four percent of total capacity of
133,000 seats. Avignon is clearly the place to be in
July for fans of new theatre and performance work
from around the world. It seemed to me that this
year's shows provided an even wider selection of
artists from different geographic regions and artistic
tendencies than in the past. A wealth of languages
from Arabic to Polish, Spanish and Italian, along
with French, could be heard on the festival's stages,
and a number of productions shared a common con-
cern with a world in turmoil, with the brutality of
war, and the shattering experience of exile. Civil
war provided the background for several important
pieces (Lebanon's civil war as well as the civil wars
in the Republic of Congo). It sometimes felt as if
Lebanese-born Wajdi Mouawad, playwright, theatre
director, writer, and actor, who is currently artistic
director of Canada's National Arts Center's French
Theater in Ottawa, and this year's Associate artistic
director, had invited us to join him on a journey to
his native Lebanon to experience first-hand an
immigrant's return home to a war-torn country, stop-
ping off on the way to visit Polish director Krzysztof
Warlikowski, Canadians Denis Marleau and Dave
St Pierre, Dieudonne Ningouna from the Congo,
Flemish artists Jan Lauwers and Jan Fabre,
Germany's Christoph Marthaler, and Italian Pippo
Delbono. If the journey sounds somewhat bleak and
rather harrowing at times, the programming was
clearly chosen as a reflection of today's shattered
world, and it was a trip worth taking when the
guides are major forces in today's theatre.
Journeys, both real and imagined, seemed
to be the overriding theme of this year's festival.
Interestingly, a small volume entitled Voyage pour
le Festival d'Avignon 2009, written by Wajdi
Mouawad and festival co-directors Hortense
Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, (published by
P.O.L., and given out free to anyone who wanted a
copy), is about the journey the three festival direc-
tors embarked on together in 2007 in preparation for
the sixty-third festival. Composed of an exchange of
Avignon 2009: A Festival of Absences
Phillippa Wehle
21
Avignon Court. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
letters, conversations, recollections of their travels,
and meetings in Avignon, Montreal, and Beirut,
Voyage provides interesting insights into
Mouawad's hopes and fears for the survival of the-
atre in today's world.
In Voyage Mouawad argues for a theatre
for our time that is text-based rather than perform-
ance art-based. Putting it simply, he believes that "if
there is no story, there is no theatre." (Mouawad
quoted in the Avignon program) Although he has
written, produced, and performed intimate pieces,
(Seuls, for example, seen at the 2008 Avignon festi-
val), Mouawad is noted for the epic scope of most
of his theatre pieces, a theatre that deals with themes
of war, exile, and loss, themes that are dear to
Mouawad whose family was forced to leave their
native Lebanon during the Civil War when Wajdi
was only eight years old.
This year Avignon audiences had a rare
opportunity to experience three of Mouawad's epic
plays presented in a marathon of consecutive per-
formances in the Honor Court of the Pope's Palace.
From eight in the evening to seven in the morning,
with two breaks, courageous festival goers eagerly
sat through a retrospective of his trilogy, Littoral
(1997), Incendies (2003), and Fort (2006). Later in
the festival, audiences could attend the premiere of
his latest play, Ciels, the final piece in his tetralogy
entitled Le Sang des promesses. All four plays were
directed by Mouawad and performed by the very
talented members of his company.
Mouawad is a gifted story teller. In Littoral
and Incendies (I was too jet lagged to stay for
Forts), he spins fascinating tales of arduous jour-
neys taken by the first-generation immigrant chil-
dren who set off to discover their origins in an
unnamed country which is most likely Mouawad's
native Lebanon. The stage is mostly bare when
Littoral (Tidelines) opens. There are a few buckets
scattered here and there. A wall made of what
looked like large, black garbage bags provides the
backdrop against which a group of people, wearing
long overcoats, are lined up with their backs turned
to us. They raise their arms up against the wall and
begin to shake, forming a bas-relief of trembling
figures. Against this backdrop, Wilfred, a young
man from Montreal, the key figure in this tale of self
discovery, seems in a hurry to tell us of what has
happened to him. His Quebecois French is a bit hard
to follow at first but he quickly draws us in with the
immediacy of his dilemma and the strength of his
delivery. He has just learned that his father died
three days ago, a father he never knew. The news
which came at an inconvenient timehe was mak-
Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral. Photo: Pascal Gely.
22
ing furious love to a woman when the phone rang
sets him off on a pilgrimage to give his father a
proper burial in the father's homeland. Wilfred is an
appealing figure. We sense his pain and confusion
as he briefly stands alone, looking quite lost. The
performers whose backs were turned to us, turn and
rush over to him. They are now a film crew, eager to
capture Wilfred's brief moment of solitude. By the
time they reach him, however, they have already
turned into his family, dressed in fur coats and hats,
and gathered in his apartment. They barely have
time to mutter a few words of sympathy when they
are transported to a funeral parlor. Such rapid scene
and character changes are frequent throughout the
play. Shifts in time and space sometimes occur so
fast that we almost miss them. In the funeral parlor,
Wilfred's uncle insists that he learn the truth about
his father, a bastard according to his uncle, who was
the cause of Wilfred's mother's death. He urged
Wilfred's mother to bear a child even though she
was too fragile and died in childbirth as a result.
Abandoned by his family, Wilfred conjures
a Medieval Knight to help him in his distress.
Dressed appropriately in chainmail and carrying a
sword, the Knight promises to serve Wilfred faith-
fully in his quest to give his father a proper burial.
Together they set off on their journey through an
opening in the back wall of the set, and presto they
find themselves in the father's homeland, a country
devastated by war. There they meet a group of
young people, survivors of this unnamed war, who
tell Wilfred of the atrocities they have witnessed and
the family members they have lost. Simone wants to
know why her father was shot and her mother raped.
Ame confesses to having killed his own father along
with many other people. Sabbe can't stop laughing
hysterically when he tells the tale of holding his
father's decapitated head with which his assassins
had played ball, and another watched his father die
in an explosion. "Wilfred has returned," Simone
shouts. "Wilfred is here." Wilfred, she seems to say,
has become one of us. He, too, must bear witness to
the horrors of war. Summoned by Wilfred's imagi-
nation and desire, his father appears. His body is
rotting and it must be buried soon but the cemeter-
ies are all full. The country is one massive grave-
yard and there is no place anywhere to bury him.
They decide to make their way to the sea where per-
haps they will find a spot. Simone leads the way as
they all set off, Wilfred's father on Wilfred's back, to
find a proper burial ground. Josephine, another sur-
vivor, appears dragging large, heavy sacks filled
with telephone books. She's reciting the names of all
of the war dead, names that fill the books. She is
Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral. Photo: Thibaut Baron.
23
anxious that the dead be remembered.
In the final scene, the father's body is
wrapped and weighted down with the sacks of
phone books. He has agreed to carry the names of
all the victims of war with him into the sea, thus pre-
serving their memory forever. He is given a grand
send off as his body is lowered into the sea. Before
dying, however, he urges the survivors not to give
up but to go on living. Littoral is a rich canvas of
memorable images in which the dead and the living
share a space spattered with the colors of death,
blood reds, blacks, whites, and grays.
A similar tale is told in Incendies
(Scorched), the second play of Mouawad's trilogy,
similar in that it also concerns the children of immi-
grants who must also travel to their parents' home-
land in order to learn the truth about their origins.
Twins Jeanne and Simon learn through a lawyer that
their mother Nawal Marwan has died and left a will
that states that they must bury her in her native land
with her face turned towards the ground. They also
have to deliver two letters, one to a father they
thought was dead and the other to a brother they
never knew existed. The focus in Incendies is on
Nawal, the mother who never spoke a word during
the last five years of her life, a silence that left her
children angry and confused. Against a backdrop of
a metallic curtain with its metal strips moving and
shimmering in the light, the play proceeds in a series
of arresting tableaux recapturing the events of this
extraordinary woman's life, filled with violence and
death.
Hermile Lebel, the lawyer who reads them
the will, is a bit of a bumbling figure. He prefers to
watch birds flying or water his lawn to dealing with
Nawal's requests. His malapropisms and idiosyn-
crasies add a note of humor and levity to an other-
wise horrendous tale that is about to unfold. The
twins react differently to the news. Simon, an ama-
teur boxer, curses his mother while Jeanne, a math-
ematician, is equally angry but feels the need to
learn about her mother's past. She is the one who
decides to travel to her mother's native country
while Simon stays home to continue his boxing. Her
journey takes the form of a series of striking
tableaux, the first of her mother, a mere child of
fourteen, about to give birth. Surrounded by the
women in her family, all dressed in black and voic-
ing their condemnation of her, she gives birth on top
of a ladder, as the women bang loudly on cans as if
to ward off evil. The baby is a boy and is immedi-
ately thrown into a bucket. Only later do we learn of
what became of Nawal's first born son. Only her
grandmother understands that Nawal must learn to
read and write and find her way on her own.
Nawal at fourteen, thirty-six, and sixty is
played by three different actresses, while the rest of
the cast play multiple roles, in this tale that reinvents
Mouawad's Incindies. Photo: Yves Renaud.
24
the Oedipus myth as told by Sophocles. We follow
her trajectory through fifty years of rape, prison, and
torture as she searches for the son that was taken
from her at birth. It is a many layered narrative in
which Nawal becomes a revolutionary and is
interned in prison for ten years in solitary confine-
ment. She befriends Sawada, "the woman who
sings," and teaches her to read and write. Nihad, a
key figure in this tale, is a torturer, murderer, and
rapist who shoots every moving thing around him,
except if they are women who look like Elizabeth
Taylor. He turns out to be not only Nawal's son but
the twins' brother. They must face the fact that they
are the children of rape.
As in Littoral, actions overlap and there are
flash backs and flash forwards. Past and present
occur simultaneously. One minute, Jeanne is asking
a weaver who is busy folding cloth if he knows the
"woman who sings," her mother. The next, the
weaver turns toward Nawal and hands her two
pieces of red cloth that he has folded into bundles
saying, "I've come to give you back your children."
Meanwhile one of the actresses playing one of the
other Nawals is seen slowly walking behind all
three of them. Such layered scenes are frequent in
Incendies as well as in Littoral. They effectively
capture the memories, real and imagined, of
Mouawad's characters.
Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh, Lebanese
performance artists who live in Beirut, are creators
of a semi-documentary theatre that also deals with
Lebanon's Civil War. Their Photo-Romance, one of
the most sought after tickets of this year's festival, is
as intimate a piece as Mouawads are epic in scope.
Their show opens with Mroue interviewing Saneh
about her film project, which Mroue claims is a
remake of Ettore Scola's 1977 film, Una giomata
particolare starring Sofia Loren and Marcello
Mastroianni. The pair conduct the interview on
comfortable arm chairs stage left. We can make out
a musician and his instruments seated towards the
back of the stage and a large screen hanging down
in front. Mroue asks Saneh how her film is different
from Scola's. She insists that the show is not an
adaptation or a recreation of Ettore Scola's film even
though the basic story of a lonely housewife's brief
liaison with a journalist in pre-war Italy is similar.
They have kept the general structure, she says, but
they have changed the chronology, the historical and
political content, and just about everything else.
They don't want to compete with the original film,
says Saneh, "and in any case what is an original
film," she asks. Her goal is to speak of the situation
in Lebanon and the role artists, and particularly
Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh's Photo Romance. Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
25
women, can play in the contemporary economic and
social climate. The characters in her film are a
divorced Lebanese woman who lives with her
brother and his family and a journalist who lives in
an apartment across the roof from them. The scene
is Beirut, 2006, shortly after the Israeli attack on
Lebanon, and all of citizens of Beirut have been
asked to take part in two large-scale demonstrations
on one side or the other. We watch the demonstra-
tions on the large overhead screen.
Saneh walks over to the screen to introduce
her film. "An apartment in Beirut," she reads from
the script. "A family," she announces, and a child's
drawing of a family appears on the screen. She iden-
tifies each member as the cartoon-like figures light
up. They have all gone off to the demonstration. A
shot of a table setting with leftovers from the meal
the family ate before leaving follows, and then the
camera zooms in on a woman in the kitchen, clean-
ing up after the meal. The doorbell rings. It is a
neighbor, a man she does not know. He is a left-
wing journalist. She is a traditional Lebanese house-
wife who is treated like a servant in her brother's
home. She has not gone to the demonstration
because she has too much work to do at home. He is
not there either because he has lost his job and is
having difficulty adapting to his new circumstances.
The slow dance of approach and retreat of this
unlikely couple played by Saneh and Mroue, is fas-
cinating to watch. One scene is particularly memo-
rable, the scene of their meeting on the roof top
among the white sheets hung out to dry. Their cho-
reography in and around the sheets is stunning. He
pursues her. She tries to get away. They kiss. She
slaps him and runs off. He chases her down the spi-
ral staircase endlessly turning the corners, and never
catching up with her. Later, she goes to his place to
apologize. They confide in each other about their
current lives. He has become the enemy because of
his left-wing views. She tells him that her husband
beat her and refuses to let her see her children, and
now she is forced to live with her tyrant of a broth-
er and his family. We watch him pack his bags and
leaves his apartment as the camera returns to the
woman back in her kitchen performing her domes-
tic duties. The final clip is of the man leaving with
another man, forced to get into a car, and most like-
ly, being taken to jail.
Mroue and Saleh's provocative work was
also presented in other festival venues. Mroue's A la
recherch d'un employe disparu, (Looking for a
Missing Employe), was part of Le Vingt cinquieme
heure, a program of the work by emerging artists at
midnight, and Lina Saneh's Appendice was per-
formed at the Rond-Point de la Barthelasse. A la
recherch d'un employe disparu, an "investigative
performance," is based on a newspaper item about a
missing employee that appeared in 1995. It caught
Mroue's attention to such a degree that he proceed-
ed to collect newspaper clippings, articles, and other
documents which he later made into this show that
he dedicated to the some 17,000 people who disap-
peared during the Civil War and have never been
heard of since.
Lebanon and its 2006 civil war also
inspired renown Flamenco dancer Israel Galvan's Et
final de Este estado de cosas, redux, an extraordi-
nary performance given in the Carriere Boulbon, the
magnificent quarry outside of Avignon. Galvan's
point of departure for his new piece was a letter he
received from Yalda Younes, a Lebanese dancer
who had taken flamenco classes with Galvan in
Seville. Younes writes him of her fear and suffering
during the war and encloses a DVD of her dancing
a solo inspired by the war and the Israeli bombing of
the city, accompanied by music composed of the
sounds of war. Et final de Este, redux begins with
the DVD of Younes dancing her solo, dancing the
war as Galvan describes it. Twelve musicians and
singers, hooded and wearing dark robes, move cer-
emoniously to the stage. When the DVD is over,
Galvan appears out of the dark and stands in a box
filled with sand. When he takes away the sides of
the box, he begins to dance in the small square of
sand, performing his special brand of flamenco,
with its unexpected bursts, its unusual twists,
strange curves, and unanticipated pauses. This is far
from traditional Flamenco. Galvan actually rein-
vents Flamenco, drawing from all styles of dance,
from classical to Japanese Butoh, and he creates a
series of fascinating portraits. One minute he is a
mysterious masked man; another he becomes a
hooded female figure, and in a final amazing "num-
ber," his dance partner is a wooden coffin. Twisting
and turning around the coffin and even managing to
make his extraordinary moves inside of the coffin.
"How can flamenco express the violence, destruc-
tion and collapse of lives," Galvan asks and answers
his own question with an astonishing evening of a
remarkable performance.
Algerian choreographer-dancer Nacera
Belaza is equally mesmerizing. Her latest choreog-
raphy Le Cri (The Scream), a duet she dances with
her sister Dalila, is composed of simple gestures and
26
minimal movement. Performed in the Chapelle des
Penitents Blancs, on a bare platform with minimal
lighting, the two sisters begin with the slightest of
movement. Dressed in purple sweat suits, they seem
not to move at all. Only their arms sway gently back
and forth to a sound track of intoned psalms by
Larbi Bestam, the voices of Maria Callas and Amy
Winehouse, and traditional instrumental music. Le
Cri ends with a film of the sisters dancing the same
restrained movements with other women. Their
piece lasts only fifty minutes, fifty minutes that are
hypnotic as well as beautiful.
Jan Fabre's explosive dance-theatre piece,
Orgie de la tolrance could not have been more the
opposite of Nacera's quiet, meditative dance. In
Orgie, as it was called by festivalgoers, Fabre and
the superb dancers of his Antwerp-based Troubleyn
company lash out at a society that will tolerate any
and all behavior, a society that accepts outrageous
behavior as normal. It is as unrestrained as Le Cri is
austere and reserved. Orgie opens with a wild dance
number that is outrageous and very funny. The per-
formers, two men and two women, seem to be
warming up for a competition. They are stretching,
doing breathing exercises, and jumping up and
down. It seems a bit odd that the women are wear-
ing men's briefs and that their trainers are dressed in
para-military outfits and carrying rifles. A bell rings
and off they go, masturbating fast and furiously, in
a race to see who can achieve the most orgasms in
the shortest amount of time. Their trainers scream at
them. "You'll rest when you're dead," one of them
shouts. It is an undeniably powerful opener and cer-
tainly underscores the absurdity of our quest for
endless moments of self-gratification. "Fake sex,"
Fabre said in a press conference, "is sold every-
where and it is accepted by a society in which
everything is for sale."
In contrast to the frenetic pace of the open-
ing number, the next scene takes place in an exclu-
sive gentleman's club, furnished with luxurious
leather Chesterfield sofas. While the men smoke
cigars and read their newspapers, waitresses come
and go among them, casually stopping every now
and again to service the men as if this were the most
normal activity in the world. Meanwhile the men
Le Cri, choreographed by Nacera Belaza. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
27
talk about the latest additions and changes they've
made to their personal art collections. "I've moved
the three Africans into the living room and the two
Americans into the dining room," says one. Another
admits that he can't decide whether or not his Arabs
need direct or indirect lighting. In fact they are not
talking about their artwork. They are hunters brag-
ging about their trophies. The conversation becomes
truly offensive when one of the men announces that
he is placing his Jewish trophies across from the
Palestinian ones. Not all scenes are as sexually
explicit or as offensive as these. In a lighter vein, the
dancers take an aerobics class in which the exercis-
es consist of making love to their money. They prac-
tice how to stretch their Euros, breathe in and
breathe out with them, how to connect their centers
to them, and mostly how to get their money to trust
them. There is also a Christ-like figure, naked but
for a loin cloth, who wanders about juggling a very
heavy cross. He is "discovered" by a fashion maga-
zine crew who make him into a sexy Super Star,
sunglasses and all. One of the most unforgettable
scenes in Orgie features four pregnant women sit-
ting precariously on the rims of their grocery carts.
They spread their legs wide and go into labor. They
scream and yell until at last they give birth, not to
babies, but to ketchup bottles, bags of lettuce and
celery, garlic, soda cans, lollipops, potato chips, and
much more. Accumulating as many consumer goods
as possible seems to be all that matters to them.
Shopping carts are also prevalent in a wonderful
dance number, performed to "The Blue Danube"
waltz, with the dancers swaying slowly back and
forth and banging their carts up and down. The
show ends with the dancers joyfully shouting a long
list of "Fuck yous" at the audience, including "fuck
you Jan Fabre."
We can cringe as much as we like at these
ethnic slurs and the masturbatory practices of these
eager consumers, but it is hard not to agree with
Fabre who makes it so abundantly clear that our
society is excessively permissive. Nothing is taboo.
Nothing shocks. Nothing is sacred.
Pippo Delbono returned to Avignon with
his latest piece, La Menzogna (The Lie), inspired by
the tragic death of seven workers who died on
December 6, 2007 in a fire at the ThyssenKrupp fac-
tory in Turin. ThyssenKrupp, a German conglomer-
ate of steel producers, misled the investigators who
found that the fire extinguishers did not work and
that safety measures were at a minimum. Pippo's
fury at this exploitation of the workers is as palpa-
Orgie de la tolrance, choreographed by Jan Fabre. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
28
ble as Fabre's but in an entirely different vein. It is
an unsettling piece all in blacks, grays, and whites,
a dark macabre dance. A set composed of two wood-
en scaffold-like structures with platforms on differ-
ent levels and stairs leading up to them, looks a lit-
tle wobbly, perhaps to remind us of the fragility of
the structure in which the workers burned to death.
Underneath these is the entrance to the factory. As
the show begins, Pippo walks across the stage in
front of the audience, goes up the stairs and informs
us that his show concerns the fire at the factory that
killed seven workers. Lights go up on a row of shiny
lockers, stage left. A man opens one of the lockers,
carefully puts his shoes and jacket inside, takes his
pants off, puts on his worker's overalls and shoes
and walks under the scaffolding into the factory.
Several more workers arrive and perform the same
ritual. Another one circles around the lockers on his
bicycle; a woman who is already wearing her over-
alls, walks behind the lockers. They both go into the
factory as well. One of the workers is wearing a
black suit and carrying a bouquet of flowers. He lies
down in a coffin stage front, places the bouquet on
his heart, and remains there, a symbolic presence to
remind us of the workers who died in the fire.
Strange tableaux unfold. Women with cat
masks, performers wearing horses heads, Gianluca,
a familiar Delbono figure who is afflicted with
down syndrome, sits naked on the side of the stage
meowing like a lost cat, a man with a cone head, and
a woman reciting Romeo and Juliette on the top of
a scaffold, all join with Pippo to mourn the lost
workers. Films are shown. A short ThyssenKrupp
publicity film, boasting of how the steel producers
make sure that the air from their factories is clean,
competes with Father Alex Zanotelli's long speech
about the unfair division of wealth in today's
democracies.
As in previous shows, Pippo remains a
forceful presence throughout the hour and a half of
the performance, pacing back and forth, making us
aware of his indignation at the lies told not only by
the ThyssenKrupp steel producers but also the lies
our politicians tell us, the hypocrisy and camouflage
that surrounds us, and the lies we all tell ourselves.
He expresses his anger in screams, howling, and
uncontrollable laughter. He kicks a metal barrier in
disgust and continually takes pictures of the audi-
ence with his cell phone camera, blinding us with
the flash device, as if to include us in his outrage.
Pippo Delbono's La Menzogna. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
29
Pippo's anger is also at himself. He can only feel
pity for the deceased workers, he tells us, not sor-
row, nor could he feel sorrow for his father when he
died. It is somehow comforting to meet up again
with the deaf and dumb Bobo, who was interned in
a mental hospital for forty-five years until Pippo
found him, and who accompanies Pippo in many of
his shows. It is Bobo who consoles Pippo when
toward the end of the piece, the Italian director takes
off all of his clothes, and lies down in the factory
doorway as if to join the charred bodies of those
who died. It is Bobo, dressed in tux and tails, who
awakens Pippo and tells him with gestures to get
dressed. He then takes his hand and leads him to
stage front where he and Pippo stand before us.
Pippo tells us that he sometimes wishes that he
could be deaf like Bobo so he wouldn't have to hear
the lies, and then concludes asking for his father's
forgiveness, and dedicating the piece to him.
A number of directors revisited Greek
tragedies during the sixty-third festival, most
notably Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. (A) pollo-
nia, one of the three major productions in the Honor
Court this year, reworks texts from Euripides and
Aeschylus into a powerful collage that examines the
concept of sacrifice from Agamemnon's sacrifice of
Iphigenia, to the story of Alcestis, who sacrifices her
life to save her husband Admetus, and real-life
Apolonia Machzynska-Swiatek, a Polish woman,
mother of three children and expecting a fourth,
who gave her life to hide twenty-five Jews during
World War Two. Composed of two parts and a pro-
logue, this impressive four-and-one-half-hour mod-
ern tragedy is filled with references to Greek gods
and mythological characters as well as contempo-
rary figures such as Apolonia. For non-classical
scholars, the program notes provided background
information on the Greek gods and characters of
Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Orestes, Admetus,
Alcestis, Apollo, as well as Ryfka Goldfinger, one
of the Jews saved by Apollonia. A set consisting of
a metallic structure in the middle of the vast stage, a
sort of copula toward the rear under which an
orchestra and its lead singer, a blues-rock who peri-
odically appear to serenade us between scenes.
There are two chairs in front waiting to be occupied,
two glass houses on either side of these, a dining
room table with six chairs stage left, and along the
side stage left, a long red bench with three life-size
dolls on it, and a man and a woman seated
(A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. Photo: Sznhs.
30
among the dolls.
(A)pollonia begins in July 1942 at an
orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. The man and
woman who had been sitting on the sidelines, now
pick up the dolls, carry them over to the two chairs
in the center and perform The Post Office, a play by
Rabindranath Tagore, as a sort of puppet show with
the dolls sitting on their laps. Amal, the boy doll,
asks his aunt if he can go out to play. She says no,
he is ill and the doctor said no. "But," says Amal, "I
want to see the world." "Why," she asks. "You can't
go over the mountain." We soon learn that these are
the children who were exterminated at Treblinka a
few days later. The dolls and their handlers move on
to sit around the dining room table and perform
what appears to be a family drama. Husband and
wife are having dinner. A lovely young woman in a
pretty white dress runs across the stage and summ-
ersaults on the red bench. She is happy and vital; she
can hardly be stopped. But her father gives her a gift
of sparkling shoes, and we soon realize that she is
Iphigenia and her father is Agamemnon.
Clytemnestra protests, but Iphigenia seems to
understand that she is being sacrificed to save her
country and she knows her duty. Still, when it's time
for her to go with her father, he has to carry her off
screaming.
Scenes are announced in large letters pro-
jected on the south wall of the Honor Court, along
with translations of the Polish text into French.
AGAMEMNON is next. A woman in a red suit,
black gloves, black shoes, and black hair (a wig),
stands under the copula. Her resemblance to Jackie
Kennedy the day of her husband's assassination is
unmistakable. She is joined by a man. The
Marseillaise plays and they stand at attention. He
delivers a very long speech on the necessity of war
despite its atrocities. "How many people were
killed," he asks himself. 572,043 a month, a week,
an hour, a minute. A death every four or five sec-
onds. He acknowledges his guilt and the indiffer-
ence he felt whenever he killed a child, Jewish or
German. Throughout this tirade, his wife stands
silent, while a huge close up of her face is projected
behind her with tears running down her cheeks.
When Agamenon returns to his glass house and
Clytemnestra goes into the other glass house, she
wipes the blood off of her dress and speaks into a
microphone. "I struck him," she says, slurring her
words. "It's done. I killed him." And she stumbles
off, taking off her wig and dress. It is now Orestes'
turn to commit his crime which he does somewhat
casually as he slits his mother's throat, puts a white
sheet over her, lights a cigarette, and peels an
orange. Alcestis, Admetus' wife is the next woman
to be sacrificed. Unlike Iphigenia, or Clytemnestra,
however, she offers to die in her husband's place,
and thanks to Heracles, she is saved and brought
back to life. In Warlikowski's piece Apollo is por-
trayed as a young man with tattoos, Thanatos is a
bureaucrat with a brief case, and Heracles is a drunk
American.
These are only a few of the many scenes in
this complex and rather difficult piece, a piece filled
with obscure references, and not always easy to fol-
low with its Polish dialogue hurled at us. It seemed,
with barely enough time to read the French superti-
tles, (A)pollonia was not to everyone's taste.
In contrast to the grand scale and complex-
ity of (A)pollonia, the simplicity and austere beauty
of Une fte pour Boris, Thomas Bernhard's first
play, directed by Canada's Denis Marleau, was not
to be missed, even if crossing the Rhone to stand
endlessly in the boiling sun to wait to be admitted to
the Tinel was a challenge. In Une fte, Bernhard
introduces a monstrous character, referred to ironi-
cally as the Good Woman, "good" because she's a
wealthy patron and benefactress, but there the
"goodness" ends. Her treatment of those around her
is filled with hatred. She is dismissive and selfish,
and she's an unrepentant bully. Yet, she must depend
on others because she has lost her legs in a car acci-
dent and she spends her life in a wheel chair, bark-
ing orders at Yohanna, her nurse, and planning a
great banquet to celebrate her new husband Boris
who also has no legs. This bizarre tale about power
and domination, opens on an empty stage framed by
silver-blue metallic curtains on either side. A film of
pleasant country scenes with boats on a canal and a
man skiing down a mountain, is shown on the
screen in the rear. The Good Woman arrives in her
shiny white armchair on wheels pushed by her tiny
nurse Yohanna. She complains that it is cold and
demands a blanket, which of course Yohanna scur-
ries off to fetch. Next she brings out a gigantic hat
box hoping to amuse her employer, who is clearly
bored and demanding. The box is so tall that
Yohanna has to stand on a ladder to get the hats and
gloves out. Sometimes she even falls into the box.
The good woman tries on each hat and each match-
ing pair of gloves but she is never satisfied, throw-
ing her hats on the floor in a fit, until finally she
seems pleased with a funny red hat.
The conversation turns to the banquet she
31
is planning for Boris, a strange companion who can
only communicate in grunts and squeaks. To cele-
brate Boris' birthday, the Good Woman invites thir-
teen legless cripples from the hospice where she met
her husband. In preparation for the event, Yohanna
dresses her in a magnificent red, full-skirted ball
gown that covers her wheel chair so that she looks
every bit like Scarlett O'Hara getting ready for a
ball. Wearing a crown and bedecked in jewels, she
actually dances quite convincingly thanks to
Yohanna who wheels her around against a backdrop
of a film with people dancing at a ball.
Accompanied by her husband banging on drums
and much admired by her guests, a wonderful group
of thirteen human-sized dolls in wheelchairs, their
faces animated thanks to the video technology we
have seen Marleau use in his memorable staging of
Maeterlinck's Les Aveugles and other pieces, (live
actors' faces superimposed on blank masks), the
Good Woman is in her element. The play ends with
Boris collapsing on his drums, dead from too much
banging, and the Good Woman having a good laugh
at how she has once more prevailed.
Radio Muezzin, conceived and directed by
Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, is a fascinating
documentary theatre piece, created by Kaegi in
Cairo in December 2008. Kaegi spent two months in
Cairo interviewing a number of muezzins when he
learned that the Ministry of Religion had decided
that the call to prayer, which can be heard every
evening in thousands of mosques throughout the
city, was about to be reduced to a radio broadcast
using the voices of a handful of chosen muezzin.
The decision to present Radio Muezzin in the Clotre
des Carmes was especially felicitous as there is a
tower overlooking the cloister that looks very much
like a minaret. One almost expected one of the
muezzins to perform the call to prayer from up
there, but this did not happen. Instead, four
muezzins would tell their stories on a stage covered
with red and white prayer rugs. A few chairs, over-
head fans whirling and four screens in the rear on
which video images of the muezzins' daily lives
including family photos would be projected, set the
scene. The Muezzin were positioned around us, one
is standing in the audience, another on the terrace
Thomas Bernhard's Une fte pour Boris, directed by Denis Marleau. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon.
32
33
above the audience. One is already on stage, anoth-
er is not yet visible.
Lights go up on the first muezzin. He is a
blind man and the only one of the four to be dressed
in the traditional garment, a sheik's robe and hat, a
garment he dreamt of owning when he was a little
boy. He tells us that he was born blind. And that he
spends two hours every day commuting on a bus
from his apartment to the mosque. He is married
with four children and teaches the Koran to young
students whom he scolds by pulling their ears if they
don't pay attention. The second muezzin comes for-
ward to share his story with us. He is a retired elec-
trician and a widower with two sons and two daugh-
ters. He worked in a textile factory for thirteen years
and was in the army in 1967 (a picture of him in uni-
form is flashed on the screen behind him). He talks
about how he was injured and now has a metal
plaque and seven screws in his leg. The third
muezzin tells us about leaving his family in the
Egyptian countryside because he couldn't find work
there. He is poor and has to supplement his income
by working in a bakery. His mosque is very small,
with only a few dozen worshippers. He is responsi-
ble for keeping his mosque clean and to prove it, he
brings out a vacuum cleaner and vacuums the car-
pet. The fourth muezzin is younger than the others.
He is a body builder who wanted to be a football
player and join the police. But he came in second at
the forty-seventh world competition of Koran
recitation at Kuala Lampur, (photos of him with fel-
low competitors in the lobby of the hotel where they
stayed and outside a Macdonald's appear on the
screen behind him). He now performs the call to
prayer from Cairo's largest mosque with tens of
thousands of worshippers. He brings out his barbells
and shows us his weight lifting routine. The fifth
man on stage is not a muezzin. He tells us that he
learned to encode radio signals at the Aswan dam
and now he has made a transmitter that will broad-
cast the azam throughout the country, thereby cen-
tralizing the call to prayer. The different quality and
volume of the resonant voices we have heard
throughout the evening will no longer be heard.
Thirty muezzin have been chosen to broadcast the
prayer and the weight lifter is one of them.
Stefan Kaegi made Radio Muezzin as a
tribute to a way of life that is quickly disappearing.
His experience in Cairo where, he says, he had "the
most impressive acoustic experience of his life"
with the call to prayer reverberating from mosque to
mosque is a thing of the past.
Ciels, the final chapter of Mouawad's
tetralogy, opened on July 18 in one of the festival
venues at the Parc des Expositions in Chateaublanc,
a good twenty-five-minute ride on the festival bus.
The show was eagerly awaited. Excitement was in
the air as we discovered a shimmering, white rec-
tangular pavilion in the middle of a vast exhibition
space. Four entrances were available to us but
Mouawad kept us waiting in suspense for one half
of an hour, a ploy not appreciated by everyone.
Once the pavilion flaps were opened, however, the
space was worth the wait. The vision of two hun-
dred low-standing white stools lined up in a square,
in the middle of a bright white house, and the real-
ization that we would not be onlookers but part of
the set, had us excited to see what other surprises
Mouawad had up his sleeve. As it turned out, the
stools were extremely uncomfortable. We were knee
to knee with our neighbors for two and a half hours,
but they did revolve so that the audience could fol-
low the action taking place above and around them.
Ciels, as it turned out, was very different
from Littoral and Incendies. There is no reference to
the past, no journey to foreign lands to find one's
identity. It is a play about a terrorist attack that is
being planned somewhere in the world, and the
attempts by six characters enclosed in a secret high
security location to foil the attack. Throughout the
play, five men and one woman, the International
operating team named Socrates, seek to decode
messages that the terrorists are sending to each
other. One of them has committed suicide, leaving a
mysterious, coded message that gets the ball rolling
in the beginning of the play. Clement Szymanowski
is the only one who can decode the message, and
this he finally does by studying Tintoretto's painting
The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, but it is too
late. When the news comes that the chief terrorist
was the son of one of the Socrates team, and that he
has been killed along with hundreds of others in one
of the explosions, it is devastating. Although Ciels
has exciting moments and the story holds ones
attention from time to time, the material and the
form are a bit too familiar; the play is clearly too
close to The Da Vinci Code and the TV show 24.
Avignon 2009 was indeed a journey, a dif-
ficult and at times unsettling journey filled with loss
and mourning. The real life deaths of Andre
Benedetto, a much revered actor, director, and
writer from Avignon whose theatre, Le Thtre des
Carmes, has played an important role in the history
of theatre in Avignon since 1966, of Maurice Jarre,
the composer who worked closely with Jean Vilar in
the early years of the festival, and whose fanfare
music is still heard in the opening moments of pro-
ductions in the festival theatres, and of Pina Bausch
whose work stunned festival goers in the early
1980s, seemed to cast a pall over what in other years
was a more festive event. But clearly these are not
festive times. Through much of the programming of
the sixty-third festival we were asked to reflect on a
number of important questions. The question of sac-
rifice, for example (who has the right to sacrifice
their children, or to sacrifice themselves if they
leave children behind?) was present in (A)pollonia,
but also in Littoral and Incendies. And what about
the survivors? Mouawad's young men and women
in Littoral and Incendies found a reason to continue
on. They are living witnesses to the horrors of war,
but the adolescents in Ciels have to become suicide
bombers in order to be heard.
34
The Avignon OFF Festival of 2009 began
with great expectations. Just consider the objective
numbers: 980 productions by 825 companies in 105
venues (sometimes a hole in the wall) within the
ramparts of the medieval papal city. I managed to
see about forty of them during my thirteen-day stay.
Need I say more about the difficulty in choosing
what to see? Plunging into my 360-page program in
search of the precious jewels, I began by discarding
almost all one-person shows as well as the main-
stream mindless crowd pleasers.
Most of the plays run between sixty and
ninety minutes, since four or five of them may be
scheduled following one another (including set
changes) at the same venue on a single day begin-
ning at eleven in the morning. The most outstanding
production I saw was Hamelin by Juan Mayorga,
the well-known Spanish literary academic and pro-
lific playwright. The title, of course, refers to the
tale of the piper who took away the city's children,
here given a modern setting and dealing with the
unmentioned subject of pedophilia. The suspect is
an honorable VIP, smart and fairly human, even
likeable. The police inspector, the principal, the par-
ents, the righteous analyst are all entrapped in a
blanket of doubt. The drab set is like a brown corru-
gated plywood box on which some chalk drawings
will later try to illustrate the action, with just a few
chairs and neon lighting. The staging by Christopher
Semet is masterful in a minimalist, non-realistic,
quick paced stylealmost Brechtian in its attempt
to force the viewer to participate, imagine, take
sides, then change his mind, as do the seven actors.
The child is performed by an adolescent for obvious
reasons. The stroke of genius is the use of the
Narrator (superbly feline Thierry Lefvre), who
reads the stage directions not as a voice-over, but as
an invisible and inaudible participant, interrupting
the dialogue with his repeated objectionscasually
dropping "NOs"echoing "I am here" with "he is
here." Neither the monster nor the savior is ever
actually identified. We are all implicated. The Cie
Rideau de Bruxelles production is terrific and unfor-
gettable.
The other high point and the most
heartrending moment of this entire festival was the
ending of Sans Ailes ni Racines (Without Wings nor
Roots). This is a not so fictional account, lasting
35
Avignon OFF 2009: A Year of Hard Knocks
Jean DeCock
Juan Mayorga's Hamelin, directed by Christopher Semet. Photo: Daniel Locus.
only an hour, which opposes an Arab father and son
in an intimate and gripping dialogue of incompati-
ble ideology. The floor consists of black and white
squares, and the actors sit on two high stools, the
senior in a black suit, the young man in an immacu-
late white garment, sculpted by the lighting.
Hamadi, the writer and director, revisits his past as
a seven-year-old child when he immigrated to
Belgium, how he became an atheist with only one
motivation: to become a successful active member
of Belgian society while denying his roots. Father
and son clash on all issues: so-called democracy,
immigration, militancy, art, women, and violence.
As the intensity increases it is bound to explode at
the end. The tragic agon is like the cracking of a
double mirror, and its violent shattering both shocks
and surprises.
Mat Visniec, a Rumanian who was lucky
enough to flee his troubled country to Paris, has cre-
ated a moving play dealing with exodus, the ten-
sions of shifting borders, countries with new names,
real estate swindling, and occupation. He asks, "is
the war over, ever?" The title of his Le Mot de
Progrs dans la Bouche de ma Mre sonnait terri-
blement faux (The Word Progress When Spoken by
My Mother Sounded Awfully Fake) refers to the
Soviet brainwashing in Eastern Europe. We see a
family ripped apartthe son probably dead, his sis-
ter prostituting herself in Paris, and the parents
hopelessly digging layers of corpses from previous
wars, Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Russians,
Germans, Turks, Albaniansin search of their
bones or skulls since they feel that everyone should
have the right to a decent burial. When the capital-
ism they wanted finally arrives they find that every-
thing has a price, even the remains of their children.
Jean-Luc Palis directed the play with a touch of
Brecht and Meyerhold's biomechanical method for
Cie Influencscnes.
Dutch Ad de Bont gave us Mirad, un
garon de Bosnie, certainly not a fairy tale! Four
actors, playing an aunt and uncle, mother and child,
tell without sentimentality about the monstrous hor-
ror people are capable of perpetrating upon
refugees: propaganda, separation, rape, torture,
brainwashingresulting in more hatred and retalia-
tion. This was directed by Gil Lefeuvre for La Nuit
Venue Cie.
Two ninety-minute plays with large casts
dealt more specifically with the persecution of the
Mat Visniec's Le Mot de Progrs dans la Bouche de ma Mre sonnait terriblement faut, directed by Jean-Luc Palis.
Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
36
Jews. Nous les Hros (version sans Pre) (We the
Heroes. The Version Without a Father Figure) was
so named since the actor cast for the role disap-
peared. It is an unusual subject for the late Jean Luc
Lagarce, who was better known for his subtle and
gentle theatre of the agony of living and dying with
AIDS. What we have here is a cluster of actors
hanging together for survival on their (last) tour in
Germany before impending World War Two, quar-
reling incessantly, fighting occasionally, yet laugh-
ing and singing collectively. It is a subject reminis-
cent of Angelopoulos's Voyage of the Comedians,
accelerated here by fear and klezmer music into a
funny pathetic musical. Is it worth itthis profes-
sion? Is it an acceptable life? Wandering from one
small town to another while dreaming of Paris or
Berlin, or simply of being free from the coercion of
living in the group. Where are we opening next?
They don't know, but we can guess: within the Gates
of Arbeit macht freiAuschwitz. Michel Brillante
directs an incredibly powerful pack of cantankerous
old and hopeful young, the sick and tired, and the
fiances about to engage, but doomed to part. It is a
superb team, with no exaggeration or caricature,
presenting theatre life in the shadow of the Nazi terror.
Timothy Daly and Isabelle Starkier, direc-
tor of her own company from Australia, presented
Le Bal de Kafka (Kafka Dances) in Alain Timar's
Thtre des Halles. In German Prague, a depressed
adolescent trapped in his Jewish family seeks solace
by attending the Yiddish theatre. Unfortunately, the
director has opted for an expressionistic and red-
nosed clownish style (as in Fellini) that is boister-
ous, overbearing, and fails to convince. Theatre
director Timar has perhaps decided to emphasize a
Jewish theme at the Halles, inviting The Hungarian
Theatre of Cluj and Rumanian playwright Andrs
Visky with a remarkably stunning production
(black, white, and beige setting and costumes) of
Naire jamais (Born Forever). In a way this is the
epitomy and devastating conclusion of Shoah, fea-
turing the ten men necessary for a minyan, the
Jewish prayer. As directed by Gbor Tompa it is a
ninety-minute lament, a Kaddish for dehumanized
zombies, beings without identity nor rest. Highly
kinetic and musical, it is performed in Hebrew,
Hungarian, Rumanian, and Greek (with projected
supertitles).
We seem to need a bridge to anywhere out
of the West, and perhaps it can be provided by the
prolific Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His The Incredible
Sad Story of Naive Erendira and Her Diabolical
Grandmother chronicles life in an imaginary town
in Central South America named Macondo. In a
short prologue a magical atmosphere is created. On
a desert beach near a stranded boat, a shape appears,
Jean Luc Lagarce's Nous les Heros, directed by Michel Brillante. Photo: Guy Delahaye.
37
perhaps a whale. Two bohemian women storytellers
reminisce about an old asthmatic man who is really
a dying angel. We know this because of his huge
useless wings. Then another extra-terrestrial dies,
Esteban, an incredibly handsome, tall, and pleasant-
ly super-endowed man. The whole village comes to
bury him. The words of the piece appeal to your five
senses, but the eye is also dazzled by the gowns,
masks, sequins and confetti, sand and some purple
rain. Two splendid actresses are featuredDeborah
Lamy and Catherine Vial, with Sarkis
Tscheumlekdjian at the helm. The company Cie
Premier Act here produced a crowd pleaser and sure
winner.
At a time when the touristic bargain hunt-
ing West extends its greed to the quaint, wretched
countries of the Third World, Africa or Asia, a
woman's voice describes the resulting tensions. I
always liked Canadian Carole Frchette, who spent
some time in Beirut, Lebanon, where she lost Le
Collier d'Hlne (Helen's Necklace). She is as upset
as we all would be in losing something of great sen-
timental value. Like everyone in the Near East, she
relies on a taxi driver, Nabil, in her frenetic search
through a city devastated by war, poverty, and
famine. During her search she becomes increasing-
ly aware of the unbearable injustice of the East and
West divide. Laudable Lucette Salibur is the direc-
tor. Her decision to switch the location and the cast
to the Caribbean is totally appropriate, sympathetic,
and compassionate. The moving production was
presented by the Thtre du Flamboyant under the
aegis of Greg Germain at Chapelle du Verbe
Incarn, devoted to Black companies and writers.
Love, like war, was a common theatre in
the OFF presentations. Diastme wrote and directed
L'Amour de l'Art (The Love of Art), a four character
play about an actress on a tour in provincial France
with a monologue about the last days of Marilyn
Monroe, performing in blond wig, white dress, and
all. We watch her performance from backstage, with
the technical lighting staff commenting on breaking
the set and keeping on schedule. The attractive
actress, Emma de Caunes, falls for the distant light
man, Frdric Andrau, who has been hurt before and
does not want another emotional ordeal. Still, there
is a happy ending, the only one in the various plays
on the theme of love I attended.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Incredible Sad Story of Naive Erendira and Her Diabolical Grandmother, presented by Cie Premier Act.
Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
38
Certainly this was not the case in Ismal
Jude's rather obscure Figures de l'Envol amoureux
(Figures of Love in Flight) influenced by Goethe's
Werther, which presents variations between three
couples (German, French, and Italian) and asks
whether romantic love still exists today. There is a
lot of hide and seek plus mirror games and talk
about despair suicide, sadomasochism, toxic mania.
As directed by Antoine Bourseiller, however, the
production is easy on the eyes, especially hunk
Alexandre Ruby. Much darker still is L'Amour
furieux (Angry Love) by Claude Bourgeyx. In an
attempt to foster love from demanding desire, an
elegant, mature and rich lady develops a mercenary
liaison with a dangerously attractive gigolo not even
half her age. There is nothing sordid on the surface.
Both are chic and cool; both seem satisfied with "I
don't kiss nor talk rules." Music by Mozart adds to
the elegance. Then it is revealed that the lady paid
her lover to kill her husband. The staging, conven-
tional and close-up, is by Philippe Leconte for
Entre des Artistes Cie.
Going still deeper into violence, Samira
Bellil was gang-raped by ten boys in the Arab sub-
urbs of Paris, and survived to write a book about it,
that was converted into a stage play by talented
Jacques Kraemer and his company Il aurait suffi ...
que tu sois mon frre (If Only You Had You Been
My Brother). The play could have been a solo
female performance, but it includes male figures
and extends to other cases. It begins in the prison
parlor with two silhouettes: The attacked woman
has come to visit the leader of her aggressors to try
to understand and to move on, because she refuses
to remain a victim for the rest of her life. Writing
has been her only therapy against humiliation,
drugs, and alcohol, brought on by the ostracism
from her family and her neighborhood.
It is difficult to classify Crmonies by
Dominique Paquet, the story of two country boys in
a stable playing some kind of sadistic ritual without
explicit sexual content. Razou, the bully, forces the
attractive Radieux, restrained by some belts, to
improvise vicariously his bad boy saga, since he
does not have the words to narrate it himself. They
appear to be abandoned orphans up for adoption,
who attempt to control their animalistic instincts by
creating this more heroic if schizophrenic alterna-
tive. Words, however, lead to blows. Radieux is
beaten down and dies. Then a girl appears who will,
perhaps, unwillingly replace him. The text is bril-
liant by its mixture of squalor and ambiguity, very
reminiscent of Genet. The set is a gyrating round
raft. This disturbing but powerful work was direct-
Dominique Paquet's Crmonies, directed by Patrick Simon. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF Festival.
39
ed by Patrick Simon for Group 3.5.81.
On a much lighter note Louis Calaferte
returned, as he does every year, with his hilarious
Thtre Intime of a family plus two adolescent kids:
incessant quibbling turning the volume to full blast
yelling, obsession with food and its natural "pipi-
caca" outlet. All this occurs in a bourgeois candy-
colored apartment with a terrace and a view.
Contention comes from sexy neighbor Madame
Ondula who wanders about in her black panties, an
invitation to not-so-discreet adultery. Acting and
staging is tightly managed by Patrick Pelloquet as
we reach the apocalyptic end with a fire in the build-
ing.
Similar bedlam mark Ionesco's Dlire
deux (Craziness for Two), directed impeccably by
Christophe Lindon and starring delightful Daniele
Lebrun. She is, however, somewhat miscast as the
matron in a mature and hostile couple trapped in the
cage of their black and white apartment de luxe
while some war is being fought in their neighbor-
hood. There are knocks on the door, a raid, and
derby hats fly like hand grenades. Ionesco in 1962
already wanted to contrast the pettiness of the bour-
geoisie and the violence outside and everywhere.
The piece has been seldom performed since, yet is
uncannily relevant.
Much more subdued and loveable in a
minor key, Florent Nicoud's Bouge plus (Don't
MoveFor the Child or the Camera) presents the
family as kindergarten. The scenes are like snap-
shots. The three characters can each assume their
own role or become a chair or a vase with flowers.
The text is adequately infantile or impressionistic.
"Mom! What? Nothing." Maybe the primal, essen-
tial, irrational message is there, an alphabet book on
growing up and how to keep still while someone
says "Cheese." Image a giggling Beckett if there
were was such a thing. This romp was directed so
gently by Michael Froehly for L'Heure du Loup.
Bravo.
I attended three disturbing plays on this our
age. The influence of the internet on our youth is the
subject of Chatroom by Irishman Enda Walsh (you
may remember his Disco Pigs). We see six fifteen-
year-old kids at home with their techno equipment
(which we will never actually see), each in his own
bubble and no adults in sight. Is this communica-
tion? There is criss-cross conversation in duos about
Potter, Spears, and the Chocolate Factory at first
then suicide. Here is the rub: the manipulation of
cyberspaceswitching identities, flirting with dan-
ger, deviance, punk rebels. There was a reference to
Golding's Lord of the Flies, "Kill the Pig." And well
they might. This was directed as fast as on skates by
Sylvie de Braekeleer for Thtre de Poche in
Eugne Ionesco's Dlire deux, directed by Christophe Lindon. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon OFF.
40
41
Brussels.
Rather milder fare was offered by David
Lodge's L'Atelier d'ecriture (The Writing Game), a
look at the world of writers, faculty, reviewers, and
publishersand a student who may be more gifted
than they areduring one of those weekend semi-
nars out in the sticks. We are familiar with those
egos, personality clashes, and, of course, flirting
libidos. Indeed the caricature might be too close for
comfort for us academics.This was directed by
Armand Eloy with a cast of five for the Thtre du
Passeur.
Koffe Kwahul is from the Ivory Coast.
His Bintou tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl
who is the leader of a boy's gang (with names like
Assassino and Terminator) in a high-rise in a suburb
of Paris. At home she is cornered between her libidi-
nous uncle and a jobless, depressed father hiding in
his room. She is hard as nails and pierced; she
knows she'll never live to be eighteen. This was an
epic, large-scale production with a multiracial
super-cast of twenty, and a mostly black (with three
white girls) chorus. The music is African rhythm
and drums. Bintou's doomed love for a white boy is
built like a Greek tragedy on three levelsthe
pedestal, the concrete jungle, and the proscenium,
where the Narrator address us. The director was
Latitia Gudon for Cie 0,10.
Marguerite Duras has always been fasci-
nated by extreme tabloid fodder (faits-divers such as
the kidnapping and still unsolved death of six-year-
old Gregory being the most notorious), taking a
stand usually opposing public opinion and the press.
She writes and rewrites variations on the same sub-
ject. L'Amante anglaise (The English Loverpho-
netically also for English Mint ) written in 1968,
was a reworking of her 1959 Les Viaducs de Seine
et Oise, where body parts were thrown on passing
trains. Originally the culprit was the wife of a cou-
ple who killed and dismembered a body, but in this
version it is her fat, deaf, and dumb cousin who
lived with them. In a dialogue between an elderly
woman and a younger reporter, he tries to under-
stand. "How can the English mint in her garden sur-
vive the winter," while she wonders "Does under-
standing lead to atonement?" This was directed and
performed by Sylvia Bruyant for Cie Cavalcade.
Among classic offerings, the mood in this
year of hard times favored Molire rather than
Marivauxand not his serious plays but the short
feel-good ones in prose, in the farcical commedia
dell'arte tradition. Two productions were made
equally enjoyable through talented casting and stag-
ing. Le mdecine malgr lui (The Doctor in Spite of
Himself, written in 1666) is Sganarelle; drunk and
good for nothing, who beats his wife regularly. Her
revenge is to suggest he is a famous doctor incogni-
to and needs beating to acquiesce. In this way he
will presumably cure the daughter of her tyrannical
father in his wheel chair. She is playing dumb to be
left alone and play doctor with her young lover.
There is a lot of tension between old age and youth,
hatred of servants against masters, and the impor-
tance of money. The staccato staging is by Andonis
Vouyoucas Gyptis in Marseilles. Actors come from
behind us onto the stage carrying the set, a trunk to
hide in of course, their costumes, and props. There
is no deconstruction here except breaking the set.
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is a social
climber from the South come up to Paris to strike it
rich, where he is pretending to be a Black aristocrat
to catch the love of a pert and feisty thing who has
a more attractive gallant in mind. It is imperative he
be discarded so that young love can thrive. Love tri-
umphs of course, and even money has its redeeming
qualities. The excellent multiracial cast performed
under the direction of Olivier Thibault. Pure theatri-
cal joy was also offered by La Botte secrte de Don
Juan (no Don Giovanni hereonly a winning fenc-
ing move he practiced), which offered swashbuck-
ling at its best with a male cast in perfect shape and
the ladies to boot, as if you were in a Dumas novel
or at the movies between Cyrano and Robin des
Bois. Written in alexandrine verse and some gross
rhymes, the plot offered a pure heroine, a heroic
lover, and a seducer, a truly mean aristocrat who
will get his comeuppance.
Schiller's Mary Stuart is a difficult play,
focusing on her last days and imminent execution, a
royal agon between two strong women, mythical
figures, admirable, direct, and authentic, surrounded
by rather wavering, hesitant, and devious men and
courtiers. Mary is Catholic, and was Queen of
France for the very short reign of Valois Francois II.
Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, was Protestant and
implacable as if the state and the people prevented
her from showing human frailty. This production is
impartial. The Queens never actually met except in
Schiller. The visualization is of a black theatre on a
charcoal ground and no set. Actors play always
standing or retire into the obscure background. The
men are dressed in black gowns, the enemy queens
in subdued red and purple. This was superb work by
Fabian Chappuis for Thtre 13.
Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, directed by Fabian Chappiu. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon OFF.
42
Whenever one is overwhelmed the by ver-
bal and sometimes verbose theatre there is the excit-
ing alternative of dance, which is also strongly rep-
resented at the festival. The lovely Long Mantel
Over a Peach V-neck Sweater depicts an encounter
between a Belgian man and a Swiss girl, a couple of
sheer perfection. Marco Delgado looks Spanish
with his incredible slim, concave body, while
Nadine Fuchs is a pure movie Clairol-blonde. They
arrive, he in pale blue, she in pink, with their gym
bags for a session. In the locker room they strip, and
stretch, suggesting Cranach's Adam and Eve, but
hiding each other's genitals. It is a loveable tease,
with the nudity never offensive. The sculpted bodies
in the flesh, suggest what the Greeks did in marble.
I can't wait to see them again.
Vendetta Mathea and Cy, African
American choreographers based in NY and Aurillac,
present two men and one woman alone together in
Homme/Animal. There is a suggestion of evolution,
but we are still mammals, crawling, then on all
fours, rising, engaging in conflict, feeling, sweating,
all to the music of Nina Simone. Another title,
Homogne, duo, says it all: Two male bodies
clothed in black leather merge and split in a
chiaroscuro environment with a reddish dramatic
flair. Are they a single being or a couple? Brother,
double, or twin? In fearful symmetry they move,
they split, one stronger than the other, maintains
him, and then drops him. The droning sounds sug-
gest wind, street noises, moaning, singing. The stir-
ring choreography is by Yann Alexander and Cie.
Competition turning to confrontation is the
theme of D Batailles (a pun on debate and battle).
It moves from the social amenities to a game with
two opposing teamsthe Blondes against the
Brunettesdaring each other, discarding rules (just
change wigs) in favor of hard knocks, double-cross-
ing, and a free-for-all rumble, ending in a kind of
gregarious slam dance. The challenging company of
five dancers and three musicians were choreo-
graphed by Dennis Plassart. In the reoccurring pat-
terns there was more brutal beating than homoeroti-
cism. All were dressed in suit and tie, obsessively
drinking bottles of water; so that they soon were
totally drenched. The audience went crazy.
How much does production at the festival
cost? The OFF is also a market for traveling pro-
ductions (of course, you provide the stage and
equipment). With a group of half a dozen thespians,
the average price runs between 4000 and 6000
Euros (add about one-third for the equivalence in
dollars) plus room, board, and transportation.
Just think about it.
There is always a period in late June and
early July when the end of the theatre season spills
into the city's annual summer arts festival, the Grec.
It's also the time when theatres announce their new
seasons, with Frost/Nixon opening the Lliure's sea-
son, Juan Cavestany's Urtan the Romea's and Leo
Bassi's Utopia the Villarroel's. Argentine writer-
director Javier Daulte also pronounced his departure
from the Villarroel at the end of the forthcoming
seasonCatalan dramatist-director Carol Lpez
seems to be the favorite to replace himciting the
problems of having his base in Argentina as the pri-
mary reason for handing over the artistic reins of the
theatre.
The Grec this year provided a larger num-
ber of events than in previous years and conse-
quently attracted a larger number of spectators:
sixty-six productions bringing in audiences of
88,841. There was, however, a decrease in tickets
soldfifty-five percent to fifty-seven percent last
yearand the festival's director, Ricardo Szwarcer,
mentioned the cancellation of Amos Gitai's adapta-
tion of Flavius Josephus's War of the Jews because
of Jeanne Moreau's indisposition as a key factor in
the percentage fall. The Grec had a strong focus on
Italian work this yearboth of established auteurs
like Castellucci and Ronconi and lesser known com-
panies and directors like Motus, Pippo Delbono,
Santasangre, and Pathosformel. There remains, nev-
ertheless, a marked emphasis on new Catalan work
as well as a healthy quota of Spanish-language pro-
ductions realized with theatres in Madrid and
Bilbao.
In many ways the success story of the year
in Barcelona has proved the new Goya theatre,
opening fully renovated and refurbished under a
new owner, Focus, and a new artistic director, Josep
Maria Pou. While the opening production, Alan
Bennett's History Boys, embarks on a tour of Spain
[see the review in WES 21.2, Spring 2009], the the-
atre's second production, La vida por delante, an
adaptation of Romain Gary's La vie devant soi (The
Barcelona's Grec Festival and the Tail of the City's 200809 Season
Maria M. Delgado
Xavier Jaillard's La Vida por Delante. Photo: Courtesy of Barcelona Grec Festival.
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Life Before Us), is attracting packed houses. The
novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1975 and was sub-
sequently adapted for the cinema two years later.
Translated into Catalan by Josep Maria Vidal and
presented in an adaptation by Xavier Jaillard, the
piece tells the story of Madame Rosa, an ageing
Jewish former prostitute who has fostered a series of
boys belonging to colleagues who are not able to
take care of them. The only one remaining with her
is the Muslim Momo, a nave seventeen-year-old
boy hopelessly devoted to the blowsy Rosa. As
Rosa becomes ill, Momo is determined to take care
of her and resists the efforts of her doctor to have
her transferred into a hospital. She dies with Momo
continuing to protect her from the ravages of the
outside world.
The action takes place in Lloren
Corbella's attic apartment, filled with well-worn fur-
niture with something of a Bohemian air. From the
very opening the emphasis is on ensuring that the
audience feels comfortable and is regularly brought
into the action. Lines are overtly addressed to them
and a spirit of complicity cultivated. Rubn de
Eguia plays Momo larger than life, as a geeky
teenager (a slight skip in his step and a healthy
quota of awkward posturing) always appearing on
the verge of bursting into song. Concha Velasco
offers a variation on her highly popular stage and
screen persona. There's an amusing shuffle across
the stage, stockings perennially having to be pulled
up and a range of risqu underwear peeping beneath
the nylon petticoats that are her day-to-day attire.
The play is laden with exposition to ensure that we
have our fill of the characters' past histories.
Nothing is left to the imagination. Momo and Rosa
discuss their past and their present, and the play is in
many ways a double act of banter and revelation
interrupted by the outside world as represented by
the kind Doctor Katz (a habitually solid perform-
ance by Romea regular Carles Canut) and Momo's
father, the fanatical recently released murderer
Youssef Kadir (all rolling eyes and manic energy
from Jos Luis Fernndez). Outside threats are dis-
pensed with through elaborated fictions, verve, and
gay abandon.
This is an unconventional love story in the
vein of Harold and Maude: the tale of a shy boy and
a forceful girl hopelessly devoted to each other.
Concha Velasco swings on and off stage in a range
of outfits and hats; her deterioration into senility is
gleefully camp and conspiratorial. We are permitted
to see her petticoats tucked into a corset as she
attempts to run away, red stilettos and matching
suitcase in hand. There is not much subtlety here,
but none of the audience seemed to mind.
Indeed, the audience delights in the stage
excess with wild applause for Velasco as she takes
her curtain call. Velasco is a much-loved institution
in Spain with a loyal following who have flocked to
the Goya since the production opened on 28 March.
With Madame Rosa, Velasco has given a larger than
life Jewish mamma, who rises to the challenges that
present themselves: her outwitting of Momo's
obsessed father, in particular, is a lesson in enter-
prising thinking on your feet and a speedy delivery
of lines. This production doesn't point to Velasco as
a versatile actress in the way Rosa Maria Sard evi-
dently isbut it shows she can carry a line and take
an audience along with her. This is a performance
conceived in broad brush strokes, charting the ups
and downs of one of life's survivors supported in
death by the unlikeliest of friendships.
Jos Sanchis Sinisterra, founder-director of
the Sala Beckett, one of Barcelona's most influential
theatre spaces, has a new play at the venue. The Sala
Beckett has proved resilient to fads, offering a
workshop environment where playwrights in
Catalonia can come into contact with writers from
elsewhere in the world. It has proved a nurturing
space for Catalan playwrights, producing the work
of Sergi Belbel, Merc Sarrias, Llusa Cunill, Paco
Zarzoso, and Carles Batlle (among others). It's
impossible to discuss playwriting in Catalonia with-
out referencing it. The venue's artistic director, Toni
Casares, is now also in charge of the Catalan
National Theatre's T6 strand of programming, com-
missioning work from emerging writers, that
demonstrates the TNC's commitment to new
Catalan writing. This summer sees Simon Stephens,
Rafael Spregelburd, and Neil LaBute delivering
workshops as part of the Beckett's summer program,
while Sinisterra's Vagas noticias de Klamm (Vague
News from Klamm) enjoys a month-long run at the
venue as part of the Grec's official program.
The terrain of the play will be familiar to
those acquainted with Galceran's Gronholm
Method. A Human Resources office in what appears
to be a large company (peddling unspecified wares)
is conducting a job interview with a young woman,
Carolina, who seems to have multiple qualifica-
tions. There's a plethora of degrees and experience
at a wide range of institutions; but probe a little
more deeply and it all seems rather irrelevant and
insubstantial. It's the office manager's job to investi-
gate how prepared she is for a job that is never real-
ly defined. And this he does with dogged persist-
ence, aided and abetted by a secretary who con-
tributes some perplexing interventions to the inter-
view. Nothing is quite what it seems. Valverde, the
prim and proper employer-cum-office manager is
too fastidious for comfort. He seems to be intent on
catching the slightly awkward Carolina out as often
as he can. He hides behind the protection offered by
an expansive corporate desk, and Marc Garcia Cot
plays him as a slightly geeky individual, parading
his power in ways that never entirely convince.
Ferran Audi plays his mysterious secretary,
Geimrez, seen one minute typing at his desk in wig
and kilt, the next receiving balls from his boss.
Geimrez is played as a cross-dressing male, an indi-
cation that gender, like so much else in the play,
cannot be pinned down.
The play is very much about protocol and
appearances, about the need to say the right thing
and assimilate the jargon of the workplace. Words
are twisted, manipulated, and misused. The mysteri-
ous Klamm, evoked all too regularly by the pusil-
lanimous Valderde, is a Godot figure, destined never
to appear; a presence evoked by the characters as
the ultimate arbitrator of all their acts. Klamm is not
vintage Sinisterra. There isn't much substance to the
play with conceits pushed into the terrain of exces-
sive repetition. The verbal games between the three
characters are entertaining enough for brief periods
but they never really add up to a fully formed the-
atrical work. Quim Roy's set aims for a modish cor-
porate feel but the action remains rather constrained
and Sinisterra's own production rests too easily
within larger than life acting and sly jokes to an all
too knowing audience.
Marta Poveda's Carolina provides the best
reason for seeing Klamm. Hers is an intelligent per-
formance that retains an audience's interest in the
play's uneven dynamics. There is something beguil-
ing in her treatment of Valverde and her take on the
assigned role-play suggests an enigmatic mystery
that none of the other performances can match. Her
comic timing makes something of the rather turgid
dialogue offered by Sinisterra, but ultimately, how-
ever, she cannot save a disappointing piece of writ-
ing.
Sinisterra is one of a number of Catalan
dramatists featuring at this year's Grec. Marc
Martnez offered a contemporary take on Look Back
in Anger, Stoklm, at the Borrs Theatre; Jordi Coca
a reworking of Iphigenia at the Lliure; and Pau Mir
turned to the family in Girafes at the Lliure. Again
at the Lliure, Jordi Casanovas provided a version of
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Jos Sinisterra's Vagas noticias de Klamm. Photo: Courtesy of Barcelona Grec Festival.
Miss Julie for the grunge generation that fuses
Strindberg's tale with the tormented life of Kurt
Cobain. Julia Smells Like Teen Spirit, certainly
attracted a young audience but the onstage music
and singingStrindberg's original trio has now
become a band with Julia as an unhappy rock star
fails to convince me that this is a carefully thought
through transposition. The first half certainly sets up
the situation between the three as the antics of the
unstable Julia generate concern among her col-
leagues, but the play only offers more of the same,
and the Brechtian comments to the audience fail to
really gel with what is essentially a naturalistic
structure. The 1980s feel is nicely conjured in
Damien Bazn's crumpled stagescattered records,
battered sofa, strewn clothesbut ultimately too
much is explained and seen, and too little left to the
imagination.
This year's Grec also proffered a look back
to key Catalan writers of the past. Joan Vinyoli's
poetry opened the festival accompanied by the
music of Eduard Iniesta in a one-off event con-
ceived by actor Llus Soler and director Antonio
Calvo. Josep Pla's El quadern gris (The Gray
Notebook), a diary written while a student in
191819 is adapted for the stage and given an imag-
inative production by Joan Oll. Less successful is
Josep Galindo's old-fashioned La ruta blava (The
Blue Route), enacting the writer Josep Maria de
Sagarra's adventures as he leaves Spain in 1936, at
the beginning of the Civil War, for Paris and then
Tahiti. Rifail Ajdarpasic offers an elegant set but the
action seems rather turgid with lines delivered
unimaginatively to the audience. The plodding sto-
rytelling is a world away from the imaginative wiz-
ardry of El quadern gris.
The Grec has also provided a fair quota of
'big' names. Castellucci's Societas Raffaello Sanzio
presented Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso across
three venues in the city. Ronconi offered what has
generally been seen as a disappointing Midsummer
Night's Dream, and Lepage his collaboration with
Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant, Eonnagata,
both at the TNC. Levaudant's Oedipus trilogy, pro-
duced in Eduardo Mendoza's Castilian-language
translation of Daniel Loayza's adaptation of
Sophocles' plays, split the critics while Llus
Pasqual's delicious double-bill of zarzuelas by
Manuel Fernndez Caballero was acclaimed as one
of the Festival's highlights.
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Look Back in Anger, Stoklm, directed by Marc Martnez. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival.
Another Catalan director, Calixto Bieito,
returned to the Grec this year with his version of
Schiller's Don Carlos, presented in a co-production
between the Romea, the Grec, Madrid's Centro
Dramtico Nacional, and the XV. Internationalen
Schillertage in Mannheim. This is not the first time
Bieito has handled Don Carlos. In 2006 he present-
ed Verdi's opera for the Theater of Basel, but here he
moves toward a reading that positions the play very
clearly within Spain. Bieito has commissioned a
new Castilian-language translation by Adan
Kovacsis and undertaken some dramaturgical shav-
ing with Marc Rosich to further condense the play
within a compact seventy-five-minute frame: the
Count Cordua, Prince of Palma, Duke of Medina
Sidonia, and Count Lerma are all dispensed with in
favour of a tighter focus on the father-son narrative.
The production draws on a number of his past col-
laborators from the RomeaMingo Rfols playing
the Great Inquisitor and the Confessor to the King
as rigid clerics, ngels Bassas, the superb Goneril
of the 2004 King Lear, as the conniving Princess of
Eboli, and Rafa Castejn, from The Persians, out-
standing as the Marquis of Pozabut on the whole
the production sees him opt for collaborators that
have been more associated with his operatic
work of late.
And indeed, Don Carlos is a return to the
theatre for a director who has been increasingly opt-
ing for opera. Rebecca Ringst, the German designer
who worked with him on a number of his most
recent productions, The Abduction from the Seraglio
(2004) at the Komische Oper Berlin and Brand
(2008) at Oslo's National Theatre, here proffers an
imaginative greenhouse set, a protected hothouse
where Carlos Hiplito's King Philip II cultivates his
many plants. The enclosed greenhouse provides a
brilliant metaphor for Philip II's court: a sweltering
space where no one can escape the watch of the
regal apparatus. Indeed, Rfols's confessor watches
over the action, pacing across the different layers of
this fragile conservatory. Nothing escapes his vigi-
lant glance. With Josep Ferrer's Duke of Alba he
creates an unholy alliance that steers the king's
actions. Hiplito's Philip appears anything but an
absolute monarch. A slight figure in casual chinos
he shouts to reinforce his presence in a court that
seems to escape his total grasp. This is a man who
would rather be pruning his plants than dealing with
people. His queen, Elizabeth de Valois, appears an
irritating distraction and it is evident that he is in no
way attracted to her. Even Bassas's scheming,
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Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, directed by Calixto Bieito. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival.
voluptuous Princess of Eboli, who throws herself
before him, fails ultimately to distract him from his
solipsistic existence.
The production seems to present many of
the characters as pawns caught within a hothouse
that dwarfs them. The Queen is a petulant girl who
uses the first opportunity alone with Carlos to bare
her breasts and declare herself in forthright ways.
Bieito's reading does not enact the attraction
between Violeta Prez's Elizabeth de Valois and
Jordi Andjar's Carlos. Rather both are presented as
little more than children. Andjar, replacing the
indisposed Rubn Ochandiano (the tormented Ray
X in Almodvar's Broken Embraces), conceives
Carlos as a nerdish adolescent who'd prefer to be lis-
tening to his ipod and spraying red highlights in his
hair than seducing his father's wife. Prez's
Elizabeth is a vulgar teen who can't wait to lift up
her crinoline skirt at the earliest opportunity.
Costume designer Ingo Krgler has
worked with Gaultier and Galliano in Paris, and boy
does it show. The tight corsets and wide crinolines
pay lip service to an earlier age, but are refracted
through vocabularies that seem more Madonna than
Marie-Antoinette. You have to know how to occupy
an outfit, however, and Prez never quite inhabits
her costume in the way Bassas's lascivious Eboli
manages. Begoa Alberdi as the Duchess of Alba (in
a reworking of the role of the Duchess of Olivarez)
provides a musical underscoring for the action,
singing out a Gregorian chant that further fixes the
action within clerical paradigms. She acts as if
remote controlled or on automatic, entering and
exiting with a mechanical efficiency. Attired in a
variation of the corset and crinoline, she appears a
severe, crow-like figure, looming ominously over
and policing the court. While the women remain
trapped within these costumes of the past, the men's
attire is somewhat less constrictive: slacks for the
King, shorts and baseball boots for Don Carlos,
suits for the Duke of Alba and the Marquis of Poza.
Castejn's Marquis, played with a hint of
Andalusian accentuation, is in many ways the pulse
of this production. His energy, the clear delivery of
the lines, the avoidance of empty declamationtoo
often a part of Andjar's and Prez's performanc-
esserve to define the urgency and attractiveness
of a character that we come to understand will risk
Schiller's Don Carlos. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival.
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all for his close friend Carlos. In many ways it is the
relationship between Castejn's Marquis and
Andjar's Carlos that becomes the central axis of the
production, and this is when it really acquires some-
thing of the energy and sexual charge of Michael
Grandage's 2004 staging. Ultimately, however,
Bieito never really follows this reading through and
we are left to watch as Carlos pines for a Queen with
which there appears little connection and no real
chemistry.
This may in part be due to Andjar, an
actor who doesn't really look at ease within the
"heroic." Well cast in Pou's production of History
Boys as the pompous Irwin, he finds it difficult here
to embody Don Carlos's struggles. Only in the
encounters with Castejn's Marquis do we get some
sort of sense of how much is at stake. Rubn
Ochandiano, who opened the production in
Mannheim, specializes in the angst-ridden and the
dangerous, and the production might have had a
very different charge with his Carlos. Andjar cer-
tainly received a warm reception from the audience
at the Grec for stepping in to replace the injured
Ochandiano (who will return to the production
when it opens in Madrid in the latter half of
September), but the characterization never really
gels. This has also to do with Bieito's reading.
Carlos is infantilized as a gauche teenager: the pro-
duction opens with him in a world of his own, danc-
ing to his iphone at the front of the stage as the audi-
ence takes their seats. His giggly awkwardness with
both his fatherwhom he confronts like a petulant
adolescentand Elizabethhe drops his pants and
chuckles as she flashes her breasts at himulti-
mately leaves their relationships in the realm of the
puerile. There is no sense of honor or decorum here,
no sense of a love that dare not speak its name.
Fumbling, groping, and testosterone fuelled are
more the order of the game. Too often the actors
deliver their lines as if rushing for a train. The pro-
duction would have benefited from a more detailed
attention to characterization to match the spectacu-
lar visuals.
This is not to say that the production is
bereft of interest. Bieito's visual imagination
remains in evidence with moments of fierce bril-
liance (as with Bassas's prostration before the King,
the masking of Carlos under the Queen's ample
skirts, the fevered encounters between the Marquis
and Carlos). The props associated with Rfols's con-
fessorrosary beads and fanssuggest an unholy
association between church and state. Indeed,
Bieito's point is precisely that Catholicism is one of
the fundamentals of the nation state and bound up
with the iconography of nationhood. Bieito's final
image of Carlos, attired as a suicide bomber, clearly
points to analogies with the present. The Queen's
white suit (worn in the production's final scene) may
suggest a breaking out of the constraints imposed by
the more formal Court attire, but the design bears
more than a passing resemblance to the suit worn by
Princess Leticia on the announcement of her
engagement to Prince Philip of Spain and may again
serve to provide associations with the current cli-
mate in Spain.
The references are, however, never really
embedded in a central defining concept or aesthetic
that binds them within a coherent spectacle. The
greenhouse design is spectacular, but the opening
scenes appear rather cumbersome as the characters
emerge from and disappear into the plastic sheeting
that envelops the metallic structure. Only when the
sheeting is pulled down do we really get a sense of
the machinations and manoeuvres within the court.
The giant iron doors at the back of the stage func-
tions again to suggest a prison, and Philip's table has
something of the operating or torture table about it:
a cold, clinical object whose alternative purpose (as
when he's curtly pruning plants) is all too evident.
Metaphors of torture abound. There's a
cage at the front of the stage where characters are
imprisoned and seek refuge like wounded animals.
Carlos and his half-sister are perhaps its most con-
spicuous occupants. The corpses that emerge from
the earthreminders of the atrocities of Flanders
perhaps or of Philip's murderous excessesmay
evoke a traumatic past that the characters can never
escape from: ghosts that haunt the nation's present.
They remain an unnecessary distraction, however,
from the main plot. And while the central narrative
is beautifully enhanced by the eerie chant of the
Duchess of Alba, the multiple spheres of action lend
the production an overly busy aesthetic. I missed the
clarity of Bieito's storytelling in Macbeth (2002),
King Lear (2004), and Peer Gynt (2006). Bieito has
always proved a compelling narrator. Here I'm not
entirely convinced he's clear about the tale he's try-
ing to tell.
Eleven years ago I was dazzled by Bieito's
inventive take on Garca Lorca's final play, The
House of Bernarda Alba. Now Llus Pasqual turns
to the play with a production that couldn't be any
more different but that similarly finds the pulse of
the play. Where Bieito opted for vertical minimal-
ism, Pasqual has turned to a horizontal landscape
that operates within realist paradigms. Paco Azorn
has provided him with an expansive gray-white tiled
room: a space that reflects every stain, every speck
of dust, anything that taints the brilliance of its sur-
faces. Pasqual has plumped for a traverse stage
where the audience frames the action. The sisters'
sense of imprisonment is evident: high tomb-like
walls on two sides, the audience on the other two.
The sense of suffocation is palpable.
The room is first seen through a fine gauze
curtain. The impression is that of looking at a
screen, or photograph. The curtain remains in place
until after the neighboursand Pasqual provides an
astonishing twenty-nine of thementer following
the funeral mass for Bernarda's husband, Antonio
Mara Benavides. When this curtain lifts (and the
ceiling closes in like a detachable car roof) we begin
to get a sense of the inner workings of the house that
Rosa Maria Sard's Poncia had alluded to in the
opening scene. Without the gauze to mask it,
Bernarda's jacket looks well worn from heavy iron-
ing; her daughters look pale and rather sickly. In act
2, appearing first in white underwear, they blend in
with the walls in an alarming fashion. In act 1,
Pasqual shows Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio
dying clothes black in a large cauldron. Pragmatic
economy is the order of the day. Forget the faded
glamour of Howard Davies's 2005 National Theatre
production, this is a world where imprisonment
takes its toll and poverty is a not-so-distant possibil-
ity for the majority of the sisters.
Indeed, Pasqual's production is filled with
memorable moments that highlight the increasing
desperation of the sisters. Fans are used as both
adornments and weapons, fluttering like a tiny cho-
rus as the neighbours enter the stage in act 1. Chairs
are removed effortlessly as the neighbours leave the
stage minutes later. Magdalena weeps as the reapers
march past the window in act 2 and then washes
away their traces with water from the tap. Angustias
kisses the photo of Pepe el Romano when it is
returned to her from Martirio. The exclusion of
Angustias is evident in act 2 as the sisters congre-
gate on the other side of the stage as if about to face
her in a gladiatorial conflict. The sickly Martirio
suffers panic attacks that suggest asthma. The girls
follow their mother like a herd of elephants as she
enters the room to enquire about the noise in the vil-
lage as act 2 nears its end. The sisters often give the
impression of waiting by the doorlistening and
observing the action. Pasqual's production sets up a
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Garca Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba, directed by Llus Pasqual. Photo: David Ruano.
concrete sense of vigilance and surveillance, of an
enclosed environment where nothing escapes.
Indeed, the small drain in the centre of the stage in
act 2 is the only way anything gets away from the
house.
While there is a definite period feel to the
productionwith clear 1930s costumes and hair
the performance vocabularies betray the influence
of both Brook and Strehler. The economy of move-
ment is pure Brook; the almost dance like aesthetic
Strehler. Crucially, Pasqual follows both in opting
for a grounded characterization of all the roles. Each
daughter is carefully defined; their modes of walk-
ing, talking, posture, gestures all worked through to
sustain the action of the play. Nuria Espert gives us
a Bernarda that struggles with what's expected of
her. Her attire betrays her conformity and
respectability: mannish lace-up shoes, a long
straight skirt, and buttoned up jacket. She whips
Angustias like a horseman berating an errant mule
who can't keep up to speed when she finds
Angustias has been outside watching the men; she
rubs lipstick across her face to render her a clown-
like figure when she sees her wearing make-up on
the day of her step-father's funeral. She confronts
Poncia like a boxer ready to throw the first blow and
arches her face knowingly to catch note of all the
conversations around her. This is not a Bernarda that
rules by shouting but rather by quiet coercion. She
is also presented as a mother who collapses to the
floor on hearing of her daughter's death. At the end
of the production she watches impotently as her
remaining daughters cling to the white walls like
distended spiders, crumpling to the floor as the cur-
tain falls. Only Angustias looks to the door, but it is
a door that the production suggests is now closed to
her. The final image is of the living dead, slowly
suffocating corpses in a tomb.
Pasqual uses the width of the stage bril-
liantly, with characters hovering by the edges,
sometimes watching or waiting, sometimes unsure
as to whether to make an entry. The build up in act
3 is expertly handled, with thunder and lightning
serving to conjure a storm-brewing mood that fur-
ther unsettles the characters. Pasqual understands
the architectural shape of the play and its echoes of
gothic melodrama. The characters' comings and
goings in the latter half of act 3 are almost farcical.
51
Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, directed by Llus Pasqual. Photo: David Ruano.
Martirio attempts to strangle Adela and then fights
with her aggressively as the latter boldly declares
that she's been with Pepe. Angustias grabs Adela
roughly by the hair as the truth of her relationship
with Pepe is exposed.
The production expertly negotiates the dif-
ferent generic registers of the playfrom gothic
horror to symbolism, from the picturesque to real-
ism. Rosa Mara Sard's Poncia is an earthy plain
speakershe first appears stuffing her face with
bread and ham. She's not afraid to get her hands
dirty and moves with the pragmatic purpose of one
of life's doers. Sard's elastic face has always been a
wonderful comic weapon, and here she uses it to full
effect: there are disdained looks, firm reproaches,
whispered suggestions, conspiratorial conversa-
tions. With Espert's Bernarda, she creates a double-
act that speaks of a shared history that we can only
begin to gleam. Indeed, for all the clarity of
Pasqual's production, much is left unsaid: just sug-
gested or implied. The play retains its mysteries.
Pasqual is also not afraid to show the grubby nature
of the world of the play. Teresa Lozano's Mara
Josefa bathes her head in the cauldron of clothes'
dye. The sisters cackle at each other like vipers.
Mara Josefa in pink-white bodicean image of
distended femininitywith red cheeks has some-
thing of Angustias with make-up streaked across her
face. She functions perhaps as a reminder of the fate
that awaits the daughters. Her act 3 appearance,
lamb in tow, portrays her as a grotesque Madonna,
shawl enveloping her head like a shroud.
Presented at Catalonia's National Theatre,
the TNC, the production opts not for a Catalan or a
specifically Andalusian world but rather a more
generalized Spanish rustic milieu. Flat espadrilles
are the preferred footwear of most of the cast. Heat
is palpably suggested through the lighting and pos-
ture of the characters. Water is flicked by the sisters
to cool themselves down; clothes are dispensed with
when possible in favour of undergarments; jugs of
water are the most conspicuous adornment in the
space. Pasqual has an impressive track record with
Garca Lorca's impossible workshaving staged
the premieres of The Public and Play without a Title
in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Here he turns to one
of the playwright's most emblematic works and pro-
vides a compelling reading that refuses to tread the
Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Oriol Broggi. Photo: Bito Cels.
52
53
all too familiar folkloric path of so many of his
predecessors. A sell out two-month run at the TNC's
Sala Petita has been met with rapturous reviews and
the production now moves to Madrid where it plays
at the Teatro Espaol from 10 September to 25
October.
Barcelona doesn't have a shortage of
appropriated theatre spaces. The old flower market
is now the Mercat de les Flors; the agricultural
pavilion in Montjuc the new Teatre Lliure home, a
former factory the Sala Beckett (and this is to name
just three). More recently, the Biblioteca Nacional
de Catalunya has served as a welcome theatrical
venue for Oriol Broggi's and Carlota Subirs's
inventive Laperla 29 company. After their majestic
King Lear last year, there's a return to Shakespeare
with an ambitious production of Hamlet in the stark
stone-walled interior of the nave of the library. In a
year where Spain has had a plethora of Hamlets
the most recent featuring Broken Embraces's Blanca
Portillo in the title roleBroggi gives us a take that
reminds us how indebted he is to the holy and rough
theatre of Peter Brook. The sand floors, a hallowed
environment, the simplicity of a dcor enacted
through and across the bodies of the actorssave
for a row of coat pegs on the back wall and a bench
and platform brought on as necessaryis all basic
Brook. The focus is on telling a story, and the stag-
ing is bereft of distractions that might get in the way
of this storytelling. We begin with a prologue by
Horatio that frames the tale as theatre. There's a row
of black jackets across a back wall, ready to be
appropriated by the actors. Bernardo and Marcellus
appear with staffs in hand, recalling Sotigui
Kouyat's Prospero in Brook's Tempest. Fire and
water make their way in to the production and a car-
pet is rolled out for The Murder of Gonzago. The
characters climb up to high windows as if ascending
battlements. Props are carried on and off as part of
the ensuing action. A cast of seven move across
characters; donning a jacket or a pair of glasses to
suggest the move to another role. Nothing is forced.
We are simply asked to accept that when the cos-
tume is picked up the transition has taken place.
Broggi's accomplished production culti-
vates our complicity. Hamlet talks to us as if we
were seated in the corner of a caf with him. Old
Hamlet's Ghost wanders into the auditoria through
the same door as the audience previously entered.
This is the disruption, the 'thing' that enters from a
different realm, sword in hand, to turn the world of
Elsinore inside out. We are witnesses to this act and
so become implicated in the culture of fear and ret-
ribution that Hamlet is a part of. Hamlet is certainly
in mourning but the mourning is only part of who he
is. We see him hugging Laertes as the latter leaves
for Paris and engaging in banter with Horatio. With
his father he speaks in Englisha reminder of the
English original strikingly reworked by Joan Sellent
into Catalan and a suggestion of the complicity
between father and son. This is a boy's world.
Polonius hugs his son while his coy, fresh-faced
daughter looks by embarrassedly. Aida de la Cruz
looks a frail Ophelia, even her flimsy dress offers
little protection in this determinedly masculine
court. She's brought on by her father to perform
what she knows about Hamlet in front of the wor-
ried King and Queen. Carme Pla's more robust
Gertrude, clad in weightier red velvet tunic, is better
able to deal with the intrigues and protocols of the
kingdom, but even the geeky Rosencrantz and
Gildenstern (memorable performances from Marc
Rodriguez and Jordi Rico in tails) show themselves
unable to survive in such a wily world. Ramon
Vila's Claudius displays the ravages of age on a
weather-beaten face, and Carles Martnez's Polonius
walks with hunched shoulders that suggest a career
worn down by responsibilities and guilt.
Julio Manrique's Hamlet has something of
the lost adolescent about him. He struts across the
stage, notebook in hand, and we are never entirely
sure if he's authoring the story of his life or writing
down exercises to perfect his English. There's some-
thing refreshingly ordinary about him. He's no mati-
nee idol Hamlet in the vein of Juan Diego Botto or
Jude Law. Rather we have an earnest young man, a
frenzied smoker swamped by the circumstances in
which he finds himself. He fights Laertes because
he is given no choice. He kills Polonius awkwardly
and then wrestles to get rid of the body. Thrust into
a situation, he struggles through it. By the final act
he appears exhausted, too tired to really contem-
plate a life beyond revenge.
This is a production that evokes the spirit
of the early Lliure. There is nothing superficial here;
indeed, the set might have been designed by Fabi
Puigserver or Cheek by Jowl's Nick Ormerod. The
projections on the back wallmoving from a
dreamy sky at the opening to storm clouds as
Ophelia is buriedmay be reminders of twenty-
first century scenography, but they are there to assist
in the telling of the story. At times the Ghost is noth-
ing but a series of projections on the wall, words
bereft of a voice; dismembered commands to a
grieving son.
There is a rich attention to detail in
Broggi's production. And while not all of it quite
worksas with the players performing in Italian
and a rather laboured dialogue between father and
son in Englishthe production demonstrates a wit
and intelligence that lifts it above the more earnest
Hamlets seen on the Spanish stage this year. This
Hamlet talks to the stage manager, puffs pensively
on a cigarette while delivering "To be or not to be,"
and closes curtains in preparation for the perform-
ance. The production also manages to ensure that
humor retains its place. As The Murder of Gonzago
begins, the recognizable theme tune from the
Indiana Jones films bursts out. The Gravediggers
dart around the stage, preparing the space for burial
with minimal fuss. Throughout, an intelligent
scoreboth onstage guitar and recorded tracks
further aids in the telling of the tale. We end with
Tom Waits's "Goodnight Irene," a veil of melan-
choly enveloping the play's finale. The characters
fallan array of corpses strewn on the sandand
then they stand again and go: both actor and role
leaving the stage at the end of the performance.
54
Ingmar Bergman will undoubtedly be best
remembered here in America as the legendary
Swedish film director. But of course, anyone famil-
iar with his career knows that he was also a great
theatre director. For over half a century, Bergman
worked in the theatre, starting in regional theatres
and eventually working his way up to Sweden's
Royal Dramatic Theatre (affectionately know as
Dramaten) in Stockholm. He ultimately directed
well over 100 productions throughout his life. Now
two years after his death, Dramaten has established
the Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival
to honor Bergman's theatre legacy, the first install-
ment of which unfolded at the end of last May and
early June at Dramaten. The festival comprised
eleven jam-packed days of performances (mostly
from other parts of Europe), readings, open
rehearsals, seminars, lectures, and exhibits (which, I
might add, also touched on his film workhow
could it not, after all?). It was a fitting tribute to the
Swedish master. Space does not permit a full
accounting of all of the events, but here are some of
the highlights.
Given that this was a new venture for all
involved without any real precedent for Dramaten
as an institution, it was perhaps understandable that
the festival suffered a bit of identity confusion the
first time out, in terms of what it was trying to
accomplish. Although Staffan Valdemar Holm, the
festival's Artistic Director (as well as a former
Artistic Director of Dramaten) stated clearly in the
festival program that the main focus "was not on the
texts by Ingmar Bergman but on artistic excellence
and relevance," the first few days did group togeth-
er several performances that were based on
Bergman's film work, so one could indeed wonder if
the festival's over-riding purpose was simply a for-
mal exercise in transposing Bergman films into
stage versions, a dubious project at best. Luckily,
the second half of the program branched out into
other performances that had nothing to do with
Bergman per se, and it was in this mode that the fes-
tival redeemed itself with several truly stunning
evenings of theatre.
Opening NightCries and Whispers
It was a typically beautiful Swedish Spring
evening. The sun hung low and golden in the sky,
refusing to setto paraphrase Stephen Sondheim in
his lyrics for A Little Night Music (based, of course,
on Bergman)not until elevenish that is, which was
still four hours off. Crowds had gathered at the steps
of Dramaten, an imposing and beautiful art deco
The 2009 Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival
Stan Schwartz
55
Cries and Whispers, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo: Jan Verweyveld.
edifice, where glasses of champagne were being
given out. The doors were flung open and the pub-
lic poured in, greeted by familiar Bergman actors.
The lobby of the theatre had been taken over by a
multimedia exhibit conceived by the Swedish
Institute, entitled Ingmar Bergman: The Man Who
Asked Hard Questions, in which a dozen or so
screens arranged in a circle projected a documentary
film presentation of thirty-two chapters, each cen-
tered on a particular theme. Over the next few
weeks, people would linger here, watching this fas-
cinating and poetic collage of clips and interviews
(including Bergman's rarely seen and hilarious early
soap commercials). But now, all attention was fixed
on the head of the Swedish Institute (and former
Swedish Consul-General here in New York City)
Olle Wstberg, who gave a spirited welcoming
speech, ending in a heart-felt toast to Bergman's
memory and the festival. The atmosphere was
indeed heady and festive, but I personally was a lit-
tle anxious about the opening night performance
which awaited us and which was bound to divide
the critics. That production was Ivo van Hove's
stage version of Bergman's 1972 film masterpiece
Cries and Whispers. The Dutch iconoclast did not
disappointnot in the sense, that is, of ensuring
divided opinion, as evidenced by the heated debates
at the opening night party afterwards.
New York readers will recall that van Hove
and his Amsterdam company, Toneelgroep, brought
their Opening Night (based on Cassavetes's film) to
the Brooklyn Academy of Music a year ago, a per-
formance which for me already set in motion my
own internal debate about the pros and cons of mak-
ing a play from a film. At the time, van Hove said he
was planning stage versions of the Bergman classic
as well as some Antonioni films. I was skeptical. It
is, after all, a well known clich that b-novels make
the best films (as opposed to great literature because
whatever it is in the language that makes something
great literature is generally not translatable to the
screen), and it reasonably follows that the better a
film isi.e., the more purely filmic it isthe hard-
er it would be to translate it to the stage. Van Hove's
Cries and Whispers proved this stunningly and
depressingly. I say "Van Hove's Cries and
Whispers" because it was clearly his Cries and
Whispers, not Bergman's. Mind you, van Hove had
repeatedly spoken in interviews of his so-called
"fidelity to the text" and indeed, much of the film's
dialogue was to be heard (in Dutch) in his stage ver-
sion. But this kind of fidelity misses the point of the
aesthetic question at the heart of the debate about
making plays from masterful films. That question is:
what is the function of dialogue? Dialogue is the
absolutely fundamental building block of theatre
(traditional, psychologically-based theatre, that is)
which is not the case in film. In film, it is the image,
or more precisely, the rhythm of images and how
they artificially "sculpt time"to quote Andrei
Tarkovsky's wonderful metaphor for filmmaking
that is at the heart of film language (I might add that
Bergman long ago went on record as adoring
Tarkovsky's work). And if there is any Bergman
film which beautifully exemplifies the notion of a
fluid stream of images "sculpting in time," it is
Cries and Whispers. Of course dialogue is impor-
tant, but it is secondary, compared to its primacy in
theatre. (In this regard, the viewer will recall that
some of the most stunning sequences in Bergman's
film, and many films out there in general, are with-
out dialogue.) So, van Hove's argument that he has
included all the film's dialogue is meaningless
especially given the typically Hove-esque context in
which he has placed Bergman's dialogue.
Not surprisingly, the director has updated
the film to the present. Instead of a gorgeous turn-
of-the-century manor-house in which two estranged
sisters and a mysteriously silent but ever-faithful
maid watch over a third sister who is dying, this ver-
sion features contemporary characters in a contem-
porary setting: a loft-like space with sliding panels
and screens, that looks like nothing less than a quick
and facile variation of the set design for Opening
Night. Crucial to the film is the almost unbearable
tension between the exquisite surface and the hor-
rific sub-currents percolating under that surface.
There is nothing analogous in the stage version;
how could there be, given the conception? In the
film, the dying Agnes is seen to paint watercolors
a small detail, really. But in van Hove's version, she
is deliberately elevated to the level of "artist,"
specifically, a video artist trying to capture her own
death on video as a conceptual piece. The idea is
just plain sillya transparent excuse for the direc-
tor to indulge in his well-known and over-used
obsession with video. And whereas in Opening
Night, the video seemed somewhat organic to the
whole, here it comes off as gimmicky and annoying.
Other basic differences between the film and this
stage production abound: Bergman's film is ulti-
mately about matters of the spiritthe final imper-
ative to achieve some kind of grace, whatever that
may mean. This all-important Bergman theme is
56
nowhere to be found in van Hove's vision. Rather, it
is matters of the flesh on which van Hove concen-
trates, and in striking and off-putting detailblood,
excrement, etc. Such a focus negates the transcen-
dent nature of Bergman's piece. One of the film's
most harrowing and important scenes is the speech
of the priest at Agnes' deathbed, in which he invokes
life's unending miseries as an inescapable existen-
tial given, from which the now-dead Agnes is final-
ly happily free, thus giving her spirit the opportuni-
ty to speak to God in person on behalf of the tor-
tured living left behind. The speech is indeed there
in van Hove's production (a perfect example of the
director's misguided notion of "fidelity") but in the
context of everything else, it makes absolutely no
impressionwhich is quite a perverse feat, given
the power of the speech. Another truly puzzling
aspect of the production is its failure to distinguish
the personalities of the four women, whose differ-
ences in the film are razor sharp, vivid, and of the
utmost importance. Here, the women's characteriza-
tionsnotwithstanding, of course, the agonized
suffering of Agnesactually seem generalized and
bland. Altogether, this was a shaky start to a festival
devoted to the spirit of Bergman. As far as I could
tell, Bergman's spirit was nowhere present in van
Hove's pretentious and misguided production.
From the Life of the Marionettes
The film-to-stage debate continued. From
the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg came this stage ver-
sion of Bergman's 1980 film From the Life of the
Marionettes, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg.
Made in Germany during Bergman's temporary self-
imposed exile there after his well-publicized tax
scandal in Sweden, the film is hardly one of
Bergman's best efforts. The piece is a stark and
somber investigation into the murder of a prostitute
by a seemingly ordinary, well-adjusted married man
(Bergman fans will note that the character is actual-
ly Peter Egerman, a secondary character from
Scenes from a Marriage). Deliberately structured as
a series of distinct scenes, mostly monologues and
duo-logues, it is a better fit for a stage adaptation
than Cries and Whispers, and although I do not par-
ticularly like the film, I found this stage version
intriguing, and far more successful than Mr. van
Hove's efforts, if only because the source material is
second-rate. This fact, ironically, allows a theatrical
investigation for its own sake to be somehow more
appropriate than if the original were an unqualified
masterpiece. Kriegenburg is a director interested in
pushed physicality and stylization, both of which
were in evidence in this production. The staging
achieved an almost choreographic effect at times,
heightening the dream-like (nightmarish, really)
quality of the play, as various people in the protag-
onist's life speculate on how such a crime could
have come to pass. Particularly effective was the use
of a flashback structure, in which the initial murder
scene was constantly replayed in developing incre-
Life of Marionettes, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Hans Jrg Michel.
57
58
ments, only to reach its eventual climactic fulfill-
ment in the final replay at the evening's end. All the
actors were first rate, but Jrg Pose in the lead role
was particularly outstanding, exhibiting an intensity
that was both compelling and appropriate for the
piece. Helmut Mooshammer as Tim, the homosexu-
al friend, was also particularly touching. I should
add that the other main star of the evening was the
set design, a strikingly bizarre and slightly Japanese
stage picture (designed by Kriegenburg himself)
featuring bright red walls in a cage formation, a
super-shiny floor reflecting the countless light bulbs
on the ceiling, a few pieces of modern furniture, and
two gorgeous cherry trees in full bloom. What this
had to do with the play is hard to know, but it some-
how worked with the deliberate strangeness and
dysfunctionality of the evening.
Of Readings and Open Rehearsals
The idea of putting Bergman films on stage
just kept going and going like the famed Energizer
Bunny. From the well-known Almeida Theater in
London came a reading of Bergman's 1962 classic
Through a Glass Darkly, adapted for the stage by
Andrew Upton (Cate Blanchett's husband, with Ms.
Blanchett acting as one of the project's producers),
and directed by Michael Attenborough, the
Almeida's Artistic Director. This was a minimally
rehearsed, script-in-hand, work-in-progress, with a
full production planned for next year in London.
Bergman's film, one of the so-called chamber films,
is a four-character study of a family falling apart
over a twenty-four-hour period on the remote island
of Fr. In its famous climactic scene, the schizo-
phrenic daughterHarriet Andersson in one of her
most legendary performancessees God in the
form of a spider (I should add that Ms. Andersson,
equally extraordinary as Agnes in the original Cries
and Whispers some years later, was in attendance at
the festival.) The four British actors here were Alex
Jennings, John Bowe, Luke Treadaway, and Ruth
Wilson, all well-known in England. Given the work-
shop nature of the evening, it would be inappropri-
ate to judge it on any level except for the question of
how well the stage adaptation worked. It did, I'm
happy to say, which is not surprising, given the
claustrophobic and literary quality of the original
piece. That's not to say that a successful finished
production would be an easily-achieved fait accom-
pli. Out of context, Bergman's text by itself could
come off as melodramaticit's the power of his
images and the superb performances, together with
the film's extraordinary tension, that keep such
potential dangers in check. A finished stage produc-
tion would have to find ways of accomplishing the
same, in which case very carefully calibrated and
nuanced direction together with an intense but inter-
nalized acting style would be key to its success. It
will be fascinating to see what they come up with in
London next year.
A few days later, Dramaten itself offered a
public open-rehearsal of their upcoming production
of Bergman's famous 1973 television series, Scenes
from a Marriage, here directed by Stefan Larsson
and featuring Jonas Karlsson and Livia Millhagen
as the couple whose marriage is falling apart
(immortalized in the original by Liv Ullmann and
Erland Josephson). In this instance, I have no
qualms about a stage adaptation: for one thing, it is
written as a series of distinct scenes of dialogue, a
form Bergman often used for his television work
and which functioned at its best as a kind of halfway
point between film language and theatre language,
mixing the best of both. Also, it's interesting to note
that Bergman himself mounted a theatre version of
his own in the 1980s. Curiously, so did Ivo van
Hove in more recent years. In fact, there have been
dozens of stage versions performed all over the
world.
In this case, the scene being rehearsed was
one of the early scenes, in which the fractures in the
couple's marriage are only beginning to show.
Although the actors were excellent, this didn't strike
me as a true rehearsal. The director was very con-
scious of the audience watching, and he was very
much "performing" as director, as much as the
actors were performing their characters. His instruc-
tions and comments to the actors between run-
throughs seemed less than spontaneous. Still, it was
a pleasure to watch the actors at work, especially the
superb Jonas Karlsson, one of Sweden's best young
actors. I should add that the finished production has
since opened at Dramaten to mostly positive
reviews.
Psychological Realism versus
Deconstructionist Collage
Both at the seminars and at the crowded
and noisy bars after performances, there was much
fascinating and sometimes heated discussion about
the nature of theatre languageand at a level of
sophistication and passion that I never hear, sadly,
during an average night out at the theatre in New
York. In certain quarters, American theatre was
aggressively disparaged as hopelessly old-fashioned
with its clinging devotion to linear narrative mired
in psychological realism. (American voices were
almost entirely absent from the festival, which was
telling, but of what, I am not sure.) To a certain
extent, the indictments against American theatre are
true, of course, but one must place such concerns
within the context of commercial theatre and its
function in a commercial society like America. It's
curious to note that people at the festival used the
phrase "art theatre" the same way we use the phrase
"art film." A theatre language where psychology is
all but jettisoned and such elements as movement,
sound, image, video, live music, even texture are all
given equal status if not superior status to tradition-
al dialogue and narrative has been commonplace in
Europe for years. (Accordingly, I had to laugh at the
recent vociferous objections to the new Tosca at the
Met as too radical and outlandish, when by certain
European barometers, the production was actually
old-fashioned.)
Suffice it to say that both modes of the-
atregood old fashioned psychological realism and
post-modern, collagist non-narrativecan be tor-
turous to sit through if done poorly, but equally tran-
scendent if done well. This perhaps obvious axiom
was no more explicitly and wonderfully proven than
by the festivals two truly stunningand utterly
oppositeperformances: Eraritjaritjaka: Museum
of Phrases and La Doleur.
Conceived and directed by composer-
director Heiner Goebbels from the Thtre Vidy-
Lausanne, Eraritjaritjaka featured a monologue of a
collage of texts by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti,
beautifully performed by Andr Wilms with a deli-
cate blend of humor, irony, and pathos. The title is
an Australian Aboriginal expression for the nostal-
gic yearning for something lost, and the text frag-
ments touched on matters of human nature and
interaction, music, the state of the world, etc., but
they defied concrete analysis or concrete cause and
effect meaning which was precisely the point. The
overriding raison d'tre of this enigmatic but beauti-
ful music-theatre piece was the elaborate and ingen-
ious theatrical construct which surrounded and
enveloped the monologue: music (supplied by the
live, on-stage Mondriaan String Quartet), lighting
effects, startling trompe-l'oeil set design, and most
importantly, live video. In the play's most notorious
moment fairly early on, the actor leaves the stage,
followed by a video cameraman, and we in the audi-
ence watch live video images projected onto the set
of him actually leaving the theatre, catching a taxi
outside, and driving ten or fifteen blocks down the
road, all the while continuing his monologue. We
see him enter an apartment, busy himself with banal
matters of his day (including a glimpse of the actu-
al day's newspaper and the turning on of an actual
radio playing an actual radio station). His mono-
logue continues as he starts to make himself an
Eraritjaritjaka, directed by Heiner Goebbels. Photo: Mario del Curto.
59
omelette, but at a certain point, we know we are in
the throes of some sort of spatial and temporal
sleight of hand when his onion-chopping turns out
to be in perfect rhythmic sync with the Ravel string
quartet we are watching being performed live back
in the theatre. I suppose it is not ruining too much
(spoiler alert!) to report that the actor is soon
revealed onstage as never having left the theatre. It's
a breathtaking coup de thtre which, in addition to
everything else, magically reveals in a single
moment an entire dimension (literally) of the set
design that before this moment, we had no visual
clue even existed. I couldn't help thinking Mr. van
Hove would do well to take a few lessons from
Goebbels about the truly imaginative and poetic use
of theatrical space and video. Goebbels and his tech-
nical team achieved a magical evening of theatre
poetics where sound, image, text, space, and even
time all coalesced into a unified effervescent vision
which completely transcended the sum of its techni-
cal parts. I might add that if all this sounds familiar,
it's because Eraritjaritjaka was performed here in
New York a few years back at the Lincoln Center
Festival in 2006.
And finally, I will end on a note of psycho-
logical realism. Famed French film and theatre
director Patrice Chreau brought to the festival his
production of La Douleur from Marguerite Duras's
novel The War: A Memoir (co-directed with Thierry
Thie Niang). In it, the sublime Dominique Blanc,
who has collaborated with Chreau before in both
film and theatre, performs an eighty-minute mono-
logue on a stage ostensibly bare save a table, some
chairs, and a few props, which chronicles Duras's
own experiences in the Resistance in World War
Two. The monologue ultimately zeroes in on the
story of her husband's return from the Nazi death
camps and the harrowing details of nursing him
back to health from a state that was perilously close
to death. With material that could easily have
slipped into distasteful melodrama, the amazing Ms.
Blanc (under Chreau's expert guidance) consistent-
ly avoided even the slightest trace of sentimentality.
Hers was a performance championing three funda-
mental and essential theatrical virtuessimplicity,
directness, and emotional honesty. The effect was
devastating and when it came time for the final
blackout, I dare say there wasn't a dry eye in the
house.
It was in these final moments, taken
together with the magical mysteries of Goebbel's
dream vision in Eraritjaritjaka, that one could pal-
pably feel the spirit of Ingmar Bergman, theatre
director, hovering in the air of Dramaten's galleries.
La Doleur, directed by Patrice Chreau. Photo: Ros Ribas.
60
The explosion of festival culture over the
past fifteen years has, as has been widely remarked,
produced a globalized culture in which certain per-
formances obtain a cult status very different from
the typical cultural capital of performances that only
appear in one city for a limited amount of time. In
the United Kingdom, a proliferation of theatrical
festivals of all levels means that even without the
madness of Edinburgh, one can see a huge variety of
new touring work. With the United Kingdom's rela-
tive compactness as well, it's easy to pick and
choose from the multitude of performances on offer
at a variety of festivals. I focus in this article on
selected pieces seen with my partner at three festi-
vals: London's Spill Festival, the Manchester
International Festival, and the Brighton Festival.
Brighton is the most established of these
festivals, with a history dating back to 1967. The
ethos of its origins can be seen in Brighton, a sea-
side city which still in some parts feels like a relic of
that era, with a plethora of tie-dyes and vegetarian
restaurants (notable among them the Michelin-rec-
ommended Terre Terre). The festival features a
bustling fringe and a variety of performances onto
which one can stumble, ranging from theatre and
performance to dance, music, literary events, and
public debate. The festival executives under the new
leadership of Andrew Comben, decided, for the first
time to invite a Guest Artistic Director to help curate
the festival and chose Anish Kapoor for this role.
Kapoor designed several sculptural installations,
most of which were free and open to the public.
(The one exception to this was his "Imagined
Monochrome: A Massage" in which the individual
audience members were given a brief massage, in
an attempt to create the experience of monochro-
maticity).
Both of the other two festivals were begun
in 2007 as biennial events. The Manchester
International Festival bills itself as "the world's first
international festival of original, new work and spe-
cial events" and claims that all events are premieres,
at least in a broadly defined sense. The Spill Festival
is produced by the Pacitti Company and presents a
variety of important local, national, and internation-
al work, as well as inviting a "thinker in residence"
61
Not Simply Edinburgh: The Proliferation of Festival Culture in the UK
Joshua Abrams
Dismemberement, designed by Anish Kapoor. Photo: Courtesy of the Brighton Festival.
to see and respond to all the events through a series
of open conversations and weekly "Spill Feast" din-
ner parties. These two festivals bring a wide variety
of major international work to the UK, both new as
well as previously seen from a plethora of practi-
tioners at the forefront of contemporary perform-
ance work. While a review of all the work from
these three festivals would be a massive undertak-
ing, I've chosen instead to pick out a few highlights
overall.
The Spill Festival has provided a much
needed London space for contemporary, challeng-
ing performance, much of which has previously not
tended to appear in London. Societas Raffaello
Sanzio produced all three parts of their Divine
Comedy trilogy, which has been seen widely since
its premiere at Avignon last year, although is vastly
different in this incarnation [see WES 20:3, Fall
2008]. We watched his trilogy out of order, begin-
ning in Paradiso, then moving to Inferno, and then,
a week later, on to Purgatorio. These three pieces,
ostensibly a trilogy after Dante, all rely on vastly
different aesthetics. Paradiso is an installation, a
white cube inside a vast empty space; you enter the
cube and hear the sound of water in the blackness.
As your eyes adjust, you see the water is rushing
down the far side of the cube, high above your head
a man's torso strains through a circular hole; rather
than allowing a true glimpse of "heaven"an
impossible theatrical taskcompany director
Romeo Castellucci has instead chosen to show us
what might be the final image of the Purgatorio, as
Dante, having moved through the ledges, wriggles
into Paradise. The only thing in this paradise then is
the individual audience member, who perhaps
becomes Beatrice, in a possible reversal of Sartre's
dictum that "Hell is other people."
Inferno is a much more theatrical, or per-
haps choreographic staging. As the performance
begins, we see the letters "INFERNO" across the
stagethree-foot high three-dimensional letters,
but spelling the word backwards. Sitting onstage
and looking out one would see the audience through
the sign, as if it were the spectators being catego-
rized; hell is not just any other people, but here, with
Handke, a theatre audience. Castellucci himself
walked on stage and introduced himself, before
dressing in a large Velcro padded suit. Several large
German shepherds are brought on stage and chained
to short heavy chains mounted at the front of the
large Barbican stage; as they strain at their bindings,
my seat in the third row suddenly seemed far too
62
Societas Raffaello Sanzio's production of Dante's Inferno, directed by Romeo Castellucci. Photo: Luca del Pio.
close to the stage. One at a time, three more dogs
(Cerberus was apparently unavailable) run onstage
from the wings to savage him, tearing at the padded
clothingthe sound of the Velcro ripping ominous-
ly in the theatre space as the other dogs bark and
growl, unable to share in the fun. As a whistle
blows, the dogs meekly run offstage, and the others
are unclasped and brought offstage as well. A helper
puts an animal skin (dog?) on Castellucci as he
stands, on all fours, center stage, and the lights go
off.
The performance follows as a carefully
choreographed, and often stark, series of images:
Several children play in a glass cube (behind what
we assume to be one-way glass, as they appear
blissfully unaware of our presence), a boy and girl
(Castellucci's children) bounce and exchange a bas-
ketball, a marionette human skeleton crawls across
the stage, a white horse is brought on stage and
splashed with blood-red paint, a grand piano is set
on fire. Our guide for the evening is Andy Warhol
(not the first use of him as a contemporary Virgil, as
I quickly flashed back to Anne Bogart's The Culture
of Desire, featuring Andy Warhol as a shopping cart
pushing guide to the underworld), who here uses a
Polaroid camera to document the onstage happen-
ings. The cast, in addition to Castellucci and family,
is about forty people, some of whom are trained
actors and some of whom simply volunteered and
spent the better part of a week rehearsing. The
trained actors execute a series of stage dives back-
wards off an onstage platform, as the titles of
Warhol works flash on the screen behind them and
the cast mills about. The large group on stage plays
a series of games, most pointedly a series of mimed
throat slashes, as each perpetrator in turn becomes
victim. The final image with which we are left is
Warhol climbing into a burnt out car. This is a hell
of everyday events in the post-Warhol world of con-
sumerism, a sequence of vivid images that remain
seared into the audience's skulls. There's no attempt
to follow Dante literally here, as the nine circles of
hell are flattened out, but the power of image mak-
ing that is Castellucci's strength is certainly on show
here.
Purgatorio comes from a different aesthet-
ic as well; the opening set is a hyper-realistic (if
obviously theatrical in size) kitchen, where a
woman stands preparing a meal. Her son enters with
a toy robot, and she feeds him and reminds him to
63
Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Purgatory, directed by Romeo Castellucci. Photo: Luca del Pio.
take his medicine. The son wonders aloud if "he" is
coming back tonight. The scene changes seem
absurdly long as the text is projected on a screen
downstage. When the lights come back up, the boy
is playing in his room and watching television. The
father comes home and has an odd reunion scene
with the motherthere's clearly something off with
this family. After the mother leaves, the father
removes a cowboy hat, neutral mask, and a silver
dildo from his briefcase, and goes to play "Cowboys
and Indians" with his son. We sit in uncomfortable
silence as we hear the boy being abused in the dark.
The boy's robot toy appears in the living room,
twenty-feet tall, perhaps to take revenge, but does
not; the father plays piano and the son comforts him.
The characters leave and reappear behind a
circle of glass, which is slowly covered with ink, as
plants seem to grow and take on eerie shapes and
absurd proportions, dwarfing the family beneath
them. The father and son are replaced by different
actorsthe father now with severe spastic tenden-
cies and the son fully grown. As they dance togeth-
er, the story appears to have come full circle, the son
now in control, while the father cannot control his
own movements. There's something both painful to
watch and at the same time incredibly powerful
about this casting choice. This show seems to be
about the audience's complicity; it is our purgatory
here to grapple with the seeming acceptance of child
abuse. Few (if any) people walked out; the audience
seemed willing to take it. According to Claudia
Castellucci's program note, as well as being a
human family, this is perhaps representative of the
Catholic tripartite godthe abused son must for-
give the father, and the circle goes on. As before, the
images are stunning, and the theatricality at times
threatens to overwhelm the message.
Looking at the relationship between adults
and children from a drastically different point of
view is That Night Follows Day, a production creat-
ed by Tim Etchells (of Forced Entertainment) for
the Flemish theatre company Victoria. Following
Josse de Pauw's 2001 Bung, this is the second
piece that Victoria has created with a cast of chil-
dren, but for an adult audience. The cast here is six-
teen children, aged between eight and fourteen. The
set is an immediately recognizable primary school
gym or multi-purpose hall. Rows of collapsible
bleachers line the back wall along with a green floor
painted with white lines for various games and a
series of stackable chairs. The performance is clas-
sic Tim Etchells, with a line-up of actors who, mak-
ing little pretense of the theatrical, speak to and at
the audience. They tell us, or perhaps remind us, of
the relationship between children and adultswe
are addressed in the second person as the children
64
Night Follows Day, directed by Tim Etchells. Photo: Phile Deprez.
cycle through a series of simple movements, stack-
ing and unstacking the chairs, standing in a line fac-
ing us, sitting and standing.
The child actors trade lines, passing them
like a game of "Hot Potato" or "Pass the Parcel,"
sometimes speaking individually, sometimes in a
chorus. Many of the lines begin "You tell us..." and
the conclusion to these declarative statements varies
from the instructionalto wash, to dress, to skip
stonesto the informativethat night follows day.
Other lines remind us that "we" tell little white lies
to children, or that we whisper when we think they
can't hear. The show is an exploration of parenting
turned on its head, and throughout the audience you
can hear the individual laughs of recognitionthe
"I say that/I do that" or "My parents said that/my
parents did that." The show is delightful, and chal-
lenging in ways drastically different from
Castellucci's use of children. Here too, the audi-
ence's complicity is on show, the circle of parent to
child and so on is brought into the light here with all
its varying shades and intensities. The white lies are
necessary along with the instructions, the com-
mands, the facts (both correct and not), the stories,
and the life lessons, Etchells suggests. I wondered
slightly about the authorship of the lines. How much
is Etchells projecting and how much was created in
workshop? But ultimately, in a piece created for an
adult audience, that's both a crucial and not a crucial
questionthis is a piece of certain nostalgia, and of
the development and relationships between adults
and children. Whether these are the children them-
selves speaking, or simply parroting lines they've
learned, it's all related.
Another expression of the parent-child
relationship seems to me to appear in Rufus
Wainwright's Prima Donna, which received its
world premiere in Manchester. Originally commis-
sioned by the Metropolitan Opera, who later with-
drew because of Wainwright's desire to write in
French, the opera is at once both a new and a con-
servative work. The score is his; the libretto co-writ-
ten with Bernadette Colomine. In many ways, it
seems that what Wainwright has done is combine
his own well documented love for opera with his
childhood in a folk-music familyhe treats the his-
tory of opera as a variety of folk sources from which
he picks and chooses. Not really postmodern pas-
tiche, Wainwright's success in this is mixed as he
never quite achieves his own voice, which in his
own performance work stands out so strongly. The
plot is somewhat reminiscent of the camp classic
Sunset Boulevard: an aging Callas-like diva, Rgine
Saint Laurent, who quit singing after her triumphant
opening night performance in an opera written for
her (Alienor d'Aquitane), contemplates (although
65
Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna, directed by Daniel Kramer. Photo: Clive Barda.
eventually deciding against) a comeback. She is
pushed in this by her fame-hungry butler and a jour-
nalist (and failed tenor), Andr, who endearingly
brings his libretto for Alienor to the interview and
ends up singing with her the duet from the opera.
This is an opera about opera and plays simultane-
ously to two audiences, Wainwright's fans and opera
buffs. The latter will recognize throughout the
touches and quotationsfrom Strauss, Massenet,
Verdi, Ravel, Poulenc, and most notably (and most
obviously as well) from Puccini. The end of the
opera turns on Andre's Pinkerton-like appearance
with his kimono-clad Japanese fiance. A reversal
of the racial conclusion to Madame Butterfly;
Rgine steps out on her balconythis betrayal
echoes her romantic betrayal on the night of
Alienor's premiereand considers leaping Tosca-
like into the streets of Bastille Day revellers below.
The opera is directed by the fabulous
young director Daniel Kramer [see WES 18:1,
Winter 2006], who brings a gothic neo-expression-
ist feel to it. Philippe, the butler (sung by baritone
Jonathan Summers), seems perhaps to be a missing
fourth bass villain role from Offenbach's Tales of
Hoffman, clad in a stunning green suit, with a shock
of grey hair and an assistant/lover/bellhop in con-
stant tow. The production was well sung in all the
leadsJanis Kelly is convincing vocally in the
demanding role of Rgine, and lyric soprano
Rebecca Bottone stood out in the sweet melodies
she is given as Rgine's confidante and maid. The
production is solid and enjoyable under Kramer's
direction and the baton of Opera North's Pierre-
Andr Valade, and while not ultimately a success,
Rgine's final aria hints at Wainwright's having dis-
covered how best to combine his sources with his
own unique sense of the lyric. This is an opera that
consciously steps back in time, and one imagines
that given more time and commissions, the thirty-
six year old composer may indeed develop as a
strong operatic composer.
The other performance that we saw at the
Manchester International Festival was Marina
Abramovi presents . . . in the Whitworth Gallery.
This piece is billed as a four-hour durational experi-
ence. When the audience arrived in the space, we
were each issued with white lab coats, and a small
Dixie cup. Walking into a large open gallery space
with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a side
street, we each were given small stools to set up fac-
ing a long narrow stage, spanning the entirety of the
room's length. The performance begins with an
hour-long lecture by Abramovic, discussing dura-
tional art and how to pay attention. She peppers this
with exercises, including staring into the eyes of
someone you don't know for several minutes at a
Marina Abramovic presents...Alistair MacLennan. Photo: Joel Chester.
66
time, and taking a full ten minutes to drink a tiny
cup's worth of water. She tells stories as well, the
afternoon we saw it, about her experiences working
with the Dalai Lama, and two different performanc-
es she designed, each of which ultimately needed to
be abandoned, each time giving her a lesson in
learning to let go. I'm not quite certain who the
intended audience is here. It perhaps speaks to per-
formance art's historical background, where these
stories and exercises might seem to come more
obviously out of theatrical training.
Abramovi has described this performance
as a trial for her "Institute for the Preservation of
Performance Art" that she intends to house in
Hudson, New York. The remainder of the four hours
the audience is free to wander the gallery, taking in
a variety of curated durational performances.
Thirteen performers, each from a different country,
have been invited by Abramovi to present their
work. Alistair MacLennan's work was particularly
memorable, with a selection of meticulously laid
out shoes forming triangles on either side of a long
diagonal plinth, covered with earth and pigs'
headsa somewhat Beckettian feel to his presence
in the space. Kira O'Reilly fell, in slow motion,
down an ornate stone staircase, while in a nearby
room Ivan Civic climbed on brackets sticking out of
the wall, while behind him is projected a video of
his return to Sarajevo after ten years. The entirety of
these performance (along with ten others simultane-
ously occurring) is impossible to convey; the impact
is in the conjunction of these pieces with
Abramovi's lecture, encouraging the audience to
focus and to slow down. I was dismayed by the
nudity in the overall shape of the afternoon, which
seemed to be solely female. While the individual
pieces may have called for it, the overall feel is that
the event was not really fully curated. All the pieces
are separate and if one were to devote equal time to
each of them, that's less than fifteen minutes each. Is
this really intended to encourage an audience to
focus on duration and seeing or living differently?
Even the twenty-two minutes we give to a television
sitcom or the nightly news is of longer duration.
The final piece that I want to discuss is
Rimini Protokoll's first UK appearance at the
Brighton Festival with Breaking News. Known in
their work for using non-theatrical "experts in
Marina Abramovic presents...Ivan Civic. Photo: Joel Chester.
67
everyday life" [see WES 17:2, Spring 2005], this
work, directed by Daniel Wetzel, promises a differ-
ent performance every day. (We saw it on 9 May).
The stage is filled with a variety of television
screens, cables, and accoutrements that look like the
set of an elaborate electronics junk shop. A cast of
sixjournalists and translatorsenter and sit, each
in front of multiple screens. Each of the cast intro-
duces themselves and the languages that they speak
and explains the rules of the evening, which is a
form of documentary theatre. Each screen will show
a variety of different news feeds from all over the
world, and the performers will translate for the audi-
ence (sequentially, but somewhat at random) how
the events of the day are being covered in different
languages and by different sources. Each has the
ability to interrupt, by ringing a bell, if she or he
feels that there is something crucial on one of their
channels. This is the first half of the evening; in the
second half, they rewind the feeds and look at simi-
lar stories from different angles
On the night we were there, there was
nothing particularly crucial or momentous in the
news, which meant that the stories flowed pretty
evenly around the stage. The performers discuss the
news; how it is made, the structure of particular
news programs, etc, interspersed with the specific
daily updates. The show also relies on Aesychlus'
The Persians, a battered copy of which is passed
around among the performers, who go to a seat on
top of racks of televisions to read from the messen-
ger scenes, discussing how theatre begins from the
same place as newsthe need to tell what hap-
pened. Over the course of the evening, they raise
questions about how we decide what's important in
storytelling and how much opinion goes into the
production of these stories. It's a fun evening at the
theatre and a production that definitely encouraged
me to try to return and see it again, if I have the
chance. For instance, how might this be different on
a day with "major late-breaking news," one won-
ders? Or what about on the third or fourth night of a
news cycle dominated by one particular story?
Theatre is often about storytelling and
learning how to listen or see again. The proliferation
of festival culture allows these events to travel and
appear to a variety of different audiences, helping us
to think about how these stories are transmitted and
retransmitted in our globalized age.
68
In the last issue I wrote about the Comdie-
Franaise. In this issue I will cover some notable
productions from the last half of the 20082009 sea-
son.
While the Thtre National Populaire's the-
atre in Villeurbane is being renovated the company
has been touring a number of productions in France.
After the excellent Coriolanus performed at
Nanterre in the fall, the company returned to the
Thtre 71 in the suburb of Malakoff with perform-
ances of five short comedies by Molire. Audiences
could see the plays over two evenings or in one five-
hour performance on the weekends.
Director Christian Schiaretti has chosen to
stage the plays with the utmost simplicity. The set
consisted of a platform on which there was a frame-
work with doors, windows, and an upper level. The
frame was covered with a curtain for the first two
plays. Actors could be seen sitting upstage of the
platform when not performing and were also visible
at dressing tables behind an upstage scrim. Julie
Grand provided often-sumptuous seventeenth centu-
ry costumes.
Ten fairly young actors performed all the
roles. The first two plays, The Jealousy of
Barbouill and The Flying Doctor, are simple farces
without much substance. Although the actors were
competent and made the audience laugh, I felt they
lacked the flare of true commedia dell' arte trained
clowns. Things improved with Sganarelle, the
Imaginary Cuckold. The plot of the play is better
managed than that of the earlier plays, and
Sganarelle's extended drinking scene was well acted
by Julien Gauthier. The premise of The School for
Husbands is delightful: two old men who are broth-
ers have raised their wards with differing principles.
Both hope to marry the young women. Ariste who
has given his ward Lonor great liberty is in fact
loved by her. Sganarelle has raised Isabelle with
severity and is detested by her. The plot concerns
bringing together the young lovers Isabelle and
Valre with the help of their respective servants,
Lisette and Ergaste. Olivier Borle was suitably
crusty as Sganarelle in contrast to Jrme Quintard's
elegant and sophisticated Ariste. Clmentine Verdier
and Clment Morinire were utterly charming as the
lovers. The final play, The Ridiculous Young Ladies,
is an amusing satire of precocity, which was in fash-
Paris Theatre, WinterSpring 2009
Barry Daniels
From Five Short Comedies by Molire, directed by Christian Schiaretti. Photo: Christian Ganet.
69
ion in 1660 in Paris. Jeanne Brouaye (Magdelon)
and Clmentine Verdier (Cathos) were deliciously
foolish as the two young slaves to fashion. Two suit-
ors they have snubbed take vengeance on them by
disguising their respective servants as a Count and a
Marquis who court the young women.
Georges Feydeau was a prolific author of
vaudevilles during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth centu-
ry. His work enjoyed an enormous success during
his lifetime and has remained in the repertory in
France and throughout the world. Although his kind
of situation-based comedy is not to my taste, I must
admit he had a genius for creating hilarious situa-
tions.
Gifted young director Jean-Franois
Sivadier staged an immensely successful production
of Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's (1900) as the
final production of the season at the Odon-Thtre
de l'Europe. The play may well be Feydeau's mas-
terpiece. Its intricate plot begins with Dr. Petypon
waking up under the sofa in his apartment, having
passed out after a night of heavy drinking with his
colleague Dr. Mongicourt. They find in Petypon's
bed a dancer from the Moulin Rouge, La Mme
Crevette (the Kid Shrimp), whom Petypon picked
up at Maxim's. When Petypon's uncle, the General,
arrives after a long stay in Africa, he assumes the
woman in Petypon's bedroom is his wife and invites
her to join the wedding party for his ward
Clementine at his chateau in Tourraine. Petypon
finds it easier to let the General think La Mme
Crevette is his wife and makes plans for her to go
with him to the chateau in the country. Act 2 takes
place at the engagement party where Feydeau deft-
ly satirizes the provincial aristocracy's desire to
keep up with Parisian fashions. La Mme Crevette,
appearing as Madame Petypon, represents the epit-
ome of Parisian taste to the women. Her frank and
vulgar speech is viewed as being the latest Parisian
fashion, which they hilariously try to imitate.
Petypon's real wife Gabrielle, having received a
written invitation to the event, arrives.
Complications ensue as Petypon has passed her off
as Mongicourt's wife to the General and she
assumes La Mme Crevette must be the General's
wife. Act 3 returns the characters to Paris where
after numerous complications and the use of an
"ecstatic" chair, which when activated puts people
into an ecstatic sleep, the true identity of La Mme
Crevette is revealed. The play ends with the
Petypons reconciled and with the General's decision
to marry La Mme Crevette and return to Africa
with her.
Georges Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's, directed by Jean-Franois Sivadier. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand.
70
Director Sivadier chose to break with the
realistic apparatus of Feydeau's work. He has set the
play on a virtually bare stage open to the back wall
and to the wings where one sees ropes and sand-
bags. For the first act there was an upturned sofa
under which Petypon was discovered and a large
white-curtained bed where La Mme Crevette was
concealed. For the hall in the chateau of the second
act the white curtain of the bed was draped against
the upstage wall where there was a table with
refreshments. Chairs were brought on as needed.
The third act returns to Petypon's house where the
white curtain now hung at the back. Props included
the sofa and the ecstatic chair. This simple arrange-
ment became a highly theatrical environment in
which emphasis went to the work of the actors.
Virginie Gervaise's costumes, based on period
styles, were colorful and often original comic cre-
ations.
Sivadier's immensely talented cast com-
mitted themselves completely to Feydeau's often
absurd situations. I especially enjoyed Ccile
Bouillot, Nicolas L Quang, Catherine Morlot and
Anne de Queiroz as the quartet of provincial women
in the second act. Gilles Privat was a blustery
General with a heart of pure gold. Nadia
Vonderheyden was amusingly clueless as Petypon's
wife Gabrielle. But the play belongs to the two main
characters, Dr. Lucien Petypon and La Mme
Crevette. Nicolas Bouchaud's Petypon was con-
stantly on the verge of hysteria. His arms flailed as
he lurched or bounded about the stage. His work
reminded me of Jerry Lewis who is much admired
by the French. In contrast to Bouchaud's frenzied
performance, Norah Krief was imperturbably calm
as La Mme Crevette. Waif-like, but with a big
voice, she often seemed like a little girl dressed up
in her mother's clothes. But this was a girl who has
"been around the block" more than a few times.
Frank and vulgar she remained bemused throughout
at the foolishness of the upper middle class charac-
ters in the play. Krief was so good in the first two
acts that it was a real disappointment that her char-
acter plays only a small role in the last act.
During a musical interlude in the second
act, when the cast danced around the stage in a cir-
cle, Sivadier used some music composed by Nino
Rota for Fellini. This was a kind of key to Sivadier's
work. The theatricality and broad comic style of the
production recalled the work of Fellini and made for
a truly memorable evening of theatre.
One of my favourite productions of the
season was Chekhov's Uncle Vanya as produced by
the collective The Possessed at the Thtre de la
Bastille. Physically the production was extremely
simple. The directors Rudolphe Dana and Katja
Georges Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's, directed by Jean Franois Sivadier. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand.
71
Hunsinger placed the audience on three sides of the
stage. For act 1 there was a carpet center stage and
a long table against the upstage wall. For act two the
carpet was removed and the table was placed in the
center of the acting area. It was covered with can-
dles, which served as the lighting for this act. The
table remained, but the candles were removed for
act three. For the last act the table was pushed
upstage so that it jutted out slightly into the acting
area. The cast wore modern clothing.
What was striking in this production was
the emotional honesty of the performers. Simon
Bakhouche was vain and somewhat clueless as the
professor. His young wife Elena's boredom and des-
peration were beautifully rendered by Katja
Hunsinger. Rudolphe Dana combined cynicism and
optimism adroitly in his creation of Doctor Astrov.
Marie-Hlne Roig was a nave but touching Sonia.
David Clavel's Vanya was truly remarkable. He
brought out the character's deep frustration and ulti-
mate despair. The tedium of life in the country, the
poignancy of the unrequited love of Sonia for
Astrov, the impossible attraction between Astrov
and Elena, the thoughtlessness of the professor, the
slavish existence of Vanya: Chekov's portrait of
failed and ruined lives was rendered with great hon-
esty and skill by the fairly young actors.
Gilberte Tsai's staging of Vassa 1910 at the
New Theatre of Montreuil was based on the 1910
text of Gorki's play Vassa Geleznova which he
revised in 1936. In the play the matriarch Vassa is
running her dying husband's shipping business with
the aide of her assistant Vassiliev. Her son Semion is
lame and half-witted, and is unhappily married to
Natalia. Her second son Pavel is married to
Vassiliev's daughter Lioudmilla. Vassa's third child
is a daughter, Anna. Plot complications center on
Vassa's brother-in-law Geleznov, a womanizer who
has seduced Natalia and Lipa, a hysterical chamber-
maid. Geleznov is threatening to recall a substantial
loan he has made to the company which will result
in its ruin. The play paints an ugly portrait of a
group of genuinely ruthless characters.
Tsai's sober realistic production was won-
derfully acted. Christiane Cohendy was outstanding
as the scheming Vassa, determined to save the busi-
ness. Jean-Baptiste Azma was suitably pitiful as
the cuckolded son, Semion. Sylvie Debrun por-
trayed well the frustration and desperation of his
unfaithful wife. Jacek Maka, as the dissolute
Geleznov, gave a performance as strong and as hor-
rifying as Cohendy's Vassa. As the maid Lipa,
Jeanne Arnes made a fine comic turn out of her
hysteria. Laurent Peduzzi provided a handsome set,
72
Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, directed by Rudolphe Dana and Katja Hunsinger. Photo: Courtesy of Thtre de la Bastille.
a large room in a warehouse full of packing crates
with an office area center stage. Bernard Vallry
designed period costumes in somber earth colors.
Although at times the plot bordered on melodrama,
director Tsai's thoughtful approach and the detailed
realistic work of the actors brought this rarely per-
formed play to life.
Paul Claudel's The Satin Slipper is a mon-
ument of twentieth century French literature.
Published in 1930, the play was generally consid-
ered unstageable because of its length. In 1943,
Claudel worked on an abridged stage version with
Jean-Louis Barrault who directed it at the Comdie-
Franaise. Antoine Vitez staged the first complete
version of the text in 1987 at the festival of Avignon.
Olivier Py's staging of the uncut Satin
Slipper was performed at the Thtre de la Ville in
2003. Py has chosen to revive and revise this pro-
duction at the Odon-Thtre de l'Europe this year
during his second season as artistic director. It was,
of course, one of the most anticipated productions of
the 20082009 season. With three intermissions
Py's staging lasts approximately eleven hours and
could be viewed in two parts on two successive
weekday evenings or in its entirety starting at one
o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday.
The play is set in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries and deals with the
Spanish conquest of the New World, Spain's
attempts to secure North Africa, the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, and the battle of Lepante where
the Europeans prevented the Turks from invading
Europe. Against this historical background Claudel
focuses on the unrequited love between Dona
Prohze, a married noblewoman, and her suitor the
valiant Don Rodrigue. The play is divided into four
parts which Claudel names "days," in a nod to the
practice of Spanish Golden Age writers. During the
first two days we follow the divergent paths of the
two lovers. Prohze is sent by her husband to
Mogador to maintain the citadel there. Rodrigue
participates in the conquest of the New World and is
named Viceroy of the Indies by the King of Spain.
When Prohze husband dies, she writes to
Rodrigue, but the letter takes ten years to reach him.
In the interim she has married a moor, Don Camille,
in order to obtain his support in saving the citadel.
In the third day, Rodrigue, having finally received
Prohze's letter, returns to Europe and joins in the
fight to keep the Moors out of Spain. At the end of
73
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Photo: Courtesy of Thtre de la Bastille.
this part he meets with Prohze. Her husband will
allow her to leave with Rodrigue if he agrees to end
the siege against Mogador. Both decide to maintain
their honor. As they part, Prohze entrusts the care
of her daughter by Camille to Rodrigue. The final
day follows Rodrigue's decline. He is reduced to
selling images painted to his specification by a man
he has met in Japan. He is humiliated by the King of
Spain who has an actress pretend to be the Queen of
England and offers Rodrigue the post of Viceroy of
England (after the defeat of the Spanish Armada).
The play ends with Prohze's daughter leaving
Rodrigue to join John of Austria in the defence of
Europe against the Turks. The whole is highly the-
atrical and richly poetic.
As a director Py matches Claudel's extrav-
agant vision with his own extraordinary theatrical
flair. Pierre-Andr Weitz designed handsome
baroque costumes with references to commedia dell'
arte in the comic scenes. Weitz's set was an ingen-
ious series of moving stairs and platforms with gold
metal surfaces placed on a gold metal floor. The
play opened with a large celestial disc framed by the
back of a proscenium arch. The second day used a
series of gold arches which recall a traditional per-
spective set, but could also by collapsed together to
form a solid wall. There were also moving platforms
which were faced with elements recalling baroque
architecture. Separately one became a church;
aligned together they formed the faade of
Rodrigue's palace. For the fourth day, the gold fac-
ings were turned against the back wall of the stage,
and the black platforms and stairs created a number
of different ships at sea where the action takes place.
The great visual variety of Py's and Weitz's work
helped in holding the audience's attention over the
enormous length of the production. It is also to Py's
credit that the action remained clear throughout.
The company consisted of eighteen actors,
most of who performed a number of roles. John
Arnold proved to be a superb clown in the roles of
the "china man" and of the commedia dell' arte dot-
tore. Michael Fau was adept as Prohze's guardian
angel and had a superb comic turn as the actress
who dupes Rodrigue. Bruno Sermonne was brutal
and dispassionate as Prohze's first husband.
Philippe Girard was a handsome Rodrigue with a
slightly otherworldly quality that was right for the
role. I found his voice to have a rather limited range
which in the long course of the play became monot-
onous. Jeanne Balibar was more vocally successful
as Prohze, but I found her lacking in warmth and
passion.
Jean-Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands (1948) and
74
Paul Claudel's Satin Slippers, directed by Olivier Py. Photo: Alan Fonterey.
Albert Camus's The Just Assassins (1949) both deal
with the issue of political assassination. Last season
the Light and Shadow Company performed Camus's
play in Paris. This season they have chosen to pres-
ent the Sartre play at the Thtre de l'Athne. Dirty
Hands is set during the Second World War in a fic-
tional eastern European country occupied by the
Germans and besieged by the Russians. Hugo
Barine, the play's protagonist, is an upper middle
class youth who has rebelled against his family by
joining a radical faction of the Communist Party. In
the first scene, Hugo has just been released from
serving a prison term for the assassination of the
leader of the Proletarian Party. The next five scenes
of the play are a flashback telling Hugo's story from
his assumption of the mission to its completion. We
see how Hugo becomes the secretary of Hoederer,
the Proletarian Party leader. Hugo represents politi-
cal idealism while Hoederer is a pragmatist, willing
to make compromises (to dirty his hands) to
advance his cause. Hugo comes to respect Hoederer
and when the moment comes to carry out the assas-
sination, Hugo withdraws. When he reenters the
office and finds his wife Jessica embracing
Hoederer, Hugo shoots him. Thus the assassination
becomes a personal action rather than a political
one. The final scene returns to the present where
Hugo, viewed as untrustworthy, is killed by his
communist colleagues.
Historically the play is a good example of
the political thinking of postwar European intellec-
tuals, but it is also a well-constructed drama of ideas
with interesting characters. Jean-Pierre Couleau's
staging of Dirty Hands was fluid, clear, and dramat-
ically interesting. He used the same basic set
designed by Raymond Sarti for The Just Assassins,
consisting of a large angled arch through which
thrusts a low platform. Props were used to establish
the different spaces required for the play. A chair
and a wall of faded wallpaper served for communist
party member Olga's apartment in the first and last
scenes. A wrought iron bed and an armoire turned
the space into Hugo and Jessica's room. A desk,
chairs, and work table created Hoederer's office.
Laurent Schneegans provided varied and evocative
lighting. The cast, the same actors who had per-
formed The Just Assassins, were uniformly excel-
lent. Nils Ohlund embodied the idealism and nave
enthusiasm as well as the refined upbringing of
Hugo. Gauthier Baillot was forceful and charismat-
ic as Hoederer. The subtle interaction of the two
men forms the intellectual core of the drama. Hugo's
wife Jessica is ironically smarter and more political-
ly astute than Hugo, which is probably what made
75
Jean Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands. Photo: Courtesy of Light and Shadow Company.
her attractive to Hoederer. Anne Le Guernec played
Jessica with intelligence and charm.
Director Bernard Levy staged an excellent
production of Beckett's Endgame last season at the
Athne. This season at the same theatre he has
been equally successful in staging Waiting for
Godot. Levy's stated intention was to follow scrupu-
lously all of Beckett's directions. In performance he
re-enforced this concept by projecting the cover of
the original edition on a scrim followed by the first
page of the text. At the end of the act the direction
"Curtain" was projected on the scrim. This was
repeated for the second act. Guilio Lichtner's set
was visually handsome, consisting of an abstract
gray surround with a kind of large inkblot on it. The
stage floor was gray with a semi-circular white path.
Down stage right there was a gray rock, and upstage
left was the stark tree whose branch sports a few
leaves in the second act. Elsa Pavanel clothed
Estragon and Vladimir in various shades of gray and
black, dark pants and light jacket for one, light pants
and dark jacket for the other.
Gilles Arbona was wiry and excitable as
Vladimir in contrast to Thierry Bosc's slow and
often morose Estragon. The two actors were very
effective in expressing the tenderness that underlies
the characters' relationship. Patrick Zimmerman, a
bear of a man, was brutal and demanding as Pozzo
in act 1, which made his helplessness in act two all
the more poignant. Georges Ser was a small and thin
Lucky, wearing a dark-blue silk jacket of a variety
performer. Levy's care in following Beckett's direc-
tions proved that these make for a good production.
Estragon and Vladimir were often like tired circus
clowns. Their routines remain funny, and in the
seemingly meaninglessness of their world their
endurance and their friendship were very moving.
Thomas Bernhard's Minetti is the story of
an aging actor who lost his job many years ago and
has lived with his daughter in southern Germany. In
the play he arrives in a hotel in Ostende on New
Year's Eve to meet with a producer who wants him
to play King Lear. Andr Engel, who directed dis-
tinguished actor Michel Piccoli in King Lear a few
seasons ago, has staged Minetti for Piccoli at the
Thtre de la Colline. Although Piccoli was superb
in what is almost a monodrama, I found Engel's
staging heavy-handed. Nicky Rieti's set recreated
the lobby, and later the coffee shop, of a grand hotel.
Snow was seen falling outdoors. The text with it
76
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Bernard Levy. Photo: Courtesy Thtre de l'Athne.
stylized rhythms and repetitions would have been
better served by a more abstract and more "modern"
staging.
At the Bouffes du Nord, Lambert Wilson
has staged Jean-Luc Lagarce's Music-Hall as a vehi-
cle for the well-known film star Fanny Ardant. The
play is virtually a monologue for a down-and-out
variety artist reduced to performing in decrepit
provincial theatres. She is accompanied by two
"boys" who dance and sing as her backup. The bare
stage and crumbling walls of the Bouffes du Nord
were a perfect setting for the play. Virginie Gervaise
designed an elegant robe and fur wrap for Ardant
who wore a blond wig which she removed in the
final scene. Ardant, a glamorous woman, honestly
portrayed the character who was clearly a second
rate performer. She combined a faded charm with
just the right hint of desperation. Lambert Wilson's
staging was efficient, although Eric Gurin and
Francis Leplay were perhaps a bit too polished as
the "boys." In one sense the text is homage to all
performers who persevere in the face of the worst of
circumstances. It was this perseverance that Ardant
so radiantly embodied.
At the Thtre de la Ville Abbesses, Marc
Paquien has directed a fine production of Martin
Crimp's The City, an intriguing text, at times banal,
at times mysterious. The play begins with Claire
describing to her husband Christopher her meeting
with a well-known writer whom she greatly
admires. He was looking for his daughter whom he
had left with his sister-in-law, a nurse. He had
bought an agenda for her which he gave to Claire.
Christopher subsequently loses his job and eventu-
ally finds work as an assistant butcher in a super-
market. Their neighbour, Jenny, who works as a
nurse at night asks them to try to keep their children
from making noise in the garden during the day
while she sleeps. Claire, a translator, returns from a
conference in Lisbon where she has met the writer
who gave her the agenda. He was mourning the
death of the daughter he abandoned. During the
Christmas celebration which ends the play, Claire
gives the agenda to Christopher who reads aloud
from it, and we come to understand that in fact the
play we have just seen was Claire's unsuccessful
attempt to write a novel.
Paquien has staged the play in an abstract
set designed by Grard Didier which consisted of a
textured gray backdrop, a polished black floor, and
Martin Crimp's The City, directed by Marc Paquien. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand.
77
some clear plexi-glass furniture. When the couple's
daughter first appears she wears the same costume
as the nurse Jenny, and they both wear the same
dress in the final scene. This odd, unrealistic detail
becomes clear when we realize what we may have
seen existed only in Claire's imagination. For this
reason also, Paquien has had Andr Marcon
(Christopher) and Hlne Alexandridis (Jenny) per-
form in a broad style that is common in the Parisian
commercial theatre. In contrast Marianne
Denincourt gave as nicely a modulated, realistic
performance as the writer/translator Claire.
The continental premier of David Hare's
Stuff Happens (2004) took place at the Thtre
Nanterre-Amandiers in a staging by Bruno
Freyssinet and William Nadylam. Using documen-
tary materials Hare recounts the events leading up to
the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. If Sartre cre-
ated a fictional vehicle to dramatically embody
political ideas, Hare chose to present a journalistic
report of actual events. Stuff Happens is always
interesting, but the material cries out for dramatic
development. One can only imagine what a
Shakespeare might have done with a cast of charac-
ters that includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell,
and Tony Blair. As an American (albeit a perma-
nently expatriated one), I would argue that Hare
presents a typically European view of the United
States. He fails to represent the profound ignorance
and fundamentalist bigotry of Bush, and he ignores
the large protest movement against Bush's actions.
The character who seems to interest Hare the most
is Tony Blair who is depicted as having a nave
belief in Bush's intelligence and integrity. Hare's
method does not allow for an exploration of charac-
ter and motivation, and this is where it fails as
drama.
Freyssinet and Nadylam's staging made the
material theatrically engaging. The play was per-
formed on a large, white traverse stage with large
video screens at each end. Furniture props were
used sparingly. The cast moved quickly about the
open space and often gave the effect of reporters fol-
lowing a story. Live video interviews were project-
ed simultaneously on the video screens. The excel-
lent cast had clearly studied video tapes of their
characters. Because character development was not
a concern of Hare, the work of the actors was
reduced to that of being good mimics. Although
Stuff Happens was always interesting, its essential
lack of the basic elements of good drama made it
frustrating to watch.
78
On a long weekend in early June in Vienna
I was able to see three productions which provided
a good sampling of the range of offerings available
in this major theatre capital. One was a German
classic, Kleist's The Broken Jug, one a modern inter-
national classic, Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? and one a Shakespeare, Macbeth (though, as
is often the case in the German-language theatre,
much adapted).
There is almost always a great deal of stim-
ulating theatre in Vienna, but the spring is especial-
ly rich due to the offerings of the Vienna
Festwochen, which, unlike the Berlin Theatertreffen
in early May (see earlier article in this issue) invites
not only German productions, but others from
around the world. The New York-based Elevator
Repair Service was playing the weekend I was
there, doing their striking reading of passages from
The Sound and the Fury. Actually the Festwochen
offering I decided to attend was very much a
German offering, Kleist's The Broken Jug, created
in September of 2008 at the Berliner Ensemble by
Peter Stein, who still has a major reputation and a
significant following in Germany, although he is
generally dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned and
traditional by younger theatre-goers. That is doubt-
less a major reason why for many years he has
directed few productions in Germany, preferring
such international venues as the Salzburg and
Edinburgh festivals. His 2007 production of
Wallenstein, also presented by the Berliner
Ensemble, was his first work in Germany in the new
century, and the Kleist is the second.
The production illustrates clearly many of
the features that cause some people to admire Stein
and others to avoid him. Unlike many recent
German directors, Stein has a deep respect for the
original text, leading him to present even a verbose
work like Wallenstein in its multi-hour entirety, a
project almost no one else would undertake.
Similarly, not only is The Broken Jug presented
without a cut, Stein even uses the variant version
Goethe asked Kleist to write which adds consider-
ably to the last part of the play, mostly rather pon-
derous moralizing and extra exposition that is far
from current taste or interest. This respect produces
an impressive but rather heavy interpretation, and
little is left of the actual humor in the play, which
was a bit Germanic and heavy-handed to begin with.
The well known Austrian actor Klaus Maria
Brandauer, who also played Wallenstein for Stein,
does much mugging and posturing, as is his custom,
Report from Vienna
Marvin Carlson
Heinrich von Kleist's Der zerbrochene Krug, directed by Peter Stein. Photo: Courtesy of Vienna Festwochen.
79
but little of it induces much laughter. The support-
ing cast, headed by Marina Senckel as Eve, Martin
Seifert as Walter, and Michael Rotschopf as Licht,
are all solid and convincing, but there is not a light
touch anywhere.
Another quality characteristic of much of
Stein's work, is the painterly beauty of the setting.
Stein and his designers Ferdinand Wgerbauer (set-
ting), Joachim Barth (lighting), and Anna Maria
Heinrich (costumes) obviously made a careful and
detailed study of seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ry Dutch genre paintings. Indeed, the setting itself is
a literal and exact copy, right down to the placement
of furniture and the direction of beams of light, of a
painting in this tradition based on the Kleist play
and called The Judge, or the Broken Jug by the
French artist Jean Jacques Le Veau. The result is a
production of considerable visual beauty, although
this does little to alleviate the static quality of the
production as a whole.
The only significant changes Stein has
made to the text are, as is often the case, in pan-
tomime sequences at the beginning and end. The
production opens with two maids clearing the room
and opening up for the day's work. This consists in
large part of removing the dozen or so live chickens
that have presumably spent the night roosting there.
The squawking and flapping of these as they are
gathered up and tossed out starts the play on an
engaging note both comic and much in the mood of
the setting, but the laughter and applause it gener-
ates are not often heard later. The ending pantomime
is far more elaborate. Adam, when exposed, has
leaped out of the window. When the play's action is
concluded, the remaining characters leave and the
elaborate setting breaks up and disappears into the
flies and wings. Behind it is revealed a large snow
bank, with gently falling snow and the disgraced
Adam trudging away across it. Then the other char-
acters in the play appear, in pursuit of him. He stum-
bles around in a circle as the snow bank, on the the-
atre's turntable, revolves. At last the others surround
him, as a harness drops from the flies. He is placed
in it and lifted out of sight, but his shadow still can
be seen on the snow, rather like that of a hovering
bird. In it the two young lovers whose happiness he
has troubled, embrace for the final tableau.
Jan Bosse is primarily known for his stag-
ings in Hamburg and Zurich, but he has twice
directed at the Vienna Burgtheater, Much Ado About
Nothing as part of the Shakespeare cycle at that the-
atre in 2006, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in
2008. I did not find the new Albee nearly so effec-
tive and innovative as either his Much Ado or his
2007 Zurich Hamlet, both invited to the annual
Berlin Theatertreffen and both reported on in this
journal as part of that festival.
The production made extensive use of the
auditorium, which seemed to be almost an extension
of George and Martha's living room. All of the char-
acters when coming in from outdoors or leaving,
came down the aisles to the stage. George (Joachim
Meyerhoff) and Martha (Christiane von Poelnitz)
frequently made direct address to the audience, and
most of the stories in the play (how Nick met
Honey, here called Putzi, the plot of George's novel,
and so on) were delivered in that way. George in
particular spent much of his time in the auditorium,
particularly moving back and forth between the
front row and the stage, and occasionally sitting in
an empty seat and speaking to Martha, who
remained on stage. There were in fact no scenes
where both members of a dialogue were in the audi-
torium, though many where one was. The actual set-
ting was contemporary and minimalist, quite sug-
gestive of the "bungalows" Bert Neuman created for
Frank Castorf in the 1990s. An open room unit,
divided from right to left into four cubical areas, sat
isolated in the middle of the stage. It could be
moved about, and indeed George and Martha pulled
and pushed the entire unit downstage at the begin-
ning. The third "cube" was empty, merely a white
back wall. Each of the other three had a large bank
of individual modern lights in the ceiling, a different
style in each cube. Each had also a set of sofa chairs
and a different wall treatment, the first a solid wall
of framed documents and photographs, the second a
solid wall of identical label-less liquor bottles, and
the fourth a wall of pull-out files, variously used to
hold props, receive waste, or be pressed into service
as makeshift toilets.
Aside from the overall distinctly theatrical-
ized and presentational delivery, the interpretations
were fairly conventional. Meyerhoff was a convinc-
ing ruffled academic near the end of his tether, and
von Poelnitz, a loud and crude Martha, set him off
well. Katharine Lorenz as Putzi seemed rather a
bland ingnue, but the role is not a very nuanced one
at best. Markus Meyer was much more interesting
and engaging as Nick, especially in the scenes with
George and in the fits of drunken amusement that
often overcome him in these.
Often modern German productions end
with some striking stage effect made possible by
80
their elaborate technical equipment, and that was
certainly the case here. After his killing off of their
imaginary son, George goes on a rampage, smash-
ing up furniture and at last running around behind
the set to knock huge holes in its walls and bring its
wall cabinets crashing down. Finally he and Martha
remain alone on stage, arms around each other, fac-
ing upstage toward the ravaged setting. Slowly it
revolves until its obviously false, but heavily dam-
aged backside faces out. Then an exact full size
duplicate of it rises up from below between the
actors and the former set. The symbolism was not
especially clear, but it was certainly a striking effect.
The following evening I went to the
Burgtheater's smaller house, the Akademietheater,
to see Stephan Kimmig's production of Macbeth, by
far the most radical reworking of the productions I
witnessed this visit. This is a part of departing
Artistic Director Klaus Bachler's final major proj-
ect, the staging at the Burgtheater of the complete
Shakespeare canon. In an earlier issue I reported on
four other productions in this cycle [see WES, 20.1,
Winter 2008] and was pleased to add another to the
list. Kimmig has no consistent approach; he has
offered rather conventional and realistic productions
as well as quite radical reinterpretations. His
Macbeth certainly must be among the latter. Clearly
its costuming (designed by Katharina Kownatzki)
owed much to the Bush era. All of the men wore
rough Western gear and golden cowboy hats, and
their poses were clearly modeled on those in
Western films. The setting, by Martin Zehetgruber,
evoked no such specific world. On the contrary it
was essentially a huge glass box, within which
according to the highly flexible and effective light-
ing by Reinhard Traub, the actors could appear, dis-
appear, seem to be floating disembodied in space, or
be reflected in multiple forms off into the remote
distance.
The play was heavily cut, running only
about two hours without an intermission, and was
presented as a series of rather brief blackout scenes,
each of which focused on a key soliloquy or inter-
change in the original. The production opened with
Macbeth (Dietmar Knig) and Banquo (Tilo
Werner) entering from the lobby rather like tourists
from Texas, taking their seats in the audience and
exchanging loud comments with each other about
the elegance of the auditorium. Their interchange
was interrupted by the appearance of the three
witches (all men in the usual cowboy hats) appear-
ing behind the glass curtain in ghostly pools of blue
light. This drew the actors onto the stage, where,
unlike those in Virginia Woolf, they remained until
81
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, directed by Jan Bosse. Photo: Stephan Trierenberg.
the end of the evening.
The most radical changes to the original
appeared in the final scenes, beginning with the
sleepwalking scene. The production faced a prob-
lem common to revivals of this play. Although both
leading actors are well known in Vienna,
Minichmayr is by far the more popular, her already
considerable reputation enhanced by her recent star-
ring appearance at the Berlin Theatertreffen in the
Burgtheater production of Weibsteufel (see article
on the Theatertreffen in this issue). The disappear-
ance of Lady Macbeth well before the end of the
play often creates something of a sense of anticli-
max after a leading actress departs. I have never,
however, seen this problem confronted in so radical
a manner as Kimmig does. For the sleepwalking
scene the stage was completely flooded with water,
so that Lady Macbeth could not only wash her
hands, but much of her body. To my astonishment,
however, it was not Minichmayr who appeared to
perform this scene but her partner, Knig. It was in
fact his last major scene. After it he appeared large-
ly in an almost catatonic state, an easy prey for the
invading Malcolm (Markus Meyer) and Macduff
(Markus Hering). It was instead Lady Macbeth who
delivered many of his later lines, most notably the
"Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, as she sat in an
inflated throne floating on the waters of the still-
flooded stage.
Like many modern directors, Kimmig does
not show Malcolm's triumph as a restoration of
order, but rather a continuation of tyranny, but per-
haps of a subtler kind. Malcolm, flanked by
Macduff and others, directly addresses the audience
from behind a podium with mike, very much the
modern American politician in the cowboy style,
promising peace and prosperity in lines added to the
original and concluding with a prayer, a sing-along,
and an excursion out in the audience to grab hands
and welcome the spectators to the new order. I was
not much impressed by the audience contact that
opened the production, but this conclusion seemed
very much in keeping with Kimmig's over-all con-
cept and effectively blended his interpretation with
our current and recent political performances.
82
William Shakespeare's Macbeth, directed by Stephan Kimmig. Photo: Hans Klaus Techt.
Two theatre companies dominate the
Icelandic Theatre landscape. Under the newly
appointed Artistic Director Magnus Geir, the
Reykjavik City Theatre is an exciting and forward
thinking theatre company that has attracted a signif-
icant audience in addition to presenting numerous
popular and artistically challenging productions.
Also located in the nation's capital city Reykjavik,
the National Theatre of Iceland receives a substan-
tially higher funding base, producing primarily
Icelandic works, Children's
Theatre, and classics. Associate
Artistic Director Vigdis
Jakobsdttir reveals some of the
basic differences as well as simi-
larities between the two institu-
tions. These interviews explore
several issues faced by the both
companies, including the future
direction of theatre in the city
and nation, the perceived grow-
ing sense of tension between the
country's four major theatre
companies and the Icelandic
Actor's Union, and other ideas
about their relationship with the
Icelandic Academy of the Arts
and the City of Reykjavik.
Together these two perspectives
reveal much about the internal
workings of the Icelandic
Theatre system.
Interview with Magus Geir
STEVE EARNEST: What is the
rationale for the current choice
of productions at Reykjavik City
Theatre?
GEIR: Obviously first of all it's
important to mention how small
the nation is. We have two big
theatre companies in Reykjavik.
Both companies tend to be doing
bits and pieces of everything
and that can be said about both
the City Theatre and the
National. We try to share as many resources as pos-
sible.
We try to give every piece its individuality, its own
distinct form. Therefore on the main stage we have
very open, welcoming pieces for a broad spectrum
of audience goers, while at the same time in the
black box we tend to present more aggressive,
provocative works like Sarah Kane's Blasted and
McDonagh's The Lonesome West. Then on the small
studio space we focus on the intimacy between the
A Pair of Icelandic Theatre Dialogues
Steve Earnest
Marcus Geir, Artistic Director of Reykjavik City Theatre.
Photo: Courtesy of Marcus Geir.
83
84
actors and the audience. We try to offer both ends of
the spectrum by doing on the one hand The Sound of
Music, and Blasted on the other. We focus mainly on
modern pieces, new writing. We try to also include
new Icelandic writing. For example, in our season
now we have The People on the Block, an original
musical, and The Deadly Sins based on the Divine
Comedy by Dante, a company created work. We
also focus on Icelandic premieres. For example,
Blasted is the first production of a Sarah Kane piece
in Iceland.
STEVE EARNEST: What is the vision or goal of
the Reykjavik City Theatre?
GEIR: First it is to produce the highest quality
works possible in Iceland, comparable to similarly
sized theatres in Europe and elsewhere, with pieces
that speak directly to our society with regard to the
issues presented. Also being very close to the socie-
ty, to the everyday lives of Icelandic citizens. It's
mainly about this connection between the theatre
and society. We serve a very broad audience, many
different age groups, all parts of society. It's a com-
munity thing to visit the City Theatre. One of the
main goals is to get a large audience, so people reg-
ularly visit the City Theatre to see works that reflect
their everyday lives. One of the major priorities at
the City Theatre today is to increase the number of
younger audience members. We are focusing espe-
cially on people from sixteen to thirty-five, at the
same time as we are strengthening our work for
children. We also encourage families to come
together to the theatre by offering enough good
pieces that are suitable and exciting for the whole
family.We are very proud to have hired in our first
in-house playwright, Audur Jonsdottir. She has been
at the forefront in Icelandic literature for years but
has not worked for the stage until now. Now she
gets a workstation in the theatre, where she works
alongside our other in-house-artists, such as actors,
directors, dramaturges, and designers. She soaks in
the theatre and the craft, and works on her first
scripts under the guidance of our dramaturges and
directors.
STEVE EARNEST: I have heard that the last few
years have been very successful for the Reykjavik
City Theatre and that you are playing to almost
ninety percent houses.
GEIR: That is correct. This season is the most suc-
cessful ever, in the history of the company as the
number of guests has now been increasing by
approximately twenty percent in one year. This
autumn we introduced new season passes which
have been highly successful. We had a record year
with the season passes by selling eleven times more
than before. Now we have 5,500 season ticket hold-
ers. That is a very strong place to start the season.
STEVE EARNEST: What are some of the chal-
lenges that you think this company will face in the
twenty-first century?
GEIR: That's a big question. One of the main chal-
lenges of Icelandic Theatre in general is that we are
an island. We are quite far away from both the
United States and Europe. The problem in the last
few years has been that we are rather isolated, I
mean, obviously because of our geography. But
exporting productions is not easy. It's very expen-
sive to take works off of the island, and in the same
way it's very expensive to bring in outside produc-
tions. One of the biggest challenges is to find a way
to link our theatre more with other countries in the
outer world. Another challenge is that while
Icelandic Theatre is generally very strongI would
say, we have very strong actors and some excellent
directorsbecause of the smallness of the nation,
the more extreme, avant-garde, experimental type of
theatre is almost non-existent in Iceland. Until
recently, more performative types of pieces were
rarely seen in Iceland. However, the Icelandic
Academy has been focusing on that kind of work to
educate the new actors in this type of work, which is
positive and will probably broaden the spectrum.
But this has been a problem in Iceland for decades.
And this is understandable due to the smallness of
the market. Therefore producing organizations tend
to be more conservative, because the market for
extremes tends to be extremely small.
STEVE EARNEST: What about funding?
GEIR: Funding was actually the first thing that
came to mind when you asked about challenges. But
that has always been a challenge, is a challenge, and
will always be a challenge. In Iceland we are lucky
compared to many other countries, as culture is in
general well supported in the country. However, we
feel that the funding is too low at the City theatre.
The funding only covers about forty to fifty-five
percent of the total revenues. So, box office, spon-
sorship, etc. are a big part of it, especially now,
because of what has been happening in this country
in the last few months. It's obvious that future spon-
sorship is going to be tougher in the years ahead.
And that is a challenge.
STEVE EARNEST: Is it possible to tell mewhat
is that level of annual funding? It always impresses
us the United States who have virtually no federal
arts funding.
GEIR: If we look at the two biggest theatres, the
National and the City Theatres, which are similar in
size, in number of productions and employees. Our
annual state subsidy for 2009 is approximately 420
million Icelandic Kronas; The National Theatre
receives approximately 830 million Kronas this
year.
STEVE EARNEST: How many actors are part of
this company and how are they selected?
GEIR: Our company is twenty-two to twenty-five
actors on a long term basis, and we also have some
members of individual contracts per production as
needed. The production contracts last for a mini-
mum of four months and get extended as the pro-
duction runs. Sometimes we do auditions for parts,
but also the theatres collaborate on open auditions
for all the companies each year. This is important
for young actors who are starting their carreers to
get seen. But the actors who have been in the pro-
fession for some time, they have been seen, and we
know who they are. It's a very small community of
actors. There are no real agents or casting directors
here, it's mainly handled by the artistic directors of
the companies and the directors of the individual
shows.
STEVE EARNEST: How strong is the Actor's
Union in Iceland? Have you ever had any tough
dealings with the union?
Reykjavik City Theatre, small stage. Photo: Courtesy of the Reykjavik City Theatre.
85
86
GEIR: It is quite strong. The contracts are all done
with the union, and all the actors you want to hire
are part of that. So, it is quite strong and powerful.
They take care of the contractsthat is the main
function of the union.
STEVE EARNEST: What other activities is the the-
atre company engaged in such as education, chil-
dren's theatre, and outreach?
GEIR: We do quite a lot. First of all, we run our own
children's theatre school. That is in collaboration
with an independent company in the city. The chil-
dren come to the theatre twice or three times a week
and work with professional teachers and actors, and
focus on improvisation, acting, and singing. It ends
in a production shown on the stage for the parents.
Then we offer a discussion with the audiences about
the plays that we produce. We bring the directors,
actors, and other artistic personnel on stage after the
performances and allow them to engage in a dia-
logue with the audience about what they saw. Then
in collaboration with the Icelandic Dance Company,
which is an in house company, we have in recent
years done a dance theatre festival, which is open
for actors and dancers to work collaboratively to
expand the form and to make new discoveries, etc.
We also have in collaboration with the university a
new course about modern playwriting with Sarah
Kane used as a focal point. This is a two-month
course open to the public. Several people are
involved in the course, some people from our the-
atre and some from different departments at the uni-
versity. In addition to producing the first Sarah Kane
production in the country, we are offering staged
readings of all her work this season. We welcome
groups from schools to the theatre for tours, discus-
sions, workshops, and courses. One of the long term
aims is to build a new platform for children's' theatre
herethe youngest audiencebut at the moment
there is just not the proper basis to be able to do this.
But our aim is to be able to run this on an annual
basis.
STEVE EARNEST: What qualities of this theatre
distinguish it from the National Theatre?
GEIR: The Reykjavik City Theatre is a vibrant com-
pany. We want to be more up-to-date, more dynam-
ic, braver, younger, and energetic. We dare to do
works like Blasted, and we want to listen to our
society. We want to realize when something is hap-
pening and be able to change the program and
answer the calls. For example, we are now changing
the program to be able to react to the catastrophic
financial happenings in the country. We hope to be
able to stage a production dealing with the situation
as soon as possible, hopefully to open it in March
2009. The National, on the other hand, is more of a
foundation or a cornerstone, it has a great prestige
and by law is supposed to do the classics, etc.
STEVE EARNEST: What is the relationship with
the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and how do you
envision that relationship evolving over the next
several years?
GEIR: It is totally independent from the City
Theatre and the National. But we have been a very
good collaborator with the arts school, and this year
and some years prior we have hosted them. We offer
them the small stage for a few months, so they are
in residence from October until December and can
use the space, the equipment, etc. We aim to wel-
come them very warmly, so that these few months
they not only have access to the facilities but they
also become part of the company, and they learn and
realize how things are done in the real professional
world. We try to communicate and work with them
as if they are professionals. This is maybe the main
thing, but then in addition to that we invite the stu-
dents to see our performances, and we welcome
them in any way.
STEVE EARNEST: How about people like stage
managers and technicians, how do they become part
of this company.
GEIR: There is no training for technical staff in
Iceland. Most of the training for technical staff hap-
pens abroad. Many of them study in England, or
they learn on the job with amateur companies and
then they are hired in at the ground level and slow-
ly learn the different aspects of technical theatre
within the company. Without a doubt it would
strengthen the Icelandic Theatre life if there was
some technical education for the departments. But
at the moment there is none. However, we have a
number of very good people who have studied
abroad, and their work kind of becomes the bench-
mark for technical and design work in the country.
And I say without a doubt that the technical staff of
The City Theatre is of a very high standard.
Interview with Vigdis Jakobsdttir
STEVE EARNEST: What factors
are shaping the repertory that you
currently offer here at the National
Theatre?
JAKOBSDTTIR: By law the
National Theatre, should do chil-
dren's theatre, new Icelandic plays,
international plays, and other works
that are geared toward the formation
of an Icelandic national identity. The
laws are actually in place, and I can
get the actual details if you would
like. They are a bit flexible. For
example, in one year you could pres-
ent all Icelandic plays and in another
year you could present a season of
international works, but the reality is
that it is always a mixture. We
always present a children's work, a
number of classical and original
Icelandic works, and a variety of
international pieces, such as
Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and
Moliere. Another factor are the
finances. We are a small market, and
we need to find ways to make a prof-
it, at least enough to run the theatre.
This is because the funding from the
government is not enough to run the
theatre. So, we can't allow ourselves
to just do only productions that are
really artsy, and no one comes to see.
Obviously, we want to do artsy productions that
hopefully people will come see, but my point is that
we must consider popular appeal as well. The new
artistic directorwell this is actually her third
yearhas been doing more children's theatre pro-
ductions, but other than that the repertory has been
very similar for a number of years.
STEVE EARNEST: What are the challenges of pro-
ducing theatre in the twenty-first century in Iceland?
JAKOBSDTTIR: There are lots of things to
choose from, such as television, film, internet, musi-
cal performances, and other possibilities. This is a
very small market. For a time the audiences were
getting smaller and older here. But it seems that
some sort of equilibrium has been reached, and
things are beginning to change. There are some pos-
itive things happening here: it seems like the audi-
ences are getting a bit younger and we are getting
more people to the theatre. The competition at the
City Theatre now is quite strong, because they have
a new artistic director who has been doing some
great things. The fact that there are great things
going on there and that more people have been
attending plays actually helps us as well. So, more
people come here too. We have been spending a
great deal of money on advertising and increasing
the profile of our theatre, and that has been helping
us also. It's not like they are taking our part of the
cake. They are actually making the cake bigger.
Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Director of the
National Theatre of Iceland. Photo: Courtesy of Vigdis Jakobsdttir.
87
88
STEVE EARNEST: Are there any qualities of this
theatre that actually embody National characteris-
tics of Iceland?
JAKOBSDTTIR: For one thing the theatre build-
ing itself is a strong symbol of our independence.
Because the laws for the National Theatre were
passed in 1923, which was only five years after we
got our independence from the Danes. (But it wasn't
until 1944 that we were an independent nation.) So,
1918 was a really big year. At that time people were
living in huts, and they were living around the coun-
try. This building is huge as you can see, but it was-
n't opened until 1950. The twenty-seven years that
the laws were there, this building stood empty for
many, many yearswhile the British Army was
here. There was an army base here, and it took twen-
ty-seven years to build that theatre. It was a very
ambitious project for Iceland. Within the scope of
the design are references to Icelandic nature and
culture. The architect had very definite ideas about
the look of the theatreyou may have noticed the
huge stone sculpture out front. We believe in elves
in Iceland, or "the hidden people," who have a sep-
arate world than us. But they're a bit shorter than us,
and they're very beautiful and bright, and they live
inside rocks. So this is the look of the theatre on the
outside. It has a look like a huge rock. The idea is
that you step in and see the fairy tales from the
standpoint of the "hidden people." There are lots of
references like the choice of color, and even inside
the theatre there are rock formations on the ceiling,
and even the choice of pastels and other colors are
very Icelandic. For many people in Iceland this is a
very important structure. It has been called the
"Temple of the Icelandic Language." The fact that
we produce so many Icelandic plays and that we are
literally the only theatre in the world that does so
really separates us from numerous other national
theatres. The City Theatre does not have these obli-
gations; the City Theatre can do whatever it wants.
They could do only new foreign plays or
Shakespeare if they wanted, but we can't do that.
That is one of the aspects of this theatre that makes
it interesting.
STEVE EARNEST: How does an actor earn a spot
here and how long is the contract?
JAKOBSDTTIR: There are only about seventeen
or eighteen actors here now on a permanent con-
tract. Normally here they have one-year contracts.
But because some of the productions here run for
longer than a year, or rather remain in the repertory
for more than a year, the contracts generally run
longer than one year. The Artistic Director, Tinna
Gunlaugsdttir, is the one who makes those choices.
She chooses the directors, the actors, the artistic
staff, almost everyone. We sometimes hold audi-
tions, but this is a very small market and we know
almost everyone. She goes to all the performances at
the Academy of the Arts in order to see new, young
talent, but she only goes to see the fourth-year stu-
dents and not the first-, second-, and third-year per-
formances. But you know who's available; you've
seen them do things. The directors have a say as
well. If I as a director come in and say "I really want
this young actress who's just graduating," then there
will actually be a dialogue there, and the case can be
made to hire the actor or whoever based on the rec-
ommendation of the director.
STEVE EARNEST: Are there any actors here hired
for only one show?
JAKOBSDTTIR: We rarely do that because it
tends not to be very cost effective. Because it's very
expensive for the theatre to pay someone to rehearse
a show and then only play it one time or so per
week. Our contract allows us to designate some per-
formers as "extras," which is different. So, if we
need children, or several soldiers who appear in one
scene only, then we have a special type of contract
that allows us to pay those types of performers less.
But generally the actors, who are trained actors and
who have an actor's contract, tend to do more than
one show in the repertory.
STEVE EARNEST: What are some of the future
goals for the National Theatre?
JAKOBSDTTIR: We have just been given state
support to develop and run a writer's fund. Just the
other day the first group of writers got the grants.
They are writing works in steps for the National
Theatre, because Icelandic playwriting really needs
more support. The money hasn't been there and we
really haven't had the money to do it. The develop-
ment of Icelandic playwriting is definitely one of
the main focuses of the theatre. Another thingand
this is my job as wellis connecting the theatre,
because it's a National Theatre, not just a Reykjavik
Theatre. In the past we used to do tours during the
summer months. We would make a mini version of
89
the plays we were doing, and we would tour them
around the country, but that disappeared because
people lost interest. Because there is so little sum-
mer here people became more interested in being
outside, etc. in the summer. So, we just stopped
doing it. Now instead we do a series of performanc-
es in the summer that are geared toward sixteen- to
twenty-year-olds from around the country that are
looking at the college, and we really want to contin-
ue that. We are also exploring a number of other
ways to connect the theatre to the countryside. Also,
and this is one of the focus points of the Education
Department of the Theatre, we present pre-show
lectures to those whose knowledge of Icelandic lan-
guage is not good or who speak no Icelandic. We
present these lectures that detail the action and plot
of the play in English, because all the plays are actu-
ally presented in Icelandic. We do the same for deaf
people as well.
STEVE EARNEST: What has been the impact of
recent economic developments?
JAKOBSDTTIR: Funny you should ask that,
because obviously we are going to suffer some cuts.
Currently they are debating these ideas in the state
parliament, and while there are going to be some
cuts it doesn't appear that they are going to be too
drastic. They see this as a pretty big workplace.
About 200 people in all work here, and we've suf-
fered cuts in the past. So, we can't do anymore. But
there has also been the suggestion of some addition-
al monies to pay off the theatre's debts, old debts
that we continue paying lots of interest on. We have
doubled the sale of tickets here due to gift certifi-
cates that we have been selling that allow people to
buy tickets for their friends and family. This has
really been working. People want to give something
special to their friends. Instead of an article of cloth-
ing, or a mug, or something, they give them a the-
atre ticket!
STEVE EARNEST: In your opinion, what is the
position of theatre currently in Icelandic society?
JAKOBSDTTIR: It's a well established fact that
about one hundred percent of the current Icelandic
population attends live theatre performances. We
have about three hundred thousand people in the
country and about three hundred thousand attend the
theatre. It's a theatre-going nation. So, in the sense
of attendance it's very strong. I would like to see it
become stronger in a political sense. I think there's
a lot of entertainment going on, and I wish there
were more works that touched the heart and soul of
the nation. But it's interesting because now we are
doing an old play that was written in, I believe,
1962. It was a huge success at the timesort of the
Icelandic version of Look Back in Angerentitled
Hart I Bak, meaning "Hard of Port," or like full
steam backwards on a ship. We decided last year to
produce this work, which is about an old man who's
a captain of a huge shipthe biggest ship the coun-
try's ever had (this is based on a true story, actually).
He was having some fun with a lady on board, and
the ship got stranded and sank. The ship was a ref-
erence to Iceland; we often refer to the Icelandic
economy as the "national ship." When the economy
is bad we are sinking, we are about to go under. It's
quite a dated play actually. It's a dated text and the
ideas are quite dated, but it's still an important part
of our dramatic history. But little did we know that
the extreme economic conditions that the play refer-
ences were going to hit us this hard. It's as if this
play has now taken on new references due to the
financial situation. And it's very popular. People are
coming to see it in droves because of the contempo-
rary references. It's as if we are seeing history repeat
itself. It refers back to the period after the second
World War when we were struggling. This was
when the theatre was just opening, so the work has
a number of different references.
STEVE EARNEST: What is the relationship
between the National Theatre and the Icelandic
Academy of the Arts?
JAKOBSDTTIR: We all feel that it should be
more. For example, the students will be doing a
rather elaborate production here of Twelfth Night on
the main stage with several established National
Theatre actors. This is something new. They have
always appeared in smaller roles on our stage but
this time they will be playing leading roles. The
Education Department of the National Theatre also
plays a role because, for example, I have taught
classes at the Icelandic Academy. Also we do a col-
laborative project every year, playwriting for col-
lege-level students, and we have students from the
Arts Academy stage the plays here at the theatre.
These are short playsten minute works, sketches
that the teenagers writeand we've been doing this
project for five years now. It's just a one evening
performance and there are not very many rehearsals,
90
but it really brings the young people into the theatre.
This year we were able to get in some good work
with the voice coach, because the plays were on the
big stage since one of our productions was on tour
at the Barbicon in London. So, we had an empty
stage here. We had an evening to spare basically,
and the voice coach used the opportunity to coach
the actors on working in a large space. It was a very
good learning experience for the students. But I
wish that there was more interaction. In the past the
students at the school came in and played small
roles at the theatre, and you learned from the older
actors. But now the young actors come in and they
think they own the placethey are only interested
in playing leading roles already. I've spoken with
many of the older actors who feel this way, that
there is less respect for the tradition of the National
Theatre. Perhaps if they were brought in more there
would be more of a dialogue between the different
generations of actors.
Another thing that has changed is that now
it's a university. In the old days it was merely an act-
ing conservatory, but now the students take a great
many more academic courses, and many of the older
actors feel that there is too much emphasis on the
academic courses and not enough on voice and act-
ing. But I actually think that the students now actu-
ally have what it takes to take us into the twenty-
first century properly, which is guts, and initiative,
and drive. Because I think that is so important. You
can always train your voice as well, but I think now
the focus is on empowering them to have the guts
and initiative to do something well. I believe that
was lacking before. They were being trained as pup-
pets, and now they are being trained to make deci-
sions about society and their place in society.
The May Theatertreffen in Berlin normally
lasts about two weeks, and offers a stimulating sur-
vey of leading contemporary productions, but since
it normally involves only around ten productions
(nine this year because one site-specific event could
not be moved) it allows several free evenings for the
determined theatre-goer to sample the rich offerings
available elsewhere in Berlin. The choice was even
larger because this year, unaccustomedly, only one
production in the festival was actually a Berlin
offering.
I began my alternative theatre-going this
year at the two theatres currently the most highly
respected in the city, the Deutsches Theater and the
Schaubhne. The two pre-eminent Deutsches
Theater directors in recent years have been Jrgen
Gosch and Michael Thalheimer. Gosch was the star
of this year's Theatertreffen, with two productions
out of the nine offered. His death on June 11 was a
major loss for the German stage. Thalheimer,
though often chosen in recent years, was not includ-
ed this year. Fortunately, however, I was able to see
his production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, which has
been in the repertoire of the Deutsches Theater for
over a year but which I had not yet been able to
attend.
Thalheimer, whose Emilia Galotti was
recently presented in New York at BAM, like
Gosch, is particularly associated with a minimalist
style, and this Wild Duck was no exception, cut to
just under two hours running time, with no inter-
mission and shorn of all group scenes (the crowd of
Werle dinner guests, the supper at the Ekdals') to
concentrate on the conflicts involving the major
characters. The stage was similarly bareno
scenery and only three propsthe menu from the
dinner, the letter of gift from old Werle, and of
course the gun. The stark and powerful setting was
by Thalheimer's usual designer Olaf Altmann.
Instead of the blank walls often utilized before,
Berlin report
Marvin Carlson
Ibsen's The Wild Duck, directed by Michael Thalheimer. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater.
91
Altmann here created a huge, steeply raked revolv-
ing stage. Facing the audience, it ran from the foot-
lights steeply up to the back of the very deep stage.
Turned the opposite way, it offered a white curved
wall that almost completely filled the proscenium
arch.
The opening scenes were played in this
later configuration, with three figuresGregers
(Sven Lehmann), Hjalmar (Ingo Hlsman) and
Director Werle (Horst Lebinsky) lined up in the nar-
row downstage space, playing mostly facing direct-
ly out toward the audience with a delivery that
mixed staccato expression with deliberate silence,
all this quite typical of the Thalheimer style as prac-
ticed by the three leading actors who are primarily
associated with his work. High above them, dimly
lit, is Hedvig (Henrike Jrissen), her head and arms
hanging unmoving over the edge of the stage wall.
Old Werle's blindness is emphasized. When he
attempts to relate to either his son or Hjalmar he
must locate them by feel and then by the closest
examination.
The stage turns to reveal the huge raked
circle which for the most part represents the Ekdal
home. Occasionally the actors will make rapid, and
apparently risky moves from the top to bottom of
this ramp or vice versa, but for the most part
Thalheimer keeps them in essentially stationary
positions for entire sequences, especially favoring
the spot in the center of the circle, that at the very
top far to the rear, and downstage right and left,
where proscenium openings provide the major
entrances. The attic is vaguely indicated out in the
auditorium down right, but there are no visual ele-
ments shown. Instead, its presence is indicated
through much of the production aurally. Old Ekdal
(Jrgen Huth) spends most of the evening standing
in this area, facing outward, a beatific if somewhat
simple-minded smile on his face, and providing a
running subtext of small chirping noises.
Ibsen's final act is Thalheimer's most pow-
erful and innovative. For most of the act the raked
stage is turned toward the audience, and as the var-
ious conversations among Gina (Almut Zilcher),
Hjalmar, and Gregors take place in the forestage
area, Hedvig moves frantically about a narrow
space in the center of the raked circle, holding the
gun and enacting in pantomime variations of shoot-
ing the duck and killing herself. Finally at the
moment of the actual shot, she holds the gun to her
breast and falls. In Ibsen, it is just after this moment
that her body is revealed, but Thalheimer reverses
this. The turntable begins to move, as usual with
ominous music (sound design by Bert Wrede), car-
rying her out of sight and leaving the Ekdals,
Gregers and Relling (Peter Pagel) lined up across
the forestage, with the curved white wall behind
them, like the characters in the opening scene. The
final exchanges are given mostly facing outward but
ending with Hjalmar and then Gina moving to Old
Ekdal's area stage left, leaving Gregers and Relling
in the center. After their final exchange, Gregers
slowly moves right, his gestures expressing his
anguish at the suffering he has brought about.
Relling moves the other way, to join the Ekdal
group at the right. All during this scene Old Ekdal,
lost in his imaginary forest, has continued with his
faint whistling and chirping. Relling stands just
behind him and Hjalmar and joins in the chirping,
gesturing to Gina to join in. She understands and
complies, and finally Hjalmar allows his suffering
to be overcome and also joins in the quiet chorus.
The lights go down as the group chirps and whistles
together and their chorus continues on in the dark-
ened theatre. Clearly for better or worse Relling has
re-established his palliative life lie among this tiny
flock.
A few evenings later I attended A Streetcar
Named Desire at the Schaubhne, which currently
has three American classics among the twenty-six
works in its active repertoire (the other two are
Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). I
was not familiar with the work of Benedict
Andrews, the director of Streetcar, but his approach
clearly is also in the minimalist style now very pop-
ular in Berlin and very different from the cool and
ironic Streetcar of Frank Castorf, the last version I
saw in Berlin, full of incongruities, pop-culture ref-
erences, and video sequences. Here, when we enter
the theatre we see a cavernous stage, empty except
for a jumble of scenic units and technical equipment
piled against the upstage wall. To the left far upstage
are two small makeup tables, to the right an open
door through which we can see cars passing on the
street outside. Later a black, stage-wide curtain will
descend far upstage, hiding these elements and pro-
viding a truly neutral background. Obviously there
is little if any attempt to create a scenic atmosphere.
All the music and sounds of New Orleans have been
cut, and as if to specifically deny that location, light
snow falls on the empty stage through much of the
final act.
Blanche (Jule Bwe) begins the play by
entering through this door, in stiletto heels and
92
wearing a short but flamboyant, layered black dress.
Although she spends much of the play in black lace
undergarments, she also has a variety of highly the-
atrical dresses, from loose sarongs to bouffant
multi-layered ball gowns (both stage and costumes
are the work of Magda Willi). Bwe sets up the min-
imal stage, pulling a standing mirror and her rack of
clothes to a position downstage left, and placing a
chair somewhat right where she sits and drinks,
takes a couple of glasses of whisky, which she will
consume almost continuously throughout the
evening. The chair is located on the right side of a
large turntable and it now begins slowly to turn, as
it will continue to do throughout almost all of the
production's two hours and fifteen minutes (with no
intermission). This provides a constant shifting per-
spective, and the director often stages scenes so that
one character is near the center of the turntable and
another near the edge, slowly circling the first,
observing them, or interacting with them in some
way. The poker table (also used for meals) is also
normally placed at the center, so that the audience
receives a constantly changing perspective of those
seated around it.
Perhaps it is the almost continual move-
ment of the turntable, or the stark emptiness of the
setting, but despite scenes of considerable violence,
especially from Stanley, there seems a kind a flat-
ness about much of the evening. Lars Eidinger, who
plays a contemporary but effective Hamlet in the
current repertoire, has a handsome physical pres-
ence but does not really convey the crude animal
side of Stanley, and his eruptions of rage are power-
ful but not fully motivated. From time to time he
rolls a wooden bowling ball across the stage to help
express his anger, but again this produces more
noise than conviction. Still, if Eidinger tends to play
primarily on two notes, of bemused frustration and
uncontrolled rage, the other leading figures,
Blanche, Lea Drager as a waif-like, long-suffering
Stella, and Jrg Hartmann as an almost simple-
minded Mitch, exhibit an even narrower range, and
though they are effective moment to moment, there
is a kind of sameness to each of their encounters.
The staging thus often dominates the act-
ing, as when Mitch demands to see Blanche in the
light. He goes to the rear of the stage and rolls out a
huge mounted floodlight, whose glare on her pro-
93
Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Benedikt Andrews. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz.
vides the only stage illumination for the next sever-
al minutes. Never has Blanche been so mercilessly
illuminated, but as the scene goes on, and the
turntable slowly revolves four or five times, each
time blinding the audience as they, like Blanche,
become the momentary object of the dazzling light,
the emotion of the moment is lost in the theatrical
effect. After this, the rape scene comes as a distinct
anticlimax.
For the final act, the black rear curtain is
pulled up, revealing the clutter of stage equipment,
Stella upstage to the right with her new child near
the dressing table and Blanche, now almost cataton-
ic, seated quietly in a modest sweater and jeans near
the door she first entered. The turntable is now
stilled and the poker game resumes also far upstage,
in subdued light. The gentle, softly falling snow
provides a final, if geographically questionable
accent of calm after the storm aroused by Blanche's
disruptive visit.
Another, far less conventional Schaubhne
offering was Dritte Generation (Third Generation),
a collective "work in progress" created by Israeli
playwright and director Yael Ronen and a group of
ten young Israeli, Palestinian, and German actors
and co-sponsored by the Schaubhne and the
Habimah Theatre of Israel. This first phase of the
project was developed in Israel and Germany in the
summer of 2008 and will be followed by a second
phase of work in Tel Aviv and Berlin based on the
experience of the current presentations.
The "third generation" refers to the fact
that the grandparents of each of these young actors
were involved in the momentous events of the
1940s. Some were Jews killed in the Holocaust, oth-
ers were Jews who emigrated to Israel, others were
Germans whose exact actions during the Nazi years
were understandably often hidden from their grand-
children. Yet others were inhabitants of Palestine,
who saw their land and sometimes their homes
appropriated by the new Jewish settlers. In short the
family memories of these actors are closely inter-
twined with those memories that make the contem-
porary Middle East so difficult and emotional a
source of international tensionthe Holocaust in
Germany, the establishment of the state of Israel,
and the dispossession of the Palestinians that this
involved.
In a series of narratives, often backed up by
group pantomimes, of discussions, and debates, and
interactions with the audience, who are treated with
understanding by the German actors and with often
open hostility by the Jewish ones, the company
explores their own connection to this complex his-
tory and even more centrally the ongoing areas of
tension and conflict between their communities
Yael Ronen's Dritte Generation. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz.
94
today. Despite their attempts at reconciliation, the
wounds of the past remain unhealed, and the pro-
duction (at least in the current version) ends in a
violent brawl involving the entire company. There is
a certain amateurish quality to a number of
sequences, but the dedication of the young company
and the seriousness of the questions under discus-
sion result in a production that is always interesting
and often moving and thought-provoking, as it obvi-
ously seeks to be. Obviously, the presentation of this
production in Berlin (and in Tel Aviv) provides a
special resonance with its audience that would be
much less the case in London, Paris, or New York,
significant as the geopolitical questions it addresses
are internationally. What is missing, of course, as is
regrettably so often the case, is the voice and pres-
ence of the other third generation, young actors
from the West Bank or Gaza, all of the Palestinian
actors in the company being residents of Israel,
whose situation is fascinating and conflicted, but
obviously quite different. In today's political climate
neither Israeli nor Palestinian authorities would
allow such participation in a project of this sort, but
that in itself is an indication of the seriousness and
intractability of the situation.
My other evening at the Schaubhne was
to see the latest contribution to Thomas Ostermeier's
series of Ibsen interpretations, John Gabriel
Borkman. Ostermeier's earlier Ibsens, Nora (A Doll
House) and Hedda Gabler, were both invited to the
annual Theatertreffen and were seen by New York
audiences at BAM. John Gabriel Borkman has
achieved less acclaim, and seemed to me on the
whole a distinctly less interesting effort. The
tragedy of a failed banker whose career was ruined
when he was exposed in a kind of late nineteenth
century Ponzi scheme would seem a perfect choice
for contemporary allusions. True, Ostermeier
includes a few current visual references, perhaps
most notably a cell phone, as he has done in his pre-
vious Ibsens, but his interpretation in fact seems
curiously removed from any specific context.
The play was created for the National
Theatre of Brittany in Rennes at the end of 2008 and
was premiered in Berlin early in 2009. Ostermeier
has assembled an outstanding cast, especially in the
leading roles. Josef Bierbichler, who plays
Borkman, Kirsten Dene, who plays Gunhild, and
Angela Winkler, who plays Ella, have been for
many years among the best known actors on the
German-speaking stage. Perhaps Ostermeier, long a
fan of the British theatre, thought to follow the stan-
Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkmann, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz.
95
dard British mode of assembling well-known actors
and not distracting from their work by any directo-
rial concept, but if so, the result was a generally
respectful but curiously flat reading of the play.
Ostermeier's usual designer, Jan
Pappelbaum, created a set in the now fashionable
German minimalist style, far more stark than the
rather cluttered design for Nora or even the elegant-
ly stylized glass box of Hedda Gabler. Here we have
only two blank white side walls, with a plain door at
the back of each, a dimly reflecting back wall, and
two very simple clusters of furniture: a sofa center
stage with coffee table, lamp, and side chair for the
Borkman living room and a table a chair for
Borkman's upstairs retreat. These are mounted on a
turntable, so that we move from one setting to the
other by temporarily raising the back wall and mov-
ing the other half of the turntable into position.
There is nothing else except for a white fog which
covers the entire stage floor at the beginning and
end and swirls continuously behind the backdrop
throughout the production. The presentation time is
also typical of much contemporary German produc-
tion, just under two hours without an intermission.
This requires a certain amount of cutting of
course, but mostly of individual lines here and there.
The only entire scene I missed was that involving
Foldol (Felix Rmer) after he has been run down by
the sleigh, but the entire final act has undergone
considerable adjustment. In both Nora and Hedda
Gabler Ostermeier's conclusions were among his
most radical departure from traditional interpreta-
tions, and the same thing is true of his John Gabriel
Borkman, although with much less effective results.
The cinematic move outdoors and up the mountain
has always presented a challenge to those who
would stage this play, but I have never seen a direc-
tor resolve this problem as Ostermeier has, by never
going outside at all, and playing the final scenes in
the Borkman living room where the play begins.
The mountainside bench where he sits with Ella
becomes the center stage sofa where Gunhild sat in
the opening act, and his visions out across the valley
are taken as entirely internal. The fog which has
been swirling behind the back wall flows out across
the stage floor, but since we have already seen this
effect in the opening scene, we cannot take it as an
indication of a shift to the outside.
Apparently Ostermeier considered a col-
lapse in front of the sofa might be too banal, or even
unintentionally comic (there was a lot of laughter,
not all of it appropriate, during this production,
indeed the young man next to me clearly enthusias-
tically embraced Borkman's suggestion to view the
whole thing as a comedy). To avoid this, just before
Gunhild's entrance, Borkman somewhat inexplica-
bly pulled the armchair which had been sitting next
to the sofa over to the right side of the stage and, as
if exhausted by this effort, collapsed into it, not
moving again. This left the sofa free for the two sis-
ters, and in the final image of the play, as they sit
side by side, Ella slowly and tentatively moves her
hand to the side to take the hand of her sister. Thus
Borkman is, in contrast to Ibsen's original idea,
effectively excluded from the image of their recon-
ciliation. Without that image, and indeed without
the snowy mountainside, the vision of the factories,
and the icy hand of the outside winter night the end-
ing seems much diminished and domesticated, and
no amount of artificial fog surrounding the charac-
ters can hide this.
Much of the May 2009 issue of Germany's
leading theatre magazine, Theater heute is devoted
to the Theatertreffen, but an unusual feature this
year is a short report on three productions that the
editors felt should have been selected and were not.
Perhaps in recognition of such sentiments, the
Hebbel Theater, Berlin's leading home of experi-
mental theatre, both native and foreign, offered one
of these three during the actual run of the festival.
This was Jossi Weiler's Munich production of a new
play by Elfriede Jelinek, Rechnitz. Theater heute
notes that the season contained two much discussed
stagings of historical-political material, this work
and a contemporary reworking of Peter Weiss's
Marat/Sade. In the opinion of Theater heute's Till
Breigleb, the "trivial-demagogic" Marat production
was selected as a much less scandalous and disturb-
ing choice of the Jelenik piece. In any case, the brief
run of Rechnitz in Berlin was sold out, with box
office lines longer than I have ever seen at the
Hebbel, so the production certainly found a Berlin
audience.
As a non-German spectator I was less
impressed. Even the favorable notice of Briegleb
had to admit that the play was not strong on theatri-
cal means or traditional character, but derived its
power from its formal presentation, its densely
packed text, and, of course, its historical-political
subject matter. Rechnitz is today a reference known
to almost all Germans and the latest grim reminder
of the crimes of the Nazi era, which still hang over
contemporary Germany (I seem to discover a new
monument to the victims of the Holocaust every
96
time I visit the city). The Austrians have never been
as willing to confront their crimes of that era as the
Germans, and Rechnitz speaks directly to that
silence. Its inspiration is the recently revealed (by a
British journalist) massacre that took place in
Rechnitz Castle, near the Hungarian border on the
night of 24 March 1945. There a "Victory Party"
was held by leading Gestapo and SS figures, guests
of the Count and Countess Batthyany, still an impor-
tant Austrian family, at which some 200 Jewish pris-
oners, declared unfit for the work camps, were
stripped, abused, and executed as part of the
evening's entertainment. Jelenik subtitles her play
"The Exterminating Angel," in ironic reference to
Luis Buel's classic film with its central decadent
aristocratic dinner party. There has still today been
no official statement from the descendents of the
perpetrators of Rechnitz, and a search for the mass
grave of the victims also continues, so this is very
much an open sore in the body politic.
Although the simple but elegant setting (by
Anja Rabes) clearly suggests an elegant paneled
room in an aristocratic hunting lodge (complete
with antlers over the door) there is no attempt to
recreate any details of the notorious evening. Indeed
it is not at all clear who the five actors/narrators rep-
resent. Katja Brkle, Andr Jung, Hans Kremer,
Steven Scharf, and Hildegard Schmahl are simply
listed in the program as "messengers," and although
they seem at the beginning to be welcoming the
audience to their residence, it is calculatedly unclear
whether they represent figures from the original
party, "messengers" in the classic Greek sense, or
modern "messengers" bringing us commentary on
this largely suppressed event. In any case, although
they speak of "our" experience, and "our" party, and
"the countess" as if she is a close acquaintance, and
although they refer often to the party and even to the
killings, they never quite admit to actual participa-
tion, focusing more on the situation's abstract horror
and on the gray, meaningless, and indeterminate
world in which they now circulate. There are occa-
sional references to the massacre itself. At one point
the characters all take rifles from a closet and bran-
dish them about, at another the action stops while
repeated gunfire echoes from all corners of the audi-
torium.
For the rest of the time the characters fill
their hollow lives with minor self-indulgences, a bit
of desultory love-making (really only a bit of grop-
ing and spanking), casual undressing, listening on
headphones placed around the room to cheap classi-
cal music (such asgrim ironythemes from Der
Freischtz played on an accordion with a polka-type
rhythm), and eating junk food, picnic chicken and
pizza from boxes. The panels of the room can swiv-
97
Elfriede Jelinek's Rechnitz, directed by Jossi Weiler. Photo: Courtesy of Hebbel Theater, Berlin.
el open to provide rapid group exits and entrances,
but the only actual door is underneath the antlers
center. Like the characters, it constantly changes,
sometimes an entrance but more often a closet, con-
taining various items, first the rifles, later liquors,
and later still a stack of fur coats suggesting the pil-
lage of the victims and seized upon in an orgy of
dressing up by the characters. Wieler, who has pro-
duced a number of Jelenik texts, has taken many lib-
erties with the cutting and arrangement of material,
not to mention the distribution of speeches and the
overall visual approach. This is quite acceptable to
the author, who makes few if any staging demands
on her directors. Clearly the text could be presented
in many ways, but Weiler's cool, almost trivialized
approach underlines with great effect the notorious
"banality of evil," and becomes as well a dynamic of
the mechanisms of avoidance and silence.
The Hebbel is actually a complex of three
nearby but separate theatres. Rechnitz was present-
ed in the largest of these, House One. A few
evenings later I returned to the nearby House Two,
the original home of Peter Stein's famous
Schaubhne, to see a new production by one of
Germany's most honored and original experimental
companies, Rimini Protokoll. The company's repu-
tation is built upon its extremely varied use of non-
actors presenting material taken from their everyday
life. For the most part, previous works have utilized
German subjects, but for Radio Muezzin, director
Stefan Kaegi took his production crew to Cairo,
where in addition to filming general scenes, they
found four Muezzins, who traditionally make the
call to prayers from the minarets, who were willing
to serve as the subjects of Rimini Protokoll's
project.
The evening begins with the four muezzins
standing at the sides of the audience in the darkened
theatre and singing their messages, a beautiful and
exotic effect. They next came forward to the stage
and began to tell their stories. The first, Hussein
Bdawy, was blind from birth, a condition at one
time preferred among Muezzins, so that they could
not peer into houses near the mosque from their ele-
vated stations. A second, Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali
Hindawy, was trained as an electrician, but after an
accident began to study the Koran and turned to this
calling. A third, Mansour Abdelsalam Namous, is a
former soldier now the caretaker of a tiny mosque,
and the fourth is a former athlete and bodybuilder
whose voice has received much favorable attention.
Their stories are illustrated with photos and films of
their homes, their children, and their mosques.
Perhaps what attracted Kaegi to these fig-
ures is their current state of transition. The Egyptian
government has picked thirty muezzin out of the
98
Rimini Protokoll's Radio Muezzin, directed by Stefan Kaegi. Photo: Courtesy of Rimini Protokoll.
hundred in Cairo with what are considered the best
voices, and in the future their voices will make the
call to prayer by radio transmission to the minaret
speakers, producing a more standardized experience
(hence the title of the production). Only one of the
four muezzin here gathered will in fact be allowed
to participate in this new program.
One can imagine this situation providing a
whole range of discussion about tradition and
modernity, the personal and the professional, tech-
nology versus hand craft and so on, but in fact this
aspect of the presentation is considered only very
briefly and near the end of the performance. Much
more time is spent on the background and daily life
of the four muezzin. A central part of this presenta-
tion has aroused considerable protest among Berlin
audiences. This is the extended sections in which
the performers demonstrate for the audience the
gestures and actions of traditional prayers and other
related activities, such as the ritual washing in
preparation for prayer. Though the performers
announce that what they are presenting is not actu-
ally a religious ritual, but a theatricalized represen-
tation of these ceremonies, the sequences had very
much the flavor of the ethnographic displays of
native ceremonies in nineteenth century exposi-
tions, or the entertainments offered today in many
tourist hotels in exotic ports of call. This of course
is deeply problematic, if not offensive, in a cultural
community aware of the tensions of colonial
thought. Although the ritual displays were the most
obvious troubling sections, not a few of the filmed
street scenes showed a similar orientalist slant, and
at one point a filmed panorama of the Egyptian
landscape also had running across it a series of
Arabic sentences, which supertitles informed us
were various prohibitions (presumably by the
Egyptian government) of subject that could not be
filmed. The point could only have been a tacit con-
demnation of this "backward" and "repressive" cul-
ture by the "more free and liberal" European cre-
ative artists. All in all, I found this a well-meaning
but often surprisingly nave project by a group that
in the past I have often considered highly sophisti-
cated in much of their work.
Next to another center for avant-garde the-
atre in Berlin, the Prater. This adjunct to Berlin's
oldest beer-garden has been closed during the past
year, like the Deutsches, for extensive renovations.
It reopened in April, most fittingly, with a new pro-
99
Der Prater, Berlin. Photo: Courtesy of the Prater.
duction by the director most associated with this
space, the radical and innovative Ren Pollesch.
There has been a clear revival of interest in choric
work in the recent German theatre, with several
striking examples in the current Theatertreffen, but
only Pollesch has made the chorus his subject, in
Ein Chor irrt sich gewaltig (A Chorus is Powerfully
Mistaken).
The immediate reference is to the popular French
comedy film of the 1970s by Yves Robert, Un ele-
phant a trompe normment, carrying on Pollesch's
love of basing his economic/philosophical romps on
films and other pop cultural products. Of course the
title also challenges the traditional view of the cho-
rus as ideal spectator or special narrative voice,
upending social and theatrical expectations in typi-
cal Pollesch fashion.
The text of Ein Chor is also typical of
Pollesch, a dense thicket of jokes, pop culture refer-
ences and material from current continental political
and economic and literary theory such as the work
of Dietmar Dath or Boris Groys. What is perhaps
most surprising about the evening is how permeated
it is by the conventions of French variety and boule-
vard entertainment. The surprise begins when the
audience enters the theatre. Instead of the surround-
ing warren of small rooms so often seen in previous
Pollesch productions, designer Bert Neumann has
converted the space into a traditional, even clichd
proscenium arch theatre interior, right down to a
pair of conventional chandeliers hanging over the
stage and with a gaudy, flower covered act curtain
that looks more like a cheap table-cloth than an ele-
gant drape. The characters, who are derived from
the sitcom-like figures of the Robert film, are well
aware of their French derivation, filling the stage
with croissants, lip-synching Piaf-style songs, and,
most notably, often stopping the action to correct
each other's French pronunciation. As always in
Pollesch, the stage fills with physical, human, and
linguistic detritus as the often manic characters
attempt to find some meaning and some grounds for
relationship amid the chaos of late capitalist society.
The central figure in the production is the
versatile Sophie Ross, an androgynous figure in a
nineteenth century black cape, who is based on phi-
landering Bouly in the film, who comes home to
find his wife has cleaned out the house and left him.
Ross is sometimes supported by, sometimes reject-
ed by the clich-spouting chorus, but her major
100
Ein Chor irrt sich gewaltig, directed by Ren Pollesch. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater.
companions are Jean Chaize, as a foppish French
Lord in an elegant frock coat and Brigitte Cuvelier,
whose speech consists in large part of fractured
French phrases and whose obsession it is to correct
the accents of her fellows. From time to time there
is a distinct feminist cast to the all-female chorus,
and even more frequently the glimmerings of an
oppressed proletarian struggling for expression, but
this is still far closer to post-dramatic theatre than
agit-prop, as Pollesch invariably is. The ninety
minute evening passes very quickly and, if not
always totally comprehensible, is always surprising
and entertaining.
For my last free night in Berlin I returned
to the Deutsches Theater, planning to see Jrgen
Gosch's staging of Schimmelpfennig's Idomeneus,
which recently opened there. The production has
been warmly praised and has an added poignancy in
that it was the last work of this major director. He
was suffering from what appears to be terminal can-
cer and in fact had to be brought from his hospital
bed to attend the opening night.
In the event, however, this presentation had
to be cancelled due to the illness of one of the
actresses, and so at the last moment the theatre sub-
stituted Barbara Frey's staging of Euripides' Medea.
Since I enjoy Frey's work and had not seen her
Medea, this was a quite acceptable substitution. Nor
was it free of the air of finality. During the past eight
years, under the directorship of first Bernd Wilms
and his chief dramaturg Oliver Reese the Deutsches
has clearly moved into the leading position among
Berlin theatres. Despite this enviable record, Wilms
was replaced this year by a new Intendant, Ulrich
Khuon. The new leader has immediately empha-
sized a new order by announcing the dropping from
the repertoire of thirty-nine productions, including
works by the directors who have established the
recent pre-eminence of the theatre, including Gosch,
Dimiter Gotscheff, Michael Thalheimer, Barbara
Frey and Nicolas Stemann. Since the Frey Medea is
among these disappearing productions, I was very
glad to have this opportunity to see it.
Bettina Meyer's design and Claus
Grasmeder's light are much in keeping with the cur-
rent minimalist vogue at this theatre. The stage is
closed in a huge white box, like a number of Gosch
productions, and within this, mounted on a large
podium, is a much smaller box stage, somewhat like
the inner stage of Thalheimer's Faust but in this case
completely fitted out as a 1950s studio apartment,
complete with bed, table, chair, sink, washing
machine, cabinets, and TV. Above the sink at the
rear is a window with a city skyline at the bottom
Euripides' Medea, directed by Barbara Frey. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater.
101
102
and a sky with constantly changing cloud patterns
(video by Bert Zander). Although the furnishings
are basically full size, an actor standing at the rear
of this little room almost reaches to the ceiling. This
is the space of Medea, played by Nina Hoss, and she
occupies it right up until the final scene. Only Jason
(Michael Neuenschwander) joins her here, while
other characters speak to her from the main stage
area. During these scenes the entire stage is usually
illuminated, Medea's room seeming to float in a sea
of white light, while for scenes involving only the
box, it is usually surrounded by darkness.
Medea's box has no visible entrances.
When Jason visits her, there is a brief blackout and
he is discovered already within the room. Medea,
when she finally leaves, also disappears during a
blackout. The effect is very much that of a well fur-
nished cell. Only twice do other figures somewhat
impinge upon this space. Once the two-woman cho-
rus (Christine Schorn the older and Meike Droste
the younger) during their dialogue with Medea they
stick their heads through hitherto unsuspected slits
in the side walls. Later, when Medea speaks to her
two children, their heads also appear in such slits.
Hoss is an admirable Medea, elegant, occa-
sionally with a touch of whimsy, but always intense
and driven. She is strongly supported by a cast of
familiar members of the Deutsches Theater compa-
ny, headed by Neuenschwander, but including the
popular character actor Christian Grashof as Creon
and the magisterial Horst Lebinsky as Aegeus.
Matthias Bunchschuh as the messenger stands
almost unmoving downstage, delivering this speech
in a quiet tone, often pausing as his emotion over-
takes him. This underplayed delivery makes this
speech one of the highlights of the evening.
Missing the Idomeneus was a disappoint-
ment, but there will be other opportunities to see it.
Not so this impressive Medea, now disappearing
from the repertoire, so I was pleased to be offered
this opportunity. In all, I saw during a period of
somewhat over two weeks almost as many Berlin
productions outside the official Festival as within it,
and in terms of range and achievement I have to say
that both were equally impressive.
103
JOSHUA ABRAMS is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University
and Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 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).
BARRY DANIELS is a retired Professor of Theatre History now living in France. He has written extensively on
the French Romantic theatre. His book Le Dcor de theatre lpoque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors
de la Comdie-Franaise, 17991848 was published by the National Library of France in 2003. In 2007 he co-
curated the exposition Patriotes en scne! Le Thtre de la Rpublique, 17901799 for the Museum of the French
Revolution in Vizille. He co-authored the catalogue which was published by Artlys. He is currently editing the
stagehands notebook for the Comdie-Franaise from 1798 to 1825.
JEAN DECOCK is a professor of French Literature with a Ph.D. from UCLA, where he wrote his thesis on
Michel de Ghelderode. After teaching at UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and UNLV, he is now retired, splitting his time
between Paris and New York. He was the editor for the French Review on African Literature and Film for many
years.
MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts at Queen Mary University of London and co-edi-
tor of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her books include Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on
the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (MUP 2003), Federico Garca Lorca (Routledge 2008), three co-edited vol-
umes for Manchester University Press, and two collections of translations for Methuen. She has recently com-
pleted a co-edited volume on European directors for Routledge that will be published in 2010.
STEVE EARNEST is Associate Professor of Theater at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina. He has previously published articles and reviews in WES, Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, New
Theatre Quarterly, and Opera Journal. A practitioner as well as a writer, he is a member of AEA, SAG, and SSDC.
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 New York Times, Village
Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and Film Comment. In Sweden, he has written for Dagens Nyheter,
Expressen, and Teater Tidningen.
PHILLIPPA WEHLE is the author of Le Thtre populaire selon Jean Vilar and Drama Contemporary: France
and of the upcoming Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. Professor Emeritus of French and Drama
Studies at Purchase College, SUNY, she writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance. She is a
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
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)
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