WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 23, Number 1 Winter 2011

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 2011
ISSN # 1050-1991
Pamela Thielman, Editorial Assistant
Barrie Gelles, Circulation Manager
Sascha Just, Managing Editor
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
1
Katharina Wagner.
Photo: Courtesy of the Bayreuth Festival
Western European Stages is supported by a generous grant from the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Journals are available online from ProQuest Information and
Learning as abstracts via the ProQuest information service and the International Index to the
Performing Arts. www.il.proquest.com.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council
of Editors of Learned Journals.
2
This is our annual issue foregrounding spring and summer theatre festivals throughout Western Europe
with reports from the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Avignon Festival, the Grec Festival in Bercelona, the summer fes-
tivals in Munich, Salzburg, and Bregenz, and those two great German festivals that dominate the field,
Oberammergau and Bayreuth. Normally we also include some non-festival material in this issue, but due to the
extent of our festival coverage and the fact that we are here including our annual index, we have moved that non-
festival material to the upcoming issue, which we expect in turn be an unusually extensive one.
We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe.
Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European
Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016 or
mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.
To the Reader
Volume 23, Number 1
An Ambitious Grec Festival for Barcelona in a Year of Austerity
Avignon's Sixty-fourth Festival: In Celebration of the New in Today's Theatre
Avignon OFF 2010: Avignon, mon amour
Theatertreffenthe Nasty, the Hateful, the Mean
Three Music Festivals: Bayreuth, Munich, and Bregenz
Passionsspiele Oberammergau 2010
Index to Western European Stages, volume 22
Contributors
Winter 2011
5
15
25
31
51
67
73
78
Maria M. Delgado
Philippa Wehle
Jean Decock
Marvin Carlson
Glenn Loney
George Panaghi
3
Table of Contents
4
Questi fantasmi, directed by Oriol Broggi. Photo: Josep Aznar.
Who says there's a recession in Spain?
Whatever the doom and gloom statistics (a budget
deficit at eleven percent of GDP), strikes, and five
percent cuts in public sector salaries, the Grec
Festival in Barcelona seems to have had a boom
year. With audience figures of over 120,000 and an
average occupancy of sixty-five percent its
Argentine director Ricardo Szwarcer has good rea-
son to be pleased. Certainly, despite the wobbly
opening production, Carme Portacelli's bombastic
Prometeu (Heiner Mller's version of Aeschylus'
Prometheus), there has been much to admire in this
year's program. Japan has been the featured nation
with eleven productions (including collaborations
between Catalan and Japanese artists, as with Cesc
Gelabert and Frederic Amat's hypnotic Ki and Joan
Oll's N, adapted from Yukio Mishima's Noh the-
atre). Certainly the Japanese work appealed to
Catalan audiences, playing to an average eighty-one
percent capacity over the different venues. Next
year France is the selected nation, but cuts to the
budget may be more difficult to survive.
Catalan practitioners once more enjoyed a
central position in the program with new Catalan
plays and Spanish-language works translated into
Catalan; and Austrian, Irish, Italian, and North-
American dramaturgy continued to resonate in the
city. The festival has seen actors directing, directors
associated with non-textual dramaturgies turning to
dense modernist texts, and an established writer-
director turning a new play over to an emerging
director. While some of the city's most innovative
directors (as with Calixto Bieito and lex Rigola)
have not premiered new stagings, each has loaned
their theatre (the Romea and Lliure respectively) to
key productions visiting the Lliure. With Llus
Pasqual returning to the Lliure as Rigola's successor
next yearhe was one of the theatre's co-founders
in 1976and Carol Lpez beginning to make a
mark on the program at the Villarroel, things are
looking promising in a bleak financial climate.
Two of the festival's strongest productions
came from actors who are increasingly forging
directorial trajectories, and both were offered in
5
An Ambitious Grec Festival for Barcelona in a Year of Austerity
Maria M. Delgado
Sergei Bebel's Fora de Joc. Photo: Josep Aznar.
taut, precise translations by actress Cristina
Genebat. David Selvas' imaginative reading of The
Seagull at the Villarroel, using Martin Crimp's crisp
reworking, proved a lithe dynamic staging, full of
quirky details and a performative tone that owes
something to Argentine Daniel Veronese's contem-
porary readings of the naturalist canon. Julio
Manrique too offered assured imaginative direction
in his treatment of Neil LaBute's tryptich of short
plays, Romance, The Furies, and Helter-Skelter.
This is familiar LaBute territory but Manrique's ele-
gant, stylish production links the American play-
wright's hermetic world to the wider landscape out-
side the Sala BeckettJapanese restaurants feature
prominently, playfully referencing the thematic
strand of this year's Grec. Manrique's cast register a
humanity that is sometimes absent from LaBute's
menacing writing.
Romance charts the recriminations of a
couple who split up a year earlier. A (Andrew
Tarbet) is the adulterer who has happily moved on.
B (Norbert Martnez) is struggling to get over him.
Their "chance" encounter brings to the fore A's cru-
elty and seductive compulsion and B's damaged
psyche. It is a bleak landscape where accusations fly
and the line between truth and lies is anyone's guess.
Is B as vulnerable as he first appears? Has A been
propositioned by B's sister? Will A visit B later as he
states he will? No answers are forthcoming. What
remains is the tension between A's indifference and
B's lingering hope. Character A alternates between
English and Catalan, a ploy that works well in
Tarbet's characterisation of a drifter who doesn't
want to stay in one place (either physical or emo-
tional) for too long. The use of Roxy Music's "Slave
to Love" and "Jealous Guy" expertly captures B's
state of mind. As the play ends Tracy Chapman's
"Baby can I hold you" articulates a world where
words don't always convey a character's journey.
In The Furies too, characters articulate
extreme positions. Paula (Mireia Aixal) is meeting
her boyfriend Jimmy (Xavier Ricart) for a drink but
when he turns up with silent sister Jamie (Oriol
Guinart), Paula is in for a rough ride. We think she's
about to end the relationship with Jimmy but her
revelation of a serious illness shocks the audience,
bemuses Jimmy, and visibly angers the passive-
aggressive Jamie. Jamie follows her brother like
something out of a bad fifties B-movie or, as the
play's title evidences, a Greek drama where blood-
lines are anything but clear. Jamie may have polyps
on her throat but this doesn't impair her manipula-
tion of the hapless Jimmy. Is she Jimmy's other half
in more ways than one? Are they really two sides of
Neil LaBute's Helter-Skelter, directed by Julio Manrique. Photo: Courtesy of the Grec Festival.
6
the same person? Her threats to Paula mark her out
as a Medusa-meets-the Furies, armed with tequila
shots and lemon to fortify her resolve and a
scratchy, hoarse voice that terrorizes.
Helter-Skelter uses Medea as its reference
point as a heavily pregnant woman (the play's trans-
lator Cristina Genebat) meets her wealthy husband
(Ernest Villegas) for dinner. He has been sleeping
with her sister and as she gradually reveals that she
knows what's been going on, his fears that this will
turn into "one of those Greek dramas" becomes a
reality. Her coral dress becomes a palette of blood as
she aborts her fetus with a steak knife before her
husband's very eyes in this most public of spaces; a
terrible revenge enacted by a wild-eyed laughing
Medea unable to rationalize the events that have
befallen her. As the play ends she stands stiffly like
a doll on a wind-up musical box as the high hyster-
ics of the operatic score resonate through the audi-
torium.
Characters from each play spill into the
fringes of the others, providing a unifying visual
motif. Jamie and Jimmy hover outside the restaurant
where the husband's secret will be revealed. A cou-
ple (that includes B from Romance) siTS in the
same restaurant and play out their own silent
romance as a backdrop to the bitter battle raging in
front of them. It is at once a reminder of the dreams
that have now turned sour and an engagement with
a wider landscape beyond LaBute's insular tales.
This layering and the links between the scenes
demonstrate Manrique's superb attention to detail.
Ultimately, it raises the production from the merely
bitter to the acerbic, recognizing that the stories told
form just a part of the complex worlds that intersect
across the stage of the Sala Beckett.
Samuel Beckett's short story, First Love
was first seen on the Catalan stage in 1986 in a ver-
sion by Jos Sanchis Sinisterra, the founder of the
Sala Beckettthe alternative new writing theatre
that takes the Irish writer's name. Opening at the
Villarroel in a new Catalan translation of Sanchis
Sinisterra's adaptation by Anna Soler, the piece is
re-envisaged by La Fura dels Baus' lex Olle work-
ing with a co-director, Miquel Grriz. Catalan actor
Pere Arquillu, one of Rigola's regulars at the Lliure
during the mid-eighties, here takes the role of the
homeless outsider who is befriended by Lulu, a
Samuel Beckett's First Love, directed by lex Olle. Photo: Josep Aznar.
7
prostitute on a park bench. The relationship that
emerges is tainted with a bitter misogyny that does-
n't seem too distant from LaBute's dramas. Indeed,
the marriage proves anything but a romantic affair,
rather a bristly tale of woe, need, an unplanned
pregnancy, and the narrator's erratic bowels. In
2007, Ralph Fiennes offered a lean, priggish, for-
mally suited narrator, sat on a lone park bench in
what appeared to be a graveyard. Arquillu is a port-
ly, far more exposed figure, first appearing as a
semi-naked corpse on a slab of white marble in a
cold room that looks all too much like a mortuary.
The cold light that envelops the space adds to the
sense of refrigeration. It could almost be a laborato-
ry with Arquillu's narrator an object ripe for clini-
cal dissection. The eerie soundscapea dog bark-
ing, a child crying, haunting musicadds to the
uncanny mood. Emerging from this dead space, this
cemetery of the soul, Arquillu shares his tale of
warped lust and revulsion. Listening to it, I alternat-
ed between fascination and repulsion. The venom
that emerges from Arquillu's matter of fact tone
demonstrates a repulsion of what humanity repre-
sents; its odors, foibles and routines come in for par-
ticular detestation. Characters come and go, intro-
duced and then dropped. Only the large Lulu
lingers, like a bad smell that hovers over the
unlucky narrator. Arquillu oscillates between a cer-
tain pathos, indifference, anger, and offence. Rather
Oll and Gorriz's cool, clean production exposes his
own shortcomings and fears, his paranoia and
misogyny. The production is bleakly funny while
never romanticizing the misogyny that fuels the pro-
tagonist's fear of the female. Arquillu negotiates
his absurd condition with a cheery stoicism that
often slips into the menacing stammer of a class-
room bully. Whether fully clothed or in plain white
underwear, this is a man whose vulnerabilities and
excesses are all too clearly exposed.
Thomas Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss, was
an early success for Calixto Bieito in 1993. His
prickly, passionate production signalled both a raw
aesthetic and a preference for works that grapple
with the realities of the contemporary European
psyche. Now Josep Maria Mestres has offered a
thoughtful if rather stolid production of the play in
Miguel Senz's respectful translation. Ludwig
Wittgenstein (Mingo Rfols) returns home from
Thomas Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss, directed by Joseph Maria Mestres. Photo: Josep Aznar.
8
time away at a sanatorium but his relationship with
his two sisters is anything but straightforward. The
elder (Carmen Machi) is a controlling mothering
figure who wants things run her way and expects
order to be observed at all times. The younger sister
(ngels Bassas) may appear less stiff but is soon
revealed to be far more needy, playing games with
her brother in a more ominous battle with her elder
sibling. Designer Pep Duran offers an imposing din-
ing room where aged furniture and dour family por-
traits suggest the parents' presence still hovers over
the three children. Indeed stern relatives look down
on the threesome without respite and even Ludwig's
attempts to move them out are frustrated by the
commitment to maintaining the family's legacy
demonstrated by his elder sister.
The performances are uniformly good.
Machi, here cast against type, offers a prim official
figure with sensible shoes, plainly cut dress and hair
neatly tied back. She takes her time over all domes-
tic chores and lays out a tablecloth with almost mil-
itary precision. Her voice rises and falls with an
almost unnerving poise. It's a very watchable char-
acterization of a role that doesn't give much room
for development.
Bassas is paradoxically both wilder and more lan-
guid. Hers is a more modern dress and mischievous
shoes that suggest a good time girl caught in the
"gilded cage" of the family house. She talks in terms
that recall both Beckett and Pinter's wayward pro-
tagonists: of wanting to leave for Rome and Paris.
Like Vladimir and Estragon in Godot and Davies in
The Caretaker, however, it is only talk and she
seems incapable of moving anywhere. Rfols is a
baby-faced brother, petulant, angry and frustrated.
He looks at the family portraits while discussing his
parents, overwhelmed by what they represent in his
life. He marches, struts, sulks, and rages. His sisters
both fuss around him and try to placate his out-
bursts. Pulling the tablecloth into a giant bib, his
infantilization is all too clear. This is a boy who was
never allowed or never able to grow up.
My reservations are with the pacing of the
production which remains rather one-dimensional;
it is as if Mestres wants to reinforce every moment
of the writing, every phrase is expertly articulated
and reflected on. The raw danger of Jacques
Rosner's 1991 Thtre de la Colline production is
here substituted by a more considered although no
less impressively acted reflection on Bernhard's
meandering (and at times frustrating) play.
Sergi Belbel has proved one of Catalonia's
most resilient dramatists, working across a mini-
malist formula to explore contemporary malaises
and dilemmas. His is a recognizably postmodern
world but one that characters are never quite able to
Thomas Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss. Photo: Josep Aznar.
9
negotiate with ease. His latest play, Fora de joc
(Offside) turns to the themes of his 2004 Forasters
(Strangers), exploring immigration, bourgeois dis-
content, and the changing face of the Catalan capi-
tal. The tone is slightly more frantic than Forasters
as an animated mother, wife, and daughter (Anna
Azcona) negotiates relationships with her student
daughter, Elisa (Queralt Casasayas); her cantanker-
ous wheelchair bound father (Toni Sevilla), her hus-
band Pol (Francesc Lucchetti) who fears losing his
job, and the football-mad South-American home
help, Ricky (Jordi Andjar) who cares for her elder-
ly father.
The production never really finds a theatri-
cal vocabulary for the play. Anna Azcona appears
trapped within a hysterical soap-opera register, for-
ever tottering in heels that render her kitchen antics
rather incredible. Toni Seville's aging patriarch is
clad in a false chest that looks close to falling off
through the play and seems totally unnecessary.
Sevilla is a hugely experienced and accomplished
actor and the role never moves beyond clich.
Ricky's accent seems rather inconsistent and his
budding romance with Elisa never really convinces.
There's a bizarre scene where Ricky becomes the
mother of his child, informing him that his son has
suffered an accident and will never play football
again. Enrich Planes' plywood set looks as if it was
knocked together in an hour and gives the staging
the look of a rather makeshift amateur dramatics
show. Cristina Clemente's production opts for
speed, big gestures, and in-your-face acting, playing
the plot like a French farce. The writing, however,
pulls the play in another direction. Certainly, the
football motif is topical but it needed more consid-
ered treatment. It seems a little like a dramatic after-
thought. Belbel might have been better off directing
the piece himself. It needed the hand of a more con-
fident or experienced director able to find an appro-
priate scenic register for the writing.
Bebel's work as a translator was also on
show at the Grec. Indeed, one of the festival's hits
showcased the work of the Navarre-born writer,
Alfredo Santo, here working with the inventive T de
Theatre. The play Delicades (Delicate Women),
beautifully translated by Belbel, assembles a com-
pelling number of short scenarios that hang togeth-
er as a delicately woven elegy to the generation of
his grandparents. The piece resembles a tapas menu:
small morsels of delight that are easily consumed,
very digestible and highly tasty. This is not to say
that the episodes evade difficult subject matter. The
piece is set largely in the 1930s and 1940s with a
few select scenarios set in the present. The absence
Alfredo Sanzol's Delicades/Delicate Women of T de Teatre. Photo: David Ruano.
10
of war, the schisms of the post-Civil War years
where the "them" (Republicans) and "us"
(Nationalists) mentality prevailed, religious indoc-
trination, and sexual conformity all feature but the
play skilfully evades demonising the Nationalists or
imbuing the Republicans with idealized virtues.
There is something Chekhovian about both the tone
of the play and the production. Lorca's Doa Rosita
also comes to mind as a reference point as charac-
ters appear to communicate with flowers more
effortlessly than with their fellow human beings
perhaps a telling indictment of a society marked for
generations by a fratricidal civil war.
A woman serves breakfast to a soldier
while extolling the virtues of the twin stalwarts of
her toilette: rubbing alcohol and Nivea crme. A
gardener sees her prize rose cut as a gift to the girl-
friend of the family's son. Two sisters do battle over
a crucifix on a wall that has been cemented in place
so that visiting militants don't remove it. A father
wants to be friends with his daughter on Facebook
but she is having none of it. Four sisters prepare to
wave their brother off to the Civil War. Two male
friends reflect on how their friends categorize them
as Batman and Robin, Bert and Ernie, and Starsky
and Hutch, opting for strategic measures to address
the homophobia that is generated by their shared
walks. A couple fears that its dog has been run over
by a train and the situation unleashes a series of
recriminations that expose the fragility of the rela-
tionship. A painter persuasively tries to sell one of
her art works to a client. A woman attempts to get a
friend to persuade her husband to kill the mouse
that's lurking in her kitchen. A nanny is quizzed by
her employers on why she has told their son that
God's existence cannot be proved. A woman dis-
cusses the things she hoards in a sparse economic
climate. A musician plays the cymbals to an assem-
bled family but only one audience member seems
able to appreciate what he is offering and envisage
the military band alongside him. A woman is
approached by a photographer friend of her
Republican aviator husband, as the latter wants a
naked photograph of her to carry with him. A grand-
mother picks plums with her two grandsons aware
of the fact that she's losing her memory. The desire
for fresh fish and the need to keep up appearances in
a difficult economic climate leads a housewife to
the measure of sleeping with the fishmonger. A
young man wants his grandmother to tell him the
story of her life: a story which the audience is led to
believe is a starting point for the play.
The cast of six each take on an assortment
of roles in the eighteen vignettes. A cyclorama
Alfredo Sanzol's Delicades/Delicate Women of T de Teatre. Photo: David Ruano.
11
across the back wall of the theatre mutates with the
mood of each scene. Dcor is largely written across
and through the actors' bodies. Props are minimal
and brought on and off by each of the performers.
There's a swift pace to the production but also a
lightness of touch that ensures scenes are not
weighed down. Costumes expertly suggest both the
Civil War years and the present, and are cut with a
simplicity that is evidenced in the entire aesthetic of
the production. Marcos Ordez of El Pas has
referred to the production as having something of a
photograph album; and the lighting of the produc-
tion does envelop the stage in sepia tones. There are
some exquisite moments: the pilot and his wife star-
ing at each other separated by an impossible abyss;
a conspiratorial contemplation of the virtues of a
particular toilette regime; a litany of items saved
and hoarded, a moment of silence as characters try
to make sense of the events before them. Sanzol has
crafted a memorable play that offers a new para-
digm for thinking through the relationship between
historical memory and the personal and the political
in Spain's checkered past.
The post-war era is also the setting for
Eduardo de Filippo's Questi fantasmi, directed by
Oriol Broggi for LaPerla29 at the Biblioteca de
Catalunya as part of an ongoing project on the play-
wright realized with Italy's Teatri Uniti. Broggi's
earlier Natale in Casa Cupiello had a Catalan cast,
whereas here two Italian performers join the com-
pany. It's a brave idea that tries to examine perform-
ance vocabularies across different nations and dif-
ferent acting traditions. Natale in Casa Cupiello
demonstrated a strong understanding of de Filippo's
narrative arcs, drawing together the bittersweet
strands of the writing in an ensemble production
that further reinforced the sparse aesthetic evi-
denced in his earlier bare-boards Hamlet. Questi
Fantasmi follows some of the ideas pioneered in
Natale in Casa Cupiello. Popular entertainment
opens the production, with jugglers and trays of
chilled wine welcoming the audience. The cast
emerge with the elegant directness of a Cheek by
Jowl cast, taking the stage to set the mood of the
piece.
Cash-strapped Pasquale (Tony Laudadio)
and his wife Mara (Marta Domingo) move to an old
building which they hope to do up in order to make
some money renting rooms out to guests. The build-
ing is supposedly haunted and this rumor is used by
the porters, Raffaele (Jordi Martnez) and Piero
(Giampiero Schiano), to remove items from the
house. It also means that Mara's lover, Alfredo
(Xavier Boada), can come and go without attracting
Eduardo de Filippo's Questi fantasmi, directed by Oriol Broggi. Photo: Courtesy of the Grec Festival.
12
suspicion. But the ghosts seem to be multiplying as
Alfredo's wife Armida (Pilar Pla) turns up, looking
for a husband she wants back home with the chil-
dren. Gastone (Pau Mir) seems willing to intervene
to keep the peace.
Designer Paula Bosch provides an open
central performance area that allows for multiple
entry and exit points and a balcony where Pasquale
is able to wave at his absent neighbor. Characters
come and go with speedy ease and the different
items of furniture that create Pasquale's family
home area swiftly deposited. It's a lively production
full of delightful details; characters walk out of
wardrobes, hide, steal and improvise as the plot
demands. A rendition of "Nessun Dorma" at the
beginning of the second act as Pasquale and Mara
grandly open their guesthouse brings the cast and
technical team together in one of the production's
most brilliant moments. There's an engagement with
the audience whose presence is acknowledged at
numerous key points in the narrative. Broggi is able
to make the production "speak" to a local audience.
The guesthouse takes the name of Pension la
Perlaafter Broggi's own theatre company. Jordi
Martnez's Raffaelle asks "what's wrong with
Catalans?" at a time when Catalunya's demands that
its autonomy be respected are hotly contested at par-
liamentary level.
There are some nice performances too.
Xavier Boada presents Alfredo as an aging gigolo
whose looks have been somewhat ravaged by time.
Pilar Pla's Armida comes over as a ghostly femme
fatale who belongs in an Italian melodrama accom-
panied by two burly adolescent boys and a mother
who is all hat, scarf, and teeth. Jordi Martnez and
Giampiero Schiano make an attractive pair of
porters; the former wily and cautious, always ready
to pick up on the mistakes of others; the latter dart-
ing in and out, following his sharper partner's com-
mands.
The interplay of languages comes once
more to the fore, only now, in addition to Catalan
and Castilian there's more than a smattering of
Italian with Neapolitan entering into the linguistic
palette. Broggi attempts to create the space for dif-
ferent gestural registers to intersect but this proves
more problematic in that the stylistic incongruities
sometimes stagger the pacing. Laudadio appears
rather wooden when speaking in Castilian.
Gastone's Argentine accent is never really contextu-
alized or explained. As such the production is less
confident than Natale in Casa Cupiello and while
Questi fantasmi. Photo: Courtesy of the Grec Festival.
13
the space offers a veritable box of tricks to accom-
modate the characters' comings and goings and the
musical underscoring effectively reinforces mood,
the production is never quite the ambitious sum of
all its parts.
At the Lliure, Antoni Parera Fons's new
opera, Amb els peus a la lluna (With Their Feet on
the Moon) from a script by Manuel Maestro and
Paco Azorn juxtaposes a young boy's fascination
with the first landings on the moon with the activi-
ties of the scientists working behind the scenes to
co-ordinate the shuttle's path. Azorn is a resource-
ful and imaginative scenographer and this produc-
tion marks his directorial debut. The set presents a
wonderfully detailed Kubrickesque world that sug-
gests the sixties as envisaged through the lens of
Tim Burton. For all the visual candy, however, the
score never comes alive and dramaturgically the
piece never holds the audience's attention. The per-
formances are all rather rigid, delivered full on to
the audience. It may have been marketed as a piece
for children but it occupies an uncomfortable space
between the cartoon graphics and adult conceits.
14
Antoni Parera Fon's Amb els peus a la lluna (With Their Feet on the Moon), directed by Paco Azorin. Photo: Courtesy of the Grec Festival.
This year's Avignon Festival (7 to 21 July)
featured more hybrid forms and dance performanc-
es than in previous years. In a word, theatre in any
traditional sense of the term was in short supply.
From Vivarium Studio's Big Bang, a comic strip his-
tory of evolution to Julie Andre T.'s performance-
installations Not Waterproof and Rouge, and the
experimental shows of La vingt-cinquime heure
(The Twenty-Fifth Hour), brave new stage creations
were plentiful. There were also notably more pure
dance pieces than in past festivals, from Anne
Teresa de Keersmaker's exquisitely crafted En
Atendant to the sober, minimalist movement pieces
of Cindy Van Acker, Joseph Nadj's powerful music
dance collaboration Les Corbeaux, and Flip book
and La danseuse malade by Boris Charmatz, next
year's associate artistic director.
Choreography, music, visual arts, and per-
formance were an integral part of a number of other
pieces as well, shows that were closer to
Performance art than dialogue driven, most particu-
larly Gisle Vienne's This Is How You Will
Disappear, and Anglica Liddell's La Casa de la
Fuerza. This is not to say that classics and authors
were totally absent from this year's festival. Ionesco,
Brecht, and Shakespeare were on the program along
with other pieces that are closer to more traditional
types of theatre, musical theatre, documentary the-
atre, and theatre based on the adaptation of a literary
text.
That said, this year's festival clearly dedi-
cated its stages to cutting edge work representative
of contemporary experiments in a "theatre" of and
for our time. There was a bit of an uproar about this
on the part of a number of critics and audience
members who regretted the lack of text-based dra-
matic works: According to Fabienne Darge, Le
Monde, July 13: "La programmation trs 'non-
thtre passe mal" ("The non-text based program-
ming is not going over well"); Brigitte Salino , Le
Monde, July 20, regretted "des spectacles 'hybrides'
au dtriment du rpertoire" (Hybrid forms at the
expense of the repertory). And Marie Labory, ARTE
TV Journal observed that "le Festival d'Avignon fait
la part belle d'autres disciplines que le thtre.[]
Parfois a fait grincer les dents aux amateurs puris-
15
Avignon's Sixty-fourth Festival: In Celebration of the
New in Today's Theatre
Philippa Wehle
Julie Andre's No Waterproof. Photo: Courtesy of the Avignon Festival.
tes de thtre" (The Avignon Festival favors disci-
plines other than theatre. [] At times this makes
purists grind their teeth). Similar comments were
read and heard throughout the festival, but I for one
found the experimental work at the sixty-fourth
Avignon to be exciting and provocative, with sever-
al major discoveries.
Cristoph Marthaler and Anna Viebrock's
new musical theatre piece, Papperlapapp, for one,
conceived and created exclusively for the Honor
Court, started the festival off with a bang. The pair
used every inch of the courtyard stage to replicate
the nave of a church with its side chapels, prayer
benches, and a confessional. Here and there were
seven sarcophagi, tombs for the seven popes who
resided in Avignon throughout the fourteenth centu-
ry during the schism with Rome. The incongruous
presence of a coke machine and a washing machine
among them made it clear from the outset that this
show was not to be taken too seriously.
Even the title, Papperlapapp, the equiva-
lent in German of our "blah blah blah," set the play-
ful tone for this two and a half hour journey through
history and religion with its mix of humor and irrev-
erence. How can one take the surroundings of the
awesome Papal Palace seriously when from the
beginning, the show is filled with jokes and comical
turns? For openers, a tour guide comes onto the
stage with his group of tourists. This could actually
happen since tours of the Pope's Palace are sched-
uled regularly. This guide is blind, however, and he
clearly doesn't know where he is. He tells the group
in German, English, and French that they are in the
Palais de Justice in Brussels. He points out prison
cells and a cemetery for old trolley tracks, as he
makes his way through the set, bumping into the
sarcophagi. "This way, please," he tells his group.
"Absorb your surroundings." And finally: "And that
ladies and gentlemen, brings me to the most impor-
tant object here: the shrine of the holy shroud." The
shrine is none other than the washing machine into
which the guide sticks his head and reappears shout-
ing: "Good gracious, a miracle has happened. I can
see!"
Sparks flying out of the confessional and
noises of hammering and banging inside, now draw
the tourists over to the prayer benches. They lean
over in prayer as if a miracle were happening. The
newly sighted tour guide has nothing to say about
this. He is too busy lifting a woman's skirt with his
cane and peeking under it. The confessional opens
and a worker comes out allowing us to catch a
glimpse of pinup pictures all over its inside walls.
None of this fazes him. He opens a can of coke and
Papperlapapp, directed by Christoph Marthaler. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.
16
drinks it while the others are still praying. One of
the tourists begins to whistle a Chopin piece and
they all follow suit. This seems to spark their desire;
they pair off and start to make love on the benches,
joined by the happy worker.
Next, the men lie down on the seven tombs
of the seven popes. Stretched out on the hard stone,
they begin to sing. It's a brief moment of calm until
one of the tombs starts to move up and down. A man
sitting next to this pope has been listening to him
and taking notes. When the slab moves down again,
the "pope" climbs off and the "therapist" takes his
place. A woman comes rushing over to one of the
popes announcing that she has returned, but before
she gets a reaction from him, he falls into his tomb.
Later the women replace the men on the slabs, not
as popes but as ordinary women getting ready for
bed. They climb up on the tombs where they pro-
ceed to put on their night gowns, brush their teeth,
shave their legs, and chatter with each other before
pulling up the covers and saying good night. Further
antics ensue. Our attention turns to the loud noise of
large bags being thrown out of the top windows of
the Pope's Palace. The men run over and unpack the
bags to discover white priestly robes, cardinal's hats
and vestments. They gingerly lift them into the
washing machine while searching for exact change.
As the clothes are spinning a group of women sta-
tioned on top the palace walls throw things at them,
French fries, among other objects.
These are just a few examples of
Papperlapapp's burlesque treatment of the popes
and their fourteenth century monument, symbols of
religious and political power. As the show proceeds,
there are long quiet moments during which little
happens, but for a piano and bass playing softly or
the songs, the beautiful solos, and choral work of
the performers as they move slowly around the
stage in the company of Bach, Chopin, Haydn,
Liszt, Mozart, Erik Satie, and Wagner. At times the
show slows almost to a standstill, and these long
pauses between antics, caused a number of audience
members to leave, loudly voicing their protests as
they clamored down the stairs. This was unfortunate
and disturbing to those of us in the audience who are
fans of Marthaler's music theatre and who enjoy the
slow pace and the voices of his actors who are all
accomplished musicians and singers.
Whereas Papperlapapp played to mixed
reviews, Marthaler's other festival offering Schutz
vor der Zukunft (Se protger de l'avenir), received
unanimous critical and public reviews. For those
Papperlapapp. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.
17
happy few who saw it (seats were at a premium and
there were very few of them), it was an unforget-
table evening. Marthaler and his team had created
the piece for the 2005 Vienna Festival and present-
ed it at the Otto-Wagner Hospital in Vienna where
many children had been the victims of eugenics
experiments performed on them by the Nazis from
1940 to 1945. Schutz vor der Zukunft is dedicated to
the memory of these children.
To recreate in Avignon an experience sim-
ilar to the presentation at the hospital in Vienna, was
not an easy task for Marthaler and his team. As it
turned out, their choice to use the Collge
Champfleury, not far from the ramparts, proved to
be an excellent one. The school's classrooms, out-
door areas, gym, and cafeteria quickly became the
corridors and rooms of the infamous hospital. Upon
arrival at the Collge, the audience was invited to
climb the stairs to visit classrooms in which archival
documents, letters from parents to the director of the
hospital, lists of the children who were exterminat-
ed, and other evidence of the horrors these children
had to undergo were displayed. Here and there a
stuffed bear or a child's toy was strategically placed
as mementos to these lost children. Downstairs, we
found ourselves in a large room filled with long
tables covered with white paper tablecloths, dirty
cups with bits of the contents still in them, and water
canisters. Perhaps these are the remains of lunch
time at the school or the hospital where the children
were kept. Or maybe there had been a going away
party, or a tourist convention here? It is not clear.
We sit at the tables wondering what to expect.
In front of us, a master of ceremonies steps
up to a podium decorated in red and white, the col-
ors of Austria. He greets us in French: "Mesdames,
et messieurs, bienvenus notre runion." (Welcome
to our meeting.) A meeting for what and for whom?
Apparently, we are in the hotel business as the
speaker tells us that hotel business is doing well and
that the 2009 numbers are good. He seems to lose
his thread when he moves on to other numbers, the
numbers of children who were treated at the hospi-
tal, for example. As if to distract us from this reve-
lation, clowns appear to entertain us with their
comic turns and a brass band parades merrily by as
the speeches become increasingly disturbing with
their talk of biological solutions and ways to inter-
rupt procreation. We now move on to the outside
and wander around the garden where videos play
and documents on music stands reveal more details
taken from the children's dossiers; details of when
and in which section of the hospital they were kept
and when and how they died. We are given time to
sit on benches and reflect on these atrocities before
once more visiting the classrooms in which the
actors are reading from more documents that further
catalogue the reasons for the children's being put
Schutz vor der Zukunft, directed by Christoph Marthaler. Photo: Courtesy of the Avignon Festival.
18
into this hospital. They were burdens on their par-
ents; they were biologically inferior, anti-social,
genetically defective, and hard to handle.
For the final section of this three part
requiem, we are back in the gymnasium, but this
time on the other side of the podium, seated on ris-
ers, in front of a closed curtain. It is time to hear the
eye witness accounts from the doctors and nurses
who committed these crimes, read by Marthaler's
actors. We hear documents that gave permission to
euthanize children up to the age of sixteen, others
legitimizing the means of extermination, and letters
from parents begging the administration to let them
see their children or bring them home for holidays.
The curtain opens and all of the actors are gathered
in the now empty gymnasium. One of them sits at
the piano playing a melody while he puts on a
child's mask. The others join him. Wearing the faces
of these lost children, they perform an extraordinary
and memorable dance of torturers and victims. As
always with Marthaler and his multi-talented com-
pany, there is the important dimension of musical
compositions, pieces by Berg, Schumann, and
Gustave Mahler, among them, sung and played
throughout this unforgettable ceremony dedicated to
the memory of the children who lives were taken
from them. But what about the future? How can we
protect ourselves from a future that would allow
such atrocities to happen again? Schutz vor der
Zukunft makes it abundantly clear that we must
remain alert in the face of the unspeakable.
La Casa de la Fuerza, conceived, written,
and performed by Anglica Liddell and the mem-
bers of her Madrid-based theatre company, was
equally strong in its condemnation of crimes against
humanity. In this case, the violent treatment of
women by men, and specifically the abduction,
rape, and murder of hundreds of women in Ciudad
Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, in Mexico since
1993. Virtually unknown in France, Anglica
Liddell was this year's discovery with two shows,
La Casa de la Fuerza (The House of Force and
Strength), and El Ano de Ricardo.
Liddell first conceived of La Casa de la
Fuerza in 2008 when she was going through an
especially difficult time in her personal life. She had
lost everybody and everything she loved and she
was afraid and very angry. She decided to join a
gym where she was able to lose herself in strength
training and where she eventually was able to
understand and confront her "house of loneliness, a
place where you compensate for spiritual weariness
with physical exhaustion. A place where there is no
love, where one practices how not to feel in order to
make up for a surfeit of feeling, a place of humilia-
tion and frustration." (Anglica Liddell, quoted in
the festival program).
In Avignon, Liddell built her house on a
mostly empty stage at the Clotre des Carmes. The
set is composed of a simple table with three chairs,
pots of flowers, oranges under the table, and bags of
something in the back of the stage. The rest of the
stage is bare. A little girl stands next to her pink toy
airplane and reads to us in Spanish: "No mountain,
no forest, no desert can deliver us from the evil that
others are preparing for us." She sweetly bids the
audience good night and pedals off the stage in her
miniature airplane, leaving us to begin an exhilarat-
ing and emotionally wrenching five and one half
hour journey with Anglica and her excellent cast.
La Casa de la Fuerza is divided into three
parts: Intoxication, Anger, and Consolation. Not
much happens in part one. Three women in long ruf-
fled dresses (blue and pink for two of them, black
for Anglica) sit at the table, smoke endlessly and
down one beer after the other. They are telling each
other stories of their daily humiliations and sharing
tales of the male dominated world in which they
live. As they talk, Anglica's personal story begins
to unfold. "I was in love. He beat me to a pulp. I felt
rage and loss of power," she says. "We had to sepa-
rate." She is left, a battered woman suffering the ter-
rible pain of loss of control and loneliness, a pain
that she and her "sisters" are trying to drown with
just one more beer. The arrival of a Mariachi band
might cheer them up but the song that they sing
together is one of inescapable sadness. The only
moments of pleasure for these women, beyond
smoking and drinking, lie in the ritual of washing
their entire body with lemons. Slowly and lovingly
squeezing lemons on her face, her hair, her arms,
her neck, her breasts, and her legs, one of the
women enjoys a brief respite from her feelings of
emptiness. As part one comes to a close, we watch
the women take off their tops and begin to lift
weights. It is an arresting image of bare breasted
women slowly strengthening their bodies in order to
better confront the male dominated world around
them.
Part two, Anger, begins with a six minute
video that Anglica made in a hotel room in Venice
where she went in January 2009 after leaving her
lover who had beaten her so severely. She is emo-
tionally drained and living in fear. "Love is dead.
19
Art is dead," she tells the camera. Her anguish and
despair are real. Liddell does not shrink from open-
ing old wounds literally and figuratively. She cuts
herself and shows us the blood on the white cloths
she uses to soak up the blood dripping down her
knees. She hands the cloths to the other women and
begins to run around the stage, screaming her rage,
in the dark, while her sisters hand her cans of beer
as she runs by. Exhausted, all three women lie on the
ground with the bloody shrouds on their faces. The
physical strength of these women is impressive.
They are able to drag heavy bags of coal out onto
the stage and spread it around. One of them falls
down in a pile and covers herself up with the coal,
burying herself and her hopes under sharp pieces of
black coal. Wearing long white dresses, they per-
form snatches of dialogue from Chekhov's The
Three Sisters but instead of Moscow, their desired
destination is Mexico.
After a half hour intermission. we return to
a stage filled with orange crosses, a Ford Fiesta cov-
ered with flowers, and part three, Consolation. We
are in Mexico and three Mexican women tell their
stories of what happened to them and to the other
women in Ciudad Juarez. "They threatened to kill
me if I refused," says one. " I don't dare leave my
home anymore," says another. "People are killing
each other in Mexico." Their stories are devastating,
stories of kidnapped women, raped and murdered
for no reason. They are brave and determined
women. "I will disobey," one of them shouts, and
another claims her right to be free from violence.
They welcome Anglica and her sisters, and dress
them in long colorful dresses with white lace on top.
They all form a circle around a group of small clay
figures, the future sons of one of the Mexican
women who is pregnant. Suddenly a giant of a man
appears from the wings. He is Juan Carlos Heredia,
the strongest man in Spain. As if to prove his
strength, he picks up the car and throws it across the
stage. He does the same with two huge beer kegs
and a very heavy jar. He is powerful yet gentle and
caring. He sits on the sofa and covers himself with
the little clay figures. Perhaps he is Liddel's ideal
man whose power has been tamed at last.
Anglica Liddell calls the theatre company
she founded seventeen years ago Atra Bilis Teatro, a
theatre of black bile, a theatre devoted to darkness
and despair. It is an uncompromising theatre that is
fully engaged in the conflicts of our time with pas-
sion, anger, and conviction.
In a much lighter vein, Massimo Furlan's
1973 takes the form of a re-enactment of a variety
show, the Eurovision Singing Contest which was
very popular in the 1970s at a time when TV variety
shows were just beginning. Broadcast live each year
La Casa de la Fuerza, conceived and directed by Anglica Liddell. Photo: Bernard Palazon.
20
from a different host country with only one contest-
ant per country allowed to compete, it was a much
awaited event each year.
On an empty stage, with a large screen in
the middle and two bouquets of flowers on either
side, the show is about to begin. It's April 1973 and
it's Luxembourg's turn to host the contest.
Eurovision and Radio Tele Luxembourg, Concours,
1973, in big letters, appear on the TV screen. The
first contestant, Marion Runy from Finland, is
announced, and out comes Massimo from behind
the screen in appropriate dress and wig to sing in
Finish for the audience. The next contestant is
Fernando Tordo from Portugal. It's Massimo again,
the quick change artist, singing in Portuguese, fol-
lowed by Zdravko Colin from Yugoslavia,
Mocedades from Spain wearing a long green skirt
and black wig, and Anne-Marie David, from
Luxembourg in a red dress and black wig, Nicole
from Belgium singing "Baby Baby" in a purple
jump suit with flared trousers is again Massimo, but
this time he shares the stage with a real woman.
Massimo convincingly portrays all of the contest-
ants and it is great fun to relive this special, simpler
time with him, a time when entertainers were not so
image conscious and self absorbed. Popular singers
were heroic figures to Massimo as a boy and he has
created 1973 hoping to recapture some of the excite-
ment he felt when he and his sister would eagerly
await the yearly show.
But 1973 is not meant to be faithful repro-
duction of the TV show or exact copies of the orig-
inal singers. Massimo is well aware that he is not a
great singer. He had to learn the songs phonetically,
and he knows that his delivery is far from perfect;
that he never quite gets it right. He is Pino Tozzi,
Furlan's alter ego, a failed Italian crooner who has
appeared in his other shows, a bit of a bumbling fel-
low he invented a few years ago. What interests him
is to investigate the realm of memory. By revis-
iting his childhood memories, recapturing and
r ei nt er pr et i ng t hem, he is able to create a
special universe t hat is a sort of re-make of the
past. Towards t h e end of the show, Pi no
To z z i i nt r oduc e s his father Umberto Tozzi
to us. He i s act ual l y Mar c Aug, a well
known anthropologist who had been sitting in the
audience. Chairs are brought out on the stage and a
panel discussion takes place on the subject of how
popular heroes are made and the difference between
the concepts of idol and icon. A blond Swedish gui-
tarist who was holding forth earlier on socio-politi-
cal issues, joins Umberto Tozzi to further discuss
the subject. Pino Tozzi sits at the end of the row,
staring into space, lost perhaps in his childhood
memories.
Massimo Furlan's 1973. Photo: Pierre Nydegger.
21
Gardenia, directed by Alain Platel and
Frank Van Laecke, and presented by Les ballets C
de la B, introduced audiences to a fantastic group of
former transvestite performers who have come out
of retirement to share with us moments in their
lives, present as well as past. The idea for the show
came from Vanessa Van Durme, a well known
Flemish actress, now sixty-two, who has been per-
forming her monologue Regarde maman, je danse,
for five years, in which she tells of her sex change.
Inspired by the film Yo soy asi, about the closing of
the Gardenia cabaret for transvestites in Barcelona
after forty years, Vanessa assembled a remarkable
cast of six transsexual and transvestite friends, to
join her in making a musical tribute to those who
performed in the cabaret. They are accompanied by
an actress Griet Debacker and a dancer Timur
Magomedgadzjeyev. Musical numbers from Ravel's
Bolero to Cucurrucucu Paloma, Forever Young, and
Over the Rainbow provided a perfect accompani-
ment to their presentation.
Presented outside of Avignon proper, in the
Salle de spectacles de Vedene, Gardenia was a must
see at this year's festival. Handsomely dressed in a
Bordeaux colored men's suit, with black patent
leather shoes, Vanessa walks over to a microphone
and asks the audience to stand up for a moment of
silence in memory of those performers from the
Gardenia cabaret who are no longer with us. We all
stood up, of course. The curtain opens on a large
stage with nine chairs lined up around a parquet
floor. Vanessa introduces us to a group of six former
cabaret performers, most of them over the age of
sixty, each with an extraordinary moniker such as
Lilie Chatte en l'air and Gina de la Rio la
Voluptueuse. They are dressed in conventional
men's suits. They hold hands and smile at us. They
are shown to their seats by Timur, who seems to be
their acolyte. They are stooped and they walk with
difficulty. They shuffle as they try to make their way
up the raked stage, barely able to reach their seats.
In a word, they are old. Seated in their chairs, they
barely manage to move to the music with a few
hand gestures. Happily, this state of affairs does not
last long. Suddenly they get up and begin to take off
their shoes, their jackets, and pants. Underneath
their men's suits, they are wearing flowered print
dresses, colorful outfits in oranges and pinks. They
are transformed in front of our eyes. One of them
shoots us a coy look. Others pose for a photo op.
The stage is covered with their discarded clothes
and for a moment, we believe that they are young
again. We watch them at their make up tables trans-
forming themselves into the roles they used to play,
Gardenia, directed by Alain Platel and Frank van Laecke. Photo: Christian Altorfer.
22
sparkles and all. Out of their bags come fantastical
wigs, huge fake eyelashes and shiny earrings. Each
one has a distinct personality. In white sparkling
sequined gowns and twenties flapper dresses, they
proudly parade up and down the stage, happy to be
strutting their stuff one last time.
It is not always clear what role Timur plays
in this cabaret, nor how Griet Debacker fits into the
scene, but they do perform an impressive dance
number together, a violent apache dance with the
man throwing the woman on the ground, and drag-
ging her across the stage and the woman fighting
back with equal strength. Gardenia is not a docu-
mentary. It is a musical tribute to a way of life with
its pain, loneliness, and lost illusions. A world in
which, as Vanessa says "our sparkles on our dresses
are our armor, and our wigs, our safety helmets." At
play's end we hear again the memorable "some-
where over the Rainbow, dreams really do come
true." For these wonderful performers, they certain-
ly did, if only for the time of their performance.
Both 1973 and Gardenia are light hearted
and humorous pieces. Gisle Vienne's This is How
You Will Disappear, is dark, mysterious, and disqui-
eting. The set, a forest made of the trunks and
branches of real trees, is stunning to look at. A
soundscape of disturbing noises, static, cymbals,
and other crackling noises hints at dangers to come.
There is something threatening about this land-
scape. It is misty and sinister. There are live birds,
an owl and a buzzard, that fly through the trees.
Something evil is going to happen. At first it is hard
to see what is happening in the woods. It looks like
there is a woman in white, lying on the ground but
she is barely perceptible through the haze. There
also seems to be a person digging in the earth, bury-
ing something. The woman wakes up and begins to
stretch. It soon becomes clear that she is warming
up to begin her physical exercises. Her trainer puts
her through her rigorous paces. She executes her
moves with precision and grace. She is the perfect
athlete. Another figure appears, decked out in gold
lame and playing his guitar. We learn that he has just
murdered his girlfriend and escaped into the forest
either to hide or kill himself. Instead he is beaten to
death by the trainer and his body is dumped in a
river. He is the fallen rock star. The trainer is the fig-
ure of authority and order who is suddenly con-
fronted with primitive impulses and the chaos
around him. What began as perfection and beauty
ends in violence. This is How You Will Disappear
explores the relationship between these three arche-
types as they make their way into the hidden recess-
es of the forest in a landscape of light, mist, and
sound. It is fascinating to watch.
Philippe Quesne's Big Bang, Studio
Gisle Vienne's This is How You Will Disappear. Photo: Courtesy of the Avignon Festival.
23
Studio Vivarium's Big Bang, directed by Philippe Quesne. Photo: Courtesy of the Avignon Festival.
24
Vivarium's latest piece, tackles the history of
humanity and the mysteries of evolution from the
ice age to our times, in a series of short scenes. Into
a glossy white landscape with a table and three
chairs and two very tall klieg lights, comes Isabelle,
a familiar Studio Vivarium face from past perform-
ances. She sits behind the table and rearranges the
letters BANG to spell BANG backwards. The letters
are big and white. Is this the explosion that led to the
formation of the universe? Or the "Bang !!!" of
comic book frames? It seems that the earth did not
begin with a bang but with a whimper. Time passes;
nothing much is happening. Voices are heard com-
ing from behind the wall. Words are barely audible.
"Gonfler, Gonfler." "Blow it up," and "Pousse le
petit bouton." "Push the little button." Other compa-
ny members come in, sit, look at books and tapes,
hum tunes, discuss something, and point at some-
thing else.
Lights dim and we hear voices, rumbling
sounds, gulps, and hickups. Something big and
white and glossy is moving slowing across the
stage. It looks like large animal wearing a fake
white fur, a sort of polar bear crawling toward the
audience. Another, larger one moves forward, and
then another and another. Some of them have brown
coats. Their leader tries to get them to stand up and
move on by playing a game with them. History
marches on and the actors move on to their next
roles. Wearing fake beards they turn into cavemen
huddled around a fake wood fire, grilling their meat
over a red light, on which they warm their hands.
Fast forward to our time, they bring in large inflat-
able rubber rafts, Challenger 1, 2, 3, and 4 written
on their sides. Boxes of Challengers pile up on the
stage. Before long the entire stage is filled with
inflatable rafts. Now the back wall opens up to
reveal another stage containing an island and sounds
of lapping water. There is also water dripping from
the ceiling. We hear the voice of Neil Armstrong and
see astronauts in the distance. There are also men in
green jumpsuits carrying trees across the stage in
the back. Three of the cast climb up on the little
island and are happily joined by Herms, the com-
pany dog, with a bone in his mouth. Is this the ship-
wrecked nucleus of survivors who will remake the
world? If so, there is hope for the Vivarium Studio
merry band has once more succeeded in recreating
the world with their special brand of whimsy.
This year's Avignon Festival presented
fifty shows in twenty different venues over a period
of twenty-one days. Ninety-five percent of the seats
were filled for the first time in the history of the fes-
tival, a festival that increasingly unveils new works
to its very large audience. Surely this can be seen as
a confirmation of the choices the festival directors
made this year.
Another July inside the ramparts: the
labyrinth of cobblestone streets, all walls covered
with colorful posters and leaflets handed out and
discarded, always the sound of applause some-
where. The hottest heat wave in decades scorched
the former Papal city only cooling off a bit when the
northern mistral blew. People-watching is part of the
"face value" experience, observing the youthful
actors and crowds in the streets. Most theatre com-
panies are hoping to be chosen, picked up for tour-
ing, which reminds us lest we forget that Avignon is
also a market. The festival is still divided into
Avignon Off and the Main IN Festival, making gen-
eralizations difficult. The IN is more elitist and
intellectual, offering the best of the avant-garde
European theatre, often performed in the original
language with sometimes illegible subtitles. It is
more open to experimental staging that supersedes
the textor paradoxically adaptations of master-
piece novels. The French critics call it the "non-
thtre." Where is the text? The OFF is for a good-
natured, easygoing audience, prone to choose funny
one-person shows or basic entertainment. I saw
some thirty-five productions out of more than a
thousand in two weeks. As a sign of the times, it is
harder to figure out the direction in which theatre is
going, what trends are prevalent or relevant perhaps.
Let me begin with my Best of the OFF, nominations,
and final awards: Grand Palme d'OrSimples
Mortels; Jury PrizePenetrator; Best staging and
ensembleLe Bouc; Best female performance
Les Combats de la Reine; Best male performance
Squash.
Simples Mortels (Mortal Coils) is born of a
2003 sociology and fiction text by Philippe de la
Genardire adapted by talented Alain Timar of
Thtre des Halles. It is a moving oratorio for five
voices and bodies (two women, three men) occur-
ring mostly in a dusty hangar after some kind of
apocalypse, a no-man's land of our contemporary
civilization. How did we get there and why? From
World War Two to 9/11nations, cities blur. There
is no real dialogue, only remembrances of the deba-
cle of the West in the last decades from AIDS to
globalization. There were Algeria, Bosnia, Rwanda
and more recently in the near East, the anti-Arab
quagmire, now cyber society all seen through the
media in our own living room. There is a sickening
contrast between toxic commercial consumerism
(somewhere life is beautiful), and the horror we
have created: ethnic wars and terrorism. The con-
trast is between idiotic reality shows overlapping
with electronic surveillance. Anton Bruckner's
brooding music contributes to the fascination of the
spell. Paul Camus is as remarkable as always and
Yael Ethadab, in a red dress, one high-heel missing,
a double of Juliette Binoche, in her voice something
like an incantation: Cassandra's third millennium.
Why liveamok? Yet, they seem to want to touch
and stare, reaching out at the audiencefor hope,
perhaps.
Penetrator is obviously ambiguous, literal,
and suggestivetaking place in an anti-bunker or
tank bomb invented by the US Air Force during the
Gulf War. It is also a torture method used by them
and us. Scottish author Anthony Neilson is at the
center of "in yer face" theatre movement, and his
explosive play is in the vein of Ravenhill or
Trainspotting. Two buddies live in London in a
small pad and are part of the nightlife, goofing
around, horny, verbally abusive, dancing, smoking,
boozing plus indulging in misogynistic rambling.
There is a knock and Dick enters, a survivor from
Baghdad, a psychopath, and a deserter who wants to
stay a night in their asylum. He starts by question-
ing Allen, the young one, who doesn't have a girl-
friend, about his sexual preference. Are they both
gay? Suddenly there is no exit. What did happen
when they were younger; what happened later in the
Army? The mystery casts a mood of tender then
brutal desire. What ensues is a battle with a danger-
ous hunter's knife. Thanks to the masterful staging
by Fabienne Matre for Torquemada Cie the sexual
impact is devastating. Antoine Segard is totally out-
standing, a sort of French Colin Farrell. What you
see is a knockout experience. Bravo.
Le Bouc (The Billygoat) is a scapegoat
involved with the inception of Greek tragedy. "We
wish you a pleasant moment" is the sweet address to
the audience. Actually this is based on another
nightmare, Katzelmacher (1969) by Rainer Werner
Fassbindercursive, compact, and filmic. In a
small German town, a young Greek immigrant
becomes the object of women's erotic fantasies and
hence quickly of persecution by the male members
of the lower classclannish, gross, rough. From the
Avignon OFF 2010: Avignon, mon amour
Jean Decock
25
start it offers a group portrait of German white trash
on a sofa behind a screen, with, in the background
in the dark, a passing, screaming train. For them a
heart is a breast; they slap their girl around to stop
her idiotic laughter; they fight amongst themselves
but the immigrant is a danger to be eradicated. At
the end, after the Greek is killed, appears the sil-
houette of the next immigrant bait, the Turk. The
mood is sustained by a sweet and deadly music from
a Hollywood B-noir film.
Les Combats d'une Reine (Fighting Like a
Queen) is about real woman Griselidis Real's (sic)
famous defender of prostitutes in Europe. The mag-
nificent Judith Magre plays the elderly Real, direct-
ed by Franoise Courvoisier. We meet Real at three
stages (played by three actresses) of her life: as a
sex worker at thirty-five in Munich, sentenced for a
year in jail; at fifty on a sidewalk at the height of her
career; at seventy-five fighting cancer but writing
poetry as well as her autobiography (Black is a
Color, 1974). In it she argues that love for sale is not
immoral. Real was buried, but having reached
greater fame, she was relocated to a higher class
cemetery very close to Borges and not far from her
archenemy Calvin, who was determined to eradicate
her profession. "Working with your genitals is not
less demeaning than with your arms," Real
observed. Anti-conformist and proud, she promoted
individual freedom in total honesty and dignity. A
fighter, Real battled despair as she became an
admirable compassionate being. "Is it better to pros-
titute one's ass than one's soulthe first is the clean-
est," she wrote.
A duo of male performers appear in Squash
Anthony Neilson's Penetrator of In Yer Face Ensemble. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
26
by British author Andrew Payne. Two buddies in
their early thirties share all their secrets in the lock-
er room. All is black and white with a large-size
mirror in the back reflecting the first rows of the
audience. The actors seem to be training in your lap,
tanned in their white gear. Later they strip, punch,
sweat, showernot to worry; the little hard ball is
imaginarybouncing between truth, lies, and
betrayal. Both are married, but when Ryan (Charle
Dupont) asks Greg (Clment Manuel, actor, direc-
tor, and producer) who is more honest, to cover his
affair by providing an alibi, they become enemies.
Their sexual drives and values clash, marriage
becomes an issue. The endgame involves a reversal
of premises. Is it better to live your libido or repress
it and live a normal life? The timing is perfect; the
company is from Belgium with rock music by Greg
Remy. Cheers.
It is hard to detect this year's trend. History,
liberation, family come to mind at first. At last, after
half a century, the Frenchnot keen on transparen-
cyseem ready to reassess their involvement in the
last war they experienced, the liberation of their
colonies, and especially Algeria. There was the inci-
dent in Cannes last May, about hors-la-loi (outlaws,
actually freedom fighters, "moudjahidins") seen
from the Algerian side (remember Pontecorvo's
Battle of Algiers). Here we have two views of a sen-
sitive issue. Very harsh is Manuel Pratt's Algrie,
Contingent 1956: five years of research, testimony,
and interviews in France, summed-up by a trio of
actors, two of which play French soldiers during
military occupation. Pratt is the leftist anti-war
peacenik, the other defending France's dominion
and flag. We see the familiar patriot versus pacifist
dilemma. Between them stands a young Algerian
Le Bouc (The Billygoat) of La Comdie de Reims. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
27
woman, who was raped by men who had eyes like
animalsin a country where innocence is quickly
lost. Slowly they move towards the retelling of
atrocities committed on both sides with the French
using Gestapo torture techniques.
1962, by Mohamed Kacimi and directed
by Valrie Grail, is a surprisingly delicate and poet-
ic play set against a background of old sepia slides
of the White City emerging from the sea. A man and
a woman with a suitcase appear. She is returning
from France to Algeria, her/their country; he is an
Arab in Marseille. They reminisce about their happy
childhood in a southern Berber village at the edge of
the desert (where a Chinese teacher was teaching
French). Come 1962, the celebration of independ-
ence is short lived; a severe, painful repression by
Islamic fundamentalists begins. They are taken to
prison but he escapes the National Liberation Front
forces. Too much hope is crushed by bitter disillu-
sion. The play is a melancholic lament between two
people and nations that should be closely tied if it
were possible. But it isn't.
Far away echoes of occupied territories:
another French colony Haiti narrated by its greatest
poet Aim Csaire, Cahiers d'un retour au pays
natal. Ruddy Sylaire from Martinique (Wabuza
Compagnie) mellows the outcry of rage for survival
and freedom with an evocation of the beauty of the
island. The Bamboo instrumental music and mood
are by Laurent Phenis. Not far from Haiti is Cuba in
Cuestiones con Ernesto Che Guevara by
Argentinean Jose Pablo Feinmann. In a small school
in 1967, in the Bolivian forest, in the town of La
Higuera, an American reporter Andes Cabreira man-
ages to talk to El Commandante. He apparently
received a $25,000 dollars from the Guggenheim to
do so. His questions are incisive about justice in
time of war. Do we know who Che was? The
Andrew Payne's Squash, directed by Clment Manuel. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
28
romantic icon of several generations to comeor
the executioner who reads Hegel, Marx, and Lenin.
There is talk of fear, hunger, hate, later apathy, and
resignation. The play turns more towards a political
debate. Gelas's direction at Le Chne Noir unfortu-
nately stresses the macho tonality. Only Olivier
Sitruk, a film actor, stands out, maybe because of
his mystical quality. Then there was a one-man ren-
dering of Haim Nahman Bialik's poem "In the City
of Slaughter." The city is Kishinev, then in
Bessarabia, the year 1903, where a notorious
pogrom took placea century ago, long before the
Shoah. Director Zohar Wexler (Cie Le Reseda)
returns to where his grandparents came from and
fled, along with thousands of others. Slides and
images, past and present, dissolve into Hebrew
words, the sacred language of the Torah, and into
contemporary profanity. Strangely the cult of the
dead is also in reverse that of retaliation, perpetual
hate and revenge. An admirable and moving tribute.
Looking at the long list of other produc-
tions, let me separate the French productions from
translated imports. On the top of the list stands
Claudel's splendid masterpiece L'Echange. His only
"American" play, set on the east Carolina shore has
become his most performed due to the sumptuous
richness of his poetic prose and the four symbolic
characters: Marthe is French and the wife of Louis
Lane. Together they are an apparently loving cou-
ple; he however is attracted to Lechy, the actress.
Thomas Pollock Nagoire is well supplied with art
and money. Louis wants freedom and therefore
becomes brutal and cruel, while for Marthe love is
the devotion to serve. The couple, played by Hugo
Dillon and Aurelia Arto, is amazing. Serge Catanese
(Tivolio Theatre) managed to get the best out of his
cast, even if his staging is lackluster.
Jean-Claude Sguin (Thtre du Loup
Blanc) had the courage to resuscitate Voltaire's first,
now long forgotten tragedy Oedipe (1718). He is
respectful of the Alexandrine verses even if the
clothes are modern and ageless. A young traveler
approaching a country devastated by horror (Haiti
or Gaza) whose population is looking for a scape-
goat to release the epidemic curse. Voltaire's hero is
innocent (tall and lanky Laurent Menoret in leather
pants) facing the usual accusers: the great priest,
Tiresias, and Philoctete, previously Queen Jocasta's
earlier lover. Superb Marie Grudzinsky is not so
matronly.
The figure of a rebel appears in two one-
person shows. This is a form I am not usually keen
on, but I recant nere, as these are impressive and
well worth seeing: An almost solo performance is
Moi, Caravaggio aka Michelangelo Merisi, adapted
and performed by Cesare Capitani from Dominique
Fernandez's biographic novel La Course l'abme
(2003) for Cie Comme il vous plaira, the narrative
and confession of a genius presently recognized
worldwide by a series of exhibitions in 2010. He is
revealed as provocative, antisocial, immoral, and bi-
sexual as illustrated by his use of prostitutes and bad
boys to incarnate religious scenes. At first protected
and welcomed, then persecuted in what was not yet
Italy, in search of the absolute, until his mysterious
death on a beach north of Rome (like Pasolini). The
dark, macho interpretation is suffused by the
chiaroscuro of warm black and ochre lighting and
by his soprano companion singing Monteverdi in
subtle counterpoint. Hloise is another impressive
performance by Giovanni Vitello, directed by Bruno
Ladet for Cie Nouvelle. Onysos, le Furieux, is a
homeless nomad who recites, mimes, dances,
trance-like his poetic story of a man who defends
the wretched, the outcasts, the derelicts of the world.
By losing two letters DI-Onysos, the character is cut
from distant mythologiesat the same time as vio-
lent as the apocalyptic present. He is not a god but a
man with a sexual spell over women who becomes
old, then is born again, when he speaks, from
Babylon to Egypt to Ilion (Troy) to the dirty New
York subway where we stand.
On the other hand, there seems to be more
translation and adaptation coming from other
European countries. An expensive, multilingual
super-production coming from Bulgaria is
Casanova, Requiem for Love starring the sex-sym-
bol Vlado Karamazov surrounded by an array of
eight lustful beauties. Not a bad man this Chevalier
de Seingalt, according to the retro-interpretation by
Diana Dobreva (auteur and director). Casanova here
is not a woman hunter, as he falls truly in love each
time: with the Russian widow, the suicidal Italian,
the Asian, the nun, the maid, before he finally sees
the light of eternal love, and dies in the arms of a
young priest. The staging is over-the-top, as is the
acting, the set enrobed with cheap golden lam and
expensive brocade. More seriously, in Le dernier cri
de Constantin (Stanislavski) by Pierre Blaise we
witness the last rehearsal of Othello according to his
famous demonstrative and intriguing method with
actors as marionettes or puppets in a constructivist
cardboard set(Thtre sans Toit).
To end in a lighter and more vulgar mood:
29
La Cuisine d'Elvis (Cooking with Elvis) by British
Lee Hall, is a Mother and Daughter play, in which,
as usual, they don't like each other. There is a father
who's a fat vegetable confined to a wheelchair.
Enter Elvis, wiry and with perfectly sculpted abs.
We soon go from comic to liberating to pathetic as
dessert is served, piping hot, ready to explode.
Remarkable are Laurence Portail as the anorexic
and dominatrix Mom and Benoit Thevenot, the
object of desire. It is interesting to see warm and
gross British humor done with a raspy, French,
hence always abrasive touch (for Fabrique des petits
Hasards). My last applause goes to the best dance
performance in the OFF, Korean Compagnie Seo,
six dancers choreographed by Misook Seo, which is
fluid, a vision of sensual beauty. Life is as water,
you never know where it will flow. Until next year.
30
Lee Hall's La Cuisine d'Elvis (Cooking with Elvis). Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF.
My subtitle is the title of one of the ten
productions selected this year for the annual festival
of theatre from the German-speaking world in
Berlin. Die Schmutzigen, die Hsslichen und die
Gemeinen was adapted by Karin Beier, now
Intendant of the Cologne Schauspielhaus, from the
1976 neo-naturalist prize-winning Italian film by
Ettore Scola.
This is Beier's first invitation to the
Theatertreffen in fourteen years, after two invita-
tions at the beginning of her career, Romeo and
Juliet in 1994 and A Midsummer Night's Dream in
1996. I was fortunate enough to see both of these
memorable productions, the first on tour for an
international Shakespeare festival in London, and
the second at its home theatre in Dsseldorf, where
I made a special trip to see it on the basis of my
excitement about the Romeo. Both remain among
my most cherished memories of the exuberant
German theatre scene of that period.
The current Beier production seems to me
emblematic of this Theatertreffen season in com-
parison to those or ten to fifteen years ago, when
Beier was last seen here. It is hard to exaggerate
how out of place the high-spirited, dazzlingly imag-
inative, movingly theatrical, and conceptually
wide-ranging Midsummer Night's Dream would
appear among the for the most part dark and, I felt,
stunted offerings of the 2010 season. It was certain-
ly the gloomiest and the thinnest Theatertreffen
within my memory.
It is both striking and telling that for the
first time in my memory there was not a single
work from the standard classics among the selected
offerings, not a single work by Shakespeare,
Schiller, Ibsen, Chekhov, or any of the Greeksthe
repertoire that has for decades provided the back-
bone of the German theatre. Their large themes did
not attract even ironic comment among this year's
offerings, which were almost entirely preoccupied
instead with grim studies of contemporary life,
especially among the many victims of the current
economic crisis. It is surely significant that the only
two productions that moved outside the contempo-
rary went no further afield than the last great eco-
nomic crisis, Germany in the early 1930s. Thus,
31
The 2010 Theatertreffenthe Nasty, the Hateful, the Mean
Marvin Carlson
Die Schmutzigen, die Hsslichen und die Gemeinen, directed by Karin Beier. Photo: David Baltzer.
instead of Shakespeare and Chekhov, the historical
figures represented in the 2010 festival were
Horvth and Fallada. This in itself says much about
the stature and vision of the festival this year.
One major difference between the modern
German and American stages, and a difference that
on the whole I admire, is that German theatre audi-
ences expect their theatre to confront the major
social and cultural concerns of the day. It is thus
hardly surprising to find the ongoing global eco-
nomic crises to be a dominant interest on the con-
temporary German stage, as it is in contemporary
German society, and this emphasis is clearly reflect-
ed in this year's selections. Almost all of the new
works are centrally concerned with the current eco-
nomic tensions, as is indicated by such titles as
Dennis Kelly's Love and Money or Elfriede Jelinek's
The Merchant's Contracts: A Business Comedy.
Among these almost uniformly grim pic-
tures of the marginalized and dispossessed victims
of modern capitalism, Beier's production stands in a
number of ways as emblematic. There are occasion-
al touches of humor but these only serve to darken
an already almost unbearably dark story, which the
director herself subtitles "A notably unsympathetic
comedy." The action has been shifted from a Roman
slum to a German one, but the main action is
retained. The ape-like father (Markus John) domi-
nates his thirteen member family sexually, physical-
ly, and above all financially, taunting them by regu-
larly displaying a large roll of bills from which he
occasionally disperses a pitiful amount, for example
to buy a round of beer for the family. It says much
about the tonality of the production that he hides the
money inside the body of a dead rat at the end of a
chain deep down in the family toilet.
The family is composed of a variety of fig-
ures that do not move beyond contemporary
clicha daughter constantly talking on the cell
phone, a gay son who dreams of being a cross-dress-
ing nightclub artist, an aunt obsessed with her fad-
ing sexuality, an abused, alcoholic wife, a half-
senile grandmother in a wheelchair who is alter-
nately petted and abused, and a variety of hangers-
on, generally sitting stupidly watching sales pro-
grams on the ever-running TV or engaging in casu-
al open sexual acts that go unremarked by the rest.
This quarrelsome and self-centered group finally
mobilizes when the father brings home a Chinese
prostitute (which oddly enough he selects out of the
audience, the sole meta-theatrical gesture of the
evening). His wife mixes rat poison with his instant
32
Die Schmutzigen, die Hsslichen und die Gemeinen. Photo: David Baltzer.
mashed potatoes and all watch in pleasure as he eats
and painfully expires. Little is changed, however.
The wife brings in a new partner who immediately
assumes both the money and the domineering man-
nerisms of the former master of the house.
The most interesting element in this
depressing production is the decision of the director
to place almost all of the action in a long metal trail-
er-like dwelling with a series of large picture win-
dows revealing most of its interior to the audience
(the setting is by Thomas Dreissigacker.) As a
result, almost none of the dialogue is actually heard
and the whole sordid history is primarily delivered
in pantomime. On the rare occasions when the out-
side door is opened, one hears only brief sounds
from inside, including usually the command "Shut
the door!" The novelty of this staging admittedly
gives the production an attraction that would be lost
in a more conventional approach. The actors are
impressive in their ability to keep various relation-
ships and developments clear without language, but
this also means that the already rather melodramat-
ic tone of the whole is if anything emphasized. I
found the whole technically impressive, but thin on
most other grounds, including, alas, the aesthetic.
As already mentioned, dn von Hrvth's
Kasimir und Karoline, which opened the festival,
was this year's single offering from the non-contem-
porary theatre, and was clearly selected, like most of
the festival offerings, to reflect contemporary eco-
nomic concerns, in this case through drawing paral-
lels to Germany in the early 1930s when the play
was written and set. This production was directed by
Johan Simons, best known for his work in the
Netherlands with the group Hollandia, which he
founded in 1985 and which gained many awards for
its innovative reworkings of classics, its creation of
new work, its unconventional stagings and use of
found space. Since 1993 he has been regularly
working with the musician Paul Koek, who collab-
orated with him on this Kasimir und Karoline.
In the new century Simons began to direct
regularly in Germany and Switzerland. His Zurich
production of Houellebecq's Elementarteilchen
gained him his first invitation to the Theatertreffen,
in 2005. That same year he began an appointment as
director of the new National Theatre in Ghent. This
year he confirms his European status by following
the legendary Frank Baumbauer, who is retiring
from directing the Munich Kammerspiele. Simon's
Kasimir und Karoline is set, like the original, in a
fun-fair at an Oktoberfest, when its emotionally
33
Angelika Richter in dn von Horvth's Kasimir und Karoline. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
intertwined characters desperately and generally
hopelessly seek emotional and physical stability in a
world that offers little of either. The echoes are con-
tinuous and deeply disturbing between our own con-
temporary society and the depression of the 1930s,
where the chauffeur Kasimir has lost his job, his
hopes, and his love Karoline, who dreams in vain of
finding economic security amid the upper classes
who fly overhead like gods in their (all too vulnera-
ble) dirigibles and regard her and her like only as
objects to stimulate their jaded tastes.
These thematic echoes of our own times
are reinforced musically by a small onstage band,
who on synthesizer, drums, and electric guitar pro-
vide occasional melancholy underscoring and iron-
ic love songs mixing elements of hard rock and off-
key sentimental material from the 1930s. Their cos-
tumes offer a similar grotesque and disturbing mix-
ture, consisting of dark suits, towering white wigs,
and blackface makeup. The passion of the contem-
porary German theatre for blackface is a strange
phenomenon, which cries out for some critical
investigation. When I saw this Kasimir und
Karoline, it was the third evening in a row where I
had seen blackface utilized, in three different major
theatres (the Festspielhaus, the Deutsches Theater,
and the Berliner Ensemble) with three different
well-known directors (Simons, Jan Bosse, and
Michael Thalheimer) doing three widely different
plays (Kasimir und Karoline, The Miser, and
Hebbel's Nibelungen).
Kasimir und Karoline was first conceived,
like much of Simon's work, for a non-traditional
space, in this case a Dutch aircraft hangar. It then
went on to open-air productions in Athens and
Avignon. When Simons was asked to restage it for a
conventional theatre, the Cologne Schauspielhaus,
there was general critical distrust of the project, but
the re-conception was a great success, thanks in no
small part to the impressive setting created by one
of Germany's foremost designers, Bert Neumann.
Neumann's Cologne set is both towering and inti-
mate, but its intimacy is untouched by any warmth
or humanity. At the rear, scaffolding towers upward,
providing higher levels and platforms, while down-
stage a more human area provides a space for the
band and is backed up by a row of upright neon
lights that provide a cold indifferent backing to all
the scenes here. At one side is parked the elegant
automobile that Kasimir drove before losing his job,
a continual onstage reminder of his fallen position,
now used almost entirely for the attempted and
34
Kasimir und Karoline, directed by Johan Simons. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
largely unsuccessful sexual encounters of other
characters. By far the most distinctive feature of the
setting is a set of huge letters on an upper level, cov-
ered with glittering scales and spelling out the
deeply ironic message "ENJOY."
Simons assembled a strong cast to present
Horvth's fallen world. At its center is the bumbling,
bear-like Kasimir of Markus John, basically humane
and loving, but totally unable to understand why his
world has fallen apart. Angelika Richter floats
through the play as Karoline, happily accepting
whatever is thrown at her so long as it offers anoth-
er ride on the rollercoaster. Michael Wittenborn and
Felix Vrtler as slumming capitalists offer little
beyond caricature, but that seems to be all the play
demands of them. Aside from the title characters,
the most outstanding creation is Lina Beckmann's
Emma, the abused girlfriend of the petty gangster
Franz (Carlo Ljubek). Unlike the flighty Karoline,
she seems to have a truly sympathetic feeling for
Kasimir, and indeed most of her suffering fellow-
creatures, and she provides a kind of emotional cen-
ter for the play. This makes her final song, which
strikes the play's last emotional note, all the more
devastating. "Every human being has his own May,"
she softly intones, a platitude that is perfectly in
keeping with the clich banality in which most of
Horvth's characters exist, but the easy optimism of
which is in deep disaccord with the actual existence
we see them leading. Like the "ENJOY" which pro-
vides its background, the song only emphasizes the
darkness of its surrounding world.
The second Theatertreffen offering looked
back again to the early 1930s, when economic insta-
bility was rampant, when the privileged few led
lives of ease and comfort while the rest struggled to
survive in a world of disappearing jobs, dwindling
resources, and cruel social engineering in the name
of efficiency, progress, and profits, with America
looked to as the ideal modelall themes that clear-
ly resonate strongly with German concerns today.
Luk Perceval adapted for the stage a novel of that
era which has recently enjoyed a revival of popular-
ity in Germany, Hans Fallada's Kleiner Mannwas
nun? The most famous previous stage version of
this work reflected a very different cultural context.
This was Peter Zadek's famous revival in Bochum
in 1972, which presented the adventures of the
young clerk Johannes and his new bride Lmmchen
in 1920s Berlin as a saucy, colorful, cabaret-style
35
Luk Perceval's adaptation of Hans Fallada's Kleiner Mannwas nun? Photo: Andreas Pohlmann.
revue of that period, full of exuberance and high
spirits.
Of that reading of the novel almost nothing
remains in the staging Perceval created for the
Munich Kammerspiele but a large glittering period
music machine, an orchestrion, some twelve or fif-
teen feet high, that stands isolated in the center of a
huge dark stage, suggesting less an instrument of
pleasure than some garish altar, to a Moloch per-
haps. The only other scenic element is a continually
projected series of scenes from a 1927 silent film,
Berlin, Sinfonie einer Grostadt (Berlin, Symphony
of a Great City), which provides an appropriate con-
tinual mlange of soulless modern architecture,
milling crowds, grinding machines, rushing traffic,
and ultimately, marching soldiers.
Around this monolith move the young cou-
ple, their friends and their manipulators, presenting
the novel as a kind of story theatre, somewhat in the
style of the famous RSC production of Nicholas
Nickleby, with the actors alternating between pre-
senting scenes theatrically and giving blocks of nar-
rative and descriptive material in the third person.
Occasionally, a single actor will present an entire
brief scene as a solo, giving both background text
and the lines of several characters, as when the pro-
tagonist Johannes (Paul Herwig) does a bravura turn
as a clothing salesman, his indecisive customer, and
the customer's domineering wife, but normally the
presentation is much more straightforward, with
each character clearly differentiated and bridging
material straightforwardly presented.
The excellent Munich ensemble provides
an engaging and moving retelling of what becomes
in Perceval's reading a dark morality of ever dimin-
ishing hopes and possibilities for its young couple in
this cruel economic world, despite their love, their
basic goodness, and the support of a circle of often
quirky, but basically good-hearted friends. Only
Herwig and Annette Paulmann as his pregnant girl-
friend Lmmchen (and then as the mother of his
child) play single characters throughout. The other
seven members of the company play a large variety
of roles, in some cases both male and female. For
the most part these are close to caricature, quite in
keeping with the somewhat morality play feeling of
the whole, but a number of the more central charac-
ters are developed with an impressive nuance and
engagement. Particularly successful are Johannes's
mentor and supporter, the self-sufficient Heilbutt of
Andr Jung, Johannes's outrageous and depraved
mother, played by Gundi Ellert, and her on-and-off
36
Perceval's adaptation Kleiner Mannwas nun? Photo: Andreas Pohlmann.
lover, the curiously sympathetic gangster
Jachmanm, winningly performed by Hans Kremer.
Although the playing style is on the whole realistic,
one or more members of the company will occa-
sionally be picked out by a spotlight to deliver a
period song. There are only four of these, each sev-
eral times repeated as a kind of leitmotif of the pro-
duction. All seem to come from the period. One is
an advertising jingle, really a hymn of praise to con-
sumption, for the department store where Johannes
works upon his arrival in Berlin. Another is a simi-
lar kind of patter song celebration of the city's prod-
ucts. The other two advocate a kind of mindless
optimism in the face of the darkening conditions.
"Keep smiling, dear" (this chorus sung in English)
and what is clearly the ironic theme-song of the pro-
duction, which claims that "everyone makes it once"
and "there is a little bit of happiness somewhere in
the world." The desperate and fragile optimism
expressed here powerfully and precisely repeats that
of the final song in Kasimir und Karoline:
"Everyone has his own May."
The next offering was another study of
contemporary German society, this time set among
the more financially secure but no less angst-ridden
middle-class suburban families. Diebe (Thieves) is
the most recent work of the popular dramatist Dea
Loher. Her previous works, appearing almost annu-
ally during the past decade, have generally dealt in
a rather dark, realistic/poetic manner with contem-
porary social and political concerns, and her newest
play continues that orientation, but with some sec-
tions in a surprisingly different tone. The characters
are the same troubled and rootless modern subur-
banites she has depicted before, but their situations
are more whimsical and a number of them are given
an unusual comic edge, in certain scenes turning
even to dark farce.
The play's structure is complex. It is made
up of thirty-seven brief scenes, following the stories
of six men and women, at first seemingly separate,
but gradually revealing unexpected connections,
common concerns or overlapping metaphoric refer-
ences, rather in the manner of an Altman film. Three
Dea Loher's Diebe, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
37
interlocking narratives lie at the center of the action.
First, there is the mysterious recluse Finn Tomason
(Jrg Pose), who covers the walls of his room with
what he supposes to be the records of his life but
which in fact is only his infinitely repeated name,
his tormented sister Linda (Judith Hofmann), who
deals with her loneliness and isolation by inventing
an imaginary family, and their father Erwin
(Markwart Mller-Elmau), who is chafing under the
restrictions of an old persons' home. Second, there is
the aspiring young businesswoman Monika
Tomason (no actual relation to the already men-
tioned family) and her husband Thomas, played by
Barbara Heyman and Daniel Hoevels. She dreams
of learning Dutch and managing a supermarket in
Holland, only to find her life and marriage dissolv-
ing along with her dreams when in fact the Dutch
take over her own company and fire her. It is of
course in this section of the play that Loher deals
most directly with the social concerns that mark so
much of this year's festival offerings.
The third grouping provides the most con-
sistently comic tone to the evening. One of the
major uniting elements of the play is a mysterious
wolf prowling the neighborhood and first sighted by
Linda. Eventually this is revealed in fact to be a per-
son, the undertaker Erbarmen, German for Mercy,
(played by the justly much-admired Helmut
Mooshammer), who is prowling around the home of
Herr and Frau Schmitt, delightfully rendered with
more than a touch of a married couple from Feydeau
or Ionesco by Bernd Moss and Katrin Klein.
Erbarmen at last reveals his interest to the terrified
couple. He is having an affair with a young woman
Mira (Olivia Grser) who is obsessed with finding
her unknown father, an anonymous sperm donor.
The pseudo-wolf Erbarmen has tracked down
Schmitt, the missing father, to confront him.
This most farcical of the play's situations in
fact offers its broadest range of tonalities. An impor-
tant part of the production's effect is its use of music
to bridge in and out of scenes, and the production
uses almost exclusively popular American songs of
the 1950s, often with ironic reference to the scenes
they frame"Tea for Two,""Come fly with me," "I
Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby," "Sweet
Georgia Brown," and so on. After Erbarmen's reve-
lation, the Schmitts, at first apparently appalled,
suddenly seem to accept him. The music from
"Cheek to Cheek" floods into the room and they all
begin dancing together like characters in an
American film musical. Gradually however the
dancing turns violent. Erbarmen is slammed into
one wall, then another, then knocked down behind a
sofa. The Schmitts rush offstage and return with a
hammer and frying pan to seemingly beat him to
death behind the sofa as the scene moves out of the
audience's sight. This grand guignol moment stands
alone in the normally delicately nuanced relation-
ships of the play but it provides a fitting climax to
the line of action of the Schmitt story, a dark comic
thread in the pl ay' s complex tapestry.
The product ion' s creat or , An dreas
Kriegenburg, is one of the most innovative and
honored directors of the contemporary German
stage, and this production marks his ninth invitation
to the Theatertreffen. Like many leading directors,
he particularly favors the work of one contemporary
playwright, in this case Loher. For this production
Kriegenburg, who often serves as his own designer,
has created an unusual, memorable, and structurally
ideal setting. The entire stage is in the form of a
giant mill-wheel or the rear paddles of a Mississippi
river-boat which turn up or down to reveal new
scenes, often literally sweeping the old ones away.
The wheel can also stop midway, splitting the stage
opening into an upper and lower area where differ-
ent actors can appear, or it can pause with the wheel
at various angles, so that actors can peep out over its
top when a section slants upward or scramble up its
steep incline when it slants downward. An extended
lip at the bottom of each rotating section provides
stability for the actors to ride in and out on the sec-
tion as it rotates. The whole provides a cinemato-
graphic flow to the short scenes, especially when the
turning wheel reveals several tableaux in rapid suc-
cession, and the continuing movement and the
unusual and surprising bodily positions it demands
adds distinctly to the grotesquely comic tone of the
whole. Both in its grotesque, almost absurdist
humor, and in the range of its emotional tone, Diebe
extends Loher's work in new directions. It has been
widely received as her most ambitious and complex
work to date, and her favored director Kriegenburg
has given it a production that more than meets its
considerable challenges.
One offering of the 2010 Theatertrffen
brought something new to the long-established fes-
tival, its first English language production.
Although during the past several years more and
more of the productions have been presented with
English supertitles, a recognition of the increasing-
ly international audience drawn to the festival, the
productions, selected from Europe's German-speak-
38
ing regions, have all been created in that language,
even when they were the work of English-speaking
directors such as Deborah Warner. Life and Times
Episode 1 by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma,
based, despite its name, in New York, is still techni-
cally a product of the German-language stage, since
it was a project commissioned by and created at the
Vienna Burgtheater. One might view this project as
the latest development in a half century of strong
interest among European theatre artists in the exper-
imental theatre of New York, beginning with the
now legendary tours of the Living Theatre and
extending through the appearance at many
European festivals of the Wooster Group and
Richard Maxwell. The Nature Theater is the most
recent example of this ongoing interest. In 2008,
their innovative Romeo and Juliet opened the
Kampnagel Summer Festival in Hamburg and won
the Young Director's Award in Salzburg. This gained
them an invitation to create a piece at the
Burgtheater and a solid position in the European
Festival circuit, today so interbred that the Nature
Theatre is appearing this year at no less than ten
such festivals, from Oslo to Istanbul.
The Nature Theater from its first produc-
tion, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, in 2005 has been pri-
marily concerned with creating a new kind of realist
dance-theatre out of found material: found spaces,
found music, found gestures (from dance, gymnas-
tics, and biomechanical exercises of various kinds),
and especially found texts. Life and Times, called a
"work in progress," is their most ambitious project
to date, created out of "found" autobiographical
material like the first productions of the Wooster
Group. In this case the material was a sixteen-hour
telephone conversation between founders Kelly
Copper and Pavol Liska with actress Kristin
Worrall, who had appeared in their 2008 Obie-
award winning production, No Dice.
During these sixteen hours, Worrall offered
a roughly chronological narrative of everything she
could remember of the first sixteen years of her
growing up in America from her birth through the
second grade. From this sixteen hours the directors
created a three and a half-hour dance theatre piece.
Most distinctively, however, the cutting preserves
the repetitions, inarticulate sounds, repetitions, and
false starts so typical of normal speech but almost
invariably omitted from transcriptions of that
speech. Here is a typical passage:
39
Life and Times by Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
And uh So.
I don't know!
II think
II think I did it, but I was
Just like, "eh."
Like I wasn't so into it.
But I really like to swim, but
Yeah, I wasn't so into the lethe lessons
stuff.
Um.
Sooo.
Far from seeing this verbal "static" as troubling or
distracting, the production celebrates it, often giving
it special emphasis in the music and movement that
accompanies every word, and indeed every word
fragment, so that the oft-repeated "um" becomes a
major part of the sound and visual texture of the
production. The continuous musical score is per-
formed by four musicians playing a ukulele, key-
board, flute, and xylophone in an improvised work
growing out of the text, sometimes suggesting a
rather repetitive jazz, more often nursery or folk
tunes, and occasionally a familiar bit of classical or
popular song. The bodies of the actors, clothed in
gray uniforms suggesting school or gymnastic garb,
are also in continuous stylized motion, also based on
the found or imposed rhythms of the text, which
often gives the impression, at least through this
treatment, of a rhythmic consistency. There are
occasional short sequences composed only of music
and movement, but by far the greater part of the
evening is the presentation of the text. Occasionally
there is choric speaking, but for the most part the
monologue is carried by a single actor, though this
responsibility is passed around among the six per-
formers. The first three are women from the Nature
Theater (Anne Gridley, Sibyl Kempson, and Julie
LaMendola), but they are later joined by three men
from the Burgtheater Ensemble (Fabien Krger,
Markus Meyer, and Moritz Vierboom) who beauti-
fully match their enthusiastic, childlike, and some-
what cartoonish delivery.
With only three performances and present-
ed in the small experimental Sophiensaele, which
40
Peter Handke's Die Stunde, da wir nichts von einander wuten, directed by Viktor Bod. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
contained only 200 seats, this was the
Theatertreffen's most eagerly sought-after produc-
tion, but critical response was mixed. For many,
including this viewer, the experiment was charming,
even delightful for the first hour or so, but became
much less so as the long evening continued. A sig-
nificant percentage of the first night audience, con-
sisting mostly of reviewers, departed at the inter-
mission, which came a good two hours into the per-
formance, prompting one of the actors to announce
on the second night (which I attended) that the best
part of the show came after the intermission. Alas, I
did not find this to be so. The second part was much
like the first and well before the end I wished that
instead of cutting a sixteen hour interview to three
and a half, the artists had gone on down to perhaps
two with no intermission, during which the origi-
nality, spirit, and enthusiasm of their unusual
approach and material would still have the full
power of its effect. Still in its naivet and celebra-
tion of the banal details of everyday life, this non-
German production provided a welcome relief from
the almost steady diet of economic angst that made
up most of the festival.
The other welcome exception to this rather
monolithic orientation was the production of Peter
Handke's Die Stunde, da wir nichts von einander
wuten (The Hour When We Knew Nothing of One
Another), in which the Theatertreffen jury, as in the
selection of the English language Nature Theater
offering, departed in a striking way from festival
tradition. Not only is the Handke text a totally
unconventional one, merely a scenario with no spo-
ken words, but the director is an emerging young
Hungarian new to this festival and the production
originated in Graz, Austria, a city never before rep-
resented here.
Although new to this festival, director
Viktor Bod is by no means an unknown name. He
established his reputation with a series of visually
stunning productions between 2003 and 2005 at the
Katona Jsef Theater in Budapest, especially his
2005 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. This gained
him an invitation to become house director in Graz,
where he has worked since. In 2008 he formed his
own production organization, the Szputnyik
Shipping Company, a title which in my opinion
rivals New York's engagingly named Elevator
Repair Service. Their first production, Apartment
Block Stories (Mietshausgeschichten) toured widely
in Europe and won several awards.
The Handke production, which retains of
the original only the title, the general setting, a busy
town square, and the basic concept of presenting a
web of relationships without the aid of a spoken
script, is a co-production of the Szputnyik Shipping
Company and the Graz Theatre. These together con-
tribute fifteen actors to the ensemble, whose work is
critically supplemented by three live musicians
(violin, violincello, and keyboard) a professional
operatic soprano, and most importantly, a camera-
man and his assistant, who are visibly and actively
41
Life and Times by Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
on stage for most of the production. Berlin review-
ers, struck by the fact that this production and the
latest work by the ever-popular Christoph Marthaler
were being presented at the Theatertreffen the same
weekend, were quick to note similarities between
the two dramatic worldsthe large casts composed
of somewhat stereotyped characters interacting in a
complex multi-focused urban setting, the heavy
reliance upon music and pantomime, the quirky
humor, often involving traditional slapstick, and in
general found Marthaler, long a critical favorite in
Berlin, to be much superior in depth and richness of
vision. I was somewhat surprised to find no mention
in the reviews I read of what seemed to me a much
more obvious Berlin source of inspiration and
indeed of parody by the young Hungarian director,
the productions by Frank Castorf
and Ren Pollesch designed by Bert
Neumann at the Berlin Prater and
Volksbhne in the late 1990s when
these were at the height of their
influence and Bod was just begin-
ning his theatre studies in Budapest.
All the most distinctive
visual features of those striking pro-
ductions are faithfully reproduced
and indeed elaborated upon in
Bod's staging. His urban space is
made up of two rows of Bert
Neumann style bungalows lined up
at the opening facing each other on
opposite sides of the stagea tiny
Eastern European caf, a hospital
room, a kitchen, a small office, a
room in an art gallery, even a rail-
way coach with obviously projected
scenery rushing by its windows, and
a rather impressionistic subterranean
tunnel with a revolving fan at its
end. The arrangement strongly
recalls the sequence and physical
arrangement of small rooms often
used by Pollesch at the Prater, but
when individual rooms are wheeled
out to center stage to display their
interiors, or turned about to expose
different perspectives, the effect is
much more like that of the Neumann
bungalows for the Castorf produc-
tions of Dostoevsky and Williams on
the Volksbhne main stage.
Even more strikingly, Bod
extensively utilizes an element
essential to the visual effect of both these Pollesch
and Castorf stagings, and that was the interplay of
the Neumann bungalows with live video manipula-
tion. Both Pollesch and Castorf utilized camera
operators, often visible to the audience, to follow
actors about, in and out of rooms, their images pro-
jected onto large screens above the stage, offering
the audience different perspectives on the action and
often views into rooms and spaces in fact not visu-
ally accessible from the auditorium seats.
The result was a complex and constantly
changing visual field. Our theatre training presses
us to follow the live action on stage, while our train-
ing in film and TV draws our attention to the video
images. In Castorf's productions these were often
Die Stunde, da wir nichts von einander wuten. Photo: Courtesy of the
Berliner Theatertreffen.
42
two perspectives on the same action, while here,
with a variety of actions occurring simultaneously,
the eye is likely to be following one sequence while
the video operators follow another. Even in a normal
theatre production the spectator's eye often moves to
different centers of attention, but here that process is
greatly complicated, especially when, as happens in
Bod's much more frequently than in his German
predecessors', the video camera uses filmic tricks to
create illusory events. One such sequence, several
times repeated, has the camera looking off down a
dark side passageway out of the direct line of vision
of the audience, to see a motorcycle racing directly
toward the camera. Immediately after this the cam-
era operator rapidly whirls his instrument about to
catch an image of an onstage actor suddenly leaping
into the air. The video sequence clearly suggests that
the motorcycle has hit the actor, but we can also see
the illusion being created, without any motorcycle
ever appearing on stage.
Every sort of trick is played with different
angles of vision and modes of perception. The cam-
eramen poke into all corners of the set, even at one
point, during a simulated tennis match created large-
ly on camera, following the ball, mounted on the
end of a long pole, into the orchestra pit, where it
bounces among the unperturbed musicians. The
cameramen rise up on lifts, rapidly shift from one
object or character to another, peek through open-
ings and slots, and move behind walls to look out at
actors through presumed mirrors. For their part, the
actors often perform as if they are in film sequences,
speeding up, slowing down or freezing their action,
or tumbling through space supported by seemingly
invisible ropes and harnesses.
Although many of the actors have distinct
social rolesa secretary, a nurse, a drug addict, an
electrical worker, a museum guard, others have
ongoing concernsa man with a map seeking
directions, a woman mourning a recently deceased
friend, and still others seem always available to join
in any of the many rapidly appearing and disappear-
ing dance sequences, sometimes involving the
whole company in a formal waltz or a Pina Bausch-
like frantic dashing back and forth across the stage,
and sometimes involving only two or three per-
formers. At one point, amid the rolling platforms,
the agitated video, and a variety of frantic down-
43
Die Stunde, da wir nichts von einander wuten. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
stage action I noticed three actresses on a park
bench far upstage carrying out a series of orches-
trated arm and leg movements clearly noticed amid
the bustle by only a small portion of the audience.
An almost continual live and recorded
musical score adds to the rhythmic structure of the
piece. Near the beginning and the end a frolicking
score suggests the films of Jacques Tati, whose
wordless comic panoramas of contemporary life this
production frequently suggests, but there is a wide
range of musical reference. Characters tend to burst
into a chorus of "Maria" at moments of great emo-
tional intensity, regardless of whether any romantic
element is present. At one point the normally rather
frenetic movement stops entirely and a towering fig-
ure moves majestically down from far up center
stage. It is a professional operatic soprano, Kata
Pet, dressed in full eighteenth century court
regalia, complete with panniers and a towering wig
surmounted by a full-masted ship, as was the cus-
tom of the time. She delivers, without further scenic
elaboration, a long passage of an Italian opera
unknown to me, then removes her panniers to reveal
an elegant set of pantaloons over thighs covered in
thick white wool and terminating in a pair of elegant
golden hooves. She then turns and exits to thunder-
ous applause from an audience clearly without a
clue as to her function in this production but dazzled
by the sheer theatricality of her appearance.
This striking sequence and occasional brief
company movements aside, the stage action is nor-
mally close to overwhelming, and calculatedly so.
The traditional production of a focused and clearly
defined narrative experience has here clearly given
way to a much more postmodern density of experi-
ence from which each viewer assembles his own
response. Repeated viewings would doubtless allow
a fuller awareness of the overall dynamics of the
piece, and I would be happy to be offered them, but
an impression of sensory overload is surely a major
aim of the performance.
Christoph Marthaler is unquestionably the
favored star of the Theatertreffen, his productions
having been selected for presentation there for thir-
teen out of the past seventeen years, a number far
exceeding that of any other director. This is all the
44
Risenbutzbach. Eine Dauerkolonie, directed by Christoph Marthaler. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
more remarkable in that there is a distinct Marthaler
style, as unmistakable as that of Robert Wilson, but
one which, like that of Wilson, somehow manages
to adjust to a wide range of dramatic material with-
out ever wearing out its welcome. I personally
found the new Marthaler piece, Riesenbutzbach.
Eine Dauerkolonie (Riesenbutzbach: A Permanent
Colony) less attractive than many other Marthalers I
have seen, but there is no question that it was
admirably suited to the theme which dominated the
offerings this yearthe ongoing world economic
crisis. Marthaler is not primarily a politically
engaged director, though works with a political
dimension are an important part of his repertoire.
From the beginning of his career he has satirized
elements of his native Switzerland, often with
implications far beyond that country, as in the
delightful Groundings of 2003, which commented
on modern corporate folly through the example of
the Swiss airline crisis.
In the past however political commentary
has been mixed with ironic and often hilarious slap-
stick sequences and the almost unearthly beauty of
the sung choral passages in these works, drawing
from the art song tradition, the classic repertoire,
and a wide variety of popular music. In the new pro-
duction the music remains, but the comic element,
while still present, is much reduced, and the over-all
tone is one of melancholy and loss. This is the dark-
est Marthaler I have yet seen. The setting is by
Marthaler's almost inevitable collaborator, Anna
Viebrock, and is another of her monumental interi-
ors, here the drab and functional main hall of the
"Institute for Fermentation," of the depressed com-
munity of Riesenbutzbach. Little is fermenting here,
however. The apparent function of the Institute is to
serve as a sort of lending institution for the suffering
inhabitants of the community, but in fact the unsym-
pathetic clerk at the desk to which the citizens from
time to time apply (Bernhard Landau) invariably
informs them that this is no lending institution and
their indigent status provides them with no basis for
help. Thus a group of local women, a kind of chorus
of the dispossessed, sit or recline hopelessly about
the vast waiting room, indulging in collective sighs
and watching helplessly as the furnishings around
them are marked for sale, sold, and carried off. Even
as the furnishings of the room disappear, the modern
passion for security keeps a workman (Raphael
Clamer) busy throughout the evening installing
45
Riesenbutzbach. Eine Dauerkolonie. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
safety alarms on every door (there are no windows
in the room, as is often the case in a Viebrock set-
ting), including even the doors of a wardrobe
against one wall. Clamer provides some of the few
Chaplinesque comic sequences typical of
Marthaler's earlier work, as when he begins pulling
cables out of one of his security boxes and becomes
gradually overwhelmed by a seemingly endless tan-
gle of cable.
Upstage right and downstage at either side
Viebrock has built into her setting three enclosed
garages, representing the living quarter of the town's
inhabitants. These contain no automobiles, appar-
ently sold or repossessed long ago, nor even any fur-
nishings except for a few light folding chairs along
their walls. To these spaces the inhabitants retreat to
console themselves with quiet singing and the occa-
sional raucous party, the only entertainment appar-
ently left to them.
The corpulent Christoph Homberger, long
a pillar of Marthaler's stagings, here plays an unusu-
ally humorless role, as a kind of functionary appar-
ently assigned to provide comfort and moral
improvement to the community by guiding its suf-
fering inhabitants in the performance of classical
music. Primarily busy answering the telephone and
writing memos in a large glass enclosed office
upstage, he emerges from time to time to direct his
wards in renditions of Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and
Beethoven or to discourage them from hiding out in
their garage to enjoy disco hits like "Staying Alive."
At the end he closes them away, quietly singing, in
their garages while he retires to his office, the only
lighted area on stage, to pursue his bureaucratic
activity. The quiet singing, including the richly iron-
ic freedom chorus from Fidelio, continues on into
the night, the only consolation apparently left to the
depressed citizens of Riesenbutzbach.
The contemporary German stage and that
of the 1930s have been heavily mined by this year's
festival judges for dark views of consumer capital-
ism, and so keen is the interest in this subject that it
46
Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, directed by Stephen Kimmig. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
has extended beyond the boundaries
of the German-speaking theatre.
From Britain came an important con-
tribution to the discussion, Dennis
Kelly's 2006 Love and Money,
revived in 2009 by Stephen Kimming
for the Thalia Theater of Hamburg. It
seems to me highly premature to des-
ignate Kelly, as the critic of Die Welt
did, as England's "great new dramatic
hope," but there is no question that
his gritty depictions of the empty
lives in contemporary council flats
and yuppie apartments in his home-
land strike a responsive chord in
Germany. There his work is widely
compared with that of Sarah Kane
and Mark Ravenhill, previous British
authors whose cruel depictions of
contemporary society placed them
among the most popular dramatists in
contemporary Germany and indeed
established the reputation of leading
directors like Thomas Ostermeier.
If Love and Money is any
indication, Kelly is still far removed
from Kane or Ravenshill. The on-
stage violence and explicit sexual
activity that were so shocking in their
plays is here reduced to a series of
often half-comic anecdotes, recount-
ed but never shown on stage. These
are for the most part little more than
adolescent protests against an oppres-
sive technological or consumerist
society such as the stories of the young office work-
er who Xeroxes images of male genitalia on the
back of interoffice invoices or who smash flat a
trapped mouse and pastes it on a Christmas card to
her employer. The most shocking onstage moment
occurs when one young woman gives in to the solic-
itations of an elderly pursuer and removes her
underpants for him to carry offindeed a far cry
from Sarah Kane.
One of the most interesting aspects of the
drama is that the scenes take place in reverse order,
beginning a year after the death of the young yuppie
bride Jess (Susanne Wolf) and ending with the cele-
bratory wedding dinner which begins the brief and
troubled marriage, where desire for goods and con-
sumer comforts steadily takes the place of love.
American theatre goers will likely be reminded of
Kaufman and Hart's Merrily We Roll Along, which
treated similar themes using the same reverse tech-
nique, but in a much more theatrically effective way.
The play is framed by two extended mono-
logues, the first by the husband David (Daniel
Hoevels) and the last by the more than slightly tipsy
bride at the wedding table. Both offer a kind of tour
de force for its speaker and the two actors each
receive well-deserved applause for their delivery. In
fact however, both are narrative, not dramatic. The
bride's monologue in its combination of sentimental
clichs, crudity, and crass materialism heavily pre-
figures the brief and dark marriage we have just wit-
nessed. The opening monologue by the husband,
purportedly an extended email message to a
prospective new lover in France, provides in graph-
ic detail that central but never shown scene in the
play, where he helps his despondent wife commit
47
Love and Money, Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
suicide by putting poison in her vodka.
Between these two scenes are a series of
others, not always in the form of monologue, but
still essentially narrated, as one character tells
another about some event such as the killing of the
Christmas mouse. Some of this material simply pro-
vides a social background for the morality tale of
Jess and David, but most is connected in some way
to their marriage or her death. In the second scene,
for example, Jess's mother (Sandra Flubacher) and
father (Stephan Schad) recount how the construc-
tion of an ornate and ostentatious funeral moment
by another family next to their daughter's modest
but tasteful gravestone led them to visit the site in
the dead of night and defecate on the rival grave.
Surely if Ravenhill or Kane had conceived of such a
scene, unlikely as that is, they would have depicted,
not recounted it.
Two other actors round out the company,
which remains on stage throughout, those not
speaking serving as more or less interested listeners
or witnesses. Hartmut Schories plays Duncan, a
family friend, and Victoria Trauttmansdorff the
office worker Debbe and Val, David's ex-wife. A
striking setting has been created by Katja Ha and
Oliver Helf, a three-story high skeletal house con-
taining scattered rather simple household items,
hardly suggesting a consumerist life style. Like Bert
Neumann's famous bungalows at the Volksbhne,
this structure is mounted on a turntable. Between
and occasionally during scenes the actors them-
selves turn it about, but since the actual performance
takes place almost entirely downstage, this does not
seem to open any new perspectives, literally or fig-
uratively, into the play. Despite some excellent act-
ing, it is difficult to imagine why this rather static
and predictable drama was selected for the
Theatertreffen this year. One can only assume that it
was the attractiveness of the theme and the faint
hope of discovering the next British neo-naturalist.
I found the text of the next offering, from
the Akademietheater in Vienna, far more engaging,
even though it provided yet another variation on the
theme of capitalistic greed and its attendant suffer-
ing. Der goldene Drache (The Golden Dragon) is by
Germany's most produced contemporary playwright
Roland Schimmelpfennig. The Golden Dragon of
the title is a Chinese restaurant in the kitchen of
which a young Chinese illegal emigrant who cannot
go to a dentist, has an impacted tooth bloodily
48
Der goldene Drache, written and directed by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
removed onstage by frightened co-workers, and it
lands in the soup of one of a pair of stewardesses
(perhaps the distant descendents of the ethereal dir-
igible flyers in Kasimir und Karoline). Interwoven
with this story is that of another exploited Chinese
next door, a young woman forced into prostitution
who is eventually murdered by a client, her story in
turn intertwined with a grim modern retelling of the
fable of the ant and the grasshopper, the grasshopper
here converted to an abused domestic laborer under
the control of the ruthless, materialistic ant.
Schimmelpfennig himself directs this rap-
idly shifting multi-scene story within a simple open
setting by Johannes Schtz consisting of five chairs
and a Chinese gong set against a plain white back
wall and black framing curtains. The five actors
(Philipp Hause, Barbara Petritsch, Christine von
Poelnitz, Johann Adam Oest, Falk Rockstroh) pre-
sented a bravura performance in that the author-
director asked each of them to portray a variety of
characters (and insects), often casting against both
gender and age, so that young men played old
women and so on. The skill of the actors made this
less confusing than it sounds but in any case much
of the play is in fact narrated with almost every
actor introducing himself in the third person and
often describing critical stage actions, such as the
flight of the tooth through the air as well.
It was while watching this production that
I came to realize that the similarities among many of
the festival offerings this year went far beyond the
constant repetition of certain economic themes.
There was also a frequent denial of conventional
theatricality, with almost half of the productions
staging most of the play as direct address to the
audience with little interaction of characters even
when the script seemed to suggest otherwise.
Perhaps this is the influence of Thalheimer, who
caused something of a revolution early in this
decade by applying this front out delivery to a num-
ber of standard classics. Whatever its source, it has
now clearly become something of a clich.
The rejection of normal dramatic interac-
tion and emphasis on narration over theatricality
would make these thematically rather similar texts
seem even more repetitive than they do were they
not presented in odd, even bizarre ways that help
conceal their rather thin content. So we have plays
that run backwards (Love and Money), plays in
which everyone is cast against gender and age (The
Golden Dragon) and plays in which almost none of
the dialogue can in fact be heard (The City, etc.).
None of these, I submit, would be nearly so inter-
esting if presented in a more conventional way, and
frankly I do not see any pressing dramatic reason,
other than novelty, for the unconventional
49
Der goldene Drache, written and directed by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Photo: Courtesy of the Berliner Theatertreffen.
approaches. I was unable to attend the final offering
of the festival, Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kontrakte des
Kaufmanns. Eine Wirtschaftskomdie (The
Merchant's Contracts. A Business Comedy) coming
from Hamburg and directed by Jelinek's frequent
director, Nicolas Stemann, though to be honest, I did
not greatly regret the loss. Not surprisingly the
notice on the production offered by the
Theatertreffen itself commented that the production
sought to prove what many already know: "capital-
ism is evil." If I had not already known that, my two
weeks of Theatertreffen theatre-going would have
so completely convinced me that I would hardly
need another evening of some four hours to demon-
strate it. Normally Stemann seriously cuts Jelinek's
sprawling text, but this time presenting the full nine-
ty-nine-page work, projecting electronically a page
countdown on stage, so that the audience would
know how much remained. He also encouraged
both actors and audiences to come and go as they
pleased while on stage unrolled what the
Theatertrffen program engagingly described as "a
rather joyless text on the subject of exploitation,
misanthropy, and avarice." Even though the pro-
gram insisted that the production was "unexpected-
ly pleasurable," I had had quite enough joyless texts
on exploitation and avarice for one season, and hope
if not for something lighter, at least for something
more varied next season.
50
Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns. Eine Wirtschatskomdie, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: David Baltzer.
German and even Austrian newspapers
were teeming with large photos of immense black
rats that surrounded powerless and hapless Elsa von
Brabant. Even her nameless savior Lohengrin is
buffeted about by ranks of black and even some
white rats. Some opera critics suggested that these
costumes and the entire production concept of direc-
tor Hans Neuenfels might have been more appropri-
ate to a show about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I did-
n't see the premiere, so I missed the boos that
Neuenfels harvested. At Bayreuth, the director and
designers usually leave town as soon as possible
after the openingunless they were or are Wagners.
Nonetheless, once I visually acclimated myself to
the idea of rats on the borders of the River Scheldt,
I found myself carried along with the flow.
Especially now at Bayreuthbut also in many
European opera housesaudiences have become so
used to historicism in opera productions that they
are often eager for something entirely different.
Younger audiences are often delighted with new
visions of old masterworks. It is interesting that few
have tried to write new librettosor even craft new
scoresfor such war horses as Logengrin, Aida, or
Tristan. Especially at Bayreuth, no one isyet
tampering with the master's scores, nor with his
words: they are still sung, even though the design
concepts often have little to do with their original
narrative and emotional content.
In the original version of Lohengrin, King
Henry is going to war and he needs the military sup-
port of the army of Brabantrather like George
Bush's "Coalition of the Willing"which he has
come to request/demand from Elsa. Unfortunately,
she is in a very awkward position, for the rightful
heir, Gottfried, has vanished and she is accused of
killing him. Actually, she is much too nice to have
done anything as vile as kill her own brother. What
no one knows is that the evil, scheming Ortrud
who wants to put her evil, scheming husband
Three Music Festivals: Bayreuth, Munich, and Bregenz
Glenn Loney
51
Lohengrin, directed by Hans Neuenfels. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bayreuth.
52
Telramund on the throne of Brabanthas turned the
boy into a swan. The foolish, trusting Elsa thinks
Ortrud is her friend, while Ortrud is actually a sor-
ceress of the old religion.
With King Henry and his troops looking
on, Telramund calls for a challenger to defend Elsa's
name. A formidable knight arrives in a majestic
swan boatactually the transformed Gottfriedto
accept the challenge. He soon strikes Telramund to
the ground but makes the mistake of allowing him
to live. Quite naturally, Elsa and the mysterious
knight fall in love, although he refuses to reveal his
identity. With her husband humiliated, false friend
Ortrud keeps urging Elsa to ask her knight's name.
In the new Bayreuth production these
major events of Wagner's libretto are all in place.
The ingenious Reinhard von der Thannnen has set
them in a pristine white laboratory with large white
portholes in its wall. These design elements change
to suggest different locales, notably the bridal bed
scene. When Elsa needs to be backed up by the
ladies of her court, especially for the famed wedding
march, some of the rats change into charming young
women, dressed in wide fringed hats and shiny pas-
tel colored, perky dresses. These split-second cos-
tume changes are remarkable.
At one point, a plucked swan with a neon
halo appears suspended over the stage and there is
also a sculpted white swan upstage, whose long
neck can be moved back and forth, rather like one of
those old fashioned water pumps. Although Elsa is
first seen in a white uniform, later, when she is con-
fronted by Ortrud, who is wearing a very wide long
skirt of black swan feathers, Elsa is garbed in an
almost mirror image skirt, but of white swan feath-
ers. There are projected cartoons of red and white
rats, as well. Almost every stage picture is striking,
but none more so than when the banned, disgraced
Telramund is discovered downstage in a broken
black buggy, a dead black horse stretched out in
front of him. The front wheels have come off. My
first thought was of Murnau's Nosferatu: the undead
racing against time, against the rising of the sun,
flooding the world with light. A huge swan's egg is
revealed. It revolves, revealing a fetus-like creature
inside, wrapped with strands of umbilical cord. This
newly born thing advances downstage, tearing off
pieces of its umbilical cord like sections of
Bratwurst (sausage), throwing them into the troops.
The evolving stage pictures that Hans Neuenfels
and his designers have created are fascinating if
sometimes puzzling, and I look forward to seeing
this amazing production again in summer 2011.
Andris Nelsons conducted with the bril-
liant young star Jonas Kaufmann as an outstanding
Lohengrin. The radiant Elsa was the lovely Annette
Dasch. Evelyn Herlitzius was a bone-chilling
Ortrud, with Hans Joachim Ketelsen as her craven
partner Telramund. Army recruiter Knig Heinrich
was Georg Zeppenfeld, represented by his shock-
headed Herald, Samuel Youn. Unlike Stefan
Mikisch's invaluable introductions to the librettos
and scores of Wagner's Operasillustrated at the
keyboard by Mikischpre-show lectures (which I
unfortunately missed) help ticket holders to under-
stand what they will actually see on stage. Next
summer, I must not miss these lectures. The one for
Die Meistersinger must be a revelation.
"Weisst du was du hier gesehen hast?" or
"Do you know what you have seen here?" This for-
mulation is from memory, not from consulting the
libretto of Parsifal. But when I had seen the open-
ing moments of the new Bayreuth Parsifal, I felt
that Guernemanz might have been talking directly
to me. Of course, he is talking to the young Parsifal,
who knows nothing about anything, least of all who
his mother might have been. Parsifal is a pure fool
or, if you like, a holy innocent. Roaming aimlessly
in the forest, Parsifal has shot a sacred swan: in
some productions, it looks like a stuffed albatross,
which it well might be, considering the problems
that unfold from that unlucky shot. Taken to the
secret temple of the Holy Grail by some knights, he
beholds the ritual of renewal that streams from the
Grail onto its attendant Grail knights. But the Grail
celebrant, Amfortas, has a hideous wound which
will not heal. Elevating the Grail for the ritual
requires a super-human effort he can hardly sum-
mon anymore. But even his dead father, Titurel, can
muster enough energy to sing from his coffin.
For those Republicans and evangelical fun-
damentalists who believe that the scourge of AIDS
is God's punishment on the wickedespecially on
those who have morally transgressedit might be
good news to learn that Amfortas is being similarly
punished for sexually fooling around in Klingsor's
magic garden. Only the touch of the holy spear can
heal the wound, but who will wrest it from
Klingsor? Well, Parsifal, of course. On seeing
Stefan Herheim's unusual vision of this opera for the
first time this summer, I felt as clueless as Parsifal at
the Grail ritual. If Guernemanz had asked me: Do
you know what you have seen here? I might have
answered a bizarre fantasy of Prussian and Nazi
military adventures from 1870 to post-World War
Two. Initially, it becomes clear that we are in
Wagner's own house, Wahnfried, a historic wall
complete with fireplace, clock, and majestic portrait
stage right. At one point, this becomes not one wall,
but four duplicates. The novelty here is that the
overture is silently acted out, although, beginning
with director Goetz Friedrich at Bayreuth, that is not
such a surprise anymore. But a big white bed center
stage dominates the proceedings. Amfortas is in it at
one point, but heas with other occasional occu-
pantsslides down out of sight under the covers.
Another apparent death bed scene involves a white
clad woman who desperately stretches out her arms
to a blond young boy in a sailor suit, who runs from
her to his toys. Could this be Parsifal's mother
dying, rejected at the last? But, as we seem to be in
Wahnfried, could this woman be either Cosima
Liszt Wagner or Winifred Wagner? Not likely.
Cosima died in 1930, followed six months later by
her doting son, Siegfried. Winifredwhom I came
to knowlong remained an uncomfortable annoy-
ance for her two sons, especially with her five-hour-
long appearance in that Syberberg film in 1976, the
centennial year of the festival. If only I had used the
morning to attend the explanatory lecture. Perhaps
then I would have understood why I seemed to be
watching snippets of All Quiet on the Western Front,
The Blue Angel, and Cabaret.
One historic Wagner-related scenic treat
set designer Heike Scheele presented was an initial
suggestion of the original nineteenth century setting
for the Grail temple in the Festspielhaus. But cos-
tume designer Gesine Vllm had to replicate period
costumes from several fairly recent eras in German
history, beginning with what might be called
Victorianor Wilhelminesuits and gowns from
around 1870 and the defeat of the French at the
Battle of Sedan. What really distinguished these
outfits for the transformed Grail knights were the
long gray wings that were attached to their shoul-
ders. Increasingly, Bayreuth productions are inte-
grating other performance media. Not so long ago,
Titurel sang from his sarcophagus via closed circuit
TV. Herheim's staging requires many feet of historic
film clips. Thanks to UFA and Path, we are able to
see enthusiastic German troops marching off to the
front in France and the debacle that followed.
Klingsor has not vanished: he now sports a tux, but
below he's wearing sleek nylons and a garter belt.
Kundry seems to be a kind of top-hatted Marlene
Dietrich. As for the magic garden and the enticing
Parsifal, directed by Stefan Herheim. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bayreuth.
53
54
flower maidens, we are instead in a hospital ward
with badly damaged soldiers in iron beds. Instead of
flower maidens, they are serviced by Red Cross
nurses, who straddle them and ride their various
manhoods. The nurses are backed up by what look
like outrageously costumed fugitives from a
Ziegfeld Follies show. I was told these ladies repre-
sented the Weimar Republic entertainers in Cabaret.
Suddenly, long red Nazi banners drop from above,
black swastikas on white. A Nazi eagle dominates
the stage. Winifred Wagner would have been
amazed. So was I: this is Parsifal? Instead of
Klingsor hurling the spear at Parsifal, a Hitler Youth
lad rises out of the bowels of the stage and throws
the sacred spear at Parsifal downstage. All the Nazi
insignia suddenly drop down, the plaster eagle
crashing to the floor, breaking into pieces. Film
footage upstage shows Germany in ruins. But is this
really about the healing power of the Holy Grail? Or
rather a salute to the Marshall Plan and Ludwig
Ehrhard's economic wonder years?
The finale takes place in what looks like
the new German Bundestag (parliament) in Berlin:
all circularities and reflective surfaces. Both the
audience and the parliamentarians are reflected in a
huge mirror, perhaps left over from Peter Hall's
doomed Bayreuth Ring. Amfortas lies in Titurel's
coffin, a German eagle on top and one on the floor
before it. Parsifal heals and blesses. There's even a
Mary Magdalene foot washing that recalls the
Oberammergau Passion Play. Momme Hinrichs
and Torge Mller provided the video clips with
lighting by Ulrich Niepel. The greatest opera
orchestra in the world was conducted by Daniele
Gatti, with the greatest opera chorus in the world, as
usual, directed by Eberhard Friedrich. Detlef Roth
as Amfortas, Kwangchul Youn as Guernemanz,
Thomas Jesatko as Klingsor, Susan Maclean as
Kundry, and Christopher Ventris as Parsifal were all
admirable. Even from the grave, the Titurel of
Digenes Randes could be clearly heard.
Superlative performances all.
This past August, I was seated next to a
German opera critic who assured me that there had
indeed been changes to the production both in 2008
and in 2009. So, I watched especially intently to
detect these changes, noting one I find important in
terms of the Meistersinger legend as imagined by
Katharina Wagner's great grandfather, Richard
Wagner. At the premiere in 2007, those spectators
who had Wagner's text books in handor who had
seen this masterwork in many different produc-
tionswere surprised to discover that Katharina
Wagner, her dramaturg, Robert Sollich, and her
designers, Tilo Steffens and Michaela Barth, had
conceived a rather novel vision of Wagner's origi-
nal. All Richard Wagner's operas are set in the past,
the distant past, even the legendary pastthough
the central characters were often already known to
Wagner's audiences through old sagas and tales, as
well as history. Had Wagner wanted to write an
opera with a contemporary setting, he certainly had
an important theme ready to hand in the failed rev-
olution of 1848in which he fled Dresden with a
price on his head. But Wagner found it safer to deal
with questions of the misuse of power and the uses
and abuses of love from an historicaleven a leg-
endaryperspective. It is sometimes unsettling
when a young director with a reputation to make
or even an aging enfant terribledecides to update
an opera from its fictional period to a more recent
century, decade, or even today, often changing the
original site of the story as well. This can be a mis-
take, because the interpretative clues are all there in
the music. Even directors who do understand what's
going on in the plot and the music may not trust
their audiences. In Germany, however, there is
another factor at work: opera lovers have seen fair-
ly traditional productions of Lohengrin, La Bohme,
Carmen, and Aida. That surely must have been on
the minds of Katharina Wagner, her dramaturg, and
her production team when they decided to take a
new look at Die Meistersinger. In the 2007 staging,
Walther von Stolzing was no longer the artist out-
sider, whose poetic genius is heightened by master-
ing the rules of the masters.
Both the actual words and the original
score were as minor inconveniences in this unusual
new staging. When the great grey black curtain
opened, we were not in a Nuremberg church any-
more. Not in the Katharina Church, nor St.
Laurentius, nor St. Sebaldus. In fact, no one in this
production seemed to have any interest in religion,
as such, let alone shoe-making. We seemed to be
looking at the imposing interior court of a pre-Nazi
arts academy. Rather than recapitulate my descrip-
tions of this production from 2007which have
been previously published in Western European
Stagesit may be more useful to note some
changes in Katherina Wagner's vision. For one small
difference, David no longer seemed to be making
Xerox copies of the Meistersinger's song rules. But
it is still something of an irritationif not an out-
right lossto watch Hans Sachs (James Rutherford)
typing away while the triumphal music of the
entrance of the guilds is playing in the sunken
orchestra pit. There are no banners, no gaily cos-
tumed apprentices, and certainly no self important
Meistersingers.
A cocky Beckmesser does make an appear-
ance, still wearing the t-shirt with the cute motto
"Beck in Town," but we no longer get him triumph-
ingcomplete with phallusas the musician of the
future. Instead, he slinks quietly offstage into the
wings, ignoredrather than scorned and repudiat-
edby all. Nonetheless, full marks for Adrian Erd
as the ambitious Beckmesser. As in 2007, Klaus
Florian Vogt was again a raffish, quasi-hippie
Walther von Stolzing, still painting white designs on
Eva's blue dress. At the close, when he, Eva
(Michaela Kaune), and their squeaky clean kids are
photographed in a golden picture frame, his visual
transformation into a handsome young suit wearing
citizen of Nuremberg does offer a modern equiva-
lent of his medieval acceptance of the code of the
Meistersingers. The photo op of Walther accepting
an immense check from the Deutsche Bank is an
amusing comic touch. After all, even though Adolf
Hitler saw Meistersinger as a hymn of glorification
of German arts and crafts, Richard Wagner well
understood the human foibles of the Nurembergers
he personified in this lyrical opera. His grandson,
Wieland Wagner, also knew how to bring this out in
production. He once told me: "This is my grandfa-
ther's only Comic Opera." Katharina Wagner, how-
ever, has very heavily underscored this point with
the comic touches she originally orchestrated and
those she has since added. Pouring soup down on
the singers was something of a novelty, although it
was nearly lost in all the frantic stage activity.
David and Magdalenaalso photographed
in a golden picture frame with their kidswere
admirably embodied by Norbert Ernst and Carola
Gruber. Veit Pognerwho offers his daughter as
grand prize in this American Idol style song con-
testwas played by Artur Korn. As always, the
chorus and orchestra demonstrated why they are
widely regarded as the best in the world. Sebastian
Weigle conducted, keeping pace with the frantic
stage shenanigans, with Eberhard Friedrich, as
55
Die Meistersinger, directed by Katharina Wagner. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bayreuth.
always, in charge of the chorus. At Bayreuthespe-
cially after Wieland Wagner introduced the concept
of Lichtregie, using changing lighting to create a
sense of movement in immovable sopranos and
tenorslighting has long been an essential compo-
nent of stage design, but seldom noted. That may
well be because the best stage lighting is subtle: it
doesn't call undue attention to itself. Andreas Grter
designed the Meistersinger lighting.
In the delightful Tannhuser for
Childrenperformed this past summer on one of
the large rehearsal stages of the Bayreuth Festival
the beloved Elizabeth refers to herself as the "prize
cow" in the battle of singers on the Wartburg: The
winning singer also wins her hand in marriage.
Now, if you are determined to win young audiences
for opera productions in general and those of
Richard Wagner in particular, Tannhuser is a tough
nut to crack. What are you going to do about those
orgies? This is, however, not a problem for Wagner's
festival. When the sex goddess Venus (Alexandra
Petersamer) first appears to Tannhuser, she looks
like Lady Gaga. Even better: she's riding a skate-
board. Actually, this is not an opera about either
orgies or skateboards. It seems rather to be a myth-
ic search for a pink flamingo. Katharina Wagner
herself had the idea for this charming introduction
to Wagner's operas. But it was developed by
Alexander Busche and by Reyna Bruns, who also
staged it. Performed on a rehearsal stagewith
bleachers along one side and at the entrance endit
opens with the men in the cast bedding down for the
night on a section of the bleachers, in what seems to
be a private boarding school. They sleep under what
we used to call feather bedsnow duvetsso this
might seem a bit strange to some youngsters abroad.
The cast was excellent, including Marek Reichert as
Wolfram, Sonja Mhleck as Elizabeth, and Jeffrey
Dowd as the youthful Tannhuser. Dowd is, in fact,
an American. It's rumored that he may even be cast
in that role when the Festival brings this majestic
Wagner opera back to its great stage.
Hartmut Keil conducted the
Brandenburgische Staatsorchester Frankfurt. Before
the death of Wolfgang Wagner, it was clear that he
wished to pass the Artistic Directorship of the
Bayreuth Festival on to his daughter Katharina. This
was something that her mother, Gudrun Amman
Wagner, was also determined to facilitate.
Unfortunately for those plans, she died suddenly,
soon followed by the aged and infirm Wolfgang.
Previously, there had been other Wagner heir candi-
Tannhuser for Children, directed by Katharina Wagner. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.
56
57
dates for the festival's artistic direction, one of
whom was Eva Wagner Pasquier, also Wolfgang's
daughter, but by his first marriage. When the two
half sisters were finally chosen to run the festival
together, readers of the New York Times were possi-
bly surprised that this was the first time the two
women had spoken to each other. When the succes-
sion was still in question, Eva Wagner was one of
the Wagner family candidates. But she graciously
withdrew when it became very clear that her father
had no intention of yielding the role of artistic direc-
tor to anyone but his daughter by his second mar-
riage. With the untimely death of Gudrun Wagner,
however, suddenly the Bayreuth chemistry changed.
Long before I arrived in Bayreuth, I'd
again requested an interview with Katharina
Wagner. But when I came to the press office, I won-
dered whether it might be a good idea to interview
both sisters together, in hopes of learning more
about their plans for the future. Several newspaper
reports suggested some major changes. Even the
Society of the Friends of Bayreuth seemed under
siege in some accounts. One paper announced that
Katharina planned to construct a new theatre next to
the Festspielhaus. This is not the case: the rehearsal
stage used for Tannhuser for Children will be in
play more often as a theatre. It is, in fact, next door
to the Festspielhaus. Obviously, the Bayreuth sea-
son cannot be extended for more days or weeks, but
more tickets have been made available by schedul-
ing individual Wagner operas on what were former-
ly performance-free days during Ring Cycles
between Walkre and Siegfried, Siegfried and
Gtterdmmerung. It's entirely possible that both
Katharina and Eva Wagner would like to have those
tickets to dispose of themselves: to spread them
more widely around among the thousands of would-
be festival-goers. When the annual summer meeting
of the Friends with the Festival Chiefs was held,
both Katharina and Eva were suddenly indisposed.
Stage director Hans Neuenfelswho was expected
to explain what giant rats had to do with
Lohengrinpreferred to autograph his new book in
a different venue.
So I was looking forward to Katharina and
Eva confirming or denying all the rumors. In the
event, there was a press office misunderstanding: I
was not to talk with Katharina, only with Eva. I was
led through handsomely remodeled halls to her spa-
cious offices. Gracious and friendly, Eva Wagner
Pasquier looked just like her photo in the New York
Times and the International Herald Tribune. But
those duplicates were in black and white. Here, she
was in full color, with an attractive flood of blond
curls. As I set up my camera, she told me that we
were not going to talk about politics, Gottfried, con-
troversial productions, finances, or backstage prob-
lems. There seemed nothing interesting left to dis-
cuss: "How about making Wagner's Operas avail-
able to the wider world?" She brightened: "Wagner
in Las Vegas? My son is an American. This could
happen." Suddenly, she noticed my little blue
recorder: "Is that a video camera?"
"Well, yes."
"Shut it off. We cannot do this interview."
What worried Eva Wagner was apparently not so
much talking about her brother Gottfried, but that
she hadn't had her hair done, nor did she have her
best make up or glasses video-ready.
The Munich Festival 2010
Even as Munich is in the midst of its
Annual Opera Festival, workmen are already put-
ting up the immense tent frames for the Oktoberfest.
Despite the terrible loss of life in post-industrial
Duisburg, when would-be ravers panicked at the
small entry to the large field where the Love Parade
was to be celebrated, Munich's Oktoberfest planners
are sure such a tragedy couldn't happen in Bavaria's
capital. Perhaps the Mnchners would be so drunk
on Lwenbru and other local brews that they
wouldn't even be able to panic? Getting in the spir-
it, Munich's Stadtmuseum am Jakobiplatz is now
showing a 200-year survey of the Oktoberfest. Two
hundred years is a long time, so there are a number
of beer kegs on display. Fortunately, no one was
drunk or panicking at the Bayerische Staatsoper,
even though some of its always outstanding produc-
tions are too modern for some opera conservatives.
You also won't get drunk at the opera on either its
beer or its champagne. Oddly enoughas at the
Metropolitan Opera, which also has a no photogra-
phy policy inside the auditoriuma command that
is blithely ignored by those who absolutely must
have shots of the glittering interior, especially with
their own faces in the foreground.
Photography of curtain calls now seems to
be taken for granted: ushers can no longer rip out
roll films from digital cameras. But the neoclassical
National Theater is surely worthy of photography,
both in its foyers and its lavishly decorated auditori-
um. After all, it was a bombed out shell for almost
twenty years after World War Two. Only in 1963 did
it have a gala reopening, with Claire Watson and
Jess Thomas on stage. Before this time, the main
stage was the Prinzregenten Theater, a Jugendstil
jewel built around the turn of the last century as a
Wagner Theatre to challenge Bayreuth, where
Wagner had never managed to build the Theatre
Temple he envisioned: the original Festspielhaus,
still in use, was then only a considered a temporary
construction. The lovely eighteenth-century court
theatre, the Cuvilles Theater, was also used for
small-scale, period inspired productions, ideal for
Mozart and Baroque operas. It doesn't really have
enough seats to justify a major production, making
it more suitable for small concerts and
Liederabende. The Royal Stables behind the
National Theater have been used for scenery storage
and for special small productions. But they are now
eclipsed by an architectural astonishment of spiky
silvery formsFrank Gehry, eat your heart out
called Pavillon 21 MINI Opera Space. Among the
listed productions were Adrian Howells'
Footwashing for the Sole, Steven Cohen's Golgotha,
Christoph Schlingensief's RemdoogoVia
Intolleranza II, Lucia Ronchetti's Narrenschiffe,
Toscapiraten, and The Phantom Carriage,
Stummfilm mit live Musik. Of the three major pro-
ductions I did see, I'll begin with the most impres-
sive.
Figaro in a white box. Just one look at
Munich's handsome and innovative production of
Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro and a metaphoric light
bulb goes on over my head: "This has got to be a
Jrgen Rose design." Not that Rose is the only inno-
vative designer often on view on the stages of the
Bavarian State Operathey enlist the best for their
opera productionsbut that he is, like Lucifer, a
devilishly clever bringer of light. The Figaro he has
designed for director Dieter DornIntendant or
artistic director of the State Drama Theatre next
door, the Residenz Theateris glowing with light,
elegantly period in chairs and costumes, but pared
down to essentials. The basic set is a deep white
box, distinguished only by blue doors in the right
and left stage walls, with a larger blue double door
upstage, anchoring the sight lines. For the first three
actswhich are all interiorsthe doors and their
frames may be changed but the walls remain a
vibrant white, lit from behind. Furniture is kept to a
minimum, but Figaro needs his bed frame in act
Mozart's Figaro, directed by Dieter Dorn. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Munich.
58
one, not later. Period chairs are lined against the
walls in acts two and three, but they are different for
each act. This also helps focus attention on the char-
acters and their actions, rather than offer visual dis-
tractions. Rose also designed the costumes, so they
are the major design elements to indicate period and
to suggest character. Act four might seem to pose
special problems for this basic white environment,
as it takes place at night in the Almaviva's formal
garden, with various characters trysting and hiding
behind hedges and in pavilions, depending on dark-
ness to aid their sexual adventures, or to frustrate
those of others. No hedges? No pavilions? No prob-
lem. Rose and Dornthere's a botanical match:
roses and thornshave the cast cover themselves
with white sheeting and lie low when they need to
be unseen. But there are no period chairs in this
glowing garden. I've not been able to see Munich
stagings since 2007, but I do seem to remember a
Cos fan tutte that also occurred in a white box. This
one was more obviously lit from above and behind
on the sides: it was also not so subtle as the newer
Figaro.
What is most important is how the artists
brought this Beaumarchais/DaPonte bittersweet
comedy to vibrant life. You knowdespite Count
Almaviva's abject pleas for forgiveness from the
Countess at the closethat his eye will be restless-
ly roving again soon. Barbara Frittoli was an inse-
cure, worried Countess, who only seemed to come
into her own when she put on her elaborate Court
gown and handsome wig. Susanna (Camilla
Tilling), on the other hand, didn't need fine feathers
to emphasize her innate ability to handle any poten-
tially difficult situation with relative easeinclud-
ing keeping her husband to be, Figaro (Ildebrando
D'Arcangelo) in line. Mariusz Kwiecien, as
Almaviva, is wonderfully thwarted at every turn. He
only needs to remember noblesse oblige, instead of
le droit du seigneur. As the love-enflamed
Cherubino, Anna Bonitatibus manages to be both
boyishly rascal and ardent, without suggesting les-
bian overtones, occasionally a problem when
women must impersonate men. There was no mis-
taking the feminine desperation of Marcellina
(Heike Grtzinger), willing to cancel Figaro's debt
to her if he can be forced to marry her. What a
shockfor both of themto discover he's her long
lost son. Completing this excellent and lively cast
were Ulrich Ress, Donato Di Stefano, Kevin
Connors, Alfred Kuhn, and Evgeniya Sotnikova.
Juraj Valchua conducted, lending an even more
international flavor to the event.
Tosca, fresh from the Metropolitan.
This new Toscastaged by Luc Bondy
and set designed by Riccardo Peduzzihad already
been premiered at the Met last season. Nonetheless,
a local paper could not resist calling the Met's
efforts a "dress rehearsal." Because the production
is so bare and spare, a number of old guard Met
patrons were very distressed with it, preferring
Franco Zeffirelli's splendidly detailed evocations of
the actual scenic locales in Puccini's powerful
opera. Seeing it only once at the Metbefore
MunichI also thought it looked too elemental. But
seeing it again at the National Theater, I've changed
my mind. It works very well and the very sparseness
helps to focus attention on what is really happening
emotionally in the narrative. Of course the passion
is already there in Puccini's score, powerfully so,
but now it doesn't have to compete with grand archi-
tecture in a richly gilded and costumed pageant.
Marco Armiliato conducted forcefully, as this stag-
ing has a throbbing physicality that's often missing
in Puccini pageants. As at the Met, Karita Mattila
was the passionate Tosca, with the sensational Jonas
Kaufmann as Cavaradossialso at Bayreuth in the
aforementioned Lohengrin. A nasty piece of busi-
ness was the Scarpia of Juha Uusitalo. The unfortu-
nate Angelotti was performed by Christian van
Horn, with Kevin Connors as Spoleta. What still
does not work is Tosca's suicidal leap from the para-
pet of Castel Sant' Angelo. It looks like a large doll
being thrown out a window. Bring back Zinka
Milanov jumping over the wall onto a trampoline.
And, reportedly, bouncing back up in full view of
the audience on one occasion.
Adina and Nemorino's miserable little
Italian villageapparently on the fringe of another
one of those European warsis a veritable waste-
land. An empty space, almost in the sense of Peter
Brook's Empty Space, it is waiting for something
magical to fill it, to bring it to life. Initially, it seems
to be a ratty, tatty, rubbish strewn village square,
with a street light stage right and an abandoned tele-
phone pole stage left. Suddenly, paratroopers drop
down into this mess. Not the magic the villagers
were looking for. Adina, who has scorned the
poorin almost every senseNemorino, soon
becomes infatuated with Belcore, a soldier. But she
has also been reading the tale of Tristan and Isolde,
with its famous love potion. Magic suddenly arrives
with what could be a colored light blinking flying
59
saucer but is, in fact, the traveling vehicle of the
quack doctor, Dulcamara. Fortunately for
Nemorino, he deals in magic, spells, and potions,
just like Gilbert and Sullivan's John Wellington
Wells. It's not the potion that makes Nemorino sud-
denly so popular with all the girlsmaking Adina
jealous, realizing she really loves himbut the fact
that his uncle has just died, making him a wealthy
catch. In David Bsch's lively staging of The Elixir
of Love in Munich, he and his designers, Patrick
Bannwart, Falko Herold, and Michael Bauer, have
tried to suggest the advent of Dr. Dulcamara as a
cross between a circus and Las Vegas. Colored
lights flash and twinkle. Balloons rise to form a
large heart. The village girls don colorful outfits.
They even try to make the desert bloom, with a gag-
gle of colorful watering cans. Rolando Villazon was
scheduled to sing Nemorino, butas all too fre-
quently recentlywas forced to cancel. This gave
Pavol Breslik a wonderful opportunity to show both
his vocal and dramatic talents. He even looks a bit
like Leonardo Di Caprio. Nemorino's military rival,
Belcore, was very macho in the person of Fabio
Maria Capitanucci. He might even have had the
rank of captain in the libretto. Ambrogio Maestri
was a magical Wizard of Ozzy Dulcamara, with
Nino Machaidze as the scornful Adina. This is a
charming, though cluttered, staging, with lots of
neon and blinking lights. Dulcamara's caravan looks
rather like a huge round bomba cast iron air bal-
loonrather than the conventional gypsy wagon.
But, as director David Bsch says in the richly illus-
trated program: "Better kitsch than cynicism."
Meanwhile, across town the Grtnerplatz
Theater has been for decades Munich's beloved
home of operetta: famed and tuneful works from
Vienna, Budapest, and even from Berlin. It had been
built in what was, pre-Hitler, predominantly a
Jewish section of the city. They loved shows like
Der Bettelstudent, Blume von Hawaii, Wiener Blut,
Lustige Witwe, Land des Lchelns, Opernball,
Viktoria und ihr Hussar, and Die Dollarprinzessin.
When was the last time you saw Der Evangelimann
or Der Vogelhndler: "Ich bin die Christl von der
Post." But in the 1960s, the ambitions of artistic
directors began to expand. Carmen and other popu-
lar operas were imaginatively produced, with the
theatre's rather young repertory ensemble. This
60
Puccini's Tosca, directed by Luc Bondy. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Munich.
effectively made the Grtnerplatz Munich's second
opera house, if not quite its second tier theatre. It
also became the favored Munich home of operas by
Carl Orff. American and British musical comedies
even found welcome on its stage: West Side Story
was a wonder. My Fair Lady was a charmer. Now,
as at the Staatsoper, the Grtnerplatz has a new
Intendant, succeeding Ulrich Peters. He is Josef
Kpplinger, who has been chief of the theatre in
Klagenfurt, which is, as he says, a virtual monopoly,
as there is no other theatre in this Austrian provin-
cial capital. But Kpplinger has already worked at
the Grtnerplatz, having staged Emmerich Klmn's
Grfin Mariza in 2004.
Although I did not have time to check out
new drama productions at the Residenztheater or the
Kammerspiele, I always make a point of seeing a
show or two at the Grtnerplatz. Of course, there are
also commercial theatres in Munich, as well as
small theatres. Especially in summer, there are large
outdoor spaces for concerts, plays, and operas. At
the Mnchener Knstlerhaus, Georg Jenisch was
showing Carl Orff's Trionfo di Afrodite in his inim-
itable puppet theatre production. Trionfo is the third
part of the Orff trilogy that includes Carmina
Burana and Catulli Carmina. Perhaps Jenisch
should bring his powerful puppets to New York? As
the Grtnerplatz has not only an
opera/operetta/musical comedy ensemble, but also a
ballet/modern dance troupe, TanzTheaterMnchen,
it can offer a varied program.
I was able to see Krpersprachen III
("Body Language III"), which was comprised of two
works. Christian Spuck's Sleepers Chamber, a
Munich premiere, was distinguished visually not
only by the animations and contortions of the
dancers, but also by the tall, thin dunce's caps they
variously wore, plus the menacing silhouettes of the
huge grasshoppers that loomed around them. In the
program, Spuck notes that the Schlferphnomen
exists in the most contrasting areas: the "Sleeper"
who seems a good citizen but who is also a member
of a terrorist cell. Also, in nature there are plants and
insects that can change, transform themselves, go
underground. There are grasshoppers in the desert
that emerge only every two or three years. You
could appreciate the dance performance per se, but
it did help to read the program.
Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und
Fall der Stadt Mahagonny is exactly the kind of pro-
duction that makes the Grtnerplatz so special.
Instead of creating some bizarre suggestion of a
61
Emmerich Klmn's Grfin Mariza, directed by Josef Kpplinger. Photo: Courtesy of the Grtnerplatz Theater, Munich.
Klondike gold rush townor American suburbia, as
was done one year at the Maggio Musicalethe
dominant image of this Mahagonny is chairs, large
and small. Thomas Schulte Michels staged and cre-
ated his own unusual visual environment for this
stunning revival of the jazzy Brecht-Weill between-
the-wars, social satire. This seems to be a show
about white chairs, some of which get larger and
larger, until, at last, an immense white chair domi-
nates the stage. Some of the doomed characters can-
not manage chairs that are too big for them, just as
the bizarre sexual freedom of Mahagonny is more
than they can handle. Schulte Michels' boldly col-
ored, heavily brushed designs for the production
make this program a real "keeper." An interesting
note: Trinity Moses (Stefan Sevenich) becomes
Dreieinigkeitmoses, when Brecht's American names
are Germanized. Widow Begbick was archly played
by Ann Katrin Naidu, with Heike Susanne Daum as
Jenny. Wolfgang Schwaninger was the feckless
Jimmy Mahoney, surrounded by Fatty, Jack, Bill,
Joe, and Toby, played by Cornel Frey, Adrian
Shjema, Gregor Dalal, Sebastian Campione, and
Adrian Sandu. Andreas Kowalewitz conducted the
admirable Grtnerplatz orchestra. If you are able to
take a trip to Munich during the 2010-2011 season,
of course you will want to see major opera produc-
tions at the National Theater, but don't miss the
splendid work at the Grtnerplatz. Premieres will
include Grand Hotel, The Love of Three Oranges,
Nutcracker, die Fledermaus, The Castle (Dance
Theatre, based on Kafka's novel), der Freischtz,
and Der Untergang des Hauses UsherPhilip
Glass's opera, inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe tale.
From the standing repertory, you could
also choose My Fair Lady, The Pirates of Penzance,
Traviata, Butterfly, Martha, Carmen, and Grfin
Mariza. Not to neglect Orpheus in the Underworld,
Hnsel and Gretel, Boccaccio, The Makropulos
Case, or The Wizard of Oz. Quite a range of
choices.
The Bregenz Festival 2010
Mid-July must find the Austrian Capital,
Vienna, almost empty of politicians. They all seem
to have rushed off to Bregenz for the opening of its
Annual Festival. Notable among the dignitaries are
always the President of Austria, plus various
Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Die Passagierin. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bregenz.
62
Ministers of State. Instead of flying off to Bregenz
in a presidential plane the environmentally aware
President used the Austrian railway. This July, not
only President Fischer was at the opening cere-
monies, but also Dr. Claudia Schmied, the Federal
Minister for Education, Art, and Culture. This link-
age of art and culture with education may seem
strange to many Americans, who see no connection
between what we teach our children and the often
incomprehensible creations of both self proclaimed
and critically approved artists. Both President
Fischer and Dr. Schmied addressed the gala throng
at the ceremonies, focusing on this season's program
theme: In der Fremde, in a foreign place. This motif
served to introduce the largely unknown musical
compositions of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, notably his
post-Holocaust opera, Die Passagierin.
Mieczyslaw Weinbergalthough Polish
lived most of his creative life in the Soviet Union,
where his genius was eventually recognized by
Dimitri Shoshtakovich. So he was certainly in der
Fremdealmost in Central Asiauntil he was
called to Russia's cultural center. To be an alien in a
strange land, far from home, is an experience few
native born Americans have ever experienced. But
this can be especially disorienting for writers, com-
posers, and other artists whose previous creations
have strongly drawn on native roots. So it was
entirely appropriate that Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darknessadapted as a dramawas also on the
festival calendar. Not only was Conrad also a Polish
alien, writing in English, but his tale of a white man
who had established a kind of kingdom in the heart
of Africa was resonant. As the attractive Lisa walks
the decks of the elegant German ocean liner that is
taking her and her new husband to a diplomatic
posting in South America, she momentarily
glimpses a gauzily veiled female passenger. South
America was certainly a popular German destina-
tion after the Second World War, but Lisa also runs
the risk of running into Adolf Eichmann or Dr. Josef
Mengele. The veiled quasi disguise of the passenger
in itself is puzzling, butworse for Lisashe fears
that this mystery woman has recognized her. She is
so upset that she finally has to confess to her charm-
ing, caring husband, Walter, that in her previous life,
she was a concentration camp overseer in
Auschwitz. This is, of course, not good news for a
post-war West-German diplomat, when many West-
Germans were trying to bury or obliterate their Nazi
pasts.
Then the scene shifts to Auschwitz where
we see Lisa in uniform, at work sorting out women
internees for forced labor or for extermination in the
gas chambers. For her own reasons, she favors a
Polish inmate, Martha, but she is angry that Martha
doesn't thank her for the special considerations. She
even makes it possible for Martha to have a forbid-
den meeting with her husband never-to-be, Tadeusz.
Every day, Lisa has to decide who is to go on the
extermination list. She finally consigns Martha to a
gruesome death. So, seeing Martha alive and veiled
on her honeymoon ship is a very unpleasant shock.
Considering New Yorkers' insatiable appetite for
ever more revelations, movies, and dramas about
the Holocaust, Die Passagierin should soon be seen
on either the stage of the New York City Opera or
across the plaza, on the Met's grand stage.
Curiously, Die Passagierin was first heard only in
concert, in Moscow on Christmas day 2006 at the
Stanislavski and Nemirovitch Danchenko Music
Theatre, no less.
The Bregenz mounting of Die Passagierin
is a coproduction with Warsaw's Teatr Wielki, to be
shown later this year, with scheduled showings in
London at the English National Opera and in
Madrid at the Teatro Real in 2012. Other European
opera houses have also expressed interest in pre-
senting the production. The libretto of Die
Passagierin is based on the Polish novel of Zofia
Posmysz. It may be offered as a novel, but it is
essentially her own story, as one of the few women
internees who escaped and survived Auschwitz. She
not only lived to tell the tale but also to see it turned
into an opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg and librettist
Alexander Medvedev. What's more, she was in
Bregenz for the premier. In fact, Zofia Posmysz met
with members of the press to take questions about
her concentration camp experiences in Auschwitz.
She is now, of course, a very old, somewhat frail
lady, but she can still speak passionately of the evils
of the past.
The libretto is sung in both German and
RussianLisa and Walter, understandably, do not
speak Russianso an American production may
require an English translation. The remarkable
castespecially the miserable women inmates at
Auschwitzwas powerful. Michelle Breedt was
Lisa, with Elene Kelessidi as the indomitable
Martha. Tadeusz was sung by Artur Rucinski and
Walter by Roberto Sacc. Teodor Currentzis con-
ducted the Wiener Symphoniker. The Vienna
Symphony is the house orchestra of the Bregenz
Festival, just as the Vienna Philharmonic belongs to
63
the Salzburg Festival in late summer. The festival's
artistic director David Pountny imaginatively direct-
ed Die Passagierin for its world premiere as a fully
staged opera. Considering the design and technical
complications not only of putting a great ocean liner
on stage, but also of rapidly switching to the
cramped confines of an Auschwitz death camp, set
designer Johan Engels is to be praised. Of course,
Engels's designs could not have been realized as
effectively as they wereon the relatively small
stage of the Bregenz Festspielhaushad it not been
for the excellent workshops of the festival, under the
oversight of technical director Gerd Alfons. The
scenic elements of Die Passagierin are enclosed in
a square of rail tracksintersecting with a circle of
railson which they can be moved about.
Concentration camp guard towers stand at the four
corners of the square. Marie Jeanne Lecca designed
the costumes, with Fabrice Kebour responsible for
lighting this complex production. If Die Passagierin
achieves a valued place in modern opera repertories,
there are even more unproduced Weinberg operas
waiting to be staged. One of these works could be
classified as an operetta, but the total is said to be
eight or nine works. In addition, there is a wide
range of orchestral and solo works. Perhaps it was
the Cold War that kept the West from discovering
Mieczyslaw Weinberg, but that effectually came to
an end in November 1989. What has taken us so
long? It should be noted that the Bregenz Festival
has a long tradition of discovering unknown operas
or reviving unjustly forgotten works, always in
unusually conceived and outstandingly designed
productions. Also shown this past summer in
Bregenz was Weinberg's The Portrait, inspired by a
story of Nicolai Gogol. This was its Austrian pre-
miere, but it opened too late for me to see it.
As no outsider is allowed to see the initial
models for the always amazing operas on the lake,
when I was still gasping at the daring scenic con-
ception of the Bregenz Tosca, I couldn't imagine
what stupendous stage image could embody Ancient
64
Guiseppe Verdi's Aida. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bregenz.
Egypt and the powerful passions of the slave girl,
Aida, her princess rival, Amneris, and the valiant
General Radames. Momentarily, I did think of a
giant Sphinx towering over the stage, but that's
almost too obvious. That would have been more
appropriate for Israel in Egypt, perhaps?
At first glanceas well as at the second,
third, and fourth glancesseeing two giant blue,
star-spattered feet on the elevation of the Aida stage
was puzzling. In fact, the star-spattered torch of the
Statue of Liberty was lying face down in the waters
of Lake Constance. Confected for the opening of the
Suez Canal, the opera's central physical action is
about the armies of Egypt invading, conquering,
humiliating, and enslaving poverty stricken Nubia.
The emotional action is a love triangle that doesn't
turn out well. Aida had already been enslaved, but
now her entire nation, including her father the King
were made slaves of the Pharaoh. We are not told
whether this was pre-Moses or post-Moses. Now, at
a perilous time, when liberty seems in real danger in
the United States of America, a shattered Miss
Liberty presents a fearful warning about the dangers
of a powerful nation sending its supposedly invinci-
ble army into third world nations that cannot effec-
tively resist the incursions: Ritorno Vincitor. As two
towering cranes lift the broken elements of Miss
Liberty's face and spiked diadem into place, hover-
ing high above her severed feet, the drama of Aida
unfolds. There's even a facial fragment that sails
high in the air above the stage, containing what
looks like the Virgin Mary singing. The sunken
torch rises half way out of the water to provide a
podium for the pharaoh. Some of its many stars are
cut out: this permits the gallons of water inside to
drain quickly for the torch uplift. As the Lake
Constance waters between the stage and the audi-
ence of thousands must always be scenically
Verdi's Aida. Photo: Courtesy of the Festival Bregenz.
65
66
involved, not only the torch is in the water, but there
are divers and a water ballet, performed by dancers
splashing around in knee deep lake water, on a
sunken rectangular platform that can rise, fall, and
revolve.
The Nubian prisoners are brought back up
the Nile inside a golden elephant which Ramses is
bringing home as tribute to the pharaoh. I was sur-
prised to see the golden ark of the covenant in the
midst of all this, also in the water. Maybe this was a
Jewish left-over? The Israelis apparently had pos-
session of the ark in the holy land. Instead of dying
of suffocation, sealed up in a great stone tomb, the
guilty loversRadames and Aidaare flown off
through the air in the golden boat that takes the
pharaoh's spirit body to the stars. Actually, royal
spirits ascended to the constellation of Orion, but
that's not easy to see at night in Bregenz.
There is always a problem on the wide,
wide Lake Stagejust as there is in Salzburg, both
on the vast stage of the Felsenreitschule and of the
Grosses Festspielhausin that the stage director
has to invent ways to fill the spaces without detract-
ing from the central action or the characters.
Although there are some impressive parades of
courtiers, servants, and even of slaves, especially
down the central set stairs, a number of the cast and
extras seem to be endlessly scrubbing, rubbing,
dusting, and polishing, notably Aida. One fellow is
high up on a piece of Miss Liberty, retouching her
golden stars with a paint brush. Of course, this gives
you something to look at when the central action is
muddy or uninteresting. But too many people doing
little things can be an unnecessary distraction from
the main event. The very sophisticated audio tech-
nology brings everyone in the audience clear,
dynamic singing, both solo and choral, but it's well
to watch where the follow spots are moving, to
focus on Amneris and Aida. Or on Radames and
Pharaoh: actually called the "King of Egypt" by
Verdi and his librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni. With
so many nightly performances during the festival,
obviously there is more than one Aida, Amneris, and
Radames. Outdoor operas are always triple cast. I
saw the first two casts, as we were rained out at the
premiere, so I asked for a ticket for the next night,
when it rained even worse, but the opera was per-
formed all the way through by the valiant singers.
These were the admirable talents I witnessed:
AidaMaria Jos Siri and Indra Thomas;
AmnerisIano Tamar and Guang Yang;
RadamesArnold Rawls and Philip Webb;
PharaohBradley Garvin and Kevin Short;
AmonasroQuinn Kelsey and Dimitri Platanias;
RamphisTigran Martirossian and Sorin Coliban.
The Vienna Symphonyenergetically conducted
by Carlo Rizziis seen in action on two great video
screens at either side of the stage inside which they
play away. Even if unseen live, they don't get rained
on.
Were it not for the lighting of the gifted
Wolfgang Gbbel, most of the spectacular stage
effects would lose their power. But nothing would
work without those two towering cranes. Although
the Lake Stages are sometimes referred to as float-
ing, they are actually very solid, built on piles driv-
en deep into the mud of Lake Constance. It might be
interesting to know that the highest point of the set
reached sixty-eight meters. If the whole Statue of
Liberty had been built she would have been 100
meters high. Her feetare each fifteen meters long.
The crane on the left side of the stage has to lift
twelve tons. This is a long way off from the days
when tenors and sopranos just had to stand on stage
and sing as loudly as they could. In todays opera,
and especially in great spectacle venues like
Bregenz, the physical setting can offer formidable
competition.
On Sunday, 1 August, I arrived at
Oberammergau with two busloads of IFTR schol-
ars, all of us with a professional interest in the play,
but with varying degrees of familiarity with either
its history or its current form. For the least informed
among us, who expected some type of medieval
spectacle with a loose structure, a temporary stage,
and a high degree spectacle albeit with low produc-
tion values, the six-hour marathon (not including
the three-hour dinner break) we were about to wit-
ness was quite a shock. It seems like the more we
knew about medieval theatre, the more we had mis-
led ourselves about what we were about to experi-
ence, partly because we were (naively) not prepared
for how much the play has changed over time, and
partly because the idea that the practice began in the
Middle Ages is already a misconception.
A Passion Play has been performed contin-
uously in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau
since 1634, when the villagers in the midst of
plague, famine, and the Thirty Years War made a
pledge to represent the Holy Passion with all the
resources available to them once every decade. This
is the official origin of the Oberammergau
Passionsspiele as it is told today by the villagers
themselves and by a variety of professionally pro-
duced books, CDs, and DVDs sold at this amateur
performance, along with a variety of commemora-
tive woodcarvingswoodcarving, mostly of reli-
gious themes, is the village's main industry for nine
out of every ten years.
As it stands today, however, the play is
Passionsspiele Oberammergau 2010
George Panaghi
67
Stage of the Passion Play. Photo: Courtesy of the Passionsspiele Oberammergau.
much more an early nineteenth century product. It
was nineteenth century folklorism and the rising
consciousness of a national identity that brought this
regional phenomenon to national attention. The text
used since then is the result of several (still on-
going) revisions, but it was first recorded and pub-
lished as a literary work by Othmar Weiss in 1811.
The play was normalized according to the conven-
tions of the time, in standard German rather than the
local Bavarian dialect, and in a peculiarly hybrid
neoclassical formthis is, in a way, Goethe's
Passion Play.
More precisely, this is a case of two differ-
ent types of plays presented simultaneously. The
main action of the play consists of the seven days
between the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on
Palm Sunday and the visit of the three Maries at the
empty tombthe risen figure is only briefly seen at
the end of the play, and stays silent. This part of the
performance has the appearance of a realistic histo-
ry play, if rather a formal and stiff one. The
Oberammergau Jesus is not a miracle workerthe
only hint of the supernatural is a mysterious figure
which begins to aimlessly wonder the stage during
the Last Supper, and is later revealed to be the
(flightless) angel at the tomb. The spectacle in this
part consists mostly of massive crowd scenes (two
thousand Oberammergauers participate in the pro-
duction in different capacities, including technicians
and the main roles which are shared by two per-
formers) and an impressive amount of livestock. In
addition to the requisite donkey in the opening
scene, there is a whole menagerie for Jesus to ban-
ish from the temple, the most impressive part of
which is a flight of white doves that are released
over the audience's head and continue to be
glimpsed during the rest of the performance. The
most exotic appearance, however, is that of the two
camels which enter as part of Herod's entourage.
The majority of the spectacle, however,
which one normally expects from biblical
pageantry, lies in the other half of the production.
Each event of the passion is preceded by a very for-
mal presentation of an event from the Old
Testament: a very literal embodiment of the
Christian doctrine of prefiguration or typology. The
68
Tableau of Jesus. Photo: Courtesy of the Passionsspiele Oberammergau.
Last Supper, for example, is introduced by a (bru-
tally bloody) vision of the first Passover in Egypt,
while the Crucifixion is compared to the Sacrifice of
Isaac. These wondrous images are presented in
tableaux vivant within the discovery space at the
center of the (otherwise very simple) stage. With
few exceptions the Old Testament scenes are stun-
ningly presented versions of supernatural events:
the parting of the Red Sea, the Burning Bush, a fiery
angel expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise. These
offer a striking contrast with the rather staid and
decorous historical drama of Jesus' passion. The
tableaux are magnificent without exception: a com-
bination of flat scenery, oversized painted props,
and living actors creates an unsettling painterly
effect. This is enhanced by the careful lighting from
inside the discovery space, which stands out in a
production that is mostly presented in daylightthe
auditorium (thankfully) is sheltered from the sun,
but the stage is uncovered. The tableaux are both
stylistically related and visually distinct. The most
memorable of these is possibly the Passover in
Egypt, presented almost entirely in bright red: an
oversized lamb is being bled on an altar on a hill by
Moses and his people, also dressed in red, while the
ground around the hill is strewn with the corpses of
the first-born of Egypt, dressed in black. That this is
followed by the rather formal, conventional, and
69
Ecce Homo. Photo: Courtesy of the Passionsspiele Oberammergau.
painfully slow-paced Last SupperJesus takes for-
ever to wash the disciples' feetis a bit of a let-
down.
Perhaps the most distinctively neoclassical
element of the performance, however, is the unim-
pressive music which accompanies these tableaux.
Along with a speaking narrator a massive chorus
explains the scenes depicted, while also making the
connection with Christian theology explicit. The
music was originally composed by Rochus Dedler
for the 1810 production: today it sounds like deriv-
ative Mozart. The musical portion of the perform-
ance (about a third of the entire six hours) is essen-
tially an oratorio, where a singer sings the lines of
the silent figure in the tableau. Admittedly, some of
the singing is superb, even though the singers are no
more professional than the actors are. Since most of
the sung texts are either narrative or analytical, the
music is mostly formal, repetitive and unemotional:
only the brief musical interlude during the crucifix-
ion, which is not attached to an Old Testament scene
but rather seems to rise from the chorus's own
response to the actual story of the passion play, is
genuinely moving.
In general, the music seems to slow down
what is already a very long and very slow-paced
performance. The declamatory style of the acting
also seems like a throwback to the nineteenth centu-
ry: the Oberammergauers seem incapable of walk-
ing and speaking at the same time, carefully reach-
ing their intended position on the stage in silence
before opening their mouths. The crowd scenes,
while numerically impressive, are static and repeti-
tive. Two design elements reinforce this monotony:
the uniform dress of the crowd, and the flatness of
the stage. Apart from two platforms over the
70
Jesus before Pilate. Photo: Courtesy of the Passionsspiele Oberammergau.
entrances at the sides of the stage, which are occu-
pied almost throughout by Roman guards, the stage
has no levels. While, after four hundred years, the
passion play has reached a striking degree of pro-
fessional polish in its technical production as well as
its financial management, the acting remains decid-
edly "authentic" to its amateur tradition. This does
not mean that the actors lack commitment: an
announcement by the director and the mayor posted
outside the theatre reminds the Oberammergauers
that all participants in the play, women, men, and
children, are expected not to cut their hair (or
beards, for the men) for more than fifteen months
before the May 2010 premiere. The static and
declamatory performances are perhaps more a sty-
listic decision. The one exception to this is the actor
portraying Herod (the role in 2010 is shared by
Raimund Fussy and Markus Kpf, I have found no
way of telling who played the role on Sunday, 1
August), whose sleek and cosmopolitan, only slight-
ly camp, nobleman stands out among the undiffer-
entiated crowd.
I have been emphasizing its nineteenth
century elements only because they seem to have
completely eclipsed the seventeenth century roots of
the playnot because the play has not continued to
evolve since then. In fact the 2010 version is a rad-
ical revision even from 2000, having cut almost an
hour of performance time, while alterations in the
1960s and 1990s had made attempts to expunge the
aura of anti-Semitism which surrounded the per-
formance. Whether or not these attempts were suc-
71
Crucification. Photo: Courtesy of the Passionsspiele Oberammergau.
cessful, and whether there's even any point in trying,
is a debatable issue. Some of the most recent
changes include having Jesus and his followers per-
form "authentic" (nineteenth century) Jewish rituals
and prayers, and also speaking "flawless" Hebrew at
times (despite the fact that a historical Jesus would
have spoken Aramaic, not Hebrew, as he does on the
cross). Lines from the gospels were cut, such as the
Jewish assumption of guilt "Let his blood be upon
us and on our children" and also perplexingly
Pilate's most famous line: "Behold the man."
According to the organizers, most of the changes
were intended to make Pilate appear more tyranni-
cal and Judas a more psychologically complex trag-
ic hero motivated by politics and not greed. These
more recent changes, however, parallel an earlier
attempt to transform the play into a national, rather
than a local event, by suppressing its Catholic char-
acter and repackaging it as a non-denominational
Christian play. After all, the original play, like its
contemporary Corpus Christi dramas in other parts
of Catholic Europe, was performed at the height of
the Counterreformation.
Today, the play carries the seal of approval
of both the Catholic Archbishop and Lutheran
Bishop of the region. Further, it attracts pilgrims and
tourists of all denominations, as well as curious sec-
ular observers. As the program notes suggest, the
Passionsspiele tries to be a "people's theatre for the
people" ("ein Theater des Volkes fr das Volk"), and
not a museum piece of ancient folklore. And like
any living theatre tradition, it continues to evolve
and change. Anybody who comes to Oberammergau
today expecting an "authentic" seventeenth century
experience will be bitterly disappointed. And the
more they know about seventeenth century theatre,
the more disappointed they will be. The only thing
that seems to have survived intact is the amateur
ethos of the performers, in the literal sense of the
word. The most striking moment in the performance
comes right after the choral finale, when the actors
disappear without coming back for a curtain call.
The Oberammergauers perform for the love of it.
72
Ahr, Henrik...................................................22:1,45
Aime, Chantal........................................22:1,24,26
Alicante Theatre Festival..........................22:1,33-8
Allenby, William Robert...........................22:2/3,49
Alonso, Antonio et al
Los mares habitados................................22:1,34-5
Aloviso, Ivan.............................................22:2/3,18
Amaral, Alex................................................22:1,35
Anders, John..............................................22:2/3,11
Angerer, Kathrin........................................22:2/3,27
Anthoff, Gerd............................................22:2/3,47
Antoni, Carmen-Maja..................................22:1,4,9
Apollo Theatre, London.......................22:2/3,57-60
Avarus, Luis Garca, et al.
Siempre fiesta.........................................22:1,38
Arqu, Joan...................................................22:1,28
Arquilu, Pere..............................................22:1,25l
Asakawa, Jinbei.........................................22:2/3,54
Ashpitel, Ian..............................................22:2/3,53
Au, Michael von........................................22:2/3,41
Auden, W.H..........................................22:2/3,49-50
Austria, theatre in.................................22:2/3,15-32
Azorin, Paco.................................................22:1,30
Bags, David.................................................22:1,30
Baily, Chip......................................................22:1,7
Balagu, Carmen .........................................22:1,29
Bannwart, Patrick.........................................22:1,43
Ballard, Jamie...............................................22:1,19
Barcelona, theatre in................................22:1,21-32
Bargall, Patricia.........................................22:1,24
Barker, Howard....................................22:2/3,63-70
Found in the Ground.................22:2/3,65,69-70
Gertrude..............................................22:2/3,68
A House of Correction.........................22:2/3,65
Hurts Given and Received................22:2/3,64-5
I Saw Myself.........................................22:2/3,67
Judith................................................22:2/3,66-7
The Possibilities..............................22:2/3,66,68
The Seduction of Almighty God...........22:2/3,63
Slowly...........................................22:2/3,65-6,68
Worship and Wonder............................22:2/3,65
Bausch, Pina
Kontakthof...........................................22:2/3,54
Beale, Simon Russell.................................22:2/3,53
Beck, Rainer..............................................22:2/3,46
Bel, Silvia.....................................................22:1,30
Belbel, Sergei................................................22:1,30
Bendokat, Margit ...................................22:2/3,8,10
Benet, Ivan....................................................22:1,26
Benito, Andreu..........................................22:1,24-5
Berenguer, Jess...........................................22:1,34
Berg, Alban
Lulu...................................................22:2/3,24-6
Berlin, theatre in.....22:1,4,8-10,39-48; 22:2/3,4-14
Berliner Ensemble.....................................22:1,8-10
Berrigan, Hanna...............................22:2/3;65,69,70
Berrondo, Paul...........................................22:1,31-2
Beseler, Ulrich.....................................22:2/3, 45,47
Bishop, Ben..................................................22:1,18
Biswas, Ansuman..........................................22:1,11
Bjrnstad, Frde......................................22:1,50-52
Blunier, Stephan........................................22:2/3,50
Boesch, Florian..........................................22:2/3,42
Bsch, David.............................................22:1,43-4
Bolao, Roberto
2666....................................................22:1,24-6
Bondy, Luc........................................22:2/3,19,50-1
Bosse, Henning..........................................22:2/3,13
Bosch, Paula.................................................22:1,28
Boucicault, Dion
London Assurance............................22:2/3,52-3
Branceli, Natalia...........................................22:1,35
Brazier-Jones, Issy....................................22:2/3; 65
Brecht, Bertolt
Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti..22:1,43,45
Mother Courage...................................22:1,4-10
Saint Joan of the Stockyards.............22:1,39-41;
..................................................................22:2/3,7-8
Brenton, Howard....................................22:2/3,61-2
Briers, Richard...........................................22:2/3,53
Brdenbauer, Andrea.................................22:2/3,32
Broggi, Oriol........................................22:1,21,28-9
Brondo, Cristina............................................22:1,25
Bchner, Georg
Dantons Death.............................22:2/3,661-2
Woyzeck......................................22:2/3,8,10-12
Burdette, Kate............................................22:2/3,51
Bustos, Enrique.............................................22:1,37
Butterworth, Jez
Jerusalem.......................................22:2/3,57-60
Calderon, Pedro
Life is a Dream....................................22:1,11-3
Callero, Carlos Alonso..................................22:1,35
Calonge, Eusebio
Los que rien los ultimos..........................22:1,37
Calvin, Marcus..........................................22:2/3,47
Campusano, Gaspar......................................22:1,37
Carmichael, Hayley...................................22:2/3,51
Carracelas, Xiana et al.
Corpos Disidentes................................22:1,36-7
Index to Western European Stages, volume 22
73
Carreras, Joan.......................................22:1,22-4,26
Castells, Lluis...............................................22:1,26
Castorf, Frank
Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau!.........22:2/3,26-9
Cerha, Friedrich.........................................22:2/3,25
Chable, Laurence.......................................22:1,50-1
Chekhov, Anton
Three Sisters.........................................22:2/3,27
Chen, Fang....................................................22:1,15
Cherif, Karim.............................................22:2/3,21
Chiltern, Robert............................................22:1,30
Chinese Opera...........................................22:1,14-8
Christ, Andreas..........................................22:2/3,45
Cister, Marcia.............................................22:1,28
Colquhoun, Christopher................................22:1,17
Collado, Ernesto........................................22:1,31-2
Comediants, Barcelona
Num3r@lia.............................................22:1,29
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness...................................22:1,46
Constable, Paule........................................22:2/3,62
Coriano, Fosco........................................22:1,50-52
Covery-Crump, Rogers..............................22:2/3,55
Cremades, Antonio
Topos.......................................................22:1,38
Crippa,
Maddalene.....................................22:2/3,18
Cristi, Estel.............................................22:1,24,26
Cruz, Pep...................................................22:1,28-9
Cubana, La Barcelona
Cegada de amor......................................22:1,29
Curio, Dorothee.........................................22:2/3,43
David, Aline..................................................22:1,19
Davies, Angela..............................................22:1,11
De Filippo, Eduardo
Natale in Casa Cupiello......................22:1,28-9
Questi Fantasmi......................................22:1,28
De la Zaranda, Paco......................................22:1,37
De Lon, Carlos............................................22:1,35
Del Valle, Emilio..........................................22:1,38
De Paco, Antonio..........................................22:1,35
Alguien silb........................................22:1,35-6
De Santos, Jos Luis Alonso
En el oscuro corazon del bosque...........22:1,38
Deutsches Theater, Berlin.......................22:1,39-48
Disla, Juli
La rabua que me das...............................22:1,38
Dhler, Andreas.........................22:1,43,45;22:2/3,8
Dormer, Natalie.........................................22:2/3,51
Douet, Claudie.........................................22:1,50-52
Donmar Warehouse, London.....................22:1,11-3
Dreschsler, Christina.......................................22:1,9
Drse, Jorinde.....................................22:2/3,8,10-2
Duke Special...............................................22:1,7-8
Dunster, Matthew....................................22:1,17-20
Edmundson, Helen........................................22:1,13
Eggert, Maren............................................22:2/3,11
Eisinger, Claudia..................................22:1,44-5,48
England, theatre in...........................22:1,5-8,11-30;
.............................................................22:2/3,49-70
English National Opera........................22:2/3,49-50
Espanosa, David...........................................22:1,25
Espiner, Mark and Tom..........................22:2/3,51-2
Espuch, Antonio............................................22:1,38
Euripides
Helena.............................................22:2/3,19-21
Medea......................................................22:1,44
Evans, Rupert...............................................22:1,13
Faustino, Sergei
Duques de Bergara unplugged...............22:1,38
Fernndez, Amparo.......................................22:1,31
Fleetwood, Kate........................................22:1,12-3
Fleischle, Anna.............................................22:1,17
Flynn, Matthew.............................................22:1,19
Folk, Abel.....................................................22:1,30
Formoso, Viktor............................................22:1,35
Fosse, Jon........................................22:2/3;79,82-86
Franken, Christoph....................................22:2/3,11
Frey, Barbara................................................22:1,44
Fujiwara, Kohtaloh....................................22:2/3,54
Garca, Camilo..............................................22:1,30
Garcia, Ignazio..............................................22:1,38
Garcia, Roberto
Lart de la fuga.......................................22:1,38
Gatti, Daniele.............................................22:2/3,26
Genebat, Christina........................................22:1,27
Germany, theatre in.....................22:1,4,8-10,39-48;
......................................................22:2/3,4-14,33-47
Glaenzel, Max..........................................22:1,22,26
Gloger, Jan Phillip..................................22:2/3,45-6
Goebbels, Heiner
I Went to the House.........................22:2/3,54-5
Goesser, Felix.............................22:1,40;22:2/3,7-8
Goldoni, Carlo
La bottega del caf.................................22:1,29
Goyanes, Emilio
Cabaret liquid.........................................22:1,38
Grsle, Thomas......................................22:2/3,44-5
Grsner, Olivia.............................................22:1,45
Graf, Markus..............................................22:2/3,11
Grandage, Michael.................................22:2/3,61-2
Grange, Katia...............................................22:1,50
Gravelle, Trystan..........................................22:1,17
Gretler, Hugo.............................................22:2/3,43
74
Grillparzer, Franz
Das goldene Vlie................................22:1,43-5
Gross, Winfried.............................................22:1,10
Grove, Moritz............................................22:2/3,11
Guillem, Lpez............................................22:1,32
Guinart, Oriol...............................................22:1,23
Hacker, Norman...........................................22:1,45
Hndler, Pia Luise.....................................22:2/3,11
Hageneier, Stefan......................................22:2/3,41
Hagmeister, Lisa..........................................22:1,48
Hamel, Lambert.........................................22:2/3,41
Handke, Peter.............................................22:2/3,19
Hansell, Richard...........................................22:1,19
Hansen, Per Boye......................................22:2/3;71
Harrower, David........................................22:2/3,50
Harrold, Steven..........................................22:2/3,55
Haslam, Dominic..........................................22:1,12
Ha, Katja.....................................................22:1,47
Hauptmann, Gerhart
Rose Bernd........................................22:2/3,43-5
Hebbel, Christian Friedrich
Die Nibelungen...................................22:2/3,4-7
Henze, Hans Werner
Elegy for Young Lovers.................22:2/3,49-50
Herrmann, Dennis..................................22:2/3,41-1
Herrmann, Karl-Ernst................................22:2/3,19
Hesch, Jochen............................................22:2/3,35
Hibernia, Eva
La Amrica de Edward Hopper..............22:1,38
Horovitch, David .........................................22:1,13
Hsiao, Lang-Ying..........................................22:1,16
Hlsmann, Ingo...........................................22:2/3,9
Hughes, Ted...............................................22:2/3,50
Hunter, Paul..................................................22:1,18
Hutchinson, Lloyd........................................22:1,12
Ibsen, Henrik
The Wild Duck.................................22:2/3;71-8
Inocian, Juinix...........................................22:2/3,53
Inoue, Hisashi............................................22:2/3,53
Jckle, Uli............................................22:2/3,33-40
Heinde Park...................................22:2/3,33-40
James, David.............................................22:2/3,55
Jelinek, Elfriede
ber Tiere.........................................22:2/3,8-11
Joan, Joel......................................................22:1,30
Jones, Dan..................................................22:2/3,51
Jones, Gordon............................................22:2/3,55
Josa, Marissa.............................................22:1,28-9
Kaiser, Billie........................................22:2/3; 64,70
Kaiser, Georg
From Morn' to Midnight...................22:2/3,41-2
Kallman, Chester..................................22:2/3,49-50
Karge, Manfred...............................................22:1,9
Kay, Barnaby.............................................22:2/3,62
Kelley, Matthew........................................22:1,18-9
Kennedy, Stephen.......................22:1,7-8;22:2/3,49
Khuon, Alexander....................................22:1,44,48
Khuon, Ulrich.............................22:1,43-5;22:2/3,5
Kafka, Franz
The Trial..................................................22:1,46
Kimmig, Stephan..................................22:1,43,47-8
Klein, Katrin.................................................22:1,45
Kleist, Heinrich von
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.....22:1,42-3,45-7
Khler, Juliane.................................22:2/3,41,44,46
Kriegenburg, Andreas22:1,42-3,45-7;22:2/3,8,12-4
Kushner, Tony..............................................22:1,5,8
Lachler, Shenja..........................................22:2/3,45
Lagerpusch, Ole........................................22:1,47-8
Lan, David.................................................22:2/3,49
Lanik, Tina.................................................22:2/3,41
Lasky, Jack................................................22:2/3,50
Lavery, Bryony
Kursk.................................................22:2/3,51-2
Lehmann, Sven.............................22:1,44; 22:2/3,7
Leipzig, Tomas.....................................22:2/3;64.70
Le Mans, France......................................22:1,49-54
Ley, Pablo.....................................................22:1,24
Lillo, Manuel Carlos.................................22:1,25-6
Loibl, Thomas............................................22:2/3,46
London, theatre in.......22:1,5-8,11-20;22:2/3,49-70
Lpez, Carol
Boulevard............................................22:1,31-2
Lpez, Pol.....................................................22:1,27
Losada, Garbe
Si ves a Lola............................................22:1,38
Lu, Po Chen..................................................22:1,15
Lubic, Sergej..............................................22:2/3,13
Lbbe, Enrico............................................22:2/3,43
Mamet, David
American Buffalo................................22:1,26-7
Manrique, Julio..............................22:1,21,24,26,28
Marco, Llus.................................................22:1,22
Martnez, Carlos...........................................22:1,28
Martnez, Irene.............................................22:1,26
Martnez, Juan de Dios.................................22:1,26
Marton, Christina.........................................22:1,31
Matthes, Ulrich.............................................22:1,48
Mayorga, Juan
Cartas de amor a Stalin.......................22:1,33-4
McArthur, Gerard..............................22:2/3;64,68-9
McCarron, Ace..........................................22:2/3;70
McGhie, Penelope.....................................22:2/3;64
Melling, Harry.............................................22:1,7-8
75
76
Mestres, Josep Maria...................................22:1,29
Minetti, Jennifer........................................22:2/3,47
Minichmayr, Birgit.................................22:2/3,20-1
Mitchell, Laurence....................................22:2/3,53
Molnr, Ferenc
Liliom...............................................22:2/3,42-3
Molzen, Peter..............................................22:2/3,6
Moncls, Sandra..........................................22:1,22
Mooshammer, Helmut...............................22:2/3,11
Mota, Joao....................................................22:1,38
Mller, Ida..............................................22:2/3;71-8
Mller-Elmau, Markwart.....................22:2/3,13,46
Munby, Jonathan.......................................22:1,11-3
Munich, theatre in..................................22:2/3,41-8
Murillo, Miguel
El angel de la luz....................................22:1,38
Murray, Robert..........................................22:2/3,49
Myers, Ruth....................................................22:1,6
Ngele, Oliver............................................22:2/3,47
National Theatre, London......................22:2/3,61-2
Nmirovsky, Irene
El ball..................................................22:1,30-1
Neukirch, Matthias...............22:1,40,48;22:2/3,4,11
Neumann, Bert.......................................22:2/3,27-9
Newman, Alec...........................................22:2/3,62
Niera, Carlos.................................................22:1,36
Niermeyer, Amelie.....................................22:2/3,46
Ninagawa, Yukio
Musashi.............................................22:2/3,53-4
Nunn, Trevor.................................................22:1,22
Oest, Johann Adam....................................22:2/3,21
Oliv, Nol....................................................22:1,29
OMara, Rebecca......................................22:2/3,62
ONeill, Eugene
Long Day's Journey into Night.......22:2/3;79-82
Oram, Christopher.....................................22:2/3,62
Oro, Bruno....................................................22:1,28
Ossig, Dirk.................................................22:2/3,44
Page, Steven..............................................22:2/3,50
Peng, Cheng-His...........................................22:1,15
Prez, Alicia..............................................22:1,25-6
Prez, Celia...................................................22:1,34
Prez, Jaume.................................................22:1,38
Peschel, Milan...........................................22:2/3,21
Petrinsky, Natascha...................................22:2/3,26
Peymann, Claus........................................22:1,8-10
Piffka, Thomas...........................................22:2/3,26
Pons, Flix....................................................22:1,22
Pons, Merc..................................................22:1,30
Portaceli, Carme...................................22:1,21,30-1
Portmann, Marco.......................................22:2/3,13
Pose, Jrg......................................................22:1,47
Pou, Josep Maria..........................................22:1,29
Ptter, Trystan............................................22:2/3,27
Pujol, Alba....................................................22:1,26
Pye, Tom........................................22:1,5;22:2/3,49
Pyper, Laura..................................................22:1,17
Rabadan, Oscar.............................................22:1,22
Radisch, Tom.............................................22:2/3,14
Ready, Paul................................................22:2/3,53
Reiter, Lotte..................................................22:1,26
Renom, Rosa.................................................22:1,22
Rhys-Davies, Jennifer................................22:2/3,49
Rieger, Silvia.............................................22:2/3,27
Rigola, Alex...............................................22:1,21-6
Riley, Tom.................................................22:2/3;64
Ripoll, Laila et al
Restos......................................................22:1,38
Roca, Agata...................................................22:1,31
Roca, Jimmy.................................................22:1,35
Rochereau, Jean.......................................22:1,50-52
Rodrguez, Marc...........................................22:1,27
Roth, Joseph
Hiob.................................................22:2/3,29-32
Rothmann, Michael......................................22:1,10
Roy, Quim.....................................................22:1,29
Rudolph, Lars............................................22:2/3,27
Rusiol, Pablo
Lauca del senyor Esteve.....................22:1,30-1
Ruiz, Boris....................................................22:1,30
Rylance, Mark...........................................22:2/3,57
Sadnik, Roman..........................................22:2/3,26
Sala, Jordi.....................................................22:1,29
Sampson, Nick...........................................22:2/3,53
Samuel, Clifford.............................................22:1,8
Snchez, Francisco.......................................22:1,37
Sandhoff, Ruth..............................................22:1,31
Schfer, Anne.............................................22:2/3,41
Schaufer, Lucy...........................................22:2/3,49
Schenk, Thomas............................................22:1,31
Schiller, Friedrich
Kabale und Liebe............................22:1,43,47-8
Maria Stuart......................................22:2/3,46-8
Schilton, Elia.............................................22:2/3,18
Schmidt, Volker
Hass..................................................22:2/3,21-4
Schneider, Carsten.....................................22:2/3,33
Schnitzler, Arthur
Liebelei............................................22:2/3,50-5
Schraad, Andreas..........................................22:1,46
Schubert, Katharina Marie............................22:1,40
Schuboth, Susanne.....................................22:2/3,11
Schudt, Anna.............................................22:2/3,46
Schwarz, Aenne........................................22:2/3,13
Schweighfer, Michael..............................22:2/3,14
Seelig, Natalie...........................................22:2/3,14
Seifert, Martin................................................22:1,9
Seitz, Stefanie............................................22:2/3,46
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet...............................22:1,28; 22:2/3,12-4
The Merchant of Venice.......................22:1,14-8
Much Ado About Nothing.................22:2/3,45-6
Troilus and Cressida.........................22:1,18-20
Shakespeares Globe, London.................22:1,18-20
Sharaishi, Kayoko......................................22:2/3,53
Shaw, Fiona......................22:1,5-9;22:2/3,49-50,53
Sibley, David.............................................22:2/3,51
Siebenschuh, Frank...................................22:2/3,45
Sir Henry....................................................22:2/3,28
Sirdey, Boris............................................22:1,50-52
Small, Sharon................................................22:1,13
Solf, Marc-Alexander................................22:2/3,46
Sound and Fury, London...........................22:2/3,51
Spain, theatre in.......................................22:1,21-38
Spassova, Jeanette.....................................22:2/3,27
Sowinski, Ania.............................................22:1,18
Stahl, John....................................................22:1,19
Stein, Peter.................................................22:2/3,25
Stemann, Nicolas...................22:1,39-41;22:2/3,5,9
Stephens, Toby...........................................22:2/3,62
Stocker, Paul.................................................22:1,17
Sttzner, Ernst........................................22:2/3,20-1
Stoppard, Tom
Rock n Roll....................................22:1,21-4
Stone, Sophie..................................................22:1,8
Storry, Malcolm............................................22:1,12
Sturminger, Michael.............................22:2/3,29-32
Subirs, Carlota............................................22:1,21
Suzuki, Anne.............................................22:2/3,54
Tachelet,
Koen............................................22:2/3,29
Tanguy, Franois.....................................22:1,49-54
Taylor, Jay.....................................................22:1,19
Terry, Michelle..........................................22:2/3,53
Thalheimer, Michael...........22:1,45-6;22:2/3,5-7,43
Thtre du Radeau
Ricercar..............................................22:1,49-54
Thompson, Mark.......................................22:2/3,53
Tome, Jos....................................................22:1,34
Ulldemolins, Mar..........................................22:1,23
Ullman, Liv..........................................22:2/3;79-82
Valentine, Kate..........................................22:2/3,49
Vesperini, Jean-Romain.............................22:2/3,25
Vidal, Gore......................................................22:1,6
Vienna, theatre in.................................22:2/3,15-32
Vila, Ramon.................................................22:1,28
Vinga, Vigard.........................................22:2/3;71-8
Wagner, Daniel..........................................22:2/3,21
Waits, Tom...........................................22:2/3,8,10-2
Waldsttten, Nora von.................................22:2/3,9
Wallworth, Lynette....................................22:2/3,50
Walser, Robert..............................................22:1,53
Walz, Sasha
Impromptus..............................................22:1,31
Wardzinska, Maria.....................................22:2/3,13
Warner, Deborah..........................................22:1,5-8
Wang, Hai-Ling.........................................22:1,15-7
Wilkening, Stefan......................................22:2/3,45
Wilms, Bernd...........................................22:1,43.45
Wilson, Robert..................................22:2/3,8,10-12
Wirth, Lucy.............................................22:2/3,44-5
Wodu, Chinna...............................................22:1,17
West, Dominic...........................................22:1,11-3
Wichmann, Katrin.....................................22:1,44-5
Wilde, Oscar
An Ideal Husband...................................22:1,29
Wille, Arndt...............................................22:2/3,14
Williams, Tennessee
A Streetcar Named Desire..................22:2/3;80
Wgerbauer, Ferdinand.............................22:2/3,25
Wrede, Bert..................................................22:2/3,6
Wurawa, David..........................................22:2/3,21
Yage, Javier.................................................22:1,38
Yang, Chi-ching............................................22:1,17
Ycobalzeta, Anna..........................................22:1,29
Young Vic, London..............................22:2/3,49-52
Zilcher, Almut..............................................22:2/3,9
Zimmermann, Regine..................................22:2/3,9
77
78
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).
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 volumes
for Manchester University Press and two collections of translations for Methuen. Her most recent co-edited vol-
ume, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, was published by Routledge earlier this year (2010).
GLENN LONEY is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is
Senior Correspondent of NYTheatre-Wire.com and of NYMuseums.com, and Founder/Advisor of Modern
Theatre.info, based on his chronology of British and American theatre, Twentieth Century Theater [Facts on File].
His fifty-year archive of art, architecture, history, and design photos he has made worldwide is now online at
INFOTOGRAPHY.biz. His digitally-preserved audio-interviews with performing arts personalities will soon be
online at GlennLoneyArtsArchive.com, along with press photos of major theatre, dance, and opera productions.
He is the author of numerous books, including his latest, Peter Brook: From Oxford to Orghast.
GEORGE PANAGHI is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is
currently working on his dissertation on German immigrant theatre in New York City. He is a fellow at the
Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College. He has published in Ecumenica, Theatre
Journal, and the Communications of the Brecht International Society.
PHILIPPA WEHLE is the author of Le Thtre populaire selon Jean Vilar and Drama Contemporary: France and
of Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. A Professor Emeritus of French and Drama Studies at Purchase
College, SUNY, she writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance. She is a Chevalier of the Order of
Arts and Letters.
Contributors
martin e. segal theatre center publications
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of Witkiewiczs most important plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz,
Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The
Beelzebub Sonata, as well as two of his theoretical essays, Theoretical Introduction and A Few
Words About the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form.
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and continues the vein of dream and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late
Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and Antonin
Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the dramatists of the Absurd. . . . It is high time that this
major playwright should become better known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
roMANIA After 2000
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould.
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff
This volume represents the first anthology of new Romanian Drama published in the United States and
introduces American readers to compelling playwrights and plays that address resonant issues of a post-
totalitarian society on its way toward democracy and a new European identity. includes the plays: Stop
The Tempo by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera Ion,
Romania 21 by tefan Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and
Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collaboration, bringing together four of the most important
contemporary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-based direc-
tors and their ensembles. Throughout a period of one year, playwrights, translator, directors, and actors
worked together to deliver four English-language world premieres at Performance Space 122 in the fall
of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the
Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Len; Panic by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance
Space 122 Production, an initiative of Saln Volcn, with the support of Instituto Cervantes and the
Consulate General of Argentina in New York.
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
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
Four Plays From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently begun to be rec-
ognized by the Western theatre community, an important area within that
tradition is still under-represented in existing anthologies and scholarship.
That is the drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in Arabic as
the Maghreb. We hope that this first English collection of drama from this
region will stimulate further interest in the varied and stimulating drama
being produced here. It engages, in a fascinating and original way, with such
important current issues as the struggle for the rights of women and work-
ers, post-colonial tensions between Maghreb and Europe, and the chal-
lenges faced in Europe by immigrants from the Arab world.
The Arab Oedipus
Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four
leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq Al-Hakims King Oedipus, Ali
Ahmed Bakathirs The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salims The Comedy of
Oedipus and Walid Ikhlasis Oedipus as well as Al-Hakims preface to his
Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating
Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recent-
ly begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this
collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
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)
This volume contains four modern plays from the Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloulas The Veil and Fatima
Gallaires House of Wives, both Algerian, Jalila Baccars Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddikis The
Folies Berbers from Morocco.
martin e. segal theatre center publications
Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works for the Theatre
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre is considered one of the most innova-
tive and versatile artists of his day. Over the past twenty-five years, he has
produced works as a performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera
maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume represents the first collec-
tion of plays by Jan Fabre in an English translation. Plays include: I am a
Mistake (2007), History of Tears (2005), je suis sang (conte de fes mdival)
(2001), Angel of Death (2003) and others.
Czech Plays: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-language anthology of
Czech plays written after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. These seven
works explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and violence, political
corruption, and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and diverse
styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on by
democracy and globalization with characteristic humor and intelligence.
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 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
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
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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
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Price US$15.00 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
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
David Savran, editor
Founded in 1989 and edited for fifteen years by Professor Vera Mowry Roberts and
later in collaboration with Professor Jane Bowers, this widely acclaimed journal is
now edited by Professor David Savran. JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative
work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the U.S.past and
present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the her-
itage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature
and the performing arts.
Slavic and East European Performance
Daniel Gerould, editor
Established in 1981, SEEP (formerly called Soviet and East European Performance)
brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and film in Russia
and Eastern Europe. The journal includes features on important new plays in per-
formance, archival documents, innovative productions, significant revivals, emerg-
ing artists, and the latest in film. Outstanding interviews and overviews.
Western European Stages
Marvin Carlson, editor
Established in 1989, WES is an indispensable resource for keeping abreast of the
latest theatre developments in Western Europe. Each issue contains a wealth of
information about recent European festivals and productions, including reviews,
interviews, and reports. Winter issues focus on the theatre in individual countries
or on special themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artis-
tic directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and
directorial interpretations.
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: www.thesegalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Each journal is published three times a year
Price US$20 per journal per annum domestic/$30 international
martin e. segal theatre center publications
For information, visit the website at
www.gc.cuny.edu/theatre
or contact the theatre department at
theatre@gc.cuny.edu
The Graduate Center, CUNY
offers doctoral education in
Theatre
and a Certificate Program in
Film Studies
Recent Seminar Topics:
Middle Eastern Theatre
English Restoration and
18 C. Drama
Sociology of Culture
Contemporary German Theatre
Kurt Weill and His Collaborators
Opera and Theatre: Tangled
Relations
Performing the Renaissance
The Borders of Latino-American
Performance
Eastern European Theatre
Critical Perspectives on the
American Musical Theatre
New York Theatre before 1900
Transculturating Transatlantic
Theatre and Performance
The History of Stage Design
The Current New York Season
Puppets and Performing Objects
on Stage
Classicism, Root and Branch
Melodrama
European Avant-Garde Drama
Theorizing Post
Executive Officer
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CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
telephone 212.817.8870
fax 212.817.1538
Affiliated with the Martin
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Journal of American
Drama and Theatre,
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Faculty:
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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