Dr.

Thomas Irmer

What school are you from?

Debates of acting methods in post-unification Germany and after

Intro:

Truly a cliché, but they have been at work for a long time and are still some sort of label tag. West-German
actors drew foremost from personal experience for a more individualistic understanding of their roles. East-
German actors, by contrast, are said to have found their highest skills in the intellectual analysis of the
characters they were to impersonate. A late confrontation between Stanislavsky (his lineage) and Brecht
(epic theatre). The actors of the latter school being scolded as cold, rational and all brains; the other ones
ridiculed as sentimental, too psychological and all blood. Despite the ideologically and aesthetically
oversimplifying debates, some grain of truth came with it before the advent of post-dramatic acting.
Paradoxically, its seemingly non-acting mode was informed by both schools and shaped by a theater that
still called for the real actor. (case stories of Ulrich Mühe and Thomas Thieme)

Start:

When I came upon further examination of my topic as it is given in the program, I really felt the urge to
include more recent examples for a debate that is just about to begin in German theatre circles. Some of
you have followed the Theatertreffen in Berlin that ended last weekend and you must have noticed the
confrontation that I am going to talk about now, maybe with some passion or doubt. And because most of
you have not seen these relevant performances I have brought some video fragments to show to you and
to make a point of reference for our discussion here.

1. Stanislavsky vs. Brecht, West-German vs. East-German: clichés, consequences and

misunderstandings in the 1990s

Our perception of what is theatre is mainly based on the actor. Our perception of how a given theatre
performance works is greatly influenced by the way the actor acts and produces his or her performance.
Sometimes this notion is easily to be understood and decoded in all its elements. Sometimes it is not so
easy when we are taken in a subtle manner and can hardly decide what was natural in the actor and what
he or she produced with visible efforts of estrangement and transmogrification.
Also, our judgement is heavily influenced by a number of things from skilled knowledge and systematic
grouping of acting styles. In Germany it has been for decades now two groupings that are rather
hemispheres or continents. The one is clearly seen as the lineage of Stanislavsky, the other one certainly
the line that runs from Brecht up to our present. This dichotomy would imply that the first one has its
foundation in the psychological conditions of a given character and its inner world. The latter one is
supposed to be addressing its social conditions in the first place, including the conditions of the role in
theatre as such. In fact, these are clichés but they are still at work and subject of constant debate.

But additionally, these concepts have their own connotations within the divided world of German theatre
before and after the reunification. In a cliché understanding the theatre actor on West German stage was
expected to be drawing from personal experience, using his own biography to act out the biography of his
role. While the East German colleague was expected to produce a construct of what he knew about the
role and what he was not in his role. Well, both methods could be appropriate depending on the general
strategies of a given production, and they may even merge and influence each other. Of course, here we
have a whole set of dichotomies: the emotional and the rational, hot and cold, heart and brains, seemingly
natural or deliberately technical. But even the real work of actors was sometimes shaped by these notions
that were shaped despite the fact that both schools existed on both sides of the wall until 1989. The only
explanation I can make for this is that there was a certain ideological longing to pigeonhole the work of
actors.

Once I interviewed the late Ulrich Mühe, whom most of you know from the Oscar-winning film Life of
others where he played the Stasi officer. The subject of our conversation was the many turns Mühe took to
break away from theatre and pigeonholing clichés about actors. At one point, he was even running off to
Florida to work with Bud Spencer which of course made him want to go back to German theatre. Mühe,
however, was very interested in this subject of the two schools and the consequences this had for an
actor’s mind. He for himself was certainly capable to merge both directions as he found it necessary for the
staging. Mühe called it models and he was extremely sensitive to what this means for an actor. In a way, his
benchmark was how much personal experience went into a role. His term ego was slightly derogative as he
saw drawing from personal experience and the presentation of ego as nearly synonymous. But what was
demanded from the actor was of course depending on the demands the director would make. Anyway,
Mühe felt provoked by the experience school, also because he could not make certain experiences in his
life that were typical for his peers. So a director’s instruction “Remember how you smoked too much pot in
India back then in the 1970s and you were totally lost” made Mühe feel lost. But he felt also challenged and
went to Salzburg and Vienna in order to demonstrate that he also can act with a soul and a bleeding heart.
And Mühe was so convincing that he made these discussions obsolete, even though he was still occupied
by it ten years later.
 2. The non-acting mode in the thrive for authenticity in the 2000s

Ten years later, that is around 2000, and a new phenomenon appeared on the German stage. Now many
people’s notion reshaped to find the seemingly non-acting actor at the momentum of new theatre
aesthetics. It was either a well-trained and sometimes even well-known actor who appeared to be just
rendering a role, or it was even a real no-actor who could accomplish similar effects. Most probably this
came from Dutch and Flemish theatre into German theatre because the Netherlands and Belgium the
conditions for troupes were decisively different from the disintegrating German ensemble system where
the ego was indeed an effective tool in the competition. But the Dutch and Flemish actors looked so
relaxed by comparison that it was called first underacting and ultimately non-acting. Remember
Needcompany for example, or Vivian de Muynck, who became a real star out of this theatre form, where
sitting and smoking cigarettes in an unspectacular set design could even produce a spectacular Richard III.
Or remember Luk Perceval’s Uncle Vanya where they were just sitting on chairs and seemed to perform the
play in a chatting mode. I told Perceval then this professor who looks a bit like Marlon Brando is great.
Where did you find this actor? And he replied: This is the dramaturge, no actor, I gave him the role partly to
enhance his post-cancer treatment.

The non-acting mode has of course many varieties and is mainly rooted in a phenomenon that has as many
varieties. I call it the theatre of authenticity and it has a lot to do with the denial of routine theatricality, the
exploration of new forms of documentary theatre and an informed attitude toward the general crisis of
representation of and with theatre. Rimini Protokoll would principally cast no actors but expert and favour
information over artistic expression. Perceval found his protagonist Thomas Thieme for his Shakespeare
productions as the actor “who has gone through all schools and models to leave them behind in the end
and become Thomas Thieme”. To compare it with what Ulrich Mühe was criticizing, the ego of an actor was
replaced by his personality as the acting material on stage. This is very much the actors’ role in the theatre
of authenticity that pretends to overcome the make-believe principle with simple role-playing as
impersonation. Now it is about being somebody on stage rather than playing a full-rounded character from
a distant historical or social world. And, not to forget about this, it could only be appreciated by an
artistically educated audience receptive for these problems of representation.

3. The counter reaction: theatre of artificiality after 2010

The theatre of authenticity is nevertheless theatre as theatre. The impulse to transcend theatre into a
theatrical form of art reality or not-anymore theatre was fully legitimate but also a contradiction in terms.
So if Thomas Thieme had become a car mechanic instead of a minimalist actor on stage, he would be no
actor anymore. So there was always, as we all know, a certain frame defining the non-acting mode within
theatre as a theatrical device. And there was a counter movement that would not buy these frame
experimentation any longer and turned towards other borders of aesthetic exploration.

This counter movement as I call it has been best seen in two recent examples from Berlin Volksbühne. Both
address acting and actors in a new way. Even though they are very different they employ similar strategies:
artificiality, exaggeration and a total contradiction to the non-acting mode. Yet they are very different.

4. Artificiality with high-skilled professional actors: Herbert Fritsch

Herbert Fritsch, who was an actor for Robert Wilson and most of all Frank Castorf, has had a comeback to
theatre recently. As a director, not as the extreme expressionistic actor he was praised for. At the age of 60
he called himself young talent. Fritsch’s theatre is extremely artificial in all its elements and makes the actor
a productive sign of hyper-expressionistic, acrobatic theatre. Fritsch calls for a theatre of artificiality to
encounter the theatre of authenticity. Theatrically, his theatre is no less authentic. Fritsch claims even in
this context his theatre is more authentic because it employs all means of what the actor in the non-acting
mode had to give up. And of course, he works with trained and experienced actors.

(video clip of Spanische Fliege with Sophie Rois and Wolfram Koch)

5. Artificiality with a mixed cast of actors and non-actors: Vegard Vinge

Another example is the currently most debated show in Germany, Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s John
Gabriel Borkman at Volksbühne’s Prater, their small venue. Here the actor is needed to carry a cartoon-like
character with mask and prerecorded lines from a technologically advanced speaker system. The cast
consists of all kinds of people but not actors in the first place. The points are about duration and extremely
alienated presence. Vinge and Müller play lead roles but may not be identified as actors behind their masks
and masking it as an exclusively collective project where nobody of these 70 collaborators stands out or is
in to ‘show’ him or herself.

(video clip of Borkman with Vegard and Ida, program leaflet to show)

6. Conclusion

What can we conclude from this rough and somewhat uneven sketch about borderlines of acting?
Surprisingly so, the actor has become more and more sign and signature. Be it in the non-acting mode as a
confluence of character and personality, be it in Fritsch’s total exaggeration of artificial disguise, or in
Vegard Vinge’s theatre where the actor, despite full exposure in unspeakable deeds, becomes the bearer of
a sign. Maybe this development was something that Ulrich Mühe as a great master actor of the 20th century
could not quite cope with. His milestone Hamlet directed by Heiner Müller in 1989 was nevertheless fuelled
by his own personality and experience and him becoming a sign of theatre history. But that may not mean
that the old fights of the 20th century are long passé, and we keep encountering them everywhere in our
theatres all around. Why not? It is authentic playing in theater.