The 2002 Theatertreffen (review)

The German theatre has become the scene of a lively generational confrontation, one in which the Theatertreffen also plays a role. The ten "noteworthy" productions invited to Berlin each year are chosen by a jury of critics that changes every three years. 2001/2002 was the first season for a new jury. Its predecessor had favored the aesthetic of masters like the septuagenarian Peter Zadek or the fifty-something Luc Bondy and their younger epigones. The new one has championed the very different theatre created by a generation of directors mostly in their late thirties.

René Pollesch may be the most radical of these directors, as his trilogy of productions in the Berlin Volksbühne's flexible Prater performance space amply demonstrated. Running sixty to ninety minutes each, the three productions examined nothing less than the corporatized production of private space and personal subjectivity under postcapitalism. Stadt als Beute showed how public and private spaces have fallen prey ("Beute") to corporate planning; Insourcing des Zuhauses: Menschen in Scheiss-hotels presented the international executive hotel as a factory in which a simulation of "home" ("Zuhause") is "insourced" through the production of conventionalized emotions and interactions. And Sex explored the commercial production of sexual interactions, comparing it to the self-deceptive production of "natural" emotions in supposedly "real" relationships.

Pollesch's theatre is remarkably successful at foregrounding its own process of production. The entire text of each of the first two plays was taken verbatim from a high-theory tome on urban planning and another on compulsory heterosexuality and gender roles in the home. The actors (a different cast for each play) sat around delivering this discourse to each other as if it were the stuff of everyday conversations. However, they also regularly erupted into the dialogue themselves, sometimes by shouting or otherwise overemphasizing a word or phrase, sometimes by adding a commentary of curses. And this entire dialectic of dialogue and performance alternated with what Pollesch calls "Clips"—nonverbal scenes in which the actors rest, drink water, or move energetically around the space, often accompanied by corporate rock (e.g., Britney Spears); some Clips also included video projection, sometimes clearly related to the dialogue, sometimes not.

Pollesch's three-level theatricality was cleverly supported by Bert Neumann's environmental set: a large "U" of eight interconnecting rooms suggesting an eclectically and cheaply furnished apartment. Spectators sat in swivel chairs within the "U" and on pillows on the edges of whichever platforms were being used least in a given production. For all its conceptual brilliance, however, The Prater Trilogy owed its success to its actors, to their ability to contrast their own energetic subjectivity with the production of constraining structures of dialogue.

Sebastian Nübling's John Gabriel Borkmann from Switzerland's Theater Basel was also distinguished by exceptional acting, albeit of a different kind. This late Ibsen play is regularly performed in Germany for its theme of generational conflict. It is often considered symbolist, but usually performed naturalistically. Nübling's production, on the other hand, used symbolist and expressionist tactics to present the older characters as vampires, feeding on each other and on the young. The two principal vampires, Borkmann's wife and her twin sister, were played with consummate skill by Katharina Schmalenberg and Silvia Fenz. Muriel Gerstner costumed them in identical rust-red satin dresses, hair styles, and chalky white makeup. She also gave them each two black canes, which they used as weapons and supports as they circled round each other or scuttled about the stage like vicious spiders, whining, sneering, and screeching. The two actors effectively used expressionistic exaggeration to render realistic the unnatural extremity of their characters' hatreds and desires.

Their battlefield was a large, low black platform with a chair-sized box at its center. Some feet away on all sides, Gerstner hung a semicircle of huge curtains in various fabrics and colors, mostly shades of red. Oppressively walling in the stage, they served as a symbolist device...