The Youth Plays of GRIPS

The Youth Plays of GRIPS GERHARD FISCHER IF The Guinness Book ofRecords were to solicit suggestions for an entry "Most Successful German Theatre of the Seventies," I would neither hesitate to nominate the GRIPS-Theatre for Children ofWest Berlin, nor limit this superlative to children's theatres - I would include "adult" theatres as well. Success, of course, is a difficult category to establish; and it is also rather flippant to compare the achievements of "serious" theatres to those of theatres playing primarily for children and young people. There, however, are a numberofgood reasons to substantiate my claim. The most impressive fact about GRIPS is perhaps its productiveness. Since its foundation in 1969, GRIPS has created twenty-three original plays, all of them written and produced in a collective working process.' Besides plays and performances, GRIPS also produces books and didactic booklets with follow-up material.' Eight ofthe plays as well as two collections of GRIPS songs are now available as long-playing records; thirteen productions have been televised in Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as well as in other countries. Another indicator of the success of GRIPS is its national and international acclaim. Until the end of 1978, there were 308 productions of GRIPS plays in twenty-one.languages, in most European countries as well as in North and Latin America, Asia and Australia; there have also been a number of tours or Gastspiele in the FRG and other European countries. The plays have received numerous awards. Das haltsteja im Kopfnicht aus (You Can't Possibly Take Something Like That), one of the youth plays I would like to discuss in this article, won the coveted Briider Grimm-Preis of Berlin and the Kulturpreis of the West German Federation of Trade Unions, and the production was also selected to participate in the Berliner Theatertreffen of 1976, where it competed with the year's best performances of the "adult" theatres in the FRG. This last point may serve as a final indication of success: GRIPS has become accepted by The Youth Plays of GRIPS 449 theatre-goers of all ages. In its morning perfonnances, the company usually plays to school classes; in the afternoon and evening shows, however, one can regularly find substantial minorities of above-age spectators who seem to enjoy themselves as much as the children. To be sure, the plays are still primarily written for and aimed at children, with age limits usually indicated, but the productions can be just as stimulating, infonnative and entertaining to grownups . The youth plays finally have brought yet a new audience to this theatre, namely teenagers and young adults, thus underlining the fact that for GRIPS , the traditional nomenclature "theatre for children" has become largely obsolete . The success story of GRIPS may appear even more impressive if one considers that the company is relatively small (some forty full-time and freelance members: teachers, actors, musicians, directors, dramaturges. technical and administrative staff), and that it functions as a collective ensemble, i.e., as a group working in a "multi-level organizational structure ..."3 based on the principle of democratic co-detennination of all members of the ensemble. It is apparent that in such circumstances, the amount of work and involvement for every individual is much greater and more demanding than it would be in a nonnal Intendantentheater run along traditional lines of management and organisation' At the same time, GRIPS has to make do with a minimum of public subsidy. In 1977, the ensemble received DM 640,000, which was much less, as Jost Hennand has pointed out,5 than the weekly subsidy of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, or (to give a comparison with an "adult"drama company) about one-tenth of the funds made available that year to Berlin's renowned Schaubiihne am Halleschen Ufer.6 Another and potentially more dangerous problem confronting GRIPS is the political pressure exerted by sectors of the media (particularly the papers of the Springer concern) and by some school authorities in districts of West Berlin that are under the administration of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. Attempts such as public campaigns to defame GRIPS and to denounce its plays as "communist indoctrination" have...