Requiem for Gotscheff, Müller, and Utopia

A focal point of this year’s Theatertreffen was the work of Dimiter Gotscheff, who died in October 2013. He came from Bulgaria to Germany to study veterinary medicine, whereupon he encountered the work of Heiner Müller and changed his career path. Gotscheff went on to direct many of Müller’s plays and continued to stage them after Müller’s death in 1995. Gotscheff also created his own original works, often characterized by broad allegorical themes, fantastical costuming and sets, and vocal music. In his company were some of the great actors of the contemporary German stage, such as Margit Bendokat, Samuel Finzi, and Wolfram Koch. His final production, of Müller’s Zement, was selected as one of the ten plays in Theatertreffen 2014. To further commemorate his enormous contributions to German theater, Theatertreffen also coordinated presentations at the Volksbühne and the Deutsches Theater of three works that he directed and that had been previously invited to the festival: Müller›s The Persiansand Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten/Mommsens Block, along with Chekhov’s Iwanow. The combination of Müller and Gotscheff in such profusion was alone enough to make Theatertreffen a very rich experience.

Gotscheff’s production of Zementwas clearly expected to be the standout of the festival, as it was presented on Theatertreffen’s opening night in the festival’s main venue, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. It did not disappoint. Written in 1972, Zementwas first produced at the Berliner Ensemble in 1973 under the direction of Ruth Berghaus, and is credited for Müller’s rehabilitation in the DDR. Although the play delves into the dislocations that revolution brings to all human relationships and is not unambiguous ideologically, the text endorses in general the sacrifices necessary for a bright Soviet future.

Müller took his inspiration in part from the Greek myths and plays that he collages or adapts into the text (Achilles, Prometheus, Medea, Odysseus, Heracles, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes). His principal source, however, was Fjodor Gladkow’s 1926 novel Zement. Both the novel and Müller’s adaptation of it are a requiem for the utopian dreams of social revolution. The village to which the nominal hero of the story returns after the war faces economic blight because the local cement factory has closed and no longer provides employment. The hero’s wife, who has become a women’s leader, coldly tramples their marriage. Their child has been sacrificed to the revolution. Everything in the production was monochromatically gray, the color of cement. The enormous stage was covered in grey fabric all around, and on the floor lay a platform a few feet high, wrapped in what appeared to be gray canvas with the beginnings of a kind of a painting, the outline of a square with some other markings. (Later in the show, in fact, the actors drew on the platform, and it was lifted up to hang vertically, like a painting.) The costumes were likewise gray and ragged. Cement blocks concretized, if you will, the idea of labor, as the actors struggled to carry and roll the blocks on the platform. As was often the case in Gotscheff’s performances, Zementhad a lot of singing (e.g., a text from a communist party congress). Gottschef’s inventions include a stand-in for the dead child, in the person of Valery Tscheplanowa, who sings Russian songs, both pop and traditional, and breathlessly recites certain passages of the text that pertain to the Greek myths.

Gotscheff’s production of Müller’s The Persiansevoked all the primitive majesty that one imagines might have been ancient Greek theater. With some wonderful, well-purposed exceptions, the performance consisted of serious, clearly articulated delivery of Müller’s adaptation/translation of the play by Aeschylus, essentially a long lament for the Persians’ humiliating defeat by the Greeks. Müller’s text seems to imitate the syntax of Aeschylus through frequent extended participial phrases that pile on top of...