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5 FRANK CASTORF AND THE VOLKSBÜHNE uring the final decade of the twentieth century, the Berlin stage, and indeed that of all of Germany, was dominated by the figure of Frank Castorf, who, at the helm of the Berlin Volksbühne, not only assumed a leading position among German stage directors of this period but also presented at his theatre a very large proportion of the most praised and influential directors, authors, and designers of this period. Castorf was born in East Berlin in 1961, and after training in theatre at Humboldt University, he became dramaturg in Senftenberg, where he mounted his own first productions from 1979 to 1981. He first gained attention as managing director of the small East German theatre at Anklam, where he served from 1981 to 1985. In Anklam his unconventional productions troubled the East German police, the Stasi, from the beginning. His first production, Othello, was played in semidarkness , with the dialogue reduced to scattered half-heard mutterings in English . The production attracted the close attention and the condemnation of the Stasi, whose secret reports complained that it was equally offensive “to Shakespeare and to the public,” that it “deprived the play of all human values,” and, most damning, that it “undermined socialist cultural politics” by emphasizing “the impossibility of communication along with a blighted view of humanity.”1 In an interview thirteen years later Castorf wittily characterized the production as the “Verwurstung” of a Soviet problem-play “instead of the old familiar material using buckets of water, the Rolling Stones, shrieking women, idiotic jokes.”2 That Castorf should launch his directing career with a calculatedly outrageous production of a standard classic was highly appropriate, and the police report was by no means unperceptive in suggesting a subversive political dimension as well. From the beginning, Castorf’s work challenged both the aesthetic and political establishment. He clearly saw a relationship between the two, and his feelings about the “impossibility” of communication may be seen in the formidable but highly suggestive title of his 1976 doctoral dissertation, highly praised by his professors at Humboldt University: “The Foundations of the ‘Evolving’ of the Philosophical-Ideological and the Aesthetic-Artistic Positions of Ionesco Concerning Reality.”3 One dramatic image from the Anklam years, near the end of Castorf’s 1984 production of Heiner Müller’s Der Auftrag, has become legendary in the modern German theatre. At the rear of a starkly minimalist set, Castorf’s designer Hartmut Meyer provided him with a practical door that in fact opened into the open air. The protagonist’s departure through this door, an escape not provided by the Müller text itself, was widely interpreted as the expression of a desire for a kind of political as well as artistic opening not easily achieved in the current theatre of East Germany. D 96 Castorf’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (called Nora in German) was widely considered the pinnacle of his Anklam years. It had less clear political implications than most of his early works and so was less directly offensive to the authorities, even though it was anything but a traditional reading. Castorf was fascinated by a 1909 German analysis of the play which was published in his program: “Ibsen’s Nora before the Correctional Judges and Psychiatrists,”4 which applied an early Freudian analysis to both Nora and Helmer. The production began quietly, but Castorf’s Nora, Silvia Rieger, soon descended into delusions and hysteria and began singing snatches of music from the Rolling Stones (a favorite Castorf source). Her confessed desire (to Mrs. Linde and Rank) to shock Torvald with a forbidden word became a hysterical several minutes of shouting the favored shocking word of the German stage, Scheiße! directly out into the audience. Henry Hübchen, who would become one of Castorf’s favored actors, here appeared with him for the first time as Helmer, displaying a disturbing blend of slapstick, neurosis, elegance, and instability that precisely suited Castorf’s seriocomic approach. The success of Nora opened other East German theatres to Castorf. In 1986 he presented Heiner Müller’s Der Bau in Berlin in a production that ran counter to established conventional, even reverential stagings of this depiction of the founders of communism. Castorf, as usual, broke up the action with musical interludes , slapstick routines, dance sequences (inspired in part by the work of Pina Bausch in the West), and long sequences of silence and inaction (the short piece...

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