Theatertreffen Festival (review)

The Theatertreffen’s basic format hasn’t changed much over the years since 1964. A rotating jury of seven critics selects the ten “most noteworthy” productions from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland during the year since the last selections. These are brought to Berlin as the core of a festival that also includes new-play readings, workshops for young theatre professionals, and, since 2005, a workshop for young journalists that results in two issues of a “Festival Newspaper.” What have changed are the festival’s international aspirations. Berlin has become a major arts center, with connections to both Western and Eastern Europe and beyond. The Berliner Festspiele, a government corporation that organizes the Theatertreffen and several other festivals, most notably the Berlinale, has become a player in this new European culture. The new plays, workshops, and Festivalzeitung, for example, attract international participants—although not from the United States. And to encourage international attendance at the main stage events, the Festspiele provided English supertitles for two productions last year and three this year. As the slogan of this year’s Theatertreffen put it: “To Berlin!”

The core of the Theatertreffen’s international appeal remains, of course, the ten German productions. The best of these all exhibited what I find most attractive about the German theatre: an original and insightful production concept, realized through compelling design and superb individual and ensemble acting on the moment-by-moment level. They also illustrated some of the problems the German theatre is confronting today, including a shortage of younger artists and female directors.

Hamlet (Joachim Meyerhoff) rehearses with one of the Players, a spectator. Photo: Leonard Zubler.

The Berlin performances of Jan Bosse’s production of Hamlet, originally produced at the Schauspielhaus, Zürich, took place in Radialsystem V, a nineteenth-century brick pumping station converted in 2006 to provide flexible spaces for music, dance, and theatre. For Hamlet, the largest hall was reconfigured into a kind of banquet room: the first rows on three sides provided seating at long, cloth-covered tables, a cup and plate at each place; Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius, in modern dress like the rest of the cast, frequently sat at a raised table on the fourth side. Most action took place in the rectangle formed by these tables, which was perhaps sixty by twenty feet. The performance began with the first court scene (1.2) and Claudius immediately exhorted the spectators to drink a toast with him. We also were “cast” in various smaller roles. Most radically, Hamlet solicited three spectators, one after the other, to rehearse with him the Aeneas speech performed by the First Player in act 2, scene 2.

On the one hand, then, we too were placed inside the play’s world—a placement designer Stéphane Laimé reinforced by mounting huge mirrors behind us on both long sides of the space; on the other, we retained our interpretive distance: we weren’t asked to weep for Hecuba like the Player King. This dramaturgy allowed Hamlet to acknowledge us as spectators, to sit among us watching the doings of Claudius, and to talk to us in his soliloquies. More importantly, it moved us into precisely the liminal space Hamlet desperately kept trying to occupy. Joachim Meyerhoff’s Hamlet was an ironic, witty, and immensely charming intellectual forced to perform in Claudius’s play, a performance from which he was increasingly unable to gain any distance. Meyerhoff played with urgent energy, providing a nice contrast to Edgar Selge’s overburdened, exhausted Claudius. The two characters played move and countermove until they brought their world down upon their heads. Bosse deleted most of Shakespeare’s metaphysical superstructure, leaving us without any comforting interpretive frame; as if to make us physically experience this confusion, crews removed most of the seating during intermission.

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