Uncle Vanya, and: Christoph Kolumbus, and: The Dirty Hands

Figure 1.

Corinna Kirchhoff as Elena and Mathias Gnädinger as Vanya in Andrea Breth’s production of Uncle Vanya at Berlin’s Schaubüne. Photo: Bernd Uhlig.

Figure 2.

Jessica (Kathrin Angerer) and Slick (Milan Peschel) in Sartre’s The Dirty Hands, directed by Frank Castorf at Berlin’s Volksbühne. Photo: Ingolf Seidel.

Figure 3.

Hoederer (Henry Hübchen) and Jessica (Kathrin Angerer) in Sartre’s The Dirty Hands, directed by Frank Castorf at Berlin’s Volksbühne. Photo: Ingolf Seidel.

The path to my seat for the Schaubühne’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya led underneath the stage, past massive pistons of hydraulic machinery. As this dreamlike version of Chekhov’s most elegiac play began to unfold almost casually, with snatches of music and careless words on a vast and barren stage, the ironic disparity between art and apparatus could not have been more sharply expressed; indeed, it became a potent metaphor for the German theatre scene itself, where considerable artistry (and, occasionally, Chekhovian self-indulgence) is sustained by a monumental machinery of federal subsidies. Germany allocates approximately one hundred times the budget of the NEA to its theatre alone.

Choosing Uncle Vanya as her penultimate offering, Andrea Breth, the hapless outgoing artistic director of the Schaubühne, risks perilous comparisons to the great “Russian” productions at this theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, especially Peter Stein’s interpretations of Gorky and Ostrovsky with their fine sense of social milieu and breathtaking ensemble playing. Breth’s Vanya could not hold in the face of these specters, but it fell apart in style. The large stage, enclosed by ink-blue walls running obliquely into an uncertain somewhere (design: Wolf Redl) was strewn with debris (sand, rocks, shards) meant not so much post-apocalyptically, it seemed, as the fallout, the shavings of too-wearisome human cohabitation. This was a planet of lost souls exhausted by defeat, disillusionment, and dereliction, returning to life in short bursts of hopeless passion or aimless rage before spinning into the void again: Chekhov in Beckettland. A large moon presided over this cool wasteland of lunacy. A grand piano, relic of bourgeois dreams, moved around the space as if by magic, at one point carrying the beautiful Elena, the professor’s young and indolent wife. The moment was profound and silly, pathetic and inexplicable.

The virtue of Breth’s production remained in these charged moments; she is a director not of conceptual depth but of psychological subtlety, a master of the telling moment. When Vanya (Mathias Gnädinger) drunkenly set his tie afire after being rejected by Elena, we understood the combustible passions of this rotund and clownish man. When Corinna Kirchhoff’s Elena glided through space, radiantly cool, as if encased in glass, a vacant Pre-Raphaelite expression on her face, we immediately grasped the strange mixture of hostility and devotion this unattainable object of desire generated. When the lovelorn Sonya, exhilarated at Astrov’s presence, shoved pickle after pickle into her beatifically smiling mouth as tears rolled down her cheeks, the midnight snack became a perfect metaphor for the consuming futility of her desires. Thanks to Breth’s acuity and especially the nuanced work of Inka Friedrich as Sonya, the act 2 conversation between Sonya and Elena, ostensibly two secondary characters, became one of the production’s most moving moments—an instant of shared suffering between two women who in many ways bear the brunt of this diminished life. Like this one, many of the intimate scenes were played close to the apron, suddenly shrinking the vast space to a chamber theatre.

The central figure of the production, its id, was clearly the eccentric doctor Astrov. In Wolfgang Michael’s version, the doctor was...