Theatertreffen Berlin (review)

Theatertreffen Berlin. 5-20 May 2000.

The Theatertreffen's rotating jury of critics is charged with selecting each season's ten most "noteworthy" productions from the stages of Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. Well into the 1990s, there was at least some unspoken consensus on what constituted "noteworthy," but this consensus has been shattered by the sometimes extreme differences in approach and style that characterize the three generations now competing on German stages. The differences reflect visions of theatre that are to some degree irreconcilable, and both theatres and critics (including me) are taking sides. Last year, the jury was criticized for promoting its own conservative vision (Theatre Journal 52.2: 266-69); this year, the same jury seemed to give way to an insecure eclecticism.

The festival's most compelling production was Frank Castorf's adaptation at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz of Dostoyevsky's Dämonen, based in part on Camus's version, The Possessed. Castorf concentrated the novel's sprawling action into one evening and one location--a kind of prefabricated 1960s bungalow, complete with pool, which revolved from time to time during the four-hour performance. Castorf has been the Volksbühne's artistic director since 1992, and his ensemble has developed a powerful way of working the seam between subjective experience and convention-bound behavior that is particularly effective in presenting fragmented characters. The actors also engage in a certain amount of physical humor, and emotional outbursts are not uncommon; they never disappear into their characters. The gags and outbursts have been quite exaggerated in some Castorf productions, but here the company showed a fair amount of restraint. Instead, they demonstrated how simply and transparently their anti-psychologist approach can allow them to play and how effectively they can refrain from smoothing out the contradictions and weaknesses of Dostoyevsky's characters. What emerged was a group portrait of an intellectual class incapable of confronting the pressing problems of the real world outside its members' own thoughts and desires--a portrait that proved quite relevant to post-cold war German intellectuals confronted by the crises in the former Yugoslavia. [Begin Page 166]

Although few have adopted his stylistic strategies, the fifty-year-old Castorf's subversive, anti-psychologist theatre has been important for younger directors as a counter-example to the 1990s version of Regietheater, in which a respectful dramaturgical reading guides the creation of an aesthetically closed performance grounded in realistic characterization. Certainly, the thirty-five-year-old Lars-Ole Walburg made good use of this counter-example in his production of Ibsen's Enemy of the People at Theater Basel, where he is Chief Dramaturg. Walburg retranslated the play into a colloquial contemporary German with few traces of Ibsen's nineteenth-century cadences. The Stockmanns, Hovstad, and Billing are young, around thirty; the Stockmann children have been cut, but Katrin is pregnant. Stockmann becomes not an established figure but a brash young comer, energetic but not refined. Ricarda Beilharz's shallow set reinforced this re-placing of Ibsen. A row of doors ran across upstage, and a tacky gold sofa ran across below it. Water pipes were visible everywhere. The actors got from one level to the other by climbing over the sofa. This movement pattern helped ground repeated breaks in basically realistic playing--breaks achieved through comic exaggeration and a sheer exuberance that sometimes distanced actor from role. The play's fictional situation seemed entirely contemporary. And the production shared its inspiration when, halfway through, the actor playing Stockmann read a letter sent to the Theater Basel threatening reprisals if the theatre presented a public lecture by the highly controversial politician, Jean Ziegler. Switzerland seemed suddenly just as provincial and clubby as Stockmann's little town.

It would have been instructive to contrast Dämonen or Enemy of the People with the septuagenarian Peter Zadek's Hamlet, directed for the Vienna Festwochen. Unfortunately, the production couldn't find a suitable venue in Berlin. It had run in Berlin before, at the Schaub&uuml...