The Poetry of Things Past

One of the celebrated European directors of his generation, Alvis Hermanis has been the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre in Latvia for twelve years. Trained as an actor who worked in theatre and film before he turned to directing classics and contemporary plays and adaptations of fiction more than two decades ago, in 2007 he received the European Prize for New Theatrical Realities in Thessaloniki. In recent years he has directed several new works with his company, including Sonia (after a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya), Long Life, Latvian Stories, Story about Kaspar Hauser, In the Burning Darkness by Antonio Buero Vallejo, Fathers, and The Government Inspector, for which he received the Young Directors Award in Salzburg in 2003. At a time when European theatre is characterized by the dominance of the director, Hermanis is devoted to the actor, and instead of highconcept stagings of the world repertoire, he often draws on the stories of ordinary people. The New Theatre of Riga has performed at major theatres and festivals in Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America, and Canada—in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Singapore, Santiago, Avignon, Helsinki, Madrid, Lisbon, Brussels, Zurich, Montreal, Edinburgh—and in November 2009 Hermanis will stage two Isaac Bashevis Singer stories for the Munich Kammerspiele, and then adapt a Jaroslav Iwaskiewicz novel for Italian actors. For the Vienna Burgtheater, he is planning a production of August: Osage County, which received the Pulitzer Prize last year. I interviewed Hermanis in Cologne during the run at Halle Kalk (Schauspielhaus Köln) of The Sound of Silence, a three-and-a-quarter hour piece co-produced by the Berliner Festspiele, and based solely on the physical action of the actors and the recorded songs of Simon and Garfunkel. Our conversation took place on March 23, 2009.

PAJ recently published your essay against the trend toward violence in the contemporary theatre [“Speaking About Violence,” in PAJ 90. 2008—eds.] after we met for the first time in New York. Here we are a year later in Cologne. Do you have any further thoughts on this issue?

My statement makes sense only in the European context. As I understand it, American theatre is non-violent, very friendly, and nice.

User-friendly. . . . Do you think this trend in violence still exists in theatre after Sarah Kane or in the treatment of the Greek classics, as in German theatre, for example?

I’m using the word “violence” not necessarily in a primitive way. Actors beating each other are using artificial blood. It can also mean how they treat not only literature but life itself—what is called “deconstructing.” The age of deconstruction, it started with Paul Cezanne, and still has not reached an end. It has something to do with white civilization itself, which has a sado-masochistic obsession with self-deconstruction.

Do you mean the post-Freudian world in terms of understanding and analyzing the self?

It has to do with something much deeper, maybe even biological roots.

Isn’t that the basis of modern drama?

What we are doing is modern drama as well. But we are trying to treat our characters with understanding, with tenderness.

It’s true. There is a great amount of tenderness in your characters and in the treatment of actors. What I was getting at is, isn’t the basis of our understanding of drama in trying to analyze conflict and the interior life of a character? It seems to me that you’re saying you are not really interested in this kind of character analysis on stage.

Maybe in the European tradition, art and theatre have always been the means to transform society. It was one of the main functions of theatre—how to invite people to revolution. That’s maybe where this aggressive and violent energy comes from. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine, at least in Europe, that theatre could be an instrument in how to make another revolution. I think theatre has dramatically changed its function in European society.

That’s an interesting way of thinking about your work because you are younger than most of the directors—like...