Heiner Müller's Democratic Theater: The Politics of Making the Audience Work by Michael Wood (review)

Michael Wood's monograph provides an excellent investigation of Heiner Müller's pursuit of effective political theater. Timely in its focus on the relationship between media and an audience that consumes or participates in its production, Wood focuses on four different periods in Müller's career to demonstrate both his evolving concept of political theater and how essential the politics of the audience are to the production and reception of art. Wood puts Müller's assumed audience at the center of a decades-long political program to create a democratic space within the theater where audience members could critique and reimagine the democracies and histories, in both East and West Germany, to which they found themselves subjected. Wood places Müller's commentary on democratic theater within a constellation of production and reception that exposes the limits of political theater, as well as the social and political pressures faced by audiences and critics alike. He argues that Müller seeks to create a theater that is democratic in the sense that the audience engages in interpretive practice by collapsing the "dichotomy of production and reception" and "mobiliz[ing] fantasy" by "providing spectators with material to be interpreted on an individual basis" (1, 9–10).

Arranged chronologically, Wood's work outlines Müller's attempts to create a collective experience free of suppression within the space of the theater, tracing the project through productions of Der Lohndrücker (1956–1960), Der Horatier (1968–1973), Wolokolamsker Chausee IV: Kentauern (1986), and a second run of Der Lohndrücker at the Deutsches Theater (1988–1991). Wood's kaleidoscope of historical sources, including interviews with Müller and audience members, journalistic reception, photographs, and film recordings of the productions, embeds Müller's work firmly within its social and historical context. This context, in turn, provides the basis for Müller's attempt to create democratic theater and Wood's analysis of its successes and failures within the shifting social and political landscape of the GDR and FRG.

In each production, Müller attempts to engage the political dissatisfaction of his audience and interrogates the material conditions and official interpretation of GDR history and politics. By carefully looking at Müller's textual production and reception, Wood also underscores the fact that productions also dramatically affect textual practices. Those that are at odds with Müller's textual practices may produce radically different results from those intended by the author, which leaves the potential for democratic or liberatory theater in jeopardy. The cooperation of producers, text, and assumed/real audience—Wood questions the nature of the audience in his reading of Müller's theory of democratic theater—is necessary for what Müller sees as the worthwhile pursuit of utopian democracy within the space of the theater.

Wood ends his analysis by bringing the discussion of Müller's decades-long project to instantiate a democratic space within the theater by emphasizing that "process over product" is fundamental to creating democratic theater and that "historical subject matter and form … are inextricably linked" (157). The focus on production and reception in response to and in the hopes of affecting politics and political history gives Müller's work and Wood's scholarship new urgency. Read in conjunction with Guy Debord, Henry Giroux, and Alexander Kluge, for example, Wood's study of Müller's political art sheds light on the artistic and social spectacles with which contemporary audiences are continually confronted. However, in "making the audience work," they retain the potential for social and political liberation from the passivity of consumption and reified history. By directing readers' attention to the social basis of human character and shifting boundaries of collective experience and action, Wood's monograph proves particularly timely as it reminds readers that the production and reception of art can and should have social and political consequences.