Theatre is More Beautiful than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century (review)

The inimitable Marvin Carlson adds to his already-impressive oeuvre with a text focusing on the German stage of the last forty years and on the role of the director. American scholars often romanticize the contemporary German stage; this is, after all, the period of the famous Regietheater (director's theatre), supplemented by government funds and supported by the public despite, or perhaps because of, an experimentation that would be "unimaginable in the more conservative English or American theatre traditions" (xi). Carlson examines the work of nine major German directors in order to offer a corrective to this romantic image and leave the reader with a very specific picture of each director's unique vision for the German theatre. Readers will benefit from Carlson's firsthand experiences with this theatre, as such an insider's perspective has not been previously available in English.

Carlson organizes his book into three sections, with three chapters per section that are essentially monographic studies of a particular director. The first three directors, Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann, are classified as "The Old Masters"; the next three, Andrea Breth, Frank Castorf, and Christoph Marthaler, are classified as "The Successors"; and the last three, Michael Thalheimer, Thomas Ostermeier, and Stefan Pucher, Carlson calls "The Next Generation." In each chapter, Carlson describes individual productions in great detail, including the press around the productions.

Central to his analysis is the question of which productions get invited to the annual Theatertreffen in Berlin, which is designed to recognize the ten best productions in Germany that year. The comparative approach is useful, but troubling because it engenders issues of chronology that could have been fixed by a simple table or appendix listing the productions selected each year for the festival. The book is organized chronologically, but very loosely. The Old Masters' earliest productions take place in the late 1960s, and the Next Generation's productions begin in the mid-1990s, but the directors featured in the book were still alive at the time of Carlson's writing (Zadek died in 2009), and, in many cases, were still producing theatre. The result of this is that many of the productions covered in individual chapters were produced concurrently, or went to the Theatertreffen in the same year, but Carlson does not help the reader follow these potential comparisons by noting when this happens.

Nonetheless, the book is an invaluable addition to our understanding of the German theatre. In the first three chapters, Carlson introduces the concept of the Regietheater primarily through the work of Stein, but Zadek and Peymann also feature prominently. Regietheater means that the director's (as opposed to the playwright's) vision of a given play prevails. For the first group of directors, this practice led them to re-envision classic plays by, among others, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, in an overtly political fashion. Perhaps most importantly, these new productions were fueled by innovative director's concepts and radical scenic designs. In fact, Carlson notes that the director/designer relationship is central to the director's work, with directors and designers often working together for many years or even over a lifetime (he makes a similar point about dramaturgs). Nevertheless, this is a book about German directing, and so, while innovations in design clearly typify the production style that Carlson sees as central to German theatre of last forty years, he credits the directors with fueling that style.

In the second section, Carlson foregrounds East German director Frank Castorf, who was a central figure in the era of "The Successors." The inclusion of Andrea Breth in this section seems almost like an afterthought—perhaps because Carlson sees her as the theatre establishment's token "female director," as opposed to a director in her own right. For example, he describes her selection as the first recipient of the prestigious Fritz Kortner...