Theatertreffen (review)

Theatertreffen has long been a benchmark of accomplishments and a showcase for German theatre, even though its choices have been disputed. The jury, currently seven rather young critics predominantly from the national media, again selected productions from a large field of up to two hundred shows from all over Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, including the usual mainstay of repertory productions from state and municipal theatres, and focusing on achievements by directors. Theatertreffen's selections in the last decade demonstrate how the theatre culture has changed, from many relevant theatres to a small number of influential, affluent, and artistically powerful theatres—a culture of two leagues that we find in so much else. But the jury's only given criterion—"remarkable"—leaves room for what it considers special in context or outstanding in quality. Most recently, "remarkable" has allowed the festival to transgress the boundaries of regular dramatic theatre, opening up for outstanding productions from alternative or independent theatres, as was the case in 2012.

Sebastian Rudolph, Patrycia Ziolkowska, and Philipp Hochmair in Faust. (Photo: Krafft Angerer.)

While Sarah Kane was the shooting star of new drama in the late 1990s, her plays have since nearly disappeared from the German repertoire. Johan Simons's Sarah Kane Trilogy (Munich Kammerspiele) was therefore a "remarkable" attempt at conceptual reinterpretation. Simons transposed the shocking Cleansed from Kane's indeterminate torture clinic to a sort of therapy group that played out the atrocities as children. The great actress Annette Paulmann played the torture doctor Tinker with child-like naiveté, and all the characters appeared in colorful costumes. The idea of contrasting the worlds of torture and children could work for the play, with actors-playing-children playing out Kane's horrible fantasies, but the result was little more than adults pretending to be children, doing and saying strange things.

The second part of the trilogy, Crave—a composition of four voices circling around their mental case histories—was much better conceived. Simons discovered the musicality of Kane's composition and reduced the acting to minimal gestures while foregrounding the rhythm of speech to an abstract level. The third part, 4.48 Psychosis, took musicality as its central structure: what is perhaps a monologue before suicide was supplemented with an excellent chamber orchestra of strings and piano. The setting, by Eva Veronica Born, looked like an orchestra rehearsal in process, but the words, delivered by virtuoso actors Sandra Hüller and Thomas Schmauser, carried desperate content and were enhanced with the finest music. Staging Kane's works as a trilogy showed her path as a playwright: from onstage action, to inner-voice parts, to her rather abstract lyrical or post-dramatic texts.

Hate Radio (International Institute of Political Murder/Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin) represented what is edgy and new in German theatre and demonstrated Theatertreffen's admission of new forms of theatre. Documentary theatre has been one of the most productive fields in Germany since about 2000, and the form has developed mainly outside the established repertory system. Swiss-born Milo Rau, who earlier made a superb reenactment of The Last Days of the Ceaucescus, turned in Hate Radio to the genocide in Rwanda, reconstructing the radio studio RTLM and checking the playlists (including "Rape Me" by Nirvana) and the hate speeches by the DJs that fueled the killings. In this case of hate-speech pop, Rau's reenactment suggested that pop and politics make the worst bedfellows.

An Enemy of the People (Theater Bonn) was the selection from the so-called provinces of German theatre. Bonn, once the capital of West Germany, has diminished to the rank of a regular town, with the theatre struggling for subsidies and attention. Director Lukas Langhoff, son of the famous Thomas Langhoff and a disciple of Frank Castorf, tried to follow Castorf's iconoclastic and deconstructive legacy, using Ibsen's Enemy to explore issues of racism and the integration of foreigners. His protagonist, played by Falilou Seck, one of the few well-known African German actors, appeared in a prologue...