Going Deutsch: Britain and Germany's theatre exchange
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Version 0 of 1. Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival is, arguably, the German-speaking theatre world’s most important annual event. It’s their equivalent of the Olivier awards and a Broadway transfer all rolled into one big, state-funded shindig. Gathered to it are the 10 “most extraordinary” productions of the previous 12 months. So it’s an excellent place to take the temperature of what’s going on in “German-speaking theatre” – that means in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In terms of its relation to wider trends in German-speaking theatre, this year’s festival was unusual as it had only three productions of classic texts – Baal, John Gabriel Borkman and Waiting for Godot. Of the remaining seven, one was an adaptation of a novel (Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands), two were adaptations of films (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Warum läuft Herr R Amok? and Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen) and four were new plays, three written and one devised. (German-Canadian theatre academic Holger Syme’s piece on the subject is worth a read for a more impassioned perspective on this apparent change of emphasis.) Superficially, the main difference between “British theatre” and “German theatre” is widely understood to be the difference between a “writer-led” culture and a “director-led” one. But that simple formulation leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding (and entirely overlooks the role of the dramaturg). As Syme points out, it’s not simply that mainstream German theatre is director-led, but that it’s also highly “canon-based” (for want of a better term). In each set of new season announcements, there are guaranteed to be fresh productions of Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Euripides and Aeschylus, along with Schiller, Goethe and Lessing, with perhaps more recent literary greats Heiner Müller, Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. “New Writing” was not quite the same astonishing growth industry in Germany as it became in Britain after the mid-90s. Instead, the real emphasis has been on directors finding ways to speak to the present through classic texts – perhaps a tiny bit like Nicholas Hytner’s “Iraq war” Henry V at the National Theatre, but usually in far more oblique, philosophical, and outright thrilling ways. (At the end of the day, Hytner’s Henry said exactly the same things as other Henrys, albeit with different costumes and a jeep.) It’s an aspect of German theatre culture that has an interesting effect on its exchange with British theatre. When I lived in Berlin, UK director friends would occasionally ask me who the exciting new writers in Germany were. I was torn between saying “Shakespeare, Chekhov and Euripides” and “Simon Stephens, Dennis Kelly and Martin Crimp”. So much of the most exciting work I was seeing was just radical new versions of plays we’d all already seen. By contrast, the German “Freie Szene” is, like Britain’s, already much more international and consequently already much more similar. Work you might see atBerlin venues HAU or Sophiensaele would just as happily show at The Yard, The Place,or Forest Fringe, and vice versa. But, as a German playwright friend observed, regarding Britain’s increased interest in “German” theatrical style, it’s very much a two-way exchange. Looking back to the effect of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill in the late 90s at the Deutsches Theater’s Baracke independent studio run by Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje, we now see Ostermeier running the Schaubühne – easily Berlin’s most “Anglo” theatre – and Hillje is co-director of the Gorki, committed to multi-ethnic casting, every performance being surtitled in English, and mass international collaboration. While (some) British directors and designers have been inspired by the apparent freedom of interpretation enjoyed by their German counterparts, one could equally argue that the UK’s championing of new writing has had an effect on German thinking, both in terms of their admiration of our writers and of the prestige now being accorded to stagings of their own playwrights’ premieres, now taking place in main-house spaces and directed by big-name directors. I don’t believe Germany’s theatre has been diminished because this year’s Robert Borgmann production at Theatertreffen was a new play by Ewald Palmetshofer rather than one by Chekhov made unfamiliar by its staging. Moreover, Suzanne Kennedy’s “adaptation” of the Fassbinder film was a masterclass in just how different a stage version of a pre-existing artwork can be to the original. Of course, you could argue that she has simply produced an entirely original reading of an extant script, but I think that the adaptation has acquired an additional radicalism – transformed from social realism to an exercise in agonisingly slow absurdism which somehow made all the points of the original feel more timeless and alive. It was perhaps the first time that I really felt the intended effect of Brecht’s “alienation” and, contrary to expectation, despite being a thought-led process, the effect was one you felt in your gut. Of course, because of our completely different histories, reference points, education systems, social makeup, even national characters as exemplified by different lavatory designs, there are always going to be some aspects of our respective theatre cultures that won’t translate. There sometimes seems to be a question about “directness” where neither country seems satisfied with the other’s solutions. Germany increasingly embraces its identity as a “post-migrant” society – the term coined by Gorki co-director Shermin Langhoff to describe her own Turkish-German identity, as “guest-worker” hardly seems relevant to the thousands of second- or third-generation children born in Germany to parents of Turkish heritage. The country remains Europe’s number-one destination for refugees (Britain is only number four, despite the impression certain recent election campaigns may have given) and it feels like its own process of self-rediscovery is ever closer to Britain’s. The influence of German direction and design on the best recent British theatre is already clear – witness everything from the phenomenally popular A View From the Bridge, to the Royal Exchange/West Yorkshire Playhouse Anna Karenina or the Almeida’s current production Carmen Disruption (a play that received its world premiere at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg). What’s perhaps even more thrilling is the number of young British directors, designers, writers, critics and fans choosing to travel to Berlin every year to discover the work first-hand, and the number of Germans now being invited to make work here. German “director-led” theatre runs exactly the same gamut as “writer-led” British theatre – from calcified and traditional to cutting-edge, from chilly and arch to wry or ridiculous, from tragic to comic and all points in between. But the exploration of the differences between our two theatrical cultures seems to be an entirely enriching process for both countries. Long may Britain continue to overcome its little-England Eurosceptics and embrace the best of what the mainland has to offer us. |