2024 Report from London and Berlin

Covid pushed many people out of the theatre, but in Germany, at least, it was not just Covid. For several years before, regular theatergoers had begun to complain of a stagnation in the theatre. The once-innovative “post-dramatic” directorial styles that had drawn international crowds to German theatres and festivals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had grown standard, rote. Visitors and young people who had only seen realist, dramatic theatre before could still experience the revelation of intelligent, well-theorized, post-everything theatrical aesthetics in their first attendance at a theatre in Berlin. But after a while, the experience devolved into just another yelling actor in a dark, minimalist room interrupted occasionally by heavy intermittent electronic music instead of scene changes. Yet more cycles of Brecht Kabuki or a Castor stage flooded with orange balls pouring out of cupboards did not seem to cut through the deadening sense of nothing-new. In Germany as in many parts of the world, theatregoers had quietly retreated even before the pandemic into their living rooms and bedrooms, where innovation took the form of a new abundance and diversity of streaming films and series available on demand. General historians will likely focus on how the pandemic created a newly mediatized society, but for many of us, the ready, mass obedience to strict public health guidelines during the pandemic was also a result of so many of us having lost our connection to in-person institutions and events: we were already increasingly sitting at home, anyway, waiting for something, well, dramatic.

Although I had continued to attend theatrical productions on a limited basis, as available, during the pandemic period, I experienced the desire for a renewal of theatregoing on a post-pandemic trip to London in Fall 2023. In short, I was surprised to feel again like a bored tourist, longing to have some contact to Shakespeare, to live Culture. It was professionally necessary, anyway, since I was writing and teaching about the Bard, so I booked a ticket at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark. I had been reading early modern travelers’ accounts of going to theatre, and this proved a helpful way to frame my walk across the Thames, embracing rather than snobbishly shirking from an authentic, new tourist impulse. Why, after all, should the dramatic tourist theatre be any less interesting than the intellectual theatre of Berlin, the conceit of theory to one side?

The audience in the lobby was an appealing, sociable group of highly educated tourists, energized evening celebrants, and people working in theatre or culture, a familiar scene. The ushers led us into the closed round Jacobean winter theater—modelled after Blackfriars—with an admirable mixture of routine professional friendliness and vigilance. They stood watch at each entrance of the auditorium throughout the entire show, adding an energy to the spectacle. I could not decide if their vigilance had to do with pride and excitement about working in such a London institution during peak-rent neoliberalism, or if it had been impressed upon them how easily even this modern wooden theatre might accidentally burn up with everyone inside if the wax candle lighting went somehow awry. I decided it was probably both, though I am sure the Globe complex has a formidable sprinkler and fire-prevention system in place.

I noted the relief of feeling safe from yelling actors here, a fact which I associated with some small distance from the War in Eastern Europe, and I gave myself what felt like almost scandalous permission to look forward to hearing what some traditionally trained Shakespearean actors would do with a classic text. My only hesitation, which had nearly prevented me from buying tickets, was that the text to be performed was not Shakespearean at all but rather Ibsen’s Ghosts. On second and third thought, however, this bit of anachronistic meditation on theatrical ghosts seemed peculiarly, teasingly smart, a way of making something new in a well-established, historicist tourist venue. The production, in this sense, turned out to be entirely satisfying, a validation of director Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production concept and the Globe’s artistic direction under Michelle Terry, who has begun to widen the productions staged there beyond texts from the early modern period.

The stage candelabra lighting ritual, performed by the actors, immediately established the conversation between the Shakespearean stage’s essential anti-realism and Ibsen’s conventional drama of servants and bourgeois masters behaving as if they really are captured in the four walls of an established house. Seeing the faces of other audience members in-the-round doubled for the gaze of the Shakespearean theatre on its later cousin, 19th-century picture-box realism. This effect was emphasized by the production’s backdrop: a large, square mirror, reminiscent equally of a cheap bordello as of the hard regime of tightened neoclassical control in Versailles’ 17th-century mirror room. The stage was otherwise bare, though covered by a large, long-shag burgundy rug on which the artist-son, Osvald (compellingly played by Stuart Thompson), lay and seemed to dream much of the action of the evening, as if himself gazing back on or hallucinating theatre history from a plastic technicolor simulacrum of the 1970s. Rosanna Vize’s highly effective set and costume designs gave strong visual support to the production’s well-crafted and subtle play with multiple historical ages of avant-garde production and fraught relations with realism. Osvald’s costume—a faux-fur sweater jacket over a plain white undershirt and light boxer shorts—featured a faded, elaborate floral pattern that evoked Renaissance court doublets and beast masquerading, at the same time as gesturing towards a slipperiness between much more antique figurations of the satyr and contemporary, neo-bohemian, art-world fashion. This still minimalist aesthetic of allowing-the-ghosts-in, this conversation with the gaze of various historical theatres and the avant-garde, was captured by one of the opening gestures of the play when Osvald, before lying down for his reverie, lit a real cigarette on stage. The smell of that cigarette lingering throughout the intermission-less Ibsen drama participated in an already well-entrenched 21st-century performance tradition of smoking actors critically reminding us of the suspiciously sanitary odor of our own mega-liberated time. It also quickly established the play’s driving allegory of an artist understanding his “rebellion” as a sociologically forced exile, about which he previously—as the supposed hero of a happy family non-drama—had been kept effectively and relatively brutally in the dark.

The acting was accomplished with intelligence and spirited handiwork. The mother, Helene, played by Hattie Morahan (known for her award-winning turn as Nora in a 2012 production of A Doll’s House), dominated the dark bare stage. Her nervous tight stage business became increasingly legible, in the exposed allegory of the play, as a 19th-century effort to keep artists and their next-generation representations away from the corruption of society’s actual making, while at the same time seducing them just enough into a torpidly incenstual drama, preventing what would otherwise be their disastrous free relation to the state and the servant classes. European Realism became for the duration of the play a moment within the Shakespearean theatre’s long, shuffling repertoire. The English Renaissance theatre was opened again as a laboratory for contemplating the extended human transhistorical in both directions, past and future.

With exquisite scenic minimalism and the speed of a sharply cut and knit-together text (clocking in at 100 minutes), Hill-Gibbins’ Ghosts staged the artist’s paradoxical epiphany about his own exile from the actual primal scene of Realism: the intentionally guarded, representational inaccessibility of the driving truths and negotiations of society’s actual practical, historical construction and business deals. Realism became in the Shakespearean gaze a manufactured narcissistic ghost-machine, the previously glimpsed netherworld of entrances from a backstage now blocked—not by a façade with necessary doors but more essentially by a supposedly endlessly revelatory mirror, a very basic but entirely effective installation mimicking Louis XIV’s mechanism of virtual social surveillance while displaying how easily and cheaply such a mechanism could be constructed, at will, via mass, industrial production. By foregoing bourgeois furniture and historicism in favor of lightly suggestive long-historical minimalism and the surreal, visual centering of the fantasizing artist, the production opened the bare allegorical dimensions of the play and its meditation on what the artist and ultimately art can be, if anything other than ghosts among ghosts.

Productions at the Sam Wanamaker are dominated by the tourist desire to visit Shakespeare’s original site of creation. This production seized this reality and dealt with it not as an impediment to original creation but as a critical tool for showing the artist’s relation to theatre vis-à-vis one of the most famous, classic plays meditating on just this theme. In Ibsen’s Ghosts, the will of the young painter, returned as the prodigal son from art school in Paris, to create a new mirror for his time, society, and family is fatally and ironically mixed up with his art education being a doomed escape, arranged by his mother’s financial management, from the disease and corruption that he is otherwise due to inherit from his father. This meditation on artistic abyss and generational juncture at the center of Ibsen’s realist dramatic career functions like a theatre-historical Verfremdungseffekt. Paradoxically, it brings the audience nearer to contact with the floor and room of modern artistic creation and exposes that site’s (childlike) separation from society—the artist’s ambivalent inheritance of society’s own will to erase its hidden bad deals—even as the artist thus captured attempts to represent society. Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Sam Wanamaker, in short, fulfilled the tourist wish to approach the Shakespearean ghost by demonstrating the realism of a transhistorical, always returning artistic dilemma only contingently attached to a period’s furniture or wallpaper.

If the double-binds of bourgeois false consciousness were Ibsen’s pet theme, Hill-Gibbins’ production used the Shakespearean gaze to more fully unearth the less historically bound, allegorical dimension of the drama. Sitting as it were in the presence of one of the larger, shaping ghosts of Shakespeare’s theatre, Queen Elizabeth I, audience members read Ibsen’s play about uncanny revenants differently. Helene haunts Helen, and vice versa, beauty in her maternal capacity becoming the controlling, tragic demi-goddess on which the play ruminates. Regine (the household maid who lights the lights and is destined to be the artist’s muse before it is revealed she is his half-sister) doubles for the state in the fantasy that beauty will make the state its servant, rather than both being the servants of other, baser powers-that-be. The artist as the pure liberated heir of beauty is doomed by his actual mixed heritage, the same construction that blocks his potentially monstrous love affair with the state. Fated to be an impotent mental invalid, a quasi-universal, de-historicized ghost-heir about whom the realist world will tell some seemingly objective history, the Shakespeare-like, authorial artist-ghost of this production attempted to break the double-bind of realism by thrusting the representation of his own compositional dreaming on stage. With the Shakespearean theatre came the loosened historical gazes of other theaters, including those most ancient and our own most contemporary, the recurring self-reflective moment of an artist attempting to create a theater both freed and captured autotrophically again by its ghostly colleague. When Helene, unable to repress the ghosts she has attempted to keep at bay along with the corruption of the family’s past and present, declares in Act 2 that “there are ghosts everywhere,” the actress seemed to show her seeing us, too, seeing ourselves as images in the mirror. The audience was appropriately riveted, as energized as our kind sentinels at the doorways, who then ushered us out with the assurance of professionals knowingly relieved again that the theater did not entirely burn down, despite its one slight violation of code, that anti-Zeitgeist cigarette.

As I walked after the play north over the Thames across the Millenium Bridge that night, I decided to continue this new engagement with the theatre as a returning tourist. In May, I was able to secure several tickets for productions at the annual Theatertreffen in Berlin, where most of the jury-invited shows continue to sell out within the first hours of tickets becoming available. These used to be named the ten “best” productions of the year in German-speaking countries, but now they are simply called ten “remarkable” productions since few of us working in culture and the arts today want to be burdened with assigning hierarchies to works. One of the most talked-about productions of this year’s festival was Falk Richter’s autofictional, family history play The Silence, which had been selling out at the Schaubühne since its November premier, but I was unable to get a ticket for that show using the ordinary purchase system. As it was, my first show at the festival was Yael Ronen and Shlomi Shaban’s Bucket List, which was staged away from the festival theater (the Berliner Festspiele) at the Schaubühne, where it had been playing since it opened in December. The playwright and director Yael Ronen has been a fixture of Berlin theater since 2009, when her Israeli-Palestinian-German ensemble comedy Third Generation about the conflicts in the Middle East debuted at the Schaubühne. For more than a decade, her dark, humane, and funny comedies have been a steady part of the repertoire at the Maxim Gorki Theater; three of her plays were invited to previous Theatertreffen editions, including her 2021 “almost-a-musical” Slippery Slope, which was also co-created with Schaban.

Shortly before arriving at the full theater, I realized that the Theatertreffen premiere of Bucket List had been scheduled to take place on Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and for Jewish heroism and resistance to Nazism. The date, May 9, was also exactly six months after the play’s premiere, and in the space of that half-year, the cultural atmosphere in Berlin, as in many cities around the world, had changed significantly. The December premiere had been met with anti-Israel protests and heightened security at the Schaubühne. In the days following the October 7 terrorist attack of Hamas against Israeli civilians, the Gorki had cancelled performances of Ronen’s The Situation (Theatertreffen 2016), a piece that centered around a Neukölln language class and Syrian, Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, and Palestinian dialogue. The Gorki’s statement at the time took a nuanced but decided stance supporting Israel in response to the recent atrocities and ongoing (still ongoing) hostage situation. Six months after the premiere, when many people in the auditorium were returning to see Bucket List for a second or even a third time, Berlin was particularly charged by a series of relatively small, international and local student and general protests against Israel’s conduct in the ongoing war between it and Hamas. Many of those protests had featured anti-Semitic slogans, occupied lecture halls, and even violence against Jewish individuals and institutions. Later in the month, a scandal would erupt when the President of the Technische Universität Berlin, Geraldine Rauch, liked several tweets with anti-Semitic content and then fought successfully to keep her job atop one of the city’s most important universities. It was, in short, an out-of-the-ordinary time for the Theatertreffen premiere of a play by two Israeli artists that meditated on the trauma of October 7, a world of increasing war, division, and terror, and the schizogenic, über-normality of ongoing, clever, smartphone-set sociality with its boring-stressful, rapid-change “turn to the left, turn to the right,” mass shock-therapy choreography (to quote one of the production’s central musical numbers.)

Sitting in the theater, I had a moment of déjà-vu taking me back to the previous year’s Theatertreffen, when I saw the Ukrainian director Andriy May’s Putinprozess, a play that delved into the personal experiences of theatre-makers forced to flee from war as their theatres became bomb shelters and targets. Here again with Bucket List the reality of war and the suffering of its many victims flooded the cultural space. There ought to be a German or French word for the basic ambivalence of even highly engaged cultural consumers towards the transformation of cultural spaces into war-time spaces of activism, trauma coping, and refuge. Whatever that useful, important, healthy, dangerous, callous, or irresponsible Kriegsunterdrückungsgestalt might actually be named, it could be felt—again, ambivalently—in the audience just as it was complexly thematized in both productions, a year apart: a reminder of our world’s increased exposure to new, lethal conflagrations over that interval of time. The mood had decidedly shifted, partially, of course, due to the different historical responsibilities involved in the Ukrainian/Russian versus the Israeli/Hamas/Palestinian conflict. Whereas in the previous year, the instinct for both repression and bold certainty seemed stronger in the audience, the audience for Bucket List seemed sadder, more troubled, and more wary.

Bucket List has a loose, impressionistic narrative about a patient who remembers waking up on a Saturday with his world having fallen apart, a thoroughgoing sense of alienation from self and the previously known world. His name, surfacing uncertainly and somewhat robotically out of the second musical number (a rather darkly hilarious pastiche derived from the “Bobby” opening number of Company), is Robert, but the science-fiction context leaves open if anything about “Robert” and “his” memories are real at all or simply a postmodern, perhaps personalized insertion of “normal” memories into an otherwise mostly erased psyche. That is to say, the main plot conceit is that Robert is an imperfectly compliant recipient of a new, thorough happy-memory-replacement therapy developed by the overdrivenly neoliberal health-care firm, Zeitgeist, which hopes to profit from an accelerating PTSD pandemic. The acted-out personal memories, which largely comprise the show, might thus belong to those more painful memories to which Robert still clings in order to give his now lonely identity dramatic coherence and context. But the “sad” memories thus displayed seem troublingly not-painful-enough, framed as they are by the diagnosis of PTSD and the visually surrounding, abstracted evidence of unutterable, mass violence. Perhaps, the darker subtext of the productions suggests, even these ultimately bittersweet, sentimental moments of personal anguish are a strategic part of the Zeitgeist’s functional brainwashing. In the clinical language of the attending doctor characters: suffering may be pathological when the technology to erase it exists, but a little bit of disorderly, remembered suffering may help melancholic loser-consumers (as Robert is specified) more wary of Zeitgeist to still feel human, a perhaps important factor in their tolerance of the prescribed therapy.

The doubling, ensemble aesthetic of Bucket List—with its four engaging actors (Ruth Rosenfeld, Damian Rebgetz, Carolin Haupt, and Christopher Nell) dressed in black and fluidly trading roles and observer positions—leaves open, like much of Ronen’s work, the extent to which material used in the show is autobiographical, and to whose specific autobiography it belongs. The basic sequential, episodic narrative of individual departures, losses, and partial returns stages different but emotionally and intellectually intertwined moments of breakage: adolescent rebellion, the end of a first love relationship, the long split of a mature marriage, the recovered memory of an early sexual trauma, and a mid-life individual break-up with reality as “Robert” undergoes a process akin to “mindfulness meets lobotomy” in which the promise of Zeitgeist begins to be realized: “in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.” Reality continues to phone-stalk Robert and the ensemble, and the traumas of Saturday, October 7th, 2023 and its (ongoing) aftermath blend with other known and unknown traumas via crucial moments of linguistic slipperiness and generally suggestive scenic elements. The minimalist, abstract set, designed by Magda Willi, looked similar to an Apple Store installation, dominated by clean, white, pseudo-humanely rounded shapes and simple architectures for basic, flexible staging and (product) interaction. The symmetrical, bulky white background module of this corporate-like display structure featured two large holes vaguely suggestive of eye pupils. There, in silent projection, slightly abstracted images of war intermittently accompanied the split-screen jazz-rock-opera drama of formerly mundane, now privileged, romance. From the side of the stage, a three-person band provided the varying rhythms and catchy Broadway sound for what the opening number suggested was the irresistible, childlike offering of war’s singing. The virtuoso, musical coolness of the band was centered in a memorable number featuring the guitarist (Thomas Moked Blum) singing the part of a BBC correspondent reluctantly taking a break from a cocaine-fueled love affair to report on hundreds of adults and children being killed, raped, and abducted, before returning home to his pleasure pad like a good professional, “not such a bad day” after all.

Anguish, the cheerful cruelty of economic coercion and enforced agreeability in still-buffered milieus, the questions of how to create, live, react, and grieve responsibly culminated in the final number. The anonymous articles of light white clothing falling from the rafters throughout the play littered the stage. Crumpled on the floor, they represented Robert’s left-behind memories, the ghosts of the ungraspable real dead from James Joyce to the Holocaust to today’s latest non-headlines, and the discarded drafts of a writer, as Robert finally sang, trying to pass on hope without simply contaminating another page, through failure, neglect, limitation, selfishness, inability, forgetfulness and inattention—the same negatives that created the possibilities and inevitability of imagination. The aesthetic was high, humane postmodernism, the moment of the postmodern that never took decisive hold because the internet changed everything. This was the moment, now “precious,” when there was to have been a return to the idea of progressive understanding of what it was to be (universally) human via the recognized, shared experience of becoming what we all were, in the midst of plastic chaos. C’est la vie. Ronen, Shaban, and the ensemble showed and mourned a generational aesthetic that has become an impossibility when there are much more urgent and serious processes and concerns at stake. In her laudatio after the show (a speech that this year replaced the ordinary audience talk-back), Carolin Emcke described her experience of this Theatertreffen premiere, a half year after the original premiere, as a kind of looking back through a snow globe at both the estranged recent past and the world-picture of childhood and earlier life. The internet, after all, performs an entirely different world picture, one that has finally put the ambiguously emerging fence up between this aesthetic age and that of postmodernism, when the individual for all its subjectivization was still operative as the crucial center of discernment. The internet, that corporate never-endingly blank-staring, data collecting Zeitgeist, has a different, eusocial teleology, decidedly towards the hive mind and what that mind wants to articulate, or manage through aesthetics.

If Bucket List survives—as it should—in an anthology somewhere, it ought to be read as a paragon of just-human honesty. In the theatre that night, the play was alive in a different manner. The audience’s applause was complicated, indiscernible, and consciously so: tepid, non-committal, or serious, it reflected as well as the play and players on stage did, although less bravely, the inability of art to break through the forcefields of caution and concern that are both refuge from and perpetuators of our new scenes of war, loneliness, and capture. I, for one, as I believed we all in that audience felt poignantly as isolated ones, believe that powerlessness is not a critique of works like Bucket List but a confessed limitation of art essentially in the face of bad politics. When Ronen appeared on stage after the show to accept the recognition given by the Theatertreffen producers, she wore a glamorous green, sparkling robe, the stunning color in contrast to the white set, black-clad actors, and the white, anonymous garments that had drifted down during the 75-minute piece from near some invisible heaven, to be picked up and used by the actors in recreations of remembered scenes. In one of the most poignant and funny episodes of the play, “Clara” (Carolin Haupt) had donned a fallen white dress and re-enacted a scene of childhood ballet training, dancing ever more vigorously as her teacher (Ruth Rosenfeld) admonished her to gesture with her left leg: “the other left!”, the teacher continued to correct her, until Clara gave up in frustration, unable to correct a mistake she was not making. The color of Ronen’s robe that evening reminded us of the difficulty of saying which is the correct way to grieve, to be active, to do honor to the dead and the living: through the pale seriousness of representation, through the postmodern exposure of so many crumpled-up unread drafts of history littering the theatre floor as the floor and waste bucket of the writer’s studio and bedroom, or through the recovered, inherited, and willed exuberance of individuality, hope, complexity, even ironic glamour that was and is a thread of the happiness with which those victims of human violence live and lived through or did their best to live through it all? The audience seemed to share an understanding that we have no real right left leg left to stand on, in any case.

The next show I attended, back at the Festspiele main theater, was for me—as for many attendees—the highlight of a superb festival. Lina Beckmann (Germany’s 2011, 2022, and 2024 Actress of the Year) opened Laois unassumingly, charmingly, as if giving a pre-theatre talk to acquaint the audience with the classical contexts of the play they were about to see. A short, open question-and-answer session about the knowledge of Greek myth that we were bringing to our spectatorship segued seamlessly into one of the most beguiling, memorable dramatic monologues I have ever witnessed. In a 90-minute, true tour-de-force, the equally unassuming and breath-taking Beckmann donned masks, applied makeup, and performed virtuoso stretches of dialogue, narrative, alternative narrative, and commentary, all with a historically deep yet satisfyingly contemporary perspective on the myth she was relating. Making use of an “antique” hurdy gurdy in place of an aulos, Beckmann dove into the complex, queer biography of Oedipus’ usually brushed-over father, gripping the audience with expertly mixed light humor, tragic pathos, postmodern alienation, Butoh aesthetics, and archeological enactment. The simple bare set design by Johannes Schütz displayed an array of props and reconstructed ancient masks, fitting for Beckman’s marathon-like, two-hour performance, which rarely failed to be imbued with a sympathetic, humane spirit even as she changed registers of acting and narration with world-class finesse, endurance, conviction, and irony.

A particularly effective, minimalist element of the staging was the use of what seemed to be a negative, live, back-projection system to occasionally create glowing “positive” white shadows of foregrounded props and human figures on the darkened stage backdrop. Annete ter Meulen provided the lighting design, Wicke Naujoks the costume design, and Sybille Meier the dramaturgy for a show sparkling with carefully interwoven, intricately non-distracting historical, political, and pop-cultural references and ornamentation. A feeling of relief and gratitude swelled in the audience for Karin Beier’s masterfully directed production. Theatre was back. We had forgotten. Beckmann’s performance used the full range of human voice, spirit, emotion, knowledge, and craft. It was tasteful, almost perfectly modulated. Perhaps three-quarters through there was a feeling of too-much, some repetition to be cut—perhaps the species was lost hopelessly in the spin-cycle of senseless, layered myth—but this was caught by the astonishing speed of the abrupt end, leaving ringing in the air the pathos-laden recognition question asked equally suddenly by the classical texts to their contemporary audiences, by both Laois and Oedipus to each other as unknown father and son, and by the actress to herself and all of us really living in that room—in a symmetry with the lighthearted, informal opening of the play: “Bist du das?”, “Is that you?”

Here was a production again that understood the grain of the voice, the thousand variations of quiet and rhythm, for example. Individual moments—Beckmann’s uncanny coughing prophecy as the oracle in a late-night snack café or her brief embodiment of the sphinx—were enough to justify anyone’s return to theater spectatorship; no film or image or reading could match the layered, immersive, physical understanding of the Sphinx and the Pythia that this live experience granted its audience. More impressive, in a way, was to be in the audience and feel that all of this was mutually appreciated, that theatre’s return—a novel and progressively incremental cultural achievement—was being greeted and appreciated collectively by a sensitive, living, packed audience, alive to subtlety, in historical agreement about how much of the useless noise (polemics, false honesty, and all that) could be supplanted by complex, understandable rendering. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s poetic text—part 2 of the 2023, five-part Beier-Schimmelpfennig Thebes series, ANTHROPOLIS, created at the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus—performed a new archeological layer of classical reception. We gave Beckmann seven enthusiastic standing ovations, the applause itself only ending out of the humane impulse to give the actress a chance to rest and recover after such an act, to disappear again with our gratitude into her life. Walking out of the theatre back onto the street in the crowd, the feeling was palpable: art had changed the season. The city buzzed and hovered again in the talk, reflective social silence, and enlivened eyes and ears of the groups lingering, coalescing, and dispersing into a hopeful evening.

After the previous two experiences, I entered my last Theatertreffen production of the year suffering from the curse of high expectations. The veteran Dutch director Johan Simons’ Macbeth production had been marketed as a revelation of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy as a meta-comedy. What this meant in practice was that most of the speed, quick-pivoting nuance, and dizzying altitude variations of Shakespeare’s text were suppressed in favor of slapstick and elastic improvisation. The very long production (3 hours and 20 minutes) from the Schauspielhaus Bochum featured three talented, decorated actors sitting in what looked like a bare, well-lit, not well-kept modern neoclassical bath or decrepit sanatorium spa environment (stage design by Nadja Sofie Eller). There was plenty of irony, reference, and momentary pastiche to unpack, and the full insider audience had the intellectual chops to do so. But there was also a lot of time to think again about the invocation of the old writing advice never to set a short story in a bathtub. In sum, the audience witnessed a lengthy production of Waiting for Godot set to the text of Macbeth, as if we were invited to the long eternal life of the three witches, occasionally painfully acting out the script (or not), changing and condensing roles, waiting for something that would never come, waiting in that sense primarily for an authentic impulse to do something, embarrassed when that thing was active, heroic, violent, or requiring movement. A smart but long and intricately created satire produced at the audience’s expense is a puzzle to critique, like a meal of fine morsels that ironically deconstructs taste and dramatic expectation beyond all simplicity, action, and brevity.

About a quarter of the audience chose to take their seats on the smart side of things, but many in the audience used the long time of watching actors play smart theatre games on stage to look around the room and wonder if we were required to admire the emperor’s new clothes, 124 years after Ubu Roi, let alone more than four centuries since audiences first took in James I’s accension and Macbeth. Boos were reported in the intermission. For all its brilliant performative quotations, the production might have benefitted from borrowing the concept of the most famous Macbeth production of the century so far. Adding Punchdrunk’s 2011 Sleep No More into the comic world of the citational production—inviting the audience to wander and enter into the active game-playing of the actors—would have enlivened the piece; more precisely, as it was, it felt like the audience was cast as regressive, back-in-time, pre-2011 certainly. The use of a standard picture-box proscenium stage and a standard darkened auditorium felt here like an act of cruelty, creating an artificial sense of a fixed, conservative bourgeois theater where most of the audience would have been relieved to experience anything more truly experimental. In an exception that proved the rule, one of the most memorable, humorous, and gripping moments of the production—when the three actors sat a table open to the audience in front of the curtain for the feast scene—performed this gesture of openness. The acting, as an extended study of relational improv, was memorable, almost never naturalistic, and thickly layered over the much-daggered text. Marina Galic, Jens Harzer, and Stefan Hunstein fluidly played all the characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Simons’ casting and dramaturgy indeed innovatively and critically exposed the play’s structure of doubling and tripling in a sophisticated, meta-comical fashion. Galic took on the meta-role of the driving second (as Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and the Macduffs) to her real-life spouse, the much celebrated, Iffland-Ring-wearing Harzer as the king (Macbeth, Duncan, and Malcom). With Hunstein as the comically weirdest of the weird sisters, sometimes joining the pair in extended, bizarre make-out sessions, the impressive acting trio created many memorable, sparkling, insightful moments in the production’s often revelatory, though drawn-out reduction sauce.

I walked home that evening from this year’s Theatertreffen, then, ambivalent, wondering if the trend towards supposed insider productions and the decadent professionalization of the audience would continue (getting its second life after the pandemic) or if the new truly green sprouts of complex, generous, humane cultural achievement would be sustained and allowed, well, to flower. In the conversations afterwards, it struck me that critics and audience members downplayed a significant, surprising “return” of the German theatre towards a literary, new-author’s theatre: amidst the praise for productions like Bucket List and Laois, the writing was only minimally mentioned. Given the high and impressive production values from the other artists and arts involved in making great theatre, that might be understandable. But it would be dishonest to not add the corrective that these productions also featured texts that deserve to be read and studied, that buoyed the performances and scenic designs and assemblages also on display. Just as Shakespeare, the outsider poet from Stratford, composed plays that we know drew much of their compelling material from the spectacular genius of ensemble—from the extraordinary talents of actors, architects, politicians, and businesspeople—a remarkable new generation of playwrights in Germany are sneaking their play texts like ghosts through the cracked mirror side-stage doors of a post-literary theatrum mundi. As superstitious as we might be, it would be a shame if we contemporaries again largely failed to remark upon them.