Report from Berlin

The company of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller is widely regarded in Europe today, especially in Germany, as the most radical and boundary challenging company in contemporary Europe. Since 2006, they have been engaged in a monumental postmodern exploration of the works of Ibsen, most notably in their extended elaborations of The Wild Duck and John Gabriel Borkman, presented as part of the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2011 and 2012. Despite their continual challenge to traditional structures and regulations, so formidable is their reputation in Germany that in 2024, when René Pollesch, the director of the leading Berlin theatre, the Volksbühne, unexpectedly died, they were considered as an interim replacement.

Such an appointment was hardly thinkable given the company’s long history of activities, which included physical damage to their venues and outraging critics, audiences, and authorities alike. In the event the Ministry of Culture appointed as the new director Matthias Lilienthal, a less revolutionary choice than Vinge and Müller, but an artist strongly associated with experimental work, having served as dramaturg at the Volksbühne under the legendary Frank Castorf and subsequently as director of Berlin’s HAU theatre, an important home for international experimental work.

It was thus in many ways appropriate that the first major production of the new administration was the most recent offering in Vinge and Müller’s ongoing Ibsen-Saga, taking on one of Ibsen’s most challenging works, the monumental Peer Gynt. Given my long-time love of Ibsen and my more recent interest in these ground-breaking artists, I booked a trip to Berlin for one of the six performances. As usual in Berlin, I had little difficulty finding other attractive offerings to fill out a five-day trip.

To begin with, Peer Gynt, however, for the first time in the Saga, the performance was announced for a specific period of time, beginning at four in the afternoon and ending at midnight. One of the most significant features of this company’s performance has always been its disregard for a set structure or time. Now for the first time, although the contents and their arrangement differed each night, the production stopped, as advertised, promptly at twelve. The plastic curtain often used during the evening was drawn closed, and Vinge (Peer) made a final appearance to write on it with a white marker the defiant “Eight hours is still not theatre.”

In the past, the Company has often pushed back against attempts to limit its excesses by incorporating references to these attempts into the production, and this terminating gesture is in that tradition, but in my opinion, this was a significant capitulation, removing one of the most critical and distinctive elements of the company aesthetic. Each audience member must decide for themselves whether, given its aesthetic, a VM production willing to compromise on central issues is better than no VM production at all.

It seemed to me that the production I attended, third in the series, carried this compromise throughout the evening. It was, on the whole, the safest, least challenging, and most conventional of any VM production I have seen. No excrements on stage or destruction in the house (the single modest invasion of the audience space would have been perfectly acceptable at Lincoln Center), and I feared that the capitulation on the running time was emblematic of a general softening of the company’s essential rough edges. Friends who saw the closing performance reported that a certain amount of more disturbing material was then included, but the evening still ended promptly on time.

Comparatively tame as it was, the production I saw was unmistakably a VM creation. The interior public spaces of the Volksbühne, like those of the Prater, the space used by the company in previous years, were covered with giant graffiti-style posters featuring now primarily American action heroes and images of military aggression and destruction.   These themes were repeated in the production, since although the Ibsen Saga imagery has been extremely wide ranging, geographically, culturally and historically, their Peer Gynt has a distinctly urban American feel with particular attention to guns, marching soldiers and military machinery (a constantly recurring motif is a squad of mindlessly marching soldiers moving lockstep across the upstage, an area also frequently crossed by large carboard cutouts of military vehicles, tanks, and jet fighters).

It may be that this interest in connecting Peer Gynt to a particular cultural background may owe something to the memory of the last great monumental staging of this play in Berlin, that of Peter Stein in 1971 at the old Schaubühne on the Halleschen Ufer. Stein subtitled his interpretation “a play of the nineteenth century” and stressed the close ties of the work to the industrialization, colonialism, and capitalism of that era. It seemed to me, though, that Stein’s orientation was much better fitted to the play than a focus on militarism, but then much of the VM interpretation still remains to be seen.

Perhaps the single scene in Ibsen’s play most directly tied to the military is that (often omitted) in which Peer oversees (with disapproval) a young man cutting off his finger to avoid the draft. The VM version of this scene is a film clip, showing a close-up downward view of a fist with the “fingers” extending from the knuckles replaced by frankfurters. These were slowly cut away from the tips backward into small rings of meat, which from time to time were splashed with spurts of ketchup, suggesting both blood and a culinary preparation. This was one of my favorite images in the production, and very typical in its imagination and shock of a VM presentation. The other sequence I found most memorable was an extended pursuit of Peer by a large cardboard cutout of a New York City police car, which, in its pursuit, created mayhem in the surrounding artificial urban setting, crushing a telephone booth and crashing through a display window to enter a military recruiting office where Peer had taken temporary refuge.

Generally speaking, except for the set length the production contained the now familiar elements of the Ibsen Saga—the cartoonish costumes and settings, the grotesque rubber masks, the amplified sound tracks emphasizing the sounds of walking, marching and physical contact, the grotesquely distorted voices, the alternation of live and filmed action, and the general freewheeling style in which the unexpected, and often the shocking and outrageous, is regularly evoked.

As in the earlier elements of the Saga, an Ibsen play provides the essential but completely negotiable framework. Although each evening offered different variations, all essentially covered Ibsen’s first act, from Peer’s opening story about the encounter with the stag until his departure from the village into the mountains, although hints of later events, scenes and even characters (like the malevolent bureaucrat/director Stockmann) from previous VW productions, and a huge variety of cultural refences, contemporary and historical, find their ways into the assemblage. Even though I found this one of the weaker VM productions, it was, like all of them, a memorable and thought-provoking theatre experience.

One final note should be included. Vinge and Müller have now become an essential element of the German theatre scene, and to a lesser extent, the international one—the night I went, I encountered colleagues from the U.S., England, France, and Sweden.  Combined with a limited run, this guaranteed that the 800-seat theatre would be completely sold out with record-breaking waiting lists. Ironically, however, this passion does not stimulate many to, in fact, undergo the actual ordeal of sitting through an eight-hour VM production. Indeed, the evening I attended, nearly half of the seats were empty after the first two hours. These can hardly have been people unaware of what was being offered, so I must conclude that VM have found or created an audience that applies to the process of spectatorship the same flexibility that Vinge and Müller apply to the process of artistic production.

This being Berlin, I was able to attend a different Ibsen production at a major theatre the following evening, this time Hedda Gabler at the Berliner Ensemble. When it celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2017, the neo-baroque Theatre am Schiffbauerndamm, intimately associated with the work of Bertolt Brecht, still performed in its same elegant, neo-baroque and distinctly un-Brechtian traditional home. Two years later, however, it opened two smaller and more contemporary spaces, the Neues Theatre (180 seats) and the Werkraum (99 seats) at the rear of the courtyard behind the original house.  I first attended the Neues Theater in 1922 to see Wagdi Mouawad’s powerful exploration of Middle Eastern tension, Vögel, and to see Hedda Gabler (in an adaptation by Merelv called Hedda). I visited for the first time the more intimate Werkraum.   

Hedda, directed by the young Norwegian Heiki Riipinen, who is also a professional drag queen, follows Ibsen’s original far more closely than the WM Peer Gynt, yet it is still a far more unconventional reworking of Ibsen than might be found on any major professional stage in the Anglosaxon world. Each year, the new Werkraum invites two young directors to work as Artists in Residence there for a year, during which they create two new productions each.  This year’s artists are Norwegian Riipinen, whose first offering was a six-hour overnight piece called Insomnia, and Iranian Alireza Daryanavard.

Hedda offers a decidedly queer reading of the Ibsen text, in which Pauline Knof’s center position as Hedda is seriously challenged by the cross-dressed dominatrix of Judge Brack, flamboyantly played by Nina Burns, and my particular favorite—Max Gindorff, as a charmingly winsome Thea and amusingly dotty Aunt Julia. Marc Oliver Schulze, though playing the gender appropriate role of Tesman, enters effectively into the campy cartoonish spirit of the whole. Paul Zichner as Ejlert does not seem to fit into the ensemble, though his lacey bouffant blue costume (one of the exaggerated and generally successful sartorial creations of Louise-Fee Nitschke) is one of the evening’s most extreme.

The tone of the whole is set when the audience enters to witness the Tesman living room, its furniture still covered, but with Hedda already lying face up and dead downstage, the pistol by her outstretched arm, and a pool of plastic fake blood under her head.  We will, of course, return to this image at the end, but here Hedda is ignored by the others until she enters the scene by simply getting up, putting away the gun, and entering the conversation while Gildorff, temporarily playing the maid, tidies up by carrying off the obviously fake pool of blood.

A central moment in any production of the play is the burning of the manuscript, and Riipinen gives this special attention. Alone among the characters, Hedda interacts several times with spectators, asking them to provide or hold items (such as a bullet for the gun, for example). Here she pantomimes striking a match and was offered a lighter the night I attended. She then left the stage and the auditorium, and an onstage video followed her through the lobby and out into the Berliner Ensemble courtyard, where she burned the papers in front of a crowd of curious onlookers on the way to or from the theatre Kanteen.  Returning to the stage, she tossed the lighter back to the spectator and continued with the play.  

Another striking addition to the role Knof provides is several extended pantomime sequences, a kind of silent soliloquy, such as the moment before she shoots herself.  Facing the audience, she carefully considers and rejects a series of possibilities, first shooting herself in the breast, then the heart, then the womb, then (like Ejlert) the genitals, then the mouth and the temple, before finally deciding on the side of the head, thus recapitulating the arc of the play in this single sequence. After her death, the other characters gather upstage to observe her, the living to the left (the Judge now in an incongruous judicial wig, and the dead Ejlert to the left on a raised platform, but now with clearly fraudulent angelic wings and (at last) vine leaves in his hair.

I was able to add one final classic work, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, at the Deutsches Theater. This is not a new piece, having entered the repertoire in 2019, but it remains an attractive one, due in part to the excellent translation in rhymed verse by Jurger Gosch, in part to a crisp and intelligent direction by Anne Lenk, and primarily to the formidable acting skills of two leading figures of the contemporary German stage, Ulrich Matthias in the title role and Franziska Machens as Célimène, his elusive object of desire. Despite Matthias’ strength, Lenk’s production keeps the dramatic focus well balanced between the two, and the others, excellent performers all, are rather eclipsed, even Manuel Harder, as Alceste’s long-suffering and remarkably tolerant friend Philinte.

The highly stylized neo-baroque costumes by Sibylle Wallum provide the main visual variety to the production, which is mounted in a setting that aroused much discussion when the work opened. The design, by Florian Lösche, was formally very simple, a three-sided box the walls of which were entirely composed of densely hung silver and black elastic ropes, pushed aside for entrances or exits, and occasionally wrapped around a body for a particular effect. Early reviews spent much time complaining that this set had been copied from various earlier productions of other works in Frankfurt and elsewhere, but the idea is a basically simple one and could easily have occurred to a number of designers. I remember seeing a Japanese production of a Mishima play with almost exactly the same configuration, and used, I might say, with vastly more variety on the part of the company. In any case, original or not, it did not seem to me particularly well suited to this play or this interpretation, other than providing a striking and essentially neutral background against which a company of extremely skilled actors could display their abilities.

I had expected that one of these long-time favorite pieces would provide my most memorable theatre experience of this trip, but was surprised that this turned out to be a new work, K, based partly upon Kafka’s The Trial and partly on the author’s biography. The production was presented in the elegant neo-baroque main stage of the Berliner Ensemble and was the creation of one of Berlin’s most imaginative directors, Barrie Kosky. Kosky has recently returned to freelance directing after a decade as Intendant at the Komische Oper, where his productions were regularly among the most praised and discussed in the city.  His interest in Jewish culture has always been strong (he is both Jewish and gay), and he was, in fact, the first Jewish director to create a production for Bayreuth. K is thus a work of particular importance to him, and his unconventional approach is clearly indicated by the subtitle, “A Talmudic Vaudeville.”

Indeed, the production derives its material equally from conventional autobiographical and biographical sources and from the surrealistic slapstick of the Jewish vaudeville of Eastern Europe, which Kafka loved. It is this tradition that provides much of the staging detail—the costumes, makeup, wigs, scenery, and general acting style. In the vaudeville tradition, cross-dressing is essential, and Kathrin Wehlisch perfectly incorporates the Chaplinesque little man caught up in a world beyond his control or comprehension. Her bravura performance begins with carefree 1920s tap dancing abandon and moves seamlessly through a carnival of mixed farce and horror, typified by the marvelous Constanze Becker, who appears as the grotesque landlady Frau Grubach, wielding a formidable extermination apparatus, with a Kafkaesque cockroach displayed prominently on its side.

After K’s arrest, the stage is transformed into an expressionistic forbidding synagogue, with candelabras, giant Hebrew letters, and an enormous Talmud ark dominating all. Oppressive Bach chorales echo in profoundly incongruous jazz rhythms in the background for the benefit of Christian observers (the ingenious musical direction is by Adam Benzwi), but the imagery is overwhelmingly orthodox. The deep voice of K’s never seen lawyer Huld (Gabriel Schneider) resounds from behind the Ark, like the voice of Jehovah himself, uttering gnomic observations in Hebrew, but the Ark emits other figures of clear secularity, and most memorably, a chorus of three vaudevillian Rabbis, whose mixture of Yiddish comic patter and songs and spirit folk dances is a guaranteed show stopper.

The production does not end with a sentencing but continues with K’s punishment, presented by a half-naked K cringing downstage as he suffers the torment of Kafka’s here unseen writing machine, while the rich voice of Constanze Becker comes over the loudspeaker reading “In the Penal Colony.”  Projected behind K are the characters presumably being etched into his body—a seemingly endless unrolling of Hebrew letters.

The play ends with scenes from the final year of the terminally ill Kafka and continues to combine moments of joy with profound suffering. They are seen through the eyes of Kafka’s last love, Dora Diamant, beautifully played by the Komische Opera leading soprano Alma Sadé. She reads passages of Kafka’s final diary, and at last, as his suffering ends, moves into a warm and deeply moving singing (in Yiddish) of Robert Schumann's "Dichterliebe," a most appropriate conclusion to this fascinating and complex theatrical and musical evening.  

For my final evening in Berlin, I attended one of the city’s biggest (in every sense of the word) theatre attractions, a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, presented by the Komische Oper in a hangar of the abandoned Tempelhof airport.  In 2023, this theatre, one of Berlin’s most honored, closed for extensive renovations, its 1882 neo-baroque building having miraculously survived the bombing of World War II, but now much in need of updating.  While this work continues, the theatre is housed at the Schiller Theater in Western Berlin, with occasional special spectacles in Hangar 4 of Tempelhof.

A trip to Hanger 4 is an experience in itself, reminding me of other remote performance locations like Mnouchkine’s in Paris. Walking from the nearest subway to the rather remote and very large former airfield, one passes by the monument to the Berlin airlift, which was once a central symbol of resistance to a divided Berlin, with Tempelhof at the center of its lifeline.

Arriving at the grounds, one follows a torturous path through the structures, first passing a small group of Christian protesters bearing signs denouncing this “blasphemy” while a few tonsured figures in monkish robes and rope belts worked their rosaries and provided a distinctly theatrical ambiance. The lobby was itself a gigantic hangar, open to a beautiful autumnal sky and well provided with comfortable sofas and concession stands for pre-theatre drinks. Between this area and the open runways, a large set of pink neon three-dimensional letters appropriately spelled out #allesaußergewöhnlich (everything extraordinary).

The bell sounded, and the lobby crowd emptied into a neighboring hangar, a huge cube with metal grandstands rising up on three sides, an elevated runway stage thrust out into the empty center space, and leading to a huge illuminated cross composed of metal poles and struts. Along a higher platform on the fourth was the Komische Oper orchestra, fronted by three guitarists, a keyboardist, and a percussionist.

The wildly idiosyncratic costumes of Frank Wilde ranged from billowing to form-fitting, and from the cartoonish capes and hats of the Jewish authorities, like the most bizarre at Oberammergau, to virtually authentic Roman armor or acid-based punk rock.  The huge crowd, more of them later, wore various forms of simple earth colored, vaguely Biblical garments, allowing them to easily merge effectively into a seemingly homogeneous mass.  Jesus (John Arthur Greene) was simply gowned in a white plaited robe, with the traditional beard and long hair, a strongly muscular build. Bal Arslan as Mary Magdalene combined sanctity and seduction in a scarlet red evening gown and shaved head. Both offered powerful voices and strong presences, but the crowd favorite was clearly the mercurial Judas of Sasha Di Capri, equally effective in a sardonic falsetto and a vibrant full-throated expression of both affection and rage. Another clear favorite was Jörn-Felix Alt as a camp Herod, the gyrations of whose multicolored billowing costume are a show in themselves.

Despite the considerable talents of the soloists and the orchestra, and in spite of the occasional and perhaps inevitable eruption of high kitsch in the music, the score and the scenic design with its huge glittering cross, what made the evening truly memorable was the nearly 400 extras who formed a constantly moving mass surrounding and at times engulfing the main action. Director Andreas Homoki and choreographer David Cavelius have woven these hundreds of voices and gesticulating bodies into a visual fabric I will long remember. As a theatre historian in Berlin, I found myself almost inevitably recalling the legendary mass spectacles staged here over a century ago by Max Reinhardt at his Grosses Schauspielhaus. For the first time, I felt I understood the incredible performative power of such displays.