In a country where the director is king, it’s the hundreds of full-time players in the many house ensembles who have assured that the lights stayed on during the pandemic.
BERLIN — One of Germany’s best-known theatrical exports is Regietheater, a staging approach that grants directors godlike powers to rewrite and reinterpret plays as they see fit. The aesthetic sensibilities, philosophical preoccupations and egos of directors here help set the tone and define the identities of the country’s highest-profile playhouses. But make no mistake: German’s rich theater landscape is sustained by the hundreds of actors employed full time by the country’s 142 publicly owned theaters, as well as by several private ones.
This truth has never struck me as forcefully as in the past 20 months during the coronavirus pandemic, in and out of lockdown, with all the resulting hygiene and distancing measures.
One of the main reasons theater here has been able to rebound after repeated closures is that Germany effectively has a standing army of actors, most of whom continued to receive most of their salaries even during the monthslong stretches when stages were dark, thanks to a government program for furloughed workers. This also meant players on hand for digital theater experiments during lockdowns and for live performances in cleverly modified formats once theaters reopened. Now, as theaters once again begin limiting attendance to promote social distancing, the actors they employ are at the ready to play for limited audiences.
Long before the pandemic turned much of our everyday reality on its head, house actors have been prized for their flexibility. Most of them are expected to be dramatic chameleons, moving from main to supporting roles in plays by Shakespeare or Sarah Kane as circumstances demand. The number of actors in a theater’s ensemble can vary wildly. In Berlin, the Deutsches Theater has 37 full-time actors, while the nearby Volksbühne employs a mere 12. Most ensemble actors are accustomed to grueling schedules and a grab bag of roles.
One of Berlin’s most recently anointed acting gods is Joachim Meyerhoff, a member of the Schaubühne in the capital since 2019. After winning acclaim in productions of works by Molière and Virginie Despentes, Meyerhoff, one of 30 actors in the Schaubühne’s ensemble, starred in the late November premiere of “Eurotrash,” an adaptation of a novel by Christian Kracht that was a best seller this year in Germany.
Meyerhoff brings a nervous, uptight energy to Kracht’s autobiographical narrator, a middle-aged son who tries to connect with his estranged mother during a dysfunctional road trip from Zurich to the Alps. The show’s director, Jan Bosse, stages this offbeat buddy comedy aboard a small yacht on an unadorned stage. It’s a delightfully absurd touch that visually enlivens what is an overlong and dramatically thin evening, despite the commanding central performance.
During two intermissionless hours, much gets tossed overboard, including colostomy bags, vodka bottles and thousands of Swiss francs, but Meyerhoff’s pained and deadpan performance as a man-child struggling to connect with a mentally ill mother remains the emotional focus of the evening. As the stony, alcoholic and self-destructive matriarch, Angela Winkler is unable to invest her character with enough emotional nuance to make us truly care about the parent-child relationship. In the end, finding the actress onstage in 2021 is itself more moving than her actual performance: Winkler belonged to the ensemble of the Schaubühne in the 1970s, during the long tenure of the artistic director Peter Stein.To see this 77-year-old next to Meyerhoff is to be reminded of the Schaubühne’s long tradition of acting excellence.
Less than a week later, I found the great female performance that had eluded me at the Schaubühne in southern Germany, in an unusual production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” that stars the Belarusian Israeli actress Evgenia Dodina, a recently minted ensemble member at the Schauspiel Stuttgart.
“The Visit,” one of the few postwar German-language plays to achieve international success, has had many lives since its 1956 premiere in Zurich. It’s been adapted for the big screen and turned into an opera and a Kander and Ebb musical. Shortly before the pandemic hit, a misbegotten version by Tony Kushner played the National Theater in London. Yet the Stuttgart production, by the theater’s artistic director, Burkhard C. Kosminski, is perhaps the most unusual of all these incarnations.
Dürrenmatt’s perverse plot, about a wealthy woman who returns to her impoverished hometown and offers to make the villagers rich in exchange for lynching the man who wronged her long ago, has often been interpreted as an allegory for postwar European life in the shadow of National Socialist crimes. That reading is made explicit by this fascinating and frustrating production, in which the play’s titular character is a Jewish woman whose being driven out of town in 1940 saved her from perishing in a concentration camp.
When she meets her old flame (Matthias Leja, another of the theater’s 31 ensemble actors), they flirt nervously in both German and Hebrew. While Kosminski reimagines the main character’s background, Dodina periodically steps out of the play to narrate, in Hebrew, her own biography as well as her mother’s and grandmother’s wartime experiences fleeing the Nazis across Central Asia. Dodina is mesmerizing as the play’s avenging fury, as well as in her personal monologues, but it’s hard to see how the various elements add up. In the end, the modified and abridged Dürrenmatt text and the actress’s family reminiscences are an odd match, despite Dodina’s committed and captivating portrayal.
The performance of “The Visit” I attended was the last that played to a full house. The next day, much of southern Germany slashed the numbers allowed in theaters there. Stuttgart got off lightly with 50 percent of capacity; in nearby Munich, most cultural events can go ahead with only a quarter. But for the most part, theaters, and their actors, have soldiered on as best they can while performing, once again, to comically small audiences.
Two hundred and twenty masked spectators were allowed into the 880-seat Residenztheater in Munich for a recent performance of “Absent Dreams,” a trilogy of plays by the Dutch author Judith Herzberg that is a sprawling saga of an extended Jewish family in Amsterdam. Memories of the Holocaust and of perished relatives loom in the background, but Herzberg is more interested in showing the vibrancy of these characters and their complex relationships than in suggesting that they are hopelessly crippled by trauma. The director Stephan Kimmig’s five-hour production resounds with a kind of epic intimacy that the theater has been honing under its new artistic director, Andreas Beck. The large dramatis personae of “Absent Dreams” are played exclusively by members of the theater’s 50-actor ensemble, the biggest in Germany. For the duration of this long evening, 15 of them populate the vast stage, some in multiple roles.
Yet beyond the accomplished performances, which are too many to enumerate, the production achieves a remarkable cohesion from the almost conspiratorial sense of rapport engendered by a group of actors who have been performing alongside one another, in both main and supporting roles, night after night and in play after play.
As I watched Herzberg’s protagonists come to life, I could see the engine of Germany’s mighty theatrical tradition at close range. Throughout the pandemic, that dynamo has proved unstoppable.
The Visit. Directed by Burkhard C. Kosminski. Schauspiel Stuttgart, through Jan. 30.
Absent Dreams. Directed by Stephan Kimmig. München Residenztheater, through Feb. 23.
Eurotrash. Directed by Jan Bosse. Schaubühne Berlin, through Jan. 2.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
