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    On European Stages, Myths and Memories Merge

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    New productions by the theater titans Krzysztof Warlikowski and Frank Castorf play games with ancient Greek folklore and modern history.STUTTGART, Germany — Perhaps no theater director working today is more haunted by memory than Krzysztof Warlikowski.To portray its tortuous mechanisms, the Polish Warlikowski favors enigmas and fragmented narratives over straightforward answers. During the past 20 years, this has helped make him one of Europe’s most acclaimed and distinctive directors. In addition to his productions for the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, which he founded in 2008, Warlikowski also stages works for many of Europe’s leading drama and opera festivals.In his latest production, “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood,” he takes the viewer on a kaleidoscopic journey from Homer to the Holocaust to Tinseltown, telling the story of a Jewish woman who risks her life during World War II to search for her deported husband. She is portrayed both as a latter-day Odysseus and as Penelope: the wily and weary adventurer in search of his elusive homeland, and the faithful, patient wife tending the hearth.Loosely inspired by “Chasing the King of Hearts,” a 2006 novel by the Polish author Hanna Krall, the production is an epic web of associations brought to life on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s handsome and versatile set, whose darkly industrial components stand in for interrogation chambers and waiting rooms.History, mythology and philosophy, and pop and high culture, rub shoulders in a four-hour production that is consistently absorbing even if you’re not always sure what it means. (An international coproduction with Nowy Teatr, “Odyssey” was recently performed at the Schauspiel Stuttgart theater here and will tour to Paris later this month.)Izolda Regensberg, the protagonist of Krall’s short novel, is convinced that her life as a survival artist would make a great Hollywood film. The play’s opening scenes, set in war-torn Europe and shortly afterward, show Regensberg navigating a film-noir landscape of violence and menace. A giant cage wheeled repeatedly across the stage heightens the sense of claustrophobia.From there, we’re whisked to Los Angeles, where a much older Regensberg is meeting with the director Roman Polanski, the film producer Robert Evans and Elizabeth Taylor, who is set to play Regensberg in a film. The Polish actors perform the scene in English with exaggerated American accents that heighten the vulgarity and ignorance of their backroom talk.That sendup of Hollywood cluelessness is rebutted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, “Shoah,” a nine-hour oral history of the Holocaust that is a milestone in the history of cinema, to which Warlikowski turns later in the evening. A screen lowers and we watch a famous excerpt from the movie in which Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber living in Israel who once cut the hair of Jewish women destined for the gas chambers at Treblinka. Bomba’s wrenching testimony contrasts sharply with a showy test reel we see during Regensberg’s meeting with Polanski — a spot-on parody of Hollywood Holocaust schlock in which a handsome Gestapo officer tortures and arouses his interrogation victim by playing Wagner on the piano.Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik as Hannah Arendt and Roman Gancarczyk as Martin Heidegger in “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood.”Magda HueckelIn “Odyssey,” Warlikowski sifts through many of the same tropes as Lanzmann’s film, rummaging around in trauma and memory while sifting through the ethical and aesthetic implications of representing the Holocaust. At times, Warlikowski’s associative and open-ended approach leads the production in unusual directions and to unexpected places.At one point, the scene abruptly shifts to the Black Forest in 1950, where Hannah Arendt is picnicking with Martin Heidegger. As the German philosophers (and former lovers) struggle to reconcile — Heidegger remains defiant about his support of the Nazi regime — a pushy, camera-toting tourist (possibly a visitor from the future) pesters them with questions. The grim trajectory of the play is often speckled with such surreal and humorous details.For the production’s finale, Warlikowski turns to the Coen brothers by faithfully re-creating the prologue to their 2009 film, “A Serious Man.” In that atmospheric short, a Yiddish horror-comedy sketch seemingly disconnected from the rest of the film, a pious couple in a 19th-century shtetl are visited by a dybbuk (an evil spirit in Jewish folklore) who possesses the body of dead rabbi.This final scene is a jarring contrast to the “Shoah” material that directly precedes it and concludes this sprawling production on a curiously muted note. Yet the subject of existential homelessness is the connective tissue that unites “Odyssey’s” various strands.The intersection of personal and communal trauma told through one woman’s eyes is also the theme of Irina Kastrinidis’s dramatic monologue, “Schwarzes Meer” (“Black Sea”), whose world premiere at the Landestheater Niederösterreich, in St. Pölten, Austria, was directed by the German theater legend Frank Castorf. It’s a surprising production, not least because Castorf, whose fame rests on his deconstructive approach to literary classics, is not exactly known for his sensitive portrayals of female protagonists.Julia Kreusch, left, and Mikis Kastrinidis in Irina Kastrinidis’s “Schwarzes Meer,” directed by Frank Castorf.Alexi PelekanosIn “Schwarzes Meer,” Kastrinidis, a former actress in Castorf’s troupe when he led the Berlin Volksbühne (she is also the director’s ex-girlfriend), has fused Greek myths with the history of her more recent ancestors: Pontic Greeks, living in what is now Turkey, who were forcibly expelled in the 1920s. Her monologue — a stilted and nonlinear oration in heightened and, at times, archaic language — is delivered by the German actress Julia Kreusch, whose physically impassioned immersion in the text seems to elevate it. Kastrinidis’s text mixes quotidian, even banal, observations with paeans to the Argonauts and passages in which Penelope seems to fuse with pop icons like Jane Birkin. The expulsion and murder of Kastrinidis’s forebears hovers in the background. And as the first-person narration shuttles among Paris, Athens, Berlin and Zurich, Kastrinidis suggests a continuity of exile and inherited trauma and memory that explains her own hallucinogenic sense of homesickness.Perhaps to safeguard against monotony, Castorf adds two characters who don’t appear in Kastrinidis’s text, including one played by his 12-year-old son, Mikis Kastrinidis, whose spirited performance alternates between adorable and irritating. Sharing the stage with Kreusch (and occasionally a real goat), he repeatedly reminds the audience that he’s acting in his parents’ play by talking to his mom on the telephone and cracking jokes about how old his dad is.This chamber staging of a brand-new work is a change of pace for Castorf, who is now 70. His classic productions, tour de force theatrical marathons, took extreme liberties with their source materials and were frequently exhausting for actors and audiences. Kreusch certainly gets a workout in “Schwarzes Meer,” but, aside from that, there are surprisingly few hallmarks of Castorf’s style.Most surprising, it is, by and large, faithful to Kastrinidis’s text, as if the onetime enfant terrible decided it would be inappropriate to impose his ego onto his former lover’s personal and poetic cri de coeur.Like “Odyssey,” “Schwarzes Meer” is ultimately an artistic excavation of the theater of memory. In the associative games they play with Greek mythology and modern European history, both of these striking new productions suggest that dislocation and exile are fundamental to the modern human condition.Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. On tour at the Théâtre National La Colline, in Paris, May 12-21; Nowy Tear, in Warsaw, June 2-5.Schwarzes Meer. Directed by Frank Castorf. Landestheater Niederösterreich. May 5 and Sept. 24. More

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      René Pollesch Aims for a ‘Safe Space’ at the Volksbühne in Berlin

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      René Pollesch is the fourth boss of the Volksbühne in four years. The Berlin theater is pinning hopes of a return to its former vibrancy on his collaborative approach.BERLIN — This fall, a new era at the Volksbühne theater got off to a curiously muted start. René Pollesch, the theater’s new artistic director, did not deliver a splashy opening salvo or unveil his first season with a flourish. Instead, four actors parlayed the writer-director’s signature banter in the cumbersomely titled “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.” If the low-key chamber piece seemed typical of Pollesch’s work, it was also hardly earth-shattering.Then again, considering all of the recent turbulence at the Volksbühne, maybe a little restraint isn’t such a bad thing.Ever since the storied Berlin theater’s longtime artistic director Frank Castorf was fired in 2017, the Volksbühne has sailed on choppy waters. Castorf had run the playhouse since 1992 and had doggedly kept the theater’s East German spirit alive in the newly reunified Berlin: His leadership style was iron fisted, but he transformed the Volksbühne into one of the most exciting and influential forces in European theater, and he built a cult following for his own punishingly long reworkings of the classics from a Marxist perspective.From Castorf, the torch passed to Chris Dercon, a Belgian who was previously the director of Tate Modern in London, and who planned to turn the Volksbühne into a showcase for visiting performers from around the world.The regime change didn’t go as planned. For many in Berlin, the replacement of a provocateur from the former East Germany with a slick international transplant was an all-too-potent symbol of a city that was losing its edge. Protesters briefly occupied the theater and, after a series of increasingly hostile episodes — including one in which feces were left in front of the artistic director’s office — Dercon quit, only a few months into the job.In 2019, Dercon was succeeded by Klaus Dörr, a veteran theater administrator who was supposed to stabilize the Volksbühne until a permanent artistic director took the reins. But this March, Dörr abruptly resigned after 10 of the Volksbühne’s female staff members accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace.Pollesch said the Volksbühne’s spirit came from “the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage.”Thomas AurinIt was against this stormy backdrop that Pollesch, 59, arrived this summer to lead the house. All of the theater’s hopes for a return to its former vibrancy have been pinned on Pollesch, a veteran of Castorf’s Volksbühne who is considered one of Germany’s most distinctive theatrical auteurs, and whose start here is both a homecoming and a new beginning.In an interview at the theater, Pollesch spoke lovingly of the “spirit of the old Volksbühne” that he had felt since he saw his first play at there at 17. “It’s the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage,” he said.But he was also quick to dispel the hope, or the fear, that he was a Trojan horse for reinstating the theater’s old guard.“We are not Castorf,” he said. “Castorf ran the theater very differently than we do.”By “we,” Pollesch means himself and a team of actors and theater professionals that he has assembled as an advisory committee. It’s a cooperative model that is rare in the German theater world — and unique for a theater the size of the Volksbühne, which has a large staff and a full-time acting ensemble.Pollesch described how the members of the committee helped him plan his inaugural season: The actor Martin Wuttke, a regular collaborator who is best known for portraying Hitler in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” recommended the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo; the actress Lilith Stangenberg proposed the Filipino experimental filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz. The Volksbühne will premiere works by both directors early next year, Pollesch said.With the young French director Julien Gosselin and the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras also working at the house this season, the Volksbühne’s globe-trotting lineup looks like it could have sprung from one of Dercon’s unrealized seasons. But that program was not the result of any agenda to make the house more international, Pollesch said. It emerged organically from his discussions with the advisory board.That collective approach also mirrors the way the director develops his own quirky plays through intense collaboration with a small group of artists he knows and trusts. A typical Pollesch show is characterized by fluent, chatty dialogue that combines the silly with the philosophical, and by high-energy performances from a group of charismatic actors. Pollesch devises the text of his plays, as well as the staging, for specific performers, whose creative input during the rehearsal process effectively make them co-authors.From left: Franz Beil, Astrid Meyerfeldt, Inga Busch and Christine Gross in “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” a show by Pollesch.Luna Zscharnt“Often, he sets out with nothing more than a theme, a title,” Wolf-Dieter Ernst, a professor of theater studies at the University of Bayreuth, said in an email. He added that performers loved working with Pollesch because his method created a “a kind of safe space for exhausted actors and actresses.” By applying a similar approach to running the Volksbühne, Pollesch was trying to “run a theater in a more democratic, and less toxic, way,” Ernst said.Pollesch, who was born in Friedberg, a small city outside Frankfurt, studied theater at the nearby University of Giessen. In the 1980s, that school was considered the theoretical cradle of “postdramatic theater,” a self-reflexive and deconstructive approach to writing and directing for the stage. Inspired by the theories of Bertolt Brecht and by postmodern artists like the director Robert Wilson, the playwright Heiner Müller and the performing ensemble the Wooster Group, postdramatic theater is less concerned with plot or textual fidelity than with exploring — and exploding — the relationship between a stage presentation and its audience.Postdramatic theater is often dense, difficult and theoretical, yet Pollesch’s work is anything but. The lack of narrative or conventional characters may confound expectations about what theater is, but his plays rarely feel obtuse or obscure. In fact, they’re surprisingly fun and punchy — and rarely exceed 90 minutes.In Pollesch’s first stint at the Volksbühne, he ran its smaller, off-site venue, the Prater, from 2001 to 2007. He also staged shows on the main stage, where his work contrasted sharply with productions by Castorf, whose dark, demanding shows could last up to 12 hours.Since Castorf’s ouster, Pollesch has been a fixture at another storied Berlin playhouse, the Deutsches Theater, and has also worked on main stages in Zurich and in Hamburg, Germany. Last year, Berlin critics and audiences went gaga for a Pollesch show unexpectedly staged at the Friedrichstadt-Palast, a 2,000-seat revue theater.Yet the director’s inaugural work for the Volksbühne has met with a different response.“Rise and Fall of a Curtain” hardly amounted to the grand statement of purpose that many expected. If it was unmistakably Pollesch, it also felt slight, as if the director was up to his old tricks at a time when he was expected to wow everyone with a bold new vision. The critical consensus was that the auteur was writing tired backstage chatter for an audience of his own groupies.Margarita Breitkreiz in “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.”Christian Thiel“Instead of timpani and trumpets and manifestoes to usher in a new start, we get a display of cluelessness,” wrote Peter Laudenbach, a theater critic, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Reviewing “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” the house’s third new Pollesch production in three months, Laudenbach concluded that it added to the “disappointing picture that the Volksbühne under Pollesch has offered so far.”The director’s flexible and collaborative approach to programming, and the fact that the theater is tight-lipped about its plans, make it difficult to say what the future of the Volksbühne under Pollesch may look like. The director is much clearer about what not to expect. The old Volksbühne’s classic productions won’t be coming back, he said, recalling the disappointment he once felt after seeing a decade-old revival at the theater during the Castorf era.“It had nothing to do with now,” he said. “You can watch movies that were made in a different era,” he added. “Theater ages insanely fast.” More

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      Generational Divides Emerge Onstage in Germany

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      At newly reopened playhouses, once-legendary and younger directors take very different approaches to their mammoth productions.BERLIN — Theatergoers know what to expect from a Frank Castorf production. The director, who helped shape the last 30 years of German theater, favors a deconstructive approach to the classics, reams of dialogue barked like manifestoes and manic performances over a marathon running time.All these Castorf hallmarks — and others — are on display in “Fabian, or Going to the Dogs” at the Berliner Ensemble, but they can’t help but feel old hat, especially when viewed alongside premieres from some of Germany’s most distinctive young theater artists.Scheduled to premiere in spring 2020, but delayed by the pandemic, “Fabian,” at five hours, is roughly two hours shorter than initially expected. I’m glad that the director, who is 69, used the extra rehearsal time to trim some fat. Perhaps the former enfant terrible has mellowed with age.Castorf ran the Berlin Volksbühne for 25 years before being fired in 2017, and this is his third production at the Berliner Ensemble since. It was loosely inspired by Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel about Berlin’s infernally decadent tailspin in the years before the Nazi takeover, but aside from some period details in Aleksandar Denic’s intricate set, there is little Weimar flavor to the production.Instead, Castorf treats the audience to a grim parade of high-octane acting and complicated, often messy, stagecraft that doesn’t seem to refer to anything outside itself.In typical Castorf style, there’s an off-kilter stage that rotates nonstop and actors performing out of sight and captured live via video. The show also features many of the director’s signature props, including gallons of stage blood (for bathing) and potato salad (for dancing in).Probably many of the graying spectators seated in the theater saw Castorf’s revolutionary productions in their youth. But by this point, he’s gone from legend to relic. I found myself wondering (and not for the first time) if his once radical brand of deconstructive theater is now an aesthetic dead end.As often with his work, one detects a strong misogynistic undercurrent, with female characters brutalized or presented as sexually available objects of gratification. So it was refreshing to see the cast’s five actresses transcend their limited roles by giving self-assured performances, especially the Russian-born Margarita Breitkreiz, who projected a feverish intensity, and the young French actress Clara De Pin, who recited Baudelaire and crawled into the audience as part of her physically adroit, courageous performance.Castorf’s quarter-century tenure at the Volksbühne was without parallel in modern Berlin theater history, but Thomas Ostermeier’s 21-year reign as the head of the Schaubühne comes close. “Vernon Subutex 1” is this 52-year-old director’s 41st show at the theater, and it suggests that Ostermeier’s verve-filled productions, which place a more traditional emphasis on the author’s text and on acting, may also be losing their bite.Joachim Meyerhoff in Thomas Ostermeier’s “Vernon Subutex 1.”Thomas Aurin“Vernon” is drawn from the French author Virginie Despentes’s kaleidoscopic trilogy of novels about contemporary French society. Published between 2015 and 2017, the books quickly became a pop cultural phenomenon and earned the author comparisons to Balzac. They have inspired numerous stage adaptations and deserve to be better known in the United States, where the final volume was recently published.The cycle’s title character is a down-on-his-luck former record store owner who embarks on an odyssey through Paris after he is evicted from his apartment. The Schaubühne production is largely faithful to the structure of the novels, where a large cast of highly opinionated characters narrate the chapters in a dazzling merry-go-round of storytelling. But what’s so alive and fresh on the page falls flat here, especially given Ostermeier’s dutiful expository approach and the show’s four-hour length.Despite some inspired performances — particularly from Joachim Meyerhoff as Vernon and Stephanie Eidt as the ex-groupie Sylvie and the reputation-destroying Hyena — the hours drag by. An onstage band, fronted by Taylor Savvy, performs at the earsplitting volume typical of Broadway musicals and is unable to ignite the dramatic spark missing from the production.Like “Fabian’s,” “Vernon’s” premiere was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic. Finally onstage this summer, they arrived around the same time as plays by young German directors who have been reared on a steady diet of Castorf and Ostermeier.The first thing you notice about productions by Ersan Mondtag, one of this group, is their visual flair. He designs his own sets (and sometimes the costumes), which frequently recall German Expressionism or Pee-wee’s Playhouse, while his actors perform with the mannered rigor favored by Robert Wilson.Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood),” also at the Berliner Ensemble, is an irreverent reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, written by Thomas Köck with music by Max Andrzejewski.From left, Philine Schmölzer, Peter Luppa and Emma Lotta Wegner in Ersan Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).”Birgit HupfeldSurprisingly, the music is one of the less exciting parts of the show, in which Wagner’s gods, dwarves and hapless humans cavort in an oversize kitchen. Or perhaps the set is a collective delusion created by Wotan, the head god, who keeps everyone confined to an asylum.Following the general contours of Wagner’s tetralogy, Köck’s version seems inspired by “Rein Gold,” the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist deconstruction of the “Ring.” Köck also puts an environmental gloss on the epic, while interrogating the nature of myth and history.Like “Fabian” and “Vernon Subutex,” this production lasts more than four hours. And though it does drag here and there, it never did when Stefanie Reinsperger’s Brünnhilde or Corinna Kirchhoff’s Wotan was onstage.In late June, Mondtag had three new shows running in Berlin, including his first dance piece, “Joy of Life.” Next season, he is scheduled to make his debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin with a staging of Rued Langgaard’s “Antikrist.”Like Mondtag, Pinar Karabulut, 34, is one of today’s most pointedly idiosyncratic young German theater directors.“The Leap From the Ivory Tower,” at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich, feels more mature than some of the director’s other recent productions. At two-and-a-half hours without intermission, it’s a fascinating deep dive into the life and wide-ranging work of the German writer Gisela Elsner, who committed suicide in 1992.Gro Swantje Kohlhof, left, in Pinar Karabulut’s “The Leap From the Ivory Tower.”Emma SzabóIn one striking scene, German children in a bombed-out city play at being concentration camp guards and prisoners. In another, former Nazis set out for a hunt in the Bavarian forest. Later, the writer finds herself attacked by a clueless West German TV anchor during a cringe-worthy interview.The show blends grotesque and unsettling humor with energetic performances and surreal touches. One of the few missteps is a film screened as part of the production about sad bourgeois couples engaging in orgies, the subject of Elsner’s novel “The Touch Ban.” Overlong and meandering, it recalls the sordid exuberance of the copious live video in “Fabian.”Nevertheless, there is something liberating about Karabulut and Mondtag that audiences here respond to. I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing more of their stylish aesthetic as the once avant-garde provocations of the past become nostalgia-laden chestnuts.Fabian, or Going to the Dogs. Directed by Frank Castorf. Berliner Ensemble.Vernon Subutex 1. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Berlin Schaubühne.“wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).” Directed by Ersan Montag. Berliner Ensemble.The Leap From the Ivory Tower. Directed by Pınar Karabulut. Münchner Kammerspiele.All shows will return next season. More