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      The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2021

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      The Times’s three European theater critics pick their favorite productions of the year — plus a turkey apiece for the festive season.Matt WolfFour favorites from The Times’s theater critic in LondonNabhaan Rizwan, left, and Emma Corrin in “ANNA X” at the Harold Pinter Theater.Helen Murray“ANNA X”Joseph Charlton’s 80-minute two-hander was first seen in 2019 at the VAULT Festival, an annual London showcase of new work on the theatrical fringe, but it hit the big time last summer as part of the producer Sonia Friedman’s RE:EMERGE season of new writing. In Daniel Raggett’s bravura production, the mysterious con woman of the play’s title draws the ambitious techie Ariel into her duplicitous orbit. Playing a fictionalized take on the real fraudster Anna Sorokin, the lauded Princess Diana of “The Crown,” Emma Corrin, proved a stage natural in this West End debut: sleek, stylish and intriguingly dangerous.Eddie Redmayne, left, and Jessie Buckley in “Cabaret” at the Kit Kat Club in London. Marc BrennerHarold Pinter Theater, London“Cabaret”Kit Kat Club, LondonThis 1966 musical is rarely absent from the London stage for long. But I’ve seldom seen it so angrily, or movingly, realized as in the production from the fast-rising director Rebecca Frecknall that opened recently at the Kit Kat Club, as the Playhouse Theater has been renamed. The West End venue has been refashioned into a Weimar-era Berlin nightclub, complete with backstage corridors full of dancers, and drinks, that audience members discover on the way to their seats. Jessie Buckley is blistering as the hapless Sally Bowles, and Eddie Redmayne is a sinister and sinuous Emcee. The two reinvent their iconic roles from scratch, and are given robust support by Liza Sadovy and Elliot Levey as the doomed couple at the musical’s bruised heart.Ivo Van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies,” which was livestreamed from the International Theater Amsterdam in February.Jan Versweyveld“Roman Tragedies”International Theater AmsterdamAmid a lean spell for Shakespeare on the London stage, a one-off livestream from Amsterdam during the coronavirus lockdown in February found something current in some time-honored texts. “Roman Tragedies” amalgamated Shakespeare’s three Roman plays — “Julius Caesar,” “Coriolanus” and “Antony and Cleopatra” — into a riveting six-hour marathon conceived well before its Belgian director, Ivo van Hove, had become a Broadway and West End presence. (The triptych was first performed in 2007.) These studies in political discord and societal discontent found multiple correspondences with the present, not least in the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the previous month: Democracy is fragile in Shakespeare’s plays, and it certainly felt so then.From left, Linda Bassett, Samir Simon-Keegan and John Heffernan in Caryl Churchill’s “What If If Only” at the Royal Court Theater.Johan Persson“What If If Only”Royal Court Theater, LondonAt 83, Caryl Churchill shows no sign — thank heavens — of slowing down or easing up on the adventure and surprise that characterize her work. “What If If Only,” her latest offering, ran a mere 20 minutes, but without leaving the audience feeling shortchanged. Churchill’s searching wit and intelligence were evident at every turn, as was the crystalline clarity brought to the play by her frequent director, James Macdonald, and a superb cast headed by John Heffernan and Linda Bassett, playing characters with names like Someone, Future and Present. The potentially cryptic, in their hands, made perfect sense.And the turkey …Lizzy Connoly, left; Ako Mitchell; onstage center; and Norman Bowman, onstage right, in “Indecent Proposal” at the Southwark Playhouse.Helen Maybanks“Indecent Proposal”Southwark Playhouse, LondonWhy must seemingly every film become a stage musical? I was beginning to feel I’d had enough after watching this misbegotten venture, which is adapted from the same novel by Jack Engelhard as the 1993 Robert Redford and Demi Moore movie. The outline remained: A couple is thrown into turmoil when the wife is offered a million dollars to sleep with a smooth-talking man of means, here played by Ako Mitchell. What was missing was any real characterization, motivation or decent music. The production resembled a cruise ship lounge act: appropriate for a show that was entirely at sea.Laura CappelleFour favorites from The Times’s theater critic in ParisEric Foucart in “What Should Men Be Told?” at the MC93 theater in Bobigny, France.Emilia Stéfani-Law“What Should Men Be Told?”MC93; Bobigny, FranceThe first performances of “What Should Men Be Told?” (“Que Faut-Il Dire aux Hommes?”) took place under unusual circumstances. Last January, theaters were still closed in France under coronavirus restrictions — they didn’t reopen until May — and to keep artists onstage, some theaters held private daytime performances for industry professionals. This collaboration between the director Didier Ruiz and seven men and women of faith provided unexpected respite from the outside world. All were nonprofessional actors opening up in monologues about their relationship to spirituality, whether they had spent decades in a Dominican cell or found shamanist beliefs late in life. Even to this atheist, the result felt like a soothing meditation.Permanent members of the Comédie-Française acting troupe in “7 Minutes.”Vincent Pontet/Comédie-Française“7 Minutes”Comédie-Française, ParisIn Stefano Massini’s “7 Minutes,” the director Maëlle Poésy found a play that both widens the horizons of the Comédie-Française, France’s oldest and most prestigious theater company, and plays to its strengths. This contemporary blue-collar drama — a rarity in the Comédie-Française repertoire — follows 11 women who fear for their jobs after the textile factory where they work changes hands. They meet to discuss whether they should accept or reject an offer from the new management team, which initially seems too good to be true. The cast, drawn from every generation within the company’s permanent acting troupe, delivered the debate with passion, nuance and a compelling hint of working-class rebellion.Vhan Olsen Dombo, left, and Claudia Mongumu in “Out of Sweat” at Le Lucernaire.Raphaël Kessler“Out of Sweat”Le Lucernaire, ParisThe premiere of “Out of Sweat” was delayed twice because of the pandemic, but it was worth the wait. The play, by Hakim Bah, won the 2019 Laurent Terzieff-Pascale de Boysson writing prize, created by the Lucernaire theater to encourage new talent and help produce their work. It deftly tells the stories of a handful of characters from an unspecified African country. One woman has already emigrated to France, while another decides to seduce a Frenchman online, abandoning her children and unfaithful husband. Yet “Out of Sweat,” co-directed by Bah and Diane Chavelet, is no gritty drama: Each scene is a self-contained work of poetry, carried by the musical lilt in Bah’s writing. A superb and versatile cast completes this showcase of Black talent.Simone Zambelli, front center, as Arturo in “Misericordia” at the Avignon Festival.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’Avignon“Misericordia”Avignon FestivalThe Italian director Emma Dante has become a regular visitor to the Avignon Festival, and “Misericordia,” one of two productions she presented there this year, exemplified her mastery of movement-based theater. In this spare show, three women rally around a mentally disabled young man, Arturo, whose mother has died. Dante gives the characters a larger-than-life physicality to express their frustrations, as money becomes tight and their home life fraught. The back-and-forth gestures and quips among them are meticulously timed, and as Arturo, Simone Zambelli, a trained dancer, anchors every scene, his limbs bending and darting eloquently in bittersweet solo turns.And the turkey …The cast of “Andy” at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon.Bruno Simão/BoCA Bienal de Artes Contemporâneas“Andy”Teatro Nacional D. Maria II; LisbonGus Van Sant certainly doesn’t lack confidence. For his first stage production, “Andy,” a musical inspired by the life of Andy Warhol, he opted not only to direct but also to write the script, design the sets and compose the music. Predictably, “Andy,” which had its premiere as part of Lisbon’s Biennial of Contemporary Arts, failed on pretty much all counts, with labored pacing, dubious songs and characters that never acquired inner lives. The inexperienced cast valiantly tried to save Van Sant from himself, but this will go down as a lesson in the perils of hiring big names who lack a basic knowledge of stagecraft.A.J. GoldmannFour favorites from The Times’s theater critic in BerlinLina Beckmann in “Richard the Kid and the King” at the Salzburg Festival.Monika Rittershaus“Richard the Kid and King”Salzburg Festival / Deutsches SchauspielhausThe German actress Lina Beckmann gave the performance of the year in this epic Shakespeare mash-up that traces the development of the Bard’s most bloodthirsty monarch. Selecting carefully from the vast panorama of the eight War of the Roses plays, the director Karin Henkel keeps her staging (seen at both the Salzburg Festival in Austria and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Germany) focused and uncluttered despite the large dramatis personae. For much of the lengthy evening, the Houses of Lancaster and York are brought to life by a handful of nimble actresses playing multiple roles. But the production belongs to Beckmann, whose volcanic performance as Richard III is a master class in shape-shifting, dissembling and uncanny persuasion: in other words, in acting itself.“The Threepenny Opera” at the Berliner Ensemble.JR Berliner Ensemble“The Threepenny Opera”Berliner EnsembleRobert Wilson’s legendary production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera,” which ran for over 300 performances at the Berliner Ensemble, was going to be a hard act to follow. If Barrie Kosky, the director of the new production at the theater, where what is Berlin’s most famous musical premiered in 1928, felt under pressure, his assured staging doesn’t show it. Kosky’s bold reimagining scrupulously avoids the Weimar clichés that have hardened around the work over the past 90 years. Working with a flawless cast from the theater’s acting ensemble, Kosky has produced something full of savage and gleeful menace — and the firecracker score has rarely sounded better.The cast of “Metamorphoses (overcoming mankind)” at the Volksbühne Berlin.Julian Röder“Metamorphoses (overcoming mankind)”Volksbühne BerlinAs Germany slid back into lockdown last winter, the Volksbühne forged ahead with a series of new plays, streamed online, exploring ancient Greek drama and myth. The most arrestingly beautiful was the director Claudia Bauer’s Ovid-inspired “Metamorphoses (overcoming mankind),” a hypnotic combination of drama, dance and music whose premiere was one of the most exquisitely filmed digital productions of the pandemic. Seven actors (wearing blank masks) and three musicians imaginatively conjured the magical transformations whereby women become birds and men turn into flowers. At the same time, Bauer used the stories about the porous relationship between humans, nature and the gods to reflect on a range of timeless and contemporary issues, including gender fluidity, toxic masculinity, exploitative capitalism and climate change. From left, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova and Thomas Schmauser in “The Politicians” at the Münchner Kammerspiele.Judith Buss“The Politicians”Münchner Kammerspiele; MunichWhen I first saw Wolfram Lotz’s dramatic monologue “The Politicians” (“Die Politiker”) embedded in a 2019 reimagining of “King Lear,” I was startled by the verve and inventiveness of this manic, free-associative monologue. In the short time since, Lotz’s screed has taken on a surprising life of its own in several stand-alone productions throughout Germany and Austria. In Felicitas Brucker’s concise and furiously paced staging at the Münchner Kammerspiele, three performers give a dazzling rapid-fire delivery of this enigmatic and repetitive text. Clocking in at 65 minutes, “The Politicians” feels like a sustained freak-out: an exhilarating roller coaster of bravura acting and transformative stagecraft, in the service of a distinctively bold (and odd) new dramatic text.And the turkey …From left, Edmund Telgenkämper, Hildegard Schmahl and Lea Ruckpaul in “The Falun Mine” at the Salzburg Festival.Ruth Walz/Salzburg Festival“The Falun Mine”Salzburg FestivalA new staging of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s rarely performed “The Falun Mine” was intended to celebrate the Austrian writer who was one of the Salzburg Festival’s founders, and whose morality play “Jedermann” is the event’s perennial favorite. Sadly, Jossi Wieler’s production, which arrived in the midst of the festival’s centennial celebrations, was so lackluster that it felt like the opposite of a rediscovery. Indeed, the inert staging was so dreary that one could wish “The Falun Mine,” never performed during Hofmannsthal’s lifetime, had remained buried. Here’s hoping some other theater or director can successfully excavate it in the future. More

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      Young Women Set the Tone for a Paris Theater Season

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      The directors staging the most ambitious premieres are all female millennials.PARIS — In March last year, Pauline Bayle’s “Lost Illusions” closed after just two performances, the day before France’s first coronavirus lockdown came into force. Eighteen months later, the Théâtre de la Bastille was chock-full once more for the production’s return to the stage — and the mood in Paris appeared to have finally lifted.Sure, proof of full vaccination or a recent negative test is required at the door, and masks remain mandatory in theaters. But the fear of shutdowns has receded along with the infection rate in the country, now that 75 percent of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine. Nearly all the country’s playhouses have reopened, with hopes now high for a “normal” season.And the directors setting the tone with ambitious premieres this September have all been millennial women. Like Bayle, Pauline Bureau, currently at the Théâtre de la Colline with “Surrogate” (“Pour Autrui”), and Maëlle Poésy, who just made her debut at the Comédie-Française, were on the cusp of national prominence when the pandemic hit.It is a relief to see them back. For emerging artists, the risk of running down funding or losing key opportunities has been especially acute over the past 18 months. The odds for women are arguably even tougher: Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum report suggested that the pandemic would delay gender equality by a generation. In France, an open letter published in the newspaper Libération last March pointed out the continued dearth of female leaders in the country’s arts world.The talent is there to change the narrative, and these millennial directors are maturing. While Bayle, Bureau and Poésy are far from alike, they all shun the highly conceptual approach that is often confused in France for a strong directorial voice. Instead, “Lost Illusions,” “Surrogate” and Poésy’s “7 Minutes” are all examples of confident, clear storytelling, complete with a few twists.“Lost Illusions” is in many ways a follow-up to Bayle’s Homer-inspired “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” two shows that toured widely in France from 2017 to 2020. Once again, Bayle has adapted an epic, character-heavy tale — Honoré de Balzac’s novel of the same name, published in installments between 1837 and 1843 — with just five actors on a bare stage. Four of them play multiple characters, men and women; the fifth, Jenna Thiam, takes the gender-swapped role of Lucien, an ambitious young writer from Angoulême who strives to make it in Parisian society.Significant cuts have been required to keep “Lost Illusions” under the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Still, Bayle and her cast manage to clearly delineate no fewer than 17 characters, sometimes with seconds to change costumes and transition from one to the next.Marie Nicolle and Nicolas Chupin in Pauline Bureau’s “Surrogate” at the Théâtre de la Colline.Christophe Raynaud de LageWhile Bayle relies on the audience’s imagination to fill in some gaps, Bureau’s instincts are closer to documentary theater. In 2019, she tackled the legalization of abortion in France in the 1970s for the Comédie-Française, in a play that drew on real-life events; “Surrogate,” at La Colline, returns to the theme of women’s reproductive rights through fiction.While legal in many countries and in some U.S. states, surrogacy remains forbidden by French law, regardless of the parents’ circumstances. “Surrogate,” which Bureau wrote and directed, openly acts as an advocate for change by telling the story of a heterosexual couple who can’t conceive after the prospective mother was treated for cancer.It’s a tricky proposition for a play, because creating characters in service of a clear cause can leave them feeling one-dimensional. When we meet Liz (Marie Nicolle), a construction manager, and Alexandre (Nicolas Chupin), a puppeteer, it soon becomes obvious — if only because of the play’s title — that they will fall in love and struggle to have a child. Yet in a neat, fast-paced series of vignettes, Bureau manages to introduce them both and stage a believable meet-cute at an airport. Their budding love story is told through intimate text messages flashed over the elaborate two-tier set.Some shortcuts are more frustrating. After Liz undergoes a hysterectomy, the play nudges them quickly toward surrogacy. Liz’s sister just happens to work at an American maternity hospital, and to have a colleague who dreams of becoming a surrogate. The staggering cost — over $100,000 — is mentioned only in passing, along with the vague prospect of a loan.Yet Bureau is brilliantly imaginative when it comes to revealing character in small, concise touches. As the American surrogate Rose, who seems too perfect on paper, she cast Maria Mc Clurg, a trained dancer who luxuriates in languid, expansive steps while heavily pregnant, as Liz watches, still — an eloquent metaphor for the relish Rose says she experiences when carrying a child, as well as Liz’s frustration with her own body.As Liz’s mother, Martine Chevallier is another highlight, insensitively deadpan, even as her daughter struggles. The only major mishap in “Surrogate” is the final scene, which sees Liz and Alexandre’s daughter appear as a teenager. Her studied weirdness, as well as repeated allusions to her high intellectual potential, undermine the rest of the play: Wouldn’t an average child be a gift, too, after infertility?The cast of “7 Minutes,” directed by Maëlle Poésy.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseNotably, both Bayle and Bureau benefited from commissions from the venerable Comédie-Française in 2019. Under its current director, Éric Ruf, the storied company has implemented a roughly equal split between female and male directors every season. This year, the two productions that opened the season were staged by women.After directing a Chekhov double bill for the troupe in 2016, Poésy returned with “7 Minutes,” a play by the Italian author Stefano Massini. It is set in a French textile factory, whose workers fear for their jobs after a change of ownership. Instead, the new management makes them a surprising offer: Eleven women elected to represent their peers are asked to voluntarily give up seven minutes out of the workforce’s daily 15-minute breaks.“7 Minutes” works like a courtroom drama. The characters have 80 minutes to decide whether or not to accept the proposal, and never leave the stage. While it initially seems like a no-brainer — seven minutes, they reason, is nothing compared with layoffs in a declining sector — one dissenting voice, that of Véronique Vella, raises the possibility that it is the first step in a rollback of hard-earned rights. As blue-collar jobs disappear, she asks with understated defiance, should those who remain accept worse working conditions just to remain employed?The play makes a superb addition to the Comédie-Française repertoire, which isn’t exactly replete with working-class stories, and brings every generation of the company together, from the company’s doyenne, Claude Mathieu, to Ruf’s latest hire, Séphora Pondi, 29.From left, Gaël Kamilindi, Sylvia Bergé, Gilles David, Claïna Clavaron and Birane Ba in Rose Martine’s “Hansel and Gretel” at the Comédie-Française.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseAnd there are already new names in the wings. “Hansel and Gretel,” a family-friendly production on the Comédie-Française’s smallest stage, the Studio-Théâtre, introduces Rose Martine, a 27-year-old director born in Haiti and raised in the overseas department of French Guiana.“Hansel and Gretel” lacks a little finesse in the acting choices, yet it’s a joy to see Martine bring elements of Black culture to the Comédie-Française stage, including call-and-response interactions with the audience borrowed from Haitian folk tales. Hansel, Gretel and the narrator are all played by young Black members of the company, with Birane Ba especially convincing as Hansel. Postpandemic, the future looks bright.Lost Illusions. Directed by Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 16.Surrogate. Directed by Pauline Bureau. Théâtre de la Colline, through Oct. 17.7 Minutes. Directed by Maëlle Poésy. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 17.Hansel & Gretel. Directed by Rose Martine. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 24. More

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      Dark. Messy. Assaultive. Inscrutable. Even From Your Couch.

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      Without international tours, streaming high-concept, director-driven European theater is the next best thing to being there.In October 1973, Arena Stage in Washington took its productions of “Inherit the Wind” and “Our Town” to Moscow and Leningrad for “the first American theatrical performances on the Soviet stage in memory,” according to The New York Times.A teenager named Dmitry Krymov was so bowled over by “Our Town” that he returned the next day. He grew up to become one of the world’s finest theatermakers, and “Our Town” plays a pivotal role in his wonderfully evocative recent memory play, “We Are All Here,” which tracks Krymov’s relationship with Grover’s Corners over the course of his life, and peaks in an emotional gut punch doubling as a visual masterstroke, with the cast lined up on a slowly rising bridge.The good news is that I was able to take in Krymov’s show earlier this month. The less-good news is that I saw it online.And that, in a nutshell, is what the past year has been for fans of border- and boundary-crossing theater: increased access, curtailed experience.Audiences in New York (and other cities that regularly host international companies) have long been able to discover theatrical ideas, techniques and aesthetics that can be radically different from the ones we encounter in the United States.Indeed, American theatergoers can be taken aback by another culture’s conception of the art form. Very roughly, if the playwright, dead or alive, rules in the United States, in Europe it’s the director who is the focus.But as Krymov learned in 1973, opening one’s mind to different possibilities is also incredibly exciting.The main problem is that travel was even harder this past year than it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. And sharing a physical space has always been a key to the more adventurous experiences, the ones that make us question our artistic assumptions: The impact of a show by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine or Poland’s Krystian Lupa can only be fully felt in real life.When you are in the room, you can see how Mnouchkine reconfigures the very idea of the theatrical space by placing movable sets on casters or having the actors get ready for a performance in full view of the audience.In the room, Scott Gibbons’s tectonic soundscapes, which are an integral part of Castellucci productions, feel as if they are pressing on your chest. Audiences entering “The Four Seasons Restaurant” at Philadelphia’s FringeArts festival, in 2014, were handed earplugs, and no, raising the volume on headphones at home just isn’t the same (you can try with another Castellucci show, “Inferno,” available in full on Vimeo).In the room, you can be awed by the supersize scope and the way live and videotaped perspectives intermingle in Ivo van Hove’s “The Damned.”The impact of oversized video imagery, as in this 2018 production of “The Damned,” can’t easily be replicated in a production watched at home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd in the room, you can thrill to an audience’s response to the moment. It’s possibly even more exciting when you’re in the enthusiastic minority in a sea of haters, “Rite of Spring”-style: I can still hear the slaps of seats springing back up as enraged patrons left in the middle of Jan Lauwers’s berserk “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was 20 years ago.But just like that, the pandemic closed borders: we will have to do without outré tableaus from visiting companies for the foreseeable future. The sudden disappearance of international theatrical touring did not make headlines in America last year: Our shellshocked stages went into survival mode, and a much needed discussion of racism in theater took precedence.Obviously I am not begrudging any of that — the reckoning was overdue — but I couldn’t deny the dull ache I felt for what was missing.It was somewhat alleviated, at least, when we switched from glaring at supertitles to glaring at subtitles, as the digital floodgates opened and theaters all over the world began streaming both shows in their repertoires and new projects.Krymov’s “We Are All Here,” for example, was just one of 15 subtitled captures I binged over five days of watching this year’s Golden Mask Festival. These were part of the Moscow-based festival’s showcase section, called Russian Case, which offers works available for tour bookings.Some of them were entrancing even on a screen, like Mihhail Plutahhin’s hypnotic “The Observers,” which consisted of handlers wordlessly moving objects rescued from forced-labor camps this way and that on a table.Yury Butusov’s staging of the Florian Zeller drama “The Son” was so bizarre that it was compelling on its own terms — the actors’ histrionic line readings were refreshingly free of any attempt at psychologizing. The popular writer Vladimir Sorokin’s “Spin” was staged by Yury Kvyatkovsky in a glass house, where we spied a rich family reveling in a decadent boozy brunch via surveillance cameras.Not everything worked, especially the shows that illustrated Regietheater (or director’s theater) run amok, like the incomprehensible commedia dell’arte-influenced production “Pinocchio. Theater.”“Investigation of Horror,” which recreated a soiree of 1930s avant-garde philosophers, complete with real-time potato-peeling and intense debates, looked at times like a “Saturday Night Live” parody. After I admitted, in a postfestival debrief on Zoom, to having been bewildered by a modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” another viewer reassured me by saying, “I’m Russian, I read the book, and I had no idea what was going on.”None of the Russian Case shows I watched were of the naturalistic bent most common in the United States. I never caught a glimpse of characters desultorily chit-chatting on a couch plopped center stage.Come to think of it, there was not much desultory chitchat at all.Yevgeny Mironov, left, as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, in “Gorbachev.” Ira Polyarnaya, via Theatre of Nations, MoscowIn her introductory note to “Investigation of Horror,” the Russian Case curator Marina Davydova wrote: “Watching relationships between characters is getting boring — it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out.”This applied even to the most traditional productions, which always had a twist, like “The Son” and its outré Expressionism, or the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s brilliant bioplay “Gorbachev” having the virtuosic Yevgeny Mironov in the title role as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, change costumes and wigs in full view as their characters age over the course of the show.And Russian Case was just the apex of a year in which I gorged on non-English-speaking theater.It all started last spring, when major companies scrambled to put catalog productions online as soon as their venues shut down — many of them stuck to traditional curtain times and eschewed on-demand, which meant appointment matinees for American viewers.Suddenly, it became easier to see work by directors we have come to know over the years. Berlin’s Schaubühne dug into its archive for full-length shows, including a healthy selection from the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier — a treat for those of us who have loyally trekked to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for his live productions. As of this writing, the prestigious Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris was still streaming a subtitled capture of a contemporary take on Molière’s “The School for Wives.”The most ambitious institution may well have been the Comédie-Française, also in Paris, which started by offering a slew of weekly archival captures (without subtitles) in the spring of 2020. I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”The Comédie-Française’s virtual programming has evolved over the past year as regulations changed, and this 341-year-old grande dame has exhibited enviable verve. When in-person rehearsals were authorized again, the company put its troupe to great use with new initiatives like the table read series “Théâtre à la Table,” which has become increasingly sophisticated (and will remain on YouTube, unlike the full captures).The Comédie-Française’s reading of “The Seagull,” part of a series that is available on YouTube.via Théâtre à la tableThose familiar with “The Seagull” could be tempted by the Comédie-Française’s dynamic reading, led by Guillaume Gallienne as Trigorin and Elsa Lepoivre as Arkadina (they also played the terrible lovers Friedrich and Sophie in “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory).Choices of source material show inventiveness, too, as with a fantastic re-enactment of Delphine Seyrig’s “Sois Belle et Tais Toi” (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a prescient feminist documentary from 1981 in which actresses including Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda talked about sexism in the film industry.Other companies have taken to appointment, blink-and-you-miss-it livestreaming, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam — the company led by van Hove, whose staging of “The Things That Pass” you can catch on April 25.Not long before my Russian immersion, I was on the edge of my, er, couch during the British director Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” for the Amsterdam theater. Even though there was no doubt as to the outcome, the modern-dress production had the intensity of a thriller and I caught myself yelping “no no no no no” out loud as the characters headed toward their fate like asteroids pulled into a black hole by an irresistible gravitational force.Hans Kesting as the title character in Robert Icke’s production of “Oedipus.”Jan VersweyveldThere have even been actual online festivals such as “Stories From Europe,” which presented subtitled captures from members of the theater network mitos21. For a few days in January, we could pretend we were at the Berliner Ensemble, Moscow’s Theater of Nations or the Teatro Stabile Torino. In dark wintertime, that escape felt precious, a window onto a world of possibilities rather than restrictions.In an article for The Times recounting that trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, the Arena Stage associate director Alan Schneider quoted an account in the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper. “Truly,” it said, “the exchange of theater experience, of theater groups, is one of the finest proofs of the willingness of peoples to live in peace, to seek mutual understanding.”If that understanding must happen online for now, so be it. The glass, at least, is half full. More

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      Michel Robin, Longtime French Character Actor, Dies at 90

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      This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Michel Robin, an award-winning French actor who became a familiar face from his roles in more than a hundred movies and television shows, died on Nov. 18. He was 90.The cause was Covid-19, according to a statement from the Comédie-Française, the prestigious theater company in Paris where he was a longtime member. The company did not specify where he died.“The French didn’t always know his name, but they recognized his face, which illuminated stages and screens,” the office of the French president said.Michel Robin was born on Nov. 13, 1930, in Reims, in eastern France. After studying law in Bordeaux, he decided to try his luck as an actor and took drama lessons in Paris when he was 26.From 1958 to 1964, Mr. Robin was part of a theater company near Lyon led by the playwright Roger Planchon before moving on to the Renaud-Barrault company in Paris. His career in theater spanned over 50 years, and he distinguished himself in classics by authors like Molière, Chekhov and Brecht.Mr. Robin was especially fond of Samuel Beckett, and played Lucky in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in 1970 and, 10 years later, Clov in his “Endgame.”“It might seem pretentious, but with Beckett, I feel at home,” Mr. Robin told the newspaper Le Monde in a 2003 interview. “It’s so funny and so awful at the same time.”He joined the Comédie-Française in 1994 and became a staple of its productions for 15 years, often playing the classic supporting role of elderly servants.“Michel always played the old, very early in his career,” Éric Ruf, the general administrator of the Comédie-Française, said in a statement about Mr. Robin’s death. “He recently admitted that he was finally old enough for those roles, and that it annoyed him.”Starting in the late 1960s, Mr. Robin also appeared in movies by a number of directors, including Costa-Gavras, Claude Chabrol, and Alain Resnais. In “Amélie,” the 2001 movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he played the father of Mr. Collignon, an irritable grocer. On television, he appeared in shows including the French version of “Fraggle Rock” in the 1980s and “Boulevard du Palais,” a police drama, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.In 1979, Mr. Robin won a prize at the Locarno Film Festival for his role as an old farmer in the Swiss comedy “Les Petites Fugues” (“Small Escapes”). In 1990, he won a Molière — France’s most prestigious theater award — for best supporting actor, for his role in “La Traversée de l’Hiver” (“Winter Crossing”), a play by Yasmina Reza about a group of six vacationers on a melancholic mountain retreat.He is survived by a daughter, Amélie, and a grandson, Gaspard. More