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    Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin

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    Recent premieres in the city ranged from a spare take on the recent Broadway hit “Prima Facie” to a dose of sheer artistic lunacy.It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “Prima Facie,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for a prodigious and fearless actress.Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “In Memory of Doris Bither,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “The Entity,” a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.Heinrich Horwitz, Ruth Rosenfeld, and Kate Strong in “In Memory of Doris Bither” at Schaubühne.Philip FroweinAt the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “Insane,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for a sprawling literary blog and a novel about ’90s techno culture. His latest, “Baracke,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“Es kann doch nur noch besser werden”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.Perra Inmunda, Amelie Willberg and Meo Wulf in “Things Can Only Get Better.”JR Berliner EnsembleThe director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.Like with “Baracke,” the production comes to the rescue, with movement, light, outlandish costumes and eclectic music by the Swiss D.J. Olan! It’s another step in the right direction for the Berliner Ensemble, the playhouse that has recently cast off its conservative reputation and emerged as one of the Germany’s most interesting theaters.It has become de rigeur to bemoan the loss of Berlin’s gleefully anarchic and experimental side, most clearly represented, perhaps, by the recent transformation of a famous former squat into the slick photography exhibition center Fotografiska. But Berlin can still be relied on to deliver some sheer artistic lunacy.“Baracke” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.Thomas Aurin“Toter Salon” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by Lydia Haider and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “Blut,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist Jung An Tagen.In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone. More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      Great Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop Screen

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewGreat Stage Acting Shines Through, Even From a Laptop ScreenThe Lessingtage theater festival, held online this year because of the pandemic, shows some of Europe’s finest performers, in classic plays by Brecht, Schiller, Ibsen and others.In “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October, eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set.Credit…Arno DeclairJan. 28, 2021MUNICH — When it comes to recorded theater, great acting translates to video much better than elaborate productions with complex concepts or intricate sets. So when the Thalia Theater, in Hamburg, Germany, asked 10 European playhouses to send their best shows for an online edition of the Lessingtage, an international festival held every January, by and large the theaters privileged accomplished performances over virtuosic stagecraft.The result, “Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from Europe,” is a wide-ranging survey of contemporary European theater that casts a spotlight on some of the continent’s finest stage actors. At a time when few people are allowed to travel — and even fewer theaters to open — the chance to discover new and recent stage works from the Iberian Peninsula to Russia feels particularly vital.While a few of the “Lessingtage Digital” productions debuted during the pandemic, the majority of the work on offer is already several seasons old, giving online viewers the opportunity to discover productions whose live runs may have already ended.One of the newest, and best, of the bunch is Anne Lenk’s stylish and focused staging of “Mary Stuart,” which premiered at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October. Throughout the evening, the eight cast members perform from isolated pink cubes in Judith Oswald’s corona-friendly set. Yet there is nothing stilted or fussily formal about Lenk’s interpretation of Schiller’s historical tragedy.The cast, clad in Sibylle Wallum’s flamboyant costumes, is uniformly superb, alive to the emotional and political turmoil of the drama, and how they intersect. This holds particularly true for the production’s incandescent stars, Franziska Machens as Mary, fighting from her prison cell to stay alive, and Julia Windischbauer as her proud yet conflicted rival, Elizabeth.The two queens come face-to-face only once, in a climactic 10-minute showdown in which Mary, refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth’s superior rank, blows her one chance at salvation to savor a moment of triumph. In a production where great acting tumbled forth in an endless stream, this confrontation stood out for its raw, electric charge.Lenk’s flat aesthetic is also kind to the high-definition cameras, which capture the seething performances with unobtrusive directness.“Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias” combines performers from the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Danel Quartet, a French musical ensemble.Credit…Kurt van der ElstI was also impressed with how well another production, “Antigone in Molenbeek/Tiresias,” translated to the screen. This absorbing diptych of mythically inspired dramatic monologues for actresses — one old, one young — premiered around the same time as “Mary Stuart.” Directed by Guy Cassiers, the artistic director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Belgium, the two parts of the evening are unified by the French musical ensemble the Danel Quartet performing Shostakovich string quartets via video feed.In “Antigone,” the author Stefan Hertmans transposes Sophocles’ tragedy to contemporary Belgium, where a law student, Nouria (Ikram Aoulad), embarks on a futile quest to retrieve the mortal remains of her brother, an ISIS fighter, from a forensics lab. Addressing the audience, Aoulad conveys her character’s pain and resolute sense of justice with both elegance and quaking rage.In “Tiresias,” the actress Katelijne Damen recites a blistering, dizzying poem by the young British poet Kae Tempest, a subversive retelling of the myth of the blind, gender-fluid prophet. Damen’s rendition of the virtuosic text is shot through with grace and wit. Especially impressive was how the Toneelhuis’ wide-screen camerawork (shot by Charlotte Bouckaert, who is also responsible for the set) succeeded in capturing the power of chamber theater.Stefanie Reinsperger, left, in the Berliner Ensemble’s production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”Credit…Matthias HornThere was a similar intimacy to the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The theatrical miracle of Michael Thalheimer’s fine-grained staging can be boiled down to two words: Stefanie Reinsperger.The young Austrian actress has been a member of the theater’s acting ensemble since 2017, and Grusha Vashnadze, the fierce survival artist at the center of Brecht’s late drama, was one of the first roles she stepped into at the house. As the peasant girl protecting an abandoned infant amid the horrors of war, Reinsperger pleads, howls and fights for herself with an intensity and pathos that is almost hard to bear. I was almost glad to have that raw experience mediated for me by a screen: Live in the theater, up close and personal, I don’t know if I’d have been able to take it.Eszter Onodi, left, in the Katona Jozsef Theatre’s produciton of “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers.”Credit…Horvath JuditOn the other hand, Eszter Onodi’s mesmerizing performance in “Nora — Christmas at the Helmers,” an update of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” made me feel as though I were sitting in the audience of Budapest’s Jozsef Katona Theater, rather than watching alone from my living room. In her deceptively simple performance, Onodi strips away the character’s artifice to reveal unsuspected depths. The production’s young director Kriszta Szekely brings the protofeminist heroine crashing into the present day in a faithful reworking that hammers home the contemporary relevance of Nora’s plight, 150 years after the play’s scandalous premiere.In ensemble productions from Italy and Sweden, single virtuosic performances were less important than the symbiotic energy generated from large casts that brought their plays to life collectively.The most nail-bitingly exciting production of the festival was “Right You Are (If You Think So),” Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 farce, staged by Filippo Dini at the Teatro Stabile in Turin, about a group of villagers trying to learn the truth about a mysterious new neighbor.In Dini’s staging, the townspeople lounge around a grand, if decaying, apartment with moldings on the high ceilings and sheets covering the furniture. The 12-person cast forms a tight and dynamic unit and they get the tone and comic timing just right.Mattias Andersson’s production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm.Credit…Roger StenbergMattias Andersson’s starkly contemporary production of “The Idiot” from the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm, one of the festival’s co-producers, boasts an even larger cast than the Pirandello staging. This one of two stage versions of Dostoevsky’s novel at the festival: The other is a largely wordless expressionist pantomime for four physical actors from the Theater of Nations in Moscow, is the event’s wild card.The epic Swedish show is anchored by David Dencik’s fragile and fearless performance as Prince Myshkin, who finds himself hounded by the denizens of Russian society, high and low, after his release from a Swiss sanitarium.Even though the props look like they’re from Ikea and the large cast sits idly onstage for much of the evening, this production manages to paint a vast societal canvas populated with damaged and emotionally fraught characters who speak to us across centuries and languages.When the festival lineup was announced, I was struck at how many works by canonical authors had been selected — far more than is common at European theater festivals these days. After soaking up the Lessingtage’s 10 productions, I wondered why this should have come as any surprise.Schiller, Ibsen, Brecht and Pirandello created some of the stage’s richest and most complex characters. What greater pleasure could there possibly be than watching some of Europe’s finest stage actors breathe fresh life into them — even from the remove of our computer screens?Lessingtage 2021 Digital: Stories from EuropeStreaming online through Jan. 31; thalia-theater.de.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      With Germany’s Theaters Closed, the Drama’s Online. Again.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best TV ShowsBest DanceBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWith Germany’s Theaters Closed, the Drama’s Online. Again.The show must go on, despite a second lockdown, with livestreamed premieres and recent recordings.A scene from Sebastian Hartmann’s staging of Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain.”Credit…Arno DeclairBy More