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    ‘Ash’ Review: Elfriede Jelinek Confronts Environmental Collapse

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    Elfriede Jelinek’s latest play deals with collective calamity and individual grief, but is let down by a chaotic production.Twenty years ago, when the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature it was a surprise that the award had gone to an author who was barely known outside the German-speaking world. It set off a scandal, too. A juror from the academy that makes the decision resigned, calling Jelinek’s work “unenjoyable, violent pornography.”Despite her Nobel and the controversy that it engendered, Jelinek is still hardly a household name in the English-speaking world. In Germany and Austria, however, the premiere of a new play by this prolific and divisive writer is always an event. When the Münchner Kammerspiele presented the opening night of Jelinek’s “Ash” on Friday, every seat in the playhouse’s main theater was full.Outside Europe, Jelinek is known, if at all, for her novels, which include “The Piano Teacher” (adapted into a 2001 movie by Michael Haneke) and “The Children of the Dead,” a gruesome 500-page opus that has just appeared in English, nearly 30 years after its original publication. But in Germany and Austria, she is the most widely performed female playwright writing in German, according to her publisher, having written nearly 50 scripts since 1979.Like most of her stage works, “Ash” bears little resemblance to a conventional play. Jelinek’s signature dramatic form is the theatrical monologue: lengthy paragraphs of discursive text without clearly indicated characters, stage directions or conventional plot. It is left to directors to determine the size of the cast and to divide up Jelinek’s finely chiseled writing, which is by turns poetic, punning, allusive and philosophical.Yet sadly, Jelinek’s prose is poorly served by the director Falk Richter in his hopelessly cluttered production of “Ash.” Throughout, our attention is diverted from the text by a barrage of ominous projections, creepy AI-generated video and the distorted sound design.“Ash” continues the exploration of ecological themes that Jelinek has addressed, often with alarm, in much of her recent work, including her 2013 “stage essay” “rein GOLD,” which brings together Wagner and environmentalism, as well as her plays “Black Water” and “Sun/Air,” with which “Ash” constitutes a loose climate trilogy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

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      An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2022

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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 London theater criticFrom left, Samira Wiley, Ronke Adekoluejo, Sule Rimi and Giles Terera in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.Marc Brenner“Blues for an Alabama Sky”National Theater, LondonWhen the American writer Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play crossed the Atlantic this fall, it was the high point of a variable year for the National Theater, England’s flagship playhouse. Set in adjacent apartments in 1930s Harlem, the play takes an unsparing look at a cross section of Prohibition-era Americans yearning for release from the racism and homophobia that mar their daily lives. An expert Anglo-American cast was led by Giles Terera (“Hamilton”) and the Juilliard-trained TV actress Samira Wiley as roommates who talk of packing up and moving to Paris; at the helm was Lynette Linton, making a terrific National Theater debut with a production that embraced freewheeling comedy as well as deep sorrow.Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s reimagining of “Oklahoma!” at the Young Vic.Marc Brenner“Oklahoma!”Young Vic Theater, LondonIt was an indifferent year for musicals in London, until the arrival from New York of a much-lauded revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 “Oklahoma!” The dilemma of the farm girl Laurey Williams (a dazzling Anoushka Lucas), forced to choose between the affections of two men, possessed an unusual urgency. And the directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein found a primal darkness in the material that made a buoyant-seeming American classic look very bleak. In February, the production is set to transfer to the West End for a limited run.From left, Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Daniel Monks and Tom Rhys Harries in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc Brenner“The Seagull”Harold Pinter Theater, LondonThe director Jamie Lloyd revived Chekhov’s 1896 play in a stripped-back, modern-dress production, with the cast seated on plastic chairs against a nondescript chipboard set. The absence of props and period detail helped focus attention on the anguish at the heart of this celebrated work. You felt, more acutely than ever, the thwarted passions that drive a play about artistic ambition and misplaced love. Indira Varma was in peak form as the charismatically self-regarding actress, Arkadina, and she was superbly matched by the Australian actor Daniel Monks as her suicidal son, Konstantin. The “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke made a memorable West End debut as the hopeful young Nina.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“A Number”Old Vic Theater, LondonCaryl Churchill’s 2002 play has been revived many times, but rarely with the scorching intensity that the director Lyndsey Turner and the designer Es Devlin brought to bear at the Old Vic in January. Nominally about genetic cloning, Churchill’s hourlong drama moves beyond scientific inquiry to address more human issues, like sibling hatred and the slippery nature of happiness. In the superlative cast, Paapa Essiedu excelled playing three cloned sons who confront a toxic parental inheritance, as did Lennie James as a father who wants to make a fresh start.And the turkey …From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc Brenner“Mad House”Ambassadors Theater, LondonDysfunctional family dramas are a staple of American drama. But they rarely come drearier and more overwritten than Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” which had its world premiere in the West End this summer. Rebeck, a New York theater regular, gave the play’s choice role to a fellow American, David Harbour; he played one of three children gathered at the home of a cantankerous father (Bill Pullman) roaring his way to the grave like a dime-store King Lear. The writing felt borrowed and inauthentic, and the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel couldn’t lift an evening rife with tired confessions (“none of us had a childhood”) and clichéd plot devices (the belated emergence of an all-important letter). More than once, I groaned.Laura CappelleFour favorites from The Times’s Paris theater criticRomeu Costa, left, and Rui M. Silva in “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe Ferreira“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”Bouffes du Nord, ParisTiago Rodrigues, the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, was on a roll in 2022. He brought several revelatory productions to Paris this fall, none more so than “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Bouffes du Nord. The unlikely subject of the play, which Rodrigues also wrote, is a fictional Portuguese family that hunts down and kills fascists, following a tradition passed down through generations. Is that an honorable contribution to society, as most of the family members believe, or is doing harm always unacceptable, even when fascists threaten democracy? Rodrigues and his cast walk a fine line to avoid caricature, yet the conversations that result onstage — starting with the youngest daughter, who experiences doubts about her right to kill — are consistently thoughtful and engage the audience critically, without feeling forced.The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival “One Song”Avignon FestivalSome of the best shows to debut in France in the past year brought unclassifiable feats of virtuosity onstage, like “One Song,” which played at the Avignon Festival. Created by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop, it was another idiosyncratic entry in the “History/ies of Theater” series that the Belgian playhouse NTGent has developed in collaboration with the festival. In “One Song,” a group of musicians/competitors perform a single song on a loop while doing an extreme workout. (A violinist plays while doing squats and leg lifts on a high beam.) Throughout, as the performers thoroughly exhaust themselves, a male cheerleader and a group of fans take turns encouraging and booing them, while a referee mumbles incomprehensibly in the background. The instant standing ovation in Avignon wasn’t merely a way to reward the performers for their efforts: “One Song” lingered in the mind as a wild, exhilarating study in absurdity.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”Gestuelle“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret”Paris l’Été FestivalAnother oddball success, “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” won a number of awards in France this year, and they were thoroughly deserved. The show’s two actors and directors, Olivier Martin-Salvan and Pierre Guillois, tell their story almost entirely through dozens of cardboard objects. Words written on the signs and boxes, of various shapes and forms, explain what each represents — including a “fjord” and a “fly swatter” — and with the help of assistants, Guillois, a lithe, clownlike figure, in boxer shorts throughout, manipulates them at lightning speed. In the tale he spins, Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an adventure around Europe to reconnect with a siren, all the while mumbling in a mix of gibberish and English. How does this all add up, you ask? The duo’s fantasy world coheres thanks to extraordinary stagecraft in this “cardboard cabaret,” and the result is serious theater magic.Juliette Speck as Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist, in “Free Will,” directed by Julie Bertin at the Théâtre Dunois. Simon Gosselin“Free Will”Théâtre Dunois, ParisTheaters that cater to young people often fly under the critical radar. With Léa Girardet and Julie Bertin’s “Free Will,” however, the Théâtre Dunois in Paris landed a hit for all ages. This new play explored the life of the South African runner Caster Semenya, an Olympic gold medalist caught in a long-running fight with her sport’s governing body — and repeatedly banned from competition — because of elevated testosterone levels. Girardet and Bertin, two gifted young writers and directors, depict the frequently inhuman treatment of Semenya (the excellent Juliette Speck) with instructive clarity, weaving together verbatim excerpts from court proceedings and witty spoofs of femininity standards that even top athletes are forced to abide by.And the turkey …From left, Julien Frison, Denis Podalydès and Christophe Montenez at the Comédie-Française in “Tartuffe,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Jan Versweyveld“Tartuffe”Comédie-Française, ParisThis “Tartuffe” was supposed to launch France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial in style. Staged by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française, a descendant of Molière’s own theater ensemble, it offered an intriguing experiment: a reconstruction of the play’s 1664 original version, censored by the French religious establishment and subsequently lost. Yet van Hove undermined it with a stultifying black-and-white production that had less to do with Molière than with his own directorial tics. The suited cast was left to wrestle with bewildering character arcs: When Tartuffe, who fakes piety to secure a position within a bourgeois family’s home, attempts to seduce the wife, Elmire, van Hove manufactured a love story between the two — leaving Marina Hands, as Elmire, to take Tartuffe’s abuse with puppy-eyed adoration. Thankfully, stronger Molière productions followed at the Comédie-Française later in the year.A.J. GoldmannFour favorites from The Times’s Berlin theater criticA scene in Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” an exploration of texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Nikolaus Ostermann/Volkstheater “humanistää!”Volkstheater, ViennaThe director Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” which premiered at the Volkstheater in Vienna in January and traveled to Berlin for Theatertreffen, the prestigious German theater festival, in May, is rightly one of the most acclaimed German-language productions of the year. This theatrical homage to the Viennese experimental poet and writer Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) is a musically supercharged and visually arresting work from one of Germany’s very best theater directors. Exuberant performances from the Volkstheater’s excellent actors are perfectly calibrated to this gleefully surreal production, in which 10 of Jandl’s key works come to eye-popping life in a Gesamtkunstwerk that combines spoken word, music, dance and pantomime. While delighting in Jandl’s linguistic games, the production, which remains in the Volkstheater’s repertoire, crackles with fresh and euphoric inventiveness. This is the one show I can’t wait to see again.The ensemble in “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”), directed by Marco Layera, at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND.Gianmarco Bresadola“Oasis de la Impunidad”Schaubühne, BerlinThis show, from the Chilean director Marco Layera and his company, La Re-sentida, is brilliant but harrowing: I don’t ever want to revisit it. A coproduction between Berlin’s Schaubühne, where it premiered in April, and the Münchner Kammerspiele, the rigorously choreographed exploration of state violence is one of those extreme works of art that is all the more disturbing for the delicate artistry of its execution. Darkly comic in some places, poetic or balletic in others, this “investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” to quote the program, feels like being trapped in a carnival of torture and brutality that is profoundly unsettling for the performers and spectators alike.“Crazy for Consolation,” directed by Thorsten Lensing.Armin Smailovic/Salzburg Festival“Verrückt nach Trost”Salzburg FestivalThorsten Lensing’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” is possibly even more astonishing. In “Verrückt nach Trost” (“Crazy for Consolation”), which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, in August, Lensing and his group of four brilliant actors achieve something close to a theatrical miracle. The lengthy and often surreal play, which revolves around an orphaned brother and sister who go through life craving love and human connection, is one of the most profoundly moving new plays I have seen in a long time. The work’s emotional impact has much to do with the finely chiseled performances of Ursina Lardi, Devid Striesow, André Jung and Sebastian Blomberg, who guide us through a long evening of unpredictable and incandescent episodes, including what is quite possibly the most moving monologue ever written for an octopus.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg.Johan Persson“Hamilton”Stage Operettenhaus, HamburgIn October, the German premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical, “Hamilton,” landed with volcanic force in Hamburg. The first production of the show in a language other than English, it was a herculean undertaking. The ingenious translation of Miranda’s abundant and inventive lyrics took four years, and the cast hails from 13 countries. Hard to believe, but the original Broadway production, directed by Thomas Kail, is already seven years old; if anything, this one seems galvanized by its new language and cultural context. There has never been a show like this before in Germany. From the dazzling linguistic feats of the translators to the convincing and handsome staging and gripping, Broadway-caliber performances, everything about “Hamilton” in Hamburg feels revolutionary.And the turkey …Christian Weise’s “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater.Ute Langkafel“Queen Lear”Maxim Gorki Theater, BerlinGermans love their Shakespeare, and Berlin has seen many fine stagings of the Bard’s work, both traditional and deconstructed. Christian Weise’s goofy sci-fi production of “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater is possibly the most bewildering Shakespeare reimagining ever conceived. The modern-language adaptation is by Soeren Voima, an authors’ collective, and it recasts Shakespeare’s darkest play as an outer-space soap opera with echoes of “Star Wars” and “Doctor Who.” The chintzy, low-budget aesthetic, the hammy acting and the lightsabers are all good, if mildly tedious, fun for the first hour. But hark! There are two more hours to go! The only thing this intergalactic spacewreck of a production proves is Lear’s maxim that“nothing will come of nothing.” More

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      Drama, in German, in the Shadow of ‘Leopoldtstadt’

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      New stagings in Germany and Austria, including Tom Stoppard’s latest play, explore the themes of social integration and tolerance that animated the “Jewish question.”MUNICH — “My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner,” boasts a character in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” summing up the rapid trajectory from piety to cultural assimilation that was common among Vienna’s Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Stoppard’s play, which is running through March at the Longacre Theater in New York, is one of the season’s most discussed productions. In it, the veteran dramatist, veering into explicitly Jewish territory for the first time in his long and decorated career, explores the themes of social integration and the limits of tolerance that made the “Jewish question” one of the flash points of modernity.Seventy years before Stoppard’s fictional Merz family graced the stage, Gabriele Tergit published “The Effingers,” a 900-page novel that traces the fortunes of a Jewish family in Germany over four generations, from 1878 to 1948. Tergit, a German Jewish writer and journalist whose long life spanned much of the 20th century (she died in 1982, in London, at age 88), has undergone a reappraisal recently. When “The Effingers” was reissued in 2019, it became a literary event in Germany; the book was compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and even won praise from the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (An English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, is coming from New York Review Books.)The Münchner Kammerspiele, whose recent programming has highlighted works by unsung female artists, has lost no time in bringing “The Effingers” to the stage. Jan Bosse’s nearly four-hour production is dramatically fluid and visually striking. Aside from the historically accurate costumes, whose changing styles help us keep track of the passage of time, Bosse and his stage designer, Stéphane Laimé, serve us a sleek and spare production that incorporates written and projected dates, historical photographs, family trees and, in one particularly amusing sequence, a car ride in a model manufactured by the Effinger family (brought to life with a green screen).The dozen actors who play the family members, and their friends and enemies, are largely plucked from the Kammerspiele’s permanent ensemble. Among the best are Katharina Bach as the beautiful, artistically talented and doomed Sofie Oppner: Bach invests the character with a blend of charisma, flamboyance and mental instability. Zeynep Bozbay is warm and convincing as Marianne Effinger, who rejects her arriviste family’s lavish lifestyle by devoting herself to charity. She waits in vain for a marriage proposal from one of her brother’s friends; when they meet again, decades later, he has become a convinced antisemite.Yet despite the fine acting and the bold staging, “The Effingers” rarely ignites onstage. Unlike the book, the performing version by Bosse and dramaturge Viola Hasselberg ends before World War II, perhaps to avoid suggesting a sense of tragic inevitability for a family of affluent Berliners who just happen to be Jewish. Though the production teems with life, it also lacks focus and narrative direction. Keeping up with the large, at times chaotic, Effinger clan over a half-century is not consistently rewarding. Perhaps a more judicious selection of scenes would have yielded a more dramatically and emotionally satisfying play. Or maybe a slimmed-down cast (such as in the three-actor tour de force that is “The Lehman Trilogy,” another Jewish family saga) would have resulted in a less cluttered and more absorbing production.From left, Johannes Nussbaum, Lisa Stiegler, Valentino Dalle Mura and Thiemo Strutzenberger in “The Tower,” directed by Nora Schlocker at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit Hupfeld“The Effingers,” an epic literary adaptation, is unusual repertoire for the Kammerspiele, where more experimental, chamber-like productions dominate these days. Large casts and extra-long running times, by contrast, are common features down the block at the Residenztheater, which boasts the largest acting ensemble in Germany. This season, dramatic epics like “Angels in America” and “The Inheritance” share the program with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Tower.” The Austrian Jewish Hofmannsthal, a leading literary figure in fin-de-siècle Vienna, is also one of Stoppard’s touchstones for recreating that period in “Leopoldstadt,” and comes in for high praise in a monologue extolling how Viennese Jews worship culture. “A new writer, if he’s a great poet like Hofmannsthal, walks among us like a demigod,” Stoppard has a character say.Nora Schlocker’s grim, aesthetically distinctive but dramatically stilted production of “The Tower” illustrates some of the difficulties of bringing Hofmannsthal’s work to the stage nowadays. An allegory about political power and the fall of empires, “The Tower” was written in the aftermath of World War I, although Hofmannsthal continued to work on it for nearly a decade. It’s a long play, modeled on an earlier work by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón, about a king who keeps the son who has been prophesied to overthrow him locked up in a tower.Schlocker has radically shortened the play, and the actors (joined onstage by three musicians) play multiple roles, except for Lisa Stiegler, who gives a bloodcurdling, affecting and acrobatic performance as the imprisoned prince, Sigismund. Sumptuous as the play’s language is, it’s a difficult work to make tick dramatically. Schlocker’s deep cuts speed things up (the show clocks in at a mere 100 minutes), though it feels disjointed at times. But the grotesque, ghoulish aesthetic she devises, while effective in places, can seem just baffling and quirky in others.Claus Peymann’s production of Thomas Bernhard’s “The German Lunch Table” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Philine HofmannFor a shocking and refreshing dose of eccentricity, turn to Claus Peymann’s delirious production of Thomas Bernhard’s equally insane play, “The German Lunch Table,” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Bernhard, who died in 1989, was the bad boy of postwar Austrian literature, and he loved to thumb his nose at his compatriots for maintaining that they were Hitler’s first victims. For this production of Bernhard’s 1988 play, a vaudeville-like series of seven sketches, Peymann has teamed up with Achim Freyer, who designed the colorful, eye-popping sets and projections.The Josefstadt Theater is known for conventional (and conservative) dramatic fare, but this bonkers staging of a play that seems hellbent on offending its audience is anything but. Bernhard’s sketches all deal with Nazism surfacing in quotidian interactions and with society’s failure to work through the past. In one, politicians who are contestants on a TV quiz show brag about being “National Socialists at heart.” In another, elderly couples gather to celebrate the acquittal of a friend who was on trial for crimes against humanity committed at a Nazi concentration camp.As luck would have it, “The German Lunch Table” is in repertoire at the theater along with the first German-language production of “Leopoldstadt.” That Stoppard’s haunting ode to the vanished Viennese Jewish world should play alongside Bernhard’s incendiary indictment of postwar Austrian repression and hypocrisy feels appropriate, in a sly and mischievous way.Effingers. Directed by Jan Bosse. Through Feb. 3 at the Münchner Kammerspiele.Der Turm. Directed by Nora Schlocker. Through Jan. 18 at the Residenztheater Munich.Der deutsche Mittagstisch. Directed by Claus Peymann. Through March 27 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. More

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      A Splashy, Messy All-Naked Revue

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      Florentina Holzinger’s striking, bewildering and stomach-churning new piece, “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” opened the season at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin.BERLIN — A group of naked women hump a helicopter suspended above an onstage swimming pool; a tattooed sword swallower inserts blades down her throat — as well as a tube with a camera that gives us a tour of her guts; someone else sticks her hand deep inside another woman’s vagina and retrieves a key; the key-bearer later pierces her cheek with a large pin. These are a few of the striking, bewildering and stomach-churning things that take place at the Volksbühne theater during “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a new work by Florentina Holzinger.Over the past few years, that Austrian choreographer and director’s radically feminist — or postfeminist — brand of dance theater has garnered critical acclaim and gained a cult following. “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” an all-naked female revue about women and water, is Holzinger’s second production at the Volksbühne. And unlike the first, “A Divine Comedy,” which was originally seen at the Ruhrtriennale festival before transferring to Berlin last season, “Ophelia’s Got Talent” is tailored to the Volksbühne’s round and technically versatile stage.At the performance I attended, the atmosphere was electric. The packed audience roared its approval before, during and after the performance. If nothing else, Holzinger has succeeded in bringing back a sense of frenzied enthusiasm to the company, which has struggled since the 2017 exit of its legendary artistic director Frank Castorf after 25 years running the theater, which inaugurated a period of decline and dysfunction.The theater’s current artistic leader, René Pollesch, a writer-director who is a veteran of the Castorf era, has certainly scored a popular coup in recruiting Holzinger, who is part of the Volksbühne’s artistic advisory board and will create several new works for the theater in the coming years. Based on the evidence, Berlin audiences have a large appetite for her brash, energetic and exuberantly discomfiting work, with its unflinching and unsentimental look at women’s bodies and desires. And, let loose on the Volksbühne’s vast stage, Holzinger can work on a grand scale that allows her to create theatrical tableaus of undeniable power. Inexplicable as it was, the flying helicopter orgy was a wild sight to behold.Less convincing, however, than such stunning and disturbing set pieces (at one point, a performer literally hangs from her teeth), is the director’s sense of dramatic clarity, structure and rhythm. At close to three hours, “Ophelia’s Got Talent” is, simply put, a mess.“Ophelia’s Got Talent” begins as a talent-show parody, including an attempted escape from a water tank.Nicole Marianna WytyczakThe production starts off as a parody of a shlocky TV talent show, complete with overemotional judges. After a Houdiniesque escape from a water tank goes wrong, the talent show breaks off and is replaced by a vaudeville-style revue that is frequently exasperating. Titles projected on the back of the stage suggest various aquatic themes, but little connects the endless procession of tap dancing, swimming, scenes of self-harm and confessional monologues.It’s not that there are too few ideas to sustain the long running time; it often feels that there are too many. Watching this show, one has the impression that Holzinger and her fearless co-stars fell down a deep, dark well of associations and haven’t fully emerged.Is “Ophelia’s Got Talent” a homage to Shakespeare’s drowned heroine? A treatise on the depiction of submissive aquatic women, or dangerous mythological figures, in Western art and literature? The evening seemed to be headed in those directions — until the performers became dancing, brawling sailors, a mash-up of “Anchors Away” and Fassbinder’s “Querelle.” But that, too, quickly fell away, and a sense of strange body horror took over. At one point a performer appeared to give agonizing birth to a reptilian, or possibly mechanical, creature as the water in the long onstage pool turned blood-red. Holzinger’s aesthetic is very in-your-face, but some subtlety would have also gone a long way. If this was a show about water’s metamorphic power, and of women as bearers of water and life, I would have preferred a more sustained engagement with those themes. Instead, the production swerved in a militantly ecological direction late in the evening, with hundreds of plastic bottles raining down into the pool.Then, toward the end, the show veered unexpectedly into sentimentality with an assist from a group of adorable young children who scampered onstage and announced themselves as representatives of the future. It was a baffling way to draw the bold, confused and exhausting spectacle to a close. More to the point, however, it struggled to convince; the environmental twist felt like straining for relevance and even a touch hypocritical. With thousands of gallons of water (there is a pool and two massive tanks on the stage) required for each performance, this is clearly not a resource-light production. As one of the onstage children says, water is “the blood of the earth.” I wonder if spilling so much of it night after night is justifiable.The sea is “the only lover whose arms are always open to us,” wrote the gender-bending French writer and photographer Claude Cahun, whose unique body of work inspired the season opener at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Performed on the playhouse’s smallest stage, that piece, “La Mer Sombre,” is a compact production by the exciting young German director Pinar Karabulut. A short work that Karabulut developed with three excellent actors from the Kammerspiele’s permanent troupe, “La Mer Sombre” is more successful as a stylized fusion of fluid mise-en-scène, eye-popping design and accomplished performances than as an exploration of Cahun’s unconventional life and pioneering work, which is enjoying a revival of interest.Christian Löber, Thomas Hauser and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “La Mer Sombre,” by Pinar Karabulut.Krafft AngererAt the start of the hourlong performance, the actors are casually embedded in the audience. It’s hard to miss them, however, since the straight black wigs and oddly cut, closefitting costumes they wear make them look like androgynous alien joggers. It’s difficult to get much of a hold on the dialogue, which is drawn largely from Cahun’s writings but often decontextualized. Instead, the production poetically honors her iconoclastic spirit by tearing down barriers. The performers have no fixed identities, rather they seem to collectively form a fractured persona; the spectators rub shoulders with the actors as they flit between the stage and the auditorium and an audience member is even invited to serve as the prompter; stagehands wander the set installing and removing props.Brightly colored and filled with music, the production proceeds by associative logic as the Kammerspiele’s actors — Thomas Hauser, Gro Swantje Kohlhof and Christian Löber — play off one another in a surreal fun house decked out with shell-shaped mirrors, illuminated hearts, a reflective floor and, at the play’s climax, a bathtub filled with bubbles.Despite the energetic and witty performances and the finely honed aesthetic of Aleksandra Pavlovic’s set design, this remains a modest production that operates within a small web of themes and motifs. While succeeding on its own terms, “La Mer Sombre” merely dips a toe into Cahun’s life and work: It doesn’t go for a full plunge. Even so, the hour spent with the Kammerspiele’s three actors somehow seemed richer and more theatrically satisfying than the nearly three endured with Holzinger and her nude 12-woman troupe.Ophelia’s Got Talent. Directed by Florentina Holzinger. Through Nov. 27 at the Berlin Volksbühne.La Mer Sombre. Directed by Pinar Karabulut. Through Nov. 20 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

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      New Playwrights’ Voices, in the Land Where Directors Rule

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      Bold takes on classic works defined theater in Germany for decades. But many playhouses are turning to new works by international dramatists.BERLIN — Germany has a rich tradition of dramatists, from Goethe to Brecht, but ask people here to name a contemporary German playwright and you’ll probably draw a blank. Over the past few decades, the creative space once occupied by playwrights in Germany has largely been filled by directors, whose takes on the dramatic repertory — and notably the classics — are often so refreshingly different that their productions can be considered new works in their own right.This season, however, some of the country’s leading playhouses are putting a renewed emphasis on cultivating new literary voices, stories and approaches to drama. And because this is happening in globalized 21st-century Europe — or perhaps because of a paucity of A-list homegrown playwrights — a surprising amount of new work on German stages comes from the pens of international dramatists.One of the most prominent places where that’s happening is the Berlin Volksbühne, a rare German theater run by a playwright. After debuting three of his own works earlier this season, the Volksbühne’s new leader, René Pollesch, ushered in 2022 with the world premiere of Kata Weber’s “MiniMe.” Like many of this Hungarian writer’s works (she’s best known for the play and film “Pieces of a Woman”), the production was directed by Kornel Mundruczo, her artistic and romantic partner. Sadly, the couple, who also recently worked on the premiere of an opera at the nearby Staatsoper, failed to hit the mark with their latest collaboration — which, for better or worse, has nothing to do with the diminutive character played by Verne Troyer in the “Austin Powers” movies.With “MiniMe,” Weber and Mundruczo have fashioned a nasty 90-minute domestic horror sitcom about a preteen girl (the exceptional 10-year-old newcomer Maia Rae Domagala, whose performance is one of the evening’s few saving graces) and her mother, an ex-model who is grooming her as a JonBenét Ramsey-type child beauty queen. But Weber never entirely makes us buy the disturbing premise of a mother so intent on fashioning her daughter in her own image that — spoiler alert — she gives the child Botox injections.“Doughnuts,” by Toshiki Okada, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Fabian HammerlMini’s ineffectual father is a dead weight at the center of the play, which expends far too much time on the parents’ boring marital issues rather than exploring the perverse mother-daughter relationship.Things aren’t much enlivened by Mundruczo’s elegant production, featuring fluid video work and a live soundtrack as well as an underutilized onstage pool with a flamingo float. The handsome set of a slick yet sterile suburban house lends the production a degree of naturalistic detail uncommon on German stages, which generally favor abstract or stylized approaches; it underscores the materialism and superficiality that destroy the play’s characters.Realism is the last thing you would associate with Toshiki Okada, the prolific Japanese theater artist, whose newest work, “Doughnuts,” recently premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (“Doughnuts” will also play in Berlin in May, as part of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best theater from around the German-speaking world.) Over 75 minutes, six actors inhabit a stranger and more claustrophobic world than that of “MiniMe,” and yet, paradoxically, it seems somehow truer and more in touch with now.The play’s absurd premise, in which a group of notables are trapped in the lobby of a fashionable hotel — perhaps they are academics, perhaps businesspeople — brings to mind the work of Beckett and Buñuel. As they converse with one another and a comically ineffectual receptionist, the actors perform precise movements that update traditional Japanese Noh theater techniques and seem to illustrate, interpret or even contradict their dialogue. The actors are pitch perfect as they accompany their precisely declaimed monologues, on subjects ranging from the hotel’s amenities to a bear terrorizing a nearby supermarket, with cryptic and often hilarious gestures.“Our Time,” by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone, at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit HupfeldIn Germany, Okada is one of several prominent playwrights who frequently stage their own works in aesthetically distinctive productions, allowing them to exert a rare measure of control. Another is the Australian writer-director Simon Stone.Stone’s latest play, “Our Time,” at the Residenztheater in Munich, is a sprawling five-and-a-half-hour contemporary saga loosely inspired by the works of Odon von Horvath. That Austrian writer vividly chronicled life in Europe shortly before World War II, but Stone’s drama plays out in our own troubled age.Over three acts, we follow 15 characters over the course of six years, from 2015, when Germany began welcoming over a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, up to the coronavirus pandemic. This makes for absorbing theater, despite a few soap-operatic touches, wild coincidences and some speechifying toward the end. Performed entirely in and around a hyper-realistic mock-up of a gas station convenience store, “Our Time” works best when the dialogue settles into a natural, unforced register. The impressive cast is drawn from the Residenztheater’s vast ensemble, which has been getting quite a workout in a series of marathon productions this season.“Our Time” currently shares the program at the Residenztheater with work by Shakespeare and Molière. A different Munich theater, however, has shown a more extensive commitment to new dramatists: The Münchner Kammerspiele, like the Volksbühne, is betting on new plays to form the backbone of its repertory under a new artistic director, Barbara Mundel.From left, Vincent Redetzki, Stefan Merki and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “Jeeps,” written and directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud, at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Armin SmailovicThe pandemic has complicated these efforts. Luring audiences into theaters has been difficult everywhere, but it’s a particular challenge when the playwrights are unfamiliar. Many recent Kammerspiele shows I’ve caught were poorly attended. So I was glad to see that Munich theater lovers turned up in droves for a recent performance of “Jeeps,” a new comedy from the young German writer and director Nora Abdel-Maksoud, which has one of the best premises of any play I’ve seen in a long while: In the not-too-distant future, inheritance has been abolished. Instead, estates are distributed by a lottery administered by the Job Center, a dreary office where both the unemployed and the recently disinherited gather in hopes of scoring a winning ticket.“Jeeps” is a smart, loopy and fast-paced farce, but the actual satire seems slight and, judging from the all the belly laughs, mostly harmless. Who or what exactly is being skewered here, I wondered. The audience was having too good a time to be provoked, let alone discomfited. Still, there is no doubt about the talents and charisma of the four actors who embellish Abdel-Maksoud’s firecracker dialogue and simple, unadorned staging — a far cry from Stone’s and Okada’s more stylish productions — with verbal and physical high jinks. The Kammerspiele clearly has a hit on its hands. That’s an encouraging sign for the direction that Mundel is charting for her house as an incubator of new dramatic voices.MiniMe. Directed by Kornel Mundruczo. Through March 28 at the Volksbühne.Doughnuts. Directed by Toshiki Okada. Through March 28 at the Thalia Theater.Unsere Zeit. Directed by Simon Stone. Through March 13 at the Residenztheater.Jeeps. Directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud. Through March 29 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

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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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      Two Theaters, Different Worlds

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      Munich is throwing off a provincial reputation to become a global cultural powerhouse. Yet tensions between local and cosmopolitan impulses in the city’s playhouses remain.MUNICH — This month, hundreds of elegant Bavarians, many decked out in the region’s traditional dress of lederhosen and dirndls, gathered for the festive opening of the new Volkstheater, a striking and luxurious performing arts complex built into the cobbled courtyards of a 19th-century abattoir.That the Volkstheater was inaugurated a week after the opening of Isarphilharmonie, a world-class concert hall, seemed a further signal that Munich is throwing off its provincial reputation and growing into a global cultural powerhouse.Yet tensions between local and cosmopolitan impulses in the city’s arts scene remain, and nowhere are they clearer than in the different approaches of the Volkstheater and another state-funded playhouse, the Münchner Kammerspiele. Once described as Munich’s “unloved child,” the Volkstheater was willed into existence in 1983 by a conservative mayor who wanted a more traditional alternative to the artistically and politically provocative Kammerspiele.The Volkstheater’s $150 million venue is a vindication of the artistic course that its longtime leader, Christian Stückl, has charted for the house. In 2002, Stückl arrived as the artistic director and set about building an ensemble of young actors, including many fresh out of drama school. Nearly two decades later, the theater is known far and wide as an incubator of talent. The company’s “Radical Young” festival, founded in 2005, showcases productions by up-and-coming directors from theaters throughout the German-speaking world.The Kammerspiele — whose history stretches back more than a century and includes world premieres by the dramatic titans Bertolt Brecht and Frank Wedekind — is also in the midst of a new beginning. It recently kicked off its second season under its artistic director, Barbara Mundel, who has brought in a mostly new (and greatly expanded) acting ensemble and a diverse team of artistic collaborators.Jan Meeno Jürgens, left, and Alexandros Koutsoulis in the Volkstheater’s “Edward II.” Arno DeclairStarting in the middle of a pandemic, however, has not been easy, and the Kammerspiele has often struggled to define or articulate its vision. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if the theater is eying the Volkstheater, whose splashy opening is still making headlines and generating excitement here, with something like envy.With a swanky home for its tried and tested model of traditional theater performed by young players, the Volkstheater seems in the ascendant. But it remains to be seen whether the company can appeal to a public beyond its mostly local base.Stückl’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” which inaugurated the stage, seems the sort of stylish yet conventional staging that could attract wider audiences. The production is sensitively acted and poignantly illustrates the medieval English king’s passionate and heedless love for Gaveston, the earl of Cornwall, which the monarch pursues as his court plots against him.With its sizable dramatis personae, “Edward II” proves a good opportunity to show off the Volkstheater’s fresh-faced ensemble, as well as the technical capacities of the stage. The costumes and the minimal props — including a bathtub and throne — vibrate with electric pinks and purples against the black expanse of the neon-lit stage, whose frequent rotations facilitate seamless entrances and exits over two intermissionless hours.“Edward II” is the first of 15 premieres that the house has planned for this season, along with works by George Orwell and Oscar Wilde and several new plays. Yet the company’s repertoire leans heavily on the classics, from Shakespeare to foundational German works.Pascal Fligg in “Felix Krull,” an adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel at the Volkstheater.Andrea HuberA brilliantly acted chamber version of Thomas Mann’s “The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” is the Volkstheater’s first revival in its new home. Presented in the house’s second, smaller theater, the 2011 staging, adapted from the novel by the show’s director, Bastian Kraft, feels remarkably fresh considering its age. Kraft succeeds in conjuring the colorful life and globe-trotting adventures of Mann’s charming confidence man with limited means.The cast remains unchanged from a decade ago: Pascal Fligg, Nicola Fritzen and Justin Mühlenhardt give heroic performances, dividing the role of Krull among them. The three bring the rakish trickster to life through a series of fast, witty and sweaty performances that are triumphs of bravura acting.“Felix Krull” is one of the Volkstheater’s classic productions, and it still sells out. Things look very different over at the Kammerspiele, which is building up its repertoire pretty much from scratch. (Almost none of the company’s productions from before Mundel’s tenure have been retained.) The program includes few famous plays or recognizable titles. Instead, the Kammerspiele is taking a gamble on recent and freshly commissioned works by international artists, dramatists and theater collectives.The cast of Sivan Ben Yishai’s “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa),” directed by Pinar Karabulut at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Krafft AngererOne young author working at the theater is the Israeli writer Sivan Ben Yishai, whose “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” recently received its world premiere there. This provocative play is a ferocious and uncompromising dramatic treatise about sexual violence, abuse, self-harm and the psychologically damaging expectations placed on girls and women in a sexist society. The playbill contains a trigger warning that may be tongue-in-cheek. (“Trigger warnings sell,” a character tells us.)Thankfully, Pinar Karabulut’s stylishly campy and colorful production does not put any violence or cruelty onstage. The spirited five-member cast, drawn from the house’s ensemble, recite (and occasionally sing) the X-rated dialogue while decked out in wacky comic-book costumes by Teresa Vergho. Karabulut’s whimsical dollhouse aesthetic provides a much-welcome contrast to the play’s relentless brutality; the production’s irony and dark humor help the audience get through what would otherwise be an unremittingly grim evening.The Kammerspiele’s terrific ensemble is also front and center in “The Politicians,” a dramatic monologue by Wolfram Lotz. It’s a lengthy poetic manifesto that feels outraged and urgent — though what it means isn’t always clear. In its incantatory power and rhythmic flow, it can be mesmerizing on a purely aural level, and its mix of sense and nonsense opens up an infinite number of theatrical possibilities.Bekim Latifi in “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” at the Kammerspiele. Krafft AngererWhen performed for the first time, embedded inside a Berlin production of “King Lear” at the Deutsches Theater, the entirety of “The Politicians” was entrusted to a single actress; in Munich, the director Felicitas Brucker distributes Lotz’s text among three performers. For a little over an hour, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova and Thomas Schmauser declaim the agitated text with white-hot intensity. Performing from isolated cubbyholes that resemble a bedroom, a workshop and a kitchen in one, and whose walls often crawl with video-game-like animation, the agile actors inject hilarity and disquiet into their absurd speeches.The single weirdest, most wonderful moment in this dizzying evening is when Bach — who delivers the most impressively unhinged performance — pauses briefly amid a fiery torrent of nigh-incomprehensible babble to ask the audience, with deadpan directness, “Any questions?”Based on the evidence so far, the Kammerspiele under Mundel is more interested in art that poses questions rather than provides answers. I hope Munich’s theater lovers rise to the challenge of discovering the untested repertoire that she is introducing to this storied house. By comparison, the more popular and crowd-pleasing Volkstheater, installed in its state-of-the-art home, finds itself in a better position than ever before to convince audiences — including those skeptical about a more traditional approach — of its theatrical vision.From left, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova and Thomas Schmauser in “The Politicians,” directed by Felicitas Brucker, at the Kammerspiele.Judith BussEdward II. Directed by Christian Stückl. Münchner Volkstheater, through Nov. 25.Felix Krull. Directed by Bastian Kraft. Münchner Volkstheater, through Nov. 6.Like Lovers Do (Memories of Medusa). Directed by Pinar Karabulut. Münchner Kammerspiele, through Nov. 15.The Politicians. Directed by Felicitas Brucker. Münchner Kammerspiele, through Nov. 24. More