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    At Salzburg Festival, Ancient Greek Tragedy Gets Modern Context

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    At the Salzburg Festival, a new adaptation of “The Oresteia” will put a classic story of war, democracy and revenge into a modern context.Staging “The Oresteia,” Aeschylus’s epic Greek tragedy, is a daunting task for any theater company, especially if you add a dash of Sophocles and Euripides when portraying one of history’s most dysfunctional families.The Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, will premiere its nearly four-hour production “Die Orestie” at the Salzburg Festival for eight performances Aug. 3-15 (and in Hamburg starting Oct. 30). It is adapted and directed by Nicolas Stemann, who has staged two plays at the festival: a nine-hour adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” in 2011 and “Die Rauber” (“The Robbers”) by Friedrich Schiller in 2008.This production, which takes its name from the Aeschylus three-part epic and is to be performed in German with English supertitles, combines three playwrights’ versions of the tragedies that befall the fabled house of Atreus. In the Aeschylus play, first staged in 458 B.C., Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, returns from the Trojan War but is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia in an effort to win the war. Their son, Orestes, urged by the god Apollo, kills Clytemnestra, only to be pursued by the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. Only when the goddess Athena intervenes is he granted justice and allowed to live.The Sophocles play “Electra” (its exact date is unknown, but most scholars put it around 420 to 414 or 416 B.C.) explores his sister’s revenge against their mother. And the Euripides play “Orestes,” first staged in 408 B.C., gives a more cynical take on his fate: Only after a bloody rampage and an intervention by Apollo are the condemned siblings allowed to live.In a video interview, Stemann discussed the challenge — and the excitement — of combining these nearly 2,500-year-old plays. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.Nicolas Stemann, who adapted and is the director of “Die Orestie” that will premiere at the Salzburg Festival in August.Diana PfammatWe 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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      Avignon Festival Gets Its Buzz Back

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      With striking premieres in the main program and enchanting discoveries on the supplementary Fringe, the eminent event in European theater is flourishing after some difficult years.AVIGNON, France — After two years of pandemic-related disruption, the Avignon Festival is well and truly back. As the event, a longtime highlight on the European theater calendar, got underway here last week, there were familiar sights everywhere. All around the small city center, buzzing crowds filled the streets, while blasé regulars zigzagged between performers handing out fliers for some 1,570 Fringe productions.That’s 500 more shows than last year, when the open-access Fringe — known as “le Off,” and running in parallel with the Avignon Festival’s official program, “le In” — attempted to find its feet again after the 2020 edition was canceled. While coronavirus cases are rising again this month in France, even masks have been few and far between in the Avignon heat.In the “In” lineup, one world premiere captured the boisterous mood better than any other. “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop at the Belgian playhouse NTGent, is loud, preposterous and extremely entertaining — if a little troubling. It requires superhuman feats from a group of musicians, dressed like sports competitors, who are alternately cheered on and screamed down by performers cast as zealous fans, in front of a mumbling referee.A double bassist plays his instrument horizontally while doing ab crunches; one of his colleagues must jump up and down to reach a keyboard set above his head. A metronome sets the often wild tempo for the production’s “one song,” composed by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which the group performs on a loop. It could hardly be more literal: Its opening lines are “Run for your life/’Til you die.”The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Near the end of the performance I saw, the physical extremes that Warlop pushes her cast to execute became a little too real. A violinist who plays on a high beam, sometimes balancing on one leg, became disoriented after jumping off the beam and hit her head hard against it. Despite the concussion risk, she climbed back up and kept going, her face tight with pain.When the show ended with much of the cast collapsed from exhaustion, the instant standing ovation for the show was more than earned, yet it also felt like “The Hunger Games” for theater aficionados. Still, it is a classic Avignon production: ripe for debate long into the night.Other productions from the official lineup were less invigorating, but together they made for a respectable lap of honor for the Avignon Festival’s departing artistic leader, the French writer and director Olivier Py. His eight-year tenure has felt muddled, with quarrels about the event’s dearth of female directors and several ill-conceived premieres on Avignon’s biggest stages.That was especially true of productions at the open-air Cour d’Honneur, a majestic stage inside the city’s Papal Palace. This summer, however, Py corrected course with a high-profile and thought-provoking show, Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”“The Black Monk” was first staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in January, yet much has happened since. A message against a red backdrop during the play’s curtain calls at Avignon — “Stop War” — was a reminder of the conflict in Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s status as a high-profile Russian dissident, who was put under house arrest in Moscow in 2017 and prevented from traveling outside his native country for five years.Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Not that war features in “The Black Monk,” which is based on an 1894 short story by Anton Chekhov. Despite its scale — four parts, a running time of nearly three hours and an expanded cast of 22 in Avignon — it is more personal than political in nature, and mainly focused on the descent of one man, Kovrin, into delusion and megalomania.Each part of the show focuses on a single character’s perspective. First there is Yegor, Kovrin’s childhood guardian; then Tanya, Yegor’s daughter, who marries Kovrin. He makes for a terrible husband, unsurprisingly, and in the third and fourth parts, his recurring hallucination — a black monk — takes over the stage as well as Kovrin’s mind.At the midway point, the structure starts to feel repetitive, and a few people walked out as a result. Yet Serebrennikov wisely pivots to a more operatic approach in the second half with a large chorus of singers and dancers, all in black monk’s cowls. The result aptly fills the expansive Cour d’Honneur stage and testifies to Serebrennikov’s obvious craft and passion for the characters, although the choreography remains too generic to fully carry the piece to its intended destination.On other stages, the mood was also bleak, as it often has been under Py. “Iphigenia,” staged at Avignon’s opera house, sneaked in a nod to Py’s successor, the Portuguese writer and director Thiago Rodrigues. The director, Anne Théron, opted for Rodrigues’s 2015 retelling of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by the Greeks in exchange for the wind needed to carry them across the sea to Troy. It is a delicate, evocative version, told by characters who remember — or refuse to remember — the story even as it happens, as if the tragedy was bound to happen over and over again.Bashar Murkus’s “Milk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalChild sacrifice also features in Bashar Murkus’s “Milk,” albeit in a very different context. Murkus, a young Palestinian director based in Haifa, took maternal milk as a central metaphor for this wordless work about mourning mothers. The women onstage cradle mannequins, slowly then frenetically; milk flows from the fake breasts they wear, ultimately filling the stage. The result is full of arresting tableaux, despite a subpar musical score.For vibrant, energetic theater, however, the best bet remains to delve into the motley Fringe offerings. This year, for instance, nine companies from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, banded together to present an invigorating mini-series of shows.David Erudel and Lolita Tergémina in “The Game of Love and Chance,” directed by Tergémina.Sébastien MarchalOne company, Sakidi, is performing Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance,” a classic 18th-century French comedy, in the Creole language spoken on Réunion (with subtitles). Réunion Creole is very rarely heard on French stages, and this vivacious production by Lolita Tergémina, at the Chapelle du Verbe Incarné theater, suggests that is a shame. Since the language is heavily influenced by French, a lot of it is understandable without the subtitles, and the translation is full of images that make Marivaux feel fresh again.New French plays often come to Avignon for a trial run, too, and at a theater called 11, the playwright Jean-Christophe Dollé has landed a hit with “Phone Me.” This well-crafted intergenerational story revolves around what now feels like a 20th-century artifact, the phone booth. There are three onstage along with three central characters — a member of the French Resistance during World War II and her son and granddaughter, in the 1980s and 1990s — whose secrets converge in this unlikely setting.Amal Allaoui, left, and Alice Trocellier in “Tales of the Fairies,” directed by Aurore Evain.Mirza DurakovicAmong 1,570 shows, there is a special kind of delight in happening upon a gem like “Phone Me,” or “Tales of the Fairies,” a bright, family-friendly production at the Espace Alya. The director and scholar Aurore Evain is part of a French movement aiming to reclaim the legacy of forgotten female artists, and in Avignon, she has revived two fairy tales by the 17th-century writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.On a pocket-size stage, at lunchtime on a Monday, Evain’s three actors and musicians brought a demanding queen, a kind prince and some very helpful animals to whimsical life. Call it a sprinkle of vintage Avignon fairy dust: There was certainly some in the air.Avignon Festival. Various venues, through July 26.Off d’Avignon. Various venues, through July 30. 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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      After Being Stuck in Russia, Kirill Serebrennikov Directs a Play in Germany

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      Kirill Serebrennikov is living under a three-year travel ban, but to his surprise, Russian authorities approved his request to direct a play in Hamburg.HAMBURG, Germany — At first glance, a recent rehearsal at the Thalia Theater here looked much like any other. Onstage, the actors ran through the final scene of a play called “The Black Monk,” trying to get the flow just right.“Stop, stop, stop,” the director, Kirill Serebrennikov, cried from the middle of the auditorium. He wasn’t happy with the projections beamed onto moons suspended above the performers, and started to troubleshoot.It was business as usual in theater, but for Serebrennikov — one of Russia’s most prominent directors, whose stage work is produced across Europe — the chance to oversee the production in person was an unexpected surprise. It was the first time in more than four years that he had been able to set foot outside of his home country.Serebrennikov’s provocative stage work, which often deals with topics considered taboo in Russia, like homosexuality, has been seen as critical of life under President Vladimir V. Putin. Perhaps too critical, since for the last four and a half years Serebrennikov has been embroiled in a financial fraud case that is widely seen by Russia’s intelligentsia as part of a crackdown on artistic freedom.“The Black Monk” features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers.Hayley Austin for The New York TimesBeginning in August 2017, Serebrennikov spent nearly 20 months under house arrest in Moscow, and was later convicted of embezzling around 133 million rubles, or around $2 million, in government funds allocated to a festival that was put on at the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater Serebrennikov used to run. The high-profile court case resulted in a suspended sentence for the director in June 2020, but also a three-year ban on his traveling outside of Russia.So when the director arrived at Hamburg Airport on Jan. 8, Joachim Lux, the Thalia’s artistic director, greeted him with astonishment.In a statement issued by his theater, Lux sounded relieved, noting that his playhouse had overcome “all pandemic and political obstacles” to bring the director to Hamburg. He called the director’s safe arrival “a great miracle that gives strength in difficult times!”Among those most surprised was Serebrennikov himself.The director explained that his request to leave Russia so he could direct a production based on a little-known story by Anton Chekhov was unexpectedly approved, and on very short notice.Since his arrest, Serebrennikov has come up with inventive ways to direct from a distance. For “The Black Monk,” he was able to be there in person again.Hayley Austin for The New York Times“Please allow me to go to Hamburg for work,” the director had asked Russian officials, he said during a recent news conference in the foyer of the Thalia. It was the same standard request that the authorities had rejected numerous times before. However, earlier this month, “they just gave the permission for this project,” Serebrennikov said, adding that the authorization to travel came through at the very last minute.“They just signed the paper right after the New Year holidays,” said the 52-year-old director, dressed in black and wearing lightly tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap. “Probably I was a good guy, my behavior was good and that’s why they said OK,” he added.In an interview after the news conference, Serebrennikov said he had given up trying to understand exactly why he was let out of Russia to direct “The Black Monk.”“Here I am. I’m in Hamburg,” he said with a shrug. “We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world.”When he was unable to leave Russia, Serebrennikov found resourceful ways to keep his work going abroad. In November 2018, when he was still under house arrest and prohibited from using the internet, he directed a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Zurich Opera using a relay system for video files that involved a USB stick hand-delivered to him by his lawyer in Moscow.Similar technological workarounds have allowed him to remain highly prolific in captivity of one kind or another. Since the Zurich “Così,” he has also had artistic control of stage productions in Germany and Austria and completed two well-received films, “Leto,” in 2018, and “Petrov’s Flu” in 2021, both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in the director’s absence.Filipp Avdeev, left, and Gurgen Tsaturyan in “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesIn much of Serebrennikov’s recent stage work, confinement has appeared as a central theme, including in his production of “Outside,” which played in Avignon and Berlin, and his 2021 staging of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Vienna State Opera, which was partially set in a prison. His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “The Nose,” which opened the current season at the Bavarian State Opera, featured scenes of state violence and repression in a dystopian yet oddly contemporary Russia.Serebrennikov speculated that being forced to practice his craft remotely over the months he spent under house arrest gave him an edge once the pandemic began. “It was my personal rehearsal for Corona,” he said with a wry laugh.Since his legal woes began in 2017, Serebrennikov has become an emblem of artistic freedom in the face of government repression. But the director said he was uncomfortable with this role. “I’m a working animal,” he said. “I don’t want to be a symbol.”Even by the director’s standards, “The Black Monk” is a challenging production. It features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers, has dialogue in three languages and incorporates music by the Latvian composer Jekabs Nimanis.“We have not too much time,” Serebrennikov said of the two weeks he has in Hamburg to finish the production. And while he seemed glad to be back to “in person” directing, he said that working remotely is an artistically viable alternative.“We get used to having a lot of digital life around us,” he said. “Of course, personal presence is much more preferable for me, but Zoom is OK,” he added.“We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world,” Serebrennikov said of “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesAfter “The Black Monk,” Serebrennikov has a number of other international productions on the horizon, including an opera at this summer’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and a possible tour of “The Black Monk.” Whether he’ll be allowed to travel for either is unclear.“It could happen, but nobody knows,” he said. “I prefer to be in the moment and not to hope too much,” he added, alluding to his own legal predicament and the wider world’s battering by the pandemic.Under the conditions of his travel permit, Serebrennikov must return to Russia on Jan. 22, the day after “The Black Monk” opens. The director said he had every intention of going back to Moscow, where he will start work on a film that will be his first in English.“I’m a reliable person,” he said, adding that “the people who allowed me to leave are probably at risk as well.” More

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      Broken Women, Made Whole Onstage

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      In Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman” and an Annie Ernaux adaptation, “Memory of a Girl,” stage directors explore post-traumatic psychology and the workings of mental recall.HAMBURG, Germany — Anyone who saw the 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” on Netflix or the big screen, will not soon forget its 22-minute single-take opening scene of a home birth. For those who haven’t yet seen Kornel Mundruczo’s movie, I won’t be revealing too much by saying that things take a turn for the worse in that technically dazzling sequence.The effect is remarkably similar to what Mundruczo, a Hungarian director, put onstage for the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw in his 2018 production of “Pieces of a Woman,” which was recently performed at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (The piece is in TR Warszawa’s repertory and will next tour to Naples, Italy, in March.) The birth takes place largely behind closed doors, and the audience watches a live video feed that is projected onto the front of the closed set. As in the film, Mundruczo gives us the birth in a single, heart-stopping shot, with no cuts to enable the audience to catch its breath.While comparisons between films and the plays they are based on have their limits, the stage version is altogether richer, more intimate and more fully imagined than the one onscreen.The play’s author, Kata Weber, who is Mundruczo’s wife, treats the harrowing birth as a prologue to a magisterially drawn-out dinner. Clocking in at close to two hours, it’s a family meal that feels like a one-act drama in its own right.Magdalena Kuta as the stern foster mother in “Pieces of a Woman”.Natalia KabanowIt’s been six months since the tragic evening that opens the play, and the grieving woman and her husband show up for roast duck and painful revelations. Unlike the film, which was a vehicle for its star, Vanessa Kirby (who won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Oscar nod), the stage version is less a character study than a portrait of the ways that relationships among parents, children, siblings and partners fray in the aftermath of a tragedy.In the main role, Maja, Justyna Wasilewska, is emotionally naked and intense in her grief, yet also full of dazzling wit and vivacity. But Mundruczo surrounds her with six actors whose extraordinary performances make this a true ensemble piece. There is Dobromir Dymecki as Maja’s charming engineer husband, Lars, who, afraid to confront his grief head-on, lapses into immaturity and inappropriate behavior. There is Magdalena Kuta as Maja’s stern foster mother, who has invited a lawyer relative (Marta Scislowicz, who is more cautious than calculating) in hopes of convincing Maja to take legal action against the midwife. For all the sharp words, machinations and recriminations, the extended scene is neither somber nor bleak. Instead, the serious themes are shot through with humor, pathos and ironic reversals that bring to mind Chekhov or Bergman. When Maja and her competitive stepsister (Agnieszka Zulewska) twirl around the dining room with gymnastic ribbons to the 1980s Italian pop hit “Felicità,” the exuberant moment provides a sort of wordless catharsis. Although Maja has suffered an unimaginable blow, we understand that she’s far from broken: not because she’s moved on, but because she has the fortitude to own her pain. Defiantly, she recognizes her loss, yet refuses to be defined by it.The determination to acknowledge and understand past trauma as a way of moving on from it also animates the work of Annie Ernaux. This French writer has been setting her life down on the page for nearly five decades, in both autobiographical fiction and memoir. Her 2016 coming-of-age memoir “A Girl’s Story” appeared in English in 2020 and introduced American readers to her precise and incandescent style.Dobromir Dymecki (at window), Marta Scislowicz (seen from the back), Agnieszka Zulewska and Magdalena Kuta in “Pieces of a Woman.”Natalia KabanowA new chamber adaptation of the novel at the Residenztheater in Munich, “Erinnerung eines Mädchens” (“Memory of a Girl,” as per the book’s title in German and in French), is directed by the young Italian Silvia Costa, who distributes passages taken verbatim from Ernaux’s memoir among three performers from the theater’s permanent acting ensemble.Sibylle Canonica, Juliane Köhler and Charlotte Schwab each bring slightly different readings to the text and to Ernaux’s half-century-old recollections. The play begins in 1958, when the 18-year-old Annie Duchesne takes a job as a counselor at a summer camp and has her first sexual experiences, including a messy encounter with the older head counselor, with whom she falls in love. Although the tone is often cool and dispassionate, the effect is poetic and intimate as Ernaux investigates the storehouse of her memories with directness, honesty and analytic rigor.The trio of middle-aged actresses whom Costa enlists to narrate Ernaux’s reminiscences suggest not so much a splintering of the self as a multiplication of consciousness. Canonica, Köhler and Schwab move about the intimate black box of the Residenztheater’s smaller stage, the Marstall, performing a near-continuous series of actions. Some, like the frequent costume changes, clearly suggest fluid transitions between time periods and locations; others, such as elaborate rituals involving screens, mirrors, glasses of milk, rocks, string, dirt and clay figures of body parts, hint at the mysterious mechanisms of memory. The production’s powerful coda, in which the actresses enter a hidden photo lab and print a portrait of the young Ernaux (it’s featured on the book’s cover in the United States), suggests that mental recall works like a darkroom where the past can be developed, enlarged and fixed. The staging is delicate, but with a solid structure and rhythm that usher the viewer through the brisk 80-minute production. The way that Costa makes a spoken word performance flow gently and organically is impressive. One of the few missteps is Ayumi Paul’s jarring original score, which occasionally overwhelms the subdued emotions onstage and makes it hard to hear the actresses.From left, Charlotte Schwab, Sibylle Canonica and Juliane Köhler in “Memory of a Girl” at the Residenztheater in Munich.Sandra ThenWatching this show put me in mind of one of the Residenztheater’s best recent productions, Bastian Kraft’s reimagining of “Lulu,” in which Frank Wedekind’s antiheroine was brought to life by three actresses, including Köhler and Schwab. That multiplication made sense, in part, because of the myriad archetypes of womanhood that the character embodies.By contrast, it is difficult to know what the multiple casting in “Memory of a Girl” is meant to convey. It could simply be that Costa wanted to take advantage of the excellent actresses at her disposal. But I wonder if there was a deeper purpose to the way that the director divided the role beyond providing a more dynamic way of bringing the book to the stage than entrusting the text to a single performer.“Am I to dissolve the girl of 1958 and the woman of 2014 into a single ‘I’?” Ernaux wonders in “Memory of a Girl.” The interrogation of a splintered or dissociated consciousness may appear to be uniquely suited to the art of writing. Yet Costa, like Mundruzco, finds eminently theatrical means to make us understand a woman who is broken and made whole again.Pieces of a Woman. Directed by Kornel Mundruzco. In repertory at TR Warszawa in Warsaw.Memory of a Girl. Directed by Silvia Costa. Through Dec. 28 at the Residenztheater Munich. 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