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    René Pollesch, Provocative Force in German Theater, Dies at 61

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    His avant-garde work, short on character and plot but long on verbal high jinks, could be irreverent, even goofy, but it was always intellectually serious.René Pollesch, a prolific playwright and stage director whose work — intellectually serious yet irreverent, chatty, goofy and riddled with pop culture references — made him one of the most significant forces in German theater of the past three decades, died on Monday in Berlin. He was 61.His death was announced by the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz theater, where he had been artistic director since 2021. No cause was given.Mr. Pollesch (pronounced POL-esh) wrote roughly 200 plays and directed virtually all of them himself, often at leading theaters in the German-speaking world. But while his plays lit up stages in places like Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna and Zurich, he was most closely associated with the Volksbühne, a publicly funded playhouse in what once was East Berlin, that had a reputation for daring and provocative theatermaking.Mr. Pollesch took over leadership of the theater after years of managerial turmoil set off by the dismissal of the company’s longtime artistic director, Frank Castorf, in 2017. When Mr. Pollesch arrived, two others in the top post had come and gone, and the theater was craving stability.In his two and a half seasons at the helm, he staged nine original plays, eight of which remain in the theater’s repertoire. The most recent, “ja nichts ist okay” (“yes nothing is okay”) premiered on Feb. 11.A scene from “ja nichts ist ok” (“yes nothing is okay”), the most recent play staged by Mr. Pollesch at the Volksbühne. It had its premiere on Feb. 11. Thomas Aurin, via Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-PlatzWe 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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      Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin

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

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      Review: Byronic Heroism in ‘Sardanapal’ at the Berlin Volksbühne

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      The director and star of the Volksbühne’s new show, based on a play by Lord Byron, picked up another role when one of the lead actors was missing in action.Before the curtain rose at the Berlin Volksbühne for Friday’s premiere of “Sardanapal,” inspired by Lord Bryon’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the audience learned that one of the show’s lead actors, Benny Claessens, was “not doing well.” In heroic, Byronic fashion, the show’s director and lead Fabian Hinrichs rescued the evening by jumping into the fray and assuming his absent co-star’s role, along with his own.And so the show — a labor of love that verges on folly — went on. Hinrichs’s ambition, it seems, is to revive the English Romantic poet’s verse drama about Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king who lived in the 7th century B.C. and whose credo, in Byron’s memorable formulation, was “eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.” Instead of pursuing violent conquest and martial glory, the powerful monarch of the title revels in the good life and inspires his subjects to do likewise.In a 2019 article about the play by Hinrichs that was republished on the production’s website, he writes that Byron’s forgotten drama “deserves a splendid rebirth.” A splendid rebirth is decidedly not what the Berlin audience got on Friday night.Hinrichs, a wry and charismatic performer who is also credited with the production’s music and the sets (along with Ann-Christine Müller), is a cult figure at the Volksbühne, known for his collaborations with René Pollesch, the German writer-director who is the theater’s artistic director. One of their productions together was a splashy extravaganza at Berlin’s biggest revue theater, in 2020.But this is Hinrichs’s first time directing a show at the Volksbühne; over the course of its intermission-less two hours, the production feels dramaturgically rudderless.Far from a faithful staging of Byron’s five-act tragedy, Hinrichs’s staging is essentially a revue. It recalls several of the Volksbühne’s other recent outings, including Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent” and Constanza Macras’s “Drama,” which also combine dialogue, music and dance in messy, hard-to-classify evenings. The most sustained engagement we get with Byron’s work and themes is a corny YouTube tribute video of inspirational quotes that is projected onstage during the show.The production features dancers, an acrobat and a local youth orchestra, but it also spends some time in a Munich supermarket.Apollonia T. BitzanThe evening gets off to a slow start, with a series of disconnected musical numbers, both live (a gusto-filled saxophone solo) and canned (Barry White’s “Let the Music Play”). Hinrichs dances ecstatically to the disco classic before singing a song by Schubert.Before we get to ancient Mesopotamia, however, we find ourselves in a Munich supermarket at 5 a.m., listening to Hinrichs making small talk with the cashier (and holding up the checkout line). What does she think about while scanning items for eight hours a day, he wants to know. The actress Lilith Stangenberg launches into a lusty monologue about her love for the sea and sand. Stangenberg, an striking and eccentric comédienne, returns later in the evening as Myrrha, an enslaved Greek woman who is Sardanapalus’s lover.After waiting on the supermarket checkout line for an hour, we finally get to Assyria and to Byron’s drama. On opening night, Hinrichs, filling in for his absent star, clutched the script in his hand as he declaimed the epicurean monarch’s lofty verse. (Claessens’ name has been taken off the “Sardanapal” program for subsequent performances, and local news media have speculated about a rift between the actor and director; a Volksbühne spokeswoman said Claessens is unwell.)Under these trying circumstances, Hinrichs’s delivery was both muscular and somehow deflated. His signature laconic tone was unmistakable: wide-eyed yet world-weary, and shot through with grace and absurd humor. Yet in the context of a disjointed and meandering production, even Hinrichs’s performance grew exasperating.Still, there were some moments of reprieve. It was wonderful to find the Volksbühne’s longtime music director Sir Henry back on the main stage and at his piano. He accompanies Hinrichs as the actor warbles his way through the Schubert, performs as the soloist in the first movement of a Chopin piano concerto and even operates a floor polisher onstage in the supermarket scene. A late-evening fairy ballet for dancers in billowy white costumes was a high point, as was the lovely, all-too-brief scene in which the acrobat Christine Wunderlich recited a monologue during an aerobic silk performance. And a youth orchestra from a local high school accompanied Sir Henry in the Chopin: it returned later in the evening to perform some Philip Glass, and the evening wrapped up with (why not?) Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”In more ways than one, “Sardanapal” felt like a missed opportunity for the Volksbühne, which is slowly regaining its footing after a few extremely rocky years. February’s premiere of “Die Monosau” was an invigorating jolt of theatrical madness that felt like a vindication of the theater’s new model of collective leadership. I hope that “Sardanapal” isn’t too much of a setback for an institution that finally seemed to be on its way to recovery.SardanapalThrough May 30 at the Volksbühne theater, in Berlin; www.volksbuehne.berlin. More

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      Review: ‘Die Monosau’ Revives Chaotic Energy in Berlin

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      Chaos also plays a role in a new play at the Volksbühne theater that delivers on its pledge of a director-free evening.Theatergoers at the opening night of “Die Monosau” at the Volksbühne in Berlin on Friday, were promised a “guaranteed director-free evening,” and that is exactly what they got.The play was inspired by texts that the German artist and enfant terrible Jonathan Meese penned in the 1990s, but the production is attributed to no one in particular. Or rather, the program cryptically credits the acronym “K.U.N.S.T.” (the German word for “art”) as director. It remained vague, however, whether this was a collective name for the artists who had brought this work to freakish, twitching life, or whether this was an abstract affirmation of the cosmic power of art.Whatever the case, “Die Monosau” blew into the Volksbühne like a revitalizing gust of badly needed oxygen. Through its dynamic performances, gleeful anarchy and insistent embrace of nonsense and mayhem, “Die Monosau” restored a chaotic energy to a venerable company that has stumbled repeatedly in recent years.In a country that deeply venerates theater directors — and especially at the Volksbühne, a house where, historically, cults of personality have formed — it was refreshing, and unexpected, to find a collaborative model of artistic authorship that succeeded.How much exactly did Meese contribute? His artistic fingerprints were all over the production in the fiendishly rambling texts and the staging that burst with high, low and pop cultural references (from Wagner to James Bond to the campy 1974 sci-fi flop “Zardoz”) and plain silliness. Despite the various scenery flats of mountains and waves, the inflatable plastic furniture and a frequently rotating stage, the production remained uncluttered and gave space to the seven actors, among them several Volksbühne veterans, who let loose with a series of delirious monologues that were often near incoherent, but grandly, epically declaimed.Between them, there were lusty renditions of songs and sitcom-like sketches that were often confounding and exhilarating in equal measure. What it all meant was impossible to say, but the fiercely committed cast, supported by their hard-working onstage prompter, Elisabeth Zumpe, and backed by a three-piece band, ensured that the evening had sustained theatrical power and musical flow.At the start of the performance, Martin Wuttke delivered a mock-epic speech in the chiseled tones of a grand thespian. Later in the evening, he executed a Hitler salute before falling into the orchestra pit: a reference to both Meese, who was taken to court in 2013 for making the banned gesture during a performance (he was later acquitted), and to Wuttke himself, who is best-known internationally for playing the führer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Franz Beil, dressed in a ridiculous white costume, made a memorable appearance as a mussel having a manic episode. Susanne Bredehöft started out as some version of Jane Fonda’s Barbarella and spent the second half of the evening nude and smeared in golden paint, like Jill Masterson’s corpse in “Goldfinger.” Between cigarettes, Kerstin Grassmann, a tough, gruff Berlin actress, belted out the shmaltzy 1969 West German hit “Mr. Paul McCartney.”An increasingly unhinged monologue, delivered by the Belgian actor Benny Claessens about a gang of friends in swinging London, sounded a lot like the drivel a crazy person on a park bench might spout, but the alacrity of Claessens’s rendition turned his confusing and lurid narration into a gripping display of verbal athletics. As for Meese, he was not onstage. Not in the flesh, at least. He appeared periodically, Oz-like, as a video projection on a floating egg, making oracular pronouncements, from claiming, “The weapon is good; the penis is bad,” to predicting that 2023 will be the year when Germany becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. I was disappointed that he didn’t take a bow at the curtain call. Perhaps he was being modest.In the end, “Die Monosau” was not so much a renewal of the Volksbühne as a throwback to an era of artistic pell-mell at the theater, albeit one without any ideological underpinning or much dramaturgical focus. There was no theory here and nothing to deconstruct. It was anarchistic without being revolutionary, explicit and in-your-face without being provocative. This isn’t a show that will change the world, let alone the world of theater. As a 130-minute freak out sustained by the high-wire performances, it was thrilling, at times exhausting, at times baffling, but almost always interesting. Most crucially, it was joyfully, mischievously entertaining, a performance whose wheels spun in a wonky, wild way that has been all too rare at the Volksbühne in recent memory.Die MonosauThrough March 19 at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin; volksbuehne.berlin. More

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      Review: ‘Drama,’ at the Volksbühne, Contains Many Things. But Drama Isn’t One.

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      The choreographer Constanza Macras’s new work at the Volksbühne is a chaotic revue featuring dance, slapstick, spoken dialogue, pop music and heavy-handed monologues.The last thing the Volksbühne Berlin needs is more drama. That might sound like an odd thing to say about one of Germany’s most important theaters, but in recent years the company seems to have had all the histrionics it can take.It has been struggling to regain its artistic footing after the dismissal of its longtime leader Frank Castorf, in 2017, to make way for Chris Dercon, a tony Belgian impresario who didn’t last through his first season. Then Dercon’s replacement, Klaus Dörr, stepped down before the end of his term, after women in the company raised allegations of sexual harassment.When René Pollesch, one of Germany’s most acclaimed dramatists and a veteran of the Castorf years, was installed as artistic director in 2021, it was widely hoped he would be a purveyor of both stability and artistic excellence. However, Pollesch has struggled to restore the Volksbühne’s reputation as one of the most groundbreaking in Europe.Since Pollesch took the reins, the theater’s program has been a hot mess, with critical pans and poor box office returns. Against this background, it seemed inauspicious that the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras titled her latest work for the theater “Drama.” The show had its premiere Thursday, and will run in repertory at the theater for the rest of the season.“Drama” is not a straightforward dance piece. Instead, Macras and her 10 performers — drawn from her own company, Dorky Park, plus some guest dancers — serve up a disjointed revue that is about theater itself, in the vaguest of senses. How is it that actors reciting lines written by someone else — often at a remove of centuries or millenniums — can ring true to audiences nowadays? Will they in the future? Using dance, movement — including Buster Keaton-esque slapstick — spoken dialogue and pop music, primarily in English and German, Macras’s intrepid and indefatigable troupe sets out to investigate.In the show’s opening minutes, Macras gives us a potpourri of Shakespearean scenes in a jittery pantomime. Toward the end, we get a three-minute version of Sophocles’s “Antigone.” In between, she treats us to a series of goofy scenarios, including a particularly zany one without dialogue, in which the dancers become life-size Playmobil figures with their helmet-like wigs and stiff limbs.In a zany scene from “Drama,” the players perform jerky movements, dressed as life-size Playmobil figures.Thomas AurinIn that scene, the performers’ controlled, jerky movements are impressive. Elsewhere, the cast display some startling physical feats. The most gob smacking is when the hunky dancer Campbell Caspary walks down a flight of stairs on his hands.The 10 performers that cavort across the large stage pretty much nonstop for two and a half hours are striking dancers, although the results are far more mixed when they are called on to recite texts or sing. With gusto but varying levels of musical skill, they belt out pop anthems backed by two onstage musicians, and when the entire cast launched into “I Sing the Body Electric,” from the 1980s musical “Fame,” joined onstage by a local amateur choir, that gaudy number felt like the show’s grand finale. Alas, we were only halfway through.As the evening wore on, cast members launched into heavy-handed soliloquies about cultural appropriation and artists’ poor pay. (“Dance is so intersectional,” is the worst line in a script with no shortage of clunkers.) Occasional self-deprecating references to the show’s own sloppiness come across as an unconvincing tactic to forestall criticism.From left: Caspary, Bas and Shoji in a musical number from “Drama.”Thomas AurinTaking in the entire spectacle is like following a sloppy brainstorming session through to its illogical conclusion. So why should we be surprised when Macras gives us a late-evening history lesson about Nélida Roca, the Argentine “vedette,” or showgirl, who held Buenos Aires enthralled from the 1950s to the 1970s. The real disappointment is that the burlesque show that follows is curiously low on razzle dazzle, despite all the feather headdresses and tassels.Here, as elsewhere in “Drama,” Macras’ choreography lacks distinction. It was deflating to watch the dancers give their all to exertions that hardly seemed worth the energy.As a chaotic vaudeville featuring dance, music, slapstick and confessional monologues, “Drama” bears more than a passing resemblance to Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a revue featuring an all-naked female dance troupe which is one of the Volksbühne’s only box office hits this season.Macras doesn’t go in for the shock tactics that are Holzinger’s stock in trade, but she still appears to take a page from the younger and more transgressive practitioner of dance theater. There’s even a monologue about suicide that will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered through “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” And although it’s blessedly shorter, “Drama” is similarly meandering, and feels endless.After two and a half hours, “Drama” leaves one exhausted, not exhilarated. It’s made up of many — far too many — ingredients, but drama isn’t one of them. 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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      Florentina Holzinger Makes Everyone Uncomfortable

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      The Austrian choreographer’s shows blend dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts to explore lofty ideas about gender and art. She pushes performers to extremes — and audiences, too.BERLIN — In a rehearsal hall on the city’s outskirts, Xana Novais was hanging by her teeth. On a recent evening, the tattooed 27-year-old performer was suspended a few inches above the ground, biting down on a piece of leather hanging from a rope, perfecting a new skill called the “iron jaw.” It did not look easy.Novais was practicing for a sequence in “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a new work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger that premieres at the Berlin Volksbühne theater on Thursday. As part of the performance, which blends dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts, Novais was meant to dangle like a fish caught on a hook for about half a minute. But after 20 seconds, she let go, lowered herself down, and grimaced. “This is about learning to manage discomfort,” she said.Discomfort is central to the work of Holzinger, 36, who has recently become a star of the European dance and performance worlds by pushing the limits of what performers — and audiences — can endure. Holzinger, whose interest in bodily extremes dates back to her own training as a dancer, has drawn acclaim for works that feature large casts of nude female performers and explore lofty ideas about art and gender while showcasing acts, sometimes involving bodily fluids, that obliterate the boundaries of good taste.In “Apollon,” a 2017 piece exploring the work of the choreographer George Balanchine and notions of artist and muse, performers bled and defecated onstage. “A Divine Comedy,” a 2021 riff on Dante’s epic poem about the circles of hell, included a scene in which a woman ejaculates explosively while using a vibrator. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of her performances are punctuated by audience members walking out.“Ophelia’s Got Talent” — an exploration of myths and narratives about women and water, including mermaids, sirens and the tragic, drowning figure from “Hamlet” — is the first of several original works Holzinger is creating as part of a multiyear agreement with the Volksbühne, one of the most influential theaters in the German-speaking world.René Pollesch, the theater’s artistic director, said he was partly attracted to Holzinger’s work because of her interest in showcasing a variety of strong female performers, including older women and women with disabilities, doing daring and demanding acts onstage. “This is a radical feminism, not a reform feminism,” he said.A scene from “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” Holzinger said she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesHolzinger, who has a self-deprecating wit and the physical intensity of a boxer, explained in an interview that she and her cast would pull fish hooks through their skin and hold their breath underwater for up to five minutes during the show. At one point, she said, cast members would form the shape of a fountain and squirt water from their noses. “That will be a nice image,” she said.She added that she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise, but that she viewed the stage as a “laboratory” where ostensibly taboo acts can be performed freely. “I can maybe teach people something about what forms of shame are necessary and which are not,” she said.Life under capitalism encouraged individuals to perfect themselves, Holzinger said, adding that her work delved into the ways this shaped women’s bodies. “We are in a society where you are able to purchase and create your own femininity, and optimize yourself in ways the system wants you to,” she said. In her work, she added, she tried to find “unexpected” ways of using the body, which has been conditioned to look and move a certain way by social pressures.Barbara Frey, the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a prominent arts festival in Germany that commissioned “A Divine Comedy,” said Holzinger had created a “new form” of performance that combines “dance, exuberant wit, great tenderness” and “the Roman gladiatorial arena” while exploring “the male gaze — and the female gaze — on the female body.”Some have compared her work to the Viennese Actionists, an Austrian art movement in the 1960s and ’70s whose (largely male) adherents staged performances in which they carried out extreme acts, including self-mutilation, as a way of confronting spectators with what they saw as repressed elements of Austrian society. Although Holzinger has previously said she draws little inspiration from the movement, the association with the Actionists, who are now a revered part of Austria’s art history, helped her gain early respect in her native country, she explained.“If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” Holzinger said.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesBorn to a pharmacist and a lawyer in Vienna, Holzinger came late to dance. She said that soon after she began her training, at age 17, she realized it was too late for her to perfect the skills necessary for a classic career as a dancer, and that she was “too strong, too muscular for ballet.”After being rejected from several traditional European dance academies, she enrolled in the School for New Dance Development, an experimental school in Amsterdam, where she began exploring alternative ways of using her body as a vehicle for spectacle. “If I’m training my body to pee on cue, then I’m exerting control over my body,” she said. “It could be seen as a form of dance technique, even if it’s not a grand jeté or a tendu.”After several eyebrow-raising collaborations with Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer, Holzinger said she reached a turning point in her career after a near-death experience during a 2013 performance at an arts festival in Norway, in which she fell from a height of 16 feet while doing an aerial stunt. Although she survived with a concussion and a broken nose, the accident, caused by a screw holding her weight that came loose, led her to take a more meticulous approach to her work and safety.Since then, she has focused on creating her more elaborate works for all-female ensembles. Four years after the accident, she debuted “Apollon,” a piece that wrestled with what Holzinger described as the “lived experience of ballet” and the “overdone femininity of ballerinas.” The show was widely acclaimed and toured internationally. That piece, as well as her 2019 follow-up, “Tanz,” drew parallels between the suffering experienced by dancers — including via the ballet shoe, which she described as a “torture item” that often deforms and bloodies dancers’ feet — and the staged violence of less highbrow acts, such as sword swallowing, or body suspension shows.Holzinger’s casts include trained dancers as well as performers with circus and sideshow backgrounds, and sex workers.Nicole Marianna WytyczakFinding performers for her works, she admitted, hasn’t always been easy. Some, like Novais, have a background in theater, while others are sex workers or sideshow performers. As part of her recruitment efforts, she said, she once advertised for “women with special talents” on Craigslist.But her work has also attracted performers with more traditional dance backgrounds, including Trixie Cordua, 81, a former soloist with the Hamburg Ballet who has worked with John Cage. Cordua, who has Parkinson’s disease and sometimes moves onstage with the help of a motorized wheelchair, said in a phone interview that she was drawn to working with Holzinger because of her “ability to combine things that don’t usually fit together to form a fully new constellation,” and because of her willingness to go “very, very far.”Holzinger said she was comfortable with the fact that the extreme elements of her works often led people to walk out of her performances. “If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” she said. “I’d rather be left with 10 people in the audience who find it cool.”Ophelia’s Got TalentSept. 15 through Oct. 25 at the Berlin Volksbühne; volksbuehne.berlin. 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