Volksbuhne

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2021

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      René Pollesch Aims for a ‘Safe Space’ at the Volksbühne in Berlin

      by

      René Pollesch is the fourth boss of the Volksbühne in four years. The Berlin theater is pinning hopes of a return to its former vibrancy on his collaborative approach.BERLIN — This fall, a new era at the Volksbühne theater got off to a curiously muted start. René Pollesch, the theater’s new artistic director, did not deliver a splashy opening salvo or unveil his first season with a flourish. Instead, four actors parlayed the writer-director’s signature banter in the cumbersomely titled “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.” If the low-key chamber piece seemed typical of Pollesch’s work, it was also hardly earth-shattering.Then again, considering all of the recent turbulence at the Volksbühne, maybe a little restraint isn’t such a bad thing.Ever since the storied Berlin theater’s longtime artistic director Frank Castorf was fired in 2017, the Volksbühne has sailed on choppy waters. Castorf had run the playhouse since 1992 and had doggedly kept the theater’s East German spirit alive in the newly reunified Berlin: His leadership style was iron fisted, but he transformed the Volksbühne into one of the most exciting and influential forces in European theater, and he built a cult following for his own punishingly long reworkings of the classics from a Marxist perspective.From Castorf, the torch passed to Chris Dercon, a Belgian who was previously the director of Tate Modern in London, and who planned to turn the Volksbühne into a showcase for visiting performers from around the world.The regime change didn’t go as planned. For many in Berlin, the replacement of a provocateur from the former East Germany with a slick international transplant was an all-too-potent symbol of a city that was losing its edge. Protesters briefly occupied the theater and, after a series of increasingly hostile episodes — including one in which feces were left in front of the artistic director’s office — Dercon quit, only a few months into the job.In 2019, Dercon was succeeded by Klaus Dörr, a veteran theater administrator who was supposed to stabilize the Volksbühne until a permanent artistic director took the reins. But this March, Dörr abruptly resigned after 10 of the Volksbühne’s female staff members accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace.Pollesch said the Volksbühne’s spirit came from “the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage.”Thomas AurinIt was against this stormy backdrop that Pollesch, 59, arrived this summer to lead the house. All of the theater’s hopes for a return to its former vibrancy have been pinned on Pollesch, a veteran of Castorf’s Volksbühne who is considered one of Germany’s most distinctive theatrical auteurs, and whose start here is both a homecoming and a new beginning.In an interview at the theater, Pollesch spoke lovingly of the “spirit of the old Volksbühne” that he had felt since he saw his first play at there at 17. “It’s the way people interact with each other here, how the entire staff is involved in what’s happening onstage,” he said.But he was also quick to dispel the hope, or the fear, that he was a Trojan horse for reinstating the theater’s old guard.“We are not Castorf,” he said. “Castorf ran the theater very differently than we do.”By “we,” Pollesch means himself and a team of actors and theater professionals that he has assembled as an advisory committee. It’s a cooperative model that is rare in the German theater world — and unique for a theater the size of the Volksbühne, which has a large staff and a full-time acting ensemble.Pollesch described how the members of the committee helped him plan his inaugural season: The actor Martin Wuttke, a regular collaborator who is best known for portraying Hitler in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” recommended the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo; the actress Lilith Stangenberg proposed the Filipino experimental filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz. The Volksbühne will premiere works by both directors early next year, Pollesch said.With the young French director Julien Gosselin and the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras also working at the house this season, the Volksbühne’s globe-trotting lineup looks like it could have sprung from one of Dercon’s unrealized seasons. But that program was not the result of any agenda to make the house more international, Pollesch said. It emerged organically from his discussions with the advisory board.That collective approach also mirrors the way the director develops his own quirky plays through intense collaboration with a small group of artists he knows and trusts. A typical Pollesch show is characterized by fluent, chatty dialogue that combines the silly with the philosophical, and by high-energy performances from a group of charismatic actors. Pollesch devises the text of his plays, as well as the staging, for specific performers, whose creative input during the rehearsal process effectively make them co-authors.From left: Franz Beil, Astrid Meyerfeldt, Inga Busch and Christine Gross in “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” a show by Pollesch.Luna Zscharnt“Often, he sets out with nothing more than a theme, a title,” Wolf-Dieter Ernst, a professor of theater studies at the University of Bayreuth, said in an email. He added that performers loved working with Pollesch because his method created a “a kind of safe space for exhausted actors and actresses.” By applying a similar approach to running the Volksbühne, Pollesch was trying to “run a theater in a more democratic, and less toxic, way,” Ernst said.Pollesch, who was born in Friedberg, a small city outside Frankfurt, studied theater at the nearby University of Giessen. In the 1980s, that school was considered the theoretical cradle of “postdramatic theater,” a self-reflexive and deconstructive approach to writing and directing for the stage. Inspired by the theories of Bertolt Brecht and by postmodern artists like the director Robert Wilson, the playwright Heiner Müller and the performing ensemble the Wooster Group, postdramatic theater is less concerned with plot or textual fidelity than with exploring — and exploding — the relationship between a stage presentation and its audience.Postdramatic theater is often dense, difficult and theoretical, yet Pollesch’s work is anything but. The lack of narrative or conventional characters may confound expectations about what theater is, but his plays rarely feel obtuse or obscure. In fact, they’re surprisingly fun and punchy — and rarely exceed 90 minutes.In Pollesch’s first stint at the Volksbühne, he ran its smaller, off-site venue, the Prater, from 2001 to 2007. He also staged shows on the main stage, where his work contrasted sharply with productions by Castorf, whose dark, demanding shows could last up to 12 hours.Since Castorf’s ouster, Pollesch has been a fixture at another storied Berlin playhouse, the Deutsches Theater, and has also worked on main stages in Zurich and in Hamburg, Germany. Last year, Berlin critics and audiences went gaga for a Pollesch show unexpectedly staged at the Friedrichstadt-Palast, a 2,000-seat revue theater.Yet the director’s inaugural work for the Volksbühne has met with a different response.“Rise and Fall of a Curtain” hardly amounted to the grand statement of purpose that many expected. If it was unmistakably Pollesch, it also felt slight, as if the director was up to his old tricks at a time when he was expected to wow everyone with a bold new vision. The critical consensus was that the auteur was writing tired backstage chatter for an audience of his own groupies.Margarita Breitkreiz in “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life In Between.”Christian Thiel“Instead of timpani and trumpets and manifestoes to usher in a new start, we get a display of cluelessness,” wrote Peter Laudenbach, a theater critic, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Reviewing “Mr. Puntila and the Giant Thing in Mitte,” the house’s third new Pollesch production in three months, Laudenbach concluded that it added to the “disappointing picture that the Volksbühne under Pollesch has offered so far.”The director’s flexible and collaborative approach to programming, and the fact that the theater is tight-lipped about its plans, make it difficult to say what the future of the Volksbühne under Pollesch may look like. The director is much clearer about what not to expect. The old Volksbühne’s classic productions won’t be coming back, he said, recalling the disappointment he once felt after seeing a decade-old revival at the theater during the Castorf era.“It had nothing to do with now,” he said. “You can watch movies that were made in a different era,” he added. “Theater ages insanely fast.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Theater Review: ‘Polis/Reset’ at the Volksbühne in Berlin

      by

      The drama behind the scenes at the Volksbühne in Berlin has surpassed any onstage. A series of premieres involving vengeful gods, inescapable fates and tragic flaws seems apt.Sing, o muses of the house of unceasing calamities!Over the past three years, the drama behind the scenes at the Volksbühne in Berlin has surpassed any onstage. To say that the company has struggled would be putting it mildly: Depending on your point of view, the goings-on have increasingly resembled either a Greek tragedy or a satyr play.Since 2017, dysfunction if not outright misfortune has dogged the venerable theater, which, like most in Berlin, is publicly run. It began when the minister of culture at the time fired the longtime artistic director Frank Castorf, who had led the house for 25 years and was known to rule with an iron fist. Berlin politicians passed the torch to Chris Dercon, a former director of the Tate Modern in London.Berliners vehemently objected; the theater was briefly occupied by protesters. Feces were left in front of Dercon’s office. He quit only months in and was replaced by Klaus Dörr, who was supposed to fill the vacancy until René Pollesch, one of Germany’s leading dramatists and a veteran of Castorf’s Volksbühne, took over as artistic director in 2021.Last week, Dörr abruptly resigned over sexual harassment allegations. Yet in the midst of a trying season for theaters worldwide, the Volksbühne has plowed ahead with an ambitious series of premieres inspired by ancient Greek drama and myth called “Polis/Reset.”Although the cycle examines the relevance of its classical sources from the contemporary perspective of our world’s environmental and economic ills, the themes of unappeased gods, inescapable fates and tragic flaws seem oddly appropriate to the Volksbühne in light of its long-running bad luck.Half of the eight productions planned for “Polis/Reset” are streaming on the Volksbühne’s website. The shows are a diverse crop, but they all confront, to varying degrees, the existential issues facing humanity in the Anthropocene, the era in which humans are the dominant influence on the natural world.An omnidirectional camera, center, was used to present “Anthropos, Tyrant (Oedipus)” as a livestream in 360 degrees.Thomas Aurin“Oedipus is the last king of the Anthropocene. This is our last winter. No one will escape this catastrophe,” an actor intones early in “Anthropos, Tyrant (Oedipus),” an associative and sometimes pedantic stage essay by the writer-director Alexander Eisenach. Of the productions in the Volksbühne’s series, this one, loosely based on Sophocles’ Theban Plays, most directly addresses environmental and economic devastation. In the middle of the performance, the marine biologist and climate expert Antje Boetius delivers a lecture on the Anthropocene that is informative, though dry.I enjoyed some of the snappier slogans, such as “Tragedy has become the language of science” and “Awaking the wrath of the gods is not a metaphor. It’s very real.” But it is possible to agree while still feeling that the show is rough around the edges.Since it couldn’t be shown in front of a live audience, the theater presented it as a livestream in 360 degrees: It was filmed with an omnidirectional camera, and viewers at home were able to control their perspective of the stage. The effect was kind of cool, although it seemed more like an interesting experiment with technology than a full-fledged production. My internet connection was too weak to view it as intended, in razor-sharp 4K.Oedipus and the other rulers of the ancient world were judged by their ability to keep nature in balance and the deities happy. The director Lucia Bihler put an environmentally conscious spin on the divine wrath in “Iphigenia. Sad and Horny in Taurerland,” a reworking of Euripides’ two Iphigenia plays that is peppered with cheeky dialogue by the young Austrian writer Stefanie Sargnagel.Vanessa Loibl, left, and Emma Rönnebeck in Lucia Bihler’s “Iphigenia. Sad and Horny in Taurerland.”Katrin RibbeIn the original, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek fleet, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis to gain favorable winds for sailing. Bihler’s staging suggests environmental parallels: with the deities’ refusal to bestow nature’s fortune on humanity and with the notion of mortgaging the future that child sacrifice represents. In the evening’s irreverent second half, Iphigenia (the young American-born actress Vanessa Loibl) is whisked away to the island of Tauris, where she works in a call center alongside a vulgar, funny gang of women who put up with verbal abuse from prank callers.Iphigenia’s sacrifice is the preamble to “The Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy about Agamemnon’s family. The young German director Pinar Karabulut has tackled Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 play cycle, “Mourning Becomes Electra,” which transposes the action of “The Oresteia” from ancient Argos to New England shortly after the Civil War. Although there is much to admire in Karabulut’s muscular production, it turns O’Neill’s tragic cycle into a dreary and sordid soap opera.On the plus side, the production looks great: sleek and stylish, with colorful costumes and props dominated by reds and blues. The atmosphere of surreal domestic horror is heightened by visual allusions to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” Those scenes are effectively unsettling, but they also seem irrelevant. Another element that doesn’t quite work is a bracing monologue about race delivered by Malick Bauer, the only Black actor in the company’s performing ensemble. Written by a dramaturge, Laura Dabelstein, the soliloquy is a very politically incorrect disquisition about prejudice in Germany, designed to shake the audience up, among other ways, with the repeated use of the N-word. It’s a powerful text and Bauer delivers it with conviction, but it feels like a forced bid for timeliness.Paula Kober, left, and Manolo Bertling in Pinar Karabulut’s “Mourning Becomes Electra.”David BaltzerO’Neill’s play stands in a long line of works refashioned from Greek sources. One of the earliest is the Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” written in A.D. 8 and comprising roughly 250 myths. In this epic poem, women turn into trees and birds, drowned men become flowers, and gods transform themselves into animals.Like “Iphigenia,” Claudia Bauer’s “Metamorphoses [overcoming mankind]” doesn’t strain for relevance. It’s an arresting production that combines surreal pantomime and song. For the majority of the performance, the actors wear blank masks. They become mythical characters through movement accompanied by live music (featuring the accordion virtuoso Valentin Butt) and voice-over narration delivered by actors whose faces are projected above the stage.“Metamorphoses” proposes the transformative world of myth as an alternative to the Anthropocene. Even though there is much violence in Ovid, including cannibalism and rape, the production holds up the enchanted symbiosis between man and nature as a sort of utopia. Of the Volksbühne’s digital streams, it’s the one with the most rhythm and verve, thanks to skillful filming and editing. It’s also the only one I’m dying to see live once theaters reopen.The cast with blank masks in Claudia Bauer’s “Metamorphoses [overcoming mankind].”Julian Röder“Polis/Reset” is a step toward making the Volksbühne a place for engagé theater that tackles burning issues. Castorf, the former artistic director, didn’t go in for topicality. It’s hard to imagine him ever structuring a season around environmental themes.The recently departed Dörr deserves credit for replenishing the acting ensemble. This versatile group of 17 has been the most consistently exciting thing about the new Volksbühne, and many of them, including Bauer and Loibl, are prominent in “Polis/Reset.”It remains to be seen whether Pollesch will be able to lift the curse placed on the house by the theatrical deities when he arrives in the fall. He faces formidable artistic and managerial challenges. I pray that Pollesch, who, like Castorf, favors intense theatrical partnerships with a small group of collaborators, doesn’t send the acting ensemble packing when he takes over. That would be a real tragedy. More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Klauss Dörr Quits Volksbühne Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

      by

      Klaus Dörr resigned as head of the Volksbühne after 10 women accused him of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.The director of the Volksbühne theater in Berlin quit on Monday after accusations of sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment and humiliating older actresses were published in a German newspaper. Klaus Dörr had led the Volksbühne, one of Europe’s most influential theaters, since April 2018.His resignation, which the theater confirmed in an email, came just days after Die Tageszeitung, a daily newspaper, said that complaints against Dörr by 10 women were being investigated by Berlin’s culture ministry, which oversees the playhouse. The women said Dörr had stared inappropriately at women who worked at the theater, made sexist comments and sent inappropriate text messages, the newspaper reported.City officials received the complaints in January and were investigating them, the ministry confirmed in a statement released on Saturday. Dörr was interviewed as part of this process at the start of March, the statement added.“I take full responsibility, as the artistic director of the Volksbühne, for the allegations made against me,” Dörr said in a statement released by the theater.“I deeply regret if I have hurt employees with my behavior, words or gaze,” he added.A spokeswoman for the theater declined to comment further.Dörr’s resignation is only the latest scandal to hit the storied Volksbühne. In 2018, Chris Dercon, its previous director and the former leader of the Tate Modern museum in London, quit just months into the job after widespread protests over his appointment. Those included an occupation of the theater by left-wing activists; at one point, someone left feces outside his office.The activists, who included members of the theater’s staff, accused Dercon of trashing the company’s tradition of ensemble theater, in which a permanent company of players creates a rotating repertoire, and turning it into a space for visiting international performers to mount their shows. Many saw the strife around Dercon’s appointment as a proxy for debates about gentrification in Berlin.Dörr was meant to be a stabilizing, if temporary, force at the theater until a new permanent director could be found. In 2019, René Pollesch, an acclaimed German playwright and director, was named as the new leader, set to take up the role in summer 2021.The latest problems at the Volksbühne emerged at a time of focus on the behavior of male leaders in Germany toward female members of staff. On March 14, Julian Reichelt, the editor in chief of Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, took a leave of absence after women who worked at the paper accused him of misconduct.A law firm is investigating the allegations, which have so far not been specified. Reichelt denies all wrongdoing.Jagoda Marinic, an author who has written extensively about the #MeToo movement in Germany, said in a telephone interview that she saw Dörr’s resignation as a watershed. That the revelations in Die Tageszeitung concerned a group of women, rather than an individual accuser, was significant, she said, adding that the case was also the first time someone in Germany had resigned so quickly after a complaint became public.“My hope is it spurs other people to speak out,” Marinic said.On Tuesday, the Volksbühne’s ensemble expressed its “unreserved solidarity” with the women who spoke out against Dörr, in a message posted on the theater’s Instagram account. “Our industry suffers under outdated power structures,” the message said. “This discourse must not end with Klaus Dörr’s resignation.” More