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"Performance Reviews"
Sixteen shows in, Berlin theatre still manages to surprise me with new stylistic choices, visual arsenals, and performance aesthetics. Stefan Pucher’s Hedda Gabler at the Deutsches Theater was the first production that used the revolve to switch between sets – every other time I’ve seen that feature used, it was obviously the stage floor itself […]
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Today, I saw my first blackface performance.
Let me rephrase that. I’m sure I saw quite a few things of this kind when I was a kid. I know for a fact that I painted my face brown, red, and yellow for carnival. But as an adult, in a serious play, this was a first […]
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Well, fuck.
This was a production I had looked forward to. The photos promised fun, if nothing else. It was supposed to be an unsentimental take on the play, putting desire above love. And Lars Eidinger is an exceptionally talented actor who has done great work in Shakespearean roles — his Hamlet in particular has […]
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Can’t keep up! So to stay on schedule, I’ll lump a few shows together and do quick summaries.
None of these were immediately deeply relevant to my “classics” project. I decided to see Armin Petras’ adaptation of Anna Karenina at the Gorki Theater mainly because I’d grown to like that little venue so much in […]
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German stagings of classics are often exciting because they draw attention to the challenges as well as the necessity of playing works of the past — they find an enormous source of energy in the friction between old and new rather than papering over the distance between text and performance with the tired blend of […]
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Ah, yes. After seven days of gushing posts, I’ve come back down to earth.
This is not all bad news. The first not-so-exciting show was a contemporary play, which I had picked specifically as a control sample. Since this entire theatre marathon is part of my nascent research project on Anglophone and Germanophone stagings of […]
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I had only seen Susanne Wolff act on video before, in Stefan Kimmig’s brilliant production of Maria Stuart (originally staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and now part of the DT’s repertory). Her performance in that filmed-for-TV show was very impressive, virtuosic, powerful. What it did not prepare me for was her […]
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Certain theatrical experiences stick with you. I doubt I will ever forget a production of Buechner’s Leonce and Lena directed by Andreas Kriegenburg at the Residenztheater in Munich that I saw in 1999. The stage was a huge steeply raked field of artificial turf; at one point, one character watered the grass, and another figure […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
