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"Performance Reviews"
What an action packed day! A morning discussion with Michael Thalheimer and Constanze Becker about their Medea, an afternoon discussion about the play with Inge Stephan and Hans-Thies Lehmann, and then my second Enemy of the People in three days, at the Maxim Gorki Theatre — the smallest of the six […]
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The stage is completely empty. Completely, utterly empty. All the way to the iron curtain at the back. A huge, black and grey cavern lined with grids, ropes, and other mechanical elements. This is the emptiest, most openly empty stage I’ve seen in my four days here.
Then the worklights fade, and a large, very […]
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Third day, third totally different kind of theatre. The smallest auditorium yet and the smallest stage; an audience somewhere between those at the DT and the Volksbuehne. And stylistically, easily the most naturalistic approach to acting. No wonder Ostermeier’s productions travel so well.
After just a few days in Berlin, what’s […]
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Two further notes apropos yesterday’s show:
– Dialect
Horvath’s play is set in Vienna. People speak, if not quite in dialect, at least with a rich smattering of dialect words and speech forms, diminutives in particular. None of Thalheimer’s actors sounded remotely Viennese (I haven’t looked at their bios to see whether any of […]
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First lesson learned: there is no such thing as a “Berlin theatre,” let alone a “Berlin audience.” The Deutsche Theater is a very different space than the Volksbuehne. The latter is slightly run down, dominated by a 1950s kind of charm, but feels very open — in the lobby and in […]
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Off the plane, into a theatre: and how. The Volksbühne, perhaps the most iconoclastic of Berlin’s publicly funded theatres, launched a three-part Moliere project this year. Of the three productions, one (The Miser, directed by Frank Castorf) is advertised as “by” Moliere; one (The Imaginary Invalid, directed by Martin Wuttke, who […]
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I really wanted to like Matthew Jocelyn’s CanStage production of Melissa James Gibson’s This. And I liked it well enough. The performances are uniformly excellent, the play is witty (Alon Nashman in particular gets a lot of mileage out of its one-liners), Jocelyn and designer Astrid Janson have transformed the Berkeley Street Theatre’s downstairs space […]
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A shamelessly self-indulgent post — I have a very exciting May in Berlin ahead of me. Here’s the itinerary, with lots of links to trailers (almost all the links are in English):
May 1: Don Juan (Moliere/Rene Pollesch) – Volksbuehne
Part of the Volksbuehne’s current exploration of Moliere (the other pieces are versions […]
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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.
