I’ve just started posting on Tumblr, here: shorterdispositio.tumblr.com
This new micro-blog, dispositio’s little sibling, will largely consist of trailers and photos from contemporary productions of classical plays. Possibly, I’ll write the odd very short post, but the bulk of what I have to say will still appear on here — the tumblr is […]
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My second Romeo and Juliet in Germany this year, and a much more satisfying production than Lars Eidinger’s at the Schaubuehne, which I saw in May. That’s not to say that the two productions were worlds apart: in fact, they approached the play in broadly similar ways (and Bettina Bruinier’s version premiered three […]
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A prologue
The title’s a misnomer. Berlin is not Germany. Things are true there that aren’t true elsewhere. It’s also a bit of a theatrical pressure cooker, so even phenomena that occur throughout Germany are likely to find a more pronounced expression there.
Chapter the first: There is no such thing […]
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My final day in Berlin, my sixth show at the Deutsches Theater: finally Shakespeare. And relatively rarely performed Shakespeare, too: Coriolanus, in a new translation by Andres Marber that to my mind got more right than wrong – it certainly didn’t interfere with my enjoyment as much as the late Thomas Brasch’s famed version of […]
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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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Copyright
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.