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"Theatre"
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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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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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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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.
