CovidTheatre: A German Update

A lot has happened since my last attempt to catalogue what theatres in the German-speaking world are offering online while we’re all in self-isolation, so rather than update the old post, I’m doing a proper second edition.

Here goes.

Rather than figuring out new formats on the fly, most theatres have resorted to streaming archival video recordings. While I do agree with people who say that watching a recorded performance isn’t the same as seeing it live (of course it isn’t!), it’s still pretty exciting to me that an international audience can now get a sense, however mediated, of what theatre looks and sounds like in German — and in many cases, with the added benefit of English subtitles. I do want to talk about why this is happening in Germany, but not really, or only to a far more limited degree, elsewhere, but that will have to wait.

Kammerspiele Munich

The Kammerspiele in Munich were first out the gate with an alternative schedule of online offerings. It’s not all archival recordings — they have programmed a number of live events (including a kind of hilarious Zoom-version of Leonie Böhm’s Yung Faust, which had a moment of genuine audience interaction), and on April 21, they will stream a live-cam version of Toshiki Okada’s No Sex, the staged performance of which they streamed last week. If you were lucky enough to see that recording, this should make for a fascinating comparison.

The videos live on Vimeo for 24 hours and most of them have English subtitles.

Today’s screening is Susanne Kennedy’s Theatertreffen-invited stage adaptation of Fassbinder’s Warum Läuft Herr R. Amok? No subtitles, oddly, but a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the most celebrated recent directors in Germany.

Most of the Berlin theatres have followed the Kammerspiele’s lead in one form or another:

Schaubühne Berlin

The Schaubühne in Berlin (not really the coolest theatre in the world, pace Time Out…) are doing something rather different: they’re offering some recent productions (mostly by Thomas Ostermeier and Falk Richter — aesthetically, nicely representative of the spectrum of things typically on offer at the Schaubühne), but they’re also opened their historical archives and are streaming a whole bunch of seriously famous productions from the company’s past. So far, this has included Peter Stein’s Prince of Homburg, Peer Gynt, and Oresteia as well as Klaus-Michael Grüber’s legendary Bacchae from 1974; Stein’s Three Sisters is still to come. Most of the productions are filmed for TV and of higher quality than standard archival video.

The shows are online for six hours only, from 6 pm to midnight German time, and live on Vimeo during that time. Many are subtitled in English or French.

Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble is going another route: they are putting some productions online, but for longer than 24 hours. This week, it’s artistic director Oliver Reese’s production of The Tin Drum — an adaptation of Günther Grass’s novel as a two-our solo performance. The recording was made on March 12 — the last show before the venue was shut down; it includes the entire curtain call, which ends, poignantly, with Holonics stopping the applause to say “Stay healthy — and I hope we’ll see each other again soon.”

On Wednesday (April 15), the theatre will also host a live Q&A session with Reese and the show’s actor, Nico Holonics. They’re also hosting a rich archive of videos and photo galleries about specific productions, talkbacks, and other related topics.

Deutsches Theater Berlin

The Deutsche Theater hesitated a bit longer than the other Berlin houses before opening their archives; instead, they started hosting an on-going (and obviously extremely topical!) reading of Boccaccio’s Decamerone performed by members of the ensemble. This continues: it is online every day at 6 pm German time, and archived on YouTube. (Decamerone readings seem to have become something on international trend among theatre artists — someone should make a list!)

As of last week, however, the DT is also streaming full productions, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last Thursday’s was a fascinating deep dive into the GDR archive: Friedo Solter’s 1987 staging of Lessing’s Philotas, starring the late Ulrich Mühe. This week, they’re streaming Stefan Pucher’s recent production of Marat/Sade and Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Hauptmann’s The Weavers — the latter filmed for broadcast in 2011, the former an archival recording. Neither is subtitled, sadly.

Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin

The Gorki, Berlin’s queerest and most multi-cultural theatre — the city’s post-migrant ensemble, in their own words — also took some time to figure out how to respond to the closures. They have now begun to offer archival streams every Wednesday for 24 hours, starting two weeks ago with a screening of Falk Richter’s Small Town Boy which was accompanied by a live chat including the director and hosted on Nachtkritik; there have been three such collective watch-and-discuss events from three different theatres so far (the Munich Kammerspiele with Christopher Rüping’s Drums in the Night and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden with Sebastian Hartmann’s take on Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted were the others), and I hope the series will continue.

I’m really excited for their Hamlet, which is streaming on March 22 — here’s a trailer for your delectation. I expect it’ll be subtitled: most of the Gorki’s productions are.

The one Berlin theatre that’s not really doing anything online is the Volksbühne. What’s up with that? I fear it’s yet another long-term effect of the dark Dercon period: he dissolved their archives and handed everything over to the Akademie der Künste, including a huge trove of archival video (fully digitized, I believe) that had been assembled during Frank Castorf’s decades as artistic director. And the ADK archive is a marvellous, marvellous place for research, but not authorized or equipped to simply put recordings up on its website for public consumption. So, the Volksbühne, with no archive to speak of, is staying silent.

In Hamburg, cool stuff is happening too:

Thalia Theater

The Thalia Theater, one of the most reliably excellent theatres in Germany, went online with a program of archival recordings and new online-only ventures two weeks ago — launching with a new take on Schiller’s Mary Stuart by the brilliant Antú Romero Nunes. Their programming most closely resembles a typical repertory schedule: for instance, they streamed archival recordings of Nicolas Stemann’s Faust (both parts) early on, and both are coming back now; Nunes’s Schiller, in three parts (with takes on Wilhelm Tell and Kabale und Liebe as well), is returning this week, too. They’re offering a remarkably rich blend of brand new things, recent productions, and older pieces that are no longer in their current repertory, some in made-for-TV edits, others in archival recordings.

Next week, it’s all Schiller all the time, with Stemann’s excellent Robbers from 2008, Jette Steckel’s Don Carlos, Stephan Kimmig’s Maria Stuart from 2007, with the incandescently brilliant Susanne Wolff in the title role, and then Stemann again, doing Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart — a famous production I can’t wait to see.

Most of these videos aren’t subtitled, unfortunately, but for my money, this may just be the most unmissable set of offerings of the lot.

Deutsches Schauspielhaus

Hamburg’s other major theatre was a bit slower to get going than the Thalia, and they seem to be relying on video from recent seasons for their offerings (all from the current AD Karin Beier’s years rather than the deeper archive). Their first screenings were of shows that were invited to Theatertreffen and were broadcast at the time, but next up are a number of productions that are new to screens — most intriguingly, Falk Richter’s much-lauded and multiply award-winning staging of Jelinek’s Trump-inspired Am Königsweg (April 23).

Most of these shows aren’t subtitled, and the schedule seems a little haphazard, but the Deutsche Schauspielhaus regularly produces some of the most interesting theatre in Germany, with a large and deep ensemble; I’m excited to see what else they have in store in the coming weeks.

I started with the Kammerspiele in Munich because they kind of got the ball rolling on streaming shows, and because under their artistic director Matthias Lilienthal, they have produced a lot of challenging, fascinating, sometimes infuriating, sometimes baffling theatre over the past four years — and Lilienthal’s contract is ending this season. There’s a real possibility that that final season will just fizzle out, so the Kammerspiele’s online presence is doing a kind of double duty as a retrospective over a short but intense period that’s about to conclude. The same is true somewhere else: at the

Schauspiel Dortmund

where artistic director Kay Voges is stepping down after a decade of programming and creating some of the most innovative theatre in Germany, or anywhere else in the world. The Schauspiel Dortmund website, under the programmatic title Déjà Vu, is explicitly hosting a retrospective of Voges’s decade at the helm, and they seem to be keeping most of the videos (all of them, I think, archival) online for the time being — not just for the 24 hours most other theatres are allowing viewers. Dortmund’s been the hotbed for theatrical investigations of new media and intermediate work in German theatre for the past few years, and the productions they are showcasing give a really rich, exciting sense of the kind of work that’s been going on there.

They don’t seem to have a set schedule, so I don’t know what ahead, but you can share in the past excitement here. No new videos have been posted since April 8, so perhaps this is it for now; but what is there is certainly worth a visit.

I’d particularly encourage those of you from the English-speaking world to have a look at Voges’s own Hamlet. The play has become a bit of a perennial presence in these streams: there was Rüping’s Hamlet from Munich; Thomas Ostermeier’s from the Schaubühne; this one; then a riff by the Finnish playwright E. L. Karhu from Leipzig; another production from the distinctly off-the-beaten-track ETA Hoffmann Theater in Bamberg (I’m allowed to say that because it’s my hometown theatre — where Hamlet was the first show I ever saw on a stage! They are now streaming their production of Faust); and the Gorki production I mentioned above — SIX very different takes on the play from six different theatres, all available, for free, within two weeks of each other.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the Dortmund shows are subtitled. This reflects one aspect of all this online activity that is easy to miss: its target audience is not the international community of theatre goers. These theatres are specifically local institutions — many of them are municipal entities — and they are making these videos available first and foremost for their local audiences who cannot come to the theatre right now. That’s why so many of the companies are also programming short YouTube videos of ensemble members doing readings or staging little impromptu playlets in their living rooms: because those actors are local presences. They are part of the cultural fabric of their cities, and as public life has moved largely into the virtual realm for now, they are connecting with their highly localized audiences, paradoxically, through a world-wide medium.

Alright. Back to my brief! I’ll conclude with a list of other theatres, most major, some more surprising, that are also streaming full productions — and I’ll end with a total highlight.

Schauspiel Köln (Cologne)

The Schauspiel Köln is putting a new archival video up every Friday — so far, they’ve offered Pınar Karabulut’s Romeo and Juliet, Therese Willstedt’s Woyzeck, and (currently) Armin Petras’s The Weavers as part of their “Dramazon Prime” program, which also features podcasts, radio plays, and other virtual pleasures. (Notice something? If you want to see two prominent directors’ extremely different takes on Hauptmann’s most famous play, you can watch this one and then head to the Deutsche Theater’s website for Michael Thalheimer’s version!)

Schauspiel Hannover

The Schauspiel Hannover, which is in its first season under its new artistic director Sonja Anders, probably doesn’t have as deep a video archive as many of the other companies I’m listing, but they are showing one recording a week from their current season (for 24 hours only); so far, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; Chekhov’s Platonov (or rather, Platonova); and an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Time out of Joint (does that count as another Hamlet riff?). Worth noting that both in Cologne and in Hannover, two out of the three productions being streamed were directed by women!

Schauspiel Leipzig

The municipal theatre in Leipzig is trying out a number of different things, including a Zoom-based show built from Kafka texts and directed by Philipp Preuss (open for 40 audience members each time it runs, with required pre-registration). But they have also streamed some recent productions, all, as far as I can tell, from their studio spaces rather than their mainstage venue. One of them was the aforementioned Hamlet-riff. They are planning to stream two shows a week, but haven’t yet announced the next programmed shows. I’m afraid they’re unlikely to be subtitled.

Staatsschauspiel Dresden

The Dresden theatre had a rather memorable season last year, with two productions invited to Theatertreffen, and they are showcasing both of those on their website now: Sebastian Hartmann’s Dostoevsky adaptation mentioned above is still available until April 14; next up, on April 18, is Ulrich Rasche’s Das Grosse Heft. This was such an aurally and physically overwhelming production that something is bound to be lost in translation, and it won’t be subtitled, but I wouldn’t miss this one. I don’t know if further streams are planned — I have high hopes though!

Nationaltheater Mannheim

The theatre in Mannheim is the kind of institution you will find in many larger German cities, but are almost unheard of in the English-speaking world: a single organization that combines a theatre company, an opera company, and a dance company under one umbrella and one leadership team. Accordingly, the Nationaltheater is streaming productions from all of its branches, including dance and opera; in the category of what in Germany is often called “Sprechtheater,” spoken-word theatre, they have put two shows online so far, including a Maria Stuart directed by Claudia Bauer — something of a Theatertreffen regular in recent years. These aren’t streamed recordings, but archival videos that remain, for now at least, accessible on the theatre’s website. No subtitles, but highly recommended anyway, if only for a sense of the remarkable level of production you can expect to find even beyond the major metropoles.

A pretty cool extra: they’ve also started a series of master classes, including classics karaoke led by the opera company’s solo répétiteur!

Schauspielhaus Zürich

The theatre in Zurich, under new artistic leadership as of this season (including, as co-AD, Nicolas Stemann, and as staff director Christopher Rüping — two names that have appeared multiple times already here!), was off to an extremely promising start before having its season curtailed by Covid-19. Rather than put archival video up, they are now starting to experiment with virtual formats — bits and pieces of which they’re posting as work in progress. Rüping is starting a new project, designed for a live online audience and based on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue this week, with the first episode going live on April 17. I’ll be there to watch, though I have no idea what this will look like; it’ll certainly be fascianting to see how a director who usually relies on actors’ bodies taking possession of the actual spaces they occupy tackles the problem of online disembodiment.

Burgtheater Vienna

It might seem a bit weird that one of the most famous theatres in Europe should come so late in this catalogue, but that’s because the Burgtheater (yet another company where a new artistic director had an inaugural season cut short by the closures) hasn’t done very much yet. Like many other theatres — too many to list them all and too many to follow — the Burgtheater is publishing solo video performances and readings by ensemble members (one of which is a total gem that I already raved about on Twitter but will happily include here again: Sarah Viktoria Frick’s hilarious and fantastically moving riff on performing while child-minding). As of this weekend, though, the Burgtheater is now streaming select videos of past performances from the rich archive of multi-camera filmed productions they have published on DVD over the years. Slightly disappointing in the sense that these are shows one could already catch on video — but still a welcome opportunity to (re)encounter some historically important stagings. All streams are online for 24 hours; they’re not subtitled.

Volkstheater Vienna

As promised, a highlight at the end. The Volkstheater is a venue that flies a bit under the radar, since the Burgtheater takes up so much of the international attention. I will admit that I wasn’t aware of how much interesting work they have been staging — but thanks to the closures, I now know. Because the Volkstheater, at the end of current AD Anna Badora’s term in office, is screening an extensive retrospective, including a whole slew of pieces by Yael Ronen. It’s a very rich program of productions, organized like a proper repertory schedule with repetitions and a mix of older and brand new shows — but as far as I can tell, none of them are subtitled.

As a final side note, I am intrigued how frequently some directors’ work appears in these streams: one could have turned oneself into something of an expert in Falk Richter’s or Yael Ronen’s oeuvre simply by watching what Germanophone theatres have been putting online over the past month, for instance. I wonder where that focus comes from — is it that some directors are more reluctant than others to give permission for their work to be screened?

Somewhat amazingly, this is not a complete catalogue. There’s still more, and more yet to follow. I haven’t talked at all about non-state theatres, about production houses (such as the Hebbel am Ufer/HAU, whose YouTube channel is a total treasure trove), or about independent companies. I’ll stop here for now, though, but not without mentioning, again, the stellar work being done by the editors of Nachtkritik, the most indispensable online source of information and venue of debate about theatre in German. Not only do they host a daily stream themselves, often from smaller or less visible venues, they also maintain a daily schedule of online events and streams, as well as of filmed productions permanently streaming on YouTube. Among other things, they list the many streams of opera productions now available, from Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna, and elsewhere.

Phew. CovidTheatre is exhausting — there is just too much of it!