What happens when a German theatre hires a French Canadian choreographer to direct a play by Shakespeare? Something very Canadian. Dave St-Pierre’s staging of Macbeth at the Schauspiel Frankfurt is, in essence, a two-hour movement piece. The theatre, and some reviews, are trying to sell it as a synthesis of text-based theatre and dance/movement-based performance, […]
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen as rigorous, as complete, and as compelling a piece of theatre on a UK stage as Ivo van Hove’s take on Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge. What’s marvellous about the show is that it takes a thoroughly middle European aesthetic and investment in theatricality but allows its British […]
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The theatre trip I’m on right now is as exhilarating as it is exhausting, and I have nowhere near enough time to write about what I’m seeing. I’ll probably do a short-form round up of sorts in the next couple of days. But the other night, I saw a production that I have to write […]
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The curtain opens, and I think I’m in the Lyttelton. No way this is a German set. The proscenium is completely closed off — a picture frame around a photo-realistic replica of the entrance hall and swooping grand staircase of a decaying 19th-century mansion, trees starting to shoot up through the cracked floor tiles, windows […]
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There is a conviction that haunts the English theatre: that proscenium stages create distance. That they create a fourth wall. That they are ultimately, somehow, undemocratic. And that all the ills of the proscenium stage, that withdrawn, closed-off, elitist monster, are remedied by the thrust stage — welcoming, reaching out to the audience, refusing to […]
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I’ve just embarked on another marathon in German theatre. This year, I partly want to see just how marked (if at all) the difference are between theatre in Berlin and the rest of the country. Last year, I repeatedly heard that because directors travel so much and even actors aren’t quite as stable in their […]
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A couple of weeks ago when I was in Vienna, attending a congress celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Burgtheater’s current home, an utterly over-the-top theatre palace and one of the reputed hallowed sites of German-language performance arts, I picked up a substantial, glossy volume published by a theatre scholar in collaboration with the Burgtheater. […]
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I’m posting a string of German season announcements for 2013/14 on my tumblr.
These are kind of amazing documents: proper books, sometimes well over 100 pages long, that introduce the ensemble for the coming season — with full-size head shots and detailed bios — but more importantly, provide information about the next season’s […]
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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.