What happens when a German theatre hires a French Canadian choreographer to direct a play by Shakespeare? Something very Canadian. Dave St-Pierreās 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’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusiastic or unsympathetic as they may be. Sometimes these posts spawned spirited discussions, and I’ll try to include whatever else I said as the threads […]
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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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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.