The Talkback Dilemma / Das Publikumsgesprächsleiden

I should be writing about the two Woyzecks I’ve seen this week, and about Karin Henkel’s fantastic John Gabriel Borkmann. But the other thing I’ve been watching, other than plays, is Q&As – and I have a few questions.

They’re a funny ritual, those post-show talkbacks. At Theatertreffen, they’re obligatory: most of the cast, the director, the dramaturg, and sometimes the set designer as well, get to sit on a dais where they are questioned first by a critic and eventually by the audience. Not an unfamiliar format, to be sure (perhaps minus the critic), and yet quite different from what I’m used to from Q&As in the English-speaking world.

Here’s how these things usually go when I see them in Canada or the UK: directors studiously avoid saying anything that would imply that what ended up on stage was their doing, and refer back to the text (or better yet, the author). Actors dish anecdotes. The moderator encourages the dishing of anecdotes. As soon as the audience gets hold of the microphone, someone asks how X could memorize all those lines, or how Y felt about playing such an evil person. People are generally quite gregarious, but also quite superficial. If “why” questions are asked, they’re mostly answered with reference to technical reasons (rehearsal time; blocking; etc.), or, more frequently, with reference to psychology. That’s a mean-spirited parody, I know, but it’s fairly true to my experience of the genre – and if you listen to the National Theatre’s rich archive of production talks on iTunes, I think you’ll find many versions of the above.

In Germany, the ritual goes rather differently. In general, I find that Publikumsgespräche often have a very odd defensive atmosphere. The actors frequently are extremely reluctant to say much, if anything. Sometimes they overtly defer to the director, sometimes to the dramaturg. At Theatertreffen, there’s the added complication that a critic (aka the enemy) is asking questions. More often than not, I walk away with a sense that the entire production team wanted the production to speak for itself, and didn’t think that their post-show explanations could add to (let alone fix) what they put on stage. The answers people do give sometimes are startlingly divorced from what actually happens in the rehearsal room. Just the other day, I asked during a Q&A about a particular production’s choice to retain certain words in dialect pronunciation when none of the characters consistently spoke in dialect; the answer I got was “Well, that’s just how the play is written.” Which is true, and might be a credible answer in the English-speaking world – but coming from a German actor clearly bears no relationship to how texts are treated here, on stage or in rehearsal, by actors and directors. Quite often, most of the cast will come to these Q&As, but very few of them will speak. (Again, this is a distorted picture — not all talkbacks go like this. But often they do, and I wonder why.)

In neither culture do theatre makers seem especially keen to reveal the inner workings of their processes. Even in Germany, at least on those occasions, dramaturgs tend to gesture to the text to justify or explain decisions. The most that might emerge is what the fundamental “Setzungen” were – a word that’s extraordinarily different to translate. A Setzung isn’t really an approach, exactly; it’s more like a ground rule, or a basic decision – something the director puts in place to limit and enable actorly choices, and to define a perspective on the play (or for the production). But often, the answer ends there: “Yes, that was a Setzung.” “No, that emerged during rehearsal.”

What happens during Q&As in the English-speaking theatre is not all that strange to me: in many ways, it’s of a piece with mainstream theatre criticism in English, and the kind of discourse that dominates talkbacks is mirrored in the kinds of books directors and actors write if they bother to write their autobiographies. There’s also a fairly wide-spread trope among actors that “no-one wants to hear about process.”

But in Germany? It’s not that the anecdotal, the personal, the psychological don’t have a place in how theatre and acting are discussed here. But the mainstream critical discourse – the way reviews are written – is much more focused on questions of interpretation than in the English-speaking world. What a particular production did with and to a play, and what the point, the meaning even, of those choices may have been – and to what extent a production achieved its apparent goals – are questions most theatre critics regularly ask in their reviews. Dramaturgs regularly pen detailed program notes outlining an interpretative stance, and include in the program historical, theoretical, philosophical, or critical texts that illuminate the production or may have played a role during the rehearsal process. Directors aren’t usually shy to describe their approach to their job in general terms – and neither are actors. So in general, the discourse surrounding and animating theatre in Germany is steeped in questions of interpretation, and questions of process aren’t considered too dull to discuss with non-theatremakers. Asking what a text might want, what a production might want from it, and what particular choices might mean and do are just normal operations for theatre artists and theatre critics alike. And often, those activities can take place at a fairly sophisticated level: it’s not unusual for rehearsal processes to include the communal reading and discussion of philosophical or theoretical texts not directly connected to the play but regarded by director and dramaturg as helpful for the production.

Given this culture, you might expect that post-show talkbacks would be welcome opportunities to continue this kind of discourse – to reflect on what the show did, to fill in conceptual gaps, to produce a fuller understanding of the meaning or the effects of a performance – for audiences and actors alike. But not so. Partly, it’s that German audiences aren’t actually all that much more sophisticated than audiences elsewhere. I haven’t heard the “how did you learn all those lines” question here, but I’m reliably informed that it does get asked. Very often, you do hear simple “why” questions. And more frequently than one might expect, people complain about shows that seem to do violence to the text. (It’s also true that German talkback audiences seem much more willing to speak their minds if they didn’t like the show, so a degree of defensiveness on the artists’ side is perhaps understandable.) But still.

What genuinely puzzles me is why actors are so reticent in this format. The best explanation I’ve come up with goes something like this: no matter how conceptually involved the early stages of a rehearsal process are, ultimately, the show comes alive when actors get up on their feet and play. And play sooner or later begins to elude rational explanation – at least for the player. It may seem like evasiveness for actors to say that they made a particular choice because it “felt right” or “made sense,” but on a fairly fundamental level, it probably isn’t – it’s probably just honesty. And I expect that the reluctance to go further and come up with a reasoned explanation for why something “felt right” is partly a fear that such a thinking-through would reduce that feeling of rightness – would reduce playfulness, presence, in-the-moment-ness. If the process of putting a show together moves gradually from thinking to doing, if a show is ready when it just is, then making the very people who’ve spent two months working through that process retrace their steps and go back to the thinking stage may be a bit too much to ask. It’s not that German actors are unwilling to think about their work, to approach performance conceptually; it’s that that thinking happens in the privacy of the rehearsal hall, at a stage of the process that precedes the coming into being of a show as a performance, and is left behind once the show is on its feet. Thought informs and enables play, but as a catalyst not as a prop.

I suspect for directors, the answer is different: there, I would guess that the relatively straightforward “the work should speak for itself” is in fact what’s at work. And I suppose I understand that position, too. After all, if a director didn’t think that the thing that wound up on stage represents her best way of saying what she wanted to say with or about that particular play, she’d probably be better off writing an essay than directing a play. Still: as a scholar interested in actorly and directorial processes, ways of thinking and ways of making, all of these hang-ups are terribly frustrating.

Frustrated as I am sometimes about all this, though, at least I’d like to have some certainty that I’ve more or less understood what’s causing the problem. So, actor and director friends: what precisely is the problem with Q&As? Warum sind Publikumsgespräche so eine Tortur? (Or have I just been really unlucky in the talkbacks I’ve seen?) Is it just that you’re all really tired at that point in the evening?