Theatre in COVID Times: A Collection of Links and Things — I: Germany

To celebrate, or mourn, World Theatre Day, I thought I’d start a list of theatres that are doing things online now to give us, and them, something to keep at least a memory of live performance alive. Others have made similar lists, and I’ll include links to those as well — and I’ll keep updating this page frequently.

German Theatre

Where else would I start?

The Kammerspiele in Munich were first out the gate with an alternative schedule of online offerings — mostly archival video of recent productions, but also a few live events (including a kind of hilarious Zoom-version of Leonie Böhm’s Yung Faust, which had a moment of genuine audience interaction). The videos live on Vimeo for 24 hours and most of them have English subtitles.

Today, they’re screening Toshiki Okada’s The Vacuum Cleaner, which would have been staged at the Theatertreffen in Berlin next month if the festival hadn’t been cancelled.

On Sunday, they’re streaming Christopher Rüping’s fantastic Drums in the Night, and there will be a live chat with the director on Nachtkritik starting at 8 pm German time.

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, including Peter Stein’s Prince of Homburg, Oresteia and Three Sisters as well as Klaus-Michael Grüber’s legendary Bacchae from 1974. 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.

On Saturday, you can catch Ostermeier’s brilliant Hedda Gabler, which has been in rep since 2005, still with the original cast (!); on April 1, his delightfully anarchic Hamlet. Both have English subtitles.

The third theatre that is putting out new archival videos of recent productions has a somewhat stronger claim than the Schaubühne to the title of coolest theatre in the world: the Schauspiel Dortmund is hosting a retrospective of Kay Voges’s decade as its artistic director (he is on his way to Vienna). 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’re 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 excitement, day by day, here.

I’m intrigued, elated, and a bit puzzled that Hamlet is a fixture on all three platforms: Rüping’s recently closed production at the Kammerspiele is no longer online, sadly (but I imagine it might come back), but Voges’s still seems to be on Vimeo — and Ostermeier’s as I mentioned is coming up in a few days.

The Thalia Theater in Hamburg, one of the most reliably excellent theatres in Germany, is starting a program of archival recordings and new online-only ventures, this Saturday — launching with a new take on Schiller’s Mary Stuart by the brilliant Antú Romero Nunes. After that, they’re streaming archival recordings of Nicolas Stemann’s Faust (both parts) — one of those productions that have already found their place in modern theatre history. And then Jette Steckel’s Danton’s Death, which I’ve never seen, but have longed to see for forever — partly because Steckel must be the single most underrated German director and partly because the set looks astonishing.

This may just be the most unmissable set of offerings of the lot.

The Berliner Ensemble is going another route: they are putting some productions online, but for longer than 24 hours. The first one is Michael Thalheimer’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, which will be available until 2 April. They’re also hosting a rich archive of videos and photo galleries about specific productions, talkbacks, and other related topics.

Other theatres are doing a similar thing. The Schauspiel Köln, for instance, is streaming a recording of Pinar Karabulut’s Romeo and Juliet for the next few days (until midnight on March 30) as part of its “Dramazon Prime” program, which also features podcasts, radio plays, and other virtual pleasures.

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); this Saturday (March 28), an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; next Saturday (April 4), Stephan Kimmig’s production of Chekhov’s Platonov (or rather, Platonova).

And yet another different approach: the Deutsche Theater, rather than streaming filmed productions, is hosting an on-going (and obviously extremely topical!) reading of Boccaccio’s Decamerone performed by members of the ensemble. It’s online every day at 6 pm German time, and archived on YouTube.

Finally, the marvellous and utterly indispensable theatre criticism and discourse website Nachtkritik is hosting its own daily rotation of streamed productions in collaboration with various major theatres and independent companies.

On April 1, they’re streaming Falk Richter’s Small Town Boy, a production from Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater — and I hope that won’t be last Gorki production we’ll see!

The Nachtkritik team have also compiled, and constantly updating, a day-by-day schedule of online theatre, which includes all sorts of delights, and should be regularly checked, here. Among other things, they list the many streams of opera productions now available, from Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Vienna, and elsewhere.

That’s it for now. More to follow!