WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES

Volume 15, Number 3 Fall 2003

Editor Marvin Carlson

Christopher Balme Miriam DAponte Marion P. Holt Glenn Loney Daniele Vianello

Contributing Editors Harry Carlson Antoinette Di Nocera Rosette Lamont Yvonne Shafer Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff

Erik Abbott, Managing Editor

Jennifer Worth, Editorial Assistant

Director Ignocio Amestoy Egiguren

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Edwin Wilson, Executive Director James Patrick, Director Jill Stevenson, Circulation Manager Serap Erincin, Assistant Circulation Manager Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2003 ISSN # 1050-1991

To the Reader
Our Fall 2003 issue foregrounds, as usual, spring and summer theatre festivals throughout Western Europe, with reports from Edinburgh, the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Ruhrtriennale, the London Globe, and festivals in Salzburg, Munich, Bregenz, and Bayreuth. There is also a report from the Off-Festival in Avignon, but the leading festival story of 2003 is surely that the Avignon festival itself, the most famous of all European theatre festivals, was cancelled this year. Our issue therefore begins with a report on that cancellation and its effects, introducing a special festival section. In addition to these reports we offer as usual a collection of interviews and reviews of important recent productions in Rome, Athens, London, Paris, Munich, Sheffield, and Scarborough. These various reports, along with the festival material, filled this issue, and so, having already offered a major report on the Theatertreffen, we held back several other reports on recent work in Berlin, with the thought of presenting a special Berlin section in our Winter issue. We therefore particularly invite essays on current or recent Berlin productions, but as always we welcome interviews and reviews on interesting recent work anywhere in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 or email mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu.

Table of Contents

Volume 15

Number 3

Fall 2003

Festival Reports Avignon ....................................................................................................................................Philippa Wehle Avignon 2003: The Festival that was Not.....................................................................................Jean DeCock The Edinburgh Festival ............................................................................................................Glenn Loney

5 9 17 21 39 49 55 65

The 2003 Berlin Theatertreffen.................................................................................................Marvin Carlson German Festival Report: Munich and Bayreuth..........................................................................Glenn Loney Festivals from Recklinghausen to the Ruhrtriennale .........................................................................Roy Kift Austrian Festival Report: Salzburg and Bregenz..........................................................................Glenn Loney The 2003 Season at Shakespeares Globe ................................................................................Louis Muinzer

Lope de Vega, Peribaez............................................................................................................Judith Milhous Letter from the UK: Summer and Autumn, 2003.............................................................................Noel Witts Paris Theatre: June, July, 2003....................................................................................................Barry Daniels Fear and Loathing at the Munich Kammerspiele.................................................................Laurence Senelick Ignacio Amestoy Egiguren and the Politics of Contemporary Spanish Theatre ..............Candyce Leonard

71 73 77 85 89 95 99 103

Abbas Kiarostami's Ta'ziye at the Teatro India, Rome..................................................................P.A. Skantze To You Who Are Listening From Athens, Greece.................................................................Marina Kotzamani Notes on Contributors.......................................................................................................................................

Ariane Mnouchine in Avignon, 2003. Photo: Philippa Wehle

The Death of Culture in France? The 57th Avignon Festival is Cancelled

Philippa Wehle The 57th Avignon Festival, director Bernard Faivre dArciers last, had promised to be one of most exciting of his tenure. From avant garde experiments to more popular entertainments, the festival, scheduled to take place from 8 July to 28 July, featured enticing new and unknown work by major international theater artists. For those who had missed two important festival events in the past, Faivre dArcier brought back Jan Fabres Je suis Sang, created specifically for the Papal Honor Court in 2000 and Eric Lacascades Platonov which was rained out more than once last summer. Belgiums Alain Platel was to present Wolf, a new dance theatre work, The Dybbuk, directed by Krzystof Warlikowski, whose extraordinary staging of Sarah Kanes Purifis created a shock at the 56th festival. Ariane Mnouchkines latest production, Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odysees), based on interviews with middle Eastern and Asian refugees fleeing their homelands, was to play throughout the entire festival and Bartabas equestrian theater was to premiere Loungta, les chevaux de vent as well as perform a special equestrian suite in the Honor Court to celebrate Zingaros twentieth anniversary. More than 120,000 visitors were expected to attend this years festival and in the Off Festival, at least 600 companies were preparing to offer alternatives to the official program, drawing thousands of other theater enthusiasts to Avignon. Even though the festival was up and ready on 8 July, it never got off the ground, a victim of the striking intermittents du spectacle, or free-lance, part-time creative artists and technicians in the entertainment industry, angry that their unemployment benefits were being reduced and their survival, as they put it, threatened. It had been clear since late spring that strikes by part-time cultural workers would threaten Frances entire summer arts festival season. Activists had disrupted performances at the Paris Opera, the Comdie Franaise and Pina Bauschs final performance at the Thtre de la Ville had been cancelled in June. Still, the arts workers were hoping the government would back down from their proposed reforms to the unemployment system, and it seemed suicidal to many that the strikers would jeopardize their own livelihood by closing down Frances many summer festivals. Therefore it came as a shock to many that on 10 July, Faivre dArcier called a Press 5 Conference and announced, la mort dans lame (sick at heart), as he put it, that he had to cancel his entire festival. That same day, Stephane Lissner, director of the Aix-en-Provence Opera festival, announced that he was closing down the rest of his festival. The Montpellier dance festival and the Marseille theater festival had cancelled their seasons shortly before. But Avignon? A festival that had survived May 1968 and another intermittents strike in 1992, how could it go under? It was truly inconceivable. Instead of canceling his festival outright in the midst of increasing unpredictabilty, Faivre dArcier had continued preparing for the arrival of its companies, many from foreign lands: Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Indeed on 8 July, the first day of the festival, the opening performances were ready to go. Even the striking technicians had agreed to suspend their strike in order to get the theatres prepared. Still, each day the strikers met in general assembly and voted to suspend the next days performances. By day three, it was clear to Faivre dArcier that the 57th festival could not survive. Already he was having to reimburse 74,000 tickets. Even if he had agreed to keep some of the shows open, he feared the worst. The example of La Traviata at the Aix-en-Provence opera festival, disrupted by protesters banging pots and pans and setting off fireworks and harassing the audience when it came out of the theatre, did not bode well for Avignon. The Festival did everything in its power to show its support of the intermittents and demand-

Faivre dArcier. Photo: Courtesy Avignon Festival

ed that the agreement should be reconsidered, Faivre dArcier said at his Press Conference. In June, he had written articles in the press supporting their position and he had been actively involved in discussions with the Minister of Culture and representatives of the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic as Festival time approached, in attempts to influence their decision, but the government stood firm in its position to go ahead with reforms. I always said that three conditions were necessary to keep the Festival open, he told Le Monde on 10 July that relations with the public should not be affected, that the shows should be presented under conditions favorable to performers and that there should be no violence threatening security. It is not possible to organize a festival under the pressure of a strike that is renewable from day to day. Since these conditions clearly were not met, the festival was cancelled. As a veteran festival-goer since 1968, I was headed on 10 July to spend two weeks in Avignon. I had known the festival was in jeopardy. Rumor had it that some of the performances might be cancelled but it seemed that others might take place as long as the intermittents were allowed to state their case before the curtain went up or hold discussions after the show. When I learned at noon on July 10 that the festival had just been cancelled, I decided to go to Avignon anyway to see for myself what was going on and what the intermittents had to say. Forums to discuss the issues, held every day, twice a day at the Clotre St. Louis, and meetings in other venues, provided the opportunity to hear all sides of the dispute. At issue is the reform of an exceptional system of unemployment benefits, run by both employers and representative unions, which was established in 1969 to protect Frances seasonal arts workers. It now covers about 200,000 actors, musicians, dancers, directors, stage hands, camera, light and sound technicians, costumers, TV and radio technicians; artists from cinema, media and the theatre. Until recently, these part-time arts workers had to work 507 hours within a twelve-month period to qualify for an entire year of unemployment benefits. A new agreement, issued in June, proposed that the artists would have 10.5 months to put in their 507 hours (for technicians it is 10 months) before they would be eligible for benefits, and that they would receive unemployment for only eight months instead of twelve. This agreement was ratified by the employers organization, the MEDEF, 6

and three trade unions (the CFDT, the CFE-CGC and the CFTC). The Communist-backed CGT, which represents most of the intermittents, called for protests and strikes. The reaction was immediate. The intermittents took to the streets with shouts of culture in danger and collective suicide and disrupted performances throughout France. The strike quickly gathered momentum. The striking artists and technicians claim that this new system effects those who can least afford it since they would be unable to work as many as 507 hours in a 10 or 10.5 month period. It would force the small and independent artists without fixed contracts to disappear. They argue that this will mean the end of many small theatre companies and ultimately, some went so far as to say, the death of culture in France. Despite the exaggeration of this statement, it is true that the survival of young companies and independent artists is very much in question. When looked at from an American perspective, however, it is hard to sympathize with the uproar about what seems like small and necessary changes to a government subsidized unemployment benefit plan which is so generous even in its new form. The privileged position enjoyed by French actors and technicians is the envy of artists everywhere. That cultural part-timers have been entitled to receive twelve months unemployment benefits at nearly full pay seems like paradise to American artists who must struggle to survive by waiting on tables, bartending, or finding other part-time work. Furthermore it is even harder to understand why these strikers would jeopardize their own future by disrupting and canceling festivals and theatre performances that represent their livelihood. When I arrived in Avignon, which is always filled to brimming with eager festival-goers and tourists, the streets seemed almost deserted, the hotels were dealing with cancelled rooms and the shop keepers were complaining that their sales had plummeted. Of course the city of Avignon relies heavily on the income the festival brings in every summer, some $17 million at last count. The theatre people I encountered expressed deep sadness, disappointment and anger at the extraordinary waste the strikers had caused even though they were supportive of their demands. Whereas a majority of theatre directors and artists were fully supportive of the strike, two of Frances great theatre directors, Ariane Mnouchkine and Patrice Chreau, voiced their opposition at an

important meeting of 450 theatre directors, union representatives, striking artists, and technicians on 3 July at the Clotre des Celestins, in Avignon where no culture, no future, was the rallying cry. Chreau, attempted to explain the advantages to the 26 June reform agreement, saying that the unemployment benefits plan had been in jeopardy for some time, and that the changes at least guaranteed that benefits would still be available to the arts workers even though there may be some losses. Mnouchkine, whose seventy-member theatre company opposed the strike, argued that the strikers were not using the right strategies. They were on a path to self-destruction, she told them, and she felt it was her duty to tell them that they must show a united front. We must be able to talk, she said. We are all fighting against the established powers and we must not give the image of a profession that is tearing itself apart. Any opposition to the strike was received with boos and name calling, however. Mnouchkines pleas for reasoned discourse earned her the label of Facho and Retro. Later, in a calmer tone, in an open letter addressed to Mnouchkine and Chreau, Jean-Claude Fall, director of the Centre Dramatique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, expressed his disbelief and sadness that two such important mentors, giants of theatre, as he put it, could speak out against the strike. How could they stand up for a reform that condemns 15,000 to 20,000 people in the arts to total uncertainty, he wrote, those who need the support of their more fortunate colleagues? As the debates went on, a number of companies in the Off Festival, about three quarters of them, kept their shows open for awhile. Some struck at first and then decided to play, others soldiered valiantly on with the strike but once the 14 July holiday was over and a potential audience was no longer available to hear their demands, they decided to leave Avignon to carry their fight to other festivals. On 15 July, a parade of trucks and cars filled with the most militant of the strikers, drove up the Avenue de la Rpublique, honking their horns and shouting slogans as they left the papal city. In all fairness to these artists and technicians it is important to understand their situation. For example, the 507 hours are calculated only on the time they spend on or behind the stage or in a studio. They may well work many more hours during the year but only 507 hours of their work is counted. What about the unpaid time spent creating 7

a piece, rehearsing, learning ones part, or upgrading ones skills, they ask and rightly so. It is important to realize as well how many of Frances cultural workers are part-time. JeanClaude Gallotta, whose fascinating dance theatre piece, Trois Generations, was created for the festival this year, forcefully illustrated the numbers in a meeting with some of the festival audiences who had remained in Avignon after the festival was cancelled. He had his large company of thirty stand on a platform and then asked all of the part-timers to leave the stage. Only four were left standing; four permanent, full-time employed workers out of thirty. The demonstration was visually stunning. Equally central to the discussion is the fact that there has been widespread abuse of the system, particularly on the part of media employers, TV, film, and radio, who have misused the fund by employing artists full-time but allowing them to claim unemployment benefits during pauses even though they are still working full time. Furthermore, one has to view the strike in a larger context as well. This past spring France had experienced the biggest strike and protest movement since the public sector transport strike in 1995. Prime Minister Raffarin was determined to tackle pension reform, and transport workers, teachers, and others took to the streets to defend their benefits. When the June agreement on part-time arts workers benefits was reached, it was inevitable that the arts workers would join their fellow workers in vigorous protest. And finally, it must be noted that since 1984, the number of adherents to Frances unemployment benefit plan for part-time arts workers has doubled according to all reports and the fund is in danger of imminent collapse since it is underfunded. The question, it seems, is where to get the money to cover the adherents even under the new reform? It is clear that the coming months will continue to be marked by strikes and protests by workers in the cultural sector although it seems that the strikers are less interested in disrupting theatre performances and festivals such as Paris prestigious Festival dAutomne which has not yet been attacked. In recent articles and internet communiques, the strike leaders have been expressing regret that the Avignon festival and others were cancelled. They admit that they did not think the strike would get so out of hand and that they were surprised at the extent of the momentum. Still, the issues remain unresolved and the claim heard so

often this past summer that the reforms are heralding the death of culture in France may not be such an exaggeration according to some, if one realizes

that the unemployment benefits insurance actually finances a part of Frances artistic activity.

Avignon 2003: The Festival That Was Not

Jean DeCock There are those who are on strike and those who are Art? One percent of the national budget. When not. there is no money left there is no welfare, nor fringe There are those who went on strike on July 9 and benefits, nor tenure. The IN public consists now demonstrated in the street when the mainly of a cultural elite (against Vilars intention). Festival IN was in the balance. The OFF audiences are more populist, but are mostThere are those who danced with joy when learning ly in search of entertaiment. They are warm and the strike was on and then the following good-hearted and the prices they can afford are day went on with their own performances. much lower, recalling the audiences of Children of There are those who went on strike for several days Paradise? I care about the opinion of those who and are no longer striking. live on 1000 a month or less, much more than the There are those who say they are on strike and yet opinion of Chereau, Mnouchkine, Bartabas, or are performing all the same. Baudrillard, even if I like their work. There was There are those who perform and express solidarity much talk about strategy and suicidal stands. with those who do not. Cliches went around about shooting yourself in the There are those who wanted to perform and foot or sawing off the branch you are perched couldnt and those who wanted not to on. Whether we like it or not, France is in the perform and performed anyway. hands of the Right: the President, the Premier, the There are those who feel betrayed by those who Assembly, and the MEDEF. Nothing has ever been perform and others by those who do not . won by their generosity. The actor Jacques Bonaff What does all this mean ? Is there any rationale in asked Is this the Last Stand ?or Sophies all this? Choice? Am I a traitor for reporting on a festival Some said from the beginning that the OFF divided? Some will say so. And yet I feel sympacompanies could not go on strike. thy for those who performed, regardlessas if their Some others exercised their power by arguing to the life depended on it. And it did. I salute those who contrary. fought. Now that the IN Festival has been cancelled, some Now to my report. As is true every year, maintain that striking no longer makes any there was a mixture of wonder and mediocrity. Here sense and that it would be to our are some of the best that I saw. Angelo, Tyran de advantage to resume performances, and Padoue by Victor Hugo at the end of his bicentenrescue the local economy as well. nial last year, as directed by Philippe Person, was a real theatrical pleasure. Back in 1549, what was not We declare: yet Italy was nevertheless terrorized by the Republic of Venice and its Conseil des Dix = CDX as tattooed Avignon 2003 cannot be a forum for theatre, art, on the back of its spies, a kind of CIA operative and communication. reaching even Padua. Its ruler Angelo has a wife We cannot perform at any cost in the center of this which he keeps prisoner of his jealousy and a mishavoc. tress, the famous popular actress La Tisbe, who We have decided to leave Avignon. loves her brother Rodolfo all the more because he is We will fight elsewhere, by other means. actually her lover. The two women are bound to meet against all odds, they are rivals through a side I found this declaration posted on the door plot too thick and machiavelian to sum up. Both are of the Big Bang, a familiar venue, now dark. This in love with the same irresistible Rodolfo. Written is the most revealing and poignant statement about in 1843, this is intense romantic melodrama ripe this years festival (or non-festival) that I have read, with fate and coincidences: secret rooms and cabibetter than the deluge of articles and opinions in the net, crucifer and crucifix, unsigned love letters press and the media on the matter of the cancellation intercepted, dangerous dark alleys, and two vials of of the biggest theatre festival in Europe. Of course drugs: one narcotic and the other lethal poison. The who can come out against the intermittents du specstage is a black box pierced by beams of light as in tacle? We all love our starving actors. What price the early TNP under Vilar (or, even further back, 9

Philippe Persons Production of Angelo, Tyran de Padoue. Photo: courtesy Philippe Person.

Gordon Craig). Person streamlined a rather complex historical drama as only Hugo could write: tense, tight, efficient, cruel and compassionate, a heart-wringing love quartet running towards disaster. La Tisbe will die, not before uttering a powerful plea in defense of the womans condition in a mans world, then and now. The four leads under the masterful direction of Person are outstanding: Anne Priol is regal as the actress and Florence Tosi as if on the verge of an epileptic fit is at once playful and pathetic. Pascal Faber justifies the mad love of the two ladies and will survive thanks to them, whereas Denis Leroy is a hulk of power with beautiful huge hands like a primal icon in his shimmering coat. It was an entrancing and superb piece of theatre. The Arteria Company consists of five wonderful young thespians, three women, two men, under the leadership of Sebastian Davis. In their Thyeste 1947 Senecas stern and brutal tragedy is uprooted from Greece to Argos, a peasant village in Provence after WW II, with some tasteful comic and erotic relief. The House of Atreus and Thyestes stands at the inception of all evil in our western tragedy, brothers becoming enemies, duplicates of Cain and Abel. The escalation of violence and retaliation culminates when the unaware Thyestes eats his own children killed by Atreus. Daviss style is reminiscent of Grotowski and Andre Gregory in the 10

sixties: a table, some chairs, an accordion, and a sheet is all the barefooted ensemble needs. The amazing and fascinating Lilia Rucco is Thyestes. She also conducts the polyphonic multilingual chorus, inspired perhaps by Bulgarian Voices. Ariane Mnouchkine was impressed enough to host them at her Thtre du Soleil, a year ago. No wonder. As a foil, and for a lark, I caught up with Les Amis de Monsieur (the elusive gay brother of the King of France), another five member company, in their riotous double bill on alternating days making fun of French and Roman history. Both plays are penned by Michel Heim, who also stars in drag. The Night of the Queens, all puns intended, involves Catherine di Medici, mother of the notorious Valois dynasty and Elizabeth, the Virgin of England (they never met), both here involved in a devious and hilarious tug of war. Catherine wants her fey son Henry the Third to wed the English Queen. He is however a closet straight who prefers his gorgeous incestuous sister Queen Margot, who in turn longs for the gay British envoy Buckingham, who in turn lusts after for Henry. The subtitle tells it all: How Henry went AC/DC. A similar twist awaits Nero the Roman Empress in a subverted version of Britannicus, Racines seventeenth-century tragedy, required reading for any French high school student, as it might have been revisited by Fellini. Nero loves Britannicus who loves Junie who courts the

Queen Mother Agrippine while Narcissus only loves him/herself. Believe it or not this is never gross, although the renaissance and Roman plot both receive a touch of Feydeau treatment in crossdressing, salacious puns (in alexandrine verse), farcical innuendoes and inoffensive nudity. Production values are lavish, and the whole suggests a Shakespearean tragi(gay)comedy offering total fun. The inspired director of these romps is Jean Pierre Rouvellat, whose team has have been performing for years to attain their present perfection An enigmatic treatment of Hamlet-inabsentia is seen, not by Rosencranz and Guildenstern, but through the actors performing The Mousetrap, as they are caught in the web of political totalitarism. LAffaire Elseneur or The Death of Gonzague, written by Bulgarian Nedjalkov Jordanov, is a political film noir or theater of the absurd in an expressionistic mood, with a laudable cast directed by Tatiana Stepantchenko in a moving set composed of strings by Veronique Bertrand. Meanwhile Timars Thtre des Halles offered a stylized exercise in Chinese wisdom with Brechtian echoes, Le Collier de Perles du Gouverneur Li Quing (The Pearl Necklace). This is an Asian story

of a young woman who escapes her village roots and female condition by passing as a man. She successfully attends a national contest and attains the loftiest functions by her qualities and savoir faire, until she falls for the looks of a young actor, which brings about her downfall. It is set is a huge varnished wooden revolving platform at the edge of which a pianist accompanies the cast when they are moved to sing, more in the vein of Demy/Legrand than Dessau or Eisner. Four actors (two males, two females) alternate between a narrative in third person voice-over and direct first person subjective dialogue. This was written and directed by Eudes Labrusse, who is anything but Oriental (any more than Bertolt Brecht.) A distinguished offering. Few of the shows I attended dealt with contemporary issues, but one exception was the gloomy and courageous Sentinelle, written and directed by Belgian Philippe Beheydt for five characters with Slavic names suggesting Mittel Europa (2 women, three men ) from Cavalcade Co. It takes place in the trenches of a generic war where a restless group is waiting with fatigue and anxiety the elusive attack by some archetypical enemy. From southern Italy came Jesprons que je men sortira,

Le Collier de Perles du Gouverneur Li Quing. Photo: courtesy Thtre des Halles

11

Patricia Clement and Stephanie Sphyras in Benoit Nguyen Tats production of Tango Tanguage. Photo: courtesy Benoit Nguyen Tat

12

which is child talk translated in French from Italian (roughly : How will I get out of this) and was directed by Marjorie Nacache with the Studio Theatre de Stains and an energetic cast of seven. It was written by Marcello DOrta, a teacher who gathered his pupils own scribblings. Amidst squalor and poverty, it reflects how they view their life. The surprise is that it is as colorful and playful as a Joan Miro painting. A good word must be said on behalf of Jean Marie Piemmes Tango Tanguage, actually mostly about language, as you might expect. Writing is like boxing he says. His text is divided into three loose segments, showing the anxiety of a speaker about to lecture, variations on partners in the love syndrome and, naturally, a tango lesson. The two-person cast directed by Benoit Nguyen Tat is most stimulating: Stephanie Sphyras sporting an Errol Flynn moustache and dominant Patricia Clement. The printed version of this butch/ fem duo was actually written for two males. It makes you wonder about the possible combinations. From Luxembourg, a revelation from the Thtre du Centaure: the middle part of a trilogy written in 1977 by an eminent Jewish Hungarian writer Peter Nadas, who survived Stalinist occupa-

tion and knows all about oppression, repression and the pressure to conform. Mnage, not yet published in French, has as a central metaphor ritual cleaning and cleansing. It is acted out by three characters, all in uniform: the matron and her two servants, a young maid and a sexy male hustler. The set is decorator chic: on the wall, an enlarged projection of a man pulling himself out of the water suggesting a perfume poster, and a gauze curtain which will become a bridal veil of death. The play is a puzzle; as the characters clean the floor with buckets of water the repressed past mixes with master/slave fantasy, leading towards murder. Their dangerous game of power and ritual, reminiscent of Genets Maids, was directed masterfully by Carol Lorang. It was a theatre of images and bodies where a heart is a sponge. In contrast I enjoyed the throwback to the seventies touch and feel theatre offered by The Innocents, whose director, David Noir, is a grandson of Czanne. You may remember The Innocents was the 1961 John Clayton (1961) screen adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, with Deborah Kerr and Marlon Brando. 16 nez noir is the name of this company, although the sixteen black-nosed koalas never actually appear on stage. What does appear is

Carol Lorangs production of Mnage. Photo: Ivana Grujic

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David Noirs production of The Innocents. Photo: Karine Lhmon

a group of totally uninhibited, exhibitionist, mostly naked young performers (headed by the incredibly beautiful and angelic Sonia Codhant) who are all over each other and even the audience with singing, videos and film excerpts (Village of the Damned and The Sound of Music). Its a bit hard to tell what it is all aboutchildren repressed?, pillow fights? Dorms? Pedophiles?or just a commune deliberately breaking taboos and blowing your mind, as Julian Beck used to say? A pagan festival, refreshing in the Avignon heatwave and strangely innocent. I attended quite a few solo performances, even more than last year (I used to call them, wrongly, one-(wo)men shows). You can hardly escape them, since they constitute about one-third of the 600 listings on the OFF program. Besides, if only for cultural enjoyment, why not spend a 60 to 90 minute refresher course in some of the best material French Literature has to offer? Needless to say, most of these were not written for the stage at all. Going backwards in time, I will start with Hugo and end with some of our contemporaries. Claude Gueux, the title and main character, is a short novel by Victor Hugo, dated 1832 and the companion to Le Dernier Jour dun Condamn. This is the true story of the man who was to become Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, a man condemned to prison for stealing a piece of bread. Both raise basic questions about justice and punishment. Under the cool vaults of the 14

Htel de la Mirande (the most expensive in Avignon), Franois Frapier and his candlelight were directed by Guillaume Dujardin for Mala Noche. The Narrator keeps the diary of the events that will lead our hero to the guillotine, since Gueux is a wretched homeless human being. Mitterand, upon becoming Frances president in 1972, finally abolished the death sentence. Belgium did it in 1918 and the US is still debating. Proust in Search of Time Lost consists of whispered excerpts from the original 27 volumes of the monumental edifice he built. On stage, a mirror, a Tiffany lamp, a gramophone, and a few flowers set the hushed tone. Daniel Legras, directed by Virgil Tanase, was a believable Proust, from child to old man, in his white linen suit, delicate, serene and sober. He helped us get lost in the puzzle of memory, his and ours. It was a treasure chest of useless pages, some very familiar (the linden tea, Albertine in bloom, San Marco) some forgotten (Punch and Judy at the Tuileries, smells and tastes dissolved, the Namethe Place), an exercise in metonymy, more than the sum of its parts. It rekindled a desire to plunge into Proust again. At 34, Kafka considered himself a failure. Bearing the yoke of his inferiority complex, he attempted in all humility to set the record straight in his love/hate relationship with the Father who is to blame, according to him, for giving us perhaps the

most absorbing writer of the century. On stage the huge counter of the Companys store in Prague, and in the background the symbolic Art Deco glass door that will never open. Lettre au Pre is performed by Philippe Labonne, directed by Marcel Bruzat of the Thtre de la Passerelle. Loneliness, pathology, and sincerity mark this psychiatric reading of his own oeuvre, addressing the overwhelming contemporary theme of man on trialfor what? All the above were suffused in darkness. On the other hand, Anne Marie Cellier, who wrote and directed Vincent ou lme bleue wants to convey the inner soul of Van Goghs through splashes of colors. Unloved by women and men, he was caught between his doubles, as there were two other Vincent Van Gogh weighing upon him, a dead brother and his nephew, the son of brother Theo. The production attempts to reach the source of his madness and the inner blue soul. It offers a feminine silhouette suggesting all the women in his life or perhaps his female other, and emphasizes the incredible love of two brothers. Mathieu Lane is a gripping lead, reminding us of the previous incarnations of Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth. I have always been haunted by the language of these imitations. Vincent was Dutch, as Im sure his French accent was, so why cant anyone ever find a Dutch actor ? This one is pure French, while the others were English-speaking. Moving closer to us in time, Alain Timar at his Thtre des Halles resumes his exploration of the oeuvre of Albert Cohen, the Jewish French writer. In O vous, Frres Humains he gives us a moving version of Le Livre de ma Mre (1954), dealing with the love and death of Cohens mother. The admirable actor Paul Camus here gave us his usual best. The style suggests litany. Timar avoided sentimental pathos by using as an echo a companion cellist and alter ego, Stefano Fogher, who supplemented the words with sound. Behind them a set of ten huge abstract canvases intensified the mood. At another venue, The Chne Noir, the delightful Nathalie Roussel, directed by Christophe Correa, packed them with her rendition of Pourquoi jai jet ma grandmre dans le Vieux Port ? (Why I threw my Grandma in the Old Harbor). Actually only poor Grandmas ashes were thrown, since she requested this as a mark of her love for the city of Marseilles. A tribute to colorful Grandma Dolores and her pets, it is really the saga of a childhood in a family of immigrants, living in peace, tolerance and mutual respect through WW I and II. The text was 15

one of many solo pieces by the prolific Serge Valletti, when not writing his popular thrillers. Another childhood piece comes from Belgian Amelie Nothomb, scion of a celebrated family of diplomats, which accounts for her agitated and nomadic itinerary. When she was six, they moved from Japan to Communist China. Children, as Truffaut said, have a tough skin. This one survives and falls madly in love with Elena, the center of the world, and this is the subject of Le Sabotage amoureux (Love as Self sinking/destruction), an epic fairytale of adoring, submissive, masochistic love. The set is a playground of rusty structures, a metaphor of love and war as seen through the imagination of a little girl. The specific blend of humor which is Amelie Nothomb is reenforced by Laurence Vielle, who, directed by Brigitte Baillieux, has managed to reproduce the crisp articulation of Nothomb, a familiar guest on literary talk shows. This is another stone from the inexhaustible quarry of Love, unrequited puppy infatuation. I have saved my two favorites for the last. A Genoux (On my knees) is a true one-man show, subjective, personal, even very autobiographical, the kind I usually dislike unless I feel strong sympathy for the performer. The subject in this case is Fabrizio Rongione, a third generation Italian from Belgium, a hypocondriac loser, totally loveable, suffering from psychosomatic knee pains- Im in pain but not always, or Im in physical pain because I have everything. He is the center of his own universe, the whole circle of seventeen family members and friends surrounding him like a vortex. He is situated in the biggest Italian restaurant in Brussels (350 tables), owned by his parents. He hasnt done badly himself, moving in five years from Rosettas lover to Zno on the silver screen to Bonaparte on stage, in a big expensive production. Watch him rise to stardom, childlike, playful, disturbed. One might call this the Portrait of an Actor as a young Pet. The same goes for George, A Cats Life as written and acted by Laura Benson, a piquant British actress living in Paris with an impressive CV on stage and screen and an adorable Franco-British pidgin dialect. She is not to be missed if you like felines, since she is three in one-Mistress Missy, her daughter and Big Pussy Cat. It is delightful to see her switch from one facet to another as so many disappearing acts, under the carpet, hiding behind the sofa or the bar, and leaping from the window into space. Although, after all, this is about love,

loneliness and death, George never speaks. Let me end on a paradoxical note. When attending LEuphorie perptuelle, adapted by Philippe Honor, directed by the talented Philippe Person, and acted by Pascal Thoreau, you are handed a card to be filled out before entering. Do you consider yourself happy ? Why ? Given three wishes, what would they be? Yes, this is womens magazine stuff, yet by the conclusion of the performance

you realize how complacent we are in our pursuit of happiness. It is a concept totally abstract and meaningless, perhaps like Libert, Egalit, Fraternit ? I am not really concerned about the future of the Festival, next year and after. The powers that be will surely find funding. What will happen to the intermittents is, however, the unanswered question.

Tatiana Stepantchenkos production of LAffaire Elseneur or The Death of Gonzague. Photo: Didier Crasmault

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The Edinburgh Festival

Glenn Loney This summers program schedule for the Edinburgh Festival looked rather slimmer than in past seasons. Not so on the Fringe, where hundreds and hundreds of attractions were on offer. Considering the considerable reductions in government arts subsidies across Europe, I thought that Edinburgh also must be suffering such cuts. Not so, says Festival Director Brian McMaster: In fact, this season has cost more than the last one. Several of the productions we have mounted ourselves, instead of importing them. And completing Wagners Ring has been a major expense. Fortunately, these are long-term investments, for the Ring will enter the repertory of the Scottish Opera. And several of the impressive stage productions are actually co-productions with other theatres. The very unusual Hamlet is already scheduled for four subsequent venues and is a candidate for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It should prove both shocking and popular in other major American venues as well. When the Scottish Opera launched its daunting project of producing a new Ring, a London critic-colleague asked friends: Why are they doing this? Scotland needs a Ring even less than it needs its own Parliament. Attitudes such as this one help explain why the Scots are so insistent on maintaining their own customs and culture, as well as producing their own contributions to the High Arts. London imports are all very well, especially Broadway and West End musicals, but Scotland has also achieved eminence in the Arts and wishes to share that not only with Scots audiences but internationally as well. Fortunately, the Edinburgh International Festival provides just such a showcase for the Scottish Opera and Orchestra, without the expense and difficulty of touring to Tokyo or Toronto. Its distinctive new Ring, just completed this past August with Gtterdmmerung, has been created in stages, beginning with Wagners Das Rheingold in the summer of 2000. Having also seen it develop in, and on, stages, I must admit that my initial reservations about the concept, interpretations, and design have been largely swept away by the power of the larger vision in performance. And the performances seem to have taken on strength and stature as well. Matthew Best was especially strong, yet vulnerable, as Wotan. Anne Masons Fricka made a good match 17 for this willful god. Peter Sidhoms brooding Alberich remained a threatening presence throughout. In Die Walkre, Carsten Stabell, having been slain as Fasolt, returned with renewed strength to become a forbidding foe as Hunding. Jan Kyhle, as a really blond super-hero Siegmund, sang the German text so clearly that every word could be understood, with no loss of vocal power or emotion. Placido Domingo could take lessons. Marie Plette initially looked like a frumpy housewife in a welfare-project, but she grew in stature as the forces arrayed against her closed in. Although Elizabeth Byrnes Brnnhilde seemed too soft in some early passages, she gained magnificent power in her awakening to earthly womanhood. Graham Sanders had no power problems as Siegfried, and his rough country-lad imagesimple and basically goodnatured, as eager for friends as for a quarrelserved him well. Alasdair Elliotts scheming and screaming Mime was comically excellent and rolled with the frequent punches and pushes Siegfried gave him. This Scottish Ring is a very physical production, so the actor/singers cannot just stand in place and vocalized to perfection. Only Erda (Mary Phillips) was allowed somnolence. Gillian Keiths Woodbird, perky in white suit with red accents, was flitting all over the forest. Fafner and Fasolt, strongly sung and acted by Markus Hollop and Carsten Stabell, again made their entrance as heads peering out of eye-sockets of a giant mask on wheels. When Siegfried killed the dragon, a painted cloth with a giant mouth of gaping teeth, not a very good effect, this fabric collapsed to reveal the tux-clad Fafner, affecting in his death agonies. As for the Rhinemaidens (Inka Rinn, Marianne Andersen, and Leah Marian Jones) the idea of costuming them as though theyd just been shopping at Victorias Secret has by now almost become a clich. After Peter Halls naked maids swimming in a pool at Bayreuth, anything now seems possible, even permissible. In fact, I had just seen the Jrgen Flimm Ring at Bayreuth, so comparisons were inevitable. Director Tim Albery and set-designer Hildegard Bechtler obviously could not have been looking at Flimm and designer Erich Wonders plans for the Bayreuth RING, but its interesting how many visual and interpretative resonances there are between

the two Ring Cycles. In fact, some of the Scottish solutions to major scenic problems seem truer to Wagners text and intentions. Certainly the forging of Nothung is more effective in the Scottish Ring. Even the awakening of Brnnhilde seems more emotionally and visually powerful than it does in the sterile majesty of the Bayreuth production. Also interesting was making comparisons between the vocal timbres and qualities of the two casts, both largely excellent. The Scottish cast was ably guided by conductor Richard Armstrong, whose familyname is fort-in-bras in French. He certainly wields his baton with power and subtlety. But then he has an excellent collective instrument in the Operas orchestra. Initially, I though it odd that Wotans interview with Brnnhilde just before the angry arrival of Fricka should take place under what seemed to be a freeway-flyover in a Phillipe Starke Post-Modernist motel-room, with the bathroom door open. This August I realized at last that this enables Wotan to go into the bathroom and throw up when he realizes that Siegmund must die. Of course, theres always that annoying problem about moderndress and modern-environments for productions of classics, in order to make them seem contemporary and relevant. This is especially ticklish in the Ring, for the standard of battle seems to be single-handed combat with swords, pikes, and spears. How about Saturday Night Specials or machine-guns? In a truly PostModernist production, Siegfried could slay the dragon with one burst of a flame-thrower! Modern-dress productions of Hamlet, once a novelty, have become instead something of a clich, but the vision of the Melancholy Dane unveiled at Edinburghs Lyceum Theatre by that innovative Catalan stage-director, Calixto Bieito, is a total astonishment. Like his elemental Edinburgh Festival Life Is a Dream, which also starred George Anton, this electrifying production is a Must for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It may outrage some Traditionalists, but

it is sure to provide a provocative New Look at an Old Master for younger, trendier audiences. This Hamlet, a co-production with the Birmingham Rep, unlike most modernist treatments, is anything but an embarrassment or a simplistic reduction. It is dynamic, ferocious, sexy, stylish, violent, bloody, hilarious, handsome, heartbreaking, and infuriating by turns. After the initial visual shock, it carries the viewer along on its floodtide of energy and emotion. Hamlets college-chum Horatio has been promoted to Lounge Pianist at the Danish Court. Looking altogether too handsome, a cross between George Hamilton and Elvis in a stunning white suit, he tickles the ivories of a gleaming white babygrand-piano. His tunes set the Royal Family dancing, with King Claudius opening the festivities by crooning Hes My Brother into a mike. As he has

Scottish Operas production of Seigfried. Photo: Scottish Opera.

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recently killed his brother to gain both crown and queen, this is only the first of many ironic or bizarre visual and sub-textual commentaries by Bieito. They follow with astonishing impact, outraging some spectators, but delighting most. Karl Daymond is Elsinores matine-idol pianist, but he has also composed the original music that underscores much of the action, as in old silentfilms. But this Hamlet is anything but silent. It is performed with tremendous energy, which sweeps away most momentary objections to Bieitos unusually psycho-sexual interpretations of the characters and situations. Giving the pretty teenie Ophelia advice, her handsome dad gropes her to the point of orgasm: his, not hers. Hamlets confused emotions about his mother even seem to extend to male friends and enemies as well. As for Hamlet in a dress, how else could Bieito provide a Player Queen with a cast of only nine actors? Horatio, aided by the mike, is the Ghost and the Gravedigger as well. Forget about Fortinbras. You can also forget about poor Yoricks skull. Instead, Horatio hands Hamlet a funeral urn filled with ashes. Hamlet sifts them through his fingers, finally finding a red clowns nose, which he rams onto his own, evoking Yoricks comic gambits of long, long ago. Later, Ophelias remains have also been reduced to ashes. A Bardophile near me suggested that Bieito had reduced the entire tragedy to ashes. Bieitos economy in casting, coupled with a deft elision and conflation of the original text, for once has made Shakespeares comment about the two-hours traffic of our stage come out right on the dot. This split-second timing is also made possible by the supercharged emotion with which the actors explore, and even explode each scene, pushing the drama relentlessly forward to its corpse-littered conclusion. This frenzy, sometimes verging on hysteria, is exemplified in George Costigans Claudius. Hes like Ron Leibman in former times: a force of nature, barely held in control. Initially, he illustrates his every utterance with stock gestures, as though hed studied Public Speaking at nightschool. Frustrated in his prayers, he hacks his way through a cake of ice on the cocktail cart. The icepick is later given to Laertes (Lex Shrapnel) to kill Hamlet. Although George Antons Hamlet looks older than anyone on stage, aside from Rupert Frazers Polonius, who is a dashing middle-aged courtier, his total immersion in the role commands attention. And his soliloquies are usually treated 19

with a thoughtfulness not accorded much of the text. Diane Fletcher is a lovely Gertrude, with Rachel Pickups dithering Ophelia hoping for her first album. Matthew Douglas and Nicholas Aaron as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a really forceful team of almost savage saboteurs, undermining Hamlet at every turn. This show should be easy to tour for, aside from the white baby-grand-piano, the set is largely composed of stepped platforms featuring four rows of modern armchairs. IKEA could have designed it, instead of Ariane Isabell Ufried and Rifail Ajdarpasic. Backing this is a metal scaffold with a huge electric sign: PALACE. What could be easier to import, and even tour America! Strictly Dandia is an engaging little show, nothing like the West Ends big Bollywood hit, Bombay Dreams. Some festival spectators seemed to have expected just that, however. So some seats were empty after the interval of this sold-out playwith-music. There might be the seeds of a Broadway musical in Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smiths charmingif slightly amateurishplay-with-music. At its core is the possibly doomed love of a Hindu girl of good family for a slim, London Indian slang for a Muslim. This is not exactly another West Side Story, where the parents of the gang-members are never seen, nor is it a clone of Romeo and Juliet, for it closes, not with tragedy, but with a festival of inter-racial and intercaste harmony, with a double-wedding on the horizon. Dandias and Garbas are traditional circle dances of Gujarati Hindus, many of whom emigrated to London from East Africa, where they had felt increasingly threatened. And there have been waves of Hindu immigration from India as well, especially after the Partition of India and Pakistan. These special dances are central to the Gujaratis religious identity, but they are hardly known in Britain outside Hindu communities. Unlike the Punjabi Bhangara, already popularized in Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham, the ritual and repetitive nature of Garbas and Dandias dont make for effective show-biz choreography. Recognizing that visual limitation even on the community level, Prema Ghedia, played by playwright Sudha Bhuchar, as a leading light in this small London Hindu social world, hosts an annual Dandia Contest, with King and Queen crowns for the best and most innovative couple. Some talented aspirants have been coached by a young man whose father insists he give up dance and join him at his

news-stand. There is more than a whiff of A Chorus Line here. Although the new-found popularity of Bollywood films in the West has introduced both Britons and Americans to distinctive customs and cultures of India, there is obviously much that is not known about the daily lives of transplanted Hindus, Sikhs, and Pakistanis on both sides of the Atlantic. Strictly Dandia offers a charming introduction to that otherwise closed world. Not only are the Hindus deeply mistrustful of Muslims, remembering the horrors of the Partition and the fact that Pakistan has the atom-bomb, but the distinctions of the caste-system are also alive and well in London and other immigrant communities. Even Hindus who are not Gujaratis may be looked down on. All comes relatively right in the end, as the lovely Preethi Ghedia, threatened with an arranged marriage, is able to win the dance contest with her Muslim partner and love, Raza Khan. The attractive dancing duo are played by Fiona Wade and Paul Tilley. Previously, it would have been unthinkable even to allow a Muslim to be present at such an event, let alone participate in it. Fortunately for the Young Lovers, Raza has just protected the Hindu news-agent from a vicious attack. This act of

courage and generosity cannot be ignored, and it helps to set changes of cultural attitudes in motion. Unfortunately for the dynamics of the show, it happens off-stage. It is merely reported. What a choreography such a street-fight might make! But it is part of the problem of this very well-intentioned entertainment that the mechanics of the playwriting are not sufficient to the needs of the conflicts. Add to that the problems of actors talking too softly, and in Asian accents unfamiliar to most audiences, making it difficult to follow what is going on. Some deft re-writing and directing would certainly help. Sudha Bhuchar as co-playwright already has considerable credits with the BBC. And for the Tamasha Theatre, which co-produced this show with the Lyric Hammersmith, she has written Balti Kings and Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral. So both she and her Tamasha colleague, Kristine Landon-Smith, are creative talents to watch. This interesting show could certainly have another and more dynamic life beyond its current format. But any choreographer/director who believes he or she can transform it into either A Chorus Line or West Side Story should pay heed to its Anglo-Asian origins and its initial creators.

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The 2003 Berlin Theatertreffen

Marvin Carlson The dominance of Frank Castorf among German theatre directors was again confirmed at this years Theatertreffen when two productions by Berlins leading director were selected for the annual Theatertreffen out of the ten that a panel of theatre scholars and critics selected as the most outstanding in German-speaking countries during the previous year. Castorf, who has for the past decade directed Berlins popular Volksbhne, and for eight of those ten years (and every year since 1995) has been represented in by a production in the Theatertreffen. The two productions this year were extremely different in over-all approach, but both were unmistakable examples of the Castorf style, in directing, acting, sound, and visual design. As a pair of productions also they reflected the double focus of Castorfs recent work, one looking east, to current Russia, the other west, to America, both of whom Castorf sees as deeply troubled cultures, locked in the grip of a soul-destroying consumerism and the burdens of a debilitating past. First came the new Russian-based work, Der Meister und Margarita, Castorfs stage version of the Russian satirical fantasy by Mikail Bulgakov. This production concludes a monumental trilogy of stage adaptations of major Russian novels by the directors, each part of which has been a central feature of the May theatre festival. Each was also a coproduction of the spring Festwochen in Vienna, and there also took a central position. The first two productions were adaptations from Dostoevsky, Dmonen in 1999 and Erniedrigte und Beleidigte in 2001 (See WES 12:3 and 14:3). For each of these productions Castorf and his designer Bert Neumann have created a complex setting, with multiple playing areas, some of which can only be seen by the audience on onstage video or film screens, a feature that has become one of the hallmarks of Castorfs recent work. Der Meister und Margarita carries this mixture of onstage and offstage action, of live action, video and flim, much further, however, than the previous two adaptations, resulting in a work in which the majority of the action is wholly or partly mediated through video or

Frank Castorfs production of Der Meister und Margarita. Photo: courtesy Volksbhne

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film. The complexity of this filmic mediation is almost beyond description. The stage is basically made up of a series of five rooms, lined up across the stage facing the audience and making up a single structure. Behind them the surrounding cyclorama is hung with glittering material like the tinseled stage curtains in a cheap nightclub or cabaret. The first room to the left contains a small bar, on which actors can sit facing the audience across the bar, and where most of the plays philosophical and political discussions take place, over drinks. At the rear of this space is a large glass fronted cooling unit containing drinks and two doors that lead offstage into what we later discover is a kind of psychiatric clinic. The next room is a kind of kitchen for the bar, with a working cooking surface between the two where actual food is prepared and cooked (another common device in Castorfs recent work). On a plexiglass screen that serves as a kind of fourth wall for these two bar spaces there is an often illuminated neon sign that boldly proclaims the central motif of Bulgakovs novel: I want to believe. The middle room is at first empty, but soon filled with a stack of chairs brought in by Voland (Herny Hbchen) who first presents himself sitting upon them like an improvised and extremely unstable throne. His real identity is soon revealed as he leaves the throne and comes down to the footlights for a spirited rendering (in English) of Sympathy for the Devil. beginning Let me introduce myself . . . The next room contains a sofa, the location for a number of rough and tumble gatherings of many of the company, and the final room contains an only infrequently used pool table. Beyond this final room, on the apparent exterior of this linear building, stairs lead upward to a room located above the pool table room. This is apparently the private apartment of Margarita, into which we can see only through a window downstage, but which later in the production will be often revealed to us through video cameras within the room. Next to this mostly concealed room is a large screen, placed above the central rooms below and itself as large as any of these rooms. This screen is almost never blank. At the opening of the evening it serves as an electronic billboard blinking continuously in large letters SEX KINO supplemented with other blinking or ribbon information such as totally air-conditioned. When the production begins, this screen provides almost continual live video and film clips related to and sometimes doubling live action elsewhere on the stage. There 22

is almost never a moment when this filmic action ceases, although there are often long sequences in which it is the only action provided. Thus the major form of presentation is mediatized, and Der Meister und Margarita is one of the most extreme and complicated experiments with the mixing of live action and media that Castorf has so far undertaken. Simply reporting the varieties of this experimentation is a formidable task. On the simplest level, there are actual film clips, contemporary (current street scenes in Moscow), historical (Stalin appearing to cheering crowds), or archival (buildings being destroyed by controlled explosions, or establishing shots of deserts, or famous tourist locations such as Niagra Falls or the Golden Gate bridge). However these are often overlaid electronically with other images, live or filmed, so that, for example, the various supernatural characters in the production are seen at one point all flying toward us through the air in a group like performing aerialists who have just jumped from a plane and cluster together in space before separating and opening parachutes, all this superimposed upon some of the touristic images just mentioned. Another such blended image despicts the key moment in the novel when the skeptical Berlioz (Joachim Tomaschewsky) literally loses his head as the Devil had predicted. This surrealistic moment, which in the novel involves the disembodied head, victim of a streetcar accident, rolling across the room, is shown on stage by a film of a (Moscow?) street, which seems almost normal until suddenly a street car bears down upon the camera, which is apparently placed in the middle of the tracks, so that the car will run over it. As this happens the screen turns black with a loud crash and the imposed image of Berlioz head bobs about on the screen. The other major filmic material is several long sequences which depict the revisionist life of Pontius Pilate which in Bulgakovs original are parts a failed and destroyed novel on that subject by The Master, here portrayed by one of the leading actors of the German stage, Martin Wuttke, whose performance of Arturo Ui, still in repertoire at the Berliner Ensemble, has become almost legendary. Wuttke also appears in the Pilate film, which is done as a kind of parody of traditional Hollywood Biblical epics, as Pilate himself, strolling about pseudo-Palestinian landscapes in an ill-fitting toga, wearing modern sunglasses and chain smoking cigarettes. The other major figures in the film are Judas von Kirjath, played by Hendrik Arnst, who in

Frank Castorfs production of Der Meister und Margarita. Photo: courtesy Volksbhne

the play proper appears as the Cat Behemoth, the bosom companion of Hbchens devil, and Jeschua Ha-Nozri, played by Kurt Naumann, who elsewhere in the play is Rjuchin, the patient in a lunatic subplot involving his psychiatric treatment by a demented Lacanian psychoanalyis, Docot Stravinski, played by Bernhard Schtz. Even more common, and far more complicated, than these filmic sequences, however, are those involving live video. A track for a moving video camera runs completely around the setting, onstage and off, and although the video crew occasionally rolls their equipment along this track in full view of the audience, filming onstage action that we simultaneously view on the large screen rather in the manner of a large rock concert, far more often what we see on the screen is live action taking place somewhere backstage. The essentially offstage room of Margarita has already been mentioned, and there are several long sequences late in the production that take place here, partly and rather agitatedly recorded on a hand-held video camera within the room itself, so that the audience sees fragments of the action (parts of bodies, sometimes of the actors, 23

sometimes of the video crew itself) through the window, and other fragments picked up by the camera on the large screen. At the rear of the bar there is an entrance into the entirely offstage clinic of Doctor Strawinski, the most important elements of which are a small clinic bedroom and adjoining shower. Although, unlike Margaritas room, we have no direct visual access to any of this space, the fact that it opens directly into the bar means that characters entering and leaving the space can be seen both live and on video as they go through the door, reinforcing the audience awareness of simultaneous action. Patient Rjuchin is often seen cowering and suffering in the clinic bedroom and in one hilarious sequence is subjected to an embarrassing neo-Freudian interview from Doctor Strawinski who joins him, both of them nude, in the clinic bed. The clinic shower, usually viewed from an overhead camera (possibly another of the quotations Castorf and other German directors love to make of Hitchcocks Psycho) provides other nude sequences in which nurses, doctors, and patients, cover themselves and each other with water, mud, or blood. Finally, there is an entire offstage setting,

seen only on video cameras until very late in the production. This is an ersatz creation of a neutral city (Moscow?) consisting of large dark blocks perhaps four feet high and five to six feet long covered with illuminated rectangles representing windows. This setting provides both the foreground and background for a number of sequences early in the production, building to one memorable moment when The Master and Voland, after a chase through the buildings, climb up on two of the taller ones and stand there, beating their breasts in the manner of King Kong. Only once is this complex and often used acting area directly revealed to the audience. Late in the evening the rear walls of the sofa and pool table area rise up to show us a bit of this ersatz city, offering a bit of ersatz spectacle as one of the buildings bursts into flame and the actors dance about it in a kind of Walpurgisnacht celebration. Even the revelation of this space is achieved with a complex layering of visual elements. The back wall of the rooms that raises to reveal the false city does not simply lift up, but swings up and back, like an automatic garage door, and since its front is mirrored, it thus creates a mirrored surface looking directly down at the floor but 7-8 feet above it. A number of the major actors, headed by The Master and Voland, then lie down on their backs on the floor beneath the mirror, and perform an acrobatic chorus line, recorded by video cameras looking up into the mirror so that they seem on the video screen to be dancing in space. Since the audience can see both the effect and simultaneously how it is being done, the moment is both profoundly disorienting and highly theatrical. In this hall of theatrical and filmic mirrors it seems most appropriate that the video crew, left on stage at the end, swings their camera outward, presenting a image from the rear of the backs of the bowing actors taking their repeated curtain calls with, beyond them, the cheering audience, an image reflected back to us, as always, from the large screen floating high above the stage. The second Castorf production looked to America: ONeills monumental Mourning Becomes Electra, first presented in Zurich. It might be considered part of an American trilogy, parallel to the Russian one, beginning with his adaptation in 2001 of A Streetcar Named Desire (see WES 15:2, Spring, 2003) and to continue with another Williams this spring in Vienna. Mourning Becomes Electra (somewhat oddly translated as Trauer muss Elektra tragenElectra must bear mourning) was 24

unmistakably a Castorf production. All the hallmarks of the Castorf style were abundantly present-the sudden shifts from a quiet, even flat delivery of lines to hysterical outbursts of screaming and violent physicality (Ezra and Christine at one point actually knock out the back wall of their bedroom in a frenzied encounter), actors sometimes breaking into dance or song, the occasional interpellation into the text of material from other works (such as Heiner Muellers Der Auftrug), the revolving, multi-room setting by Bert Neumann with its hidden crannies revealed by a television monitor, and the musical score by Castorfs usual musical director, Sir Henry, a often inspired continual presence accompanying a commenting upon the action with snatches of popular song, commercial advertising, anti-war music, and snatches of recorded speech from Eisenhower condemning the military industrial complex to Madeline Albright on Milosovic as a force of evil, to George Bush on the role of America as moral leader of the world. The score is among Sir Henrys most perfectly adapted to the production, as is Neumanns setting. The Mannon mansion is much reduced in size and pretension to something closer to a white trash haven than to the temple-like retreat of ONeills quasi-aristocrats (the action is moved, somewhat inexplicably, to rural Louisiana). Here is a stark white three room one story bungalow with an American flag hanging prominently over the center of its modest front porch, and in the rear a small garden lit by eerie green neon lights in which roam two live chickens and which serves as a kind a Sam Shepard style symbolic territory for the troubled and repressed personal and national memories of the Mammons, the scene of the most violent confrontations, the most explicit and unnatural sexual couplings, male anal rape being the most common. A 1932 quotation from ONeill begins the program: Todays author must reveal the roots of the sickness of our times, the death of the old god and the failure of knowledge and materialism to bring about something new and emancipating. Clearly Castorf feels sympathetic to this project, and certainly the sickness of contemporary America is densely developed, with Adam Brandt recalling the Wild West in his cowboy costume, Ezra Mammon the returned and deeply troubled Vietnam veteran (both played by Castorfs brilliant leading actor Bernhard Schtz), Peter Niles (Oliver Mallison) as a simpleminded sybarite who displays himself in a Chippendale style costume, Orin (Marc

Frank Castorfs production of Mourning Becomes Electra. Photo: courtesy Volksbhne

Hosemann) as a psychotic, self-loathing GI baby. Christine (Sylvana Krappatsch) attempts to present a model of feminine allure (derived perhaps from the soap operas which along with baseball games form the main fare available on the family TV set, which runs continually, even during the single intermission), but her flowing red gown, towering red heeled shoes, and long flowing red wig make her instead a grotesque parody of flashy seductiveness. Lavinia (Babiana Beglau) comes more and more to resemble her, until at her final exit, delivered in a mock Sarah Bernhardt style that is both amusing and chilling, she has become almost indistinguishable from her mother. Aniesse Cabeia as Orins sometime love object Hazel Niles and Rosa Galina as the vaguely choric Minnie bear, rather inadequately, the heavy burden of suggesting some of the many rejected others that haunt American history. Minnie is clearly Asiatic, perhaps Vietnamese, and speaks with so heavy an accent that she often cannot be understood. Cabeia portrays an even stranger figure. She is an attractive black woman who wears 25

an obviously false blond wig who speaks mostly Spanish, and in the latter part of the play introduces Voodoo ceremonies to suggest the haunting of the house. Like Galina, she has, or at least displays, almost none of the vocal or physical ability needed to execute a Castorf production and it is difficult to tell whether this awkwardness is accidental or an attempt to exclude them from the Mammon world. Despite the enormous skill of the leading actors, and the striking set and score, I found this production curiously flat, almost as if after the baroque excesses of Meister und Margarita Castorf was seeking something that (for him) was much closer to minimalism. Whole scenes were played in fairly conventional style, which after the usual fireworks of flourishes of Castorf, seemed predictable and ordinary. Siggi Schwientek, with his interminable monologues and his uninspired guitar and vocal rendition of Shenandoah, could have come out of a quite traditional and not very interesting production of this play, and by the end of the four hour evening he had become little better than a bore.

The ambition of this production was stimulating, as Castorf invariably is, and certain moments brilliant, but in comparison with Castorfs earlier and far more imaginative Streetcar, I found this new American exploration disappointing. The Theatertreffens second production, Lessings classic Emilia Galotti, could almost have been selected as a conscious contrast to the technological extravaganza of Castorfs Meister und Margarita. Although far from a traditional performance of the play (which would in any case be unthinkable in the innovation-oriented atmosphere of the Theatertreffen) this production, from the Vienna Burgtheater, was as cool, smooth, and elegant, as Castorfs was spiny, irregular, and baroque. It was also, not surprisingly, far more faithful to the original text, at least in the words spoken, if not in their physical realization. While last years Theatertreffen, whether by conscious design or not, stressed emerging young directors (See WES, Fall, 2002), this years featured more well-established figures. Andrea Breth, the director of Emilia Galotti, like Castorf gained national recognition in the late 1980s, she chosen director of the year by

Theater Heute in 1985. From 1992 to 1997 she was artistic director of the major theatre in West Berlin, the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz, where her productions of Chekhov and other classic authors gained much praise. Her 1993 Hedda Gabler toured internationally, providing, in Toronto, her first North American appearance. Since 1999 she has directed regularly at the Burgtheater. Breths work in general is characterized by large open, light-filled abstract or geometric spaces, utilizing a kind of simplified realism. This is certainly true of the current Emilia Galotti, created by Breths usual designer, Annette Murschetz. The first and last settings, in the Princes palace, have as a background white curtains, apparently covering panoramic windows, stretching across the entire upstage. At the opening, a simple but elegant wooden wall extends out from the left wings about halfway upstage and about one-third of the way onto the stage. In front of it sits a wooden console containing only a radio/record player. The only other furnishings are two boxy yellow 1930-style arm chairs up center. For the final scene, an identical wooden screen is used stage right with the same curtained

Andrea Breths production of Emilia Galotti. Photo: courtesy Vienna Burgtheater

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background, and scattered about the stage are seven of these same identical yellow chairs, along with about ten simple white table lamps sitting spaced among them on the floor. The intervening setting, in the Galotti home, is even simpler, dark curtains surrounding a section of wall containing a door and decorated with heavy, dark purple striped wallpaper that is color coded to the Galotti family costumes. The action has been kept in Italy (the radio in the first act has muted Italian programming and the brigand Angelo (Nicholas Ofczarek) is a caricatured Mafioso type, with a sleek dark suit and shirt and a shocking pink tie. The elegant costumes are designed by Dagmar Niefind, and very much capture the feeling a 1930s aristocratic elegance in the tailored suit of the Machivellian councilor Marinelli (Roland Koch), the white ensembles (first lounging pajamas and then a crisp suit) of the unshaven, decadent Prince (Sven-Eric Bechtolf) and perhaps most strikingly, in the glittering ensemble of the seductive Countess Orsina (Andrea Clausen). The smooth and elegant style, strongly suggesting the tradition of salon comedy, but with a hidden violence that occasionally surfaced, was remarked upon by all reviewers. The Sddeutsche Zeitung headed its review Boulevarddmmerung while the Allegemeine Zeitung evoked the spirit of Feydeau. Actually, the production seemed to me much more in the spirit of Noel Coward than of French farce, especially in the figures of the world-weary Prince and the elegant Countess Orsina, whose subtle and nuanced performance of her single extended scene was clearly one of the most memorable parts of the evening. Indeed Johanna Wokalek, in the title role, was rather overshadowed by the theatrically more interesting and more powerfully performed roles of the Countess and Emilias mother, performed by Elisabeth Orth. Nevertheless, the famous acting ability of the Burgtheater ensemble was on powerful display here, without a weak link and extending from the major roles down to the delightful butler in the Princes home, played by Roland Kenda, who simultaneously fulfills his household functions with impeccable precision and provides a silent disapproving witness to the unpleasant events which clearly are a regular feature of life in the Gonzaga household. Although Thomas Ostermeier came to prominence a few years later than Castorf and Breth, in the mid-1990s, he is now, like Castorf, one of Berlins leading directors. He gained his reputation at the now destroyed experimental stage 27

attached to the Deutsches Theater, the Baracke, primarily with the work of the British neo-naturalists from the Royal Court theatre, with which the Baracke established a close relationship. In 1999 Ostermeier became director of the Schaubhne, the major theatre in West Berlin, formerly directed by Breth. His production of Dantons Death in 2001 was a highlight of the Avignon Festival and he was invited in 2002 to become an Associate Artist with the Festival. The selection of Ostermeiers Nora (A Doll House) for the 2003 Theatertreffen was thus another choice of another well-established director, but Nora is a production that has aroused a good deal of critical comment and a certain amount of controversy. The new translation, by Hinrich SchmidtHenkel, is fairly faithful to Ibsen, but Ostermeier takes considerable liberties with it, cutting and adding material as well as making some fairly serious changes in the text. The central concept of the Ostermeier production is to set the play in contemporary society, to make the Helmers a nouveau riche young couple of the twenty-first century. The production is thus essentially cast in the traditional mode of detailed realism, but since all of the details are taken from contemporary culture, the result is a staging that becomes as radical a departure from conventional Ibsen as the more abstract and expressionistic approaches of directors like Castorf. The children play with Star Wars light swords and electronic games and Nora late in the play refers to herself as a Barbie-Doll. Her Tarantella costume becomes that of the popular computer game heroine Lara Croft, and her frantic dance a punk performance set to blaring hard rock music from the console. Torvald, as a rising young bank manager, is equipped with all the expected tools of his trade. His conversations with Nora are frequently interrupted by beeping from his pager or muttered conversations on his cell phone, and his wife must compete for his attention with his laptop computer. The only time she or the children seem to receive his full attention is when he is taking pictures of them with his miniaturized digital camera, and indeed when Nora tries desperately to gain his attention before the party, posing for this camera is one of her most effective strategies. Thus a veil of contemporary technology provides an effective extra dimension to the communication barrier between the Helmers. Technical equipment is by no means the only way in which the twenty-first century Helmers celebrate their rising status in the world of capital-

ism. Their lavish apartment, by designer Jan Pappelbaum, could provide illustrations for a magazine on contemporary interior design. At the lowest level is an entry hall with coat closet, and a side opening to the back stairs, then a few steps lead up the apartments main level, with a small sofa to the left and to the right a sunken living area dominated by two elegant Mies van der Rohe style armchairs. Behind this is a huge tank with tropical fish, essentially making up the back wall of this space. Beside the tank, stairs lead up to a third level, with the door to the childrens room at one side of it and an elegant liquor cabinet and music console at the rear, surmounted by a huge Kandinsky-style painting. More stairs lead upward to a small balcony and the door leading to Torvalds offstage study. Sliding glass doors separate most of these living areas. This elegant and elaborate setting is built on a turntable, which moves from scene to scene to provide different perspectives, but, unlike the Castorf turntable, does not hide other detailed scenery behind it. Occasionally the turntable will revolve completely (mostly between acts), and we see behind it a normal backstage, with the scaffolding supporting escape stairs and the unadorned rear of the stage flats. On this basically blank area, however, as the

set continues to turn, are projected images from the digital photographs Torvald keeps taking of Nora and the children. Aside from its strikingly contemporary setting, the production probably most surprises its audiences from the outset by the youth of its characters. Of course Nora and Torvald are among Ibsens younger couples, but Torvald usually seems about ready to sink into comfortable middle age. Here, however, everyone is young, surely still in their twenties, even Ibsens old nurse, Anne-Marie, here converted into a bouncy dark-skinned au pair girl, amusingly played by Agnes Lampkin. This youth gives to all the relationships in the play a kind of adolescent exuberance and sexual undertone. There is a distinct sexual edge not only to Krogstads relationship with Christine but also to his with Nora, and their conversation about suicide actually becomes disturbingly intimate. Dr. Ranks disease, though not named, is clearly AIDS, and he blames it not on his father but on his own casual affairs. The Zurich theatre has in recent years become a major contributor to the German theatre scene, in part because of the appointment of Christoph Marthaler as Intendant but also due to the work of the Stefan Puchner, who has been associat-

Thomas Ostermeiers production of Nora. Photo: courtesy Thomas Ostermeier

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Stefan Puchners production of Richard III. Photo: Zurich Schauspielhaus

ed with the Schauspielhaus Zurich since the year 2000/01 and whose Three Sisters, the final play in his Chekhov trilogy, was invited to the Theatertreffen last year (see WES 14:3, fall, 2002). One of the most distinctive features of Puchers Chekhov was his extensive use of video sequences, and although this years Richard III contained a few similar sequences (most notably in an opening video projected on the theatres iron curtain showing Richard receiving a bouquet of flowers from a young girl and a later sequence which, rather like a sequence in Three Sisters, showed individual shots of Margaret, Anne, and the Duchess of York in contemporary settings) they were far less central to the visual scheme of the current production. Although the setting (by Barbara Ehnes) included a long flower-walk out into the audience that was used fairly frequently by Richard and at the end by Richmond, most of the settings were shallow, suggesting a relief stage, either in front of the iron curtain of the opening (for the early scene between Richard and Clarence, for example), or in front of a more conventional soft red act curtain 29

behind it (in front of which the Lady Anne scene was played), or, most commonly, against an elaborate interior baroque facade, with a series of openings in it, each large enough to accommodate a single actor. The major openings were a row of five curtained and arched niches in which actors could appear like a row of statues. Between these niches were panels each containing a bas-relief of a snakedragon, all of which breathed out smoke and showed glowing red eyes during the curse by Queen Margaret (Nikola Weisse). These niches were raised about four feet from the ground, and below them were three oblong niches, like sleeping bunks on a train or, more likely, burial niches in the walls of a crypt. Three similar niches were also in the wall above the tall statue niches in the center. A number of scenes were played with characters lying in these niches, sometimes as if in actual beds, as when Hastings (Peter Brombacher) is warned by Stanley (Ludwig Boettger) speaking from a neighboring niche, and sometimes simply to suggest a slightly different space, as when Richard lies in the lower center niche, as if retiring from the world, as

Michael Thalheimers production of Liebelei. Photo: courtesy Deutsches Theater

Buckingham and the Lord Mayor plead with him to assume the crown. The area containing the statue niches can also be removed, leaving an open space behind which actors can appear as if seated together at a table. Richards first scene with the young princes and the scene in which he denounces Hastings, for example, are played in this space. The other major performance space is used primarily in the fourth act, another, deeper facade, covered (as in the floor) with rose designs, and with a large box-like opening serving as a kind of interior stage. In this box a white lounge chair serves as a throne, in which Richard can never become comfortable, and at the rear is a door which is primarily associated with Tyrrel and his dark deeds. On either side of the door a niche contains disturbingly lifelike waxen heads, as if Richard is keeping parts of his victims on display. Some of the directorial choices were striking, but others seemed whimsical, arbitrary, and even inappropriate. The mourning scene of the three queens was played as an Oscar-Wilde style tea scene, an amusing conceit but one which seriously eroded the elegiac effect of the scene. The ghosts 30

who appear to Richard and Richmond were all (except Anne) dressed in heavy suits of armor which made them appear heavy, awkward, and faintly ridiculous. Such problems however, were overshadowed by an excellent cast, headed by Robert Hunger-Buehler as Richard, whose vocal range was extraordinary, and who played Richard as a always aware of playing a role, even that of the deformed hunchback, which he could move into and out of at will. Jean-Pierre Cornu supported him ably as Buckingham. Every Theatertreffen naturally omits some productions that many feel should certainly have been included, and a notable example last year was the Emilia Galotti of Michael Thalheimer, which is still playing to sold-out houses in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. This year, however, Thalheimers production of Arthur Schnitzlers Liebelei from Hamburg was selected, and although I frankly thought it less brilliant than the Emilia Galotti, still in a class by itself, it was an impressive offering in a quite similar style. Thalheimer is widely credited with introducing a new style of the German stage, far removed from the baroque extravaganzas of, for

example, Chekhov. His settings are simple and highly formal, usually stripped of both furniture and decoration. Scripts too are severely cut, and the actors move little, often directly facing the audience and either delivering lines with little inflection or with intense emotion. Thalheimer, most German critics agree, concentrates on the core of a play, the essence of its relationships. Liebelei begins, as is common in contemporary German theatre, with projected images, here huge smiling faces of each of the four young people at the center of the play, each image blending into the next, while the productions theme music, the Tindersticks soft rock Trouble Every Day plays in the background. One after another, the four young people themselves appear through slots in the screen and gently move with the music, four downstage shadow figures. When the screen rises it reveals a typical Thalheimer setting (designed by Henrik Ahr), polished side walls that extend far upstage, but not quite to a terminal wall so that entrances are left at their ends. Nothing else. In this void the actors present their scenes, often standing almost unmoving. This normal stillness gives great power to the occasional moments of close or violent contact, as in the scene when Fritz (Hans Loew) taking his leave of Christine (Maren Eggert), tries awkwardly to relate to her physically, just as the normal pattern of quiet uninflected speech gives great power to the occasional sudden violent outbursts, as when Christine launches into a diatribe against men. On some occasions, the actors present their speeches with a rapidity that demands considerable skill in enunciation, suggesting the total vacuity, transparency, and rote quality of this discourse. At other times lines are delivered explosively, with enormous emotional weight behind them. At still others, as the characters literally search for the proper expression, they are delivered haltingly, with much pausing and repetition. A striking example of this is Christines fathers (Helmut Mooshammer) heartbreaking attempt to provide her with a happier vision of life near the end. In a typical Thalheimer presentation, he stands center stage, facing the audience directly, far from Christine, who sags against the wall down right, and works his way agonizingly through a lengthy speech, with much pausing and repeated Ja.Ja.Ja.Um..Um..Um. At the end, the screen again falls and Christine pushes through it, leaving the world of the others and appearing again as a shadow, her arms raised in a gesture used throughout the production to suggest 31

the combined hope for love and desperate supplication of these lost youths. Ibsen holds pride of place in the recent history of the Theatertreffen, with one or more productions in eight of the last ten festivals. Shakespeare comes second, represented in six, and Chekhov third, in five. This year, in addition, Ibsen was represented by two productions of the same play, A Doll House, which has happened only five times in the forty year history of the Theatertreffen (another of these five also being an Ibsen play, with two productions of Hedda Gabler in 1977). This privileging of Ibsen may not however be cause for rejoicing among Ibsens more devoted followers, as, in the director-oriented or deconstructive German theatre of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, what is presented is often very far from the original. Often I have been extremely impressed by the daring and brilliance of these innovations, but I have also found them sometimes to be merely whimsical, distracting, or outright foolish. Both of the 2003 Noras, I felt, introduced serious problems with their innovations, although I must admit I enjoyed a number of the admittedly bizarre changes in the Ostermeier adaptation, and while I personally found Stephan Kimmings Nora, from the Hamburg Thalia theatre, full of choices that seemed to me both arbitrary and ineffective, the German reviewers unanimously considered it an outstanding production, several of them calling it the best production of the Festival. First of all, Kimming begins with an assumption very similar to that of Ostermeier, and to my mind not at all compatible with the play. In both productions the Helmers are contemporary yuppies who have recently moved into enormously expensive apartments, so extreme in their furnishings as to be essentially parodies of contemporary nouveau riche taste. Torvalds expressed concern to Nora about too much spending before he has moved into his new position therefore makes no sense and this passage was, I believe, cut from both versions. Even so, the extreme and bizarre settings in both productions provides a marvelous opportunity for two designers to display their scenic imagination (Kimmings designer is Katja Hass). Kimming makes even more of a point of this. Ostermeiers Helmers have settled into their high-tech mansion, but Kimmings have just moved in, with the apartment still not even furnished. They can thus scarcely find their way around the apartment (especially since its layout makes little sense in either dramatic

or domestic terms). An entry buzzer/phone is next to a large sliding door right that gives way to some sort of foyer, but when this door is closed (as Nora closes it once against Krogstad), the person in the foyer can simply (as Krogstad does) walk a few steps upstage and come in an alternate door. On the left, various doors led confusingly to most of the other rooms in the apartment and this wall also contains a Murphy bed which may or may not be the main bed in the apartment. It is lowered from time to time, primarily to provide a place for someone to sit, as the only other furnishings in this huge room are two small symmetrical settees tucked away far down right and left at the base of the proscenium. The climactic scene in the play, the confrontation between Nora and Torvald, is played entirely with both actors seated on this back with their backs full to the audience, a choice the critic of the Tagespiegel considered brilliant. Much of their conversation would have been lost entirely except here and throughout the play all the actors are miked, a

common enough practice in New York, but rarer in major German theatres, and here hailed as an innovation that gave a film-like realistic intensity to the production. One wonders if this innovation will continue to prove so exciting if it becomes as common in Berlin as it is in New York. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of this Helmer apartment is a large bulge in the floor, about two feet high, running from the footlights upstage to the rear wall. Nora asks Torvald about it early in the production and he responds that the previous tenant was a surfer, who wanted an artificial wave. There is then a faintly amusing sequence as Nora checks it out, balancing on the wave and sliding down its sloping back side. It is a weak joke at best, with no relation to anything else in the play, and yet the wave is a permanent part of the set, upon or over which everyone must step all evening. Scarcely better is the other most prominent item in the setting. The upstage wall is almost entirely glass, looking out onto an open patio surrounded by high walls

Stephan Kimmings production of Nora. Photo: Thalia Theater

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and containing two simple white chairs, a planting, and most prominently, a large gymnasium-style punching bag. After her first encounter with Krogstad (Stephan Schad), the furious Nora (Susanne Wolff) rushes out to the patio, kicks the gravel and takes out her aggression on the punching bag, a mildly amusing but hardly brilliant choice. The bag is however never used again, although during the second act Torvald (Norman Hacker) gives Nora a mechanical toy which is a rabbit punching a similar bag. At the end of the second act, before the single intermission, Nora punches this rabbit as it punches the bag, which we are perhaps to interpret as more evidence of misplaced aggression. The emotionally charged but often underplayed performances were highly praised by the Berlin critics, especially the two leads and Victoria Trauttmansdorff as Mrs. Linde, described in one review as a somnabulistic fairy, with which I would agree, although not in the tone of praise the reviewer intended. Christoph Bantzer was genially seedy as Dr. Rank, although clearly a full generation older than the Helmers, which made their friendship seem a bit odd. In his final scene he borrowed a CD from Torvald instead of a cigar, and slipped away without asking for a light. Stephad Schad provided an adequate, but rather colorless Krogstad. No children were listed in the program, and I assumed they had been cut, but a boy and girl did make one appearance, not in Ibsens text. In the final act Krogstad and Mrs. Linde concluded their scene with a passionate embrace out on the patio, where they were caught in embarrassment by these two observing children, whom apparently Mrs. Linde was baby-sitting. An amusing moment, but like many others, at least in my minority opinion, contributing little to the production as a whole. Usually one or two productions in the Theatertreffen are presented not in large houses but in smaller experimental spaces like the Sophiensaele, which hosted this years Zeit zu Lieben Zeit zu Sterben (Time to Love, Time to Die), a new play from Hamburg directed by Armin Petras and written by Fritz Kater. The director and author, frequent collaborators, are generally assumed to be the same person, although the program lists quite different biographies for them, and exactly which part of which biography, both involving youthful years in East Germany, with occasional excursions into the West, in fact truly represents Petras/Kater is a matter of some speculation. Zeit zu Lieben is the second play of a trilogy on Katers generation, born 33

in the mid-sixties and so spending childhood and youth in a divided Germany, then adulthood after the Wende in 1989. First came the 2001 Fight City, Vineta, the story of a boxer who returns from East Germany after the Wende to his native Frankfurt to find the people and the places he knew there dispersed and alien. The trilogy will be completed with We Are Camera in December of 2003 in Hamburg. Although there is a dark and despairing tone in much of Zeit zu Lieben, it is on the whole a much lighter piece than Fight City, due in large measure to the many scenes of broad farce in its large center section. The play itself is a triptych, which opens with seven actors sitting in a semi-circle on stage, at first scarcely visible through heavy smoke circulated through the auditorium, but gradually becoming more distinct. Although individuals sometimes stand and move about (most notably Peter Jordan, as a rabid soccer fan, whose rapid-fire patter and gesticulation anticipates the farce sequences of the second part), generally this is a contemplative collage of spoken fragments of childhood memories, mostly individually spoken, but with brief choric responses. It ends, movingly, with actress Fritzi Hamberlandt (the outstanding performer in the production), singing Oh man look at my life as a series of childhood photos flash on a screen at the rear of the stage. The extended second section is a cartoonish reconstruction of the family history of an Eastern European (apparently Hungarian) family before the Wende, a long-suffering mother (Verena Reichardt), a substitute father, the bumbling corrupt uncle (Peter Kurth), the two sons whose coming of age is center to the story, Ralf (Peter Jordan) and Peter (Hans Loew) and the girl (Fritzi Haberlant) that attracts both of them. A series of sometimes sentimental, but more often comic, even farcical, follows the adventures of this family and their encounters with friends, neighbors, officials, and teachers. Typical is an extended sequence in which Ralf, as a young adult, tries to show his business efficiency by simultaneously answering multiple phone messages and ironing his shirt (without entirely removing it). Predictably, he mixes up phone and iron, frying his ears. As this routine continues, it takes on a kind of commedia dellarte surrealism. Multiple irons become stuck all over his body and have to be removed by fellow actors, with attendant loss of clothing, hair, and dignity. The final section of the performance depicted another love story, or relationship depic-

Armin Petrass production of Fritz Katers Zeit zu Lieben, Zeit zu Sterben. Photo: courtesy Armin Petras and Fritz Kater

tion, with a man and a woman (Milan Peschel and Fritzi Haberlandt) chatting, arguing, embracing, dancing, and violently fighting, in a series of short scenes broken by short abstract musical passages. It is the most poetic of the three, the shortest, and the only one set in the present, where a diminishing love affair plays itself in a dance of death before a consumerist background of shelves of expensive shoes lit by neon. The new Germany has not brought either happiness or fulfillment, but only new frustrations and disorientations. The planet is extinct is the dark final line of the play. The most ambitious, and one of the most impressive, of the offerings in this years festival was Andreas Kriegenburgs five and a half hour rendition of Aeschyluss Orestia, from the new Kammerspiele space in Munich, here presented in the cavernous Arena in the far east of Berlin. Although references to the events of 9/11 and the subsequent American new world order as envisioned by George Bush are common in contemporary German productions of plays from almost any period, Kriegenburg moves these to the very center of the Aeschylean trilogy, stressing the contemporary relevance of the plays central concern, how to 34

escape from a deeply embedded cycle of vengeance and retribution. The connection is made particularly clear in the Agamemnon, by far the longest of the three sections, and the most complex. The setting (also designed by the director) is essentially a huge wall upstage on which appear the letters STADT (city). After a dumb show prologue tracing the previous history of this unhappy house and consisting already largely of a series of murders and sacrifices, the play proper begins with an evocation of post 9/11 as a bedraggled and crippled chorus file past the wall, stapling to it pictures of missing friends and family members like those that covered public spaces in New York in the weeks following 9/11. The Herald (Michael Neuenschwander) who appears later is covered in white ashes like many of the survivors who fled the collapsing towers, and in this coating, with a shambling walk, he more than a little resembles the deathly figure of the Golem. The announcement of the watchman (Walter Hess) from atop the wall that Troy has fallen inspires cries of Victory and Revenge but little real jubilation from the choric women, who staple their hair to the wall and turn helplessly against it. Clytemnesta, powerfully performed by

Nina Kunzendorf, drags in a bed and, vowing that the cycle of violence will continue, sets fire to it. She then moves about the stage with a fire-generating device, one by one setting fire to books held by chorus members from which they are reading accounts of the continuing cycle of wars of the past century, from the World Wars to the war in Iraq, as she repeats Terror against terror. This powerful sequence is followed by Kriegenburgs most startling innovation, a kind of internal satyr-play featuring three actors wearing cartoon masks of George Bush (Rene Dumont), Donald Rumsfeld (Stefan Merki) and Angelika Merkel (Matthias Bunchschuh), leader of the German Christian Democrat party. This comic interlude, the first of several featuring these three characters, is played entirely in English, and deals with Bushs determination to remake the world according to the instructions he receives from God in the form of a small plastic action figure. These interludes are apparently largely improvised, which like much improvised comedy , has occasional flat or obvious passages, but also allows for the immediate adjustment to

developing events. Most obviously this was the case here in the German representative, who in the Munich original, and even in the Berlin program was announced as Defense Minister Peter Struck. However, Struck was replaced at the last moment by Merkel when she appeared in Washington and announced that her party, unlike the current German government, strongly supported Bushs war. This made her a much more obvious and amusing target than Struck, who was merely Rumsfelds German counterpart, and the routines were adjusted accordingly. For most of the Agamemnon these clown scenes are kept, in a rather Shakespearian style, quite separate from the main action, but near the end of the play they chillingly merge in the Cassandra scene. Cassandra is brilliantly played by Ulrike Krumbiegel. Rolled onto the stage in a metal refuse barrel, she wraps herself in the red material left on stage from Agamemnons entry into the house and embarks on an astonishing monologue, part textual and part improvised, in which her visions of the sufferings of the house of Atreus and its destruction are

Andreas Kriegenburgs production of Orestia. Photo: courtesy Kammerspiele

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Cassandra and George W. Bush in Agamemnon. Photo: courtesy Kammerspiele

mixed with contemporary war references, references to her own career as an actress, and references to the playing the role of Cassandra, the prophetess whose dark warnings are never heeded by the blinded, violent people who hear them. She speaks of a recurring dream/nightmare in which she plays Cassandra in Ghana, in Moscow, and in Berlin, always with the same fruitless results. The chorus, as uncomprehending of her as everyone else, forces her back into her barrel, where she is subsequently discovered by the comic trio. Bush and Rumsfeld, finding her in what they take to be an oil barrel, naturally assume she is a terrorist, especially since they cannot understand her language. Merkel helpfully offers to translate, explaining that Cassandra foretells the future, and the intrigued Bush asks her to foretell his. When she has nothing positive to offer him, he returns to his conviction that she represents the enemy and kills her with a baseball bat as Rumsfeld cheers him on and Merkel flees in terror. She is then left for the appalled chorus to find. 36

The other, much shorter plays are staged in an equally unconventional manner, but remain far closer to the Greek text, powerfully translated by Ernst Buschor. In the second play, here called The Sacrifice the STADT wall has been replaced by a huge upstage box, actually a fairly conventional stage room within an encompassing box, supported by rods so that the interior stage is suspended in an open space. The setting in the interior box, apparently a room in the palace, suggests a rather tacky family room of the 1950s or 1960s with an ugly decorative lamp and sofa to the right and a bar with stools to the left and, on the back wall, a collage decoration with images of Bob Dylan and other period entertainers. The genial but ineffectual cross-dressed Apollo (Wolfgang Pregler), in blonde wig and fur coat, one of the inhabitants of this space adds to the atmosphere by listening to Dylans The times they are a-changin on his portable radio. Into this room come the suitcase-bearing Orestes (Christoph Loser) and Pylades (Rene Dumont).

Christoph Marthalers production of Groundings. Photo: courtesy Schauspielhaus Zurich

Pylades suitcase contains his saxophone, but that of Orestes bears the properties which further the plot, the letter announcing his death and the sacrificial knife. Downstage of this box unit a light film of water covers a large blue plastic sheeting and the splashing and sliding of actors and chorus members becomes in the last two plays a major part of the sight and sound of the production. The choric song about the joys and sorrows of giving birth is a particular delight, with big-bellied chorus members bouncing and splashing about in this area before giving birth to a collection of large, white dolls. As the murders approach however, the chorus returns in more solemn mood, in simple red dresses. Anticipating the furies, they crawl into the open spaces around the interior stage, completely surrounding it. The lights go out on the inner stage as they deliver their last long ode, but they punctuate it with occasional striking of their fists against the walls of the interior stage, whereupon the lighting there briefly flashes on, revealing the accursed family in a frozen tableau, one of the most powerful and original effects of the evening. 37

The final play takes place in a kind of nightmarish underworld, with the water-covered plastic sheeting stretching to the far rear wall and the space filled with odd bits of furniture, a boat in which the troubled Orestes arrives, and the scattered figures of the furies, most of them scarcely moving or making small obsessive gestures like the inhabitants of a madhouse. A few figures move among them in equally obsessive repeated patterns, a young woman pulling a model of the Trojan Horse, and several dark-suited young men, who regularly repeat a shambling zombie-like run across the upstage area. The actress originally cast as Athene became ill just before the opening and was replaced by a male, Hans Kemer, who plays her as a quiet, powerful, but abstract female figure, old and chalky white. Under the quiet authority of her words the furies cease their strange distracted movements and band together into an upstage chorus that responds to and comes to accept Athenes words, a model, which the world sorely needs, of the triumph of quiet speech over cries for vengeance. The 2003 Theatertreffen ended with a pro-

duction by another long-time favorite of German audiences and Theatertreffen judges, Christoph Marthaler, director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich. With his now-classic production of Murx der Europaer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab! in 1988, still drawing sold-out houses whenever it is revived, Marthaler introduced a new theatrical language, of which he is still the master, to the German stage. Among its features are an exquisite sense of timing, including an often daring use of silence and immobility, a rich musical score (Marthaler began his career as a composer of theatre music) performed pianists and other instrumentalists, but primarily by a cast whose voices can blend harmonically in traditional often sentimental tunes of heartstopping beauty, deft comic routines of striking originality and complexity. To these features should be added the witty settings of Marthalers regular designer, Anna Viebrock, one of the German theatres leading visual artists. All of these features are richly displayed in Marthalers latest piece, Groundings, which begins as a rather local satire on the corruption and financial manipulation of the corporate managers behind Swiss Air, but soon evolves into a free-wheeling comic speculation on the follies of modern international capitalism. The names of the characters themselves suggest something of the spirit of the piece: A Gross Failure (Peter Brombacher), A Casino Capitalist (Jean-Pierre Cornu), A National Globalist (Ueli Jaeggi), An Easygoing Fellow under Pressure (Andre Jung), A Plant Manger (Juerg Kienberger), A Newcomer (Matthias Matschke, who does an extended routine with a suitcase that was a brilliant mime display and reminded me of American Bill Irwin) An Artistic Director (Sebastian Rudolph), A Recording Secretary (Bernhard Landau), and, to add to the high-level lunacy, two characters from a Dadist novella by Richard Hulsenbeck: Doctor Billig (Josef Ostendorf) and Margot (Karin Neuhaeuser). Kienberger, the Plant Manger, is also a kind of manic stage manager, bouncing in and out of the orchestra pit (with the aid of a trampoline) and doing virtuoso turns both as a piano player and comic actor, a typical Marthaler combination. Later as a journalist he interviews Ueli Jaeggi about the troubles at SwissAir in a routine that delightfully parodies both investigative journalism and bureaucratic doubletalk, here further confused by a lin-

guistic pot pourri of German, Swiss German, and English, translated, after a fashion, by supertitles. Kienbergers inability to start the production due to some technical foulup preventing the raising of the iron curtain gets the absurdist evening off to a perfect start. Similar technical problems bedevil both the production and the assembled corporate leaders. Erractic loudspeaker announcements tell of technical problems and delayed flights in messages themselves garbled by technical difficulties. Nevertheless after each such announcement the entire cast checks their watches and speak frantically into cell phones, apparently trying to gain some control over the chaos. A wide variety of bizarre help is offered the confused capitalists. They are led in breathing and meditation exercises, are offered meaningless discussions with light pointers dancing around blank screens, and a lecture by the helpful Margot on Using Aristotle for Profit which culminates in her scrawling on the blackboard the Mantra Thinking helps! None of this in fact does help much, and a number of the cast are treated to a very funny removal sequence, placed in a large armchair, given a series of handshakes, and then sent scooting, chair and all, across the stage to crash through the wall (quickly replaced by alert stagehands for the next victim). As their falling cry rings out, the survivers gather around the hole to sing a sentimental ballad of farewell. The final sequence of the evening is the most elaborate and dazzling. The bureaucrats open the suitcases they have carried all evening and reveal inside the heads and torsos of dummies, who now become their partners. First they give them mouth to mouth breathing, then sit them up and exchange clothing with them, placing the dummies before us as cast members. They row with them in an imaginary racing boat, dance with them, and finally indulge in a frantic sexual orgy, rather like a Marx Brothers version of Kantors The Dead Class. At last the exhausted dolls are left alone on stage, gathered like children around Margot, now dressed as a kind of fairy godmother telling them a bedtime story. It ends with the whimsical suggestion If one day a UFO lands in your garden, dont be surprised. Just climb aboard. The delighted audience gave the line, and the production, extended cheering and applause, a testimony to the exuberance of their own dizzy ride in Marthalers UFO.

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German Festival Report: Munich and Bayreuth

Glenn Loney Munich Even before Sir Peter Jonas left the English National Opera to become Intendant of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, his predecessors, Wolfgang Sawallisch and August Everding, were in the vanguard of opera chiefs giving old operas a New Look. Of the several stagings seen this past July in Munichs Neo-Classic National Theater, only Der Rosenkavalier remained resolutely traditional. This is still played in the once beautiful silver-baroque settings of the brilliant designer Jrgen Rose. But the physical production has been too long in the repertory, and it shows its age. This was originally a co-conception of Rose and the Viennese actor and stage-director Otto Schenk. In the years since this Rosenkavelier was premiered, however, Rose has pursued a path of ingenious innovation, creating some of the most powerful stage-visions to be seen anywhere in Europe. Schenk, on the other hand, has had a fondness for what he once called Romantic Realism. His Tannhuser at the Met, with designer Gnther Schneider-Siemssen, was a very handsome example of this production-genre. In the Marschallins bed-chamber, at least in Munich, the walls have been shuffled about so much from storage to stage and back again that some of Roses most lovely silver-rococo decoration has been damaged, or knocked off entirely. You can see the ghostly stains of cherubs which have vanished. Those that remain remind old-timers of how glitteringly lovely this Act One setting once was. But Ive just read an essay which suggests that this chamber should look a bit worn, as though the unseen Field Marshall has little interest in keeping up appearances on the upper floors of his great palace, largely leaving his aging wife to her own devices and amours. This is an interesting concept, a mid-lifecrisis Marschallin, with her glamour sadly fading. To this harsh vision is added the observation that, in production in Act Two, the newly-rich and newly ennobled Herr Faninal should manifest a strong visual contrast to the Marschallins environment, with bright, costly, vulgar over-ornamentation in his new Vienna palace. In Munich, unfortunately, this setting also shows wear and tear. The abrasions of long years of use in the repertory do no damage, however, to the scenic-flats of Act Threes rustic inn. In fact, this entire production still works very well, cast with such talents as Cheryl Studer (Marschallin), Franz Hawlata (Ochs), Katharina Karmmerloher (Octavian), and Carmilla Tilling, a lovely young Sophie. Peter Schneider conducted. Nonetheless, it would be

David Aldens production of Tannhuser. Photo: courtesy Bavarian State Opera

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Martin Duncans production of Abduction from the Seraglio. Photo: courtesy Bavarian State Opera

most interesting to see what kind of new vision Jrgen Rose would bring to the opera now. Of all the beloved Opera War Horses, Rosenkavalier certainly needs a New Look, especially in Munich, where most of the repertory has been innovatively rethought since the arrival of Peter Jonas. It seems almost a relic now. Munich opera-regulars, who surely have seen a variety of avant-garde productions of Mozarts Abduction from the Seraglio, were greatly baffled by Martin Duncans new staging, set by coconspirator Ultz who is one-name, one-note designer. Martin Duncan has turned Mozarts wonderfully comic 18th century opera into an ultramodern vision of an old Turkish Tale, told by a blackBurkah-clad female narrator. This divorces the dialogue entirely from the central characters, who are left largely with their songs, here ripped from any dramatic context. Most of them now make little or no sense dramaturgically. Konstanzes heroic Martern alter Arten aria is almost meaningless in this Story-Theatre framework. But it was Duncans and designer Ultz unusual decision to fill the air above the stage with six colorful suspended sofas, on which most of the action took place. This annoyed, amused, or baffled both critics and audiences. These Flying Sofas, however, did not just hang there. They flew on wires, up and down, back and forth. Luxuriously 40

and gleamingly upholstered in bright basic colors Yellow, Green, Blue, Red, Purple, Orangethey provided moving venues for sinuous airborne ballets by harem lovelies. Tall tables loaded with luscious fruit were in fact worn by deftly moving extras, who could keep them near the moving sofas, davenports, or chesterfields. As a prelude to the actual action of the opera, a group of young men who seemed to be soccer-fans divested themselves of their clothes on the forestage. They then proceeded to emasculate themselves, perhaps to become harem eunuchs, showing the audience jockstraps stained with blood. Music-critics, not only from Munich but from all over Germany, had a field-day mocking this pretentious production, which was also roundly booed at its premiere. Some headlines will give an idea: Kastration live, Auf fliegenden Sofas, Fliegende Haremsdamen, A Tale with Six Sofas, Singers on Sofas, Swinging Sofas, Serail auf dem Sofa, What Are Football Fans Doing In the Harem? British conductor Daniel Harding, part of this English production-team, was also roundly blamed for his eager participation. Certainly he spurred the orchestra on, to keep the proceedings from sinking into incomprehension. Only the Pedrillo of Kevin Conners emerged with vocal and character credits, despite the appalling stage-direction. Malin Hartelius did her best as Konstanze, but

the sofas were stacked against her. Natalie Karl also tried to make her mark as Blonde, although the effort was doomed by her director. It was embarrassing to see a mature singer like Paata Burchuladze have to perform Osmin with his shirt off. Will opera-singers soon have to start going to the gym for workouts on their abs? Roberto Sacca, as Belmonte, was almost a cipher in this Flying Sofa Circus. Georg Friedrich Handel didnt have to worry about offending Muslim sensibilities with his opera Rinaldo in the London of his time. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was then still regarded with suspicion and wariness. Rinaldo was inspired by Gerusalemma Liberatta, which suggested that the brave Christians were up against much more than armies of ignorant Infidels. Rinaldos most dangerous enemy is Armida, the Sorceress Queen of Damascus. Talk about Weapons of Mass Destruction! Well before the recent White House campaign of misinformation about Iraqs threat to American Security, David Alden, the brilliant American stage-director, had the ingenious idea of up-dating Rinaldo, making it something of an American Radical Religious Right Crusade. In fact, he put a self-promoting contemporary Protestant

Christian Evangelist center-stage in his Munich staging. It might be an interesting idea for the White House to invite the Bavarian State Opera to bring this Rinaldo production to the Kennedy Center. It now seems even more timely and satiric than it did several seasons ago. But some of the design-jokes of Paul Steinberg (sets) and Buki Shiff (costumes) are less amusing seen for the second or third time round. And, although Ann Murray continues to soldier on in Handelian castrato roles in Munich, the amazing counter-tenor David Daniels was much more impressive as Rinaldo when this production premiered. Ivor Boltons enthusiastic conducting, however, shows no diminution in his dedication to and affection for this staging. Even after four years in the Munich repertory, David Aldens witty, satiric Rinaldo staging still has visual power. That cannot be said, however, of his bizarre Deconstructionist vision of Wagners Tannhuser. Using a vast Post-Modernist architectural faade featuring the large-writ legend: GERMANIA NOSTRA, Alden and his set-designer, Roni Toren, have metaphorically attempted to translate Tannhusers tragic tale into an operatic survey of 20th century German History. The late Goetz Friedrich was the first to suggest that the furious knights at the Battle of

David Aldens production of Rinaldo. Photo: courtesy Bavarian State Opera

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Singers in the Wartburg were, in fact, proto-Nazis. This outraged some Bayreuth Traditionalists, but it had a certain resonance that was reinforced when Friedrich reworked the production for television. Unfortunately for such Modernist Concepts, they often lack validity or consonance, in relation to the central character and to the plot. Tannhuser is not an Anti-Fascist Freedom-Fighter. He is a Romantic Outsider who has deliberately broken all the religious and sexual taboos of his time. Worse, he has even boasted about his high old times in the Venusberg before his saintly and beloved Elizabeth and the entire court of Medieval Thuringia. Elizabeth, sensitively interpreted again this past summer by the lovely Emily Magee, has to endure a great deal of suffering in the libretto. And Wagners demands on her voice are also taxing. Add to that the directorial indignities David Alden has heaped upon her, and she deserves a medal for Hazardous Duty, as well as the bravos and applause she justly wins. In this cast, the Wolfram of the admirable Simon Keenlyside was clearly the winner of any song-contest on the stage. Robert Gambills Tannhuser was not persuasive enough. As Venus, Waltraud Meier provided a powerful, if not very sexy performance. But she can do no wrong in her fans eyesand ears. Jun Mrki conducted. Early in the last century, the twentieth, not the nineteenth, some very impressive young composers were creating new operas in Italy. Some of these works achieved almost immediate successeven at the Met, but they gradually faded from opera repertories, only to be rediscovered at the Bregenz Festival and other experimental venues. Unfortunately, in recent years, most new operas, either in Europe or the Americas, have glittering, hyped premieres and then disappear without a trace. Thus, it seems problematic whether American audiences will see any time soon Jrg Widmans new opera, Das Gesicht im Spiegel. It had its world premiere this past July in Munichs historic Cuvillis Court Theatre. This venue provided a strange visual contrast to an opera celebrating multi-media electronic, video, and digital technology, in service of a Post-Modernist fable about a marriage gone wrong as a result of cloning-experiments. The operas production values, as well as its very trendy topic, might well make this an item for the Next Wave at BAM, but it is unlikely to enter the repertory of New York City Opera or the Met. This is partly the fault of the score, which is also technology-oriented. Although press-hype suggest42

ed that Widman is one of Germanys most brilliant young composers, the music for his The Face in the Mirror did not support that claim. Perhaps the elegant poster for Gesicht im Spiegel provided a more appropriate visual metaphor. It showed a mirror with no reflection in it. The production, of course, is not entirely faceless. In fact, it is filled with multiple electronic images of logos and its central character, Justine (Julia Rempe), an exact clone-copy of Patrizia (Salome Kammer), who is chief of BIOTEC, which specializes in cloning experiments. The four-hander cast is completed with Milton (Richard Salter), a bio-engineer for the firm and Justines teacher/trainer, as well as Bruno (Dale Duesing), Patrizias husband and business-partner. The plot-devices involve Bruno gradually failing in love with his wifes clone, her insane jealousy, and Justines developing real human feelings, with attendant despair at the impossible situation into which her creators have plunged her. As a Mad Scientist, Milton has distinct dramatic possibilities. As does Justine, who could certainly be much more interesting than the Bride of Frankenstein. But the libretto of Roland Schimmelpfennig is not dramatically effective, nor are the characters interesting enough. This wouldnt make the critical grade as a play without music. Alas, the score doesnt enhance the fable very much. Instead, the production-values have to do that. Costume-designer Martin Krmer has created an impressive outfit for Justine: she rises from a hole in the stage in a dress and hose which are covered with large-scale silver micro-circuits. Justines agonized face is projected on a video-screen overhead, as are Biotec logos, obviously inspired by Albrecht Drer and Leonardo de Vinci. Lab operations at Biotec are facilitated by a corps of little blonde Munchkins, tapping away at uniform banks of laptop computers. They look like Nibelheim dwarfs in Bayreuths current Ring production. Bayreuth In Bayreuth, the new fliegende Hollnder takes place entirely in an immense two-story livingroom-or in a foyer of a Grand Hotel somewhere in Germany between the wars. Because this grand space-dominated by a great unsupported staircase, which rises in three stages to a second-floor doorway-looked so sterile, so barren, so unlived-in, some spectators opted for the Grand Hotel Lobby interpretation. Dr. Joachim Kaiser, dean of South German music-critics, took issue with this unusual,

Jrg Widmans Das Gesicht im Spiegel.. Photo: courtesy Cuvillis Court Theatre

if highly imaginative production because almost all of the high drama and visual shocks implicit in Wagners Romantic/Gothic libretto and score were missing or muted by the concept. Certainly some of the stage-pictures seemed almost placidly, or defiantly at odds with the thunderings of Wagners score. Kaiser is correct in thinking that someone who had never before seen Hollnder in performance would have no idea of the original story. Even those Wagner novices who had taken the trouble to read the text, or even to scan a synopsis, would surely have had difficulty recognizing the tale Wagner set to music. But for older Wagner fans who know the opera well. and who may also have seen more than enough traditional nineteenth century-style productions over the years, director Claus Guths new interpretation of the libretto and characters is an exciting revelation. In Wagners original text, the innocent Sentas obsessive romantic longing for the doomed Dutchman, whom she knows only from a mysterious painting on her chamber wall and from tales told of his bizarre damnation, seems strange indeed, Innovative stage-director Harry Kupfers vision was, in that regard, a stroke of genius: Senta as a psychopath! Now director Claus Guth has given Bayreuth audiences a different Senta psychology. Spectators get to experience the Dutchman Legend and Sentas infatuation with it at two stages of her strange life: as a little girl and as an immature hys43

terical woman, trapped in her obsessions. Guth shows Senta as a child, leaning against her somewhat cold, distant fathers leg, as he reads her the Dutchmans story again and again. He sits in a big armchair, with a large floor-lamp at one side, in his spacious but virtually empty living-room. The curved wall behind him is pierced by four noblyframed doors. From down-stage right to high over his head, the great staircase curves gracefully upward to a second-floor, also pierced with four handsomely framed- openings. Three are windows and one a door, but all are playable. This is certainly quite a bourgeois venue for Wagners Hollnder. No docks, harbor, or sea in sight! But the reason for their mysterious absence soon becomes hauntingly clear: When the Dutchman appears, he is dressed like Sentas father. He has the same beard, the same pipe, the same mannerisms: he could be her fathers double. True, Daland, her dad, looks less like an adventurous seacaptain than a North German Lloyd Lines shippingexecutive. But that may be the point: anchoring Sentas romantic fantasies in a recognizable reality. For that matter, the Dutchman looks less doomed than baffled at Sentas attentions. Not only is the young Senta obsessed with the storyher father reads it over and over to her but also with the actual story-book itself. She even has a Dutchman doll and puppet-theatre. Toward the close of the opera, when a frantic middle-aged

Senta is seeking to save the elusive Dutchman, the puppet-idea returns in a grisly fashion. An immense skeleton Dutchman-puppet in storm-gear appears from inside the proscenium border-which is, oddly enough, called the Dutchman in backstage parlance. The bony arms of this giant puppet reach down and seize a Senta puppet-doll and carry it upward, out of sight. This provides an amazingly intuitive, even visually fantastic, solution to the central problem of the redemption of the Dutchman. In Wagners libretto, Senta finally fears to give herself definitively to the Hollnder, leaving him to sail off in bitter disappointment at her betrayal. As his ship disappears, in a sudden change of heart, she leaps from the dock into the turbulent sea. Is her sacrifice only a useless suicide, or does it finally redeem the Dutchman? For his Bayreuth premiere of the work, Wagner had puppets of Senta and the Dutchman created. In the final moments of the powerful score, the two lovers ascended, as puppetfigures, into the heavens. So Guth and his designteam had the authority of Wagners own practice in the use of puppets. But Wagners resort to such doll-images suggested a more conventional religiosity than a childhood psychological impulse to obsession. The chorus of village women and their sailor-husbands, confronted with the appalling realization that the Dutchmans cursed crew are dead men, are quite transformed. The sailors are all like live toys, robotic in movement, with identical sailorsuits and caps and Pinocchio-noses like long car-

rots. The women who throng the grand staircase, completely cramming it, are all smartly dressed in nautical attire, as is Senta throughout the opera. But they behave rather more like Jazz Age flappers. This is especially so in what traditionally would be the spinning-scene. Obviously, the events of Wagners opera are all taking place in Sentas head. Guth makes a visual running-gag of Wagners steersman. Instead of staying at the helm of Dalands ship, he wanders through the opera with a guttering candle, like Diogenes searching for an honest man. Still, Wagners score certainly does require a Wagnerian storm at sea and the horrifying apparition of the Dutchmans black ship. This effect Guth and his designers manage brilliantly with suggestive abstract projections on the rear wall of the lower part of the living-room set. The room disappears, replaced by the agitated motion of the projections. The upper triangle of stage-wall above the curving stairs at this point is completely concealed with rich red curtains, so the sense of a grand room is negated. Christian Schmidt has brilliantly conceived and designed the set, costumes, and set-props. Manfred Voss, now retiring after many years with the Festival, created the lighting, so important to the visual success of Guth and Schmidts special effects. Video credits go to Werner Penzel and Nicolas Humbert. The new Guth/Schmidt Hollnder plays so powerfully now that it is difficult to imagine how it might be improved next summer. I am eagerly look-

Claus Guths production of Der fliegende Hollnder. Photo: courtesy Bayreuth Festival

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ing forward to seeing it again, as there were so many layers, visually and emotionally, that I did not have time to explore on a first-seeing of this dynamic production. Obviously, the cumulative effect of this production is not due entirely to the ingenuity of its conception and design. But, being design and techoriented, that is where I almost always begin my accounts of new productions. None of Guths ideas would have worked, however, had it not been for the remarkable acting and vocal performance of Adrienne Dugger as Senta, paralleled by the mute performance of Senta as a little girl, not credited in the program insert. As mariner look-alikes, Jaakko Ryhnens Daland and John Tomlinsons Dutchman were very well-matched, but also well-contrasted, considering what they represent to the young Senta and to her mature/immature self. Endrick Wottrichs Eric suggested a virile male of whom Senta was sexually afraid. Uta Priew was an unusual Mary, in a household where spinning flax is no longer needed. Tomistav Muzek was an admirably consistent Steuermann, but he never found his honest man. Marc Albrechts vital conducting enlivened the Concept every step of the way. Eberhard Friedrichs chorus, surely the best operachorus in the world, if only for five weeks every summer, was not only musically marvelous, but also astonishing as actors. Many seemed to have developed individual characters, which made the new vision of this masterwork even more impressive. Some in the audience later expressed misgivings about the great unsupported staircase carrying so many choristers. Indeed, I feared it might sag of crumple at any moment. Fortunately, on a Spielfrier Tag, or performance-free day, Matthias Lippert, of the Festivals tech department, took me and Oregon Shakespeare Festival chief-designer, Richard L. Hay, on a backstage tour. Not only were we able to photograph a genial Wolfgang Wagner, the 83-year-old Festival Director, embracing his technical staff, but Lippert showed us the Hollnder staircase up close. It is a marvel of engineering, welded steel, completely separate from the upper and lower walls of the room it seems to cling to. You could put elephants, as well as choristers, on that staircase and it would not sag. The Bregenz stagings of director/designer Philippe Arlaud have been both innovative and impressive. He is especially ingenious in his use of color in lighting his sets and costumes. Sometimes, however, this seems more in service of these special elements than of the plot and the characters in 45

action. Last seasons Bayreuth Tannhuser premiere certainly showed some of that designer disjunction at work. The basic setting for the first and third acts, for me, was a visual atrocity, with its multiple Astroturf arches and inclines, studded with what looked like Buddy-Poppies. Upstage, the arches formed an empty eye-socket, for no apparent or symbolic reason. Worst of all, damaging both visually and dramatically, the Pilgrims on their way to Rome oozed out of that eye-socket, coming over the lower lid out of nowhere. Moving downstage, they soon disappeared into a slit in the ground, facilitated by the forward section of Astroturf rising up to swallow them, like the Pied Piper leading the rats of Hamlintown to their doom, or Manhattan commuters vanishing into the Subway! This is not at all an impressive way to march off to Rome to see the Pope. Unfortunately, this awkward method of getting the chorus off-stage is not one which is at all musically or emotionally suggested by Wagners score. In fact, it is anti-dramatic But the Pilgrims climactic return from Rome was even stranger. Instead of climbing up out of the bowels of the Earth again, where they had gone in search of the Pope, they appeared in force again through the empty eyesocket, which was not the way back from Rome in Act One. But Bayreuth is, after all, a Workshop. So I was sure that Wolfgang Wagner, Arlaud, or someone would decide that this set had to be discarded, redesigned used in a rather different way. No such luck! It seems totally unchanged in design, function, and stage-direction. On my backstage tour, however, I was able to see how this complicated setting had been designed and constructed. Indeed, it seems a wonder of structural engineering, the various arches folding back like a fan for compact storage. The forward flap is so solidly constructed to ride upward and backward on tracks that it would be fiscal folly to discard it, and virtually impossible to redesign or rebuild it for more effective staging of Acts One and Three. Last summer, Arlauds love of color and lighting made the gold, red, and black miniamphitheatre of the Wartburgs great hall into a glittering jewel-box. It was crammed with courtiers in Mikado-inspired costumes for Act Twos Teure Halle scene. The real Hall in the historic Wartburg Castle surely never looked so good! After years of DDR mis-maintenance, it certainly doesnt look very impressive now. This was setting was indeed

handsome to look at, but Arlauds murky stagedirection made it almost impossible to understand who was who, or what was going on in the confrontations of the contesting Minnesingers. This past summer, however, the scene had been effectively re-staged, with no changes in sets or costumes, so that the dangerous drama of the Battle of Singers was powerfully clear and even darkly exciting. Whether Arlaud worked this out himself, or had some helpful input from Wolfgang Wagner, not to mention the critics who had complained, it now works very well indeed. In 2002, Roman Trekel was the most effective of the cast, in the role of Tannhusers abused friend, Wolfram Von Eschenbach. Glenn Winslade, who seemed overtaxed as Tannhuser in 2002, came into his own in vocal power and acting presence. He now seems a tenor worth watching. Quite as powerful, in his way, was Kwangchul Youn as Landgraf Hermann of Thuringia. And, thanks to redirection of Act Two, he seemed much more magisterial in the Teure Halle, although in no way able to restrain Tannduser from his epic act of folly. Elizabeth has to put up with a lot in this opera, not to mention in this production. Ricarda Merbeth now seems equal to the challenges. As Venus, however, Barbara Schneider-Hofstetter was at even more of a design/directorial disadvantage. Arlaud has positioned her on what seems to be the Worlds Biggest Laptop PC. On both sides, it is being impacted by two enormous glaciers. This Venusberg could be sited somewhere on Mount Everest. The scene is bluishly cold, not suggestive of a Hot Time Under the Hill, which is certainly in the music and libretto. Instead of a lascivious orgyballet, some Golden Girls who look like fugitive Rheinmdchen are cavorting in the very limited playing-space. This production still needs work, but redesigning or rebuilding the settings seems out of the question. The singers will just have to help the composer save the his own opera. Of course, conductor Christian Thielemann will do what he can as well. The best thing about the entire production, at present, is the chorus. When Keith Warners production of Lohengrin premiered in 2001, it was a revelation. After a number of recent Romantic/Fantastic productions and the bizarre post-modernist circus of the Munich Lohengrin, the vision of Brabant as T. S. Eliots Wasteland was a stroke of visual and metaphoric genius. This concept was as much Warners as set-designer Stefanos Lazaridis idea. 46

And Sue Blanes costumes contributed to the haunting symbolism, a far cry from her outfits for that cult-object, The Rocky Horror Show. I was tremendously impressed the first season, and more so the second, when some helpful changes in set, lighting, and staging made murky and mysterious matters more clear. Even if the lighting did seem to have become darker. Now, the third time around, the production seems even darker than before, certainly as defeatist and despairing as one could imagine. This time, I found it immensely depressing, though musically powerful as ever. But then both Warner and Lazaridis had initially noted that this is Wagners only opera without a hint of redemption for the principals. The return of the enchanted Gottfried to his people at the close provides no real closure for those main characters still alive. Any potential redemption would lie outside and beyond this fable. In any case, the swan has become a young boy, not a mature ruler, which Brabant certainly needs at this time. And the historic Gottfried of the House of Cleves was a disaster, especially in the Holy Land. Peter Seiffert only seems to grow in power and authority as Lohengrin. Reinhard Hagen still seems at risk to make it through the opera as King Heinrich. Roman Trekel remains centrally strong in the production, although his is not really a central role. His stature, bearing, and voice command authority. Petra-Maria Schnitzer does her best as the pathetic Elsa: wan, colorless, clueless. Elsa has to be one of Wagners most hopeless, helpless heroines. Even the saintly Elizabeth would have sent Ortrud packing. Eva wouldnt have let her in the house. Judit Nemeths Ortrud has Villainess written all over her. Its perhaps a bit extreme, too unsubtle? John Wegners Telramund is an appropriate tool for Ortruds schemes: she gets the Hit Man she deserves. Sir Andrew Davis conducted with a subtle appreciation of the darkness of this production and its vision of epic hopelessness in life and love. Fortunately, the remarkable Bayreuth Chorus provided some of the most powerful, even temporarily uplifting, musical moments in this grim production. Next summer, in July and August of 2004, Jrgen Flimms innovative staging of Wagners Ring Cycle will be seen for the last time, completing the customary five-year run of Bayreuth Ring productions. Only Peter Halls misconceived Ring petered out after four years. There wont be another Bayreuth Ring until 2006. This will certainly be worth all efforts to

get tickets, as it is to be directed by the Scandinavian film-director Lars Von Trier. He has never staged any opera before, let alone this most challenging of all Wagners works. And hes on record as not being much of an opera-fan either. Wait and see! The problem, of course, is getting to see any opera in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, not to mention a complete Ring Cycle of four operas. Currently, there are over a hundred requests for every ticket for every seat for every performance during the five-week summer season at Bayreuth. But if you do get the Ring, you will surely get all four of the operas. The Wagners have always wanted their guests to see the work in its entirety. Lucky Ring ticket-holders are not supposed to share out their seats, seeing Rheingold and Siegfried, while letting someone else have their seats for Walkre and Gtterdmmerung. Every new Bayreuth Ring Cycle is intended to be both surprising and innovative. Few have disappointed; even Halls was something of an unintentional scandal. Going way back to 1956, when I first began going to Bayreuth, buying my own tickets as I had no idea about press-seats or reviewing shows, I have seen every new Ring production. Some of the most memorable ones I have seen several summers running. Last summer, I missed seeing the Flimm Ring again, owing to a tight schedule. Fortunately, I did see it this summer and realized once again what a brilliant metaphor it is for human life as lived over the ages. And how amazingly Flimm has made all its characters come alive as real people, despite the often monumental music they have to sing. This is surely because Flimm is essentially a drama-director, one of the best in the German-language theatre today. Many opera stagedirectors have no idea how to help their singers give their heroes and heroines a human dimension. If a tenor or soprano hasnt a clue about building a character or how to move and react as real people do in tense situations, these directors cant help them, especially in the short periods usually available for most opera rehearsals. Traffic-Management on stage is the best one can hope for in many cases. Flimms staging of the Rings initial opera, Das Rheingold, the intermissionless prelude to the much longer trilogy remaining, could stand entirely alone as an exciting, even amusing at times, drama of larger-than-life human-beings. You know people like these, even though here they are gods, giants, and even dwarfs. In fact, so dramatically and 47

believably effective are the singer/players in their roles that this production would be dynamic, fascinating theatre, even without the music! In many a modern production, Loge, the mischievous God of Fire, suggests some kind of ethereal, if pyrotechnical, spirit. In Arnold Bezuyen, Flimm has found an ideal Macher of a Loge. Although a stocky, even bulky man, he moves with easy grace and boundless energy. Hes also immaculately tailored in a smart suit which he wears with the elegance of a consummate Confidence Man. Although he shares his contempt for Wotan and the other gods with the audience, he never lets the others on stage get a clue about what hes really thinking. Bezuyens facial expressions, spontaneous and premeditated gestures, and, indeed, his entire Body-Language provide a masterful portrayal of the kind of businessman who would have a Cabinet Post in the Bush Administration. Whats more, all his athletic and energetic movements, leaps, and dodges do not impair his vocal excellence in the role. Rather, they add to it. This is also true of all the others in Rheingold, some to a lesser degree, as their roles are not so central. And seldom has a Wagner cast been required to be so physical in performance. Mime especially seems in danger of real harm from Siegfried. The gods are also somewhat grounded, distanced from their mythic images. Fricka for example, is not the customary stereotypical shrew. She may be a goddess, but she is also a wife much wronged. Wotan has so often deceived and lied to her that wariness and moral-armor have now become her constant postures. The greedy dwarf Alberich, as a successful, boastful, but somewhat primitive mining-magnate, could be Henry Clay Frick. In Flimms hands, and with the talents of his wonderful actor/singers, these almost metaphoric and certainly symbolic figures become incredibly real. The sad sufferings of Sieglinde, the malicious maneuverings of Mime, the betrayals of Brnnhilde, the blustering childishness of Siegfried: these could all be Oscar-winning performances in a Flimm film of The Ring. But these images arent projected moving transparencies; they are living, breathing, painfully, even joyously, REAL. As Wotan, Alan Titus grows each season in stature and humanity. I can remember him as a student singer with the Bronx Opera decades ago. How far he has come, and how admirably! Philip Kangs Fafner, as well as his quite different Hunding, is amazing. (At Australias Perth Festival

last winter, he was amazing as Hagen.) This is not to overlook the acting and singing talents of Michael Howard (Mime), Hartmut Welker (Alberich), Mihoko Fujimura (Fricka), Wolfgang Schmidt (Siegfried), and Evelyn Herlitzius as Brnnhilde. Simone Schrders Erda could break your heart. Violeta Urmana certainly would as Sieglinde, though Robert Dean Smith is a bit light-weight for Siegmund. One of the most affecting moments in Flimms entire Ring Cycle is the tense encounter between Brnnhilde and her sister Valkyrie, Waltraute, as played and sung by Lioba Braun. The depth of Waltrautes frantic desperation to save Valhalla and the gods, virtually ignored by Brnnhilde, now no longer a Valkyrie and blissfully brimming with joy for Siegfrieds love, was truly heart-breaking. Comparing this Ring two weeks later with the Scottish Operas newly completed Cycle, I realized how much the apparent power of the Scots production was aided by the supertitles. There are none at Bayreuth, however. But the brilliance of the portrayals, guided by Flimms remark-

able Personnen-Regie, the emotional power of the vocal interpretations, also influenced by the direction, and the stunning inventiveness of designer Erich Wonders Post-Modernist Post-Industrial environments make this Ring almost immediately understandable. Even when the sung German is not all that clearly articulated, actions here often speak louder than words, spoken or sung! Adam Fischers able conducting also had a great deal to do with the final effect, however. And, although Eberhard Friedrichs Chorus is only in action in the final opera, it is also magisterial and totally believable as a group of employees in what seems to be a glass and steel corporate HQ! Next summer, 2004, will be your last chance to see this remarkable production, which unfortunately has not been videotaped for commercial release. But ticket demand is now so great that even longtime members of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth may have to wait six or seven years to get tickets. The following season, 2005, five of Wagners operas will be performed in repertory. A new Parsifal is promised. But no Ring.

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Angels for a Better World? Festivals from Recklinghausen to the Ruhrtriennale

Roy Kift Its been a long hot summer of uncertainties, illusions and disillusions, and although the season is changing the uncertainties show no sign of ending. Neither for George Bush, Tony Blair, nor if youll forgive the comparison for the Festivals in Germanys Ruhr area which have threatened to drown the audiences (and empty their bank accounts) in a flood of theatre, opera, dance and music shows. Anybody starved for culture would have died of an overdose here. The traditional Recklinghausen European Festival and the spanking new Ruhrtriennale opened within days of each other pointedly ignoring each others existence, and within a week the Mlheim Festival of new German drama began, to be followed by the Ruhr Klavierfestival featuring pianists, classical and jazz from all over the world, not to speak of the Duisburg Akzente Festival, the Fidena puppet theatre festival in Bochum, the Moers Jazz Festival and the world street theatre festival in Schwerte just outside Dortmund. And all this alongside the normal repertory in the countless theatres and opera houses in the region. The festival that has attracted the most media attention is, of course, the Ruhrtriennale, now in its second year under the Intendant, Gerard Mortier. But before I come to this it would be only fitting to bid farewell to its predecessor the Recklinghausen Festival and its Intendant HanGnter Heyme whose last season opened appropriately enough with a show called Les Adieux. Superficially the show, conceived and directed by Franz Wittenbrink, is little more than a compilation of songs - everything from Bach via Rilke and Gershwin to Brecht, Jagger, Elivs Presley and Bob Dylan - performed by six very talented actor/singers with a guest appearance by Esther Ofarim. Farewells are little deaths. Separations. They also throw up opportunities for new beginnings. Hope of change, improvement, new encounters, friendships. A time where pain meets joy and fear wrestles with curiosity. Wittenbrinks peculiar talent is to stage the songs within a theatrical ambience on a set somewhere between street, hotel room, airport lounge, office and home, thereby allowing them to unfold their message within a specific context. A husband abandons his family, an idealist bids 49 farewell to his years of revolt, a hairdresser breaks out to try to become a pop star, an aging diva looks back on her years of glamour, a young woman abandons the cold climate of Northern Europe for the heat of Brazil The evening could have been banal. But the accumulation and the constant changes in mood and atmosphere, combined with a stringent dramaturgy and an immaculate cast made it not only painful, but exquisitely pleasurable. Heyme could not have had a better tribute. Music seems to have played more than its fair share in Heymes last festival. Alongside an evening of Brecht songs for the Threepeny Opera, we were also treated to an enjoyable bit of nostalgic nonsense, dressed up as a show about 1930s emigration from Nazi Germany and entitled Atlantic Affairs, by one of Germanys most famour stars Udo Lindenberg. At the other end of the scale was a superb if difficult programme of Schnberg (!) cabaret songs staged by Peter Stein and featuring the wondrous Italian actress, Maddalena Crippa. Twelve tone music is not usually expected to get you humming the melodies after the show and sure enough the first half of the evening, Pierrot Lunaire, proved hard going. But after the interval Signora Crippa and her band entertained us marvellously with a selection of songs which Schnberg had indeed written for a Berlin cabaret theatre in 1901. There was even a text by Frank Wedekind! Of the theatre shows Heyme himself bid farewell with a selection of previously unperformed fragments of Greek classics and a rustic, Volkstheater version of King Lear performed by the Madrid company, the Teatro de La Abadia. It was an honourable attempt to take a fresh look at the play but the hotchpotch of re-hashed 1960s staging and a quasi music-hall repartee from Goneril and Regan failed to move me either to anger or pity. If a great tragedy leaves you coldThe rest of the festival threw up the highlights we have come to expect from Heymes impressive 13 year regime in which he has turned a local regional event into a high profile internationally respected festival. The theatrical highlight came from the Berlin Schaubhne with an extraordinary contemporary version of Ibsens Dolls House which transported the 19th century classic into the early 21st century world of callow con-

sumerism. Here Nora traps herself by naively conniving in the image of a chic sex symbol endowed on her by her rich capitalist banker husband and admirers alike. She is even more mindlessly proud of getting her husband out his financial mess by forging her fathers signature on a loan. But when the fraud comes to light the fragile construction of her marriage breaks apart as her husband turns against her. The terror of consumer possession reeks its revenge on both husband and wife as she puts a bullet through his skull and is left shivering and whimpering outside the house with no future. The gesture of emancipation reveals the bare nihilism of her previous life. Thomas Ostermeiers production casts a scathingly fresh light on the play and is strengthened still more by a spectacular cast led by Anne Tismer who turns Noras every word and gesture into a parade of empty self-image projections, a Barbie doll devoid of any genuine contact with the core of what she is and might become. Glorious stuff which revives your faith in the power of theatre. [See article on the Theatertreffen in this issue.] The same can be said of a particularly a stunning evening from Portugal presented by Lisbons Ballet Gulbenkian. The evening featured a passionate homage to Mediterranean women called Cantata and culminated in a work called Minus 7 comprising excerpts from shows by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin which not only broke down barriers between the company themselves but also between the dancers and the audience. I had never expected to see members of the audience hauled out of the auditorium to dance alongside lithe professionals. But here it happened. Bodies trained and untrained came together for ten whole minutes of pure pleasure on and off stage. Had the dancers not taken their chosen audience members seriously the exercise might have been embarrassing or even contemptible. As it was it proved to be a exultant, heartfelt mutual celebration. Two days later I was present at another overwhelming dance experience provided by the legendary Pina Bausch company in the early weeks of the Ruhr Triennale. Apart from the excellence of the dancing the contrast could not have been greater. Whereas the Ballet Gulbenkian was effervescent and life-enhancing, Pina Bausch took us deep into the heart of solitude and destruction. The works were not new, which was more than a little disappointing given the pretensions of the Triennale. But for those like me who were unacquainted with either 50

Bauschs choreography of Caf Mller (first performed in 1978) or Stravinskys Rite of Spring they were a revelation. A caf is usually a place of sociability. Bausch turns it into a resort for desperate loners on the edge of collapse. Individuals stagger through the scene knocking over chairs as if in a trance, whilst others desperately attempt to re-right or pre-empt the situation by moving the chairs out of the way in advance. Bausch herself, now all of 63, shows up as a ghostly wraith, elegant and enigmatic in her dark collapsing world. The Rite of Spring picks up and develops the theme of destruction. But this time it is animal men against animal women in a frenzied struggle amidst whirling clouds of dirt. What starts peacefully as a purely female dance is soon turned into chaos by the arrival of the men and ends in the male-driven self-destruction of one of the women who danced herself to the point of death. This was so painful I was hard put to stop myself from leaping to my feet to call a halt to the proceedings. As it was I froze in horror and admiration at the sheer total commitment of the Japanese (?) soloist in the thin red dress as she impelled herself into a Dionysian act of self-immolation. Unforgettable. The Bausch evening was performed in the newly refurbished Hall of the Century in Bochum, a gigantic red-brick structure which originally housed the central gas power station of Alfred Krupps steelworks. Visitors walking around have the feeling of being lost in the shell of an industrial cathedral. The Federal Government of North-Rhine Westphalia has spared no expense to add two additional outsides building to the structure, and redesign the interior with lifts, wardrobes and toilets and auditoria to function as the Triennales performance headquarters. Unfortunately, in doing so, they have destroyed the silhouette of the original building and by splitting up the gigantic interior into variously sized auditoria and playing areas turned what was once a spatial marvel into little more than a series of what seems to be up-market motor-car workshops. Having neglected to blacken out the glass roofs the festival organisers have also been forced to move back performance hours until after dark in order to be able to light the stages appropriately. This was also the case with the opening production, Patrice Chreaus highly praised production of Racines Phdre, a coproduction with the Odon Theatre in Paris. Phdre is one of those plays that have puzzled me all my life. As a student of French many years ago I utterly failed to connect

with it emotionally despite the assurance of my tutors that it was the French tragic masterpiece par excellence. And several productions later I still remain unmoved either by the verse (there is no action to speak of) or the situation which seems to revolve around an out-dated idea of honour and destiny. Im sure all the actors were good. Nonetheless the evening was little more than a torture for me, aggravated by the intolerable heat (the building suffers once again from its unprotected glass roof) and woefully uncomfortable seating. If the essential atmosphere of the Hall of the Century has been destroyed in the name of art, the same cannot be said about the auditoria in another disused steel works in Duisburg. The Landscape Park is a fascinating place anyway, as it offers everything from childrens playgrounds to mountaineering on the disused ore bunkers and deep-sea diving in a flooded gasometer. Here I was able to witness three of the Triennales home-grown inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary creations in which the Intendant Gerald Mortier sees the future of the performing arts. The first, called Wolfa reference to Mozart and the canine specieswas ostensibly a dance theatre performed to live music by Mozart. The piece has been structured around its performers improvisations and particular talents by the Flemish director Alain Platel. Thus at one point we even get a circus act with a woman hanging down from long strips of cloth The set seems to indicate a broken down shopping alley in an urban ghetto and in the first piece of action three kids beat up a hobo. He escapes and for the rest of the show is surrounded by a pack of almost twenty dogs who wander around the stage at will whilst Mozart pieces come and go, some of which are sung by three very accomplished singers. The characters form and reform into different groups, identities and genders are tested and parodied and towards the end the whole cast indulge in a raucous version of the Internationale before being executed with a single shot and dying in a long drawn-out slow motion sequence. No present. No future? What sounds chaotic in description was in reality, rather poignant, even at times inspiring and amusing. The fragility of the kids existence was only emphasised by the extraordinary music. Mozart himself is said to have gone 51

out round Vienna at night with a pack of poodles hunting rats in order to get inspiration for Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Im still not sure how relevant this is to the show or even what it was about but thats probably not the sort of question one asks in a post-modern performance world. Whatever the case itll be touring till 2005 by which itll probably be a completely different show. Take a look if you get the chance. Wolf was performed in the huge central power station, another cold and uncomfortable venue. By contrast the other three theatre shows I saw in the Park were staged in the converted blast house whose shell is vaguely reminiscent of an old church, which makes for an eminently acceptable theatre space. Unfortunately the first offering - a world premiere opera - failed to make the mark at all. Heliogobal was a decadent late-Roman boy emperor, a kind of Michael Jackson superstar, or so

Patrice Chreaus production of Phdre. Photo: courtesy of Ruhr Trienniale and Odon Theatre

the intellectual explanation given us by the librettist Thomas Jonigk who seems to have studied his life down to the last detail. It shows. For the libretto reveals no signs of any creative approach other than to run us through the boys life from A to Z. That would have been fine had Mr Jonigk possessed ever the most elementary idea of how to translate facts into dramatic action. Here he abdicated his role as a dramatist completely in favour of allowing his singers to narrate the story in a series of solo arias. This might have been minimally acceptable had we been able to make out the words. These however were drowned in a cacophony of brass music and other effects composed by a Belgian composer Paul Vermeersch and played by a big band which took up one half of the stage. The other half was inhabited by the performers who seemed as lost as the director who had decided to impose his particular talents on the play by dictating that our particular superstar, Heliogobal, should be played as a fat slob with no attractive qualities at all. This, at the same time as the libretto was trying to persuade us how sexy and attractive he was. All very depressing, Mr Mortier.

The festival dramaturg deserves a kick up the pants from the Wolf cast for even allowing this pathetic farrago to get anywhere near the stage. A couple of weeks later everything was put to rights again by Robert Wilson and a great cast of black performers from New York. The show: The Tempation of St. Antony was an adaptation of a Flaubert novel. It tells of the hermit St. Antony in search of true faith in the desert and subject to the temptations of the flesh and bodily love He is accompanied by an old pupil Hilarion who conducts a lengthy debate with him on a series of philosophical and religious approaches to life. An old man appears and tells of his meeting with Christ. Antony is overwhelmed by all the arguments and at the end of his search arrives at a beautiful placehis starting pointwhere he feels the power of the universe within him. The morning sun begins to rise Wilson too fails to convert the narration into any convincing action but his sense of staging and creative lighting combined with some wonderful gospel music by Bernice Johnson Reagon and performed impeccably by cast and musicians made this

Robert Wilsons production of The Temptation of St. Antony. Photo: courtesy Ruhr Trienniale

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an inspiring evening. The third show I saw here was even more stunning - an operatic adaptation of Roddy Doyles novel The Woman who walked into Doors from the ro theatre in Rotterdam. There are only two performers in the show, one singer and one actress, each an embodiment of the central character. With the help of a live orchestra they tell the story of a working-class woman in Dublin, the victim of violent beatings from her husband, and how she survives amidst a series of personal and economic disasters. Her stream of memories is triggered by the news that her estranged husband has been shot dead by the police during a raid. The flash-backs are intensified by an amazing video projection which runs throughout the show and which, despite its potentially overwhelming nature, nonetheless blends marvellously with the production style. We are taken back to the womans deprived youth, the first fumbling attempts at sex, her falling in love, the start of marital violence, her fear of abandoning her husband and finally to her final courageous decision to strike out on her own. What could have been depressing turned out to be an uplifting endorsement of human resilience. The combination of all the different formal elements made this truly a breakthrough in the art of opera. See it if you can. The Landscape Park provided the Triennale with yet another venue. The half-open foundry bay proved an ideal venue for a series of six concerts conceived by the American guitarist Bill Frizell and arranged around a simple concept. The Century of Song. The concerts featured Brecht/Weill, Jacques Brel, Viennese music, Suzanne Vega, Italian Canzoni and an unforgettably entertaining night with Loudon Wainwright III and Van Dyke Parks. This was festival fun at its best. Another American artist, working in a completely different genre, was featured within the cavernous walls of the 116 metre tall gasometer in Oberhausen. Christo and Jean-Paul erected a marvellous wall of oil barrels here recently. Now it was Bill Violas turn. His video spectacle Five Angels for the Millenium was an extraordinary meditative installation which dared to try to evoke the big bang and the birth of creation in Asian mythology. Not a show to rush through for superficial sensual stimulation. Rather one to absorb in a mind-less fashion (and I mean that positively). A few weeks later Viola erected a copy at Tate Modern in London where it created a furore. Lucky Ruhrgebiet! More than 1,000,000 inhabitants saw it here in a huger 53

and more impressive environment. Mr. Mortiers stated theme for this years Triennale was angels as symbols of spirituality infusing new life into what he sees as cathedrals of industry. The analogyit is almost a clich here seems to me at least to be utterly wrong-headed for I have always seen cathedrals as pointing upwards to the skies, transporting us into transcendent realms. Industrial monuments, by contrast, root one to the earth and even, in the case of colliery pithead towers, carry the minds eye down to the bowels of a filthy, fiery hell of agonizing labor. Angels or demons, Mr. Mortier? Industrial monuments may have an awesome grandeur. What they are not, for the most part, is beautiful and inspiring. Back to Bochum and the Hall of the Century. An appropriate enough venue for a tribute to the workers of the area who toiled to make Germany one of the worlds leading economic nations. Grard Mortiers way of paying tribute to them artistically was to commission an adaptation of a novel called Milk and Coal by Ralf Rothmann which deals with life in the 1960s and the early wave of guest workers from Italy. The adaptation was put in the capable hands of the Dutch director Johan Simons and although, once again, most of the action was told through direct narrative Simons found a way to make the evening highly dramatic. The director exploits Mortiers vision of a mixture of genres o the full to ask the question whether the music - in this case Verdi arias sung live and interpolated into the action - is merely an expression of sentimentality or a true expression of deeper emotions. The story tells of a German woman, the wife of a Ruhrgebiet collier, who has a brief love affair with an Italian guest worker and discovers new horizons beyond the narrow, unromantic Teutonic world in which she is trapped. The evening unfolds in a series of flashbacks beginning with the womans death, and angel-like she reappears to recreate the past and affirm life with all its finest and deepest emotionsembodied in Verdis music?in the face of death. Ironically enough the piece was at its most powerful at the end when it suddenly reverted to traditional dialogue. There were many more angels appearing during the huge programme which made up the Triennale, including a seven hour version of Paul Claudels Satin Slipper and a five hour performance of Messiaens Joan of Arc. The festival will return again next year for a third term. Which is more than can be said for its counterpart in Recklinghausen

which will be swallowed whole into the Triennale next May under Frank Castorf, the controversial director of the Berlin Volksbhne. Many years ago the actor Bernhard Minetti, (in his time the German equivalent of Laurence Olivier) spoke of the Recklinghausen Festival in these terms: The audience in Recklinghausen was not used to theatre and was overwhelmingly composed of real workers who had bought their tickets at the works themselves. It was open, curious and uninhibited. You could feel their expectations from the excitement in the auditorium and this made it a great pleasure to act there. People would smile at you on the street the next day as if to say: you belong to usIt was not one of those tourism festivals which you can find anywhere and everywhere. The Triennale, by contrast, is clearly intended to arouse national and international interest as a new top venue on the European arts scene. State politicians have conjured it into life with an incredible amount of public subsidy (even by German standards!) in a desperate attempt to rid the Ruhrgebiet once and for all of its misleading image as a backward, uncultured, ugly industrial wasteland. The decision aroused much doubt in the minds of artists and taxpayers alike. The former saw their own grass-roots works threatened by a cut in subsidies to meet the extra expense at the top and the latter doubted that an implanted festival, no matter how prestigious, would have no real connection with their own lives and concerns. After a shaky

start Mortiers second year with the Triennale is beginning to show tangible fruits. Despite its inevitable mistakes and failures, this is no ordinary festival with conventional prestige productions but a genuine attempt to break new artistic ground. Audience numbers have reached a good level, even if they overwhelmingly comprise the usual festivalgoing middle classes. There has been a small increase in the international recognition, mostly from neighbouring Holland. The New York Times has even come up with a couple of articles, although the headline of the latestTempting Audiences to the German Rust Beltonly served to confirm the lie that the area is basically unattractive. But the British press has stayed well clear and, from my talks with artists and journalists alike the Triennale has utterly failed to make any impact there whatsoever. Quite bluntly no one I have talked to has heard of it. Perhaps you can put this down to traditional British insularity. But given the uncertain economic future in Germany, the appropriation of the Recklinghausen Festival into the Triennale under the directorship of Frank Castorf, who does not seem to have been near the theatre or the area all year, and the handover in 1905 to the next Intendant Jrgen Flimm, an out-and-out theatre specialist, it remains to be seen whether the festival will turn out to be little more than a short rich flowering or be able to take root and flourish, not only within the community, but on the wider European performing arts scene.

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Austrian Festival Report: Salzburg and Bregenz

Glenn Loney Avant-Gardism in the Festivals At a time when Muslims are being demonized by some powerful politicians in the West, staging Mozarts Singspiel, The Abduction from the Seralio, with close attention to the details of the plot could make this opera a political favorite. After all, the mainspring of the story is the attempt by two brave young Christian men to rescue two lovely young Christian virgins, held as slaves in a Turkish Harem. They are in dire danger of being forced to yield to the sexual lusts of Selim Bassa [Pasha] and Osmin, his supervisor of the Seraglio. Several seasons ago at the Salzburg Festival, stage-director Franois Abou Salem tried a gritty TV-Realist approach to Abduction. A Palestinian, Abou Salem was apparently not remotely interested in Mozarts cartoonish Turks, nor in the sexual fantasies and fears which animated Mozarts characters. He didnt even show much affinity for Mozarts music. Instead, he chose to introduce Salzburg audiences to modern life in the Gaza Stripor perhaps Occupied Arab Jerusalem. The forestage was separated from the spectators by coils of razorwire, complete with a United Nations PeaceKeeper and a mobile TV cameraman, on hand to record for CNN moments in Mozarts opera which should have been most intimate. Mozarts score was even enlivenedthough not enriched-with the addition of an Arab drum, a flute, and some tinny cymbals. For even more Ethnic Experience, extraneous Arab Music also was enthusiastically played, though it had no reference to the original score or plot. It could be argued that, as a Palestinian, Abou Salem may have his own aesthetic axe to grind on Western European stages. But what are audiences, and critics, to think of Western European and British stage-directors who rework Entfhrung to suit their own visions? This past summer, both the Munich and the Salzburg Festivals premiered very unusual avant-garde productions of Mozarts little classic. In Munich, the novelty was staging all the major arias and duets on flying sofas, while across the border in Salzburg, Stefan Herheim left the 18th century fantasy Turkey and the dangers of a Muslim Harem far behind, peopling his Entfhrung with lovely young brides and formally-attired grooms, all ready for a multiple Westchester Wedding. Details of both stagings follow in separate festival reports. 55 Then there was the recent Salzburg Festival Hamlet, staged by Martin Kusej, who has just succeeded Jrgen Flimm as chief of the Festivals drama-programs. Although recognizable speeches of Shakespeare were cut, chopped, transposed, and occasionally put into the mouths of quite different characters than the Bard obviously intended, this new version was not based on the original text. Instead, it was reduced and reworked from a Heiner Mller English version. The new production did open with soldiers, a lot of them, but not the Night Watch up on the castle walls of Elsinore. What appeared to be a glass-and-steel industrial warehouse was guarded by a score of soldiers in heavy medieval armor. An unknown knight appeared and tried unsuccessfully to break through their lines. Then the knight disarmed and revealed herself as Fortinbras, a charming blonde, with a lightweight voice. The cordon of Danish knights was seen again only once. When Hamlet was to set sail for England, they appeared, in long white robes with cowls, outside the walls of the warehouse. Each carried a brightly colored plastic kayak. Perhaps they were planning to paddle off to England, accompanying Hamlets ship? Some actually broke through the walls with their small boats. The translucent panels between the metal ribs of the building were actually soft plastic. At the close, some kind of solvent dripped down over these panels, and they all began to melt, as the Danish Court was dissolving in death, apparently a Visual Metaphor. In the first of the three sections of this production, the front folding panels of the warehouse slid open to reveal a stage-filling thicket of leafy green stalks. Hamlet pulled up many of them in the center rear and then hacked his way forward with a sword. This image made a number of critics believe the play was set in a green-house, or a tree-nursery. As members of the Danish Court were soon shooting clay-pigeons, with a real trap-shooting machine and double-barreled shotguns in the clearing just created, this must be an exterior scene, but merely contained in the warehouse. Only set-designer Martin Zehetgruber knows for sure. In the second and third sections, the room was stocked with very large cardboard shipping cartons. Not a tree of Birnham Wood was in sight. Some of the boxes were filled with white styrofoam packing-pellets.

The body of Polonius was stashed in a pile of pellets in one of the cartons. Cascades of the pellets overwhelmed the stage at the close. At midpoint, when pretty Fortinbras stopped by to ask for permission to pass over Denmark on the way to an idiotic Polish war, she and Hamlet were on a movable bridge-crane above the warehouses floor-sections of which had now been removed. Hamlet and Fortinbras got on so well that Hamlet put his head in Fortinbras lap. He also repeated this bit with Ophelia and his mum, the Queen. After Hamlet had slashed his way through the thicket, at the top of the show, he was revealed in a black T-shirt-which did not conceal his penis. When he confronted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about their complicity with the King, instead of using a wooden recorder to mock their attempts to play upon him, he pulled out his penis and offered it to them to play upon. They wisely refused. On the voyage to England, Hamlet was not freed by pirates. As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enjoyed a cigar and a banana-was it only a cigar?-Hamlet stole their automatic and shot both of them dead. Then he finished the banana. The climactic duel, however, was fought with real swords and daggers and was fairly exciting. Horatio was called Yorick in this Kusej version of Hamlet. He was dressed all in white and was clearly Hamlets alter-ego. Horatio/Yorick was also Hamlets Fathers Ghost, carrying a vintage portable radio to provide popular musical accompaniment. For the Mousetrap Scene, Yorick/Horatio played the entire pantomime himself, lip-synching to snippets of pop movies and TV dialogue-a hilarious virtuoso turn. In the Grave-Digger Scene, Horatio/Yorick asked the unseen grave-digger Hamlets opening question about whose grave it is. When the digger appeared above the edge of one of those cardboard packing cartons, it was of course Hamlet himself. Hamlet then pulled Yorick/Horatio into the grave and leapt out himself. He seized his alter-egos living head as if it were a free-floating skull and uttered his famous riff about Yoricks talents as a Popular Entertainer. Queen Gertrude had a Marine white-sidewall haircut, so her crown fit very snugly. She was the only one who dressed grandly, with several changes of elegant gowns, one with a long train. And smart red shoes! Ophelia, when first seen, looked like a 1960s sorority girl: fluffy powder-blue sweater and sleek short sequined dress. By the time her Mad Scene arrived, she was considerably more 56

bedraggled. She even whacked Gertrude with some of her gathered greenery, knocking the poor queen flat. When Ophelia began passing out sprigs of rosemary and rue soon after, everyone shrugged off the clippings as though they were poison-oak. Laertes, just back from France, was so horrified that he slapped her repeatedly and then knocked her down into the cellarage of the warehouse. He jumped in after her, and some critics were sure he must have been raping her. Whatever happened, Gertrude almost immediately pulled a long and very wet gown out of the depths. Perhaps Laertes drowned her to expunge the shame to his Family Name? Afterward, when the King made his futile and desperate prayer to God he seemed to be confiding in Hamlet instead of praying in secret. In any case, the emotional rush so inflamed him that he pushed Gertrude flat on her face, pulled up her dress, and yanked down her undies. Then he tore open his fly and proceeded to perform violent sodomy on her as she screamed. Although some scenes were played with real passion and most of the actors were very good, the total effect was of a sub-textual parody of Shakespeares tragedy. Instead of heightening the tragic effect with clearly modern visual references, the clash between the classic and the trendy was often laughable. Such unsettling, and unnecessary, reworking of a classic of drama is only part of a disturbing trend among major European stage-directors, desperately seeking notoriety through novelty. They cannot write their own plays, so they savage the scripts of far more talented artists. In the earlier phases of this up-dating of the classics, the watchword was Desconstruction. More recently, the rationale for revising great dramas is to make them more relevant, more contemporary, especially for younger audiences. This argument is not entirely without merit. Much of the state-subsidized repertory programming in Mittel-Europa no longer has much appeal for young spectators. Teen-agers and college students have too many other, and livelier forms of entertainment crying out for their patronage and their Euros. Salzburg This past summer in Salzburgs Altstadt, amongst the great baroque churches and palaces of the former Prince-Archbishopsthe new Festival Intendant, Prof. Dr. Peter Ruzicka, tried to program operas, dramas, concerts, and allied events which

would appeal to a wider audience than was the aim of the recent Artistic Director, Dr. Gerard Mortier, now toiling with the Ruhr Triennale. He is also making an effort not alienate very wealthy festival guests with negatively provocative productions of classics, as Mortier so often did. Unfortunately, with economic downturns in Europe, state subsidies and corporate sponsorships have not been as substantial as in the past. This summer, the previously announced program of new productions of works by Austrians forced into exile by the Nazis was a casualty. But it is such a good idea that it will surely have to be funded somehow and go forward. The good news is that ticket-sales are increasing under Ruzickas Intendancy. In the final years of Mortiers tenure, empty seats at major productions were an embarrassing testimony to the effects of his arts-policies on rich and elitist festival-goers. This summer there were some 219,000 tickets available for all the festival events. Just before the formal opening of the fest, 180,000 of them had already been sold! Final sales of over 200,000 were forecast. This is very impressive, considering the fact that Salzburg Festival opera-tickets are the most costly in the world-although Covent Garden and the Met are catching up. Top price for an orchestra-seat for Don Carlo or La Clemenza di Tito was Euro 350, in a season when the Euro had eclipsed the American dollar in value. If you have ever taken a tour of Salzburg area Salt-Mines-the great Medieval and Renaissance wealth of this Principality was built on salt, after all-you might imagine a Festival production in the Hallein Salines would involve staging a show in a vast underground salt-crystal grotto, approached through sparkling salt-spangled tunnels. Its an interesting idea, but the actual Hallein venue is an immense salt-drying hall-which can be amazingly adapted to a variety of wildly innovative stagings. Luca Ronconis version of Pirandellos Giants from the Mountains used levels and compartments of the structure. Peter Steins unforgettable production of Grillparzers Libussa had an undulating stage-constructed of rough wooden planks-to suggest the terrain on the River Moldau which would become the City of Prague. At the conclusion of this mythic drama revealing the roots of Czech History, men with chain-saws rushed on stage and began sawing through the boards until the entire stage had fallen down, out of sight of the astounded bleacher-bound audience. Of course, this unusual stage had to be re57

built before each performance. This past summer, two quite different, but equally impressive, productions were mounted in the great drying-hall. The first of these ought to have a World Tour. The second is perhaps too Austria-Specific, or even too author-specific, to provoke the necessary Shock of Recognition in audiences outside German-speaking Lands. The first was a Festival co-production with Schauspielhaus Hannover. Johann Kresniks Peer Gynt staging is one of the most outrageously imaginative and Over-the-Top revisions of a Modern Drama Classic I have ever seen! Even in its first amazing moments, it is already Over-the-Top: A fusillade of white plastic lawn-chairs comes flying over tall green mountain-peaks. Out of nowhere, with no chair-throwers in sight, these Wal-Mart chairs thump down on the forestage, just short of the first rows of the astounded audience. Suddenly, on the tops of the peaks, strange mountain-men with immense antlers on their heads begin to leap about on these precarious perches. They are, in fact, Trolls, headed by Henrik Ibsens Troll King. It used to be one of the initial challenges for acting-students to develop a character for a troll in Peer Gynt, but the lusty, crazy Hannoverians have outdone anything one could imagine. Some trolls even poke their heads out of the stage-floor, or disappear down tight holes in the stage. At one point, the Astroturf-green covering of the mountain-peaks is pulled off to reveal these rocky outcroppings as the Great Stone Faces of Fallen Idols, such as Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and even John F. Kennedy. Neither as peaks or portraits are these images mere scenic backdrops. They are major performance platforms, with actors leaping from ledge to ledge, or from eyebrow lip ... Kresniks enthusiastic players have to be very surefooted indeed, as these rock faces are not their only challenges. Great Seven-League Boots are given Peer for Alpine hikes, the Trolls already being expert in stomping about in them. These huge boots even become candle-holders in a haunting scene. At one point, tux-clad attendants wheel on large garbage-carts filled with stone-bones. These are promptly dumped and strewn about the stage. As though these werent hazardous enough, shortly afterward a hailstorm of blue and silver Red Bull cans rains down from the rafters. [Red Bull, the energy-drink, is headquartered near Salzburg and has become a major corporate sponsor!] But there are other oddments up in the

overhead as well. When Peer is shipwrecked, five fully inflated life-rafts drop down with great thumping crashes on stage. After the cast has fought for places in the rafts, a number of lovely naked women, part of the ten-person dance-troupe in the show, perch on the rims of the rafts, miming defecation at sea. There is a great deal of flaunted nudity, bared breasts, and suggestive movement in this taboo-breaking production. Handsome blond Benjamin Hppner, who plays Peer 1, exposes himself for all to see. Johann Kresniks directorial specialty since the 1970s has been Choreographic Theatre. He focuses on taboo political and social themes, often using theatre classics as his point of departure. In some ways, his new Peer Gynt is a long way off from Ibsen, but in others it does echo the major events in Peers picaresque humbling, fumbling through life. Ibsen, for instance, could never have imagined the creation of the State of Israel or the Arab Refugee Camps. But in this production, Peer meets fervent Palestinians and fanatic Settlement Israelis. Peer finds them both crazy. Nor would Ibsen have included photos and quotations of Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Lenin in his Norwegian peasant-fantasy. But here they are: all the Great Icons of the 20th Century . . . Kresnik has even recreated the images of American Astronauts landing on the moon! His able, athletic, and enthusiastic ensemble is composed of ten dancers and eight actors. But all of them have to act and to move in his often wildly abandoned choreographies. Not only is there a Young Peer, but also Numbers 2 and 3, revealing Peer in Middle and Old Age. Clearly, Kresnik has used Ibsens poetic fantasy as a Point of Departure, but the basic moral is still there. Serge Weber has created special music for the show, which was ingeniously designed by Martin Zehetgruber, with fantastic costumes by Heide Kastler. These are all talents to watch, hopefully on American stages as well. American production, even in English translation, is a much greater problem for Austrias leading female playwright, Elfriede Jelinek. She is widely admired in Mittel-Europa, but her plays are virtually unknown across the Atlantic. In Austria, however, she seems to have become something of a cult. Several seasons ago, she was the focus of a Salzburg Festival program which even zoomed in on her tastes in clothes, horror-films, and other authors. A press-ticket to a staging of one of her works, which featured a lot of older people in rows 58

of easy-chairs, was denied me. The reason: Youre an American. You wouldnt understand it. Had I not read various synopses and newspaper reports on Jelineks Macht Nichts, I might have been even more baffled, although it was certainly fascinating to watch dead people briefly come back to life in slow-motion. Macht Nichts: Its a German phrase which became very popular with American Occupation Army GIs after World War II. It can variously mean: It doesnt matter, Forget about it, or Dont get upset. Jelinek has used the term as the title for a trilogy of meditative monologues by zombie-like dead people-personas she favors in fiction and on stage. This work was not conceived as a play, but director Jossi Wieler and designer Anna Viebrock have ingeniously adapted it for stage performance. It was originally mounted at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, and it subsequently won the Mulheim Drama Prize as Work of the Year. As the Salzburg staging of this work was delayed a season, designer Viebrocks setting for the Hallein Saline Hall must have been specially constructed. Even if it is in essence what was shown on the Zurich proscenium-stage, it would certainly have had to be adjusted to the broad space in front of the spectators bleacher-seats. Viebrock provided a long beige box with sliding windows in the center, raised up on concrete columns and suggesting a garage below a condo. In this misty space below, a hunter prowled with his rifle, a feathered alpine hat on his head. Seen through curtains on the windowsections was a dinner-table-with three people slumped over their meal, either asleep. . . or dead. From time to time, they variously emerged from comas to move robotically and then slump again into oblivion. They seemed an oddly matched family at first, with the gabby Matriarch correcting her daughter and humiliating her husband. But no, the woman began to talk of past triumphs on the stage: she was not just any wife and mother. In fact, the dead character was based on the late, great Austrian actress, Paula Wessely. Jelinek seems to have a strong animus against her, notably for her Burgtheater career during the Nazi era. Jelinek had this still-vain-in-death figure play scratchy recordings of old applause for her performances. In the play-text, she is called the Erlknigin, or Queen of the Elves, transmuted from that famous horrorpoem, Der Erlknig, a monstrous rider, bringing death. She was brilliantly, obsessively played by Graham F. Valentine.

It is by now no secret that Elfriede Jelinek is fascinated by Zombies and the Undead, not to mention Horror Films and the like. But the zombiedaughter (Sylvana Krappatsch) was someone else altogether. She was the original Snow White, or Schneewittchen. Unfortunately for her, before she could find her Seven Dwarfs, she was shot dead by the Hunter (Ludwig Boettger). The man (Andr Jung) slumped over the Wienerschnitzel who roused himself to an insanely raging monologue was based on the playwrights father. Need one say more? It is one thing to stage an outrageous visual and cultural riff on Ibsens already surreal Peer Gynt. But it is quite another matter to rework Georg Bchners Wozzek fragments into a gratuitous blood-bath which makes completely meaningless the original character and the plebeian tragedy the playwright tried to evoke. This is the handiwork of director Michael Thalheimer. In the Salzburg Festival co-production with Hamburgs Thalia Theatre, Wozzecks world is defined and enclosed by a huge metal box, open at the audiences end. Wozzek is initially discovered striking a pose, which he holds for an eternity-a possible challenge to the spectators, or a visual harbinger of worse to come. Of course, in line with the current Germanic fascination with nudity on stage, Wozzek bares more than his soul. The Drum-Major strips down to his boots and trousers, but the naked white gut of middle-aged European actor is almost as horrible a sight as an inert corpse. Maybe worse, because the actors mid-section was still in gelatinous motion. A major conceit of this odd production was the presence in front of the metal-box of a slightly dissipated lounge-singer in a black suit, crooning songs of love into a mike. This device has its counterpart in the new Hamlet staging at the Edinburgh Festival, which features Horatio as an Elvis-type white-suited lounge-pianist. The Wozzek vocalist, it must be assumed, provided a bitterly satiric contrast to the mayhem occurring in the box. Horatio, at a white baby-grand piano, served almost the same function in Elsinore/Edinburgh. Each of Bchners original characters makes a downstage-left entrance, narrowly constrained by the front edge of the box and the sidewall of the Art Nouveau proscenium of Salzburgs Landestheater. No one makes a precipitate entrance, however. Each spends some time establishing some physical or visual quirk to symbolize character. The Drum-Major repeatedly jabs the air 59

with his baton, suggesting his both his cock and his cockiness. Not limiting himself to killing Marie, Wozzek takes a blade-razor to the Major, the Captain, and the Doctor. Soon the shining metal walls of his box are spattered with stage-blood. Before he murders Marie, he rapes her violently. Her friend Kthe gets off easy: Wozzek only breaks her neck. . . One critic described this Wozzek as a Serial-Killer. Other review-headlines included: Bloodbath after Bchner, Festival Massacre, and Woyzeck Runs Amok. Add Stefan Herheims name to the list of extremist post-modern stage-directors. In his new Salzburg staging, Herheim has turned Mozarts Entfhrung into a Modern Morality, a light-hearted musical-comedy about popular marriage rituals in the West. One critic disparagingly described this staging as a Skandal-Revue. Although the bevies of brides initially appeared in full wedding-gown drag, they soon stripped down to their slips, and thence to white bras, bikinis, and sheer hose. There are even images of white-clad workers preparing to wall-paper a bridal-bower, which they actually do, assisted by some clever video-effects. Nor are the wedding-gift kitchen-appliances neglected. Laundromats, dish-washers, sink-ensembles, and ironing-boards worthy of Wal-Mart take centerstage. Osmin, Bassa Selims harem-master [the admirable Peter Rose], first appears dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, urging on young lovers to Christian Marriage. Later, he appears in formal dress, teased by the lovely young ladies. At one point, he even wears Bavarian Lederhosen, with the cute effect of his actual naked chest being seen above a TV-screen featuring his Hosen-clad torso in video. Video games and tricks were prominent, including a video of Mozarts lovers on a flying-carpet, possibly to maintain some tenuous link to the original opera. In fact, this production was so relentlessly designed, tricked-out, and frenetically in motion that Konstanze (Iride Martinez), Blondchen (Diana Damraul), and their boyfriends were almost totally eclipsed. Gottfried Pilz designed the set and costumes. Ivor Bolton, who is no stranger to such bizarre productions in Munich, conducted with obvious enthusiasm. As in Munich, the spoken-role of Bassa Selim evaporated in the mists of bridal-veils. Salzburg found a wonderful way to celebrate the stunning achievements of the late Herbert

Wernike as director/designer of memorable Salzburg Festival opera-productions! Not just the handsomely designed foyer exhibition in the Festspielhaus, but also the revival of his monumental Post-Modernist Don Carlo. Outside the Festspielhaus, two immense shining cone-like spikes were suspended horizontally over the plaza, almost meeting but leaving a spark-gap. Having seen Wernickes Don Carlo before, I recognized these as menacing symbolic elements in his stagedesign for the oppressive Spanish Court of King Phillip II. But only when I looked at program illustrations of Penitentes in Holy Week in Seville and victims of the Spanish Inquisition did I realize that their conical hoods, much later favored by Americas Ku Klux Klan, had been adapted by Wernike into these gleaming metal-spikes. On stage, from either side or from above and below, they are constant reminders of the grim grip of the Roman Church, the Holy Catholic Inquisition, and King Phillips own fanatical religiosity on his court and people. Valery Gergiev conducted with subdued power, supporting an impressive cast including Olga Borodina as Eboli, Ferrucio Furianetto as the King, Kurt Rydl as the blind Grand Inquisitor, and the dashing Dwayne Croft as Posa. Although Johan Botha is vocally strong as Carlo, his girth works entirely against the image of singer-as-hero. He is really more suited to Don Carlo in concert. American conductor Kent Nagano knows a great deal about European operas, so he is not to be blamed for the defects of the new Tales of Hoffmann production in the Grosses Festspielhaus. The British production-team of director David McVicar, set and costume designer Tanya McCallin, and lighting designer Paule Constable simply did not know what to do with the wide, wide stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus, which seems like two football-fields set end-to-end when it is opened to its fullest. The framing plot and the three fantastic tales of Hoffmanns disastrous adventures in love were all performed in an immensely wide grungy room. This milieu at times threatened to swallow them up, or overwhelm them with needless gigantism. Worse yet, as this vast chamber was supposed to be some kind of garret in which the burned-out drug-addict-alcoholic failed poet Hoffmann was raving and trying to scribble down his fevered imaginings, it seemed the worlds largest studio-apartment. It made most of those Grand Central Station60

sized Bohme attics look cozy in comparison. Add to that the designers attempts to localize each of the stories, anchoring them in some area of the stage, which diminished their visual and musical impact. McVicar and his choreographer, Andrew George, are also anything but expert in deploying large numbers of chorus, dancers, and extras on such a large stage. The resultant mob-scene crowding certainly detracted from the central events. While the set-prop of a bare naked tree hung with violins was an effective visual symbol for Antonias sad tale, it was not enough to focus attention on the action. If anything, it diffused it. To make the stage look somewhat more intimate, Giuliettas gondola was much longer than the regulation boats in Venice. It scooted out of a monster fireplace from stage-right and just sat there as the major set-prop, while some scantily-clad young men climbed the walls. Waltraud Meier sang the role of the devious Venetian courtesan, only days after shed done Venus in Munich. This casting could be habit-forming, but it doesnt guarantee the erotic charge the music suggests. Neil Shicoff was a raving lunatic as the desperate Hoffmann, but he sang affectingly and played the role with skill. He was also rough and dismissive with the Nicklausse of Angelika Kirchschlager, whom McVicar imagined as a woman, Hoffmanns much-abused and long-suffering lover. Both Lover and Muse, in fact. As Nicklausse is a breeches-role, there has always been a strange sexual linkage between Hoffmann and his young friend. Is Nicklausse, in fact, an effeminate, but suppressed, homosexual admirer of the boastful poet? In four roles, Ruggero Raimondi was sleekly sovereign in his malice toward Hoffmann. Ursula Pfitzner was the sexy Stella, whose assignation-letter to Hoffmann is intercepted by the villainous Lindorf. One of the most effective performances, however, was the mechanical doll Olympia, robotized by Lubica Vargicov. Krassimira Stoyanovas Antonia was sadly moving, but the staging vitiated the effect of the tale. The German composer Hans Werner Henze is now 83 years old. This puts him right up there with Bayreuths Wolfgang Wagner, who will surely never mount a Henze opera in his historic Festspielhaus. Salzburg, however, commissioned Henze to create a new opera, LUpupa, which he insists will be his last. Years ago, the Salzburg Festival also premiered Henzes Die Bassariden, an

operatic version of Euripides tragedy, The Bacchae, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallmann. This was interesting, but it didnt make a major place for itself in opera repertories. Yet Henze has certainly kept on trying, fortunate in support by German and Austrian funds and opera-houses. For me, his most impressive opera achievement was virtually his first, the haunting and tragic: Elegie fiir Junge Liebende or Elegy for Young Lovers, also with an Auden/Kallmann libretto. This was premiered almost 40 years ago in Munich in the jewel-box Cuvillis-theater. Henzes new work is titled LUpupa and the Triumph of a Sons Love. It is based on an old Arab tale, but it seems rather more Sufi Persian, related to The Conference of the Birds, which Peter Brook once turned into performance art and toured widely. On the evidence of the Salzburg premiere, however, it doesnt seem likely that there will be a similar tour for this pretty-as-a-picture-book production. Indeed, the libretto is so simplistically childrens theatre that it is difficult to imagine this opera entering any regular repertory. It may be, like other Henze operatic works, best seen as a Festival Opera, and only produced on special occasions. This charming production of LUpupa, cleverly designed by Jrgen Rose, who created both sets and costumes, seems almost too relentlessly cute for grown-ups. Nor is its attenuated picaresque story made more compelling by Henzes serviceable, but not memorable, score. As stage-director, Dieter Dorn did what he could with the piece. Bregenz The opening days of the Bregenz Festival this past July were celebratory in the extreme. Not only was there a remarkably imaginative new production of Leos Janaceks Das schlaue Fchslein and a monumental revival of Leonard Bernsteins West Side Story on a giant purpose-built stage on Austrias section of Lake Constance. But there were also many well-deserved tributes to the departing Artistic Director of the Festival, Dr. Alfred Wopmann. Although the Bregenz Festival as a major Austrian summer attraction dates back to 1946, in the wake of the devastation of World War II, it really owes its present fame and form to the vision and innovations of Dr. Wopmann, who developed the concept of Bregenzer Dramaturgie, or Bregenz Dramaturgy. As Bregenz was saying a grateful ,but slightly sad, good-bye to Alfred Wopmann, it was 61

also preparing a welcoming Hello for his talented successor, David Pountney, who is already wellknown on the Bodensee for his monumental operastagings, notably a Flying Dutchman as a nineteenth century Industrial Hell and a haunting Magrittestyle Fidelio. Pountney honed his directorial craft and his innovative vision at the English National Opera, and his unusual operatic visions are now to be seen on major international opera stages. His Faust, for the Bavarian State Opera, is one of the most flamboyantly bizarre post-modernist stagings of this traditional Romantic opera. Mephistophiles ascends to Heaven in a wheelchair! Pountneys first season as the Festivals Artistic Director, or Intendant, in July 2004 will feature the second year of Leonard Bernsteins West Side Story on the lake-stage. But the opera indoors will be a double-bill of two forgotten Kurt Weill short operas: Royal Palace and The Protagonist. The Protagonist, based on a text by Georg Kaiser, is Weills first opera, but Pountney sees both works as worthy complements to the Bernstein/Sondheim musical on Lake Constance. Their innovative American visions he views as direct inheritors of Kurt Weills and Bertolt Brechts fusion of serious subjects with exciting music. This fall at the San Franciso Opera, audiences will be able to see a most remarkable production of Janaceks Das schlaue Fchslein, as it was staged this past summer in the Bregenz Festspielhaus. Not so long ago, the unusually visionary operas of Leos Janacek were seldom produced, and even now The Excursions of Herr Broucek and Aus einem Totenhaus are very seldom staged. But such works as The Makropulous Case, Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, and Das schlaue Fchslein have found their rightful places in the repertories of leading opera-houses. Thus it was a surprise that Dr. Wopmann chose Fchslein as his final indoor production at the Festival. Today, it is hardly forgotten or neglected. It was once neglected, true, but largely because it was regarded as almost impossible to visualize on stage. Imaginative productions at the Glyndebourne Festival and ENO, among others, demonstrated that it could be performed quite simply, especially by enlisting the imaginations of the spectators. Of course there was a time, not so long ago, when asking a soprano to dress up in a fox-suit, cavort around the stage on all-fours, and vocalize as well would have provoked a major crisis. Fortunately, this was not a role ideally suited to the talents and tempera-

ments of Joan Sutherland or Maria Callas. But Janaceks Fchslein has a male mate for its Cunning Little Vixen, not to forget her little foxes and a host of woodland creatures, including insects. Younger singers with reputations to make are now glad of the opportunity to show what they can do in such roles. And opera choristers have hardly been in a position to complain, while opera ballets have risen to the movement challenges with gusto. The result has been a number of magical productions, including Maurice Sendaks Cartoonsas-High-Art vision of woodland and village settings and fantastical costumes. Munichs current Fchslein production concentrates the fantasy on the costumes, rather than the setting, which is essentially several clumps of step-ladders on an otherwise bare stage. For Bregenz and San Francisco, director Daniel Slater and his designer, Robert InnesHopkins, have taken quite a different approach, distinctly innovative, yet ultimately revelatory of the deeper emotions of both humans and animals in this strange fable, obviously so close to Janaceks secret heart. Slater notes that when they were beginning discussions at the cocktail-hour, a drunk nearby overheard and told them he thought the opera was about some people who turned into animals. Of course that is not at all what happens, but this odd misunderstanding gave them a brilliant idea for visualizing Fchslein anew. The Forester, despite being a married man, is obviously deeply lonely, disappointed in life, and discouraged about the future. Finding the cute little vixen, saving its life, and bringing it home with him means much more than a man who needs a pet or another mouth to feed. His special affection for the vixen has nothing of vulgar bestial perversion about it: there is nothing in the text or music to suggest that. But his bond with the little fox is certainly some kind of love. Although soporano Margareta Klobucar can wear a fox-suit and cavort with athletic glee as Fchslein Schlaukopf on other opera stages, in the Bregenz/San Francisco production, she plays a beautiful young red-haired girl who dons a coat with a huge fox-fur collar, which effectively suggests both the vixen and the female essence. So the barflys chance remark inspired the idea of metaphoric transformations worthy of Ovid. In case anyone in the audience misses the sense of love and longing, there is a dancing duo, standing in for the vixen and the Forester, who is strongly sung and acted by Peter Coleman-Wright. 62

As for creating a Czech woodland wonderland, the team went the opposite direction from Sendak or the Romantic Realists. Instead, the forest was simply suggested by a few chairs or a table from the village pub standing in solitary silhouette upstage on one of the Art Nouveau sliding scenicsections. This was amazingly effective, even haunting. Innes-Hopkins sliding sections were a series of ten rounded rectangular frames that could roll stage-right or stage-left to change the central stagepicture. These were three-dimensional, so the raised floors of the frame-bottoms were playable. Actually, the final upstage frame had a round opening, so it looked like the end of a tunnel, when all ten were lined-up at the close. The only apparent divergence from this basic scenic-scheme was the hilarious fox-in-the-hen-house scene, in which the mischievous vixen inspires the assembly-line egglaying hens to rebel against the arrogant tyranny of the rooster. Such lighter moments were especially welcome, for this beautiful but ineffably sad production visually underscored, and the actor-singers, guided and inspired by the score, emotionally reinforced the essential loneliness of not only the Forester, but of his fellow villagers as well. These are simple, superstitious peasants who live very close to Nature and each other, yet they inhabit neither their village nor the forest beyond it. And they understand nothing about themselves, their neighbors, or the woods beyond. The Riddle of Mans Existence comes no closer to revelation in Janaceks operatic meditation on Life and Death The animals, fowls, and insects, on the other, hand, inevitably obey the laws of Nature, the changes of the seasons, and the inevitable birthdeath-birth cycles of renewal. Even though audiences may glimpse some elements of human behavior, they are not people, and they inhabit a different but parallel world. Aletta Collins devised the ingenious choreographies. And the magisterial Vladimir Fedoseyev conducted the Wiener Symphoniker with great sensitivity. Although West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, which makes this seminal musical almost half-a-century old, it has been revived on the Bodensee as a contemporary vision of Outsiders vs. Insiders. Even though both youth gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are both Outsiders, with the Whites less Outside than the Puerto Ricans. Given the current nature of gangs and turf-wars in modern Manhattan, this is really archivally quaint. Aside from Police Officer Krupke, apparently represent-

ing Law and Order, the Insiders seem to be visually represented only by designer George Tsypins monumental skyscraper Leaning Tower of steel and glass. He has suggested this as a visible contrast of dominant Capitalism to the poverty and misery of Manhattans slums. Actually, this Post-Modernist megalith looks more like a 9/11 homage to the twisted ruins of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. It belongs to an entirely different musical or opera, which has yet to be written. But architectural monumentality is often a signature of a Tsypin stagedesign, at least when the producers can afford it. This Bodensee Tower can be ascended. Tech Director Gerd Alfons took me up into its dizzying heights. The view over the Alps and Lake Constance is breathtaking. But the structure is in effect not playable, nor is it needful that it be so. Its real design-function is to provide an immense visual symbol of the lake-production that can be seen kilometers away by tourists in autos, trains, and Bodensee ships. It is a Giant 3-D Logo. If both designer Tyspin and stage-director Francesca Zambello, who should know better, really believe West Side Story is about the contrasts between Insider Capitalism and Outsider Poverty and Discrimination, they should take a closer look at the actual book and lyrics, not to neglect Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, which inspired it. The evil agents of Capitalism, who might be seen as the creators of the Economic System that forces White and Hispanic kids to band into opposing street-gangs, are nowhere to be found in Arthur Laurents elemental book, although something of the sort is suggested now and then in Stephen Sondheims satiric lyrics. The crux of the Lovers Problem in Romeo and Juliet is the mutual hatred of the two families, the Montagues and Capulets, both of whom are Italian Renaissance Capitalists. In West Side Story, the essential conflict is between the more mainstream white gang vs. the obvious outsider Puerto Rican gang. The parents on both sides who have engendered their hates, fears, and prejudices are nowhere to be seen on stage. So, the attempt to impose a much larger, weightier oppressive social structure onto this story of doomed love is more than it can bear. Nor is West Side Story any longer effectively contemporary. In Manhattan today, it would be almost impossible to find an all-White street-gang. Working-class Whites have virtually abandoned the Metropolis for the Outer Boroughs. And, while there are strong 63

enmities among Black and Latino groups, the turfwars are more often about drug-dealing than about whos seeing my sister. This is what makes West Side Story now seem so quaint, despite its musical and lyrical charms. If a more up-to-date treatment is needed, theres always Paul Simons Latino Capeman, which was an abrupt flop on Broadway. Both Laurents and Sondheim have said that the initial idea was a confrontation between Puerto Rican and Black teen-gangs. But the issue of miscegenation was still too risky for a Broadway musical in the late 1950s. As for the stark contrasts of overwhelming skyscrapers dwarfing and stunting the lives of West Side slum-kids, the actual site of West Side Story is now Lincoln Center, which was not then, and hardly is now engulfed by skyscrapers. So West Side Story is hardly a contemporary paradigm. Its not even relevant in a drug-ridden social underside. But it is an affecting Period Musical, remembering a much more innocent time in America. Also, for an immense musical spectacle on Lake Constance, West Side Story has the same scenic limitations as most of the operas that have been given gargantuan productions on the lakestage. Almost all of the scenes are relatively intimate, with only gang-rumbles offering the possibility of full-stage choreographic extravaganzas. The same problem was posed for Bregenz by A Masked Ball, Fidelio, and Flying Dutchman. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an effective opera composed of nothing but full-cast, full-stage spectacular scenes. Designer George Tsypin, in creating the West Side Story Leaning Tower, has provided the Festival with the structural equivalent of Masked Balls towering human skeleton, visible kilometers distant and reproduced in media worldwide. But for some of the intimate scenes, he has provided a drug-storefront that scoots from beside the skyscraper down to mid-stage like a streetcar. Other small-scale scenes are accommodated in the revolving Brick House, which also can move forward on tracks. Because it has to contain several interiors, the effect of most of these often crucial scenes is somewhat cramped. And how were the performances, after all this technical/conceptual concern? Not bad at all. Maria Montalvo, in fact, was radiant as Maria, and Sibylle Wolf was amusing and charming as Anita. Andreas Wolfram was scary as Bernardo, but Jesper Tydns Tony seemed vocally and physically a bit wan, though handsome. Can you believe the slumkids chorus was the Kammerchor Moskau? Wayne Marshall conducted the Wiener Symphoniker with

appropriate Broadway flair. Richard Wherlocks choreography was rather routine for what should have been a revelation. Marie Jeanne Leccas costumes were adequate, without being outstanding, but then these kids live in the slums. Fortunately, James F. Ingalls lighting made sets, costumes, and dance-routines look even better than they actually were. For those who love figures, the skyscraperWolkenkratzer, in Germanis 36 meters high. And it will stand there in place all winter,

waiting for next Julys audiences. It leans forward at a 60 angle. Grounded on 13 steel and 5 wooden piles, it weighs 160 tons! The foundations in the lake required 34 tons of steel. Atop the skyscraper are 26 glass-towers which represent Manhattan and the Hope for a newer, better Life. These weigh some 19 tons! The drugstore faade weighs 12 tons, while the Brick House is constructed of 12 tons of steel and 10 tons of wood. And how about 95 loudspeakers and 800 spotlights?

Francesca Zambellos prodcution of West Side Story. Photo: courtesy Bregenz Festival

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The 2003 Season at Shakespeares Globe

Louis Muinzer of Katherina is brought to a timely end by Petruchio, The theme of the 2003 season at her new lord and master. The result is not a new Shakespeares Globe, London, was Regime royal dynasty but a (hopefully) happy marriage. Changethe ending of social patterns and the On my annual pilgrimage to the Globe, I beginning of new ones. To explore that theme, attended all of the seasons offerings except Dido Artistic Director Mark Rylance and his team chose Queen of Carthage, which had ended its run before five plays: Richard II, Richard III and The Taming my arrival. I was sorry to miss it, for Marlowes of the Shrew by Shakespeare himself and Dido, script contains much good writing. I wonder, howQueen of Carthage and Edward II by Christopher ever, how closely a modern audience could follow Marlowe. How the three English history plays suitits numerous classical allusions and entire lines of ed the program is immediately clear, for all portray Virgilian Latin. It would have been fascinating to the downfall of kings and the beginning of new see. reigns. With its classical gods and Virgilian subject Attending the three royal English plays one matter, Dido differs in style from the three plays after the other was certainly a depressing history already mentioned, but it, too, involves the death of lesson, but a splendid theatrical experience, and The a ruler; as Rylance writes in his introduction to the Taming of the Shrew offered a refreshing change of season, the play proposes that all our changes in pace. The most striking feature of the quartet was matters of love and state may in fact be responses to the staging of two of the plays by an all-male cast divine influence. At first thought, The Shrew and two by an all-female one. seemed a strange bedfellow for those plays about With the notable exception of the allill-fated royalty, but the choice is actually both apt female casting, the productions were straightforand amusing: the anarchic and highly volatile reign

Will Keen as Aeneas and Raykie Ayola as Dido in Tim Carrolls production of Dido, Queen of Carthage. Photo: Donald Cooper

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ward Globe staging. Traditional costume was used in all four; the doors and discovery space were employed as usual; benches, potted trees, thrones and a bed were positioned on the platform as required; and there were a few entrances and exits from among the groundlings. Even more memorable than the physical stagecraft of the productions, however, was the fluidity of scenic movement made possible by the skilful use of the stage doors and discovery space. The effect, though unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, was one that any visiting director should have observed carefully. It was the bedrock of Elizabethan stagecraft and is one of the central achievements of modern Globe stagecraft. As always, a strong feature of the productions was the music, usually played from the balcony above the discovery space. As I have noted in earlier WES reviews, Claire van Kampen, Director of Theatre Music, is one of the jewels in the Globe crown. She and her associates bring great style to every performance. The all-women productions were of Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, two relatively early plays by Shakespeare. Generally speaking, the same team of actresses appeared in both. Their work was clearly devised to compensate for the Globes traditional all-male productions past and present and to give the ladies a chance. The also served to underscore an important tenant of Shakespeares Globe, that Theatre is not Biology, but Artthat it involves the creation of characters who define their own gender in the context of the stage. In the present instance, I found little difficulty in accepting and responding with the Globe actresses in the numerous male parts. Sometimes, the voices were necessarily more feminine than masculine, but that was far better than faking a masculine baritone. Indeed, the characters spoke well for themselves. Nor were the faces of the players made heavily male through make-up. To the best of my recollection, all the men in Richard III were whiskerless, while the few touches of facial hair in The Shrew were surprisingly effective. While I endorse the cross-gender casting at the Globe without difficulty, the thought that a woman would play the deformed and evil Richard III was one that challenged my imaginationdoubly so as I saw from the programs that the same actress would be playing Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. Impossible! But like many things the history of the stage, the impossible turned out to be exciting theatre. Kathryn Hunters Richard was not 66

simply effective: for me, it was one of the high points of the Globe season. Short and slim, but with remarkable body control and visual expressiveness, Ms. Hunter was a wonder to behold. Her contorted body and crooked stance were matched by her sly expression and lightly sinister voice. The manner in which she handled her supposedly crippled right arm and distorted hand were the focus of her monstrous presence. I myself thought that a false hand had been attached to the real one, and I learned that someone in an earlier audience had even insisted that her arm itself was prosthetic. We were both wrong: here was simply the physical control of a very special actress. But Ms. Hunters toad-like appearance was not a self-sufficient piece of mime: it was the outward sign of a spiritually warped personality, a part of the actresss total characterization. This Richard was not a physically disabled person in the modern sense of the term, but a crippled beinga sick joke among kings. We in the disenchanted audience enjoyed him not as a somber villain, but as an evil clown in a piece of black humora comic melodrama brilliantly embodied in one revolting but strangely beguiling being. Whether unconsciously or not, the audiences response to Kathryn Hunters twisted king was triggered by his relevance to contemporary society. If certain outrageous moments in the monsters career were plausibly portrayed, the overall effect was of mocking irony. For disenchanted playgoers from virtually any modern country in the world, this monarch must have seemed a bitter parody of certain of their own great men. Richards relevance to notable figures of the last hundred years seemed inescapable. But the Globe spectators was not permitted to observe the unfolding of Richards career with detachment. In the scene in which the people accept and acclaim Richard as their king (III, vii), Master of Play (aka director) Barry Kyle and his team skilfully involved them in the corrupt doings of the script. To achieve this, the pivotal figure of the Lord Mayor (Rachel Sanders) was positioned on a stool among the Globes groundlings, who became the people who were to give their vote for or against Richard. As at a hyped-up contemporary political convention, the action of the selection scene was contrived and controlled by as authentic a spin-doctor as was ever glimpsed in the shadows at a modern media briefing: Richards wily front man, the

Kathryn Hunter as Richard and Amanda Harris as Buckingham in Barry Kyles production of Richard III. Photo: Donald Cooper

Duke of Buckingham (Amanda Harris). In the absurdist presentation of Richard as a humble and virtuous man, the members of the audience were encouraged to give him their backing, and they did so with cynical enthusiasm. They knew, of course, that they were participating in a social charade and helping a classic play move forward. Nevertheless, this disenchanted byplay made them participators in a pattern of political and social corruption, just as cynical acquiescence makes thousands of modern citizens participants in the corruption of totalitarian and other diseased societies. Here indeed was a joke with a moral punch. As Richards career hastened towards its climax, Kyle handled the dramatic material effectively. The dramatic scene between the scoundrel king and Queen Elizabeth (Yolanda Vasquez) , the mother of the murdered princes, was very effectively staged. I also liked the treatment of the tent scene (V, iii) where pegged out ropes attached to tent poles outlined the structures without blocking the view. I was also pleased by the underplaying of Richards famous offer of his kingdom for a horse at Bosworth Field: that tired old quote should never be played to the gallery, but absorbed dramatically into the flow of speech and movement. All in all, this Richard III was a well-performed history play that moved tellingly forward into our own world. The same talented team of performers were able to let their hair down (so to speak) in their free67

wheeling treatment of The Taming of the Shrew. Here, the Master of Play was actually the Mistress of Play, for the actresses were directed by one of their own gender, Phyllida Lloyd. For the occasion, the Richard III troop was joined by Janet McTeer, who played Petruchio. I enjoyed the production very much indeed, although, like some others, I cant say that The Shrew is a favorite play of mine. Its amusing theme, that brainwashing can be fun, is made doubly annoying by its blatant sexism. Personally, I can take pleasure in the play only by pretending that its surface subject matter isnt really there and that it is a farce about psychotherapy. In spite of my personal reservations, though, I must admit that the Globe actresses tackled to play with a gusto that strongly suggested that they were thoroughly enjoying themselves. In a sense, perhaps, they were getting their own back on this male chauvinist pig of a play. At the heart of the production was the swaggering, cool-cat figure of Janet McTeers Petruchio, who dominated the stage in a bravura performance. I was aware that he was actually an attractive actress, but I dont really expect to see a more satisfying embodiment of Shakespeares character than hers. Tall and muscular enough to carry Kate when appropriate, Ms. McTeer moved through the scenes with splendid confidence, even miming a casual urination against one of the stage pillars with masculine indifference.

But the key to the productions success lay in the subtle treatment of the shrew herself by director Phyllida Lloyd and actress Kathryn Hunter. First of all, the Bards feminine maverick wasnt played for laughs as a superficial caricature: Ms. Hunter played her as a woman whose character could develop naturally in the course of the action. Even better, though, was one of the master strokes of the production: at first sight, this little Kate was erotically awed by the charismatic Petruchio. The effect was subtle but clear. For me, this touch set the battle of the sexes that followed in a special context and rather undercut the clinical viciousness of the heros campaign. The ending of the play contained another special touchin fact, the triumph of this entertaining production. Bernard Shaw, quoted in the pro-

gram, called Kates big speech there altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. For once, Shaw was much too kind: if played straight, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew is even worse than that. But then Shaw didnt see this production. The obedientwife wager was carried through in a straightforward enough manner, but then Katherina and her director pulled the rug out from under the script. Katherinas long, didactic speech was broken up into short units or bursts of verbiage. Petruchio clearly wanted his tamed wife to say a few words to those present, but her long-winded stop-start diatribe clearly took him aback. Unable to stop her, he became embarrassed and (if my eyes didnt deceive me), almost cried. Clearly, Kate was the boss now. It was a neat reversal of their relationship and turned a deadly ending into a comic triumph.Perhaps in the future we should leave The Shrew to the ladies. Here, anyway, they have performed it as a very enjoyable comedy. The all-male company in the 2003 Globe season dealt out a pair of English kings and hence could offer no such tonal contrast as their female counterparts. Both Edward II and Richard II, however, provided enough fare to stimulate and challenge any theatre-goer. Unlike Richard III, each featured an English monarch who was a flawed but recognizably human being, rather than a brilliantly conceived monster. Some of the Globes most illuminating productions in the past have been of non-Shakespearean plays. It was good to find Christopher Marlowe added to the list of the theatres visitors, for his Edward II was a worthy choice for the 2003 program. I knew the play only from reading and from seeing a television version some years ago, so I welcomed this opportunity to see it on stage. To my surprise and pleasure, the Master of Play was the versatile Timothy Walker, who had played Malvolio in last seasons Twelfth Night. His intelligent proJanet McTeer as Petruchio and Kathryn Hunter as Katherina in Phyllida Lloyds duction flowed along seamlessly production of The Taming of the Shrew. Photo: John Tramper 68

and was especially notable for its stylized, expressionistic treatment of the climactic conflict of king and nobles, where singing was successfully employed, and the fighting was evoked through dance-like movement. In my opinion, this staging was much more effective than a more conventional battle treatment would have been. Marlowes play is one of character, not action. As in certain Globe productions in earlier seasons, the female roles were handled effectively by the men in the cast. I thought Richard Glaves as Lady Margaret was especially convincing, but none of the ladies fell short of requirements or added a camp element to their characterizations. The Globes skill in producing such performances has become one of its hallmarks. Walkers King Edward was played with discipline and power by Liam Brennan, with Gerald Kyd as his scandal-inducing male lover Piers Gaveston. Thematically shocking stuffor is it? As the Victorian Period ended more than a century ago, the homosexual relationship of the king and his minion probably shocks fewer of us today than Petruchios handling of Kate. I also suspect that the Elizabethans themselves were no more bothered by it four centuries ago than we are. Indeed, the gay aspect of Edwards and Gavestons relationship seems to me something of a red herring: what surely matters to the nobles in the play is not the fact that Gaveston is the kings gay lover, but that he is of inferior social origin and standing. That is something the in-set simply cant endure. In my reading of the play, Edwards nobles would have responded quite differently if Gaveston had been a member of their exclusive club. The key to Marlowes homosexual king lies in his being passionately identical to the playwrights heterosexual queen in Dido Queen of Carthage, the play I unfortunately missed: each is a dramatic study in a human being mastered by an uncontrollable physical passion. In Didos case, that compulsive passion is dramatically motivated by the manipulation of Venus through her son Cupid: it is decreed by a power beyond Dido herself. In Edwards case, Marlowe has presented that irresistible passion without classical framework, making it direct and (as in real life) unexplainable. As a portrait of a man gripped by such a force, the play gains its core of strength. Marlowes intent was well served indeed by the Walker production. Enslaved by his passion for Gaveston, Brennans perceptively-played Edward was a king 69

of misrule, and hardly a worthy ruler. Nevertheless, he was more appealing as a person than his ultimately monstrous enemies. The unnatural people on the Globe stage were not the gay king and his lover, but those who deposed, debased and finally murdered Edward. The horrific murder itself was handled with feeling but restraint. The plays terrible parody of homosexual love-making was masked by the forward-facing position of the king and thus left to the imagination. World theatre can surely contain few more sadistic moments than that, which is based on Holinsheds account of Edwards death. I consider myself 95% pacifist, but I was delighted by the murder of Lightborne, the kings assassin (the dependable John McEnery); it couldnt have happened to a viler man. Paired with the male groups successful Marlowe was Shakespeares own Richard II. Here, Artistic Director Mark Rylance joined the team to play the king himself. The productions Master of Play was the experienced Tim Carroll, whose earlier Globe stagings have included Twelfth Night, The Two Nobel Kinsmen and the modern-dress Macbeth. At the beginning of the play, Rylances Richard and his court entered singing from the hunt, bringing on a slain deer slung on a pole. The entry may have provided a hearty pastoral touch to the proceedings, but its effect evaporated when the kings unappealing character began to reveal itself. First off, Richard responded ineffectually and rather superciliously to the conflict between Bolingbroke (Liam Brennan) and Mowbray (Terry McGinity) in the opening minutes of the play. Too foolish to let them fight it out between them, he sewed the seeds of his own destruction by banishing them both. Thereafter, the kings character was defined by contrast with other characters as well as from within. In scenes with John McEnerys noble Gaunt and Bill Stewarts passionately erupting York, for instance, the kings personal inadequacies are made all too evident. An especially revealing scene is II, i, where Gaunts moving This England speech is followed by Richards farewell visit to the dying duke with a handkerchief held effetely over his nose. In time, the king exploded and pummeled the helpless old man. Even at his best, Rylances king was precious and fretful and not to be taken seriously. His misrule was chronic and his posturing speech could be embarrassing to his nobles. Even his incomparable sad stories of the death of kings speech (III,ii) got a laugh from the Globe audience.

And yet, having created this inadequate and unappealing hero, Rylance moved him beyond the frontiers of tragedy, just as Shakepeseare intended the actor to do. For all his human failings, this second-rate monarch came to deserve our compassion as he was reduced symbolically to the state of the slaughtered deer of the opening. I could accept and respond to this tragic Richard even if I personally could not grasp his emergence. The matter is ultimately academic, for Mark Rylance made the audience feel for Richard in the end as deeply as we scorned him in the beginning. If I could see again one scene from the 2003 season at the Globe, it would be Rylances treatment of Richards great

soliloquy in V, v: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world Moments like that remind us why the Globe was worth rebuilding and why after all those centuries we honor Shakespeare. Although even a sympathetic American like myself can grow rather weary of English monarchs, I found the Globes 2003 season a fascinating one. I am only sorry that my review cant do justice to the musicians, skilled costume makers and other professionals who always make a visit to the Globe such a memorable experience. I hope to be there learn still more about Shakepearean stagecraft.

Mark Rylance as Richard in Tim Carrolls production of Richard II.. Photo: courtesy Shakespeares Globe Press Office

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Lope de Vega, Peribaez

Judith Milhous What a pleasure to see Peribez, a play that deserves to be better known, presented by a professional company at londons Young Vic! While condensing Lopes expansive language a bit, the translation of Peribez y el Comendador de Ocaa (c. 1608) by Tanya Ronder follows the action faithfully except at the very end, and finds a speakable, if not poetic, modern idiom. To review the plot briefly, on the day of a peasant wedding, the Commander of Ocaa is gored by a bull. When he wakes from this fall to find himself being cared for by the bride, Casilda, he is intensely smitten and pursues her for months, having her portrait painted surreptitiously and favoring her husband in a variety of ways. This sounds like a standard jealous-husband set up, but the folksong that inspired the play records determined resistance on the part of the peasants, particularly Casilda, and the song dictates the direction of the plot. Peribez almost inevitably has fleeting doubts, but none that grow, because his wife so clearly loves him. However, the Commanders pursuit is the problem he must solve in the course of the play. This struggle provides a strenuous eveningtwo and a half hours of ups and downsbut director Rufus Norris had not quite solved the pacing problems, at least when I saw this production two weeks into its run. Despite extra time spent on the festival that establishes the bliss of the newlyweds, the chessboard movements by which Peribez again and again blocks the attempts on his wife did not develop an escalating tension. The stage was divided into three levels. Toledo (the cathedral, the painters studio, the palace) was mostly above, and Ocaa mostly below, with a short, elevated walkway curving around the whole back from stage left that facilitated entrances into the central playing space. The walkway was balanced by a flight of stairs broken by a landing. This area functioned most often as Peribez house, and Casildas balcony scenes were played from the far stage right above the stairs. The shallow, elongated playing space was well used and allowed the scenes to flow into one another or be sharply separated, for variety. Scene changes were often accompanied by a few chords on a guitar or other instrument, and the songs that punctuate the play grew naturally out of this environment. The song of Casildas resistance, sung by one of the 71 reapers and overheard by Peribez, was a powerfully galvanizing incident. The costumes were simple, anonymous modern dress: uniforms for the military and work clothes for the peasants. More could have been done with color, but the choice made here was to bleach out rather than intensify, and the bland results did not do a lot to support the actors. While the gap between the Commander and the local people was clear, there was too little difference between Peribez, a young farmer successful enough to employ laborers, and the field hands who work for him. He is well-thought of in the region in part because he too works in the fields, but he and Casilda have a bed to sleep in, whereas the harvesters curl up on the floor and are glad of a filling supper. Casilda should have been better dressed than her cousin Ins, whose dissatisfaction with her impoverished state makes her vulnerable to temptation. The Commanders staff was more successfully presented. Leonardo, who in Lopes script is a servant, became an aide-de-camp. His uniform, slightly less fancy than that of his superior officer, made him a more plausible adviser, but still one whose only option is to take orders. It also gave him much more status when carrying out the seduction of Ins, who will eventually betray Casilda. The man-of-all-work Lujan acts as messenger, harnesses mules, and scouts ahead for the plotters, passing as a reaper. The reference to him late in the script as a mangy cur was taken literally: not only did Paul Hamilton pant, drool, and fawn on his master, but his hair had been cut and bleached to show jagged, patchy spots. Seven more members of the company doubled the many other small roles. The assigning of accents was meant to invoke contemporary political references, but the parallel struck me as inexact. The Commander spoke a bland, correct, but unstagey standard English, while the peasants used a lilting Irish overlay, which helped unite them against him. But the people of Ocaa do not see themselves as victims of an occupation. Their resistance is to the Commanders abuse of his position, not to its existence. Freedom is not the issue, and theres nowhere for this imposed political content to go in the trajectory of the plot, so the accents became meaningless. A choice that made me even more uncomfortable was the casting of a black actor as

the Commander, because, again, it did not seem sufficiently thought through. David Harewood has the presence and dominating voice to carry off the role, but he was not helped to make his character multidimensional. While recovering from the wounds the bull inflicted, the Commander becomes obsessed by a fantasy of courtly love inappropriately directed at Casilda, which is of course incomprehensible to her. If all he wanted was to rape her, he could do so the first day Peribez was out of the house, or sooner if he were willing to disable her husband. What he wants is the excitement of a secret courtship, and part of the reason he (extra legally) makes Peribez a knight is to raise the status of his rival. He resorts to force only after his attempts to interest Casilda have been repeatedly frustrated. None of this development was apparent in the production, with the result that the plot became tiresomely melodramatic and the Commander a simple villain. Under those circumstances, the black-on-white threat, followed by white-on-black vengeance, seemed less a bold example of color blind casting than an unfortunate invocation of stereotypes. One clever touch, irrelevant to color, was having the Commanders shoulders serve as the horse Peribez rides back and forth to Toledo. This was an amusing irony both visually and aurally, since much of his mounted time is spent complaining about the Commander. The catastrophe and ending of the play were intensified in ways that were more successful. Peribez returns home under cover of night and hides behind a flour barrel. Ins opens the locked door to the Commander, who entreats, then threatens Casilda. Peribez leaps out and stabs the intruder, then goes in pursuit of the others. The aide-de-camp helps the mortally-wounded Commander away to a church, but not before he pardons Peribez, as a good Christian on his deathbed should. Thus far, the audience sides with the energetic farmer. This solemn moment is succeeded by the return of Peribez, herding his quarry. Lujan, who had climbed into the flour barrel to hide, is covered with a spurious innocence, a wonderful

grotesque image. He is quickly dispatched and staggers offstage to die. When Ins pleads for mercy, the director had Peribez open his arms and embrace her. Then, after she had relaxed, he reached up and cut her throat. Throughout, Casilda watched in horrified silence. She understood why he was doing what he did, but at the same time was revolted by the violence unleashed in her husband. She was essentially in shock from the time Peribez unexpectedly intervened in the rape, and though she agreed to leave Ocaa with him, she did so partly in fear that resistance would cost her her life. In the original, Casilda more actively endorses what Peribez is doing. She subscribes to the convention of honor killing, her honor being at stake, and her complicity serves as preparation for the ending, which allows for the title page description of the play as la famosa tragicomedia. At the palace in Toldeo, King Enrique III gets the mornings reports on troops assembling to fight the Moors. His queen, Catherine of Lancaster, is with him, consulting on problems as they arise. The king had already appeared in a short scene early in the play, and the royal pair get enough stage time at the end that they are not just dei ex machina. When Peribez gives himself up for murder, he has 68 lines of uninterrupted explanation in the best Golden Age tradition, after which the king confers with the queen and releases him to continue to serve in the upcoming battle. The queen demonstrates the generosity of a renaissance prince by giving Casilda four gowns, and Peribez steps forward to deliver the closing plaudite. Though less abrupt than many of Lopes endings, this one is no longer emotionally satisfactory, and at the Young Vic, Norris chose to ignore the generic label. Royalty departed, leaving Peribez (Michael Nardone) and Casilda (Jackie Morrison) at a stand, both drained by the whole experience. Instead of embracing, they just looked at each other for a long time and then turned slightly apart as the lights came down. The joyous innocence and trust with which the play began had been totally destroyed by the violence Peribez committed and Casilda witnessed. While not authentic, this ending redeemed the slightly uneven production.

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Letter From the UK, Summer/Autumn 2003

Noel Witts by Alison Pargeter, and her strange relationship with This hot summer and early autumn has Uncle Val, her sugar daddy, who at the start of seen new shows in Scarborough and Sheffield the play she rescues from a fall when dressed as respectively by our most prolific playwright Alan Father Xmas. Val has a murky past which is never Ayckbourn and our longest-serving experimental fully revealed, and Sasha has a neurotic half sister company Forced Entertainment; an American intercalled Chloe and a retired policemen who lives rogation in London of German music by Trisha below and who is out to get Val for his past sins. Brown; a much needed critical success in Ayckbourn calls the play a comedy and, true to form Edinburgh, Birmingham, Barcelona, and Dublin, for there is some smoothly funny dialogue, well-turned the Spanish director Calixto Beieto (about whom by a cast who know well how to point an Ayckbourn Maria Delgado wrote at length in the Winter 2003 joke. It all passes the time well enough in classic edition of WES); and the near arrival on these Ayckbourn manner, with no questions asked until shores actually at Groeningen in Holland of the towards the end, when Val is finally caught out and much contested Ukrainian wunderkind director says his farewell to Sasha, putting his hand on her Andrezj Zoldak. shoulderthe first physical contact made between When the auditorium curtains close at the them throughout the play. At this point one says, start in the Theatre-in-the-Round at Scarborough, hey, isnt this phenomenon of the sugar daddy a where Alan Ayckbourn resides and premieres all his bit more questionable and potentially unpleasant in work, there is an unseen sign which should say, 2003 than it has been presented to us for the last two Welcome to an amusing, often unbelievable, defihours? After all, even the program points out the nitely artificial couple of hours of comfortably dated cases of Hugh Hefner, Sandy Murphy, the murdertheatre with only one swearword. At least that is what Ayckbourns core audience at Scarborough, ess of sugar daddy Ted Binion, and the notorious Thai case of 22-year-old Chalasai Kwanthiti, a poor most of them over 50, expect, and is what they get. abused girl who married her fairy-tale sugar daddy, Ayckbourns 60-odd plays have grown old with his Prince Thitiphan, a man 37 years her senior, only to audience and his latest smoothly acted and directed poison him so that she could spend more time with piece, Sugar Daddies, is no exception. A tale of her 18-year old lover. As so often these days with Sasha, the student from Norfolk, with statutory and Ayckbourn, while admiring the sheer skill in the very convincing Norfolk accent, played with energy

Alan Ayckborns Sugar Daddies at Theatre-in-the-Round in Scarborough. Photo: courtesy Theatre-in-the-Round

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writing and construction, one comes away with an uncomfortable feeling that any excavation of the underbelly of a potentially serious social phenomenon has been rigorously excluded in favour of its comic potential. Which is what the audience wants and gets. It is another triumph of artifice from the UKs longest-running comic playwright. Only isnt the comedy wearing a bit thin? In some ways it is a relief to emerge into the reality of Scarboroughs streets once the curtains are again drawn back. Where, indeed, is the cutting Ayckbourn of the seventies and eighties? Perhaps its too much to expect in the hard-edged world of Blair and Bush. Across the country, at Sheffields nineteenth century Lyceum Theatre, the audience for Forced Entertainments latest construction, entitled The Voices, assembles for what they, too, expect an evening of monologues delivered by 19 performers, which challenges it to stay in its seats for two hours without interval. The piece was devised by the company, directed by their supremo Tim Etchells, in collaboration with Volksbhne Berlin, Warwick Arts Centre, Sheffield Theatres, and the Glasgow Tramway, so there is much pedigree and much touring to come. Its based on a series of stream of consciousness texts revealing the wishes and desires for the future of the protagonists. Thus, after much wandering around the bare Lyceum stage, the performers, rather like props waiting to be used, in a tableau reminiscent of Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author finally find a chair each and form a rough semi-circle. The first performer gets up, walks to the front centre of the stage and tells us that she has always wanted to be an astronaut. She would like to take a cat and spider on board to watch the play of the weightless! The next performer wants to be an inventor, another wishes to be remembered with a grand party etc. Its all a bit reminiscent of another confessional piece of Forced Entertainment, Speak Bitterness, of several years back. But whereas that piece ended up giving the audience a spectrum of social concerns of 1995, this one turns, extraordinarily, into a set of audition pieces, where the audience applaud the most engaging. Far from alienating the audience, or asking them to question their role the usual Forced Entertainment questions the piece leaves you wishing they could give you some Shakespeare. Interestingly the Forced Entertainment audience, too, like Ayckbourns, has grown old with the company, providing a solidly loyal following for the work. The writing, too, by Etchells, has grown 74

more poetic and engaging. Could it be that the company, in existence since 1984, has finally run out of provocative steam, or, given their current interests in technology, were they telling us that theatre itself no longer holds any interest for them but as ironic candidates for our attention? Back in Londons Barbican, Trisha Brown, the American post-modernist, had the gall to set Schuberts seriously gloomy song cycle, Winterreise, to movement. Schuberts intense settings of poems by Wilhelm Mller totally unacknowledged in the program follow the protagonist, who has lost his love, through an increasingly despondent winter landscape where frozen rivers flow, there is no room at the inn, the crow squawks on the snow-covered roof and where finally the lonely hurdy-gurdy players stands at the edge of the frozen village. It is a journey to the heart of the romantic soul and Schuberts music, as it proceeds, becomes almost unbearably intense. Obviously too intense for Trisha Brown, who has Simon Keenlyside, the baritone, singing and dancing his journey while on a blue lit stage he is accompanied not only by a fine pianist but by three dancers, who gyrate round him, hold him up at key points, become trees, the stream, even the crow! It is almost unbelievable that Brown should think that Schubert needs this farago of movement which restricts the singer in a variety of ways; or that the choreographer could possibly add something or even transform the piece. The problem is that the form of the song cycle, perfected by certain German composers, resists interpolation because all visual distraction downgrades the words, which are the kernel of the form. Since these are in German, and therefore have to be accompanied by two hefty screens with the translations, I can only suppose that the explanation of the resounding success of this piece with American and British audiences means that they can escape the full intensity of this suicidal cycle. It is not for nothing that Wintereise, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on disc, was an obsession of Samuel Beckett, who knew a thing or two about minimalism. Im afraid that Schubert, like Beckett, tends to resist the depredations of contemporary artists. Not so Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, cut down to two interval-less hours by director Calixto Beieto, was one of the successes of this years Edinburgh Festival. [See also the Edinburgh Festival report in this issue.] Beieto is on record as saying that the universal theme of the production is

Trisha Browns production of Winterreise. Photo: courtesy Barbican Theatre.

that everything is rotten. This is a rotten family full of rotten people. So the whole play takes place in a night-club of the palace, with Horatio brilliantly played by Karl Daymond the club pianist who strums out old and new tunes on a white piano. The play starts with a tuxedo-clad man singing The Road is Long until you realize that this is Claudius singing about his lost brother Hamlet. After this initial shock the play grips you by the neck, forces you to wallow both in the rottenness of Denmark, and of the characters, who fight, dance, and kill their way through Shakespeares text. At the end you feel, such is the intense physicality of the playing, that you, too, have been through a meat-grinder, have seen the force of Shakespeares view of Hamlet as the meddler caught up in a violent and duplicitous court and a cynical society that gets its kicks from drugs and alcohol. Bieito says it is like what Picasso did with Las Meninas. We have Velasquezs Las Meninas and we have Picassos Las Meninas. I think we have done something similar. I think the whole art of the twentieth century is to reinvent the classics... I want to do Hamlet with a vision for now. Bieitos Birmingham cast do him proud, with Rupert Frazer a brilliantly slimy Polonius, and George Anton a Hamlet straight out of Trainspotting. But for me the real revelations were the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Matthew Douglas and Nicholas Aaron beautifully played as cynical, two-faced, dangerous funny men, so much so that one wanted to see more of their story... Many of Bieitos UK and Irish incursions have in the past been greeted 75

with hails of derision from critics. Here, by attacking the audience and dragging it kicking and screaming through the horrors of Shakespeares play, he has silenced them, and shown that he has indeed a view of theatre for our times. This is Hamlet as horror story. Reinterpreting, or reappropriating, the classics, was always a strength of directors in the former communist countries, forced as they often were to invent theatrical codes of dissidence with which to criticize the regimes under which they lived. Now these codes are no longer necessary but the theatrical ideas still remain, and the Ukrainian director Andrezj Zoldak, who has been producing work in Kiev for several years, at last came west to Holland in August to showcase his work, all of which is based on Russian literary classics. Zoldak, like Bieito, takes a text and tears into it, breaking it, sometimes dumping it, but above all using it as a basis for visual and physical interpretation that is sometimes astonishing in its complexity. At Groeningen Zoldak showed his versions of Turgenevs A Month in the Country, and Solzhenitsyns A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He has turned the Turgenev, with the aid of a cast of about 30, into a wordless series of tableaux, each lasting under a minute, where the Russian countryside is evoked in sound and vision with many stuffed animals, performers in period costume, and a scenario which vaguely follows the original storyline. Most of the piece takes place against a single white flat. The violence which comes to a head from time to time is stylised with often multiple

reenactments of single moments. The scenery increases in scope as the evening goes onand it is a long three hour eveninguntil finally we see a three-dimensional room rotating through 360 degrees with actors entering through doors which are now upside down. There is much physicality throughout, much music, much animal and sexual imagery, an much visual excitement. The impression is of a series of still sketches which hook the audience through the eye, leaving the text on one side, as if words would in some way corrupt the vision a perfect analogy with the dissident theatrical codes of Ukraines communist past. Zoldaks idea is that this long piece could be viewed as in a gallery, with the audience sampling as they wish. It offers a view of theatre as visual spectacle developed with extraordinary yet simple theatrical resources deployed with the vision of a painter. Zoldak studied in Moscow with Vassiliev and is related to Tarkovskys family, so it is not surprising that the work is both striking and in many ways spiritual in its intensity and its belief in its own vision. I have not seen work like this since my first experiences of the work of Robert Wilson. Zoldaks Ivan Denisovich is once again a torn text, but has parallels with A Month in the

Country in that the intention is for the audience to feel as intensely as possible the atmosphere which the text invokes. Thus to access the play the audience processes underneath the stage of the theatre, passes barking and snarling police dogs, up into the stage area where Solzhsenitsyns prison has been re-created with cages and observation balconies. Here the full horror of Solshenitsyns vision is given to us the cruelty, the starvation, the doomed love affairs, the cynical guards driving the prisoners along what looks like rabbit runs and being subjected to all kinds of hard labour. The gulags duality is represented by a soprano interrupting the action from time time by singing Mozart, and the sound score of pop tunes, madrigals, aircraft noise and barking dogs continually reinforces the horror of the imagined scene. This is emphatically not theatre for the textual purist, but it gives us a tantalizing view of what theatre can be an almost operatic form which attempts to strike the audience and to engage in what is often a portfolio of artists reflections. Like Bieito, Zoldaks theatre is for our times, and the combination of these two, relatively young, visionary directors on the European scene gives hope for a revival of theatre as a visual art which just might attract and keep a young audience that is at present deserting the art for the world of the club.

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Paris Theatre: June, July 2003

Barry Daniels The Paris theatre season came to a close with bang this year. The professionals whose work is intermittent, since they work from production to production often with unemployed periods between jobs, disrupted performances in protest of the governments plans to change their unemployment benefit program. In Paris productions were cancelled or, in one case, at the Opera Bastille, performed without scenery. Finally most of the summer festivals in France were cancelled. [See article by Philippa Wehle in this issue.] The government plan was approved by a few of the unions involved, but not by the largest one. Apparently there is much abuse of the program, which has led to its increasing expense. This was highlighted when the program was reviewed 10 years ago, but no steps were taken eliminate the abuses. In my opinion the problem of the abuse of the program should have been addressed before proposing significant changes. Once the governments decision was announced, both sides refused to budge and the result was disastrous for the summer theatre season. In spite of all this I managed to see a fair amount of theatre in June and early July. And as always the offerings included a good mix of classic, modern and contemporary texts. Cyril Tourneurs Revengers Tragedy is rarely performed. Director Richard Brunel staged it as a fast paced horror film in a lively production at the Thtre Grard Philipe in Saint Denis. The performance started in a small basement room of the theatre where Vendice plots his revenge on the Duke and his corrupt family. The audience was then moved up to the main stage where we were given folding chairs and asked to place them around a specific area on the stage. As scenes changed location in the space, the audience followed with their chairs. For the final conspiracy we were divided into two groups and taken into to the lobby to plan the final scenes of revenge. We returned to the theatre auditorium where we watched the concluding scene. Throughout the performance, actors retired to the

Richard Brunel production of Revengers Tragedy. Photo:Agence Enguerand/Bernand

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first row of the auditorium, where signs over their seats gave their characters name. Tourneurs play does not have the fine verse of his contemporaries Webster and Middleton so little was lost in translation. Brunel chose to emphasize the corruption and ruthlessness of the Duke and has family. Acting was broad and intense in way that seemed appropriate to the bloody melodramatics of the plot. Among the actorsall of whom were goodI especially liked Olivier Werners Vendice who savored his revenge with an almost sadistic pleasure. He was especially creepy in his disguise with a black stocking drawn over his head. Jacques Hadjaje was a suitably lubricious Lussurioso, the Dukes son and heir. Thierry Vennesson was cold and malignant as Spurio, the dukes bastard, who seduces the Duchess, lustily played by Valrie Marinese. Brunels staging cast the audience as voyeurs and made us seem like silent participants in the orgy of blood and lust. Many of his stage pictures were striking, starting with Vendice and his family huddled around a table in the cramped and dank basement. Antonio appeared with the body of his wife clad in white at the top of the balcony whose red seats were illuminated for the scene. Lussurioso was first seen lounging in black briefs and a white robe. The only false note in the production was the interpretation of Vendices sister Castiza (Rjane Bajard). Brunel had her play an early scene in the play nude and bathing with masturbatory gestures. In this sensational play, she is one of only a few uncorrupt characters. Virtue was decidedly not welcome in the world that Brunel created with his lively and talented actors. Italian director Giorgio Barberio Corsettis staging of Le Festin de Pierre (The Stone Banquet), adapted from Molires Dom Juan, was the least successful of the three stagings of this play that Ive seen in the past two years. It was created for the National Theatre in Strasbourg and performed in Paris at the Thtre de Gennevilliers. Although the production was generally well-acted, text and character seemed less important than directorial effect. Having Dom Juan and Sganarelle strapped to chairs inside a large double hoop that was rolled back and forth across the stage during one of their mid-play discussions was simply distracting rather than illuminating. Marionettes appeared regularly in a trap at the front of the stage, but except for the scene of the shipwreck, they didnt contribute much to the action, but rather slowed it down. One gimmick 78

that was mildly successful involved placing Pierrot in a kind of bungee jump that allowed him to hop extravagantly around the stage. Luc-Antoine Diquro, dressed in a tuxedo, was a slick and seductive debauchee. He was an effective seducer, but hardly the philosophic philanderer of most recent productions. Daniel Zynk was more interesting as Sgnarelle, alternately servile and critical of his master. Corsetti provided him with generally amusing Italian style lazzi. Clment Victor was excellent as Pierrot, bursting with so much energy that he made the bungee jumping seem appropriate to the character. Philippe Adriens production of Molires Monsieur de Pourceaungnac, created in 2001, was revived by the Comdie-Franaise at the Thtre du Vieux-Colombier. Although some of the acting was very fine, the production ultimately seemed misguided. Adrien chose to focus attention on Julie, claiming in program note that his interpretation is based on the Freudian question: What does woman want? Molires comdie-ballet is a slight farce written on command by the king for a perforamce at Chambord. In the plot Julie is pivotal although her role is not very important. She is in love with Eraste who schemes with the help of Sbrigani to prevent her marriageplanned by her fatherto a wealthy provincial bumpkin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. Adrien starts the play with Julie rejecting Erastes embraces. When she is introduced to Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, she flings herself lasciviously at him. This, of course, makes no sense. Although this may have been Freuds point, it makes hash of Molires plot. At the end of the play Julie is portrayed as a helpless victim when Eraste convinces her father to give her to him. This interpretation is both obvious and much too heavy for Molires commedia dellarte-inspired farce. Like all of Molires work, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is full of lively scenes. Bruno Raffaelli was quite wonderful as the title character, totally out of his element in the big city. Tall and awkward in demeanor, he looked ridiculous in the fashionable plaid costume designed by Claire Belloc. Jrme Huguet was excellent as Sbrigani, the Neapolitan intriguer who organizes the duping of Pourceaugnac. Thierry Hancise stole the show with his over-the-top performance of the doctor as a kind of mad scientist in a bad horror film. Hancisses work was a bit mannered and crude, but it, at least, provoked laughter. It seems to be the

Alain Zaepffels production of Esther. Photo: Agence Enguerand/Bernand

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Dynamo. Photo:Agence Enguerand/Bernand

vogue now to darken Molires plays as much as possible. This works with some of his more complex plays but is decidedly pretentious when applied to his farces. Alain Zaepffels staging of Racines Esther at the Comdie-Franaise was by far the best classical production of my Paris theatre season. This rarely performed tragedy, with music by JeanBaptiste Moreau, was written for the girls at the private school of St. Cyr in 1689. It is a noble plea for religious tolerance written in exquisite alexandrine verse. Zaepffel, who also served as musical director, used Moreaus score, performed by the Gradiva Ensemble and the girls chorus of Radio-France. The staging was spare but elegant. Leonida Tracanellis set had white scrim walls, a white floor and a white cloth ceiling. Props were black and included tables and benches that served as a classroom for the chorus in Act I, a low platform and throne for Act II. In Act III the ceiling cloth was raised, revealing a Persian style arch upstage center. A garden was projected on the back wall that gradually becomes bright enough for us to see that it was painted in the style of a Persian miniature. Renato 80

Bianchi costumed the chorus in black taffeta period gowns worn over white tee shirts. Esther wore black in Act I, a lovely white gown in Act II, and dark burgundy velvet in Act III. The mens costumes were in greys and black in a chic layered Japanese contemporary style. The staging was reminiscent of Robert Wilsons work: full of simple but elegant pictures. Director Zaepffel was especially inventive in his staging of the choruses, finding actions for them that seemed appropriate to the environment of a girls school. All the roles were performed by women (the original production was performed by students). Franoise Gillard, a dark beauty, was a lovely Esther, her voice, however, was a bit weak at the beginning. Sylvia Berg made a regal entrance as Assurus and was movingly gentle and loving in her scene with Esther in Act II. Claude Mathieu provided a vigorous Mardoche, and Isabelle Gardien was a suitably villainous Aman. This production was a huge success that unfortunately had a very limited run because of the complexity of using the orchestra and chorus. It

was graced with simple but eloquent stage pictures, clearly drawn characters, powerful emotions, and wonderful music. And best of all perhaps, Director Zaepffel was especially attentive to the music of Racines verse. The French are much more curious about American drama than Americans are. Eugene ONeills Dynamo is a curiosity that I was delighted to be able to see even though it was staged in French translation. This work, written in 1928 in an expressionist style, makes use of spoken interior monologues. The symbolism is heavy-handed and the dialogue is often awkward. ONeill presents two families: the Lights and the Fifes. Mr. Light is a Pastor who is strongly puritanical. Mrs. Light adores their son Reuben and wants him to go to college rather than the seminary chosen by his father. Reuben is a timid lad caught between his cold father and his over-protective, controlling mother. The Light house is old fashioned and unequipped with electricity. In contrast, the neighboring Fife house is modern. Fife is an atheist employed at the Electric Power plant. He believes in the power of science and technology. His somewhat dotty wife

adores him in a clearly sensual way. Their daughter, Ada, is strong willed, and has been secretly seeing Reuben Light. After being duped by Fife and deceived by his parents, Reuben flees home and becomes fanatically devoted to Dynamo, the god of modernism. ONeills text is both painfully obvious and an interesting insight into the American psyche circa 1928. It has been given a reasonably successful staging by Robert Cantarella on the main stage at the Thtre de la Colline. Claudine Brahem designed a large metal structure that represents the two separate houses with upper and lower levels for the first two acts. Between and behind them was the central structure that represents the dynamo. For the final act the house units transformed into side sections of the dynamo in the electric power plant. This skeletal set was both functional and visually dramatic, especially in the final scenes of the play. For the inner monologues, the actors whisper their lines and are miked. This is reasonably successful, but doesnt really solve the problem of shifting from inner monologue to regular dialogue. All of the acting was good. I especially liked Pierre-

Emmanuel Demarcy-Motas production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. Photo:Agence Enguerand/Bernand

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Georges Lavaudants production of El Pelele. Photo:Agence Enguerand/Bernand

Flix Gravire as Reuben, transforming from oppressed son to fanatical believer in technology. He was always convincing in a role that is hard to make convincing. Florence Giorgetti was endearing and scary as the slightly off Mrs. Light, entranced by the humming of the dynamo. Emmanuel Demarcy-Motas critically acclaimed production of Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author, created in 2001 at the Thtre de la Ville, was revived as the final production at the Bouffes du Nord, replacing a production that had to be postponed. Yves Collet, who designed the scenery and lighting, used simple props and a moveable platform on the large open stage. Together with the director he created memorable pictures with some of the most beautiful lighting Ive ever scene. One of Pirandellos points is that fiction is more vivid than real life. Demarcy-Mota artfully underlines this point by making the actors somewhat non-descript and self-effacing while the characters are vividly portrayed. Interesting moments are created when the actors move around the open space observing the characters they are supposed to perform. Although the acting is generally excellent 82

I was somewhat disappointed by Hugues Questers making a star turn out of the father. Although much praised, his look-at-me style veered away from the conviction of the other actors playing the characters. I was pleased to be able to see the work of young German author, Roland Schimmelpfennig. His most recent play Before/After, created in 2001, was given its French premire in May in the small theatre at the Colline. Schimmelpfennigs text consists of 51 short scenes involving 27 characters. The scenes are like snapshots; some of which relate ongoing stories. A woman has an affair with a colleague, a married man from another town. It is the first time she has been unfaithful to her longterm lover. Another woman recalls scenes from her childhood, finally telling us how she left her husband. A man hunts a mysterious organism. An old woman dresses avoiding the mirror in her room. A woman is constantly changing her physical appearance. What was interesting about these mostly banal scenes was their style and the odd poetry that resulted from their juxtaposition and accumulation. Scimmelpfenning frequently employed third person

narration. The shift from characters in dialogue to a character commenting on his or her situation was interesting and effective. Most critics argued that the group of stories simply didnt add up to much. I rather enjoyed the effect of the minutely observed realities of the characters whose stories I had to piece together as the evening progressed. Michle Fouchers staging of Before/After was sensitive to the rhythms of the text and attentive to the minutia of everyday relationships. Serge Marzolffs set divided the stage into two compartments that were framed like windows through which the audience looked into the series of rooms inhabited by the diverse characters. Exterior scenes were performed on a narrow band of forestage. Seven professional actors performed the 14 principal roles. The 13 secondary roles were performed by 9 amateur actors from the 20th arrondissemont and the Studio dIvry. It is a compliment to the director that it was hard to distinguish the amateur work from that of fine professional company. The second production of the Thtre de lOdon at its temporary space in the Atheliers Berthier on the north edge of Paris was JeanChristophe Baillys new play, El Pelele. It was staged by Georges Lavaudant, a longtime collaborator with Bailly. The text was inspired by a Goya painting in which a man is thrown up in the air on a cloth held by three women. It is a poetic fable in which El Pelele, who has been a guide to a blind giant in the mountains, descends into the valley for two days. The young man gradually reconnects with life in a series of disconnected scenes with various people who inhabit the village in the valley. Although I didnt think the text added up to much it certainly wasnt as stylistically interesting as Before/AfterLavaudants staging made for a visually sumptuous evening of theatre. For this production the open stage of the Atheliers Berthier was backed by a wall painted to look like the grey plaster walls of a building (designed by Jean-Pierre Vergier.) The audience seating was banked in front of the stage. Mostly black and white video (by Franois Gestin) was projected onto the wall at the back of the stage. The costumes, also by Vergier, neither period nor modern, were attractive and theatrical. Some were inspired by Goya drawings, others, like those for lantern-men, were purely imaginative. In scene after scene Lavaudant used placement of actors, light, and simple scenic pieces to create beautiful pictures. The play opened with 83

cloud projections on the back wall as El Pelele led the giant on the mountain. Two actors sitting on a metal girder with projected light creating rippling water at their feet represented the fisherman and his wife sitting on a bridge. A small stage, a hucksters booth and a shooting gallery were backed by an elaborate video of amusement park rides for the carnival scene. Snow fell gently on the final scenes. Yann Colette was fine as the protagonist, El Pelele, making his progress through the human world. The actor embodied the characters naivet and his optimism. The rest of the actors were excellent in roles that had mostly a symbolic function. It was perhaps this poetic symbolism that made Baillys text seem rather lifeless. Lavaudant, however, is a master of theatrically. His work in El Pelele was often simply astonishing. Ariane Mnochkines latest Thtre du Soleil production was performed through June at the Cartoucherie in Vincennes before its official opening which was scheduled to be in July at the Avignon Festival. For this production, The Last Caravansary (Odysseys), Mnouchkine and her assistant Shaghayegh Beheshti collected stories from refugees in camps in France, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia. Working with actors and some refugees who joined the company, a number of stories were developed and a total of 250 scenes were created. In performance 25 actors, each performing a number of roles, offer a selection from theses scenes. Thus, in principal, every performance is different. The performance I saw had a series of scenes from the camp at Sangette in France, a story of two lovers in Afghanistan, the portrait of a family in Teheran forced to send the children into exile, and scenes portraying the trade in illegal immigration to England from France. The central issue throughout the evening was the oppression of women in the Islamic states and their exploitation once they escape to the West. Although most of this material was familiar and almost cartoon-like in its obviousness, Mnouchkines staging was often theatrically exciting. The set by Serge Nicola et Duccio BellugiVannuccini consisted of a large platform with sky blue walls at the left and back, a sky blue curtain at the right, and a sky blue ceiling and floor. The musicians platform was at the right. Small scenic units were rolled on stage by stagehands dressed in black. Among these units were a living room in Teheran, a house in Afghanistan, and a compartment

in the camp at Sangette. These units could be repositioned by stagehands during the scenes for dramatic effect. Most strikingly and somewhat oddly, Mnouchkine had the performers rolled in and out on small platforms by stage hands. The effect of this was to theatricalize the essentially realistic material of the scenes. For the first time in a Mnouchkine production, I found Jean-Jacques Lemtres music heavy-handed. It seemed inspired by pop music or movie music and highlighted the melodramatic

nature of the action. For me the most successful and most moving aspect of the production was the projection of letters written by refugees to their family and friends. Recorded voices read the letters in their original language while subtitles gave the French translation. Their portrayal of the terrible sense of loss that separation from home created in them transcended the clichs that were too often present in the staged scenes.

Ariane Mnouchkines production of Le Dernier Caravanserail. Photo:Agence Enguerand/Bernand

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Fear and Loathing at the Munich Kammerspiele

Laurence Senelick German theatre is still stuck in its Ugliness phase. The hangover from the Brechtian binge lingers. Wherever you look, the favored color is black, the favored material is leather. Stages are opened to the back wall, lights are left ungetied and unconcealed, real water is as ubiquitous here as elsewhere throughout Western theatres at the moment. (Crummles was right!) Historically accurate costumes are anathema. Ultra-violence is a common eruption in the action. Not untypical is the current Woyzeck at the Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. Set in a soulless East German housing project, it has the Doctor eviscerating a cat on stage and tossing its entrails on a barbecue, and Woyzeck shaving the Captains legs and rear end. No wonder the In-Yer-Face school of British playwriting has found such welcome here, with Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill fixtures in the repertory. These extremes are also to be seen at the Munich Kammerspiele. Three years ago it was taken over by Frank Baumbauer, a younger company was installed, and 110 million Euros spent on renovations to the buildings. At the new experimental space, its Dantons Tod, directed by a Swede, Lars-Ole Walburg, opens with the whole cast on stage, clad in black (except for the with black mud, which gets slimier and damper as the evening progresses. Suddenly, a trombone begins to play a sustained note (a brass band accompanies the production), and the characters begin to be blown about as if by the winds of change (get it?). To make sure that political parallels are not missed, Walburg has provided a chorus, two amiable burghers in white jackets (Stefan Merki and Wilhelm Eilers), who serve as masters of ceremonies. At various points, they hand out questionnaires on the current German political scene, eliciting viva voce answers; conduct a community sing of the German Communist anthem Die Rote Fahne, and prompt us in serving as jurors at the trial. Periodically, another new character, the Headsman, an athletic youth (Lorenz Nufer) veiled in a bag with eye-holes, and with bare arms caked with dried blood, shouts Mahlzeit! (Mealtime or Time out), thus suspending the action as he lugs a covered basket, presumably packed with heads, across the stage. Most of the proletarian characters have been cut (so to speak), except for Marion (Julia Jensch), who at one point spouts female-emancipationist rhetoric from the Revolutionary feminist

Lars Ole-Walburgs production of Dantons Death. Photo: courtesy Munich Kammerspiele

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Olympe de Gouges. Danton in Michael Neuenschwanders interpretation is suitably feral, but impossibly lethargic, meant to stand for the current status of the German Left. Robespierre, a bald, bespectacled bureaucrat (Paul Herwig) is equally indecisive, but for other reasons; he is gnawed by questions of morality and ethics. He holes up in a glass-encased booth over the stage, and it is there that his debate with Danton takes place; we cannot hear it through the sound-proofed window, but must receive most of it, as St. Just does, through an intercom. In this version, St Just is the real motivating force, a combination of Joseph McCarthy and Lavrenty Beria, icily played by one of the Kammerspieles strongest actors, Wolfgang Pregler. When Danton, Camille (Martin Butzke) and Lacroix (Ren Dumont) are arrested, they are stripped down to skimpy underpants and forced to squat in the mud. The Hangman periodically hoses them down with a powerful jet of water, making their physical state (and the stages) even more degrading. The historical testimony of Dantons pleadings is intercut with large swatches of dialogue from the Bader-Meinhof trials, which, though Powerful, rather confuses the issue. Are Danton and his colleagues now to be viewed as terrorists, or are the Bader-Meinhof gang to be seen as well-meaning radicals railroaded by a ruthless dictatorship? The play ends unsensationally: Danton exits through the back doors which close quietly behind him, Lucile delivers her mad speech and collapses. Blackout. The effort to make Dantons Tod relevant to contemporary German issues had the benefit of genuinely engaging the audience, which was with the production every inch of the way. It ran the risk, rarely avoided, of being both simple-minded and confusing in its parallels. However, the urgency of the performances and the proximity of actors to audience prevented overmuch contemplation as the action was proceeding. Only afterwards did serious doubts about the concept settle in. Serious doubts assail the spectator from the first moment of the Kammerspieles Othello and only increase over the course of the evening. There has been so much ink spilled over it that no audience comes to it unforewarned, so it is matter of accepting or resisting the concept from the start. Conventional translations of Shakespeares text have been discarded in favor of a thorough-going rewrite by Feridun Zaimoglu, who gained some notoriety for his book on Kanak-Sprach, a hybrid 86

argot of Turkish and German current among secondgeneration immigrants. He has not rendered Othello into this patois, however, but into an up-todate billingsgate, a highly flavorsome and scurrilous language of abuse. Most of it issues from the biliously compressed lips of Iago, who, in the interpretation of Wolfgang Pregler, comes across as a deeply sardonic and misanthropic Mephisto; his dirty jokes, exquisitely timed, reveal a loathing of sex and the human condition. His behavior with his wife suggests that he is impotent, but no one cause can explain his incisive hatred which bespatters everything and everyone. Cassio is a damned pretty-boy queer, his superiors bonzes and bureaucrats, Othello blubber lips, Desdemona the trophy shiksa, love and duty crap and shit. Carpenter Center at Harvard, a building designed by Le Corbusier and out of keeping with its architectural surroundings, has been described as two pianos copulating. That is the literal scenographic image of this production. The only setpiece on an otherwise bare stage, again open to the back wall, is a white piano overturned, with its legs in the air. It is covered, in the animal husbandry sense, by a black piano. This less than subtle emblem is played on throughout the evening by Jens Thomas, a jazz musician who has composed the score and who ululates at regular intervals to express the inner anguish of the characters. He grinds his teeth, sobs tremulously, whimpers softly. This soundtrack is usually more eloquent and more imagination-stirring than the plays excremental verbiage. Despite the jokey symbolism of the pianos, race is the least important element of the production. Othello is rarely performed in Germany, partly owing to a lack of black actors. If one has ever seen Emil Jannings tearing a passion to tatters in the silent-film version or photographs of Albert Bassermann in what looks like minstrel makeup, its no wonder. Peter Zadek created a succs de scandale in 1976 at the Bochum Schauspielhaus when he deliberately set out to shock with a vulgar, corked-up Moor. In Munich the director, the Belgian Luc Perceval, has reshuffled the face cards. He has cast a black woman as Emilia (though most of her lines are cut) and Thomas Thieme as Othello. Thieme is a heavy-set, middle-aged white actor, who resembles the late Gert Frobe, a typical German Biedermann. He is as clearly besotted with the mini-skirted teeny-bopper Desdemona (Julia Jentsch) as she is with him. The point seems to be

Luc Percevals production of Othello. Photo: Munich Kammerspiele

that pigmentation is less important than the sense of being an outsider, that blackness comes less from pigmentation than from alienation. Although she calls him Mein Schokopltzchen (My Chocolate Drop) and the other characters refer to the pair as Schoko and Mona die Blonde, the disparity between them is not race or ethnicity, but age. Desdi, the hyperactive nymphet in sneakers, romping around with Cassio, is clearly a sexual and psychic strain on the aging warrior. Thieme makes Othellos anguished desire and self-doubt extremely credible. In his infatuate but also exhausted state, he is easy prey to Iagos potty-mouthed insinuations. After the confrontation with a visiting Brabantio (who replaces the Venetian embassy in this cut-down cast), most of Shakespeares plot is discarded, and we move swiftly to Iago metaphorically murdering Cassio by mutilating a leather jacket with a flick-knife (ah, the ubiquitous leather jacket of the German stage). Again, at the moment of

greatest emotion, words are dispensed with. Then, with much dispatch, Othello does in Desdemona, and seems to die of the exertion it entailed. Curtain. Throwaway endings appear to be a Kammerspiele speciality, and are followed by the five-minute ovation which is now also endemic in the German theatre. All that is left of Shakespeare in this Othello are the basics of the plot and a few figures of speech that have been so reworked that they are easily missed. The final effect is reductive: personal psychologies are made so bleak and sinister that they can find voice only in obscenity and vituperation. Iagos worst insinuations, whispered in Othellos ear, have to be portrayed in mime. The productions point may be that, in our age, our inner agonies and hatreds are so virulent that they cannot be expressed in a richly poetic language. We have become incapable of anything but spurts of invective and jagged gesticulation. Not only Othellos, but Shakespeares occupations gone.

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Ignacio Amestoy Egigurens Ederra. Photo: courtesy Ignacio Amestoy Egiguren

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Ignacio Amestoy Egiguren and the Politics of Contemporary Spanish Theatre

Candyce Leonard Basque by birth and spirit, Ignacio quite acceptable in the early 1980s when Amestoys Amestoy Egiguren (born Bilbao, 1947) has spent play Ederra was awarded the Lope de Vega award, his adult life in Madrid as a journalist, playwright, by 1993 it was taboo when his play Betizu, the Red and professor of playwriting at Madrids Real Bull was staged. He encountered more trouble with Escuela Superior de Arte Dramtico, Spains distinhis Stalinist characters Pasionaria and her son who guished school of performing arts. In addition to his represented Mary and Jesus in 1993, as well as with very active role within Madrids theatre community, his 1999 revisionist reading of the conception of he is prominent as one of two contemporary playKing Alfonso XIII. As time passes, however, any, wrights to earn the prestigious Lope de Vega theatre all, or none of them may be regarded as offensive or award twice, first in 1981 for his play Ederra, and inoffensive in the next decade or two. By examinagain in 2001 for Chocolate for Breakfast. The lating the trajectory of Ignacio Amestoys corpus of ter belongs to his newly completed tetralogy, If plays in terms of audience response, one can see the Daisies Could Grow in Concrete. A second play fluctuating biases that govern social acceptability or from the same tetralogy, Lock the Door Tight, won political anxieties at a given moment. Ultimately, Spains National Award for Dramatic Literature in what the awards for Chocolate for Breakfast and 2002, thereby securing Amestoys trajectory into the Lock the Door Tight show is that feminist theatre of twenty-first century. The author favors historical a certain category and, in this case, authored by a settings and characters to comment on contempomale, is acceptable and saleable in todays market. rary issues, and consistently asks his audiences to On the one hand, favoring plays that guarantee a consider events from a new perspective. While the healthy box-office return makes good business artistic and thematic merit of his plays is consistent sense; but on the other hand, such business biases with the high quality of his theatre in general, proand commodification of the arts inhibit an authentic fessional and public reaction to them is not. Amestoy has consistently studied the role of women within Spains patriarchal society. Plays such as Ederra (written in 1980), They Shall Not Pass, Pasionaria! (written in 1993), or Violets for a Bourbon. The Austrian Queen of Alfonso XII (written in 1995), demonstrate the authors attention to women as primary characters. With the four plays that comprise If Daisies Could Grow in Concrete, however, Amestoys attention is more keenly focused on the coming-of-age of the independent woman, a promise yet unfulfilled and left to twentyfirst-century society to complete. These female protagonists make strategic choices toward self actualization, and this thesis has been twice rewarded by Spains elite theatre cognoscenti. As Amestoy explains below, moods change so that different historical moments embrace or rebuke both play and playwright when dissonant with the current conventional wisdom. More specifically, while in his previous plays Amestoy championed female participation within the annals Spanish history or culture, significant conflict arose when his protagonists Director Ignacio Amestoy Egiguren. Photo: Candyce crossed the line into territories unwelcome in the Leonard. courts of popular opinion. Whereas the topic of Basque violence was 89

Spanish theatre from spontaneously emerging. What makes Amestoys theatre important to study is the historical moment of its writing, ranging from the early democratic period to the twenty-first century; second is the variety of the authors thematic and artistic expertise, and finallyand perhaps above allis Amestoys unwavering commitment to exploring the human condition within shifting social and political prejudices and imperatives. WESTERN EUROPEAN STAGES: When you and I saw each other last November at the 2002 Fall Theatre Festival, you told me that Spanish theatre was not doing so well. Then in an article published in Primer Acto (No. 196, 2002:18-23) you write that the current state of Spanish theatre is mediocre and franchised With so many plays on stage these days, and with so many theatres in operation, what are you criticizing? IGNACIO AMESTOY: Most of the plays that we write never make it to the stage. This is nothing new, but right now its our biggest problem, and its more unsettling than ever. But its not only in Spain where this is happening. Not too long ago Arthur Miller was in Madrid, and he argued that New York has plenty of theatres, but it has no theatre. In Spain in general, and in Madrid specifically, this is what happening. We have very successful commercial theatres with shows that entertain, with audiences that want to be entertained, but we dont have our own theatre. The reason that our contemporary Spanish plays arent being staged is that impresarios prefer successful plays from the London and New York stages, or stage adaptations of already familiar and successful novels or movies. Rather than create a theatre singular to Madrid, the theatre is viewed as a for-profit business, much like a McDonalds or Benetton franchise, so I consider that what we have now functions as a theatre franchise. Contemporary Spanish authors are a risky business, and impresarios wont go for it, so we end up with a mediocre or franchised theatre, or both. WES: Subventions have been a topic of discussion since Francos death in 1975, so Im wondering if in 2003 subventions are helpful, or do they become a means of making you cautious when it comes to sitting down and writing a play? IA: Theatre, just like music or museums, needs financial support from the government. In fact, 90

everything in Spain is underwritten: newspapers, television programming, agriculture, the cattle trade, even the automobile industry. Really, nothing can survive without such economic assistance. But as it is today, funding is actually shaping the trajectory of Spanish theatre. I believe, as do my colleagues from the Generation of 82 [authors generally born in the 1940s who by 1982 were discernible as the next generation of playwrights], that we were the first to write in a political environment free from censorship. Previous generations had suffered harsh censorship, but when the Constitution was approved in 1978 following Francos death in 1975, problems of censorship faded into the past. Essentially, from 1982 forward, the year when the socialists formed Spains government, a free atmosphere was a fact. As for me, I am a Basque fully committed to my homeland although I live in Madrid. Ive written plays about violence in the Basque region, both past and present. Some of the plays are Doa Elvira, Just Imagine Euskadi, that I wrote in 1985, [Euskadi is the Basque region], Durango, A Dream, 1439, written in 1989, and Betizu, The Red Bull, written in 1991, as well as other candid pieces, some of which resulted in confrontations. In the Basque region, one radical sector objects to my plays, suggesting that they are by an essentially Castilian playwright, when, in fact, I wrote the majority of them while visiting my homeland, plus they were performed by Basque theatre companies. But when these same plays are staged here in Madrid, folks characterize them as radical Basque nationalism. These are some of the comments explicit or tacitthat have produced anxieties. So, those of us who wrote in the 1980s and a good part of the 1990s felt absolute freedom, offend whom we may. And our plays were provocative as we dealt with issues which in that moment were pulsing throughout society. What has happened is that back then the boundaries of Horatian proprieties that measured what the social collective tolerates were much more extensive than they are today. I could write about important social and political issues, but bit by bit, especially concerning Basque themes, as much in the radical sectors of Basque nationalism as Spanish nationalism, my plays became problematic and, at times, even caused confrontation among spectators. In his review of Betizu, the Red Bull, staged at the Sala Olimpia in Madrid in 1993, Eduardo Haro Tecglen talked about the clash between two groups of audience members [Vasquismo militante El Pas, 01 March 1993]. On more than one occasion a few

spectators came to blows. Yet Ive had problems staging plays that have nothing to do with the Basque region. WES: In other words, that spring wasnt the last time that you experienced opposition to your theatre. IA: Thats right. I had another problem in 1993 with my play They Shall Not Pass, Pasionaria! The orthodox communists opposed the play as well as a portion of the more conservative sectors. Neither of these two factions wanted to see Dolores Ibrruri and her son Rubn Ruiz Ibrruri, inhabiting the personas of the Virgin Mary and Christ. [Dolores Ibrruri, born in 1895 and popularly known as Pasionaria, was a symbol of resistance during the civil war against Franco (1936-39). Born of a Basque father and Castilian mother, Ibrruri became a powerful communist leader who lived in exile in Russia during Francos regime. She coined the much quoted phrase They shall not pass!, refer-

ring to Francos troops during the 1936-39 civil war. She returned to Spain in 1977, two years after Francos death, and became a living legend as a popular hero. She died in 1989]. In the debates going on back then in the Socialist Party between renovaders and guerristas [the former are the more liberal social democrats, and the latter are the more rigid socialists, followers of Felipe Gonzlez and Alfonso Guerra, respectively], there were politicians who prohibited the mention of international themes in local, state or regional theaters. They Shall Not Pass, Pasionaria! was an unyielding and explicit treatment, thanks to the aesthetics of Salvador Tvora [actor, author, director, born in Seville in 1930], of the situation of the socialist utopia after the Berlin Wall came down, and also of the dilemma/crossroads of the female protagonist both as a mother but also as an individual in a stagnant sexist society. Then, in 1999 I was censored as antimonarquist for my play Violets for a Bourbon. The

Ignacio Amestoy Egigurens Durango, A Dream. Photo: courtesy Ignacio Amestoy Egiguren

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Austrian Queen of Alfonso XII, which I wrote in 1995. What I told was a revisionist history of Spain surrounding the death due to illness of King Alfonso XII at the age of twenty eight in November of 1885. At the plays close, the king and queen make love, as the king lies dying without a male heir save for two illegitimate sons by the opera singer Elena Sanz. Since Alfonso XIII was born in May of the following year, I was envisioning a historical story to talk about the urgency of the conflict, both personal and political, rather than the more traditional version already written. The official story about Alfonso XII was established through two plays by Luca de Tena. Yet neither in Where Are You Going, Alfonso XII, written in 1957, nor in Where Are You Going, Sorrowful One? does Luca de Tena even mention Elena Sanz or the dimension of an heir to the throne, a cause of significant worry for the monarchy and the public. Both plays were major successes, yet they fail to approach the play from the historical moments of the death of a young king and the posthumous birth of his heir that calmed the worries of the country. There was a very strong reaction to my version of Alfonso XII so that some impresarios along with others told me that after my plays on Basque violence, then my play on the Stalinist Pasionaria, and now this one about Alfonso XII, my chances of having another play staged were not good. The message was clear. The dominating propriety was reducing our freedom of expression. In recent times, with the Iraqi conflict, along with asking for peace, we are asking for freedom of expression. More than ever, polemical plays are cast to alternative theatres due to censorship. WES: How have you reacted to such social judgment? IA: Im continuing my work on the Basque tetralogy that Im calling Everything for the Crown, which includes Violets for a Bourbon, and another play with a Basque theme, Cain and Abel in Postdamer Platz. But Ive also written another tetralogy, this time of comediessome are comedy dramas and others are comedies in the strict sense of the word. Women serve as protagonists in all four comedies because I have always been interested in how women figure into a patriarchal society, and women are in almost all of my plays: women characters like Ederrra, Doa Elvira, and Pasionaria. Lock the Door Tight, the first in the collection If Daisies Could Grow in Concrete, was so named from the 92

poetry of Angela Figuera in her collection I Touch the Earth. My play is about a conflict between two generations: a mother from the 1960s, my own generation, and her daughter representing the following generation, such as my own daughter, Ainhoa, who played the role of the daughter, with Beatriz Carvajal as the mother when the play debuted December 22, 2000. Im interested in the relationship between these generations, and in this steadfast woman from the 1960s whose generation is now the most rancid of contemporary Spain. She has learned how to free herself from the rubble of traditional Spain, for example, by having a child without getting married, affirming herself as an independent woman, and becoming a top notch journalist. Ive been a journalist for more than thirty years, sixteen of which were spent with the emblematic daily Diario 16, and Ive seen this type of very capable woman struggle in the sexist world of journalism. The contrast Im making lies between hers and the following generation. Her daughter has impressive professional credentials, a masters degree, and her freedom, but, nevertheless, she remains unemployed. And whats most important is that she knows that there is no magical solution to the problem. The second play of the tetralogy is Rondo for Two Women and Two Men that I wrote in 2001. It is almost strictly a comedy and again finds a woman in a sexist professional world. If in the first half of the play we see romantic jealousies among female and male violinists, in the second half we see professional jealousies surrounding gender issues, a theme of fundamental importance these days. At the conclusion, the woman finds herself professionally crushed for no other reason than that she is female; but she reacts vigorously. In 2001 I wrote Chocolate for Breakfast, and won the Lope de Vega Award, exactly twenty years after I won it in 1981 for Ederra. As in the first two plays, its about a woman caught in a profoundly masculine reality. Its an overstated comedy, along the lines of Jardiel Poncela, in the story of a fifty-something mother who had abandoned university studies in order to have children: a son and three daughters. The play begins on the day that her youngest daughter at long last gets married. The motheralong with her majordomo in this play truly inspired by Jardiel decides that this is the moment to finally free herself from the children and start a new life for herself. But it is also the moment when her children, one after another, return home to mama. Including the

one who just got married! None has been capable of establishing his or her independence, and so they return to take refuge at their mothers skirts. Each one of them, including the three daughters, wants a traditional mother to come home to! Will their mother choose to sacrifice her independence again? Not for a second. WES: What is the fourth play about, the one that you are currently writing for publication in the Fall 2003 issue of the theatre journal Estreno? IA: The title is From Jerusalem to Jericho and, beyond the struggle of women within the patriarchal community, I advance the theme of individual rightsthe right to make life choices like anyone else, whether male or female, intelligent or not, rational or emotionally conflicted. In this play even a turtle has certain rights! The protagonist is a young woman, twenty-eight years old and with special needs due to an accident at age thirteen that impaired her intellectual growth. Due to old-fashioned ideas that her mother subscribed to, practices long since rejected, the young woman has spent the past fifteen years confined to an institution, unable to participate in any aspect of mainstream life. The play begins with the death of the mother, when the older brother and sister plan for her future. Her sister wants her released from the institution, away from her bell jar in order to develop her potential. The brother, interested only in more inheritance money since he has already squandered his own, and working within an absolutely traditional and patriarchal pattern, wants to succeed his mother as his sisters guardian without releasing her from the anachronistic care of the institution. In the end, the young woman herself will decide how to spend her future and thus finds more than merely release from the institution. WES: Why is it that you have almost without exception made women the protagonists in your plays? IA: Because it is essential that issues regarding women in society and culture be explored on stage, and that we think toward a future when society views women with a different attitude. The woman in Spain who for the most part up until the 1950s was unable to marry without her fathers permission or travel without her husbands permission is now making herself visible within the social imaginary. She is causing us to visualize a new sensibility far 93

removed from the concept of a male-centered life so that past conformities have fallen away. But her future has not yet arrived. Lets hope that it does, and that the twenty-first century is hers! Society still resists allowing women an increased role to equal her male counterpart, and in many instances this resistance comes from women themselves. But however strong the opposition, we are at the end of patriarchal domination in western culture where the vestiges of the Roman paterfamilias law has ruled. Our present legal system is making changes that promote a greater awareness of women as equal partners in society. Even though events such as war can slow down progress! In these circumstances, we must turn our thoughts toward perceiving women in roles far removed from the stagnant theatre models of Terence and Seneca. This social change that must be dealt with in contemporary theatreand not only by female writersis a truly revolutionary phenomenon that without a doubt can transform society. Hopefully violence wont crush this reality while still in its embryonic stage. WES: I cant stop thinking about what you have said about the difficulties of staging some of your plays, specifically the reaction of the impresarios and others regarding Violets for a Bourbon, but also Pasionaria and Betizu. After the threat of banishing your theatre from the stage, your two recent plays both won prestigious awards. What would you say regarding the thematic thrust of your plays and the issue of theatre awards? IA: In its day, and Im talking now about 1982, I was very pleasantly surprised that my play Ederra won the Lope de Vega. Its a play with a Basque theme, although a bit abstracted via a mythic perspective. But theres simply no doubt that Ederra is precisely about violence in a very specific place: the Basque country. A few years later in 1987, Ederra won the Espinosa y Cortina de la Real Academia de la Lengua, the award having the longest history in Spain, for best play staged during 1982-86. My mentor, Antonio Buero Vallejo, along with Joaqun Calvo-Sotelo, and Jos Lpez Rubio juried the award. Buero wrote to me about Ederra saying There are echoes that I view very positively of Unamuno and Sartre, as it were, belonging to the same family. Not for a single moment did CalvoSoltelo waver concerning the Basque content of Ederra, and he was favorable regarding three others of my Basque plays, Durango, A Dream, and 1439,

which seemed to him self sacrificing. The play is about the anarchist movement by Alfonso de Mella, one of Menndez y Pelayos disbelievers. At any rate, my plays have continued to garner awards, but not of the mainstream variety. In 1986 Doa Elvira, was named best play of the Festival of Sitges that Ricard Salvat administered back then. And Violets

for a Bourbon was chosen by the Critics and Press of Madrid for the Celestina Award for best author of 1999, an honor far from the traditional ones. What Im saying is that in the 1980s, there was a more open climate, so that the Academy could select a play like Ederra for the award.

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Whos Watching Whom?: Kiarostamis Taziye at the Teatro India, Rome

P.A. Skantze theatrical gifts given by Roman players musicians, For a short while after its inauguration, the young actors, senior citizens in displays of dancing Teatro India in Rome became a sacred space for per to the Teatret players and their maestro, Eugenio formance. Created by Mario Martone, the India Barba. Over the erected platform stage rose the disoffered innovative and alternative theatre in contrast tinctive marker of the mix of then and now at the to other traditional and somewhat stodgy theatres in India: an abandoned gasometro. The steel skeleton Rome. Built upon the site of an old soap factory, the in the round rises towards the sky just to the back of India shares an architectural affinity to Peter the India that night a crescent moon seemed to Brooks Bouffes du Nord and the BAM Majestic; as descend within the steel circle. Just behind the platin those two empty spaces, so in the India where form on the hill fire wheels spelled out, Grazie spectators could read the history of the original Odin in a final salute to the power of the theatrical building in streaks across half-plastered walls, faded experience accumulated through a month of perpainted cornices and cavernous rooms. In spring formances, of lectures, and of exchange. and summer the huge open space outside the theatre If past productions haunt current perserved for a stage: the surrounding, crumbling walls formances in Marvin Carlsons term, so too does made for a natural entrance beneath the ruined archspace hold memory of earlier shapes and stage conways and the traditional pans of flame set on the figurations that shimmer like phantoms about the ground guided spectators towards the performance. current production. My elegiac use of the past tense A memory lingers here outside the long as I describe productions at the Teatro India indirectangular building of the India, a memory of the cates how great a loss to theatre culture in Rome theatrical performances made by Odin Teatret in occurred when the right-wing regional government their month-long residency in Teatro Indias inaugudismissed Mario Martone and the India lay fallow. ral year (1999-2000). On the final night of Odins Over the last two years the theatre has been used visit, the spectators took up places on the ground only occasionally for performance; in fact the space (free to all) and attended a potlatch, an exchange of

Abbas Kiarostamis production of Taziye. Photo: Matthew H. Fink

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is often rented for christenings and weddings. The use of the space as one of transient celebrations accords well with the recent spectacle of Taziye, an ancient Iranian passion play. That same gazometro haunted the July 2003 performance of Taziye, directed by the Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. The steel skeleton permanently empty it would seem of gasoline provided a visual echo to the constructed theatre enclosure for Taziye. Five rows of platforms with chairs divided into six sections surrounded the ring of the stage. Into the structure built around the ring of seats were fitted six white screens. Though the spectator expected a contemporary version of an ancient Iranian text, the screens brought an instantaneous modernity to the ancient theatre practice. Unavoidable and imposing, the video projections complicated the spectators position as an audience member present at a live performance with a more extreme form of voyeurism (see below). Each screen, about six-feet high, extended the width of each section, filling the steel scaffolding. From the outside the theatre space seemed enclosed, the screens blocking the usual open space of an amphitheatre, but even as I walked toward the entrance I could see the faces and bodies that filled the screens. Thus the play had begun or at least the event of the performance was underway. A band of four men in white, suspended on a small platform above one of the four entrances played flute, trumpet, drums and tambourine. The center stage, a raised platform, held shields and swords; encircling the stage at the level of the ground was a ring of sand. Advertisement for the evening made much of the fact that Kiarostami was an acclaimed film director and this was his first attempt at theatre. So the truly beautiful videos being shown above the space were not exactly a surprise. I learned their code quickly: two videos being shown on three screens each interspersed one with another. The purdah of Islamic society held: the women and girls appeared on one screen, the men and boys on the other. It is odd, especially as a spectator whose main interest is in how live bodies make performance, to watch an audience watching something outside our vision; something we are led to assume is very like the play we ourselves are watching. As the night went on I found myself intrigued and disturbed by these visions of watching Iranians (or whoever they might be, since we were left to make assumptions based on the dress, the faces and the 96

fact that the play was from Iran and director, Iranian). I assumed the videos were timed to our own experience of the same play; that the waiting of the audience in Rome was alike the waiting of the audience in Iran. They drank tea and ate rice with their hands, we watched them eat and wait while we waited for the play to begin. A disembodied voice narrated the gist of the story in Italian, then the action began. The play follows the martyrdom of Hossein (and the beginning of the split between the Sunni and Shiite religions). Yazid, chief of the emperor of Islam sets in motion the plot by refusing Hossein water. When Sharbanu, Hosseins wife, shows him their small son dying from thirst, Hossein takes the child to Yazid and his two generals to plead for water only to have the men kill the child with an arrow in the throat. After dreaming of the archangel Gabriel who reminds Hossein he must martyr himself, the scene changes briefly to the desert where an Indian maharaja and his minister (bizarrely dressed in a British navy costume anachronistic to the play in its signal of colonial occupation since all the other action occurs in ancient times) meet Hossein who saves them from a lion. The lion then prophesizes the massacre of all of Hosseins family and loved ones until there is no one left even to bury the bodies. To this end Hossein willingly returns and martyrs himself. A nephew is slain before his eyes before his own death where Hossein is repeatedly stabbed. Each thrust releases a white dove, the proof of the ascension of Hosseins soul. The lion, however, comes back at the end to bury the dead. Many in the audience of Italians seemed surprised the play was performed in Farsi. Since working in Europe I have become accustomed to seeing theatre in languages entirely foreign to me; yet I have also been tutored in the ritual drama from India and Iran by Peter Brook and the Odin Teatret among others. The drama of gods, or in this case archangels, and the centrality of sacrifice and mourning communicated itself powerfully. The allmale cast sang with voices arresting and affecting, sometimes in trance-producing chants, sometimes in suffering wailing, beautifully pitched in the minor keys of traditional Iranian song. The break in tradition of the videos did not extend to any break in the tradition of the acting. All the parts were played by men. The boys playing the children and women entered in multi-colored veils very unlike the blackveiled women on the screens. Their voices singing and speaking their parts had little indication of gen-

Abbas Kiarostamis production of Taziye. Photo: Matthew H. Fink

der, no effort was made to hide the facial hair of the young man playing Hosseins wife. As a spectator one looked up and down and down in this performance. Up to see the response of the filmed audience, down to the action on the stage and down further to the entrances made onto the circus sand. There were points were those other projected watchers disappeared, particularly when the three protagonists, our hero Hossein and the evil Yazid generals flew around the ring on horses, riding so fast, halting with such presumption and speaking daggers to one another. Then it was as if the screens melted, because what was here, now in front of you demanded all your attention. At the points of greatest pathos when Hossein accepts his path to martyrdom, when the children are killed my ambivalence about the projected audience increased. While a large part of the audience in Rome could be assumed to be from a Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of Hosseins sorrow at his six-month old sons dying from thirst needed no common set of beliefs to communicate the pain. In fact, who could not think of the children in post-war Iraq very possibly suffering the same fate while awaiting the restoration of water and the electricity that might purify that water? Yet the pictures above our heads seemed calculated to show us the difference in response between those watching something that has for them 97

an intimacy of pain not unlike the way of the cross for devout Christians and our own response. What does it mean to break the anonymity of the watcher? The understood contract of spectator to performance is that while watching the play one is not watched. Of course some theatre performances openly confront the audience, but that is generally an understood contract as well. It was mesmerizing to see those faces on the screen and the aesthetic beauty of the video; the screens could not be separated from the experience of watching. It was not that all the Iranian spectators were beautiful in any conventional sense, but that they were very individually compelling. Yet it was also curious to have such an intimate view of faces often convulsed in weeping or looking off into the distance. The position of the spectator behind the camera lens, as it were, enforced the passivity of watching someone who does not know you are watching them. It broke the threads John Webster in the 17th century suggests bind the ears of the audience at the theatre to the body of the actor by inserting between us and the players those other watchers and their reactions. Often we saw the same faces (did the people become characters for us as we saw them repeatedly shown with their habits of sitting and watching?). Sometimes the camera showed a mongoloid teenager, a young leper. If one of the prevailing

questions in the audiences mind was whether the video showed an audience watching what we were watching whether the videos were timed to the performance we were seeing the answer came in the echo of the gesture of touching the breast and opening the hand that occurred on the stage in Rome and on the videos at the same time. Though the Roman audience did not follow suit, the filmed audience clearly knew their gestural part. The pathos of the story built throughout the play, cresting in the poignant repeat and return of Hosseins leaving for his final martyrdom only to be stopped by his wife, who, unable to control herself, ran down off the platform to intercept him as he walked the ring again and again. The longing and the grief increased with each repetition of exactly the same leave taking, sorrow, walking away, a sudden move from Sharbanu and then her flinging herself down to stop him. I thought of the theatrical variations I knew of such powerful loss, of Lear carrying his daughter in his arms, howl, howl, howl where the words are at once direction and cues as well as uncontrollable sound. As this scene went on, the filmed watchers wiped tears from their eyes; the women lifted the chador over their heads, an abandonment to grief that couldnt help but awaken the feelings of those

of us watching them watching. Around me the reception was mixed with some watchers very attentive, others talking all the way through. I couldnt help but wonder whether the talking which is not so common in live theatre performances in Italy did not have to do with the confusion of genres in outdoor theatre and outdoor cinema, the latter offering a very different sort of watching often punctuated by conversation and laughter. At the end of the playwhich was consistently sold outI rejoined Italian friends who found the play and the performance uninteresting but the videos beautiful. I have heard this comment more than once from others who saw Taziye, and I wonder how they would have responded had there been no screens, no faces, no cues, no place to distract attention from the live to the filmed. But most of all I was left with the odd sense of having witnessed a private act confounded by the watching eye of the camera. Nothing reinforced this more than when at the close of the play Kiarostami joined the cast for the ovation and walked from section to section of the seats with a camera in his hands, the flash of light in the dark a reminder of the static nature of pictures taken and the mans face obscured by the camera a reminder of the distance between the seen and the shown.

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To You Who Are Listening From Athens, Greece: Citizenship and Democratic Politics in a Global World
Marina Kotzamani One of the most interesting productions of in complex ways to place and to the conception of last Spring in Athens was To You Who Are Listening, space in the production. Traditionally, citizenship is directed by Lefteris Voyatzis at the Kykladon associated with a unique place, a country. The privTheater. Voyatzis, a highly reputed director in ilege affords the citizen protection and a sense of Greece has presented in recent years exemplary belonging to a particular place. Moreover, the exerproductions of contemporary Greek plays. To You cise of citizenship has been associated par excelWho Are Listening is a new play by Loula lence to the public, as opposed to the private space. Anagnostaki, a major dramatist of the post World To You Who Are Listening subverts these tenets and War II era. The production addresses issues of demargues for the need to redefine citizenship for the ocratic participation in the new globalized world new globalized world in real life, as well as in the and has stimulating openness in grappling with sigfictional space of art. nificant problems, such as what constitutes citizenCharacters in To You Who Are Listening ship and political protest today. It draws a thoughtcome from and are connected to many places. Their ful and unsettling picture of contemporary western varied backgrounds form a complex multicultural society from the point of view of those who are mosaic which serves to highlight in an enriching excluded from decision making and power; this is of way diversity, as opposed to uniformity There is no course the majority of us. The clich-less producattempt to assimilate the non Greek cultural eletion leaves the audience with urgent questions about ments into the Greek background or to create tenthe possibilities and conundrums of contemporary sion with it. Rather, multiculturalism is accepted as democratic politics. part of a new reality or of an expanded sense of The action is set in the Berlin lower middle Greek identity. The multicultural emphasis is relaclass apartment of Hans, an aged German and his tively novel and welcome in a country like Greece, young wife Maria, a German of Greek origin. where until recently official rhetoric had been preMaria is renting part of the apartment to three young senting a monolithic picture of national identity, Greeks, Ivan, a drug addict, Ayis, an aspiring writer insisting on the ancient Greek legacy and the Greek and frequenter of politically rallies and his wife orthodox religion. Sofia, who traffics in drugs to support her needy Multiculturalism exceeds beyond national family in Greece. Sofias family, her mother, her boundaries. Marias immigrant, Trudels East invalid homosexual brother Niko and his Italian German, and Hanss native Berliner background are companion Gino, who brings Sophia a large stash of more significant to understanding them than the fact drugs, visit them in Germany after a trip to Turkey. that they are German. Characters are exposed to At the end of the play Sofia leaves the apartment to and freely partake of several cultures. German, sell the drugs and is killed by her client, a policeman Italian, and Turkish cultural references abound in who is himself a drug dealer. the production and there is rich interplay with the Even though the play appears to be focused Greek background. Gino sings beautifully the revon Sofia, it has no central characters or protagonists. olutionary Bella Ciao in his native Italian but also The plot has a loose structure and is interspersed partakes of the alternative Greek culture, as he lives with monologues given by the characters at an in Athens, with a Greek homosexual lover. Sofias imaginary political rally. Ayis, who is collecting mother, superbly interpreted by Reni Pitaki as material for a novel on Rosa Luxemburg, asks the unconventionally youthful and vibrant, is entirely at characters to envision how they would address a home with the Eastern heritage of the Greek tradipolitical rally and they are all more than eager to tion; she stuns the audience with a passionate perrespond. Anagnostaki respects the desire of each formance of belly dancing on the dinner table. In character to speak and gives them the opportunity to many cases, foreign cultural references even retain do so. The monologues convey a vivid picture of their alien character in the context of the Greek conwho the world citizens might be and what they have versation. Hans and Trudel only speak in German. to say. The exploration of citizenship is associated Some of their communications are translated for the 99

Lefteris Voyatziss production of To You Who Are Listening. Photo: courtesy Kykladon Theater

non-German speaking characters, others are not. Rather than alienate, foreign elements encourage the audience to envision a more inclusive culture. As world citizens, characters feel in place everywhere. Paradoxically however, these world citizens are also out of place, or rather, there is no place they can claim as their own. The tenants of the German apartment appear to be in transit there, just like the visitors from Greece. All of them have utopian dreams of escaping to other places. Ayis wishes to leave Sofia and to move to another country, Sofia wants to follow him and to break ties with her family, Ivan escapes into the world of drugs and Maria hopes to move to Greece and start a new life there. The desire to flee highlights a sense of displacement and insecurity the characters are feeling. They are frustrated over being marginalized and controlled by unfathomable mechanisms of power. Even their own private space is threatening to them, in ways they cannot fully understand. Characters hear sounds that appear to be shots, or pebbles being thrown against their window panes. Are they being threatened by Neonazis and drug dealers or are these victims of the system like themselves? Is it the police who is a threat? Nobody has a clear theory on these issues. The characters escapist tendencies are counterbalanced by their strong desire to undertake 100

civic responsibility, to find a public voice. Their monologues on the microphone make a powerful impression on the audience as efforts to articulate a new form of political speech, which is devoid of the political orthodoxies and empty rhetoric of the past whether coming from the left of the right. Most important, their political protest is remarkably inclusive, encompassing what we would previously label apolitical and conflating issues pertaining to the public with those of the private space. The private, the painful coming to terms with personal relationships in a world where the traditional family and its values are a memory is unambiguously presented as a political issue. Sofias and her mothers monologues on how Nikos became an invalid makes this clear. We hear that Nikos was run down by a car, upon rushing out of the familys apartment. He was trying to escape from his father, who was beating him up because he was dressed up as a woman. On the way to the hospital, the nurses were frantically attempting to remove Nikos make-up, so that the doctors would not see it. The restrictive societal values and the mechanisms for repressing homosexuality within the family make homosexuality a political, not a personal issue. Traditionally, the monologue has been a notoriously difficult genre to stage. In Voyatziss production the monologues command the audi-

ences attention and have striking theatricality. They range remarkably in content and especially in mood from the confessional and conspiratorial tone of Sofia, to the intense tragic pathos with which her mother relates Nikos story, to the morbid vision of Ivan about a future race of super humans that will eliminate the sick and disenfranchised of this world, to Ayiss self involved presentation of the book he is writing on Rosa Luxemburg and his theories about the fate of revolutionaries today. The speeches have a conversational quality and are addressed not only to the other characters and to the audience at the imaginary rally, but also to the actual audience of the production. They are deeply moving for their directness and honesty, as well as for exemplifying an unfinished, improvisational quality, giving the impression characters are struggling to articulate something yet formless. However, the task of public speaking is also laden with irony, as it occurs entirely within the private space of the apartment. Clearly, characters do not speak in public but rather, they rehearse public speaking. The presence of the apartments owner, Hans, as a silent witness of these speeches reinforces the irony. As played by Voyatzis, Hans is a living symbol of the disintegration of the old twentieth century world on the threshold of the new century. Characters are uncertain whether Hans silence indicates wisdom or senility. He has an

exaggeratedly rigid elderly walk, and constantly appears to be on the verge of collapsing. Hans opens and closes the play, making political protest appear like an ironic parenthesis. At the opening of the play Hans, alone on stage, turns on Ayiss tape recorder. The blasting sound of shouting and revolutionary songs, complemented by visual material from demonstrations on video projected on the entire back wall of the stage, make Hans fidgety and increasingly uneasy. With almost clownish, comical awkwardness he finally collapses on the floor. At the end of the play Hans is the only one of the apartments household to have witnessed Sofias death. His silent presence at that point conveys irony that is bitter and morbid. Unlike the imaginary political protesting we have been hearing in the apartment, Sofias death, which occurred outside, is real. Absurd, hard to understand and hard to account for. The reporting of the news of Sofias death to the other characters is superbly staged. The messenger is Trudel, played by a young, sexy actress in a red dress who has a poetic presence. She speaks in German and her words must be interpreted to be understood, giving the message a hermetic and mysterious quality. At the same time though, the message is almost in danger of passing unnoticed. We need to pay attention to hear what is said. Ivan translates for Gino at a fast pace, while the audience

Lefteris Voyatziss production of To You Who Are Listening. Photo: courtesy Kykladon Theater

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is distracted by Ayiss imaginary speech at the tape recorder. Ayis misses the message, as he is too absorbed by his speech to hear what is said. Yet, ironically, as the husband of Sofia and particularly as an aspiring writer he should be the one most concerned about Sofias death. Indeed, he has repeatedly told the audience that his conception of the character of Rosa Luxemburg is modeled after Sofia. Clearly, Ayiss inspiration is too simplistic, capturing neither Luxemburgs revolutionary stature nor Sofias uniqueness and the truth she embodied. The production ends on an ironic and questioning mode. How is Sofias death to be accounted for? How does one speak about it at the demonstration and how does one interpret the contemporary revolutionary spirit in art? All characters in Anagnostakis play undertake to speak for themselves and are essentially characters in search of an author, just like the six characters in Pirandellos famous play. The lack of

protagonists in To You Who Are Listening and the urge of the characters to address political issues also readily brings to mind the chorus of Greek drama. However, in the contemporary play characters lack the self assurance about their identity that the Greek chorus has. They are not citizens but only would be citizens; they have an incomplete, unfinished quality as characters. The problem of how to give them a voice applies to politics as well as to art and extends beyond the scope of this production. The strong irony of the ending in To You Who Are Listening also evokes Gogols The Inspector General. It becomes apparent in both plays that what we have been watching has only been a rehearsal, or a play that falls short of reality; action is ready to begin upon the fall of the curtain. Sofias death makes the need to articulate a democratic politics for today urgent and painfully real. Dealing with this problem is necessary for the characters as well as for us.

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Contributors
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature. He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the Callaway Prize. BARRY DANIELS is a retired professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French Romantic Theatre. The publication of his book Le Dcor de thtre l'poque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la Comdie-Franaise, 1799-1849, by the Bibliothque nationale de France, will be celebrated on 9 December 2003 with a reading/presentation in the Studio Thtre of the Comdie-Franaise located in the Carrousel du Louvre. JEAN DeCOCK is a Professor of French Literature with a Ph.D. from UCLA, where he wrote his thesis on Michel de Ghelderode. After teaching at UCLA, UCBerkeley and UNLV, he is now retired between Paris and New York. He was Editor for the French Review on African Literature and Film for many years. ROY KIFT is a British playwright living in Germany. His latest play, Camp Comedy, on the fate of the German artist and film director, Kurt Gerron, in the Nazi concentration camp at Theresianstadthe sang the Mackie Messer Moritt in the premier of Brechts Threepenny Opera and appeared opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angelpremiered at the State University of New York-Geneseo this past spring. MARINA KOTZAMANI is an Assisatnt Professor in the Classics Department at Columbia University. She is currently working on a book on the production history of Aristophaness plays in the twentieth century. She has published articles on twentieth-century productions of Greek drama as well as theatre and book reviews for Western European Stages, Theatre Journal, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. CANDYCE LEONARD is a professor in the Humanities program at Wake Forest University. Her areas of specialization include the study of the image within a political context, both in theatre and film, and a concentration on Spanish theatre authored by living writers. Leonard has written extensively on contemporary Spanish theatre, in addition to co-editing five volumes of Spanish plays since 1950. Most recently, Indiana University invited her to deliver the 2003-04 Merle E. Simmons Distinguished Alumni Lecture. GLENN LONEY is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. His forthcoming book, edited with Richard Helfer, follows Peter Brook from the outset to his work in Paris. His forty years of photographs at home and abroad are now represented by the Everett Collection. He continues to record Architecture, Art, Design, and Lifestyles under the NYC registered title of INFOTOGRAPHY. JUDITH MILHOUS is a Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D. in Theatre Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with specilizations in seventeenth and eighteenth century British theatre, opera, and dance. Her books include Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincolns Inn Fields, 1695-1708, Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675-1707 (with Robert D. Hume), and the two-volume Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London (with Curtis Price, Gabriella Dideriksen, and Robert D. Hume.) Her recent article, The Economics of Theatrical Dance in Eighteenth-Century London, was published in Theatre Journal in October, 2003. LOUIS MUINZER is a retired Reader in Extra-Mural Studies at Queens University, Belfast. His theatrical interests include the plays of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Yeats. He is currently translating plays by the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse. 103

LAURENCE SENELICK is a Distinguished Professor of Drama at Tufts University, and has written extensively on Russian theatre, theatre history, the history of popular entertainments, and sex and gender. His most recent book, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, received Honorable Mention from the Theatre Library Association for the George Freedley Award for Best Theatre Book of 2000, an award a previous book, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, received in 1988. The Chekhov Stage received the Barnard Hewitt Award for the Best Book in Theatre Studies by a North American in 1997 from the American Society for Theatre Research. P.A. SKANTZE is an independent scholar and theatre director living in Rome. Her book Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre has just been published by Routledge Press. She currently teaches in Italy and the US. She has been a Fulbright Scholar and a fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University working on her newest project, Staging EUrope: Exploring Transnationality on European Festival Stages. PHILIPPA WEHLE, Professor of French Language and Culture and Drama Studies at SUNY-Purchase, is the author of Le Thtre populaire selon Jean Vilar and Drama Contemporary: France. Dr. Wehle writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance, and is currently a reviewer for the New York Theatre Wire (website: www.nytheatre-wire.com). She is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. NOEL WITTS is Senior Research Fellow at the London Institute. He is co-editor of The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, and is at work on a book about the arts and communism.

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Johann Kresniks production of Peer Gynt, a co-production of the Salzburg Festival and Schauspielhaus Hannover, at the Salzburg Festival. Photo: courtesy Salzburg Festival. [See page 57.]

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