Postcard from Berlin 3
Maxim Gorki Theater, Common Ground; Komische Oper, West Side Story/Moses und Aron; Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus, John Gabriel Borkman
After seeing Event for
a Stage (the last work reviewed in my previous Postcard) I’m left pondering
the questions it raises about being an actor, performing in front of an audience,
serving a director’s vision, and the peculiar self-consciousness (or
self-abnegation) all of this entails.
I don’t have any answers, but I’m
ready to be an audience-member again and forget myself for a while.
Common Ground is the
Maxim Gorki Theater production selected for inclusion in this year’s Theatertreffen.
It’s a collaborative work of documentary theatre directed by Israeli theatre-maker
Yael Ronen, and co-written by her and the cast – most of whom are from former
Yugoslavia, apart from one (Orit Namias) who identifies herself as Israeli (and
interested in ‘conflict resolution’), and another (Niels Bormann) who
identifies himself as ‘German’ (and gay). These two are the chief comic foils
in the piece (and also the chief points of access for the audience), as they vainly
struggle to understand the complex identity-politics that still divides the
rest of the cast – from each other and more deeply within themselves.
A brief warm-up act by Orit in English – simulaneously and
subsersively mistranslated by Niels into German, while alternating surtitles in
both languages keep track of what’s really going on – is followed by a
high-speed group flashback through the 90s during which the individual cast members
relive their pre-war youth. The rest of the play reconstructs the process of how
they found (or failed to find) ‘common ground’ while developing the show –
primarily through a collective research-trip to post-war Bosnia.
All this might sound didatic or self-indulgent, but to my
relief the script, staging and performances are refreshingly witty, physical
and sexy – more so in fact than any other theatre I’ve seen so far in Berlin. The
show also doesn’t avoid the complexities of its subject matter in the name of
facile notions of personal, political or artistic ‘closure’: there are no happy
or unhappy endings here, and tensions remain unresolved. Most importantly, the
actors seem fully empowered as collaborative theatre-makers rather than mere
performers executing the conceptual whims of an auteur-director (unlike the
Susanne Kennedy and Castellucci versions of Fassbinder and Holderlin/Sophocles
I sat through the previous week).
The most interesting and effective theatrical ‘device’ is
that two of the young female actors tacitly swap roles and play each other: a young
Bosnian Muslim whose father was killed in a massacre, and a young Bosnian Serb
whose father supervised the same massacre (and is still an active politician in
a post-war Serbian enclave). The two women meet at an audition, become best friends,
eventually realise their tangled connection, and embrace at the end of the
show. The role-swap isn’t explicitly acknowledged, but hinted at when one
corrects the other over tiny details during the latter’s monologue about ‘her’
father’s death. It’s later confirmed for me by one of the actors in question, when
I chat with her in halting German at the theatre bar after the show. We linger in
the foyer for a post-show concert of ‘Balkan Soul’ sung by another female actor
from Sarajevo (whom she refers to as ‘her hero’), and I think about the ironies
of an Israeli director coming to Berlin to work with a cast of Serbs, Croats
and Bosnian Muslims on a play about genocide.
I remember earlier that day seeing a sheet hanging out of
the upper-floor window of an apartment building in Kreuzberg, and painted with
the words: ‘No border, no nation.’ Tonight in the Maxim Gorki Theatre at
least, those words ring true. In a similar vein, after every performance I attend at the
Theatertreffen, the actors return to the stage and read aloud from a manifesto,
‘My Right Is Your Right!’, calling for the right of asylum seekers to move and live
freely within the EU and to be protected from discrimination. ‘The asylum
policies in Germany and Europe have failed,’ the manifesto proclaims. ‘The
processes and dealings with refugees in Berlin have shown that this city is not
the open metropolis it claims to be.’ I think with shame of my own country’s
current policy of ‘stopping the boats’. Old habits, it seems, die hard, in
Europe as well as back home.
*
The following night I’m at the Komische Oper for Barrie
Kosky’s production of West Side Story. Barrie
is in my opinion easily the most significant theatre and opera director to have
come out of Australia in the last twenty-five years, comparable with Jim
Sharman or Neil Armfield in terms of theatrical instinct, stagecraft and showmanship,
but otherwise utterly different in terms of his hybrid aesthetic – which is broadly
cosmopolitan, postmodernist (or perhaps more specifically post-surrealist), iconoclastically
Jewish and high camp in equal measure. At its best, his work achieves a sense
of delirium and even nightmare like nothing else I’ve seen onstage; I still
count his productions of The Dybbuk
with Gilgul Theatre and The Lost Echo with
the STC Actors Company as two of the most exhilarating and terrifying nights
I’ve had in the theatre or anywhere else. He also led the way for a new
generation of young male Australian directors on the national and international
stage that includes Benedict Andrews, Matt Lutton and Simon Stone. Since 2012 he's been the Intendant and Chief Director at the Komische Opera; after his first
season, it was voted ‘Opera House of the Year’. Under his leadership the
company stages equally radical versions of baroque, classical, romantic and modern
operas alongside Broadway musicals and Viennese operettas. I’m equally impressed by the
fact that he’s had screens installed in the back of the seats with surtitles in
Turkish as well as English, German and French. His stated philosophy is not to
try to please everyone, but simply to do what he loves. With houses at 85% of
capacity, it seems to be working; his contract was recently extended to 2022.
Before being appointed Indendant he scored a huge success at
the Komische Oper with Kiss Me Kate,
and has since championed the Broadway musical as a vital offshoot of the European operatic tradition transplanted to America by
the Jewish cultural diaspora (the same argument can be extended to the
Hollywood film industry, as Simon Schama does in The Story of the Jews). West Side Story fits the bill perfectly,
with its brilliant Bernstein score, scintillating Sondheim lyrics, ambitious
original choreography by Jerome Robbins (replaced in this production with a thrilling
new dance score by Otto Pichler) and book by Arthur Laurents – the whole thing
inspired by Romeo and Juliet and
transplanted to the youth gangs of 1950s immigrant New York (or in this
production, a contemporary globalized city that could be anywhere in the world). The staging is lean and minimal (apart
from a spectacular mirror-ball sequence), leaving the music and drama to speak
for themselves. In fact it’s probably the least ‘interventionist’ Kosky
production I’ve seen – apart from one song, the heart-rending ‘Somewhere’,
whose Utopian sense of longing is heightened by the addition of an elderly
couple who dance and hold hands with the two young leads (engagingly played and
sung by Jasmina Sakr and Michael Pflumm).
As with Common Ground the
previous night, I find the whole show an intelligent, visceral and deeply
moving statement about tribalism and love. It’s an extra treat hearing
Bernstein’s rhythmically biting, colouristically dazzling, melodically and
harmonically ravishing score played by a full orchestra. All in all, Barrie
makes a convincing case for the work as a cornerstone of the 20th
century musical-dramatic repertoire, operatic or otherwise.
*
On Saturday night I return to the Festpielhaus for my final sample
from the Theatertreffen: the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus production of
Ibsen’s penultimate play, John Gabriel
Borkman, directed by Karin Henkel.
Ibsen’s late works mark a return from the social and
domestic realism of his middle period to the more psychological and symbolic
landscapes of his early verse-dramas Brandt
and Peer Gynt. In fact the last
act of John Gabriel Borkman literally
takes us out of the drawing-room and back into the wilderness, as the two main
characters (and former lovers, who – as always in Ibsen – have denied
themselves and each other for the sake of ‘the world’) leave the house and go out
into the snowbound forest to die; the play’s successor, When We Dead Awaken, ends even more spectacularly with its lovers buried
in an avalanche. These last two plays are thus as ‘literally’ unstageable as the
first two – which is to not to say
that they can’t be staged at all, but rather that they can’t be staged
literally. In this respect, they anticipate the 'dream plays' of Strindberg and
the advent of Expressionism.
Henkel’s production makes broad gestures in support of this stylistic
transition: once again, all the actors wear masks (which are sporadically and
to all intents and purposes randomly removed and then replaced again); Borkman’s
wife Gunhild (Julia Wieninger) periodically rushes over to an organ at the side
of the stage and interrupts the dialogue with a deranged hymn; Borkman himself
(Josef Ostnendorf) is visible upstage from the beginning of the play lying on a
slab as if prematurely emtombed (rather than being heard invisibly walking up
and down in his room upstairs until Act Two); and everyone’s movements and
delivery are exaggerated beyond the edge of parody (the mortally yet mysteriously
ailing Ella Rentheim, in a show-stealing turn by Lina Beckmann, is given a twitching,
spasmodic physicality that has the audience continually laughing out loud).
It’s all entertaining and clever enough, in a post-Brechtian pantomine kind of way, but I can’t help feeling that the play is being kept at a cerebral and mocking distance rather than being seriously engaged with. Ironically, the most successful scene theatrically is arguaby the weakest-written in the play: the melodramatic confrontation in Act Three between the estranged parents, their son Erhart (Jan-Peter Kampwirth), his English mistress Mrs Wilton (Kate Strong) and their young and willing helpmeet Frida (Gala Winter). It’s played as a camp comedy-of-manners, but completely avoids the sense of catastrophe being transmitted from one generation to the next, which is Ibsen’s obsessive preoccupation. Conversely, the transcendent Fourth Act – which concludes with Borkman’s death on a bench in the snow overlooking a fjord, while the rival twin sisters Gunhilde and Ella take hands over his corpse (‘We two shadows – over the dead man’) – is here reduced to a non-event taking place back inside the house.
One wonders, what was the point of staging it at all? For a production of a play about facing the past, the whole thing seems more like an exercise in denial. The program is replete with the usual obligatory quotes from Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud and Canetti, but the production itself has nothing to say to me – except perhaps, that if you’re going to tackle Ibsen, especially the late plays, you need to be up for the climb. As Ella says to Borkman at the start of Act Four, as they gaze out over the fjord and the mountains beyond: ‘We have often sat on this bench before, and looked out into a much further distance. It was the dreamland of our life. And now that land is buried in snow.’ As with all great plays: if you can’t go there, don’t go there. It’s as simple as that.
It’s all entertaining and clever enough, in a post-Brechtian pantomine kind of way, but I can’t help feeling that the play is being kept at a cerebral and mocking distance rather than being seriously engaged with. Ironically, the most successful scene theatrically is arguaby the weakest-written in the play: the melodramatic confrontation in Act Three between the estranged parents, their son Erhart (Jan-Peter Kampwirth), his English mistress Mrs Wilton (Kate Strong) and their young and willing helpmeet Frida (Gala Winter). It’s played as a camp comedy-of-manners, but completely avoids the sense of catastrophe being transmitted from one generation to the next, which is Ibsen’s obsessive preoccupation. Conversely, the transcendent Fourth Act – which concludes with Borkman’s death on a bench in the snow overlooking a fjord, while the rival twin sisters Gunhilde and Ella take hands over his corpse (‘We two shadows – over the dead man’) – is here reduced to a non-event taking place back inside the house.
One wonders, what was the point of staging it at all? For a production of a play about facing the past, the whole thing seems more like an exercise in denial. The program is replete with the usual obligatory quotes from Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud and Canetti, but the production itself has nothing to say to me – except perhaps, that if you’re going to tackle Ibsen, especially the late plays, you need to be up for the climb. As Ella says to Borkman at the start of Act Four, as they gaze out over the fjord and the mountains beyond: ‘We have often sat on this bench before, and looked out into a much further distance. It was the dreamland of our life. And now that land is buried in snow.’ As with all great plays: if you can’t go there, don’t go there. It’s as simple as that.
*
I’m back at the Komische Oper on Sunday for another new
Kosky production: Schönberg’s Moses Und
Aron. Arguably the composer’s masterpiece, it’s rarely performed, as much
because of his forbidding reputation as the work’s actual musical and dramatic
challenges. The score is relentlessly demanding, and unlike most operatic
music, non-figurative (although still composed of musical ‘figures’), in the
sense that it doesn’t represent what’s happening onstage directly (or at least
not according to the habitual connotations of tonal music) but in a rigorously codified
and symbolic form, according to logic of the twelve-tone system invented by Schönberg
himself. In other words: unlike the music of Wagner, Strauss or the Hollywood cinema-scores
they spawned, it’s not a soundtrack providing dramatic or narrative cues but a pure language of its own, with its own grammar and syntax but free from the baggage of semantics. As such it’s an appropriate musical
expression for the content of the work, which deals with the contradiction (and
mutual entanglement) between pure thought and figurative language, as exemplified by the
two Biblical brothers: Moses (here sung by Wagnerian baritone Robert Hayward,
although his part is mostly scored as Sprechgesang
or 'sung-spoken'), who experiences the thought of God directly through visions
and can work miracles; and the more mellifluous Aron (tenor John Daszak), who
can interpret and communicate these ‘messages’ to the masses through the medium
of language, but only by reducing and betraying their content in the process.
If all this sounds abstract and schematic (and indeed is in Schönberg’s
somewhat didactic libretto) Barrie’s gift for visual storytelling vividly brings it to life by linking the story and themes to the entire
post-Biblical history of the Jews, and the paradoxes and paroxysms of
monotheistic culture and civilization – up to and including Zionism, Broadway,
Hollywood and the Holocaust (the production commemorates the 70th
Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945). Moses and Aron are a pair of
roadside magicians performing cheap conjuring tricks; the chorus become the
gullible contemporary masses; the Dance of the Golden Calf is performed by
gold-attired showgirls (male and female) from the 1920s; and the final sacrificial
orgy is enacted by the entire chorus brandishing mannequins which are then torn
apart and piled up to form a genocidal mass-grave, while being filmed from the
wings by two figures using old-fashioned movie cameras and wearing oversized
head-masks that look like Freud and Theodor Herzl. Unlike West Side Story, the action is crammed into a relatively confined
space, with a low ceiling, large circular down-lights and a steep wide
staircase at the back as the only entrance and exit. It looks a little like a hotel lobby or theatre foyer, unfurnished except for a motley collection of Persian rugs on the floor.
Moses emerges by unrolling himself from inside one at the beginning, and covers
himself again at the end.
Musically and dramatically though, the night belongs to the Komische
Oper Chorus, and to Barrie’s
stagecraft when it comes to mobilising them. There must be at least a hundred
of them onstage and singing for practically the duration of the performance
(which runs for about an hour and 45 minutes without interval); and instead of
the stand-and-deliver approach which is customary for traditional opera
choruses (let alone for a score as demanding as this), here they’re in a
continuous state of frenzied animation, physically as well as emotionally. It’s
a remarkable feat – and a compelling image of mass psychology in action. It’s
also in keeping with the distinctive performance tradition of the company,
whose founding director Walter Felsenstein was famous for his Bewegungsregie or ‘movement-direction’.
Musically, the whole thing is held together by the masterful conducting of
Vladimir Jurowski. It’s hard to believe the same orchestra was doing West Side Story here only two nights
ago.
When Moses sings the last words of Act Two (literally, ‘Das Wort mich fehlen!’ –‘Words fail me!’)
and covers himself again with a rug before sinking into the pile of mannequins,
there’s a prolonged silence as the curtain slowly descends. Schönberg never
completed the score for Act Three; but I can’t imagine anything that could
possibly follow that devastating final image.
*
On my last day in Berlin, I decide to visit my grandparents.
I catch the U-Bahn to Potzdamer Platz, walk to the corner of Hannah-Arendt-Strasse
and thread my way through the vast field of concrete stelae until I find the
steps that lead down to the underground information centre of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial
for the Murdered Jews of Europe. I enlist the help of a young man who works
there to navigate the computer touch-screens, and eventually we find two entries
that seem to match: Max Bauer, born in 1875, and Regine Bauer, born in 1887;
same wartime address in Vienna; same transport numbers to Theresienstadt concentration camp on 10/7/1942; same transport numbers to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on
28/10/1944. Their prisoner numbers are the same as each other's except for the final digit, for both transportations.
I hope that means they travelled together, right up until the end.
Humph’s next Postcard
will be from New York.
