Editor Marvin Carlson Contributing Editors Christopher Balme Harry Carlson Miriam D'Aponte Maria M. Delgado Marion P. Holt Barry Daniels Glenn Loney Yvonne Shafer Daniele Vianello Phyllis Zatlin Editorial Staff Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Martin E. Segal Theatre Center-Copyright 2009 ISSN # 1050-1991 Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Iceland. Joseph Talarico, Editorial Assistant Sascha Just, Managing Editor 1 Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration Tori Amoscato, Circulation Manager To the Reader Our annual fall issue foregrounds, as usual, spring and summer theatre festivals in Europe with reports on the Berlin Theatertreffen, the Avignon Festival, the Ingmar Bergman Festival in Stockholm, the Festival Grec in Barcelona, and Edinburgh and other festivals in the United Kingdom. Among the other reports we are pleased to offer information, as usual, from Barry Daniels on the current scene in Paris and information on current offer- ings in Berlin and Vienna. Our series of interviews with leading Western European theatre artists continues with two interviews from Iceland by Steve Earnest, one with Magnus Geir, Artistic Director of the Reykjavik City Theatre and the other with Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Direction of Icelands National Theatre. We welcome, as always, interviews and reports on recent work of interest anywhere in Western Europe. Subscriptions and queries about possible contributions should be addressed to the Editor, Western European Stages, Theatre Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, or mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu. Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Journals are available online from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts via the ProQuest information service and the International Index to the Performing Arts. www.il.proquest.com. All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. 2 Table of Contents Volume 21, Number 3 The 2009 Berlin Theatertreffen Avignon 2009: A Festival of Absences Avignon OFF 2009: A Year of Hard Knocks Barcelona's Grec Festival and the Tail of the City's 200809 Season The 2009 Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival Not Simply Edinburgh: The Proliferation of Festival Culture in the UK Paris Theatre, WinterSpring 2009 Report from Vienna A Pair of Icelandic Theatre Dialogues Berlin Report Contributors Fall 2009 5 21 35 43 55 61 69 79 83 91 103 Marvin Carlson Phillippa Wehle Jean Decock Maria M. Delgado Stan Schwartz Joshua Abrams Barry Daniels Marvin Carlson Steve Earnest Marvin Carlson 3 Christoph Schlingensief's Kirche der Angst. Photo: David Baltzer. 4 The annual Theatertreffen, consisting of the ten productions selected by a jury from those presented in German-speaking Europe during the past year, was held this year as usual in Berlin dur- ing the first half of May. One of the ten, a site-spe- cific production created in a Zurich hotel by Christoph Marthaler, was long closed from its limit- ed run and in any case could not be transported, and so could be seen only in a film version. Only one of the others was created in Berlin, Jrgen Gosch's The Seagull from the Deutsches Theater, so a larger number of offerings than usual were new to the Berlin public. There were two from Vienna, two from Switzerland, and one each from Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and the Ruhr Triennale. The opening production was one of the most unconventional, which was hardly a sur- prise, as it was the work of one of the most iconoclastic of contemporary German directors, Christoph Schlingensief, best known perhaps for creating a major scandal at Bayreuth by staging Parsifal with voodoo rituals and video footage of a rotting hare. His last presentation at the Theatertreffen was in significant measure a med- itation on that experience, called Kunst und Gemse (Art and Vegetables) and like Schlingensief's stag- ings in general, was part live action, part mixed media, part docudrama, part slapstick parody, part political, religious, and cultural commentary, and part happening. In many ways his new work, Die Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir (The Church of the Dread of the Foreign within Me) can be seen as a similar construction, but a critical new dimension is now present. At the beginning of 2008, just back from a trip collecting images and concepts in Nepal, the forty-seven-year-old, non-smoking Schlingensief was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. After difficult and painful treatments, and the removal of one lung, he is now in remission, but still undergoing constant therapy and examina- tion under the cloud of mortality. His new work is thus above all a reflection upon his own mortality, a non-religious, or even anti-religious mass for the The 2009 Berlin Theatertreffen Marvin Carlson Kirche der Angst. Photo: Courtesy of Berlin Theatertreffen. 5 dead and the dying, filled with religious imagery and the sounds of work like Faure's Requiem and Bach's B-minor Mass. Like Marthaler's hotel piece, Schlingensief's production was site-specific, although in this case arrangements were made to re-create its space in the smaller side theatre at the Berlin Festspielhaus, home of the Theatertreffen. The original production was staged in an abandoned blast furnace in the for- mer industrial park of North Duisburg, one of many such now-deserted industrial sites in the Ruhr val- ley. Within this huge and ghostly space, Schlingensief recreated the interior of the sort of provincial German church in which he once served as altar-boy (indeed, to add to the autobiographical layering, from the roof of the furnace one can see Schlingensief's boyhood church, Herz Jesu in Oberhausen). Perhaps also there was an implied quotation of Max Reinhardt's famous theatrical recreation of an ecclesiastical space for The Miracle. Entering the space, the audience found themselves in a nave-like interior, with banners on the walls, a central carpeted aisle, church pews complete with kneeling benches for seats, and everywhere religious icons, including a prominent monstrance with Schlingensief's removed lung on prominent, gory display. The front of the space was curtained off and for the first twenty minutes or so of the production served as a neutral background for readers of appropriate texts from such figures as Heiner Mller, Hlderlein, Joseph Beuys, the Christian fathers, and of course Schlingensief him- self, and, even more strikingly, for almost continu- ous film images, which appear here and on a series of side screens throughout the productions. These images form a powerful running commentary on the production. Most poignant are carefree boyhood films of the author himself, playing with his parents on the beach, playing soldier with a toy gun, bathing his then still whole and healthy body. Most chilling are the frequent microscopic films of the cancer cells at work, often layered over and corrupting other images and the live action. Particularly dis- turbing is a reprise of the famous dead rabbit in the process of rapid decay, almost an icon of Schlingensief's iconoclasm for its use in Parsifal, but now taking on shocking new meaning in this theatrical meditation on the author's death. There is a mock crucifixion and mock religious procession, and scattered throughout, real and simulated film- ings of "actions" by Fluxus, the avant-garde hap- penings group with which Schlingensief clearly feels a close affinity. Important as this filmic level is, the pro- duction places its primary emphasis upon living actors, who are also engaged in a range of activities, some modeled on Fluxus events, some recalling the life and work of the author, but most derived from visual quotations of high church ritual, subjected to a Felliniesque exaggeration and distortion. Impressive processions come up the aisle, headed by a diminutive female figure in golden Papal regalia and complete with priests and a variety of choirsschoolgirls, children, and male and female members of the black Angels Voices Gospel Choir. Sometimes these enter in solemn church procession, sometimes they enter running, sometimes they exit rapidly, moving backward. They, and the two oper- atic singers Friederike Harmsen and Ulrike Eidinger, add a major musical element to the pro- duction. When these religious figures enter, the cur- tains open at the front, revealing an on-stage chapel with high stained-glass windows, which is the main setting for most of the evening. Against this is played a variety of parody religious scenes, includ- ing funeral services, sermons, and celebrations of the Mass, reconstructions of scenes we have wit- nessed on the films, disturbing telephone calls from Schlingensief's dominating mother (beautifully played by Angela Winkler, one of Germany's most honored actresses), visual presentations in front of x-ray photos by medical technicians, and grotesque hospital scenes. Schlingensief himself appears both in a coffin and in a hospital bed, the two bearing a grim resemblance. It has often been remarked that death, the most mysterious and universal of human experi- ences, has been the central concern of much of the world's greatest art. Schlingensief, has experienced the "Angst vor dem Fremden" more directly than most and has created a profoundly moving and hon- est dramatic exploration of this experience, and yet one which is continually shot through with a con- soling wit, humor, and bravery. By a grim coincidence the second director represented in this year's festival, Jrgen Gosch, was also diagnosed with advanced cancer during this past year. Like Schlingensief, however, he did- not allow this threat to diminish his artistic achieve- ment. He was the unquestioned star of the 2009 Theatertreffen, the only director with two produc- tions selected, and he was named this year for the 6 Berlin Prize for artistic achievement, a prize first awarded in 1988 to George Tabori, and since, among others, to Peter Stein, Claus Peymann, and Christoph Marthaler. As was the case of most of these, the prize was jointly given to the director and the designer with whom he almost invariably works, in Gosch's case Johannes Schtz. Thanks to the contribution of Schtz, most Gosch productions are instantly recognizable by their visual style, just as are the settings of Anna Viebrock for Marthaler. In the opening years of this century, the Deutsches Theater, where Gosch was based, has become especially associated with a new minimalism, to which he and Michael Thalheimer were the primary contributors. Among its character- istics are very simple, unadorned geometrical set- tings, few props, straightforward, almost flat light- ing, and a strong presentational style of acting. Gosch's Seagull this year was thus stylistically extremely close to his award-winning Uncle Vanya a year ago, not only because he utilized almost all of the same leading actors, but also because the setting and staging was almost identical. A huge blank wall (black now, brown for Vanya) filled the proscenium arch, leaving only a modest forestage at the back of which a long, low platform ran across the stage at the base of the wall, providing a bench for actors to use when they were not in the current scene. The house remained dimly illuminated, and the major stage lighting was provided by a single huge flood- light mounted on the front of the balcony. The only other piece of scenery was a large, real rock, carried in by two workers, which, downstage center, pro- vides the acting area for Constantine's play. Obviously such an approach puts primary emphasis upon the actors and Gosch's company, familiar with each other and with his approach, pro- vide an ensemble of admirable depth and power. The German press had much praise for the realism and honesty of the characters. I found their work, in comparison with the rather underplayed Chekhov of America and England, often had a distinctly theatri- cal edge, but this seemed perfectly suited, for exam- ple, to Arkadina, played by Corinna Harfouch in a dazzling performance that confirms her reputation as one of Germany's outstanding actresses. The range and intensity of her emotions, and especially the rapid shifts from rage to tenderness in her deal- ings with her son, were quite breathtaking. Perhaps the clearest example of this was the scene in the third act where she changes his bandages, which was both as tender and as violent an interpretation of this key scene as I have ever witnessed. Jirka Kett as Constantine was rather overshadowed not only Chekhov's Die Mwe, directed by Jrgen Gosch. Photo: Matthias Horn. 7 by Harfouch, but by the other extremely powerful members of the ensemble, especially Peter Pagel as Dorn, Bernd Stempel as the estate manager, Mieke Droste as Masha, and most memorably Christian Grashof as Sorin, whose rapid transitions from rage to almost total physical collapse were both frighten- ing and farcically comic. The running time is long by contemporary German standards, almost three hours (I still remember the days when major productions were expected to run four or five hours), and Gosch made no compromise on that account, placing his single intermission after the third act. This of course emphasizes the time break in the play and places the entire development of the Trigorin/Nina relation- ship in the first part. Kathleen Morgeneyer has a winning, delicate quality as Nina, and seems indeed from another, perhaps more normal world than the theatrical Sorin/Arkadina house- hold. Still I found her, like Constantin, dramatically less interesting than mem- bers of that household. Alexander Khuon played Trigorin very effectively as an awkward adolescent, much younger than the worldly Arkadina. This is especially clear when he first begins to feel an attrac- tion for Nina. It is an unusual, and to my mind very engaging approach to this role. "No theatrical tricks, no illusions, only high concentration" were the sort of praises often heard in the German press. I would disagree, but not in concerning the power or concentration of the work, which often relied upon theatricalism of the purest sort, especially in the acting, for its effect. Nor were more directorial tricks omitted, most notably the striking final scene. Most of the company is gathered stage right around a game on the floor. Dorn pulls Trigorin aside and gives the final line, that Constantine has shot him- self. Suddenly the entire stage picture freezes and there is a long tableau as the house lights come to full strength, preserv- ing this moment of illusion and play, the artificial world in which the Sorin house- hold has existed. It is a moving and mem- orable moment, and pure theatre. The third Theatertreffen offering was an important international event, the first production created in Germany by one of Britain's leading directors, Katie Mitchell. For over a decade her imaginative produc- tions of classic and modern works have gained crit- ical acclaim at the Royal Court and Royal National theatres, and her career took a major new direction in 2006 with her staging of Virginia Woolf's Waves, which also toured nationally and internationally. Her co-creator of this production was Leo Warner, founder and artistic director of Fifty Nine Productions, a pioneer organization in Scotland developing the integration of video and digital tech- nology with live performances. With the National Theatre of Scotland they created Black Watch, which like The Waves enjoyed a major international success. Audiences in New York were fortunate to have had the opportunity to see both. Since 2006 Mitchell and Warner have con- tinued to work together, creating some of the most Virginia Woolf's The Waves, directed by Katie Mitchell. Photo: Courtesy of Fifty Nine Production. 8 striking experimental productions in the mainstream London theatre: Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life in 2007 and Some Trace of Her, based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot in 2008. Wunschkonzert (Request Concert) based on a 1973 play without words by Franz Xaver Kroetz, is the latest contribu- tion to this series. Audiences who have seen the widely tour- ing Waves would find themselves in very familiar territory with the new Mitchell/Warner production. There is again a large screen above the stage which displays the images we see being created and filmed in various parts of the stage below. The basic alter- nation throughout is between shots showing the sole actress, Julia Wieninger, and close-ups of her phys- ical surroundings and her hands in various activi- tiestyping, preparing a meal, embroidering, wash- ing dishes, washing themselves, and finally, laying out the sleeping pills with which she ends her life. Without exception all of these close-ups are created not by the actress but by a busy group of five stand- ins, whom we see creating these images in various stations around the stage. The basic device is identi- cal to that of The Waves, with a few important changes. First, there is only a single actress, so she is juxtaposed only with objects, not with other peo- ple. Second, there is at the rear of the stage a TV-set version of her apartment for scenes showing her moving about there (although the front wall can be raised and lowered, so that we sometimes see her both alive and on the monitor screen above and sometimes only on the monitor screen). Third, a life string quartet provides the classical selections to which she listens on a portable radio through most of the play. The action shows a lonely middle-aged woman coming home from work, going through the banal and repetitious routine of an average evening, and then killing herself with an overdose of pills. Part of the power of the original is its simplicity and directness, which is distinctly compromised not only by all of the production trickery, but also by Mitchell's decision to introduce a series of apparent flashbacks to a happier youth, involving such actions as dancing in the leaves, collecting seashells, and tentatively taking the hand of a young man. We also see these scenes being created down- stage on a neutral ground covering by members of the technical crew, but they rather disperse the focus of the main action. Similarly distracting are voice- over thoughts of the woman which, although not frequent, add little to the impact of Kroetz's idea and in fact rather weaken its simplicity. One could argue that The Waves provided a means for visualizing a complex and multilayered literary text, but that dynamic can hardly be said to operate for this conception of Wunschkonzert, where the straightforward original is replaced by an audi- ence focus on the technical devices and the work of the crew. The continuously repeated pattern remains essentially the same. We see in the open apartment upstage the actress performing some activity washing dishes, for example. The screen then moves to a close-up of this action, being created as we see, by an actress at a downstage station, dressed in black with only her arms in costume, providing the image of the close-up in a freestanding sink at her station. If water comes into the sink, presumably from a faucet, we see the actress upstage turning the faucet handle, but the water coming into the sink in the close-up is provided by another crew member pouring it from a pitcher into the field of vision. To add to the phenomenological complexity, all sounds are similarly visually generated, not only the live string quartet, but the clink of glasses, the rattle of dishes, the splashing of the water, and so on. Two technicians at a table left create all of these sound effects with a complex set of noise devices reminis- cent of those used in the early days of radio (coconut shells for horse hoofs, etc.). In order to precisely coordinate their sounds with the images in the close- ups, they must continuously and closely watch TV monitors at their various stations. The coordination is impressive, although after about ten or fifteen minutes the technique is clear and long before the eighty-minute production ends has become predictable and not extremely interesting. Critical reaction was divided. At a peri- od when the minimalism of directors like Thalheimer and Gosch is strongly favored, this more consciously complex construction seems to some a refreshing change. Others have noted that only a decade or two ago German directors like Castorf and Pollesch were using many of these same techniques, and almost invariably in a more com- plex and challenging manner. Can theatrical memo- ries be that short? For myself, I have also wondered why Mitchell's multimedia experiments have drawn so much praise from mainstream critics in London and New York, when the experimental work of groups like Big Art in New York or Complicit in London have for some time done similar work but in a much more sophisticated way. Apparently at the National Theatre, on Broadway, or among the jury 9 of the Theatertreffen, criticism operates in its own, rather closed world. When Christoph Marthaler began his ill- fated directorship of the Zurich theatre in 2000, one of his conditions for assuming that position was the building of a huge new cultural complex in an aban- doned industrial building, the Schiffbau. Since his departure the major theatre in the Schiffbau, having become something of the symbol of the financial extravagance that caused Marthaler's dismissal, has been rarely utilized. When, early in 2007, Jrgen Gosch was invited to direct a production in Zurich, he staged The God of Carnage by Yazima Reza in the old city theatre, an enormously successful pro- duction that was invited to the Theatertreffen. Invited to return for another guest direction in 2008, Gosch wanted to use the underemployed Schiffbau, and asked Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of Germany's leading contemporary dramatists, to cre- ate a piece that could be performed only in a very large open space like the Schiffbau. The result was Hier und Jetzt (Here and Now), a typical Schimmelpfennig piece combining the banalities of everyday life with occasional bursts of violence and of poetry. In this case what is seen is a wedding party, with the guests assembled along one side of a long banquet table facing the audience. Despite the basically realistic conversation and the unchanging setting, time slips about. The party begins in the spring and seems to go on through several seasons, and includes discussions of partial re-enactments of various scenes from other times, most notably the bride Katja's (Drte Lyssewski) affair with Martin (Charley Hbner), driving the groom, Georg (Wolfgang Michael) to bloody revenge. Gosch's designer Johannes Schtz convert- ed the interior of the vast main hall of the Schiffbau into a scenic environment, covering the entire floor with a thick layer of earth and building along one side a series of terraces, also covered with earth. The audience was provided with plastic cushions to sit on these terraces. Facing them is an elevated platform, placed in the center of the open space, with the fes- tival table placed on it. For the Berlin pro- duction a large open hall was found, part of the old railway complex around Gleisdreieck, near the city center, but now a largely deserted space. Here the Schtz set- ting was recreated, complete with earth and audience cushions, although the regular rumble of passing trains provided an urban touch not at all involved at the rather isolat- ed Schiffbau. Frankly, I considered the efforts that went into creating the space and the dis- comfort of sitting for well over two inter- missionless hours on a plastic cushion and an earthen terrace largely wasted. The cen- tral platform, where almost all of the action took place, could easily have been fitted onto a conventional stage, the vast amount of earth brought in was never seriously uti- lized, and the huge side spaces were in fact used only for three brief sequences, appar- ently added to the original text by the direc- tor. In each of these sequences two of the wedding guests, brothers played by Fabian Krger and Gottfried Breitfuss, carry out an apparently ongoing feud which is perhaps supposed to serve as a kind of parallel or 10 Roland Schimmelpfennig's Hier und Jetzt, directed by Jrgen Gosch. Photo: Matthias Horn parody to the Georg-Martin conflict. In the first and last of these they strip off their clothes and one car- ries the other nude up and down the earthen banks at the left edge of the seating area. In the second they carry on an extended and exhausting battle with medieval broadswords in the area to the right of the stage, ending covered in sweat and dirt, the only real use of the earthen floor in the production. Several reviewers evoked the tradition of Ekeltheater ("theatre of disgust"), with which Gosch is sometimes associated, largely on account of his much-praised 2006 Macbeth, which made extensive use of such Ekeltheater staples as male nudity, dirt, blood, and other body fluids. Hier und Jetzt almost seems to be making a minor and jocu- lar reference to that tradition, however, with the expendable brothers providing the nudity and smearing with mud, and the blood provided in two identical almost grand guignol sequences in which Georg drags Martin behind the table and apparently beats and stomps on him until Martin rises up, total- ly covered in blood. Georg then knocks him down again, seizes a folding chair and continues the beat- ing, then returns to his seat. Martin, now a mass of blood, arises, clearly somewhat stunned but appar- ently bearing no ill will. After both attacks he stag- gers behind Georg to upstage left, where he picks up an electric guitar and leads the company in a song or a dance. A series of stories, arguments, toasts, songs, and dances fills out the rest of the evening, with occasional striking theatrical, but not clearly relevant set pieces. In one a spring rain, provided by one of the actresses with a hose, temporarily dis- rupts the party. In another, when the script calls for snow to fall, most of the cast climbs up on the table, each carrying a colored laundry basket and creates their own snowfall by throwing fistfuls of white feathers into the air. Such sequences provide an amusing theatrical expansion of the author's rather straightforward, even banal text, but did not seem to me integrated into any convincing overall experi- ence. The company, which included a number of excellent actors who have worked before with Gosch, offered an amusing collection of off-beat and yet quite recognizable characters, and this was perhaps the most enjoyable part of the evening. Aside from those already mentioned, I must note Corinna Harfouch, a major talent rather wasted here but showing a surprising skill on the accordion, Johanna Schwertfeger as a world-weary teenager, the doting mother Karin Pfammater and the unflap- pable parents Georg Martin Bode and Christine Schorn. The generally acknowledged outstanding production of this year's festival was a dazzling stage adaptation from Munich of Kafka's The Trial, the work of Andreas Kriegenburg, whose work has Schimmelpfennig's Hier und Jetzt, directed by Jrgen Gosch. Photo: Matthias Horn. 11 been featured in five of the last ten festivals and whose 2005 Oresteia remains one of my own most treasured memories of those years. In addition to directing this production, Kriegenberg also created the design, an absolutely essential element in its effect. When the curtain rises, the immediate impression of the setting is that of a gigantic eye, filling the entire stage. What is most striking about this eye is the pupil, itself a circular stage, contain- ing a small bed, in which an actor is lying, several chairs, and two tables. At one a second actor is seat- ed, typing, and at the other a third actor is drinking a cup of coffee and speaking to the actor on the bed. Sheets of paper are scattered across the tables and floor. The scene is of Josef K. awakening one morn- ing and finding himself charged with some mysteri- ous crime. What is remarkable about this scene is that it is vertical to the actual stage floor, so that we seem to be looking down upon it. Moreover the cir- cle slowly turns and the three actors are able to maintain their positions on this vertical surface only by careful positioning, supporting themselves in dif- ferent angles on the pieces of furniture. Throughout the evening this pupil will remain at the center of the stage action, almost always turning and in a variety of positions from the vertical, where it begins, to various angles down to a flat, more conventional turntable stage in the mid- dle of the eye. Whatever its position, one or more actors are normally moving about on it, sliding, climbing, dancing, echoing its constant motion, in carefully coordinated and often highly physical demanding configurations. The eight performers, as impressive as gymnasts or dancers as they are as actors, four men and four women (Walter Hess, Sylvana Krappatsch, Lena Lauzemis, Oliver Mallison, Bernd Moss, Annette Paulmann, Katharina Schubert, Edmund Telgenkmper) are all identically costumed and made-up, each in a black suit and tie, with short haircut and clown white makeup with darkened eye- brows and eye shadow and thin mustaches, men and women alike. At one time or another each represents Joseph K. and sometimes they represent him as a group, moving in coordinated patterns and each repeating the same series of gestures or variations of them. Not only in their costumes, but even more in their expressions, gestures, and movements they continually evoke images of silent film comedy, and especially of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. From time to time actors will step out of the ensem- ble to play other characters from the novel, but nor- Franz Kafka's Der Prozess, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair. 12 mally only by adding an additional element to their basic costume, a priest's scarf or a cleaning woman's apron. Occasionally one of the women will put on a full dress, though without removing her white makeup mask and mustache, creating a strikingly grotesque effect. At either side of the narrow main stage is a door opening into a white wall suggesting a stone- like surface, and much of the action is played on this forestage or within the pupil, with the rest of the eye forming a sloping transitional area, much less used. The style throughout suggests a combination, as I have suggested, of silent film comedy with more than a touch of German expressionism and perhaps Meyerhold's biomechanics. The whole suggests a kind of grotesque dance theatre which provides a highly effective medium for Kafka's disturbing world. Among the many highly effective sequences is the rambling and confused discussion of the vari- ous forms of acquittal by the painter Titorelli, basi- cally a bravura monologue lasting twenty minutes or so, in which the painter wanders back and forth on the forestage while a six-member Josef K. chorus reacts to his speech on the constantly revolving iris- turntable in a fascinatingly varied series of chorus line configurations. This is in the second part of the evening, when the formerly brown pupil is now cold white, with six short black poles protruding up from its surface in a smaller circle. When Josef K. is visited by the prison chaplain, the turntable moves up to an almost vertical position, and around each of these poles curls a Josef K. double in a fetal position, like a small black larva, each little body slowly turning, like cars on a ferries wheel, as the turntable movesone of many stunning visual images in this production. When Josef K. is at last executed, this takes place with the turntable in its horizontal posi- tion, and his body cannot be seen when the other figures crouch over him. Then they depart and the turntable slowly tips back up to nearly its original vertical position with his splayed body at its center, his chest bloody and supporting himself in an almost upright position by placing his feet on two of the black poles, a contemporary crucifixion. The next offering of the Theatertreffen was Nicolas Stemann's adaptation of Schiller's The Robbers, from the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Stemann, like Kriegenberg, is a regular invitee to the Theatertreffen, this being his fourth production there since 2002. His reworking of the Schiller clas- sic had an interesting feature in common with The Der Prozess, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Arno Declair. 13 Trialits famous, almost legendary protagonist was incorporated by several actors, normally work- ing as a group. In this case, however, while the four young men who represented at one time or another each of the Moor brothers and briefly, in the open- ing scene, their tormented father, while in constant motion did not emphasize their physical configura- tions, but the spoken lines. These were sometimes spoken by one of the four, sometimes by several or all of them speaking as a chorus, and in various combinations, as when a line would be begun by one, then joined in sequence by each of the others until all four were speaking. Sometimes lines were repeated several times either in sequence or as leit- motifs, giving the overall impression of a kind of verbal music drama. There was actual music as well, a series of songs in a sentimental pop style sung by Karl Moor's deserted love, Amelia, Maren Eggert, and several punk rock numbers delivered by a small guitar and percussion band, especially to underline the depredations of the robbers. Aside from Amelia and the four young men (Philipp Hochmaier, Alexander Simon, Felix Knopp, Daniel Hoevels) and Amelia, the cast included Christoph Bantzer as the father and Peter Maertens and Katharina Matz as the faithful old household servants. Aside from the sons, these all were costumed (by Esther Bialas) in elegant upper- class dress of Schiller's era, while the sons wore a variety of costumes. When playing the evil son, Franz, all wore contemporary slacks and pullover sweaters. For Charles they removed the sweaters until the second part when Charles comes home dis- guised as a visiting Count, when they all put on ele- gant, golden brocaded frock coats, lace and wigs, to join the visual world of the other characters. Finally, as members of the robber band, especially when committing or planning their acts of violence, they wear the dark hoods with eye and mouth openings associated with contemporary terrorists. The setting, by Stefan Meyer, was in essence an empty stage, with the armchair of Old Friedrich Schiller's Die Ruber, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair. 14 Moor in the center as normally the old property. Much use however was made of video and film pro- jections, sometimes on a downstage curtain, but more often on the blank rear wall, which could also open at critical moments to reveal banks of flood- lights pointed directly at the audience. The videos (by Claudia Lehmann) were at first quite simple titles, portraits, a picture of what might have been the Moor residence, but as the evening progressed they became more fluid and more complex impressionistic compositions of pine trees and snow to represent the Bohemian forests and disturbing collages of weapons and flowing blood to accompa- ny the false report of Karl's death in battle. The cli- mactic video sequence occupied much of the second act, beginning with Karl's return to his home in dis- guise and ending with Franz' suicide in the burning home. For this sequence an entire small village, like those constructed for model railroads, is placed on a table stage left, illuminated by a standard desk lamp. When Karl returns to his home town in dis- guise and wanders through its streets, recalling his youth there, video assistant Hanna Linn Wiegel moves a tiny camera through this setting, so that we seem to see Karl's view of the buildings, streets and trees projected onto the larger rear screen. We are even taken into the Moor home, where Karl finds the empty chair and assumes his father dead. Later, when Franz' treachery is revealed and the mob is setting fire to the city and to the Moor home, an actual fire is set in the model village, so we see it burning on the projection, finally reduced to burnt out shells which resemble those of actual buildings. For the final confrontation of the brothers, the four actors indicate by changes in costume the rapidly changing shifts of power between the two, wearing their Franz sweaters when he dominates the scene and removing them as Karl gains the upper hand. Finally only one of the four is left to play the increasingly isolated Franz. Surrounded by the father he has wronged, the moralizing servants, and his multiplied brother, with the mob raging outside, he is driven to increasing desperation until, accord- ing to Schiller, he strangles himself with the golden cord from his hat. This stage direction, like many previous ones, is spoken by the actors playing the brothers, but in this production, the defiant Karl refuses to kill himself. There is a frantic chase on and off stage and a violent struggle at the end of which the other three brother figures forcibly hang him from a rope dropped upstage. Karl, agonizing over all the suffering he has witnessed and caused, departs in agony, leaving Amelia to sing a quiet final Die Ruber, directed by Nicolas Stemann. Photo: Arno Declair. 15 song of hopeless love for him. The Vienna Burgtheater usually contributes at least one production to the Theatertreffen, and this year's offering was a particularly Viennese one, Der Weibsteufel (The Woman Devil) by Karl Schnherr. Schnherr is hardly a familiar name in the Anglo- Saxon theatre, but he is a central figure in the mod- ern Austrian drama, with certain similarities to both Schnitzler and Strindberg. Indeed the production program remarks that Schnherr "has long been considered, after Schnitzler, the most important and successful Austrian dramatist." The 1914 Weibsteufel is one of his best-known plays and a good example of his perspective and his style. With only three characters, two men and a woman, it explores their developing web of emotional rela- tionships, ending in a death struggle over the women between the men. So far this could be the basic situation of countless European tragedies, but in direct contradiction to, for example, Strindberg, the woman is seen to have the more sophisticated and mature perspective, the men all too ready to resort to confrontation and violence. The role of the woman is thus at the center of the play, and Birgit Minichmayr, one of Austria's most beloved actresses, makes this role a triumph of physical dexterity (on a difficult and demanding set- ting) and emotional range and depth. Her return to Vienna after several years of working abroad, most- ly in Berlin, added to the significance of the pro- duction at the Burg. It was also a homecoming for director Martin Kuej and designer Martin Zehetgruber, who, like Minichmayr, have been recently working in Berlin. Kuej began his direct- ing career in Graz with another Schnherr play and has been working with Zehetgruber regularly since 1990. Although Minichmayr dominated the evening, she was ably supported by two familiar fig- ures on the Vienna stage, Werner Wlberg, who plays her husband, and Nicholas Ofczarek, the rival, a young border patrol officer. The husband and wife are conducting a profiting smuggling business, and doing so well that they are planning to purchase a comfortable Tyrolean home, when their trade is threatened by the arrival of the young officer. The husband suggests the wife distract the officer so that the business can continue, a ploy that soon grows Karl Schnherr's Der Weibsteufel, directed by Martin Kuej. Photo: Georg Soulek. 16 out of control. At the conclusion howev- er, with the rather foolish husband dis- patched by his rival, the young wife goes off to enjoy the new home on her own. Zehetgruber's provides a simple and powerful visual statement. It is com- posed of a mass of massive, cut down tree trunks, no branches visible, like giant rough tubes, laying in a heap across the stage, some flat, others rather steeply slanted, and each one large enough for the actors to walk or sit upon. Although its sometimes steep inclines and gaps require a certain acrobatic skill on the part of the actors, its stark and simple configuration makes a fitting cadre for the emotional confrontations of Schnherr's drama. The one-man autobiographical reading has now become a distinct part of the international theatre scene. First came Spalding Grey in the United States, then Philippe Cambert in France and now Joachim Meyerhoff in Austria and Germany. Recently the Vienna Burgtheater began presenting small, usu- ally one-actor pieces in the north vestibule of this huge building, somewhat similar to the platform performances in the lobby of the National Theatre in London. Here Ignaz Kirchner read pas- sages from van Gogh's letters, Philipp Hochmair presented a monologue based on Kafka's The Trial, and various songs and instrumental pieces were offered. Then in the fall of 2007 Joachim Meyerhoff presented something new to the Burg, a monologue autobiographical reading, Alle Toten fliegen hoch (All the Dead Fly High). This was such a huge success that Meyerhoff continued to perform it in Vienna and elsewhere and added in January and April of 2008, two extensions of the work, moving further into his life. When all three parts are done together, as they were at the Theatertreffen, the per- formance now lasts five hours. Twenty years ago five-hour productions were quite common in the German theatre, but today even Ibsen and Chekhov often clock in at around two hours without an intermission, and Meyerhoff's marathon requires a real commitment. I have much admired him in a number of productions, as Benedict in the 2006 production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jan Bosse, as Ariel in Barbara Frey's Tempest in Vienna in 2007, and in the title role in Bosse's 2007 Hamlet, for which Theater heute named him "actor of the year." Certainly he brings an engaging and varied interpretation to this new project, but I would much rather have seen him again in an actual play. I felt much like one of the Berlin reviewers, who complained about the selec- tion of this work, noting that the Theatertreffen is supposed to present the "ten best stagings" of the previous year, but Alle Toten is not in fact a staging, "but rather a reading." Indeed, Meyerhoff provides little of the pantomime that marks the French work of Caubere. Much more like Grey he basically remains in a chair, reading from his manuscript, with piles of let- ters on it, from which he also occasionally reads. 17 Alle Toten fliegen hoch, directed by Joachim Meyerhoff. Photo: Courtesy of Berlin Theatertreffen. There is a second chair on the stage, but it is basi- cally bare. A screen above the stage to our left shows relevant pictures, mostly of the people Meyerhoff mentions, but this is hardly a slide pres- entationnormally the slides only change every fif- teen minutes or so. For an American, by far the most interest- ing of the three sections ("America," "At Home with the Psychiatrist," and "My Grandmother's Legs") is the first, telling of Meyerhoff's high school years with a host family in Laramie, Wyominghis sports career there, his first romances, his trips into the mountains, and his encounter with a German in prison there who became a life-long friend (At the end of the first section, Meyerhoff actually seats him, a non-speaking but striking presence, in the second chair). Meyerhoff was in Laramie in the late 1980s, long before the hate crime there brought it to national attention, and so of course there is no refer- ence to that, but I was nevertheless struck by the coincidence that this small American town, far from any major theatre center, has now become, for quite different reasons, a familiar reference to theatre audiences in both America and Germany. The main "dead" person in the first section is Meyerhoff's brother, killed in an automobile acci- dent, whose death causes his return to Germany and his first meditations on mortality in the evening. Many others follow, most notably members of his family. It is an often amusing and often touching chronicle of a fascinating and richly considered life, with, for an American viewer, an amusing and pen- etrating view of heartland American culture by an outsider. It remained, however, for me at least, dis- tinctly less satisfying on the whole than most of the actual theatre productions in the festival. The festival's final offering was Marat. Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden? (Marat, What's Become of Our Revolution?), a major rein- terpretation of Peter Weiss's drama by Volker Lsch for the Hamburg Schauspielhaus. The general shape and most of the key arguments between Marat (Achim Buch) and de Sade (Marion Breckwoldt) are retained, but this is on the whole a very free adaptation, with the emphasis upon the ongoing class struggle in contemporary times. Marat, Sade, Coulmier (Hanns Krumpholz), and Jacques Roux (Tristan Seith) make their first appearance in a series of theatrical poses and in eighteenth century dress, but from then onward they and their world are solidly contemporary. Indeed, in one of the most theatrically effective running jokes of the produc- 18 Peter Weiss's Marat. Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden?, directed by Volker Lsch. Photo: A.T. Schaefer. tion, Marat appears, as the evening goes on, in a variety of revolutionary guises, first as a bronzed statue of Lenin, as a 1960s hippie to the music of "Age of Aquarius," as Che Guevera, always promis- ing to the ever exploited chorus imminent salvation, which of course never comes. What the chorus gets instead is a series of social palliatives and distract- ing handouts by the ever-interrupting Coulmier. It is a wonderful and highly effective extension of the "Fifteen Glorious Years" sequence. The two leading figures are excellent, Marat in his constantly changing guises, and the overweight, tousled, beer-swigging, flatulent de Sade, striking reminiscent physically of Fellini's Saraghina in 8 . The production's most radical innovation, and the center of all critical commentary upon it, however, was the twenty-eight-member chorus. Choral work is undergoing a major revival in German theatres at the moment, central in differ- ent ways to three of the most highly praised works in the Theatertreffen (The Trial, The Robbers, and Marat/Sade) as well as in the recent Oresteia of Thalheimer's and Ren Pollesch's tongue-in-cheek A Chorus Makes Big Mistakes. Marat/Sade not only contributes significantly to that trend, but also to an interest in contemporary German experimental the- atre (most notably by the group Rimini Protokoll) is utilizing non-actors on the stage. The entire twenty-eight-member chorus is made up of such non-actors, drawn in fact from street people and others among the poorest inhabi- tants of Hamburg. During the major part of the pro- duction they primarily inhabit a huge padded cell, with rubber walls and floor at the rear of the stage, bearing a huge ALDI logo (ALDI is the German equivalent of Wal-Mart, with an even worse reputa- tion for exploiting the poorer elements of the popu- lation). Here they occasionally erupt in protest, to be beaten down or pacified by the shoddy goods show- ered on them by Coulmier and his assistants. Their major moments, however come in the most signifi- cant additions to the play, a major choric prologue and epilogue. The production opens with a single mem- Was ist aus unserer Revolution geworden?, directed by Volker Lsch. Photo: A.T. Schaefer. 19 20 ber of the chorus stepping downstage before the cur- tain to address the audience. He is joined by anoth- er, then another, each one continuing the spoken line which thus becomes more and more a choric deliv- ery. For perhaps fifteen minutes different combina- tions of chorus members, from a single voice to a full chorus, carry out an extended speech discussing the living conditions experienced by themselves and others like them throughout Germanylack of work, lack of training for work, neglect of the poor, the sick, the old, the pressures of rising prices and shrinking services, the indifference of the state, the official charities, and above all the wealthy, whose excess possessions could so easily eliminate much of this suffering. It is a powerful indictment, and powerfully delivered, since the director and his choric assistant Anselm Lenz, have brought these inexperienced performers to a remarkable degree of accomplishment in the delivery of these passages, as Erich Hausmann has provided them with extremely effective physical training. Powerful as the opening sequence is, it is quite overshadowed by the epilogue. After the lead- ing actors took their conventional bows and left, the stage remained empty as the applause continued. Finally the chorus members appeared, lining up across the stage, but not acknowledging the applause. They took sheets of paper from their pock- ets, unfolded them, and began to read over the applause, which of course died out. They began by announcing that as representatives of the poorest inhabitants of Hamburg, they would like to address their counterparts, the twenty-eight most wealthy inhabitants of the city. They then begin, like a roll call, the names and the assets, starting with Frank Leonhart, 450 million euros, and Thomas Ganske, 550 million euros. The figures grow higher as the list continues, and with each name the home address in Hamburg is given, with pauses for the audience to take notes. The effect is stunning and cumulative, added to by the clear anger and frustration of the readers themselves. A clearer and more devastating proof of the continuing failure of Marat's revolution would be difficult to imagine. This, I thought, is truly effective agit-prop theatre for the twenty-first century, and I could not help thinking of the ending of the agit-prop classic Waiting for Lefty, with its call for political action. Not surprisingly, some of the Hamburg financiers whose names, worth, and addresses were thus pre- sented, were concerned that someone might in fact heed what could clearly be considered a Lefty-like call for social action, and attempted to have this sec- tion of the play censored. Their protests were not effective, however, since all these facts and figures had been taken from a recently published and wide- ly circulated financial journal in Germany and so were a matter of public record, long a perfectly acceptable source for the familiar German docudra- ma. In its mixing of real life material and highly the- atricalized elements, its powerful re-imagining of the chorus, and its return to a challenging political theatre after a decade or more tending to favor more formal experimentation, Lsch's Marat/Sade seemed to suggest some important shifts in the cur- rent German stage, and certainly provided a power- ful and memorable ending to the 2009 Theatertreffen. The statistics are in. The sixty-third Avignon Festival (July 7 to 29) was an overwhelm- ing success. Forty-two shows, three quarters of them premieres, and 125,000 tickets sold, which represents ninety-four percent of total capacity of 133,000 seats. Avignon is clearly the place to be in July for fans of new theatre and performance work from around the world. It seemed to me that this year's shows provided an even wider selection of artists from different geographic regions and artistic tendencies than in the past. A wealth of languages from Arabic to Polish, Spanish and Italian, along with French, could be heard on the festival's stages, and a number of productions shared a common con- cern with a world in turmoil, with the brutality of war, and the shattering experience of exile. Civil war provided the background for several important pieces (Lebanon's civil war as well as the civil wars in the Republic of Congo). It sometimes felt as if Lebanese-born Wajdi Mouawad, playwright, theatre director, writer, and actor, who is currently artistic director of Canada's National Arts Center's French Theater in Ottawa, and this year's Associate artistic director, had invited us to join him on a journey to his native Lebanon to experience first-hand an immigrant's return home to a war-torn country, stop- ping off on the way to visit Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, Canadians Denis Marleau and Dave St Pierre, Dieudonne Ningouna from the Congo, Flemish artists Jan Lauwers and Jan Fabre, Germany's Christoph Marthaler, and Italian Pippo Delbono. If the journey sounds somewhat bleak and rather harrowing at times, the programming was clearly chosen as a reflection of today's shattered world, and it was a trip worth taking when the guides are major forces in today's theatre. Journeys, both real and imagined, seemed to be the overriding theme of this year's festival. Interestingly, a small volume entitled Voyage pour le Festival d'Avignon 2009, written by Wajdi Mouawad and festival co-directors Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, (published by P.O.L., and given out free to anyone who wanted a copy), is about the journey the three festival direc- tors embarked on together in 2007 in preparation for the sixty-third festival. Composed of an exchange of Avignon 2009: A Festival of Absences Phillippa Wehle 21 Avignon Court. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon. letters, conversations, recollections of their travels, and meetings in Avignon, Montreal, and Beirut, Voyage provides interesting insights into Mouawad's hopes and fears for the survival of the- atre in today's world. In Voyage Mouawad argues for a theatre for our time that is text-based rather than perform- ance art-based. Putting it simply, he believes that "if there is no story, there is no theatre." (Mouawad quoted in the Avignon program) Although he has written, produced, and performed intimate pieces, (Seuls, for example, seen at the 2008 Avignon festi- val), Mouawad is noted for the epic scope of most of his theatre pieces, a theatre that deals with themes of war, exile, and loss, themes that are dear to Mouawad whose family was forced to leave their native Lebanon during the Civil War when Wajdi was only eight years old. This year Avignon audiences had a rare opportunity to experience three of Mouawad's epic plays presented in a marathon of consecutive per- formances in the Honor Court of the Pope's Palace. From eight in the evening to seven in the morning, with two breaks, courageous festival goers eagerly sat through a retrospective of his trilogy, Littoral (1997), Incendies (2003), and Fort (2006). Later in the festival, audiences could attend the premiere of his latest play, Ciels, the final piece in his tetralogy entitled Le Sang des promesses. All four plays were directed by Mouawad and performed by the very talented members of his company. Mouawad is a gifted story teller. In Littoral and Incendies (I was too jet lagged to stay for Forts), he spins fascinating tales of arduous jour- neys taken by the first-generation immigrant chil- dren who set off to discover their origins in an unnamed country which is most likely Mouawad's native Lebanon. The stage is mostly bare when Littoral (Tidelines) opens. There are a few buckets scattered here and there. A wall made of what looked like large, black garbage bags provides the backdrop against which a group of people, wearing long overcoats, are lined up with their backs turned to us. They raise their arms up against the wall and begin to shake, forming a bas-relief of trembling figures. Against this backdrop, Wilfred, a young man from Montreal, the key figure in this tale of self discovery, seems in a hurry to tell us of what has happened to him. His Quebecois French is a bit hard to follow at first but he quickly draws us in with the immediacy of his dilemma and the strength of his delivery. He has just learned that his father died three days ago, a father he never knew. The news which came at an inconvenient timehe was mak- Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral. Photo: Pascal Gely. 22 ing furious love to a woman when the phone rang sets him off on a pilgrimage to give his father a proper burial in the father's homeland. Wilfred is an appealing figure. We sense his pain and confusion as he briefly stands alone, looking quite lost. The performers whose backs were turned to us, turn and rush over to him. They are now a film crew, eager to capture Wilfred's brief moment of solitude. By the time they reach him, however, they have already turned into his family, dressed in fur coats and hats, and gathered in his apartment. They barely have time to mutter a few words of sympathy when they are transported to a funeral parlor. Such rapid scene and character changes are frequent throughout the play. Shifts in time and space sometimes occur so fast that we almost miss them. In the funeral parlor, Wilfred's uncle insists that he learn the truth about his father, a bastard according to his uncle, who was the cause of Wilfred's mother's death. He urged Wilfred's mother to bear a child even though she was too fragile and died in childbirth as a result. Abandoned by his family, Wilfred conjures a Medieval Knight to help him in his distress. Dressed appropriately in chainmail and carrying a sword, the Knight promises to serve Wilfred faith- fully in his quest to give his father a proper burial. Together they set off on their journey through an opening in the back wall of the set, and presto they find themselves in the father's homeland, a country devastated by war. There they meet a group of young people, survivors of this unnamed war, who tell Wilfred of the atrocities they have witnessed and the family members they have lost. Simone wants to know why her father was shot and her mother raped. Ame confesses to having killed his own father along with many other people. Sabbe can't stop laughing hysterically when he tells the tale of holding his father's decapitated head with which his assassins had played ball, and another watched his father die in an explosion. "Wilfred has returned," Simone shouts. "Wilfred is here." Wilfred, she seems to say, has become one of us. He, too, must bear witness to the horrors of war. Summoned by Wilfred's imagi- nation and desire, his father appears. His body is rotting and it must be buried soon but the cemeter- ies are all full. The country is one massive grave- yard and there is no place anywhere to bury him. They decide to make their way to the sea where per- haps they will find a spot. Simone leads the way as they all set off, Wilfred's father on Wilfred's back, to find a proper burial ground. Josephine, another sur- vivor, appears dragging large, heavy sacks filled with telephone books. She's reciting the names of all of the war dead, names that fill the books. She is Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral. Photo: Thibaut Baron. 23 anxious that the dead be remembered. In the final scene, the father's body is wrapped and weighted down with the sacks of phone books. He has agreed to carry the names of all the victims of war with him into the sea, thus pre- serving their memory forever. He is given a grand send off as his body is lowered into the sea. Before dying, however, he urges the survivors not to give up but to go on living. Littoral is a rich canvas of memorable images in which the dead and the living share a space spattered with the colors of death, blood reds, blacks, whites, and grays. A similar tale is told in Incendies (Scorched), the second play of Mouawad's trilogy, similar in that it also concerns the children of immi- grants who must also travel to their parents' home- land in order to learn the truth about their origins. Twins Jeanne and Simon learn through a lawyer that their mother Nawal Marwan has died and left a will that states that they must bury her in her native land with her face turned towards the ground. They also have to deliver two letters, one to a father they thought was dead and the other to a brother they never knew existed. The focus in Incendies is on Nawal, the mother who never spoke a word during the last five years of her life, a silence that left her children angry and confused. Against a backdrop of a metallic curtain with its metal strips moving and shimmering in the light, the play proceeds in a series of arresting tableaux recapturing the events of this extraordinary woman's life, filled with violence and death. Hermile Lebel, the lawyer who reads them the will, is a bit of a bumbling figure. He prefers to watch birds flying or water his lawn to dealing with Nawal's requests. His malapropisms and idiosyn- crasies add a note of humor and levity to an other- wise horrendous tale that is about to unfold. The twins react differently to the news. Simon, an ama- teur boxer, curses his mother while Jeanne, a math- ematician, is equally angry but feels the need to learn about her mother's past. She is the one who decides to travel to her mother's native country while Simon stays home to continue his boxing. Her journey takes the form of a series of striking tableaux, the first of her mother, a mere child of fourteen, about to give birth. Surrounded by the women in her family, all dressed in black and voic- ing their condemnation of her, she gives birth on top of a ladder, as the women bang loudly on cans as if to ward off evil. The baby is a boy and is immedi- ately thrown into a bucket. Only later do we learn of what became of Nawal's first born son. Only her grandmother understands that Nawal must learn to read and write and find her way on her own. Nawal at fourteen, thirty-six, and sixty is played by three different actresses, while the rest of the cast play multiple roles, in this tale that reinvents Mouawad's Incindies. Photo: Yves Renaud. 24 the Oedipus myth as told by Sophocles. We follow her trajectory through fifty years of rape, prison, and torture as she searches for the son that was taken from her at birth. It is a many layered narrative in which Nawal becomes a revolutionary and is interned in prison for ten years in solitary confine- ment. She befriends Sawada, "the woman who sings," and teaches her to read and write. Nihad, a key figure in this tale, is a torturer, murderer, and rapist who shoots every moving thing around him, except if they are women who look like Elizabeth Taylor. He turns out to be not only Nawal's son but the twins' brother. They must face the fact that they are the children of rape. As in Littoral, actions overlap and there are flash backs and flash forwards. Past and present occur simultaneously. One minute, Jeanne is asking a weaver who is busy folding cloth if he knows the "woman who sings," her mother. The next, the weaver turns toward Nawal and hands her two pieces of red cloth that he has folded into bundles saying, "I've come to give you back your children." Meanwhile one of the actresses playing one of the other Nawals is seen slowly walking behind all three of them. Such layered scenes are frequent in Incendies as well as in Littoral. They effectively capture the memories, real and imagined, of Mouawad's characters. Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh, Lebanese performance artists who live in Beirut, are creators of a semi-documentary theatre that also deals with Lebanon's Civil War. Their Photo-Romance, one of the most sought after tickets of this year's festival, is as intimate a piece as Mouawads are epic in scope. Their show opens with Mroue interviewing Saneh about her film project, which Mroue claims is a remake of Ettore Scola's 1977 film, Una giomata particolare starring Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. The pair conduct the interview on comfortable arm chairs stage left. We can make out a musician and his instruments seated towards the back of the stage and a large screen hanging down in front. Mroue asks Saneh how her film is different from Scola's. She insists that the show is not an adaptation or a recreation of Ettore Scola's film even though the basic story of a lonely housewife's brief liaison with a journalist in pre-war Italy is similar. They have kept the general structure, she says, but they have changed the chronology, the historical and political content, and just about everything else. They don't want to compete with the original film, says Saneh, "and in any case what is an original film," she asks. Her goal is to speak of the situation in Lebanon and the role artists, and particularly Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh's Photo Romance. Courtesy of Festival Avignon. 25 women, can play in the contemporary economic and social climate. The characters in her film are a divorced Lebanese woman who lives with her brother and his family and a journalist who lives in an apartment across the roof from them. The scene is Beirut, 2006, shortly after the Israeli attack on Lebanon, and all of citizens of Beirut have been asked to take part in two large-scale demonstrations on one side or the other. We watch the demonstra- tions on the large overhead screen. Saneh walks over to the screen to introduce her film. "An apartment in Beirut," she reads from the script. "A family," she announces, and a child's drawing of a family appears on the screen. She iden- tifies each member as the cartoon-like figures light up. They have all gone off to the demonstration. A shot of a table setting with leftovers from the meal the family ate before leaving follows, and then the camera zooms in on a woman in the kitchen, clean- ing up after the meal. The doorbell rings. It is a neighbor, a man she does not know. He is a left- wing journalist. She is a traditional Lebanese house- wife who is treated like a servant in her brother's home. She has not gone to the demonstration because she has too much work to do at home. He is not there either because he has lost his job and is having difficulty adapting to his new circumstances. The slow dance of approach and retreat of this unlikely couple played by Saneh and Mroue, is fas- cinating to watch. One scene is particularly memo- rable, the scene of their meeting on the roof top among the white sheets hung out to dry. Their cho- reography in and around the sheets is stunning. He pursues her. She tries to get away. They kiss. She slaps him and runs off. He chases her down the spi- ral staircase endlessly turning the corners, and never catching up with her. Later, she goes to his place to apologize. They confide in each other about their current lives. He has become the enemy because of his left-wing views. She tells him that her husband beat her and refuses to let her see her children, and now she is forced to live with her tyrant of a broth- er and his family. We watch him pack his bags and leaves his apartment as the camera returns to the woman back in her kitchen performing her domes- tic duties. The final clip is of the man leaving with another man, forced to get into a car, and most like- ly, being taken to jail. Mroue and Saleh's provocative work was also presented in other festival venues. Mroue's A la recherch d'un employe disparu, (Looking for a Missing Employe), was part of Le Vingt cinquieme heure, a program of the work by emerging artists at midnight, and Lina Saneh's Appendice was per- formed at the Rond-Point de la Barthelasse. A la recherch d'un employe disparu, an "investigative performance," is based on a newspaper item about a missing employee that appeared in 1995. It caught Mroue's attention to such a degree that he proceed- ed to collect newspaper clippings, articles, and other documents which he later made into this show that he dedicated to the some 17,000 people who disap- peared during the Civil War and have never been heard of since. Lebanon and its 2006 civil war also inspired renown Flamenco dancer Israel Galvan's Et final de Este estado de cosas, redux, an extraordi- nary performance given in the Carriere Boulbon, the magnificent quarry outside of Avignon. Galvan's point of departure for his new piece was a letter he received from Yalda Younes, a Lebanese dancer who had taken flamenco classes with Galvan in Seville. Younes writes him of her fear and suffering during the war and encloses a DVD of her dancing a solo inspired by the war and the Israeli bombing of the city, accompanied by music composed of the sounds of war. Et final de Este, redux begins with the DVD of Younes dancing her solo, dancing the war as Galvan describes it. Twelve musicians and singers, hooded and wearing dark robes, move cer- emoniously to the stage. When the DVD is over, Galvan appears out of the dark and stands in a box filled with sand. When he takes away the sides of the box, he begins to dance in the small square of sand, performing his special brand of flamenco, with its unexpected bursts, its unusual twists, strange curves, and unanticipated pauses. This is far from traditional Flamenco. Galvan actually rein- vents Flamenco, drawing from all styles of dance, from classical to Japanese Butoh, and he creates a series of fascinating portraits. One minute he is a mysterious masked man; another he becomes a hooded female figure, and in a final amazing "num- ber," his dance partner is a wooden coffin. Twisting and turning around the coffin and even managing to make his extraordinary moves inside of the coffin. "How can flamenco express the violence, destruc- tion and collapse of lives," Galvan asks and answers his own question with an astonishing evening of a remarkable performance. Algerian choreographer-dancer Nacera Belaza is equally mesmerizing. Her latest choreog- raphy Le Cri (The Scream), a duet she dances with her sister Dalila, is composed of simple gestures and 26 minimal movement. Performed in the Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, on a bare platform with minimal lighting, the two sisters begin with the slightest of movement. Dressed in purple sweat suits, they seem not to move at all. Only their arms sway gently back and forth to a sound track of intoned psalms by Larbi Bestam, the voices of Maria Callas and Amy Winehouse, and traditional instrumental music. Le Cri ends with a film of the sisters dancing the same restrained movements with other women. Their piece lasts only fifty minutes, fifty minutes that are hypnotic as well as beautiful. Jan Fabre's explosive dance-theatre piece, Orgie de la tolrance could not have been more the opposite of Nacera's quiet, meditative dance. In Orgie, as it was called by festivalgoers, Fabre and the superb dancers of his Antwerp-based Troubleyn company lash out at a society that will tolerate any and all behavior, a society that accepts outrageous behavior as normal. It is as unrestrained as Le Cri is austere and reserved. Orgie opens with a wild dance number that is outrageous and very funny. The per- formers, two men and two women, seem to be warming up for a competition. They are stretching, doing breathing exercises, and jumping up and down. It seems a bit odd that the women are wear- ing men's briefs and that their trainers are dressed in para-military outfits and carrying rifles. A bell rings and off they go, masturbating fast and furiously, in a race to see who can achieve the most orgasms in the shortest amount of time. Their trainers scream at them. "You'll rest when you're dead," one of them shouts. It is an undeniably powerful opener and cer- tainly underscores the absurdity of our quest for endless moments of self-gratification. "Fake sex," Fabre said in a press conference, "is sold every- where and it is accepted by a society in which everything is for sale." In contrast to the frenetic pace of the open- ing number, the next scene takes place in an exclu- sive gentleman's club, furnished with luxurious leather Chesterfield sofas. While the men smoke cigars and read their newspapers, waitresses come and go among them, casually stopping every now and again to service the men as if this were the most normal activity in the world. Meanwhile the men Le Cri, choreographed by Nacera Belaza. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon. 27 talk about the latest additions and changes they've made to their personal art collections. "I've moved the three Africans into the living room and the two Americans into the dining room," says one. Another admits that he can't decide whether or not his Arabs need direct or indirect lighting. In fact they are not talking about their artwork. They are hunters brag- ging about their trophies. The conversation becomes truly offensive when one of the men announces that he is placing his Jewish trophies across from the Palestinian ones. Not all scenes are as sexually explicit or as offensive as these. In a lighter vein, the dancers take an aerobics class in which the exercis- es consist of making love to their money. They prac- tice how to stretch their Euros, breathe in and breathe out with them, how to connect their centers to them, and mostly how to get their money to trust them. There is also a Christ-like figure, naked but for a loin cloth, who wanders about juggling a very heavy cross. He is "discovered" by a fashion maga- zine crew who make him into a sexy Super Star, sunglasses and all. One of the most unforgettable scenes in Orgie features four pregnant women sit- ting precariously on the rims of their grocery carts. They spread their legs wide and go into labor. They scream and yell until at last they give birth, not to babies, but to ketchup bottles, bags of lettuce and celery, garlic, soda cans, lollipops, potato chips, and much more. Accumulating as many consumer goods as possible seems to be all that matters to them. Shopping carts are also prevalent in a wonderful dance number, performed to "The Blue Danube" waltz, with the dancers swaying slowly back and forth and banging their carts up and down. The show ends with the dancers joyfully shouting a long list of "Fuck yous" at the audience, including "fuck you Jan Fabre." We can cringe as much as we like at these ethnic slurs and the masturbatory practices of these eager consumers, but it is hard not to agree with Fabre who makes it so abundantly clear that our society is excessively permissive. Nothing is taboo. Nothing shocks. Nothing is sacred. Pippo Delbono returned to Avignon with his latest piece, La Menzogna (The Lie), inspired by the tragic death of seven workers who died on December 6, 2007 in a fire at the ThyssenKrupp fac- tory in Turin. ThyssenKrupp, a German conglomer- ate of steel producers, misled the investigators who found that the fire extinguishers did not work and that safety measures were at a minimum. Pippo's fury at this exploitation of the workers is as palpa- Orgie de la tolrance, choreographed by Jan Fabre. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon. 28 ble as Fabre's but in an entirely different vein. It is an unsettling piece all in blacks, grays, and whites, a dark macabre dance. A set composed of two wood- en scaffold-like structures with platforms on differ- ent levels and stairs leading up to them, looks a lit- tle wobbly, perhaps to remind us of the fragility of the structure in which the workers burned to death. Underneath these is the entrance to the factory. As the show begins, Pippo walks across the stage in front of the audience, goes up the stairs and informs us that his show concerns the fire at the factory that killed seven workers. Lights go up on a row of shiny lockers, stage left. A man opens one of the lockers, carefully puts his shoes and jacket inside, takes his pants off, puts on his worker's overalls and shoes and walks under the scaffolding into the factory. Several more workers arrive and perform the same ritual. Another one circles around the lockers on his bicycle; a woman who is already wearing her over- alls, walks behind the lockers. They both go into the factory as well. One of the workers is wearing a black suit and carrying a bouquet of flowers. He lies down in a coffin stage front, places the bouquet on his heart, and remains there, a symbolic presence to remind us of the workers who died in the fire. Strange tableaux unfold. Women with cat masks, performers wearing horses heads, Gianluca, a familiar Delbono figure who is afflicted with down syndrome, sits naked on the side of the stage meowing like a lost cat, a man with a cone head, and a woman reciting Romeo and Juliette on the top of a scaffold, all join with Pippo to mourn the lost workers. Films are shown. A short ThyssenKrupp publicity film, boasting of how the steel producers make sure that the air from their factories is clean, competes with Father Alex Zanotelli's long speech about the unfair division of wealth in today's democracies. As in previous shows, Pippo remains a forceful presence throughout the hour and a half of the performance, pacing back and forth, making us aware of his indignation at the lies told not only by the ThyssenKrupp steel producers but also the lies our politicians tell us, the hypocrisy and camouflage that surrounds us, and the lies we all tell ourselves. He expresses his anger in screams, howling, and uncontrollable laughter. He kicks a metal barrier in disgust and continually takes pictures of the audi- ence with his cell phone camera, blinding us with the flash device, as if to include us in his outrage. Pippo Delbono's La Menzogna. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon. 29 Pippo's anger is also at himself. He can only feel pity for the deceased workers, he tells us, not sor- row, nor could he feel sorrow for his father when he died. It is somehow comforting to meet up again with the deaf and dumb Bobo, who was interned in a mental hospital for forty-five years until Pippo found him, and who accompanies Pippo in many of his shows. It is Bobo who consoles Pippo when toward the end of the piece, the Italian director takes off all of his clothes, and lies down in the factory doorway as if to join the charred bodies of those who died. It is Bobo, dressed in tux and tails, who awakens Pippo and tells him with gestures to get dressed. He then takes his hand and leads him to stage front where he and Pippo stand before us. Pippo tells us that he sometimes wishes that he could be deaf like Bobo so he wouldn't have to hear the lies, and then concludes asking for his father's forgiveness, and dedicating the piece to him. A number of directors revisited Greek tragedies during the sixty-third festival, most notably Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. (A) pollo- nia, one of the three major productions in the Honor Court this year, reworks texts from Euripides and Aeschylus into a powerful collage that examines the concept of sacrifice from Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, to the story of Alcestis, who sacrifices her life to save her husband Admetus, and real-life Apolonia Machzynska-Swiatek, a Polish woman, mother of three children and expecting a fourth, who gave her life to hide twenty-five Jews during World War Two. Composed of two parts and a pro- logue, this impressive four-and-one-half-hour mod- ern tragedy is filled with references to Greek gods and mythological characters as well as contempo- rary figures such as Apolonia. For non-classical scholars, the program notes provided background information on the Greek gods and characters of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Orestes, Admetus, Alcestis, Apollo, as well as Ryfka Goldfinger, one of the Jews saved by Apollonia. A set consisting of a metallic structure in the middle of the vast stage, a sort of copula toward the rear under which an orchestra and its lead singer, a blues-rock who peri- odically appear to serenade us between scenes. There are two chairs in front waiting to be occupied, two glass houses on either side of these, a dining room table with six chairs stage left, and along the side stage left, a long red bench with three life-size dolls on it, and a man and a woman seated (A)pollonia, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. Photo: Sznhs. 30 among the dolls. (A)pollonia begins in July 1942 at an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. The man and woman who had been sitting on the sidelines, now pick up the dolls, carry them over to the two chairs in the center and perform The Post Office, a play by Rabindranath Tagore, as a sort of puppet show with the dolls sitting on their laps. Amal, the boy doll, asks his aunt if he can go out to play. She says no, he is ill and the doctor said no. "But," says Amal, "I want to see the world." "Why," she asks. "You can't go over the mountain." We soon learn that these are the children who were exterminated at Treblinka a few days later. The dolls and their handlers move on to sit around the dining room table and perform what appears to be a family drama. Husband and wife are having dinner. A lovely young woman in a pretty white dress runs across the stage and summ- ersaults on the red bench. She is happy and vital; she can hardly be stopped. But her father gives her a gift of sparkling shoes, and we soon realize that she is Iphigenia and her father is Agamemnon. Clytemnestra protests, but Iphigenia seems to understand that she is being sacrificed to save her country and she knows her duty. Still, when it's time for her to go with her father, he has to carry her off screaming. Scenes are announced in large letters pro- jected on the south wall of the Honor Court, along with translations of the Polish text into French. AGAMEMNON is next. A woman in a red suit, black gloves, black shoes, and black hair (a wig), stands under the copula. Her resemblance to Jackie Kennedy the day of her husband's assassination is unmistakable. She is joined by a man. The Marseillaise plays and they stand at attention. He delivers a very long speech on the necessity of war despite its atrocities. "How many people were killed," he asks himself. 572,043 a month, a week, an hour, a minute. A death every four or five sec- onds. He acknowledges his guilt and the indiffer- ence he felt whenever he killed a child, Jewish or German. Throughout this tirade, his wife stands silent, while a huge close up of her face is projected behind her with tears running down her cheeks. When Agamenon returns to his glass house and Clytemnestra goes into the other glass house, she wipes the blood off of her dress and speaks into a microphone. "I struck him," she says, slurring her words. "It's done. I killed him." And she stumbles off, taking off her wig and dress. It is now Orestes' turn to commit his crime which he does somewhat casually as he slits his mother's throat, puts a white sheet over her, lights a cigarette, and peels an orange. Alcestis, Admetus' wife is the next woman to be sacrificed. Unlike Iphigenia, or Clytemnestra, however, she offers to die in her husband's place, and thanks to Heracles, she is saved and brought back to life. In Warlikowski's piece Apollo is por- trayed as a young man with tattoos, Thanatos is a bureaucrat with a brief case, and Heracles is a drunk American. These are only a few of the many scenes in this complex and rather difficult piece, a piece filled with obscure references, and not always easy to fol- low with its Polish dialogue hurled at us. It seemed, with barely enough time to read the French superti- tles, (A)pollonia was not to everyone's taste. In contrast to the grand scale and complex- ity of (A)pollonia, the simplicity and austere beauty of Une fte pour Boris, Thomas Bernhard's first play, directed by Canada's Denis Marleau, was not to be missed, even if crossing the Rhone to stand endlessly in the boiling sun to wait to be admitted to the Tinel was a challenge. In Une fte, Bernhard introduces a monstrous character, referred to ironi- cally as the Good Woman, "good" because she's a wealthy patron and benefactress, but there the "goodness" ends. Her treatment of those around her is filled with hatred. She is dismissive and selfish, and she's an unrepentant bully. Yet, she must depend on others because she has lost her legs in a car acci- dent and she spends her life in a wheel chair, bark- ing orders at Yohanna, her nurse, and planning a great banquet to celebrate her new husband Boris who also has no legs. This bizarre tale about power and domination, opens on an empty stage framed by silver-blue metallic curtains on either side. A film of pleasant country scenes with boats on a canal and a man skiing down a mountain, is shown on the screen in the rear. The Good Woman arrives in her shiny white armchair on wheels pushed by her tiny nurse Yohanna. She complains that it is cold and demands a blanket, which of course Yohanna scur- ries off to fetch. Next she brings out a gigantic hat box hoping to amuse her employer, who is clearly bored and demanding. The box is so tall that Yohanna has to stand on a ladder to get the hats and gloves out. Sometimes she even falls into the box. The good woman tries on each hat and each match- ing pair of gloves but she is never satisfied, throw- ing her hats on the floor in a fit, until finally she seems pleased with a funny red hat. The conversation turns to the banquet she 31 is planning for Boris, a strange companion who can only communicate in grunts and squeaks. To cele- brate Boris' birthday, the Good Woman invites thir- teen legless cripples from the hospice where she met her husband. In preparation for the event, Yohanna dresses her in a magnificent red, full-skirted ball gown that covers her wheel chair so that she looks every bit like Scarlett O'Hara getting ready for a ball. Wearing a crown and bedecked in jewels, she actually dances quite convincingly thanks to Yohanna who wheels her around against a backdrop of a film with people dancing at a ball. Accompanied by her husband banging on drums and much admired by her guests, a wonderful group of thirteen human-sized dolls in wheelchairs, their faces animated thanks to the video technology we have seen Marleau use in his memorable staging of Maeterlinck's Les Aveugles and other pieces, (live actors' faces superimposed on blank masks), the Good Woman is in her element. The play ends with Boris collapsing on his drums, dead from too much banging, and the Good Woman having a good laugh at how she has once more prevailed. Radio Muezzin, conceived and directed by Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, is a fascinating documentary theatre piece, created by Kaegi in Cairo in December 2008. Kaegi spent two months in Cairo interviewing a number of muezzins when he learned that the Ministry of Religion had decided that the call to prayer, which can be heard every evening in thousands of mosques throughout the city, was about to be reduced to a radio broadcast using the voices of a handful of chosen muezzin. The decision to present Radio Muezzin in the Clotre des Carmes was especially felicitous as there is a tower overlooking the cloister that looks very much like a minaret. One almost expected one of the muezzins to perform the call to prayer from up there, but this did not happen. Instead, four muezzins would tell their stories on a stage covered with red and white prayer rugs. A few chairs, over- head fans whirling and four screens in the rear on which video images of the muezzins' daily lives including family photos would be projected, set the scene. The Muezzin were positioned around us, one is standing in the audience, another on the terrace Thomas Bernhard's Une fte pour Boris, directed by Denis Marleau. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon. 32 33 above the audience. One is already on stage, anoth- er is not yet visible. Lights go up on the first muezzin. He is a blind man and the only one of the four to be dressed in the traditional garment, a sheik's robe and hat, a garment he dreamt of owning when he was a little boy. He tells us that he was born blind. And that he spends two hours every day commuting on a bus from his apartment to the mosque. He is married with four children and teaches the Koran to young students whom he scolds by pulling their ears if they don't pay attention. The second muezzin comes for- ward to share his story with us. He is a retired elec- trician and a widower with two sons and two daugh- ters. He worked in a textile factory for thirteen years and was in the army in 1967 (a picture of him in uni- form is flashed on the screen behind him). He talks about how he was injured and now has a metal plaque and seven screws in his leg. The third muezzin tells us about leaving his family in the Egyptian countryside because he couldn't find work there. He is poor and has to supplement his income by working in a bakery. His mosque is very small, with only a few dozen worshippers. He is responsi- ble for keeping his mosque clean and to prove it, he brings out a vacuum cleaner and vacuums the car- pet. The fourth muezzin is younger than the others. He is a body builder who wanted to be a football player and join the police. But he came in second at the forty-seventh world competition of Koran recitation at Kuala Lampur, (photos of him with fel- low competitors in the lobby of the hotel where they stayed and outside a Macdonald's appear on the screen behind him). He now performs the call to prayer from Cairo's largest mosque with tens of thousands of worshippers. He brings out his barbells and shows us his weight lifting routine. The fifth man on stage is not a muezzin. He tells us that he learned to encode radio signals at the Aswan dam and now he has made a transmitter that will broad- cast the azam throughout the country, thereby cen- tralizing the call to prayer. The different quality and volume of the resonant voices we have heard throughout the evening will no longer be heard. Thirty muezzin have been chosen to broadcast the prayer and the weight lifter is one of them. Stefan Kaegi made Radio Muezzin as a tribute to a way of life that is quickly disappearing. His experience in Cairo where, he says, he had "the most impressive acoustic experience of his life" with the call to prayer reverberating from mosque to mosque is a thing of the past. Ciels, the final chapter of Mouawad's tetralogy, opened on July 18 in one of the festival venues at the Parc des Expositions in Chateaublanc, a good twenty-five-minute ride on the festival bus. The show was eagerly awaited. Excitement was in the air as we discovered a shimmering, white rec- tangular pavilion in the middle of a vast exhibition space. Four entrances were available to us but Mouawad kept us waiting in suspense for one half of an hour, a ploy not appreciated by everyone. Once the pavilion flaps were opened, however, the space was worth the wait. The vision of two hun- dred low-standing white stools lined up in a square, in the middle of a bright white house, and the real- ization that we would not be onlookers but part of the set, had us excited to see what other surprises Mouawad had up his sleeve. As it turned out, the stools were extremely uncomfortable. We were knee to knee with our neighbors for two and a half hours, but they did revolve so that the audience could fol- low the action taking place above and around them. Ciels, as it turned out, was very different from Littoral and Incendies. There is no reference to the past, no journey to foreign lands to find one's identity. It is a play about a terrorist attack that is being planned somewhere in the world, and the attempts by six characters enclosed in a secret high security location to foil the attack. Throughout the play, five men and one woman, the International operating team named Socrates, seek to decode messages that the terrorists are sending to each other. One of them has committed suicide, leaving a mysterious, coded message that gets the ball rolling in the beginning of the play. Clement Szymanowski is the only one who can decode the message, and this he finally does by studying Tintoretto's painting The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, but it is too late. When the news comes that the chief terrorist was the son of one of the Socrates team, and that he has been killed along with hundreds of others in one of the explosions, it is devastating. Although Ciels has exciting moments and the story holds ones attention from time to time, the material and the form are a bit too familiar; the play is clearly too close to The Da Vinci Code and the TV show 24. Avignon 2009 was indeed a journey, a dif- ficult and at times unsettling journey filled with loss and mourning. The real life deaths of Andre Benedetto, a much revered actor, director, and writer from Avignon whose theatre, Le Thtre des Carmes, has played an important role in the history of theatre in Avignon since 1966, of Maurice Jarre, the composer who worked closely with Jean Vilar in the early years of the festival, and whose fanfare music is still heard in the opening moments of pro- ductions in the festival theatres, and of Pina Bausch whose work stunned festival goers in the early 1980s, seemed to cast a pall over what in other years was a more festive event. But clearly these are not festive times. Through much of the programming of the sixty-third festival we were asked to reflect on a number of important questions. The question of sac- rifice, for example (who has the right to sacrifice their children, or to sacrifice themselves if they leave children behind?) was present in (A)pollonia, but also in Littoral and Incendies. And what about the survivors? Mouawad's young men and women in Littoral and Incendies found a reason to continue on. They are living witnesses to the horrors of war, but the adolescents in Ciels have to become suicide bombers in order to be heard. 34 The Avignon OFF Festival of 2009 began with great expectations. Just consider the objective numbers: 980 productions by 825 companies in 105 venues (sometimes a hole in the wall) within the ramparts of the medieval papal city. I managed to see about forty of them during my thirteen-day stay. Need I say more about the difficulty in choosing what to see? Plunging into my 360-page program in search of the precious jewels, I began by discarding almost all one-person shows as well as the main- stream mindless crowd pleasers. Most of the plays run between sixty and ninety minutes, since four or five of them may be scheduled following one another (including set changes) at the same venue on a single day begin- ning at eleven in the morning. The most outstanding production I saw was Hamelin by Juan Mayorga, the well-known Spanish literary academic and pro- lific playwright. The title, of course, refers to the tale of the piper who took away the city's children, here given a modern setting and dealing with the unmentioned subject of pedophilia. The suspect is an honorable VIP, smart and fairly human, even likeable. The police inspector, the principal, the par- ents, the righteous analyst are all entrapped in a blanket of doubt. The drab set is like a brown corru- gated plywood box on which some chalk drawings will later try to illustrate the action, with just a few chairs and neon lighting. The staging by Christopher Semet is masterful in a minimalist, non-realistic, quick paced stylealmost Brechtian in its attempt to force the viewer to participate, imagine, take sides, then change his mind, as do the seven actors. The child is performed by an adolescent for obvious reasons. The stroke of genius is the use of the Narrator (superbly feline Thierry Lefvre), who reads the stage directions not as a voice-over, but as an invisible and inaudible participant, interrupting the dialogue with his repeated objectionscasually dropping "NOs"echoing "I am here" with "he is here." Neither the monster nor the savior is ever actually identified. We are all implicated. The Cie Rideau de Bruxelles production is terrific and unfor- gettable. The other high point and the most heartrending moment of this entire festival was the ending of Sans Ailes ni Racines (Without Wings nor Roots). This is a not so fictional account, lasting 35 Avignon OFF 2009: A Year of Hard Knocks Jean DeCock Juan Mayorga's Hamelin, directed by Christopher Semet. Photo: Daniel Locus. only an hour, which opposes an Arab father and son in an intimate and gripping dialogue of incompati- ble ideology. The floor consists of black and white squares, and the actors sit on two high stools, the senior in a black suit, the young man in an immacu- late white garment, sculpted by the lighting. Hamadi, the writer and director, revisits his past as a seven-year-old child when he immigrated to Belgium, how he became an atheist with only one motivation: to become a successful active member of Belgian society while denying his roots. Father and son clash on all issues: so-called democracy, immigration, militancy, art, women, and violence. As the intensity increases it is bound to explode at the end. The tragic agon is like the cracking of a double mirror, and its violent shattering both shocks and surprises. Mat Visniec, a Rumanian who was lucky enough to flee his troubled country to Paris, has cre- ated a moving play dealing with exodus, the ten- sions of shifting borders, countries with new names, real estate swindling, and occupation. He asks, "is the war over, ever?" The title of his Le Mot de Progrs dans la Bouche de ma Mre sonnait terri- blement faux (The Word Progress When Spoken by My Mother Sounded Awfully Fake) refers to the Soviet brainwashing in Eastern Europe. We see a family ripped apartthe son probably dead, his sis- ter prostituting herself in Paris, and the parents hopelessly digging layers of corpses from previous wars, Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Russians, Germans, Turks, Albaniansin search of their bones or skulls since they feel that everyone should have the right to a decent burial. When the capital- ism they wanted finally arrives they find that every- thing has a price, even the remains of their children. Jean-Luc Palis directed the play with a touch of Brecht and Meyerhold's biomechanical method for Cie Influencscnes. Dutch Ad de Bont gave us Mirad, un garon de Bosnie, certainly not a fairy tale! Four actors, playing an aunt and uncle, mother and child, tell without sentimentality about the monstrous hor- ror people are capable of perpetrating upon refugees: propaganda, separation, rape, torture, brainwashingresulting in more hatred and retalia- tion. This was directed by Gil Lefeuvre for La Nuit Venue Cie. Two ninety-minute plays with large casts dealt more specifically with the persecution of the Mat Visniec's Le Mot de Progrs dans la Bouche de ma Mre sonnait terriblement faut, directed by Jean-Luc Palis. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF. 36 Jews. Nous les Hros (version sans Pre) (We the Heroes. The Version Without a Father Figure) was so named since the actor cast for the role disap- peared. It is an unusual subject for the late Jean Luc Lagarce, who was better known for his subtle and gentle theatre of the agony of living and dying with AIDS. What we have here is a cluster of actors hanging together for survival on their (last) tour in Germany before impending World War Two, quar- reling incessantly, fighting occasionally, yet laugh- ing and singing collectively. It is a subject reminis- cent of Angelopoulos's Voyage of the Comedians, accelerated here by fear and klezmer music into a funny pathetic musical. Is it worth itthis profes- sion? Is it an acceptable life? Wandering from one small town to another while dreaming of Paris or Berlin, or simply of being free from the coercion of living in the group. Where are we opening next? They don't know, but we can guess: within the Gates of Arbeit macht freiAuschwitz. Michel Brillante directs an incredibly powerful pack of cantankerous old and hopeful young, the sick and tired, and the fiances about to engage, but doomed to part. It is a superb team, with no exaggeration or caricature, presenting theatre life in the shadow of the Nazi terror. Timothy Daly and Isabelle Starkier, direc- tor of her own company from Australia, presented Le Bal de Kafka (Kafka Dances) in Alain Timar's Thtre des Halles. In German Prague, a depressed adolescent trapped in his Jewish family seeks solace by attending the Yiddish theatre. Unfortunately, the director has opted for an expressionistic and red- nosed clownish style (as in Fellini) that is boister- ous, overbearing, and fails to convince. Theatre director Timar has perhaps decided to emphasize a Jewish theme at the Halles, inviting The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and Rumanian playwright Andrs Visky with a remarkably stunning production (black, white, and beige setting and costumes) of Naire jamais (Born Forever). In a way this is the epitomy and devastating conclusion of Shoah, fea- turing the ten men necessary for a minyan, the Jewish prayer. As directed by Gbor Tompa it is a ninety-minute lament, a Kaddish for dehumanized zombies, beings without identity nor rest. Highly kinetic and musical, it is performed in Hebrew, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Greek (with projected supertitles). We seem to need a bridge to anywhere out of the West, and perhaps it can be provided by the prolific Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His The Incredible Sad Story of Naive Erendira and Her Diabolical Grandmother chronicles life in an imaginary town in Central South America named Macondo. In a short prologue a magical atmosphere is created. On a desert beach near a stranded boat, a shape appears, Jean Luc Lagarce's Nous les Heros, directed by Michel Brillante. Photo: Guy Delahaye. 37 perhaps a whale. Two bohemian women storytellers reminisce about an old asthmatic man who is really a dying angel. We know this because of his huge useless wings. Then another extra-terrestrial dies, Esteban, an incredibly handsome, tall, and pleasant- ly super-endowed man. The whole village comes to bury him. The words of the piece appeal to your five senses, but the eye is also dazzled by the gowns, masks, sequins and confetti, sand and some purple rain. Two splendid actresses are featuredDeborah Lamy and Catherine Vial, with Sarkis Tscheumlekdjian at the helm. The company Cie Premier Act here produced a crowd pleaser and sure winner. At a time when the touristic bargain hunt- ing West extends its greed to the quaint, wretched countries of the Third World, Africa or Asia, a woman's voice describes the resulting tensions. I always liked Canadian Carole Frchette, who spent some time in Beirut, Lebanon, where she lost Le Collier d'Hlne (Helen's Necklace). She is as upset as we all would be in losing something of great sen- timental value. Like everyone in the Near East, she relies on a taxi driver, Nabil, in her frenetic search through a city devastated by war, poverty, and famine. During her search she becomes increasing- ly aware of the unbearable injustice of the East and West divide. Laudable Lucette Salibur is the direc- tor. Her decision to switch the location and the cast to the Caribbean is totally appropriate, sympathetic, and compassionate. The moving production was presented by the Thtre du Flamboyant under the aegis of Greg Germain at Chapelle du Verbe Incarn, devoted to Black companies and writers. Love, like war, was a common theatre in the OFF presentations. Diastme wrote and directed L'Amour de l'Art (The Love of Art), a four character play about an actress on a tour in provincial France with a monologue about the last days of Marilyn Monroe, performing in blond wig, white dress, and all. We watch her performance from backstage, with the technical lighting staff commenting on breaking the set and keeping on schedule. The attractive actress, Emma de Caunes, falls for the distant light man, Frdric Andrau, who has been hurt before and does not want another emotional ordeal. Still, there is a happy ending, the only one in the various plays on the theme of love I attended. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Incredible Sad Story of Naive Erendira and Her Diabolical Grandmother, presented by Cie Premier Act. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF. 38 Certainly this was not the case in Ismal Jude's rather obscure Figures de l'Envol amoureux (Figures of Love in Flight) influenced by Goethe's Werther, which presents variations between three couples (German, French, and Italian) and asks whether romantic love still exists today. There is a lot of hide and seek plus mirror games and talk about despair suicide, sadomasochism, toxic mania. As directed by Antoine Bourseiller, however, the production is easy on the eyes, especially hunk Alexandre Ruby. Much darker still is L'Amour furieux (Angry Love) by Claude Bourgeyx. In an attempt to foster love from demanding desire, an elegant, mature and rich lady develops a mercenary liaison with a dangerously attractive gigolo not even half her age. There is nothing sordid on the surface. Both are chic and cool; both seem satisfied with "I don't kiss nor talk rules." Music by Mozart adds to the elegance. Then it is revealed that the lady paid her lover to kill her husband. The staging, conven- tional and close-up, is by Philippe Leconte for Entre des Artistes Cie. Going still deeper into violence, Samira Bellil was gang-raped by ten boys in the Arab sub- urbs of Paris, and survived to write a book about it, that was converted into a stage play by talented Jacques Kraemer and his company Il aurait suffi ... que tu sois mon frre (If Only You Had You Been My Brother). The play could have been a solo female performance, but it includes male figures and extends to other cases. It begins in the prison parlor with two silhouettes: The attacked woman has come to visit the leader of her aggressors to try to understand and to move on, because she refuses to remain a victim for the rest of her life. Writing has been her only therapy against humiliation, drugs, and alcohol, brought on by the ostracism from her family and her neighborhood. It is difficult to classify Crmonies by Dominique Paquet, the story of two country boys in a stable playing some kind of sadistic ritual without explicit sexual content. Razou, the bully, forces the attractive Radieux, restrained by some belts, to improvise vicariously his bad boy saga, since he does not have the words to narrate it himself. They appear to be abandoned orphans up for adoption, who attempt to control their animalistic instincts by creating this more heroic if schizophrenic alterna- tive. Words, however, lead to blows. Radieux is beaten down and dies. Then a girl appears who will, perhaps, unwillingly replace him. The text is bril- liant by its mixture of squalor and ambiguity, very reminiscent of Genet. The set is a gyrating round raft. This disturbing but powerful work was direct- Dominique Paquet's Crmonies, directed by Patrick Simon. Photo: Courtesy of Avignon OFF Festival. 39 ed by Patrick Simon for Group 3.5.81. On a much lighter note Louis Calaferte returned, as he does every year, with his hilarious Thtre Intime of a family plus two adolescent kids: incessant quibbling turning the volume to full blast yelling, obsession with food and its natural "pipi- caca" outlet. All this occurs in a bourgeois candy- colored apartment with a terrace and a view. Contention comes from sexy neighbor Madame Ondula who wanders about in her black panties, an invitation to not-so-discreet adultery. Acting and staging is tightly managed by Patrick Pelloquet as we reach the apocalyptic end with a fire in the build- ing. Similar bedlam mark Ionesco's Dlire deux (Craziness for Two), directed impeccably by Christophe Lindon and starring delightful Daniele Lebrun. She is, however, somewhat miscast as the matron in a mature and hostile couple trapped in the cage of their black and white apartment de luxe while some war is being fought in their neighbor- hood. There are knocks on the door, a raid, and derby hats fly like hand grenades. Ionesco in 1962 already wanted to contrast the pettiness of the bour- geoisie and the violence outside and everywhere. The piece has been seldom performed since, yet is uncannily relevant. Much more subdued and loveable in a minor key, Florent Nicoud's Bouge plus (Don't MoveFor the Child or the Camera) presents the family as kindergarten. The scenes are like snap- shots. The three characters can each assume their own role or become a chair or a vase with flowers. The text is adequately infantile or impressionistic. "Mom! What? Nothing." Maybe the primal, essen- tial, irrational message is there, an alphabet book on growing up and how to keep still while someone says "Cheese." Image a giggling Beckett if there were was such a thing. This romp was directed so gently by Michael Froehly for L'Heure du Loup. Bravo. I attended three disturbing plays on this our age. The influence of the internet on our youth is the subject of Chatroom by Irishman Enda Walsh (you may remember his Disco Pigs). We see six fifteen- year-old kids at home with their techno equipment (which we will never actually see), each in his own bubble and no adults in sight. Is this communica- tion? There is criss-cross conversation in duos about Potter, Spears, and the Chocolate Factory at first then suicide. Here is the rub: the manipulation of cyberspaceswitching identities, flirting with dan- ger, deviance, punk rebels. There was a reference to Golding's Lord of the Flies, "Kill the Pig." And well they might. This was directed as fast as on skates by Sylvie de Braekeleer for Thtre de Poche in Eugne Ionesco's Dlire deux, directed by Christophe Lindon. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon OFF. 40 41 Brussels. Rather milder fare was offered by David Lodge's L'Atelier d'ecriture (The Writing Game), a look at the world of writers, faculty, reviewers, and publishersand a student who may be more gifted than they areduring one of those weekend semi- nars out in the sticks. We are familiar with those egos, personality clashes, and, of course, flirting libidos. Indeed the caricature might be too close for comfort for us academics.This was directed by Armand Eloy with a cast of five for the Thtre du Passeur. Koffe Kwahul is from the Ivory Coast. His Bintou tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who is the leader of a boy's gang (with names like Assassino and Terminator) in a high-rise in a suburb of Paris. At home she is cornered between her libidi- nous uncle and a jobless, depressed father hiding in his room. She is hard as nails and pierced; she knows she'll never live to be eighteen. This was an epic, large-scale production with a multiracial super-cast of twenty, and a mostly black (with three white girls) chorus. The music is African rhythm and drums. Bintou's doomed love for a white boy is built like a Greek tragedy on three levelsthe pedestal, the concrete jungle, and the proscenium, where the Narrator address us. The director was Latitia Gudon for Cie 0,10. Marguerite Duras has always been fasci- nated by extreme tabloid fodder (faits-divers such as the kidnapping and still unsolved death of six-year- old Gregory being the most notorious), taking a stand usually opposing public opinion and the press. She writes and rewrites variations on the same sub- ject. L'Amante anglaise (The English Loverpho- netically also for English Mint ) written in 1968, was a reworking of her 1959 Les Viaducs de Seine et Oise, where body parts were thrown on passing trains. Originally the culprit was the wife of a cou- ple who killed and dismembered a body, but in this version it is her fat, deaf, and dumb cousin who lived with them. In a dialogue between an elderly woman and a younger reporter, he tries to under- stand. "How can the English mint in her garden sur- vive the winter," while she wonders "Does under- standing lead to atonement?" This was directed and performed by Sylvia Bruyant for Cie Cavalcade. Among classic offerings, the mood in this year of hard times favored Molire rather than Marivauxand not his serious plays but the short feel-good ones in prose, in the farcical commedia dell'arte tradition. Two productions were made equally enjoyable through talented casting and stag- ing. Le mdecine malgr lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, written in 1666) is Sganarelle; drunk and good for nothing, who beats his wife regularly. Her revenge is to suggest he is a famous doctor incogni- to and needs beating to acquiesce. In this way he will presumably cure the daughter of her tyrannical father in his wheel chair. She is playing dumb to be left alone and play doctor with her young lover. There is a lot of tension between old age and youth, hatred of servants against masters, and the impor- tance of money. The staccato staging is by Andonis Vouyoucas Gyptis in Marseilles. Actors come from behind us onto the stage carrying the set, a trunk to hide in of course, their costumes, and props. There is no deconstruction here except breaking the set. Monsieur de Pourceaugnac is a social climber from the South come up to Paris to strike it rich, where he is pretending to be a Black aristocrat to catch the love of a pert and feisty thing who has a more attractive gallant in mind. It is imperative he be discarded so that young love can thrive. Love tri- umphs of course, and even money has its redeeming qualities. The excellent multiracial cast performed under the direction of Olivier Thibault. Pure theatri- cal joy was also offered by La Botte secrte de Don Juan (no Don Giovanni hereonly a winning fenc- ing move he practiced), which offered swashbuck- ling at its best with a male cast in perfect shape and the ladies to boot, as if you were in a Dumas novel or at the movies between Cyrano and Robin des Bois. Written in alexandrine verse and some gross rhymes, the plot offered a pure heroine, a heroic lover, and a seducer, a truly mean aristocrat who will get his comeuppance. Schiller's Mary Stuart is a difficult play, focusing on her last days and imminent execution, a royal agon between two strong women, mythical figures, admirable, direct, and authentic, surrounded by rather wavering, hesitant, and devious men and courtiers. Mary is Catholic, and was Queen of France for the very short reign of Valois Francois II. Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, was Protestant and implacable as if the state and the people prevented her from showing human frailty. This production is impartial. The Queens never actually met except in Schiller. The visualization is of a black theatre on a charcoal ground and no set. Actors play always standing or retire into the obscure background. The men are dressed in black gowns, the enemy queens in subdued red and purple. This was superb work by Fabian Chappuis for Thtre 13. Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, directed by Fabian Chappiu. Photo: Courtesy of Festival Avignon OFF. 42 Whenever one is overwhelmed the by ver- bal and sometimes verbose theatre there is the excit- ing alternative of dance, which is also strongly rep- resented at the festival. The lovely Long Mantel Over a Peach V-neck Sweater depicts an encounter between a Belgian man and a Swiss girl, a couple of sheer perfection. Marco Delgado looks Spanish with his incredible slim, concave body, while Nadine Fuchs is a pure movie Clairol-blonde. They arrive, he in pale blue, she in pink, with their gym bags for a session. In the locker room they strip, and stretch, suggesting Cranach's Adam and Eve, but hiding each other's genitals. It is a loveable tease, with the nudity never offensive. The sculpted bodies in the flesh, suggest what the Greeks did in marble. I can't wait to see them again. Vendetta Mathea and Cy, African American choreographers based in NY and Aurillac, present two men and one woman alone together in Homme/Animal. There is a suggestion of evolution, but we are still mammals, crawling, then on all fours, rising, engaging in conflict, feeling, sweating, all to the music of Nina Simone. Another title, Homogne, duo, says it all: Two male bodies clothed in black leather merge and split in a chiaroscuro environment with a reddish dramatic flair. Are they a single being or a couple? Brother, double, or twin? In fearful symmetry they move, they split, one stronger than the other, maintains him, and then drops him. The droning sounds sug- gest wind, street noises, moaning, singing. The stir- ring choreography is by Yann Alexander and Cie. Competition turning to confrontation is the theme of D Batailles (a pun on debate and battle). It moves from the social amenities to a game with two opposing teamsthe Blondes against the Brunettesdaring each other, discarding rules (just change wigs) in favor of hard knocks, double-cross- ing, and a free-for-all rumble, ending in a kind of gregarious slam dance. The challenging company of five dancers and three musicians were choreo- graphed by Dennis Plassart. In the reoccurring pat- terns there was more brutal beating than homoeroti- cism. All were dressed in suit and tie, obsessively drinking bottles of water; so that they soon were totally drenched. The audience went crazy. How much does production at the festival cost? The OFF is also a market for traveling pro- ductions (of course, you provide the stage and equipment). With a group of half a dozen thespians, the average price runs between 4000 and 6000 Euros (add about one-third for the equivalence in dollars) plus room, board, and transportation. Just think about it. There is always a period in late June and early July when the end of the theatre season spills into the city's annual summer arts festival, the Grec. It's also the time when theatres announce their new seasons, with Frost/Nixon opening the Lliure's sea- son, Juan Cavestany's Urtan the Romea's and Leo Bassi's Utopia the Villarroel's. Argentine writer- director Javier Daulte also pronounced his departure from the Villarroel at the end of the forthcoming seasonCatalan dramatist-director Carol Lpez seems to be the favorite to replace himciting the problems of having his base in Argentina as the pri- mary reason for handing over the artistic reins of the theatre. The Grec this year provided a larger num- ber of events than in previous years and conse- quently attracted a larger number of spectators: sixty-six productions bringing in audiences of 88,841. There was, however, a decrease in tickets soldfifty-five percent to fifty-seven percent last yearand the festival's director, Ricardo Szwarcer, mentioned the cancellation of Amos Gitai's adapta- tion of Flavius Josephus's War of the Jews because of Jeanne Moreau's indisposition as a key factor in the percentage fall. The Grec had a strong focus on Italian work this yearboth of established auteurs like Castellucci and Ronconi and lesser known com- panies and directors like Motus, Pippo Delbono, Santasangre, and Pathosformel. There remains, nev- ertheless, a marked emphasis on new Catalan work as well as a healthy quota of Spanish-language pro- ductions realized with theatres in Madrid and Bilbao. In many ways the success story of the year in Barcelona has proved the new Goya theatre, opening fully renovated and refurbished under a new owner, Focus, and a new artistic director, Josep Maria Pou. While the opening production, Alan Bennett's History Boys, embarks on a tour of Spain [see the review in WES 21.2, Spring 2009], the the- atre's second production, La vida por delante, an adaptation of Romain Gary's La vie devant soi (The Barcelona's Grec Festival and the Tail of the City's 200809 Season Maria M. Delgado Xavier Jaillard's La Vida por Delante. Photo: Courtesy of Barcelona Grec Festival. 43 44 Life Before Us), is attracting packed houses. The novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1975 and was sub- sequently adapted for the cinema two years later. Translated into Catalan by Josep Maria Vidal and presented in an adaptation by Xavier Jaillard, the piece tells the story of Madame Rosa, an ageing Jewish former prostitute who has fostered a series of boys belonging to colleagues who are not able to take care of them. The only one remaining with her is the Muslim Momo, a nave seventeen-year-old boy hopelessly devoted to the blowsy Rosa. As Rosa becomes ill, Momo is determined to take care of her and resists the efforts of her doctor to have her transferred into a hospital. She dies with Momo continuing to protect her from the ravages of the outside world. The action takes place in Lloren Corbella's attic apartment, filled with well-worn fur- niture with something of a Bohemian air. From the very opening the emphasis is on ensuring that the audience feels comfortable and is regularly brought into the action. Lines are overtly addressed to them and a spirit of complicity cultivated. Rubn de Eguia plays Momo larger than life, as a geeky teenager (a slight skip in his step and a healthy quota of awkward posturing) always appearing on the verge of bursting into song. Concha Velasco offers a variation on her highly popular stage and screen persona. There's an amusing shuffle across the stage, stockings perennially having to be pulled up and a range of risqu underwear peeping beneath the nylon petticoats that are her day-to-day attire. The play is laden with exposition to ensure that we have our fill of the characters' past histories. Nothing is left to the imagination. Momo and Rosa discuss their past and their present, and the play is in many ways a double act of banter and revelation interrupted by the outside world as represented by the kind Doctor Katz (a habitually solid perform- ance by Romea regular Carles Canut) and Momo's father, the fanatical recently released murderer Youssef Kadir (all rolling eyes and manic energy from Jos Luis Fernndez). Outside threats are dis- pensed with through elaborated fictions, verve, and gay abandon. This is an unconventional love story in the vein of Harold and Maude: the tale of a shy boy and a forceful girl hopelessly devoted to each other. Concha Velasco swings on and off stage in a range of outfits and hats; her deterioration into senility is gleefully camp and conspiratorial. We are permitted to see her petticoats tucked into a corset as she attempts to run away, red stilettos and matching suitcase in hand. There is not much subtlety here, but none of the audience seemed to mind. Indeed, the audience delights in the stage excess with wild applause for Velasco as she takes her curtain call. Velasco is a much-loved institution in Spain with a loyal following who have flocked to the Goya since the production opened on 28 March. With Madame Rosa, Velasco has given a larger than life Jewish mamma, who rises to the challenges that present themselves: her outwitting of Momo's obsessed father, in particular, is a lesson in enter- prising thinking on your feet and a speedy delivery of lines. This production doesn't point to Velasco as a versatile actress in the way Rosa Maria Sard evi- dently isbut it shows she can carry a line and take an audience along with her. This is a performance conceived in broad brush strokes, charting the ups and downs of one of life's survivors supported in death by the unlikeliest of friendships. Jos Sanchis Sinisterra, founder-director of the Sala Beckett, one of Barcelona's most influential theatre spaces, has a new play at the venue. The Sala Beckett has proved resilient to fads, offering a workshop environment where playwrights in Catalonia can come into contact with writers from elsewhere in the world. It has proved a nurturing space for Catalan playwrights, producing the work of Sergi Belbel, Merc Sarrias, Llusa Cunill, Paco Zarzoso, and Carles Batlle (among others). It's impossible to discuss playwriting in Catalonia with- out referencing it. The venue's artistic director, Toni Casares, is now also in charge of the Catalan National Theatre's T6 strand of programming, com- missioning work from emerging writers, that demonstrates the TNC's commitment to new Catalan writing. This summer sees Simon Stephens, Rafael Spregelburd, and Neil LaBute delivering workshops as part of the Beckett's summer program, while Sinisterra's Vagas noticias de Klamm (Vague News from Klamm) enjoys a month-long run at the venue as part of the Grec's official program. The terrain of the play will be familiar to those acquainted with Galceran's Gronholm Method. A Human Resources office in what appears to be a large company (peddling unspecified wares) is conducting a job interview with a young woman, Carolina, who seems to have multiple qualifica- tions. There's a plethora of degrees and experience at a wide range of institutions; but probe a little more deeply and it all seems rather irrelevant and insubstantial. It's the office manager's job to investi- gate how prepared she is for a job that is never real- ly defined. And this he does with dogged persist- ence, aided and abetted by a secretary who con- tributes some perplexing interventions to the inter- view. Nothing is quite what it seems. Valverde, the prim and proper employer-cum-office manager is too fastidious for comfort. He seems to be intent on catching the slightly awkward Carolina out as often as he can. He hides behind the protection offered by an expansive corporate desk, and Marc Garcia Cot plays him as a slightly geeky individual, parading his power in ways that never entirely convince. Ferran Audi plays his mysterious secretary, Geimrez, seen one minute typing at his desk in wig and kilt, the next receiving balls from his boss. Geimrez is played as a cross-dressing male, an indi- cation that gender, like so much else in the play, cannot be pinned down. The play is very much about protocol and appearances, about the need to say the right thing and assimilate the jargon of the workplace. Words are twisted, manipulated, and misused. The mysteri- ous Klamm, evoked all too regularly by the pusil- lanimous Valderde, is a Godot figure, destined never to appear; a presence evoked by the characters as the ultimate arbitrator of all their acts. Klamm is not vintage Sinisterra. There isn't much substance to the play with conceits pushed into the terrain of exces- sive repetition. The verbal games between the three characters are entertaining enough for brief periods but they never really add up to a fully formed the- atrical work. Quim Roy's set aims for a modish cor- porate feel but the action remains rather constrained and Sinisterra's own production rests too easily within larger than life acting and sly jokes to an all too knowing audience. Marta Poveda's Carolina provides the best reason for seeing Klamm. Hers is an intelligent per- formance that retains an audience's interest in the play's uneven dynamics. There is something beguil- ing in her treatment of Valverde and her take on the assigned role-play suggests an enigmatic mystery that none of the other performances can match. Her comic timing makes something of the rather turgid dialogue offered by Sinisterra, but ultimately, how- ever, she cannot save a disappointing piece of writ- ing. Sinisterra is one of a number of Catalan dramatists featuring at this year's Grec. Marc Martnez offered a contemporary take on Look Back in Anger, Stoklm, at the Borrs Theatre; Jordi Coca a reworking of Iphigenia at the Lliure; and Pau Mir turned to the family in Girafes at the Lliure. Again at the Lliure, Jordi Casanovas provided a version of 45 Jos Sinisterra's Vagas noticias de Klamm. Photo: Courtesy of Barcelona Grec Festival. Miss Julie for the grunge generation that fuses Strindberg's tale with the tormented life of Kurt Cobain. Julia Smells Like Teen Spirit, certainly attracted a young audience but the onstage music and singingStrindberg's original trio has now become a band with Julia as an unhappy rock star fails to convince me that this is a carefully thought through transposition. The first half certainly sets up the situation between the three as the antics of the unstable Julia generate concern among her col- leagues, but the play only offers more of the same, and the Brechtian comments to the audience fail to really gel with what is essentially a naturalistic structure. The 1980s feel is nicely conjured in Damien Bazn's crumpled stagescattered records, battered sofa, strewn clothesbut ultimately too much is explained and seen, and too little left to the imagination. This year's Grec also proffered a look back to key Catalan writers of the past. Joan Vinyoli's poetry opened the festival accompanied by the music of Eduard Iniesta in a one-off event con- ceived by actor Llus Soler and director Antonio Calvo. Josep Pla's El quadern gris (The Gray Notebook), a diary written while a student in 191819 is adapted for the stage and given an imag- inative production by Joan Oll. Less successful is Josep Galindo's old-fashioned La ruta blava (The Blue Route), enacting the writer Josep Maria de Sagarra's adventures as he leaves Spain in 1936, at the beginning of the Civil War, for Paris and then Tahiti. Rifail Ajdarpasic offers an elegant set but the action seems rather turgid with lines delivered unimaginatively to the audience. The plodding sto- rytelling is a world away from the imaginative wiz- ardry of El quadern gris. The Grec has also provided a fair quota of 'big' names. Castellucci's Societas Raffaello Sanzio presented Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso across three venues in the city. Ronconi offered what has generally been seen as a disappointing Midsummer Night's Dream, and Lepage his collaboration with Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant, Eonnagata, both at the TNC. Levaudant's Oedipus trilogy, pro- duced in Eduardo Mendoza's Castilian-language translation of Daniel Loayza's adaptation of Sophocles' plays, split the critics while Llus Pasqual's delicious double-bill of zarzuelas by Manuel Fernndez Caballero was acclaimed as one of the Festival's highlights. 46 Look Back in Anger, Stoklm, directed by Marc Martnez. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival. Another Catalan director, Calixto Bieito, returned to the Grec this year with his version of Schiller's Don Carlos, presented in a co-production between the Romea, the Grec, Madrid's Centro Dramtico Nacional, and the XV. Internationalen Schillertage in Mannheim. This is not the first time Bieito has handled Don Carlos. In 2006 he present- ed Verdi's opera for the Theater of Basel, but here he moves toward a reading that positions the play very clearly within Spain. Bieito has commissioned a new Castilian-language translation by Adan Kovacsis and undertaken some dramaturgical shav- ing with Marc Rosich to further condense the play within a compact seventy-five-minute frame: the Count Cordua, Prince of Palma, Duke of Medina Sidonia, and Count Lerma are all dispensed with in favour of a tighter focus on the father-son narrative. The production draws on a number of his past col- laborators from the RomeaMingo Rfols playing the Great Inquisitor and the Confessor to the King as rigid clerics, ngels Bassas, the superb Goneril of the 2004 King Lear, as the conniving Princess of Eboli, and Rafa Castejn, from The Persians, out- standing as the Marquis of Pozabut on the whole the production sees him opt for collaborators that have been more associated with his operatic work of late. And indeed, Don Carlos is a return to the theatre for a director who has been increasingly opt- ing for opera. Rebecca Ringst, the German designer who worked with him on a number of his most recent productions, The Abduction from the Seraglio (2004) at the Komische Oper Berlin and Brand (2008) at Oslo's National Theatre, here proffers an imaginative greenhouse set, a protected hothouse where Carlos Hiplito's King Philip II cultivates his many plants. The enclosed greenhouse provides a brilliant metaphor for Philip II's court: a sweltering space where no one can escape the watch of the regal apparatus. Indeed, Rfols's confessor watches over the action, pacing across the different layers of this fragile conservatory. Nothing escapes his vigi- lant glance. With Josep Ferrer's Duke of Alba he creates an unholy alliance that steers the king's actions. Hiplito's Philip appears anything but an absolute monarch. A slight figure in casual chinos he shouts to reinforce his presence in a court that seems to escape his total grasp. This is a man who would rather be pruning his plants than dealing with people. His queen, Elizabeth de Valois, appears an irritating distraction and it is evident that he is in no way attracted to her. Even Bassas's scheming, 47 Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, directed by Calixto Bieito. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival. voluptuous Princess of Eboli, who throws herself before him, fails ultimately to distract him from his solipsistic existence. The production seems to present many of the characters as pawns caught within a hothouse that dwarfs them. The Queen is a petulant girl who uses the first opportunity alone with Carlos to bare her breasts and declare herself in forthright ways. Bieito's reading does not enact the attraction between Violeta Prez's Elizabeth de Valois and Jordi Andjar's Carlos. Rather both are presented as little more than children. Andjar, replacing the indisposed Rubn Ochandiano (the tormented Ray X in Almodvar's Broken Embraces), conceives Carlos as a nerdish adolescent who'd prefer to be lis- tening to his ipod and spraying red highlights in his hair than seducing his father's wife. Prez's Elizabeth is a vulgar teen who can't wait to lift up her crinoline skirt at the earliest opportunity. Costume designer Ingo Krgler has worked with Gaultier and Galliano in Paris, and boy does it show. The tight corsets and wide crinolines pay lip service to an earlier age, but are refracted through vocabularies that seem more Madonna than Marie-Antoinette. You have to know how to occupy an outfit, however, and Prez never quite inhabits her costume in the way Bassas's lascivious Eboli manages. Begoa Alberdi as the Duchess of Alba (in a reworking of the role of the Duchess of Olivarez) provides a musical underscoring for the action, singing out a Gregorian chant that further fixes the action within clerical paradigms. She acts as if remote controlled or on automatic, entering and exiting with a mechanical efficiency. Attired in a variation of the corset and crinoline, she appears a severe, crow-like figure, looming ominously over and policing the court. While the women remain trapped within these costumes of the past, the men's attire is somewhat less constrictive: slacks for the King, shorts and baseball boots for Don Carlos, suits for the Duke of Alba and the Marquis of Poza. Castejn's Marquis, played with a hint of Andalusian accentuation, is in many ways the pulse of this production. His energy, the clear delivery of the lines, the avoidance of empty declamationtoo often a part of Andjar's and Prez's performanc- esserve to define the urgency and attractiveness of a character that we come to understand will risk Schiller's Don Carlos. Photo: Courtesy of Grec Festival. 48 49 all for his close friend Carlos. In many ways it is the relationship between Castejn's Marquis and Andjar's Carlos that becomes the central axis of the production, and this is when it really acquires some- thing of the energy and sexual charge of Michael Grandage's 2004 staging. Ultimately, however, Bieito never really follows this reading through and we are left to watch as Carlos pines for a Queen with which there appears little connection and no real chemistry. This may in part be due to Andjar, an actor who doesn't really look at ease within the "heroic." Well cast in Pou's production of History Boys as the pompous Irwin, he finds it difficult here to embody Don Carlos's struggles. Only in the encounters with Castejn's Marquis do we get some sort of sense of how much is at stake. Rubn Ochandiano, who opened the production in Mannheim, specializes in the angst-ridden and the dangerous, and the production might have had a very different charge with his Carlos. Andjar cer- tainly received a warm reception from the audience at the Grec for stepping in to replace the injured Ochandiano (who will return to the production when it opens in Madrid in the latter half of September), but the characterization never really gels. This has also to do with Bieito's reading. Carlos is infantilized as a gauche teenager: the pro- duction opens with him in a world of his own, danc- ing to his iphone at the front of the stage as the audi- ence takes their seats. His giggly awkwardness with both his fatherwhom he confronts like a petulant adolescentand Elizabethhe drops his pants and chuckles as she flashes her breasts at himulti- mately leaves their relationships in the realm of the puerile. There is no sense of honor or decorum here, no sense of a love that dare not speak its name. Fumbling, groping, and testosterone fuelled are more the order of the game. Too often the actors deliver their lines as if rushing for a train. The pro- duction would have benefited from a more detailed attention to characterization to match the spectacu- lar visuals. This is not to say that the production is bereft of interest. Bieito's visual imagination remains in evidence with moments of fierce bril- liance (as with Bassas's prostration before the King, the masking of Carlos under the Queen's ample skirts, the fevered encounters between the Marquis and Carlos). The props associated with Rfols's con- fessorrosary beads and fanssuggest an unholy association between church and state. Indeed, Bieito's point is precisely that Catholicism is one of the fundamentals of the nation state and bound up with the iconography of nationhood. Bieito's final image of Carlos, attired as a suicide bomber, clearly points to analogies with the present. The Queen's white suit (worn in the production's final scene) may suggest a breaking out of the constraints imposed by the more formal Court attire, but the design bears more than a passing resemblance to the suit worn by Princess Leticia on the announcement of her engagement to Prince Philip of Spain and may again serve to provide associations with the current cli- mate in Spain. The references are, however, never really embedded in a central defining concept or aesthetic that binds them within a coherent spectacle. The greenhouse design is spectacular, but the opening scenes appear rather cumbersome as the characters emerge from and disappear into the plastic sheeting that envelops the metallic structure. Only when the sheeting is pulled down do we really get a sense of the machinations and manoeuvres within the court. The giant iron doors at the back of the stage func- tions again to suggest a prison, and Philip's table has something of the operating or torture table about it: a cold, clinical object whose alternative purpose (as when he's curtly pruning plants) is all too evident. Metaphors of torture abound. There's a cage at the front of the stage where characters are imprisoned and seek refuge like wounded animals. Carlos and his half-sister are perhaps its most con- spicuous occupants. The corpses that emerge from the earthreminders of the atrocities of Flanders perhaps or of Philip's murderous excessesmay evoke a traumatic past that the characters can never escape from: ghosts that haunt the nation's present. They remain an unnecessary distraction, however, from the main plot. And while the central narrative is beautifully enhanced by the eerie chant of the Duchess of Alba, the multiple spheres of action lend the production an overly busy aesthetic. I missed the clarity of Bieito's storytelling in Macbeth (2002), King Lear (2004), and Peer Gynt (2006). Bieito has always proved a compelling narrator. Here I'm not entirely convinced he's clear about the tale he's try- ing to tell. Eleven years ago I was dazzled by Bieito's inventive take on Garca Lorca's final play, The House of Bernarda Alba. Now Llus Pasqual turns to the play with a production that couldn't be any more different but that similarly finds the pulse of the play. Where Bieito opted for vertical minimal- ism, Pasqual has turned to a horizontal landscape that operates within realist paradigms. Paco Azorn has provided him with an expansive gray-white tiled room: a space that reflects every stain, every speck of dust, anything that taints the brilliance of its sur- faces. Pasqual has plumped for a traverse stage where the audience frames the action. The sisters' sense of imprisonment is evident: high tomb-like walls on two sides, the audience on the other two. The sense of suffocation is palpable. The room is first seen through a fine gauze curtain. The impression is that of looking at a screen, or photograph. The curtain remains in place until after the neighboursand Pasqual provides an astonishing twenty-nine of thementer following the funeral mass for Bernarda's husband, Antonio Mara Benavides. When this curtain lifts (and the ceiling closes in like a detachable car roof) we begin to get a sense of the inner workings of the house that Rosa Maria Sard's Poncia had alluded to in the opening scene. Without the gauze to mask it, Bernarda's jacket looks well worn from heavy iron- ing; her daughters look pale and rather sickly. In act 2, appearing first in white underwear, they blend in with the walls in an alarming fashion. In act 1, Pasqual shows Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio dying clothes black in a large cauldron. Pragmatic economy is the order of the day. Forget the faded glamour of Howard Davies's 2005 National Theatre production, this is a world where imprisonment takes its toll and poverty is a not-so-distant possibil- ity for the majority of the sisters. Indeed, Pasqual's production is filled with memorable moments that highlight the increasing desperation of the sisters. Fans are used as both adornments and weapons, fluttering like a tiny cho- rus as the neighbours enter the stage in act 1. Chairs are removed effortlessly as the neighbours leave the stage minutes later. Magdalena weeps as the reapers march past the window in act 2 and then washes away their traces with water from the tap. Angustias kisses the photo of Pepe el Romano when it is returned to her from Martirio. The exclusion of Angustias is evident in act 2 as the sisters congre- gate on the other side of the stage as if about to face her in a gladiatorial conflict. The sickly Martirio suffers panic attacks that suggest asthma. The girls follow their mother like a herd of elephants as she enters the room to enquire about the noise in the vil- lage as act 2 nears its end. The sisters often give the impression of waiting by the doorlistening and observing the action. Pasqual's production sets up a 50 Garca Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba, directed by Llus Pasqual. Photo: David Ruano. concrete sense of vigilance and surveillance, of an enclosed environment where nothing escapes. Indeed, the small drain in the centre of the stage in act 2 is the only way anything gets away from the house. While there is a definite period feel to the productionwith clear 1930s costumes and hair the performance vocabularies betray the influence of both Brook and Strehler. The economy of move- ment is pure Brook; the almost dance like aesthetic Strehler. Crucially, Pasqual follows both in opting for a grounded characterization of all the roles. Each daughter is carefully defined; their modes of walk- ing, talking, posture, gestures all worked through to sustain the action of the play. Nuria Espert gives us a Bernarda that struggles with what's expected of her. Her attire betrays her conformity and respectability: mannish lace-up shoes, a long straight skirt, and buttoned up jacket. She whips Angustias like a horseman berating an errant mule who can't keep up to speed when she finds Angustias has been outside watching the men; she rubs lipstick across her face to render her a clown- like figure when she sees her wearing make-up on the day of her step-father's funeral. She confronts Poncia like a boxer ready to throw the first blow and arches her face knowingly to catch note of all the conversations around her. This is not a Bernarda that rules by shouting but rather by quiet coercion. She is also presented as a mother who collapses to the floor on hearing of her daughter's death. At the end of the production she watches impotently as her remaining daughters cling to the white walls like distended spiders, crumpling to the floor as the cur- tain falls. Only Angustias looks to the door, but it is a door that the production suggests is now closed to her. The final image is of the living dead, slowly suffocating corpses in a tomb. Pasqual uses the width of the stage bril- liantly, with characters hovering by the edges, sometimes watching or waiting, sometimes unsure as to whether to make an entry. The build up in act 3 is expertly handled, with thunder and lightning serving to conjure a storm-brewing mood that fur- ther unsettles the characters. Pasqual understands the architectural shape of the play and its echoes of gothic melodrama. The characters' comings and goings in the latter half of act 3 are almost farcical. 51 Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, directed by Llus Pasqual. Photo: David Ruano. Martirio attempts to strangle Adela and then fights with her aggressively as the latter boldly declares that she's been with Pepe. Angustias grabs Adela roughly by the hair as the truth of her relationship with Pepe is exposed. The production expertly negotiates the dif- ferent generic registers of the playfrom gothic horror to symbolism, from the picturesque to real- ism. Rosa Mara Sard's Poncia is an earthy plain speakershe first appears stuffing her face with bread and ham. She's not afraid to get her hands dirty and moves with the pragmatic purpose of one of life's doers. Sard's elastic face has always been a wonderful comic weapon, and here she uses it to full effect: there are disdained looks, firm reproaches, whispered suggestions, conspiratorial conversa- tions. With Espert's Bernarda, she creates a double- act that speaks of a shared history that we can only begin to gleam. Indeed, for all the clarity of Pasqual's production, much is left unsaid: just sug- gested or implied. The play retains its mysteries. Pasqual is also not afraid to show the grubby nature of the world of the play. Teresa Lozano's Mara Josefa bathes her head in the cauldron of clothes' dye. The sisters cackle at each other like vipers. Mara Josefa in pink-white bodicean image of distended femininitywith red cheeks has some- thing of Angustias with make-up streaked across her face. She functions perhaps as a reminder of the fate that awaits the daughters. Her act 3 appearance, lamb in tow, portrays her as a grotesque Madonna, shawl enveloping her head like a shroud. Presented at Catalonia's National Theatre, the TNC, the production opts not for a Catalan or a specifically Andalusian world but rather a more generalized Spanish rustic milieu. Flat espadrilles are the preferred footwear of most of the cast. Heat is palpably suggested through the lighting and pos- ture of the characters. Water is flicked by the sisters to cool themselves down; clothes are dispensed with when possible in favour of undergarments; jugs of water are the most conspicuous adornment in the space. Pasqual has an impressive track record with Garca Lorca's impossible workshaving staged the premieres of The Public and Play without a Title in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Here he turns to one of the playwright's most emblematic works and pro- vides a compelling reading that refuses to tread the Shakespeare's Hamlet, directed by Oriol Broggi. Photo: Bito Cels. 52 53 all too familiar folkloric path of so many of his predecessors. A sell out two-month run at the TNC's Sala Petita has been met with rapturous reviews and the production now moves to Madrid where it plays at the Teatro Espaol from 10 September to 25 October. Barcelona doesn't have a shortage of appropriated theatre spaces. The old flower market is now the Mercat de les Flors; the agricultural pavilion in Montjuc the new Teatre Lliure home, a former factory the Sala Beckett (and this is to name just three). More recently, the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya has served as a welcome theatrical venue for Oriol Broggi's and Carlota Subirs's inventive Laperla 29 company. After their majestic King Lear last year, there's a return to Shakespeare with an ambitious production of Hamlet in the stark stone-walled interior of the nave of the library. In a year where Spain has had a plethora of Hamlets the most recent featuring Broken Embraces's Blanca Portillo in the title roleBroggi gives us a take that reminds us how indebted he is to the holy and rough theatre of Peter Brook. The sand floors, a hallowed environment, the simplicity of a dcor enacted through and across the bodies of the actorssave for a row of coat pegs on the back wall and a bench and platform brought on as necessaryis all basic Brook. The focus is on telling a story, and the stag- ing is bereft of distractions that might get in the way of this storytelling. We begin with a prologue by Horatio that frames the tale as theatre. There's a row of black jackets across a back wall, ready to be appropriated by the actors. Bernardo and Marcellus appear with staffs in hand, recalling Sotigui Kouyat's Prospero in Brook's Tempest. Fire and water make their way in to the production and a car- pet is rolled out for The Murder of Gonzago. The characters climb up to high windows as if ascending battlements. Props are carried on and off as part of the ensuing action. A cast of seven move across characters; donning a jacket or a pair of glasses to suggest the move to another role. Nothing is forced. We are simply asked to accept that when the cos- tume is picked up the transition has taken place. Broggi's accomplished production culti- vates our complicity. Hamlet talks to us as if we were seated in the corner of a caf with him. Old Hamlet's Ghost wanders into the auditoria through the same door as the audience previously entered. This is the disruption, the 'thing' that enters from a different realm, sword in hand, to turn the world of Elsinore inside out. We are witnesses to this act and so become implicated in the culture of fear and ret- ribution that Hamlet is a part of. Hamlet is certainly in mourning but the mourning is only part of who he is. We see him hugging Laertes as the latter leaves for Paris and engaging in banter with Horatio. With his father he speaks in Englisha reminder of the English original strikingly reworked by Joan Sellent into Catalan and a suggestion of the complicity between father and son. This is a boy's world. Polonius hugs his son while his coy, fresh-faced daughter looks by embarrassedly. Aida de la Cruz looks a frail Ophelia, even her flimsy dress offers little protection in this determinedly masculine court. She's brought on by her father to perform what she knows about Hamlet in front of the wor- ried King and Queen. Carme Pla's more robust Gertrude, clad in weightier red velvet tunic, is better able to deal with the intrigues and protocols of the kingdom, but even the geeky Rosencrantz and Gildenstern (memorable performances from Marc Rodriguez and Jordi Rico in tails) show themselves unable to survive in such a wily world. Ramon Vila's Claudius displays the ravages of age on a weather-beaten face, and Carles Martnez's Polonius walks with hunched shoulders that suggest a career worn down by responsibilities and guilt. Julio Manrique's Hamlet has something of the lost adolescent about him. He struts across the stage, notebook in hand, and we are never entirely sure if he's authoring the story of his life or writing down exercises to perfect his English. There's some- thing refreshingly ordinary about him. He's no mati- nee idol Hamlet in the vein of Juan Diego Botto or Jude Law. Rather we have an earnest young man, a frenzied smoker swamped by the circumstances in which he finds himself. He fights Laertes because he is given no choice. He kills Polonius awkwardly and then wrestles to get rid of the body. Thrust into a situation, he struggles through it. By the final act he appears exhausted, too tired to really contem- plate a life beyond revenge. This is a production that evokes the spirit of the early Lliure. There is nothing superficial here; indeed, the set might have been designed by Fabi Puigserver or Cheek by Jowl's Nick Ormerod. The projections on the back wallmoving from a dreamy sky at the opening to storm clouds as Ophelia is buriedmay be reminders of twenty- first century scenography, but they are there to assist in the telling of the story. At times the Ghost is noth- ing but a series of projections on the wall, words bereft of a voice; dismembered commands to a grieving son. There is a rich attention to detail in Broggi's production. And while not all of it quite worksas with the players performing in Italian and a rather laboured dialogue between father and son in Englishthe production demonstrates a wit and intelligence that lifts it above the more earnest Hamlets seen on the Spanish stage this year. This Hamlet talks to the stage manager, puffs pensively on a cigarette while delivering "To be or not to be," and closes curtains in preparation for the perform- ance. The production also manages to ensure that humor retains its place. As The Murder of Gonzago begins, the recognizable theme tune from the Indiana Jones films bursts out. The Gravediggers dart around the stage, preparing the space for burial with minimal fuss. Throughout, an intelligent scoreboth onstage guitar and recorded tracks further aids in the telling of the tale. We end with Tom Waits's "Goodnight Irene," a veil of melan- choly enveloping the play's finale. The characters fallan array of corpses strewn on the sandand then they stand again and go: both actor and role leaving the stage at the end of the performance. 54 Ingmar Bergman will undoubtedly be best remembered here in America as the legendary Swedish film director. But of course, anyone famil- iar with his career knows that he was also a great theatre director. For over half a century, Bergman worked in the theatre, starting in regional theatres and eventually working his way up to Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre (affectionately know as Dramaten) in Stockholm. He ultimately directed well over 100 productions throughout his life. Now two years after his death, Dramaten has established the Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival to honor Bergman's theatre legacy, the first install- ment of which unfolded at the end of last May and early June at Dramaten. The festival comprised eleven jam-packed days of performances (mostly from other parts of Europe), readings, open rehearsals, seminars, lectures, and exhibits (which, I might add, also touched on his film workhow could it not, after all?). It was a fitting tribute to the Swedish master. Space does not permit a full accounting of all of the events, but here are some of the highlights. Given that this was a new venture for all involved without any real precedent for Dramaten as an institution, it was perhaps understandable that the festival suffered a bit of identity confusion the first time out, in terms of what it was trying to accomplish. Although Staffan Valdemar Holm, the festival's Artistic Director (as well as a former Artistic Director of Dramaten) stated clearly in the festival program that the main focus "was not on the texts by Ingmar Bergman but on artistic excellence and relevance," the first few days did group togeth- er several performances that were based on Bergman's film work, so one could indeed wonder if the festival's over-riding purpose was simply a for- mal exercise in transposing Bergman films into stage versions, a dubious project at best. Luckily, the second half of the program branched out into other performances that had nothing to do with Bergman per se, and it was in this mode that the fes- tival redeemed itself with several truly stunning evenings of theatre. Opening NightCries and Whispers It was a typically beautiful Swedish Spring evening. The sun hung low and golden in the sky, refusing to setto paraphrase Stephen Sondheim in his lyrics for A Little Night Music (based, of course, on Bergman)not until elevenish that is, which was still four hours off. Crowds had gathered at the steps of Dramaten, an imposing and beautiful art deco The 2009 Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival Stan Schwartz 55 Cries and Whispers, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo: Jan Verweyveld. edifice, where glasses of champagne were being given out. The doors were flung open and the pub- lic poured in, greeted by familiar Bergman actors. The lobby of the theatre had been taken over by a multimedia exhibit conceived by the Swedish Institute, entitled Ingmar Bergman: The Man Who Asked Hard Questions, in which a dozen or so screens arranged in a circle projected a documentary film presentation of thirty-two chapters, each cen- tered on a particular theme. Over the next few weeks, people would linger here, watching this fas- cinating and poetic collage of clips and interviews (including Bergman's rarely seen and hilarious early soap commercials). But now, all attention was fixed on the head of the Swedish Institute (and former Swedish Consul-General here in New York City) Olle Wstberg, who gave a spirited welcoming speech, ending in a heart-felt toast to Bergman's memory and the festival. The atmosphere was indeed heady and festive, but I personally was a lit- tle anxious about the opening night performance which awaited us and which was bound to divide the critics. That production was Ivo van Hove's stage version of Bergman's 1972 film masterpiece Cries and Whispers. The Dutch iconoclast did not disappointnot in the sense, that is, of ensuring divided opinion, as evidenced by the heated debates at the opening night party afterwards. New York readers will recall that van Hove and his Amsterdam company, Toneelgroep, brought their Opening Night (based on Cassavetes's film) to the Brooklyn Academy of Music a year ago, a per- formance which for me already set in motion my own internal debate about the pros and cons of mak- ing a play from a film. At the time, van Hove said he was planning stage versions of the Bergman classic as well as some Antonioni films. I was skeptical. It is, after all, a well known clich that b-novels make the best films (as opposed to great literature because whatever it is in the language that makes something great literature is generally not translatable to the screen), and it reasonably follows that the better a film isi.e., the more purely filmic it isthe hard- er it would be to translate it to the stage. Van Hove's Cries and Whispers proved this stunningly and depressingly. I say "Van Hove's Cries and Whispers" because it was clearly his Cries and Whispers, not Bergman's. Mind you, van Hove had repeatedly spoken in interviews of his so-called "fidelity to the text" and indeed, much of the film's dialogue was to be heard (in Dutch) in his stage ver- sion. But this kind of fidelity misses the point of the aesthetic question at the heart of the debate about making plays from masterful films. That question is: what is the function of dialogue? Dialogue is the absolutely fundamental building block of theatre (traditional, psychologically-based theatre, that is) which is not the case in film. In film, it is the image, or more precisely, the rhythm of images and how they artificially "sculpt time"to quote Andrei Tarkovsky's wonderful metaphor for filmmaking that is at the heart of film language (I might add that Bergman long ago went on record as adoring Tarkovsky's work). And if there is any Bergman film which beautifully exemplifies the notion of a fluid stream of images "sculpting in time," it is Cries and Whispers. Of course dialogue is impor- tant, but it is secondary, compared to its primacy in theatre. (In this regard, the viewer will recall that some of the most stunning sequences in Bergman's film, and many films out there in general, are with- out dialogue.) So, van Hove's argument that he has included all the film's dialogue is meaningless especially given the typically Hove-esque context in which he has placed Bergman's dialogue. Not surprisingly, the director has updated the film to the present. Instead of a gorgeous turn- of-the-century manor-house in which two estranged sisters and a mysteriously silent but ever-faithful maid watch over a third sister who is dying, this ver- sion features contemporary characters in a contem- porary setting: a loft-like space with sliding panels and screens, that looks like nothing less than a quick and facile variation of the set design for Opening Night. Crucial to the film is the almost unbearable tension between the exquisite surface and the hor- rific sub-currents percolating under that surface. There is nothing analogous in the stage version; how could there be, given the conception? In the film, the dying Agnes is seen to paint watercolors a small detail, really. But in van Hove's version, she is deliberately elevated to the level of "artist," specifically, a video artist trying to capture her own death on video as a conceptual piece. The idea is just plain sillya transparent excuse for the direc- tor to indulge in his well-known and over-used obsession with video. And whereas in Opening Night, the video seemed somewhat organic to the whole, here it comes off as gimmicky and annoying. Other basic differences between the film and this stage production abound: Bergman's film is ulti- mately about matters of the spiritthe final imper- ative to achieve some kind of grace, whatever that may mean. This all-important Bergman theme is 56 nowhere to be found in van Hove's vision. Rather, it is matters of the flesh on which van Hove concen- trates, and in striking and off-putting detailblood, excrement, etc. Such a focus negates the transcen- dent nature of Bergman's piece. One of the film's most harrowing and important scenes is the speech of the priest at Agnes' deathbed, in which he invokes life's unending miseries as an inescapable existen- tial given, from which the now-dead Agnes is final- ly happily free, thus giving her spirit the opportuni- ty to speak to God in person on behalf of the tor- tured living left behind. The speech is indeed there in van Hove's production (a perfect example of the director's misguided notion of "fidelity") but in the context of everything else, it makes absolutely no impressionwhich is quite a perverse feat, given the power of the speech. Another truly puzzling aspect of the production is its failure to distinguish the personalities of the four women, whose differ- ences in the film are razor sharp, vivid, and of the utmost importance. Here, the women's characteriza- tionsnotwithstanding, of course, the agonized suffering of Agnesactually seem generalized and bland. Altogether, this was a shaky start to a festival devoted to the spirit of Bergman. As far as I could tell, Bergman's spirit was nowhere present in van Hove's pretentious and misguided production. From the Life of the Marionettes The film-to-stage debate continued. From the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg came this stage ver- sion of Bergman's 1980 film From the Life of the Marionettes, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Made in Germany during Bergman's temporary self- imposed exile there after his well-publicized tax scandal in Sweden, the film is hardly one of Bergman's best efforts. The piece is a stark and somber investigation into the murder of a prostitute by a seemingly ordinary, well-adjusted married man (Bergman fans will note that the character is actual- ly Peter Egerman, a secondary character from Scenes from a Marriage). Deliberately structured as a series of distinct scenes, mostly monologues and duo-logues, it is a better fit for a stage adaptation than Cries and Whispers, and although I do not par- ticularly like the film, I found this stage version intriguing, and far more successful than Mr. van Hove's efforts, if only because the source material is second-rate. This fact, ironically, allows a theatrical investigation for its own sake to be somehow more appropriate than if the original were an unqualified masterpiece. Kriegenburg is a director interested in pushed physicality and stylization, both of which were in evidence in this production. The staging achieved an almost choreographic effect at times, heightening the dream-like (nightmarish, really) quality of the play, as various people in the protag- onist's life speculate on how such a crime could have come to pass. Particularly effective was the use of a flashback structure, in which the initial murder scene was constantly replayed in developing incre- Life of Marionettes, directed by Andreas Kriegenburg. Photo: Hans Jrg Michel. 57 58 ments, only to reach its eventual climactic fulfill- ment in the final replay at the evening's end. All the actors were first rate, but Jrg Pose in the lead role was particularly outstanding, exhibiting an intensity that was both compelling and appropriate for the piece. Helmut Mooshammer as Tim, the homosexu- al friend, was also particularly touching. I should add that the other main star of the evening was the set design, a strikingly bizarre and slightly Japanese stage picture (designed by Kriegenburg himself) featuring bright red walls in a cage formation, a super-shiny floor reflecting the countless light bulbs on the ceiling, a few pieces of modern furniture, and two gorgeous cherry trees in full bloom. What this had to do with the play is hard to know, but it some- how worked with the deliberate strangeness and dysfunctionality of the evening. Of Readings and Open Rehearsals The idea of putting Bergman films on stage just kept going and going like the famed Energizer Bunny. From the well-known Almeida Theater in London came a reading of Bergman's 1962 classic Through a Glass Darkly, adapted for the stage by Andrew Upton (Cate Blanchett's husband, with Ms. Blanchett acting as one of the project's producers), and directed by Michael Attenborough, the Almeida's Artistic Director. This was a minimally rehearsed, script-in-hand, work-in-progress, with a full production planned for next year in London. Bergman's film, one of the so-called chamber films, is a four-character study of a family falling apart over a twenty-four-hour period on the remote island of Fr. In its famous climactic scene, the schizo- phrenic daughterHarriet Andersson in one of her most legendary performancessees God in the form of a spider (I should add that Ms. Andersson, equally extraordinary as Agnes in the original Cries and Whispers some years later, was in attendance at the festival.) The four British actors here were Alex Jennings, John Bowe, Luke Treadaway, and Ruth Wilson, all well-known in England. Given the work- shop nature of the evening, it would be inappropri- ate to judge it on any level except for the question of how well the stage adaptation worked. It did, I'm happy to say, which is not surprising, given the claustrophobic and literary quality of the original piece. That's not to say that a successful finished production would be an easily-achieved fait accom- pli. Out of context, Bergman's text by itself could come off as melodramaticit's the power of his images and the superb performances, together with the film's extraordinary tension, that keep such potential dangers in check. A finished stage produc- tion would have to find ways of accomplishing the same, in which case very carefully calibrated and nuanced direction together with an intense but inter- nalized acting style would be key to its success. It will be fascinating to see what they come up with in London next year. A few days later, Dramaten itself offered a public open-rehearsal of their upcoming production of Bergman's famous 1973 television series, Scenes from a Marriage, here directed by Stefan Larsson and featuring Jonas Karlsson and Livia Millhagen as the couple whose marriage is falling apart (immortalized in the original by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson). In this instance, I have no qualms about a stage adaptation: for one thing, it is written as a series of distinct scenes of dialogue, a form Bergman often used for his television work and which functioned at its best as a kind of halfway point between film language and theatre language, mixing the best of both. Also, it's interesting to note that Bergman himself mounted a theatre version of his own in the 1980s. Curiously, so did Ivo van Hove in more recent years. In fact, there have been dozens of stage versions performed all over the world. In this case, the scene being rehearsed was one of the early scenes, in which the fractures in the couple's marriage are only beginning to show. Although the actors were excellent, this didn't strike me as a true rehearsal. The director was very con- scious of the audience watching, and he was very much "performing" as director, as much as the actors were performing their characters. His instruc- tions and comments to the actors between run- throughs seemed less than spontaneous. Still, it was a pleasure to watch the actors at work, especially the superb Jonas Karlsson, one of Sweden's best young actors. I should add that the finished production has since opened at Dramaten to mostly positive reviews. Psychological Realism versus Deconstructionist Collage Both at the seminars and at the crowded and noisy bars after performances, there was much fascinating and sometimes heated discussion about the nature of theatre languageand at a level of sophistication and passion that I never hear, sadly, during an average night out at the theatre in New York. In certain quarters, American theatre was aggressively disparaged as hopelessly old-fashioned with its clinging devotion to linear narrative mired in psychological realism. (American voices were almost entirely absent from the festival, which was telling, but of what, I am not sure.) To a certain extent, the indictments against American theatre are true, of course, but one must place such concerns within the context of commercial theatre and its function in a commercial society like America. It's curious to note that people at the festival used the phrase "art theatre" the same way we use the phrase "art film." A theatre language where psychology is all but jettisoned and such elements as movement, sound, image, video, live music, even texture are all given equal status if not superior status to tradition- al dialogue and narrative has been commonplace in Europe for years. (Accordingly, I had to laugh at the recent vociferous objections to the new Tosca at the Met as too radical and outlandish, when by certain European barometers, the production was actually old-fashioned.) Suffice it to say that both modes of the- atregood old fashioned psychological realism and post-modern, collagist non-narrativecan be tor- turous to sit through if done poorly, but equally tran- scendent if done well. This perhaps obvious axiom was no more explicitly and wonderfully proven than by the festivals two truly stunningand utterly oppositeperformances: Eraritjaritjaka: Museum of Phrases and La Doleur. Conceived and directed by composer- director Heiner Goebbels from the Thtre Vidy- Lausanne, Eraritjaritjaka featured a monologue of a collage of texts by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, beautifully performed by Andr Wilms with a deli- cate blend of humor, irony, and pathos. The title is an Australian Aboriginal expression for the nostal- gic yearning for something lost, and the text frag- ments touched on matters of human nature and interaction, music, the state of the world, etc., but they defied concrete analysis or concrete cause and effect meaning which was precisely the point. The overriding raison d'tre of this enigmatic but beauti- ful music-theatre piece was the elaborate and ingen- ious theatrical construct which surrounded and enveloped the monologue: music (supplied by the live, on-stage Mondriaan String Quartet), lighting effects, startling trompe-l'oeil set design, and most importantly, live video. In the play's most notorious moment fairly early on, the actor leaves the stage, followed by a video cameraman, and we in the audi- ence watch live video images projected onto the set of him actually leaving the theatre, catching a taxi outside, and driving ten or fifteen blocks down the road, all the while continuing his monologue. We see him enter an apartment, busy himself with banal matters of his day (including a glimpse of the actu- al day's newspaper and the turning on of an actual radio playing an actual radio station). His mono- logue continues as he starts to make himself an Eraritjaritjaka, directed by Heiner Goebbels. Photo: Mario del Curto. 59 omelette, but at a certain point, we know we are in the throes of some sort of spatial and temporal sleight of hand when his onion-chopping turns out to be in perfect rhythmic sync with the Ravel string quartet we are watching being performed live back in the theatre. I suppose it is not ruining too much (spoiler alert!) to report that the actor is soon revealed onstage as never having left the theatre. It's a breathtaking coup de thtre which, in addition to everything else, magically reveals in a single moment an entire dimension (literally) of the set design that before this moment, we had no visual clue even existed. I couldn't help thinking Mr. van Hove would do well to take a few lessons from Goebbels about the truly imaginative and poetic use of theatrical space and video. Goebbels and his tech- nical team achieved a magical evening of theatre poetics where sound, image, text, space, and even time all coalesced into a unified effervescent vision which completely transcended the sum of its techni- cal parts. I might add that if all this sounds familiar, it's because Eraritjaritjaka was performed here in New York a few years back at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2006. And finally, I will end on a note of psycho- logical realism. Famed French film and theatre director Patrice Chreau brought to the festival his production of La Douleur from Marguerite Duras's novel The War: A Memoir (co-directed with Thierry Thie Niang). In it, the sublime Dominique Blanc, who has collaborated with Chreau before in both film and theatre, performs an eighty-minute mono- logue on a stage ostensibly bare save a table, some chairs, and a few props, which chronicles Duras's own experiences in the Resistance in World War Two. The monologue ultimately zeroes in on the story of her husband's return from the Nazi death camps and the harrowing details of nursing him back to health from a state that was perilously close to death. With material that could easily have slipped into distasteful melodrama, the amazing Ms. Blanc (under Chreau's expert guidance) consistent- ly avoided even the slightest trace of sentimentality. Hers was a performance championing three funda- mental and essential theatrical virtuessimplicity, directness, and emotional honesty. The effect was devastating and when it came time for the final blackout, I dare say there wasn't a dry eye in the house. It was in these final moments, taken together with the magical mysteries of Goebbel's dream vision in Eraritjaritjaka, that one could pal- pably feel the spirit of Ingmar Bergman, theatre director, hovering in the air of Dramaten's galleries. La Doleur, directed by Patrice Chreau. Photo: Ros Ribas. 60 The explosion of festival culture over the past fifteen years has, as has been widely remarked, produced a globalized culture in which certain per- formances obtain a cult status very different from the typical cultural capital of performances that only appear in one city for a limited amount of time. In the United Kingdom, a proliferation of theatrical festivals of all levels means that even without the madness of Edinburgh, one can see a huge variety of new touring work. With the United Kingdom's rela- tive compactness as well, it's easy to pick and choose from the multitude of performances on offer at a variety of festivals. I focus in this article on selected pieces seen with my partner at three festi- vals: London's Spill Festival, the Manchester International Festival, and the Brighton Festival. Brighton is the most established of these festivals, with a history dating back to 1967. The ethos of its origins can be seen in Brighton, a sea- side city which still in some parts feels like a relic of that era, with a plethora of tie-dyes and vegetarian restaurants (notable among them the Michelin-rec- ommended Terre Terre). The festival features a bustling fringe and a variety of performances onto which one can stumble, ranging from theatre and performance to dance, music, literary events, and public debate. The festival executives under the new leadership of Andrew Comben, decided, for the first time to invite a Guest Artistic Director to help curate the festival and chose Anish Kapoor for this role. Kapoor designed several sculptural installations, most of which were free and open to the public. (The one exception to this was his "Imagined Monochrome: A Massage" in which the individual audience members were given a brief massage, in an attempt to create the experience of monochro- maticity). Both of the other two festivals were begun in 2007 as biennial events. The Manchester International Festival bills itself as "the world's first international festival of original, new work and spe- cial events" and claims that all events are premieres, at least in a broadly defined sense. The Spill Festival is produced by the Pacitti Company and presents a variety of important local, national, and internation- al work, as well as inviting a "thinker in residence" 61 Not Simply Edinburgh: The Proliferation of Festival Culture in the UK Joshua Abrams Dismemberement, designed by Anish Kapoor. Photo: Courtesy of the Brighton Festival. to see and respond to all the events through a series of open conversations and weekly "Spill Feast" din- ner parties. These two festivals bring a wide variety of major international work to the UK, both new as well as previously seen from a plethora of practi- tioners at the forefront of contemporary perform- ance work. While a review of all the work from these three festivals would be a massive undertak- ing, I've chosen instead to pick out a few highlights overall. The Spill Festival has provided a much needed London space for contemporary, challeng- ing performance, much of which has previously not tended to appear in London. Societas Raffaello Sanzio produced all three parts of their Divine Comedy trilogy, which has been seen widely since its premiere at Avignon last year, although is vastly different in this incarnation [see WES 20:3, Fall 2008]. We watched his trilogy out of order, begin- ning in Paradiso, then moving to Inferno, and then, a week later, on to Purgatorio. These three pieces, ostensibly a trilogy after Dante, all rely on vastly different aesthetics. Paradiso is an installation, a white cube inside a vast empty space; you enter the cube and hear the sound of water in the blackness. As your eyes adjust, you see the water is rushing down the far side of the cube, high above your head a man's torso strains through a circular hole; rather than allowing a true glimpse of "heaven"an impossible theatrical taskcompany director Romeo Castellucci has instead chosen to show us what might be the final image of the Purgatorio, as Dante, having moved through the ledges, wriggles into Paradise. The only thing in this paradise then is the individual audience member, who perhaps becomes Beatrice, in a possible reversal of Sartre's dictum that "Hell is other people." Inferno is a much more theatrical, or per- haps choreographic staging. As the performance begins, we see the letters "INFERNO" across the stagethree-foot high three-dimensional letters, but spelling the word backwards. Sitting onstage and looking out one would see the audience through the sign, as if it were the spectators being catego- rized; hell is not just any other people, but here, with Handke, a theatre audience. Castellucci himself walked on stage and introduced himself, before dressing in a large Velcro padded suit. Several large German shepherds are brought on stage and chained to short heavy chains mounted at the front of the large Barbican stage; as they strain at their bindings, my seat in the third row suddenly seemed far too 62 Societas Raffaello Sanzio's production of Dante's Inferno, directed by Romeo Castellucci. Photo: Luca del Pio. close to the stage. One at a time, three more dogs (Cerberus was apparently unavailable) run onstage from the wings to savage him, tearing at the padded clothingthe sound of the Velcro ripping ominous- ly in the theatre space as the other dogs bark and growl, unable to share in the fun. As a whistle blows, the dogs meekly run offstage, and the others are unclasped and brought offstage as well. A helper puts an animal skin (dog?) on Castellucci as he stands, on all fours, center stage, and the lights go off. The performance follows as a carefully choreographed, and often stark, series of images: Several children play in a glass cube (behind what we assume to be one-way glass, as they appear blissfully unaware of our presence), a boy and girl (Castellucci's children) bounce and exchange a bas- ketball, a marionette human skeleton crawls across the stage, a white horse is brought on stage and splashed with blood-red paint, a grand piano is set on fire. Our guide for the evening is Andy Warhol (not the first use of him as a contemporary Virgil, as I quickly flashed back to Anne Bogart's The Culture of Desire, featuring Andy Warhol as a shopping cart pushing guide to the underworld), who here uses a Polaroid camera to document the onstage happen- ings. The cast, in addition to Castellucci and family, is about forty people, some of whom are trained actors and some of whom simply volunteered and spent the better part of a week rehearsing. The trained actors execute a series of stage dives back- wards off an onstage platform, as the titles of Warhol works flash on the screen behind them and the cast mills about. The large group on stage plays a series of games, most pointedly a series of mimed throat slashes, as each perpetrator in turn becomes victim. The final image with which we are left is Warhol climbing into a burnt out car. This is a hell of everyday events in the post-Warhol world of con- sumerism, a sequence of vivid images that remain seared into the audience's skulls. There's no attempt to follow Dante literally here, as the nine circles of hell are flattened out, but the power of image mak- ing that is Castellucci's strength is certainly on show here. Purgatorio comes from a different aesthet- ic as well; the opening set is a hyper-realistic (if obviously theatrical in size) kitchen, where a woman stands preparing a meal. Her son enters with a toy robot, and she feeds him and reminds him to 63 Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Purgatory, directed by Romeo Castellucci. Photo: Luca del Pio. take his medicine. The son wonders aloud if "he" is coming back tonight. The scene changes seem absurdly long as the text is projected on a screen downstage. When the lights come back up, the boy is playing in his room and watching television. The father comes home and has an odd reunion scene with the motherthere's clearly something off with this family. After the mother leaves, the father removes a cowboy hat, neutral mask, and a silver dildo from his briefcase, and goes to play "Cowboys and Indians" with his son. We sit in uncomfortable silence as we hear the boy being abused in the dark. The boy's robot toy appears in the living room, twenty-feet tall, perhaps to take revenge, but does not; the father plays piano and the son comforts him. The characters leave and reappear behind a circle of glass, which is slowly covered with ink, as plants seem to grow and take on eerie shapes and absurd proportions, dwarfing the family beneath them. The father and son are replaced by different actorsthe father now with severe spastic tenden- cies and the son fully grown. As they dance togeth- er, the story appears to have come full circle, the son now in control, while the father cannot control his own movements. There's something both painful to watch and at the same time incredibly powerful about this casting choice. This show seems to be about the audience's complicity; it is our purgatory here to grapple with the seeming acceptance of child abuse. Few (if any) people walked out; the audience seemed willing to take it. According to Claudia Castellucci's program note, as well as being a human family, this is perhaps representative of the Catholic tripartite godthe abused son must for- give the father, and the circle goes on. As before, the images are stunning, and the theatricality at times threatens to overwhelm the message. Looking at the relationship between adults and children from a drastically different point of view is That Night Follows Day, a production creat- ed by Tim Etchells (of Forced Entertainment) for the Flemish theatre company Victoria. Following Josse de Pauw's 2001 Bung, this is the second piece that Victoria has created with a cast of chil- dren, but for an adult audience. The cast here is six- teen children, aged between eight and fourteen. The set is an immediately recognizable primary school gym or multi-purpose hall. Rows of collapsible bleachers line the back wall along with a green floor painted with white lines for various games and a series of stackable chairs. The performance is clas- sic Tim Etchells, with a line-up of actors who, mak- ing little pretense of the theatrical, speak to and at the audience. They tell us, or perhaps remind us, of the relationship between children and adultswe are addressed in the second person as the children 64 Night Follows Day, directed by Tim Etchells. Photo: Phile Deprez. cycle through a series of simple movements, stack- ing and unstacking the chairs, standing in a line fac- ing us, sitting and standing. The child actors trade lines, passing them like a game of "Hot Potato" or "Pass the Parcel," sometimes speaking individually, sometimes in a chorus. Many of the lines begin "You tell us..." and the conclusion to these declarative statements varies from the instructionalto wash, to dress, to skip stonesto the informativethat night follows day. Other lines remind us that "we" tell little white lies to children, or that we whisper when we think they can't hear. The show is an exploration of parenting turned on its head, and throughout the audience you can hear the individual laughs of recognitionthe "I say that/I do that" or "My parents said that/my parents did that." The show is delightful, and chal- lenging in ways drastically different from Castellucci's use of children. Here too, the audi- ence's complicity is on show, the circle of parent to child and so on is brought into the light here with all its varying shades and intensities. The white lies are necessary along with the instructions, the com- mands, the facts (both correct and not), the stories, and the life lessons, Etchells suggests. I wondered slightly about the authorship of the lines. How much is Etchells projecting and how much was created in workshop? But ultimately, in a piece created for an adult audience, that's both a crucial and not a crucial questionthis is a piece of certain nostalgia, and of the development and relationships between adults and children. Whether these are the children them- selves speaking, or simply parroting lines they've learned, it's all related. Another expression of the parent-child relationship seems to me to appear in Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna, which received its world premiere in Manchester. Originally commis- sioned by the Metropolitan Opera, who later with- drew because of Wainwright's desire to write in French, the opera is at once both a new and a con- servative work. The score is his; the libretto co-writ- ten with Bernadette Colomine. In many ways, it seems that what Wainwright has done is combine his own well documented love for opera with his childhood in a folk-music familyhe treats the his- tory of opera as a variety of folk sources from which he picks and chooses. Not really postmodern pas- tiche, Wainwright's success in this is mixed as he never quite achieves his own voice, which in his own performance work stands out so strongly. The plot is somewhat reminiscent of the camp classic Sunset Boulevard: an aging Callas-like diva, Rgine Saint Laurent, who quit singing after her triumphant opening night performance in an opera written for her (Alienor d'Aquitane), contemplates (although 65 Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna, directed by Daniel Kramer. Photo: Clive Barda. eventually deciding against) a comeback. She is pushed in this by her fame-hungry butler and a jour- nalist (and failed tenor), Andr, who endearingly brings his libretto for Alienor to the interview and ends up singing with her the duet from the opera. This is an opera about opera and plays simultane- ously to two audiences, Wainwright's fans and opera buffs. The latter will recognize throughout the touches and quotationsfrom Strauss, Massenet, Verdi, Ravel, Poulenc, and most notably (and most obviously as well) from Puccini. The end of the opera turns on Andre's Pinkerton-like appearance with his kimono-clad Japanese fiance. A reversal of the racial conclusion to Madame Butterfly; Rgine steps out on her balconythis betrayal echoes her romantic betrayal on the night of Alienor's premiereand considers leaping Tosca- like into the streets of Bastille Day revellers below. The opera is directed by the fabulous young director Daniel Kramer [see WES 18:1, Winter 2006], who brings a gothic neo-expression- ist feel to it. Philippe, the butler (sung by baritone Jonathan Summers), seems perhaps to be a missing fourth bass villain role from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman, clad in a stunning green suit, with a shock of grey hair and an assistant/lover/bellhop in con- stant tow. The production was well sung in all the leadsJanis Kelly is convincing vocally in the demanding role of Rgine, and lyric soprano Rebecca Bottone stood out in the sweet melodies she is given as Rgine's confidante and maid. The production is solid and enjoyable under Kramer's direction and the baton of Opera North's Pierre- Andr Valade, and while not ultimately a success, Rgine's final aria hints at Wainwright's having dis- covered how best to combine his sources with his own unique sense of the lyric. This is an opera that consciously steps back in time, and one imagines that given more time and commissions, the thirty- six year old composer may indeed develop as a strong operatic composer. The other performance that we saw at the Manchester International Festival was Marina Abramovi presents . . . in the Whitworth Gallery. This piece is billed as a four-hour durational experi- ence. When the audience arrived in the space, we were each issued with white lab coats, and a small Dixie cup. Walking into a large open gallery space with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a side street, we each were given small stools to set up fac- ing a long narrow stage, spanning the entirety of the room's length. The performance begins with an hour-long lecture by Abramovic, discussing dura- tional art and how to pay attention. She peppers this with exercises, including staring into the eyes of someone you don't know for several minutes at a Marina Abramovic presents...Alistair MacLennan. Photo: Joel Chester. 66 time, and taking a full ten minutes to drink a tiny cup's worth of water. She tells stories as well, the afternoon we saw it, about her experiences working with the Dalai Lama, and two different performanc- es she designed, each of which ultimately needed to be abandoned, each time giving her a lesson in learning to let go. I'm not quite certain who the intended audience is here. It perhaps speaks to per- formance art's historical background, where these stories and exercises might seem to come more obviously out of theatrical training. Abramovi has described this performance as a trial for her "Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art" that she intends to house in Hudson, New York. The remainder of the four hours the audience is free to wander the gallery, taking in a variety of curated durational performances. Thirteen performers, each from a different country, have been invited by Abramovi to present their work. Alistair MacLennan's work was particularly memorable, with a selection of meticulously laid out shoes forming triangles on either side of a long diagonal plinth, covered with earth and pigs' headsa somewhat Beckettian feel to his presence in the space. Kira O'Reilly fell, in slow motion, down an ornate stone staircase, while in a nearby room Ivan Civic climbed on brackets sticking out of the wall, while behind him is projected a video of his return to Sarajevo after ten years. The entirety of these performance (along with ten others simultane- ously occurring) is impossible to convey; the impact is in the conjunction of these pieces with Abramovi's lecture, encouraging the audience to focus and to slow down. I was dismayed by the nudity in the overall shape of the afternoon, which seemed to be solely female. While the individual pieces may have called for it, the overall feel is that the event was not really fully curated. All the pieces are separate and if one were to devote equal time to each of them, that's less than fifteen minutes each. Is this really intended to encourage an audience to focus on duration and seeing or living differently? Even the twenty-two minutes we give to a television sitcom or the nightly news is of longer duration. The final piece that I want to discuss is Rimini Protokoll's first UK appearance at the Brighton Festival with Breaking News. Known in their work for using non-theatrical "experts in Marina Abramovic presents...Ivan Civic. Photo: Joel Chester. 67 everyday life" [see WES 17:2, Spring 2005], this work, directed by Daniel Wetzel, promises a differ- ent performance every day. (We saw it on 9 May). The stage is filled with a variety of television screens, cables, and accoutrements that look like the set of an elaborate electronics junk shop. A cast of sixjournalists and translatorsenter and sit, each in front of multiple screens. Each of the cast intro- duces themselves and the languages that they speak and explains the rules of the evening, which is a form of documentary theatre. Each screen will show a variety of different news feeds from all over the world, and the performers will translate for the audi- ence (sequentially, but somewhat at random) how the events of the day are being covered in different languages and by different sources. Each has the ability to interrupt, by ringing a bell, if she or he feels that there is something crucial on one of their channels. This is the first half of the evening; in the second half, they rewind the feeds and look at simi- lar stories from different angles On the night we were there, there was nothing particularly crucial or momentous in the news, which meant that the stories flowed pretty evenly around the stage. The performers discuss the news; how it is made, the structure of particular news programs, etc, interspersed with the specific daily updates. The show also relies on Aesychlus' The Persians, a battered copy of which is passed around among the performers, who go to a seat on top of racks of televisions to read from the messen- ger scenes, discussing how theatre begins from the same place as newsthe need to tell what hap- pened. Over the course of the evening, they raise questions about how we decide what's important in storytelling and how much opinion goes into the production of these stories. It's a fun evening at the theatre and a production that definitely encouraged me to try to return and see it again, if I have the chance. For instance, how might this be different on a day with "major late-breaking news," one won- ders? Or what about on the third or fourth night of a news cycle dominated by one particular story? Theatre is often about storytelling and learning how to listen or see again. The proliferation of festival culture allows these events to travel and appear to a variety of different audiences, helping us to think about how these stories are transmitted and retransmitted in our globalized age. 68 In the last issue I wrote about the Comdie- Franaise. In this issue I will cover some notable productions from the last half of the 20082009 sea- son. While the Thtre National Populaire's the- atre in Villeurbane is being renovated the company has been touring a number of productions in France. After the excellent Coriolanus performed at Nanterre in the fall, the company returned to the Thtre 71 in the suburb of Malakoff with perform- ances of five short comedies by Molire. Audiences could see the plays over two evenings or in one five- hour performance on the weekends. Director Christian Schiaretti has chosen to stage the plays with the utmost simplicity. The set consisted of a platform on which there was a frame- work with doors, windows, and an upper level. The frame was covered with a curtain for the first two plays. Actors could be seen sitting upstage of the platform when not performing and were also visible at dressing tables behind an upstage scrim. Julie Grand provided often-sumptuous seventeenth centu- ry costumes. Ten fairly young actors performed all the roles. The first two plays, The Jealousy of Barbouill and The Flying Doctor, are simple farces without much substance. Although the actors were competent and made the audience laugh, I felt they lacked the flare of true commedia dell' arte trained clowns. Things improved with Sganarelle, the Imaginary Cuckold. The plot of the play is better managed than that of the earlier plays, and Sganarelle's extended drinking scene was well acted by Julien Gauthier. The premise of The School for Husbands is delightful: two old men who are broth- ers have raised their wards with differing principles. Both hope to marry the young women. Ariste who has given his ward Lonor great liberty is in fact loved by her. Sganarelle has raised Isabelle with severity and is detested by her. The plot concerns bringing together the young lovers Isabelle and Valre with the help of their respective servants, Lisette and Ergaste. Olivier Borle was suitably crusty as Sganarelle in contrast to Jrme Quintard's elegant and sophisticated Ariste. Clmentine Verdier and Clment Morinire were utterly charming as the lovers. The final play, The Ridiculous Young Ladies, is an amusing satire of precocity, which was in fash- Paris Theatre, WinterSpring 2009 Barry Daniels From Five Short Comedies by Molire, directed by Christian Schiaretti. Photo: Christian Ganet. 69 ion in 1660 in Paris. Jeanne Brouaye (Magdelon) and Clmentine Verdier (Cathos) were deliciously foolish as the two young slaves to fashion. Two suit- ors they have snubbed take vengeance on them by disguising their respective servants as a Count and a Marquis who court the young women. Georges Feydeau was a prolific author of vaudevilles during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth centu- ry. His work enjoyed an enormous success during his lifetime and has remained in the repertory in France and throughout the world. Although his kind of situation-based comedy is not to my taste, I must admit he had a genius for creating hilarious situa- tions. Gifted young director Jean-Franois Sivadier staged an immensely successful production of Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's (1900) as the final production of the season at the Odon-Thtre de l'Europe. The play may well be Feydeau's mas- terpiece. Its intricate plot begins with Dr. Petypon waking up under the sofa in his apartment, having passed out after a night of heavy drinking with his colleague Dr. Mongicourt. They find in Petypon's bed a dancer from the Moulin Rouge, La Mme Crevette (the Kid Shrimp), whom Petypon picked up at Maxim's. When Petypon's uncle, the General, arrives after a long stay in Africa, he assumes the woman in Petypon's bedroom is his wife and invites her to join the wedding party for his ward Clementine at his chateau in Tourraine. Petypon finds it easier to let the General think La Mme Crevette is his wife and makes plans for her to go with him to the chateau in the country. Act 2 takes place at the engagement party where Feydeau deft- ly satirizes the provincial aristocracy's desire to keep up with Parisian fashions. La Mme Crevette, appearing as Madame Petypon, represents the epit- ome of Parisian taste to the women. Her frank and vulgar speech is viewed as being the latest Parisian fashion, which they hilariously try to imitate. Petypon's real wife Gabrielle, having received a written invitation to the event, arrives. Complications ensue as Petypon has passed her off as Mongicourt's wife to the General and she assumes La Mme Crevette must be the General's wife. Act 3 returns the characters to Paris where after numerous complications and the use of an "ecstatic" chair, which when activated puts people into an ecstatic sleep, the true identity of La Mme Crevette is revealed. The play ends with the Petypons reconciled and with the General's decision to marry La Mme Crevette and return to Africa with her. Georges Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's, directed by Jean-Franois Sivadier. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand. 70 Director Sivadier chose to break with the realistic apparatus of Feydeau's work. He has set the play on a virtually bare stage open to the back wall and to the wings where one sees ropes and sand- bags. For the first act there was an upturned sofa under which Petypon was discovered and a large white-curtained bed where La Mme Crevette was concealed. For the hall in the chateau of the second act the white curtain of the bed was draped against the upstage wall where there was a table with refreshments. Chairs were brought on as needed. The third act returns to Petypon's house where the white curtain now hung at the back. Props included the sofa and the ecstatic chair. This simple arrange- ment became a highly theatrical environment in which emphasis went to the work of the actors. Virginie Gervaise's costumes, based on period styles, were colorful and often original comic cre- ations. Sivadier's immensely talented cast com- mitted themselves completely to Feydeau's often absurd situations. I especially enjoyed Ccile Bouillot, Nicolas L Quang, Catherine Morlot and Anne de Queiroz as the quartet of provincial women in the second act. Gilles Privat was a blustery General with a heart of pure gold. Nadia Vonderheyden was amusingly clueless as Petypon's wife Gabrielle. But the play belongs to the two main characters, Dr. Lucien Petypon and La Mme Crevette. Nicolas Bouchaud's Petypon was con- stantly on the verge of hysteria. His arms flailed as he lurched or bounded about the stage. His work reminded me of Jerry Lewis who is much admired by the French. In contrast to Bouchaud's frenzied performance, Norah Krief was imperturbably calm as La Mme Crevette. Waif-like, but with a big voice, she often seemed like a little girl dressed up in her mother's clothes. But this was a girl who has "been around the block" more than a few times. Frank and vulgar she remained bemused throughout at the foolishness of the upper middle class charac- ters in the play. Krief was so good in the first two acts that it was a real disappointment that her char- acter plays only a small role in the last act. During a musical interlude in the second act, when the cast danced around the stage in a cir- cle, Sivadier used some music composed by Nino Rota for Fellini. This was a kind of key to Sivadier's work. The theatricality and broad comic style of the production recalled the work of Fellini and made for a truly memorable evening of theatre. One of my favourite productions of the season was Chekhov's Uncle Vanya as produced by the collective The Possessed at the Thtre de la Bastille. Physically the production was extremely simple. The directors Rudolphe Dana and Katja Georges Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's, directed by Jean Franois Sivadier. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand. 71 Hunsinger placed the audience on three sides of the stage. For act 1 there was a carpet center stage and a long table against the upstage wall. For act two the carpet was removed and the table was placed in the center of the acting area. It was covered with can- dles, which served as the lighting for this act. The table remained, but the candles were removed for act three. For the last act the table was pushed upstage so that it jutted out slightly into the acting area. The cast wore modern clothing. What was striking in this production was the emotional honesty of the performers. Simon Bakhouche was vain and somewhat clueless as the professor. His young wife Elena's boredom and des- peration were beautifully rendered by Katja Hunsinger. Rudolphe Dana combined cynicism and optimism adroitly in his creation of Doctor Astrov. Marie-Hlne Roig was a nave but touching Sonia. David Clavel's Vanya was truly remarkable. He brought out the character's deep frustration and ulti- mate despair. The tedium of life in the country, the poignancy of the unrequited love of Sonia for Astrov, the impossible attraction between Astrov and Elena, the thoughtlessness of the professor, the slavish existence of Vanya: Chekov's portrait of failed and ruined lives was rendered with great hon- esty and skill by the fairly young actors. Gilberte Tsai's staging of Vassa 1910 at the New Theatre of Montreuil was based on the 1910 text of Gorki's play Vassa Geleznova which he revised in 1936. In the play the matriarch Vassa is running her dying husband's shipping business with the aide of her assistant Vassiliev. Her son Semion is lame and half-witted, and is unhappily married to Natalia. Her second son Pavel is married to Vassiliev's daughter Lioudmilla. Vassa's third child is a daughter, Anna. Plot complications center on Vassa's brother-in-law Geleznov, a womanizer who has seduced Natalia and Lipa, a hysterical chamber- maid. Geleznov is threatening to recall a substantial loan he has made to the company which will result in its ruin. The play paints an ugly portrait of a group of genuinely ruthless characters. Tsai's sober realistic production was won- derfully acted. Christiane Cohendy was outstanding as the scheming Vassa, determined to save the busi- ness. Jean-Baptiste Azma was suitably pitiful as the cuckolded son, Semion. Sylvie Debrun por- trayed well the frustration and desperation of his unfaithful wife. Jacek Maka, as the dissolute Geleznov, gave a performance as strong and as hor- rifying as Cohendy's Vassa. As the maid Lipa, Jeanne Arnes made a fine comic turn out of her hysteria. Laurent Peduzzi provided a handsome set, 72 Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, directed by Rudolphe Dana and Katja Hunsinger. Photo: Courtesy of Thtre de la Bastille. a large room in a warehouse full of packing crates with an office area center stage. Bernard Vallry designed period costumes in somber earth colors. Although at times the plot bordered on melodrama, director Tsai's thoughtful approach and the detailed realistic work of the actors brought this rarely per- formed play to life. Paul Claudel's The Satin Slipper is a mon- ument of twentieth century French literature. Published in 1930, the play was generally consid- ered unstageable because of its length. In 1943, Claudel worked on an abridged stage version with Jean-Louis Barrault who directed it at the Comdie- Franaise. Antoine Vitez staged the first complete version of the text in 1987 at the festival of Avignon. Olivier Py's staging of the uncut Satin Slipper was performed at the Thtre de la Ville in 2003. Py has chosen to revive and revise this pro- duction at the Odon-Thtre de l'Europe this year during his second season as artistic director. It was, of course, one of the most anticipated productions of the 20082009 season. With three intermissions Py's staging lasts approximately eleven hours and could be viewed in two parts on two successive weekday evenings or in its entirety starting at one o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday. The play is set in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and deals with the Spanish conquest of the New World, Spain's attempts to secure North Africa, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the battle of Lepante where the Europeans prevented the Turks from invading Europe. Against this historical background Claudel focuses on the unrequited love between Dona Prohze, a married noblewoman, and her suitor the valiant Don Rodrigue. The play is divided into four parts which Claudel names "days," in a nod to the practice of Spanish Golden Age writers. During the first two days we follow the divergent paths of the two lovers. Prohze is sent by her husband to Mogador to maintain the citadel there. Rodrigue participates in the conquest of the New World and is named Viceroy of the Indies by the King of Spain. When Prohze husband dies, she writes to Rodrigue, but the letter takes ten years to reach him. In the interim she has married a moor, Don Camille, in order to obtain his support in saving the citadel. In the third day, Rodrigue, having finally received Prohze's letter, returns to Europe and joins in the fight to keep the Moors out of Spain. At the end of 73 Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Photo: Courtesy of Thtre de la Bastille. this part he meets with Prohze. Her husband will allow her to leave with Rodrigue if he agrees to end the siege against Mogador. Both decide to maintain their honor. As they part, Prohze entrusts the care of her daughter by Camille to Rodrigue. The final day follows Rodrigue's decline. He is reduced to selling images painted to his specification by a man he has met in Japan. He is humiliated by the King of Spain who has an actress pretend to be the Queen of England and offers Rodrigue the post of Viceroy of England (after the defeat of the Spanish Armada). The play ends with Prohze's daughter leaving Rodrigue to join John of Austria in the defence of Europe against the Turks. The whole is highly the- atrical and richly poetic. As a director Py matches Claudel's extrav- agant vision with his own extraordinary theatrical flair. Pierre-Andr Weitz designed handsome baroque costumes with references to commedia dell' arte in the comic scenes. Weitz's set was an ingen- ious series of moving stairs and platforms with gold metal surfaces placed on a gold metal floor. The play opened with a large celestial disc framed by the back of a proscenium arch. The second day used a series of gold arches which recall a traditional per- spective set, but could also by collapsed together to form a solid wall. There were also moving platforms which were faced with elements recalling baroque architecture. Separately one became a church; aligned together they formed the faade of Rodrigue's palace. For the fourth day, the gold fac- ings were turned against the back wall of the stage, and the black platforms and stairs created a number of different ships at sea where the action takes place. The great visual variety of Py's and Weitz's work helped in holding the audience's attention over the enormous length of the production. It is also to Py's credit that the action remained clear throughout. The company consisted of eighteen actors, most of who performed a number of roles. John Arnold proved to be a superb clown in the roles of the "china man" and of the commedia dell' arte dot- tore. Michael Fau was adept as Prohze's guardian angel and had a superb comic turn as the actress who dupes Rodrigue. Bruno Sermonne was brutal and dispassionate as Prohze's first husband. Philippe Girard was a handsome Rodrigue with a slightly otherworldly quality that was right for the role. I found his voice to have a rather limited range which in the long course of the play became monot- onous. Jeanne Balibar was more vocally successful as Prohze, but I found her lacking in warmth and passion. Jean-Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands (1948) and 74 Paul Claudel's Satin Slippers, directed by Olivier Py. Photo: Alan Fonterey. Albert Camus's The Just Assassins (1949) both deal with the issue of political assassination. Last season the Light and Shadow Company performed Camus's play in Paris. This season they have chosen to pres- ent the Sartre play at the Thtre de l'Athne. Dirty Hands is set during the Second World War in a fic- tional eastern European country occupied by the Germans and besieged by the Russians. Hugo Barine, the play's protagonist, is an upper middle class youth who has rebelled against his family by joining a radical faction of the Communist Party. In the first scene, Hugo has just been released from serving a prison term for the assassination of the leader of the Proletarian Party. The next five scenes of the play are a flashback telling Hugo's story from his assumption of the mission to its completion. We see how Hugo becomes the secretary of Hoederer, the Proletarian Party leader. Hugo represents politi- cal idealism while Hoederer is a pragmatist, willing to make compromises (to dirty his hands) to advance his cause. Hugo comes to respect Hoederer and when the moment comes to carry out the assas- sination, Hugo withdraws. When he reenters the office and finds his wife Jessica embracing Hoederer, Hugo shoots him. Thus the assassination becomes a personal action rather than a political one. The final scene returns to the present where Hugo, viewed as untrustworthy, is killed by his communist colleagues. Historically the play is a good example of the political thinking of postwar European intellec- tuals, but it is also a well-constructed drama of ideas with interesting characters. Jean-Pierre Couleau's staging of Dirty Hands was fluid, clear, and dramat- ically interesting. He used the same basic set designed by Raymond Sarti for The Just Assassins, consisting of a large angled arch through which thrusts a low platform. Props were used to establish the different spaces required for the play. A chair and a wall of faded wallpaper served for communist party member Olga's apartment in the first and last scenes. A wrought iron bed and an armoire turned the space into Hugo and Jessica's room. A desk, chairs, and work table created Hoederer's office. Laurent Schneegans provided varied and evocative lighting. The cast, the same actors who had per- formed The Just Assassins, were uniformly excel- lent. Nils Ohlund embodied the idealism and nave enthusiasm as well as the refined upbringing of Hugo. Gauthier Baillot was forceful and charismat- ic as Hoederer. The subtle interaction of the two men forms the intellectual core of the drama. Hugo's wife Jessica is ironically smarter and more political- ly astute than Hugo, which is probably what made 75 Jean Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands. Photo: Courtesy of Light and Shadow Company. her attractive to Hoederer. Anne Le Guernec played Jessica with intelligence and charm. Director Bernard Levy staged an excellent production of Beckett's Endgame last season at the Athne. This season at the same theatre he has been equally successful in staging Waiting for Godot. Levy's stated intention was to follow scrupu- lously all of Beckett's directions. In performance he re-enforced this concept by projecting the cover of the original edition on a scrim followed by the first page of the text. At the end of the act the direction "Curtain" was projected on the scrim. This was repeated for the second act. Guilio Lichtner's set was visually handsome, consisting of an abstract gray surround with a kind of large inkblot on it. The stage floor was gray with a semi-circular white path. Down stage right there was a gray rock, and upstage left was the stark tree whose branch sports a few leaves in the second act. Elsa Pavanel clothed Estragon and Vladimir in various shades of gray and black, dark pants and light jacket for one, light pants and dark jacket for the other. Gilles Arbona was wiry and excitable as Vladimir in contrast to Thierry Bosc's slow and often morose Estragon. The two actors were very effective in expressing the tenderness that underlies the characters' relationship. Patrick Zimmerman, a bear of a man, was brutal and demanding as Pozzo in act 1, which made his helplessness in act two all the more poignant. Georges Ser was a small and thin Lucky, wearing a dark-blue silk jacket of a variety performer. Levy's care in following Beckett's direc- tions proved that these make for a good production. Estragon and Vladimir were often like tired circus clowns. Their routines remain funny, and in the seemingly meaninglessness of their world their endurance and their friendship were very moving. Thomas Bernhard's Minetti is the story of an aging actor who lost his job many years ago and has lived with his daughter in southern Germany. In the play he arrives in a hotel in Ostende on New Year's Eve to meet with a producer who wants him to play King Lear. Andr Engel, who directed dis- tinguished actor Michel Piccoli in King Lear a few seasons ago, has staged Minetti for Piccoli at the Thtre de la Colline. Although Piccoli was superb in what is almost a monodrama, I found Engel's staging heavy-handed. Nicky Rieti's set recreated the lobby, and later the coffee shop, of a grand hotel. Snow was seen falling outdoors. The text with it 76 Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Bernard Levy. Photo: Courtesy Thtre de l'Athne. stylized rhythms and repetitions would have been better served by a more abstract and more "modern" staging. At the Bouffes du Nord, Lambert Wilson has staged Jean-Luc Lagarce's Music-Hall as a vehi- cle for the well-known film star Fanny Ardant. The play is virtually a monologue for a down-and-out variety artist reduced to performing in decrepit provincial theatres. She is accompanied by two "boys" who dance and sing as her backup. The bare stage and crumbling walls of the Bouffes du Nord were a perfect setting for the play. Virginie Gervaise designed an elegant robe and fur wrap for Ardant who wore a blond wig which she removed in the final scene. Ardant, a glamorous woman, honestly portrayed the character who was clearly a second rate performer. She combined a faded charm with just the right hint of desperation. Lambert Wilson's staging was efficient, although Eric Gurin and Francis Leplay were perhaps a bit too polished as the "boys." In one sense the text is homage to all performers who persevere in the face of the worst of circumstances. It was this perseverance that Ardant so radiantly embodied. At the Thtre de la Ville Abbesses, Marc Paquien has directed a fine production of Martin Crimp's The City, an intriguing text, at times banal, at times mysterious. The play begins with Claire describing to her husband Christopher her meeting with a well-known writer whom she greatly admires. He was looking for his daughter whom he had left with his sister-in-law, a nurse. He had bought an agenda for her which he gave to Claire. Christopher subsequently loses his job and eventu- ally finds work as an assistant butcher in a super- market. Their neighbour, Jenny, who works as a nurse at night asks them to try to keep their children from making noise in the garden during the day while she sleeps. Claire, a translator, returns from a conference in Lisbon where she has met the writer who gave her the agenda. He was mourning the death of the daughter he abandoned. During the Christmas celebration which ends the play, Claire gives the agenda to Christopher who reads aloud from it, and we come to understand that in fact the play we have just seen was Claire's unsuccessful attempt to write a novel. Paquien has staged the play in an abstract set designed by Grard Didier which consisted of a textured gray backdrop, a polished black floor, and Martin Crimp's The City, directed by Marc Paquien. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand. 77 some clear plexi-glass furniture. When the couple's daughter first appears she wears the same costume as the nurse Jenny, and they both wear the same dress in the final scene. This odd, unrealistic detail becomes clear when we realize what we may have seen existed only in Claire's imagination. For this reason also, Paquien has had Andr Marcon (Christopher) and Hlne Alexandridis (Jenny) per- form in a broad style that is common in the Parisian commercial theatre. In contrast Marianne Denincourt gave as nicely a modulated, realistic performance as the writer/translator Claire. The continental premier of David Hare's Stuff Happens (2004) took place at the Thtre Nanterre-Amandiers in a staging by Bruno Freyssinet and William Nadylam. Using documen- tary materials Hare recounts the events leading up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. If Sartre cre- ated a fictional vehicle to dramatically embody political ideas, Hare chose to present a journalistic report of actual events. Stuff Happens is always interesting, but the material cries out for dramatic development. One can only imagine what a Shakespeare might have done with a cast of charac- ters that includes George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Tony Blair. As an American (albeit a perma- nently expatriated one), I would argue that Hare presents a typically European view of the United States. He fails to represent the profound ignorance and fundamentalist bigotry of Bush, and he ignores the large protest movement against Bush's actions. The character who seems to interest Hare the most is Tony Blair who is depicted as having a nave belief in Bush's intelligence and integrity. Hare's method does not allow for an exploration of charac- ter and motivation, and this is where it fails as drama. Freyssinet and Nadylam's staging made the material theatrically engaging. The play was per- formed on a large, white traverse stage with large video screens at each end. Furniture props were used sparingly. The cast moved quickly about the open space and often gave the effect of reporters fol- lowing a story. Live video interviews were project- ed simultaneously on the video screens. The excel- lent cast had clearly studied video tapes of their characters. Because character development was not a concern of Hare, the work of the actors was reduced to that of being good mimics. Although Stuff Happens was always interesting, its essential lack of the basic elements of good drama made it frustrating to watch. 78 On a long weekend in early June in Vienna I was able to see three productions which provided a good sampling of the range of offerings available in this major theatre capital. One was a German classic, Kleist's The Broken Jug, one a modern inter- national classic, Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and one a Shakespeare, Macbeth (though, as is often the case in the German-language theatre, much adapted). There is almost always a great deal of stim- ulating theatre in Vienna, but the spring is especial- ly rich due to the offerings of the Vienna Festwochen, which, unlike the Berlin Theatertreffen in early May (see earlier article in this issue) invites not only German productions, but others from around the world. The New York-based Elevator Repair Service was playing the weekend I was there, doing their striking reading of passages from The Sound and the Fury. Actually the Festwochen offering I decided to attend was very much a German offering, Kleist's The Broken Jug, created in September of 2008 at the Berliner Ensemble by Peter Stein, who still has a major reputation and a significant following in Germany, although he is generally dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned and traditional by younger theatre-goers. That is doubt- less a major reason why for many years he has directed few productions in Germany, preferring such international venues as the Salzburg and Edinburgh festivals. His 2007 production of Wallenstein, also presented by the Berliner Ensemble, was his first work in Germany in the new century, and the Kleist is the second. The production illustrates clearly many of the features that cause some people to admire Stein and others to avoid him. Unlike many recent German directors, Stein has a deep respect for the original text, leading him to present even a verbose work like Wallenstein in its multi-hour entirety, a project almost no one else would undertake. Similarly, not only is The Broken Jug presented without a cut, Stein even uses the variant version Goethe asked Kleist to write which adds consider- ably to the last part of the play, mostly rather pon- derous moralizing and extra exposition that is far from current taste or interest. This respect produces an impressive but rather heavy interpretation, and little is left of the actual humor in the play, which was a bit Germanic and heavy-handed to begin with. The well known Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who also played Wallenstein for Stein, does much mugging and posturing, as is his custom, Report from Vienna Marvin Carlson Heinrich von Kleist's Der zerbrochene Krug, directed by Peter Stein. Photo: Courtesy of Vienna Festwochen. 79 but little of it induces much laughter. The support- ing cast, headed by Marina Senckel as Eve, Martin Seifert as Walter, and Michael Rotschopf as Licht, are all solid and convincing, but there is not a light touch anywhere. Another quality characteristic of much of Stein's work, is the painterly beauty of the setting. Stein and his designers Ferdinand Wgerbauer (set- ting), Joachim Barth (lighting), and Anna Maria Heinrich (costumes) obviously made a careful and detailed study of seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ry Dutch genre paintings. Indeed, the setting itself is a literal and exact copy, right down to the placement of furniture and the direction of beams of light, of a painting in this tradition based on the Kleist play and called The Judge, or the Broken Jug by the French artist Jean Jacques Le Veau. The result is a production of considerable visual beauty, although this does little to alleviate the static quality of the production as a whole. The only significant changes Stein has made to the text are, as is often the case, in pan- tomime sequences at the beginning and end. The production opens with two maids clearing the room and opening up for the day's work. This consists in large part of removing the dozen or so live chickens that have presumably spent the night roosting there. The squawking and flapping of these as they are gathered up and tossed out starts the play on an engaging note both comic and much in the mood of the setting, but the laughter and applause it gener- ates are not often heard later. The ending pantomime is far more elaborate. Adam, when exposed, has leaped out of the window. When the play's action is concluded, the remaining characters leave and the elaborate setting breaks up and disappears into the flies and wings. Behind it is revealed a large snow bank, with gently falling snow and the disgraced Adam trudging away across it. Then the other char- acters in the play appear, in pursuit of him. He stum- bles around in a circle as the snow bank, on the the- atre's turntable, revolves. At last the others surround him, as a harness drops from the flies. He is placed in it and lifted out of sight, but his shadow still can be seen on the snow, rather like that of a hovering bird. In it the two young lovers whose happiness he has troubled, embrace for the final tableau. Jan Bosse is primarily known for his stag- ings in Hamburg and Zurich, but he has twice directed at the Vienna Burgtheater, Much Ado About Nothing as part of the Shakespeare cycle at that the- atre in 2006, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2008. I did not find the new Albee nearly so effec- tive and innovative as either his Much Ado or his 2007 Zurich Hamlet, both invited to the annual Berlin Theatertreffen and both reported on in this journal as part of that festival. The production made extensive use of the auditorium, which seemed to be almost an extension of George and Martha's living room. All of the char- acters when coming in from outdoors or leaving, came down the aisles to the stage. George (Joachim Meyerhoff) and Martha (Christiane von Poelnitz) frequently made direct address to the audience, and most of the stories in the play (how Nick met Honey, here called Putzi, the plot of George's novel, and so on) were delivered in that way. George in particular spent much of his time in the auditorium, particularly moving back and forth between the front row and the stage, and occasionally sitting in an empty seat and speaking to Martha, who remained on stage. There were in fact no scenes where both members of a dialogue were in the audi- torium, though many where one was. The actual set- ting was contemporary and minimalist, quite sug- gestive of the "bungalows" Bert Neuman created for Frank Castorf in the 1990s. An open room unit, divided from right to left into four cubical areas, sat isolated in the middle of the stage. It could be moved about, and indeed George and Martha pulled and pushed the entire unit downstage at the begin- ning. The third "cube" was empty, merely a white back wall. Each of the other three had a large bank of individual modern lights in the ceiling, a different style in each cube. Each had also a set of sofa chairs and a different wall treatment, the first a solid wall of framed documents and photographs, the second a solid wall of identical label-less liquor bottles, and the fourth a wall of pull-out files, variously used to hold props, receive waste, or be pressed into service as makeshift toilets. Aside from the overall distinctly theatrical- ized and presentational delivery, the interpretations were fairly conventional. Meyerhoff was a convinc- ing ruffled academic near the end of his tether, and von Poelnitz, a loud and crude Martha, set him off well. Katharine Lorenz as Putzi seemed rather a bland ingnue, but the role is not a very nuanced one at best. Markus Meyer was much more interesting and engaging as Nick, especially in the scenes with George and in the fits of drunken amusement that often overcome him in these. Often modern German productions end with some striking stage effect made possible by 80 their elaborate technical equipment, and that was certainly the case here. After his killing off of their imaginary son, George goes on a rampage, smash- ing up furniture and at last running around behind the set to knock huge holes in its walls and bring its wall cabinets crashing down. Finally he and Martha remain alone on stage, arms around each other, fac- ing upstage toward the ravaged setting. Slowly it revolves until its obviously false, but heavily dam- aged backside faces out. Then an exact full size duplicate of it rises up from below between the actors and the former set. The symbolism was not especially clear, but it was certainly a striking effect. The following evening I went to the Burgtheater's smaller house, the Akademietheater, to see Stephan Kimmig's production of Macbeth, by far the most radical reworking of the productions I witnessed this visit. This is a part of departing Artistic Director Klaus Bachler's final major proj- ect, the staging at the Burgtheater of the complete Shakespeare canon. In an earlier issue I reported on four other productions in this cycle [see WES, 20.1, Winter 2008] and was pleased to add another to the list. Kimmig has no consistent approach; he has offered rather conventional and realistic productions as well as quite radical reinterpretations. His Macbeth certainly must be among the latter. Clearly its costuming (designed by Katharina Kownatzki) owed much to the Bush era. All of the men wore rough Western gear and golden cowboy hats, and their poses were clearly modeled on those in Western films. The setting, by Martin Zehetgruber, evoked no such specific world. On the contrary it was essentially a huge glass box, within which according to the highly flexible and effective light- ing by Reinhard Traub, the actors could appear, dis- appear, seem to be floating disembodied in space, or be reflected in multiple forms off into the remote distance. The play was heavily cut, running only about two hours without an intermission, and was presented as a series of rather brief blackout scenes, each of which focused on a key soliloquy or inter- change in the original. The production opened with Macbeth (Dietmar Knig) and Banquo (Tilo Werner) entering from the lobby rather like tourists from Texas, taking their seats in the audience and exchanging loud comments with each other about the elegance of the auditorium. Their interchange was interrupted by the appearance of the three witches (all men in the usual cowboy hats) appear- ing behind the glass curtain in ghostly pools of blue light. This drew the actors onto the stage, where, unlike those in Virginia Woolf, they remained until 81 Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, directed by Jan Bosse. Photo: Stephan Trierenberg. the end of the evening. The most radical changes to the original appeared in the final scenes, beginning with the sleepwalking scene. The production faced a prob- lem common to revivals of this play. Although both leading actors are well known in Vienna, Minichmayr is by far the more popular, her already considerable reputation enhanced by her recent star- ring appearance at the Berlin Theatertreffen in the Burgtheater production of Weibsteufel (see article on the Theatertreffen in this issue). The disappear- ance of Lady Macbeth well before the end of the play often creates something of a sense of anticli- max after a leading actress departs. I have never, however, seen this problem confronted in so radical a manner as Kimmig does. For the sleepwalking scene the stage was completely flooded with water, so that Lady Macbeth could not only wash her hands, but much of her body. To my astonishment, however, it was not Minichmayr who appeared to perform this scene but her partner, Knig. It was in fact his last major scene. After it he appeared large- ly in an almost catatonic state, an easy prey for the invading Malcolm (Markus Meyer) and Macduff (Markus Hering). It was instead Lady Macbeth who delivered many of his later lines, most notably the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, as she sat in an inflated throne floating on the waters of the still- flooded stage. Like many modern directors, Kimmig does not show Malcolm's triumph as a restoration of order, but rather a continuation of tyranny, but per- haps of a subtler kind. Malcolm, flanked by Macduff and others, directly addresses the audience from behind a podium with mike, very much the modern American politician in the cowboy style, promising peace and prosperity in lines added to the original and concluding with a prayer, a sing-along, and an excursion out in the audience to grab hands and welcome the spectators to the new order. I was not much impressed by the audience contact that opened the production, but this conclusion seemed very much in keeping with Kimmig's over-all con- cept and effectively blended his interpretation with our current and recent political performances. 82 William Shakespeare's Macbeth, directed by Stephan Kimmig. Photo: Hans Klaus Techt. Two theatre companies dominate the Icelandic Theatre landscape. Under the newly appointed Artistic Director Magnus Geir, the Reykjavik City Theatre is an exciting and forward thinking theatre company that has attracted a signif- icant audience in addition to presenting numerous popular and artistically challenging productions. Also located in the nation's capital city Reykjavik, the National Theatre of Iceland receives a substan- tially higher funding base, producing primarily Icelandic works, Children's Theatre, and classics. Associate Artistic Director Vigdis Jakobsdttir reveals some of the basic differences as well as simi- larities between the two institu- tions. These interviews explore several issues faced by the both companies, including the future direction of theatre in the city and nation, the perceived grow- ing sense of tension between the country's four major theatre companies and the Icelandic Actor's Union, and other ideas about their relationship with the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and the City of Reykjavik. Together these two perspectives reveal much about the internal workings of the Icelandic Theatre system. Interview with Magus Geir STEVE EARNEST: What is the rationale for the current choice of productions at Reykjavik City Theatre? GEIR: Obviously first of all it's important to mention how small the nation is. We have two big theatre companies in Reykjavik. Both companies tend to be doing bits and pieces of everything and that can be said about both the City Theatre and the National. We try to share as many resources as pos- sible. We try to give every piece its individuality, its own distinct form. Therefore on the main stage we have very open, welcoming pieces for a broad spectrum of audience goers, while at the same time in the black box we tend to present more aggressive, provocative works like Sarah Kane's Blasted and McDonagh's The Lonesome West. Then on the small studio space we focus on the intimacy between the A Pair of Icelandic Theatre Dialogues Steve Earnest Marcus Geir, Artistic Director of Reykjavik City Theatre. Photo: Courtesy of Marcus Geir. 83 84 actors and the audience. We try to offer both ends of the spectrum by doing on the one hand The Sound of Music, and Blasted on the other. We focus mainly on modern pieces, new writing. We try to also include new Icelandic writing. For example, in our season now we have The People on the Block, an original musical, and The Deadly Sins based on the Divine Comedy by Dante, a company created work. We also focus on Icelandic premieres. For example, Blasted is the first production of a Sarah Kane piece in Iceland. STEVE EARNEST: What is the vision or goal of the Reykjavik City Theatre? GEIR: First it is to produce the highest quality works possible in Iceland, comparable to similarly sized theatres in Europe and elsewhere, with pieces that speak directly to our society with regard to the issues presented. Also being very close to the socie- ty, to the everyday lives of Icelandic citizens. It's mainly about this connection between the theatre and society. We serve a very broad audience, many different age groups, all parts of society. It's a com- munity thing to visit the City Theatre. One of the main goals is to get a large audience, so people reg- ularly visit the City Theatre to see works that reflect their everyday lives. One of the major priorities at the City Theatre today is to increase the number of younger audience members. We are focusing espe- cially on people from sixteen to thirty-five, at the same time as we are strengthening our work for children. We also encourage families to come together to the theatre by offering enough good pieces that are suitable and exciting for the whole family.We are very proud to have hired in our first in-house playwright, Audur Jonsdottir. She has been at the forefront in Icelandic literature for years but has not worked for the stage until now. Now she gets a workstation in the theatre, where she works alongside our other in-house-artists, such as actors, directors, dramaturges, and designers. She soaks in the theatre and the craft, and works on her first scripts under the guidance of our dramaturges and directors. STEVE EARNEST: I have heard that the last few years have been very successful for the Reykjavik City Theatre and that you are playing to almost ninety percent houses. GEIR: That is correct. This season is the most suc- cessful ever, in the history of the company as the number of guests has now been increasing by approximately twenty percent in one year. This autumn we introduced new season passes which have been highly successful. We had a record year with the season passes by selling eleven times more than before. Now we have 5,500 season ticket hold- ers. That is a very strong place to start the season. STEVE EARNEST: What are some of the chal- lenges that you think this company will face in the twenty-first century? GEIR: That's a big question. One of the main chal- lenges of Icelandic Theatre in general is that we are an island. We are quite far away from both the United States and Europe. The problem in the last few years has been that we are rather isolated, I mean, obviously because of our geography. But exporting productions is not easy. It's very expen- sive to take works off of the island, and in the same way it's very expensive to bring in outside produc- tions. One of the biggest challenges is to find a way to link our theatre more with other countries in the outer world. Another challenge is that while Icelandic Theatre is generally very strongI would say, we have very strong actors and some excellent directorsbecause of the smallness of the nation, the more extreme, avant-garde, experimental type of theatre is almost non-existent in Iceland. Until recently, more performative types of pieces were rarely seen in Iceland. However, the Icelandic Academy has been focusing on that kind of work to educate the new actors in this type of work, which is positive and will probably broaden the spectrum. But this has been a problem in Iceland for decades. And this is understandable due to the smallness of the market. Therefore producing organizations tend to be more conservative, because the market for extremes tends to be extremely small. STEVE EARNEST: What about funding? GEIR: Funding was actually the first thing that came to mind when you asked about challenges. But that has always been a challenge, is a challenge, and will always be a challenge. In Iceland we are lucky compared to many other countries, as culture is in general well supported in the country. However, we feel that the funding is too low at the City theatre. The funding only covers about forty to fifty-five percent of the total revenues. So, box office, spon- sorship, etc. are a big part of it, especially now, because of what has been happening in this country in the last few months. It's obvious that future spon- sorship is going to be tougher in the years ahead. And that is a challenge. STEVE EARNEST: Is it possible to tell mewhat is that level of annual funding? It always impresses us the United States who have virtually no federal arts funding. GEIR: If we look at the two biggest theatres, the National and the City Theatres, which are similar in size, in number of productions and employees. Our annual state subsidy for 2009 is approximately 420 million Icelandic Kronas; The National Theatre receives approximately 830 million Kronas this year. STEVE EARNEST: How many actors are part of this company and how are they selected? GEIR: Our company is twenty-two to twenty-five actors on a long term basis, and we also have some members of individual contracts per production as needed. The production contracts last for a mini- mum of four months and get extended as the pro- duction runs. Sometimes we do auditions for parts, but also the theatres collaborate on open auditions for all the companies each year. This is important for young actors who are starting their carreers to get seen. But the actors who have been in the pro- fession for some time, they have been seen, and we know who they are. It's a very small community of actors. There are no real agents or casting directors here, it's mainly handled by the artistic directors of the companies and the directors of the individual shows. STEVE EARNEST: How strong is the Actor's Union in Iceland? Have you ever had any tough dealings with the union? Reykjavik City Theatre, small stage. Photo: Courtesy of the Reykjavik City Theatre. 85 86 GEIR: It is quite strong. The contracts are all done with the union, and all the actors you want to hire are part of that. So, it is quite strong and powerful. They take care of the contractsthat is the main function of the union. STEVE EARNEST: What other activities is the the- atre company engaged in such as education, chil- dren's theatre, and outreach? GEIR: We do quite a lot. First of all, we run our own children's theatre school. That is in collaboration with an independent company in the city. The chil- dren come to the theatre twice or three times a week and work with professional teachers and actors, and focus on improvisation, acting, and singing. It ends in a production shown on the stage for the parents. Then we offer a discussion with the audiences about the plays that we produce. We bring the directors, actors, and other artistic personnel on stage after the performances and allow them to engage in a dia- logue with the audience about what they saw. Then in collaboration with the Icelandic Dance Company, which is an in house company, we have in recent years done a dance theatre festival, which is open for actors and dancers to work collaboratively to expand the form and to make new discoveries, etc. We also have in collaboration with the university a new course about modern playwriting with Sarah Kane used as a focal point. This is a two-month course open to the public. Several people are involved in the course, some people from our the- atre and some from different departments at the uni- versity. In addition to producing the first Sarah Kane production in the country, we are offering staged readings of all her work this season. We welcome groups from schools to the theatre for tours, discus- sions, workshops, and courses. One of the long term aims is to build a new platform for children's' theatre herethe youngest audiencebut at the moment there is just not the proper basis to be able to do this. But our aim is to be able to run this on an annual basis. STEVE EARNEST: What qualities of this theatre distinguish it from the National Theatre? GEIR: The Reykjavik City Theatre is a vibrant com- pany. We want to be more up-to-date, more dynam- ic, braver, younger, and energetic. We dare to do works like Blasted, and we want to listen to our society. We want to realize when something is hap- pening and be able to change the program and answer the calls. For example, we are now changing the program to be able to react to the catastrophic financial happenings in the country. We hope to be able to stage a production dealing with the situation as soon as possible, hopefully to open it in March 2009. The National, on the other hand, is more of a foundation or a cornerstone, it has a great prestige and by law is supposed to do the classics, etc. STEVE EARNEST: What is the relationship with the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and how do you envision that relationship evolving over the next several years? GEIR: It is totally independent from the City Theatre and the National. But we have been a very good collaborator with the arts school, and this year and some years prior we have hosted them. We offer them the small stage for a few months, so they are in residence from October until December and can use the space, the equipment, etc. We aim to wel- come them very warmly, so that these few months they not only have access to the facilities but they also become part of the company, and they learn and realize how things are done in the real professional world. We try to communicate and work with them as if they are professionals. This is maybe the main thing, but then in addition to that we invite the stu- dents to see our performances, and we welcome them in any way. STEVE EARNEST: How about people like stage managers and technicians, how do they become part of this company. GEIR: There is no training for technical staff in Iceland. Most of the training for technical staff hap- pens abroad. Many of them study in England, or they learn on the job with amateur companies and then they are hired in at the ground level and slow- ly learn the different aspects of technical theatre within the company. Without a doubt it would strengthen the Icelandic Theatre life if there was some technical education for the departments. But at the moment there is none. However, we have a number of very good people who have studied abroad, and their work kind of becomes the bench- mark for technical and design work in the country. And I say without a doubt that the technical staff of The City Theatre is of a very high standard. Interview with Vigdis Jakobsdttir STEVE EARNEST: What factors are shaping the repertory that you currently offer here at the National Theatre? JAKOBSDTTIR: By law the National Theatre, should do chil- dren's theatre, new Icelandic plays, international plays, and other works that are geared toward the formation of an Icelandic national identity. The laws are actually in place, and I can get the actual details if you would like. They are a bit flexible. For example, in one year you could pres- ent all Icelandic plays and in another year you could present a season of international works, but the reality is that it is always a mixture. We always present a children's work, a number of classical and original Icelandic works, and a variety of international pieces, such as Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Moliere. Another factor are the finances. We are a small market, and we need to find ways to make a prof- it, at least enough to run the theatre. This is because the funding from the government is not enough to run the theatre. So, we can't allow ourselves to just do only productions that are really artsy, and no one comes to see. Obviously, we want to do artsy productions that hopefully people will come see, but my point is that we must consider popular appeal as well. The new artistic directorwell this is actually her third yearhas been doing more children's theatre pro- ductions, but other than that the repertory has been very similar for a number of years. STEVE EARNEST: What are the challenges of pro- ducing theatre in the twenty-first century in Iceland? JAKOBSDTTIR: There are lots of things to choose from, such as television, film, internet, musi- cal performances, and other possibilities. This is a very small market. For a time the audiences were getting smaller and older here. But it seems that some sort of equilibrium has been reached, and things are beginning to change. There are some pos- itive things happening here: it seems like the audi- ences are getting a bit younger and we are getting more people to the theatre. The competition at the City Theatre now is quite strong, because they have a new artistic director who has been doing some great things. The fact that there are great things going on there and that more people have been attending plays actually helps us as well. So, more people come here too. We have been spending a great deal of money on advertising and increasing the profile of our theatre, and that has been helping us also. It's not like they are taking our part of the cake. They are actually making the cake bigger. Vigdis Jakobsdttir, Associate Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Iceland. Photo: Courtesy of Vigdis Jakobsdttir. 87 88 STEVE EARNEST: Are there any qualities of this theatre that actually embody National characteris- tics of Iceland? JAKOBSDTTIR: For one thing the theatre build- ing itself is a strong symbol of our independence. Because the laws for the National Theatre were passed in 1923, which was only five years after we got our independence from the Danes. (But it wasn't until 1944 that we were an independent nation.) So, 1918 was a really big year. At that time people were living in huts, and they were living around the coun- try. This building is huge as you can see, but it was- n't opened until 1950. The twenty-seven years that the laws were there, this building stood empty for many, many yearswhile the British Army was here. There was an army base here, and it took twen- ty-seven years to build that theatre. It was a very ambitious project for Iceland. Within the scope of the design are references to Icelandic nature and culture. The architect had very definite ideas about the look of the theatreyou may have noticed the huge stone sculpture out front. We believe in elves in Iceland, or "the hidden people," who have a sep- arate world than us. But they're a bit shorter than us, and they're very beautiful and bright, and they live inside rocks. So this is the look of the theatre on the outside. It has a look like a huge rock. The idea is that you step in and see the fairy tales from the standpoint of the "hidden people." There are lots of references like the choice of color, and even inside the theatre there are rock formations on the ceiling, and even the choice of pastels and other colors are very Icelandic. For many people in Iceland this is a very important structure. It has been called the "Temple of the Icelandic Language." The fact that we produce so many Icelandic plays and that we are literally the only theatre in the world that does so really separates us from numerous other national theatres. The City Theatre does not have these obli- gations; the City Theatre can do whatever it wants. They could do only new foreign plays or Shakespeare if they wanted, but we can't do that. That is one of the aspects of this theatre that makes it interesting. STEVE EARNEST: How does an actor earn a spot here and how long is the contract? JAKOBSDTTIR: There are only about seventeen or eighteen actors here now on a permanent con- tract. Normally here they have one-year contracts. But because some of the productions here run for longer than a year, or rather remain in the repertory for more than a year, the contracts generally run longer than one year. The Artistic Director, Tinna Gunlaugsdttir, is the one who makes those choices. She chooses the directors, the actors, the artistic staff, almost everyone. We sometimes hold audi- tions, but this is a very small market and we know almost everyone. She goes to all the performances at the Academy of the Arts in order to see new, young talent, but she only goes to see the fourth-year stu- dents and not the first-, second-, and third-year per- formances. But you know who's available; you've seen them do things. The directors have a say as well. If I as a director come in and say "I really want this young actress who's just graduating," then there will actually be a dialogue there, and the case can be made to hire the actor or whoever based on the rec- ommendation of the director. STEVE EARNEST: Are there any actors here hired for only one show? JAKOBSDTTIR: We rarely do that because it tends not to be very cost effective. Because it's very expensive for the theatre to pay someone to rehearse a show and then only play it one time or so per week. Our contract allows us to designate some per- formers as "extras," which is different. So, if we need children, or several soldiers who appear in one scene only, then we have a special type of contract that allows us to pay those types of performers less. But generally the actors, who are trained actors and who have an actor's contract, tend to do more than one show in the repertory. STEVE EARNEST: What are some of the future goals for the National Theatre? JAKOBSDTTIR: We have just been given state support to develop and run a writer's fund. Just the other day the first group of writers got the grants. They are writing works in steps for the National Theatre, because Icelandic playwriting really needs more support. The money hasn't been there and we really haven't had the money to do it. The develop- ment of Icelandic playwriting is definitely one of the main focuses of the theatre. Another thingand this is my job as wellis connecting the theatre, because it's a National Theatre, not just a Reykjavik Theatre. In the past we used to do tours during the summer months. We would make a mini version of 89 the plays we were doing, and we would tour them around the country, but that disappeared because people lost interest. Because there is so little sum- mer here people became more interested in being outside, etc. in the summer. So, we just stopped doing it. Now instead we do a series of performanc- es in the summer that are geared toward sixteen- to twenty-year-olds from around the country that are looking at the college, and we really want to contin- ue that. We are also exploring a number of other ways to connect the theatre to the countryside. Also, and this is one of the focus points of the Education Department of the Theatre, we present pre-show lectures to those whose knowledge of Icelandic lan- guage is not good or who speak no Icelandic. We present these lectures that detail the action and plot of the play in English, because all the plays are actu- ally presented in Icelandic. We do the same for deaf people as well. STEVE EARNEST: What has been the impact of recent economic developments? JAKOBSDTTIR: Funny you should ask that, because obviously we are going to suffer some cuts. Currently they are debating these ideas in the state parliament, and while there are going to be some cuts it doesn't appear that they are going to be too drastic. They see this as a pretty big workplace. About 200 people in all work here, and we've suf- fered cuts in the past. So, we can't do anymore. But there has also been the suggestion of some addition- al monies to pay off the theatre's debts, old debts that we continue paying lots of interest on. We have doubled the sale of tickets here due to gift certifi- cates that we have been selling that allow people to buy tickets for their friends and family. This has really been working. People want to give something special to their friends. Instead of an article of cloth- ing, or a mug, or something, they give them a the- atre ticket! STEVE EARNEST: In your opinion, what is the position of theatre currently in Icelandic society? JAKOBSDTTIR: It's a well established fact that about one hundred percent of the current Icelandic population attends live theatre performances. We have about three hundred thousand people in the country and about three hundred thousand attend the theatre. It's a theatre-going nation. So, in the sense of attendance it's very strong. I would like to see it become stronger in a political sense. I think there's a lot of entertainment going on, and I wish there were more works that touched the heart and soul of the nation. But it's interesting because now we are doing an old play that was written in, I believe, 1962. It was a huge success at the timesort of the Icelandic version of Look Back in Angerentitled Hart I Bak, meaning "Hard of Port," or like full steam backwards on a ship. We decided last year to produce this work, which is about an old man who's a captain of a huge shipthe biggest ship the coun- try's ever had (this is based on a true story, actually). He was having some fun with a lady on board, and the ship got stranded and sank. The ship was a ref- erence to Iceland; we often refer to the Icelandic economy as the "national ship." When the economy is bad we are sinking, we are about to go under. It's quite a dated play actually. It's a dated text and the ideas are quite dated, but it's still an important part of our dramatic history. But little did we know that the extreme economic conditions that the play refer- ences were going to hit us this hard. It's as if this play has now taken on new references due to the financial situation. And it's very popular. People are coming to see it in droves because of the contempo- rary references. It's as if we are seeing history repeat itself. It refers back to the period after the second World War when we were struggling. This was when the theatre was just opening, so the work has a number of different references. STEVE EARNEST: What is the relationship between the National Theatre and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts? JAKOBSDTTIR: We all feel that it should be more. For example, the students will be doing a rather elaborate production here of Twelfth Night on the main stage with several established National Theatre actors. This is something new. They have always appeared in smaller roles on our stage but this time they will be playing leading roles. The Education Department of the National Theatre also plays a role because, for example, I have taught classes at the Icelandic Academy. Also we do a col- laborative project every year, playwriting for col- lege-level students, and we have students from the Arts Academy stage the plays here at the theatre. These are short playsten minute works, sketches that the teenagers writeand we've been doing this project for five years now. It's just a one evening performance and there are not very many rehearsals, 90 but it really brings the young people into the theatre. This year we were able to get in some good work with the voice coach, because the plays were on the big stage since one of our productions was on tour at the Barbicon in London. So, we had an empty stage here. We had an evening to spare basically, and the voice coach used the opportunity to coach the actors on working in a large space. It was a very good learning experience for the students. But I wish that there was more interaction. In the past the students at the school came in and played small roles at the theatre, and you learned from the older actors. But now the young actors come in and they think they own the placethey are only interested in playing leading roles already. I've spoken with many of the older actors who feel this way, that there is less respect for the tradition of the National Theatre. Perhaps if they were brought in more there would be more of a dialogue between the different generations of actors. Another thing that has changed is that now it's a university. In the old days it was merely an act- ing conservatory, but now the students take a great many more academic courses, and many of the older actors feel that there is too much emphasis on the academic courses and not enough on voice and act- ing. But I actually think that the students now actu- ally have what it takes to take us into the twenty- first century properly, which is guts, and initiative, and drive. Because I think that is so important. You can always train your voice as well, but I think now the focus is on empowering them to have the guts and initiative to do something well. I believe that was lacking before. They were being trained as pup- pets, and now they are being trained to make deci- sions about society and their place in society. The May Theatertreffen in Berlin normally lasts about two weeks, and offers a stimulating sur- vey of leading contemporary productions, but since it normally involves only around ten productions (nine this year because one site-specific event could not be moved) it allows several free evenings for the determined theatre-goer to sample the rich offerings available elsewhere in Berlin. The choice was even larger because this year, unaccustomedly, only one production in the festival was actually a Berlin offering. I began my alternative theatre-going this year at the two theatres currently the most highly respected in the city, the Deutsches Theater and the Schaubhne. The two pre-eminent Deutsches Theater directors in recent years have been Jrgen Gosch and Michael Thalheimer. Gosch was the star of this year's Theatertreffen, with two productions out of the nine offered. His death on June 11 was a major loss for the German stage. Thalheimer, though often chosen in recent years, was not includ- ed this year. Fortunately, however, I was able to see his production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, which has been in the repertoire of the Deutsches Theater for over a year but which I had not yet been able to attend. Thalheimer, whose Emilia Galotti was recently presented in New York at BAM, like Gosch, is particularly associated with a minimalist style, and this Wild Duck was no exception, cut to just under two hours running time, with no inter- mission and shorn of all group scenes (the crowd of Werle dinner guests, the supper at the Ekdals') to concentrate on the conflicts involving the major characters. The stage was similarly bareno scenery and only three propsthe menu from the dinner, the letter of gift from old Werle, and of course the gun. The stark and powerful setting was by Thalheimer's usual designer Olaf Altmann. Instead of the blank walls often utilized before, Berlin report Marvin Carlson Ibsen's The Wild Duck, directed by Michael Thalheimer. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater. 91 Altmann here created a huge, steeply raked revolv- ing stage. Facing the audience, it ran from the foot- lights steeply up to the back of the very deep stage. Turned the opposite way, it offered a white curved wall that almost completely filled the proscenium arch. The opening scenes were played in this later configuration, with three figuresGregers (Sven Lehmann), Hjalmar (Ingo Hlsman) and Director Werle (Horst Lebinsky) lined up in the nar- row downstage space, playing mostly facing direct- ly out toward the audience with a delivery that mixed staccato expression with deliberate silence, all this quite typical of the Thalheimer style as prac- ticed by the three leading actors who are primarily associated with his work. High above them, dimly lit, is Hedvig (Henrike Jrissen), her head and arms hanging unmoving over the edge of the stage wall. Old Werle's blindness is emphasized. When he attempts to relate to either his son or Hjalmar he must locate them by feel and then by the closest examination. The stage turns to reveal the huge raked circle which for the most part represents the Ekdal home. Occasionally the actors will make rapid, and apparently risky moves from the top to bottom of this ramp or vice versa, but for the most part Thalheimer keeps them in essentially stationary positions for entire sequences, especially favoring the spot in the center of the circle, that at the very top far to the rear, and downstage right and left, where proscenium openings provide the major entrances. The attic is vaguely indicated out in the auditorium down right, but there are no visual ele- ments shown. Instead, its presence is indicated through much of the production aurally. Old Ekdal (Jrgen Huth) spends most of the evening standing in this area, facing outward, a beatific if somewhat simple-minded smile on his face, and providing a running subtext of small chirping noises. Ibsen's final act is Thalheimer's most pow- erful and innovative. For most of the act the raked stage is turned toward the audience, and as the var- ious conversations among Gina (Almut Zilcher), Hjalmar, and Gregors take place in the forestage area, Hedvig moves frantically about a narrow space in the center of the raked circle, holding the gun and enacting in pantomime variations of shoot- ing the duck and killing herself. Finally at the moment of the actual shot, she holds the gun to her breast and falls. In Ibsen, it is just after this moment that her body is revealed, but Thalheimer reverses this. The turntable begins to move, as usual with ominous music (sound design by Bert Wrede), car- rying her out of sight and leaving the Ekdals, Gregers and Relling (Peter Pagel) lined up across the forestage, with the curved white wall behind them, like the characters in the opening scene. The final exchanges are given mostly facing outward but ending with Hjalmar and then Gina moving to Old Ekdal's area stage left, leaving Gregers and Relling in the center. After their final exchange, Gregers slowly moves right, his gestures expressing his anguish at the suffering he has brought about. Relling moves the other way, to join the Ekdal group at the right. All during this scene Old Ekdal, lost in his imaginary forest, has continued with his faint whistling and chirping. Relling stands just behind him and Hjalmar and joins in the chirping, gesturing to Gina to join in. She understands and complies, and finally Hjalmar allows his suffering to be overcome and also joins in the quiet chorus. The lights go down as the group chirps and whistles together and their chorus continues on in the dark- ened theatre. Clearly for better or worse Relling has re-established his palliative life lie among this tiny flock. A few evenings later I attended A Streetcar Named Desire at the Schaubhne, which currently has three American classics among the twenty-six works in its active repertoire (the other two are Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). I was not familiar with the work of Benedict Andrews, the director of Streetcar, but his approach clearly is also in the minimalist style now very pop- ular in Berlin and very different from the cool and ironic Streetcar of Frank Castorf, the last version I saw in Berlin, full of incongruities, pop-culture ref- erences, and video sequences. Here, when we enter the theatre we see a cavernous stage, empty except for a jumble of scenic units and technical equipment piled against the upstage wall. To the left far upstage are two small makeup tables, to the right an open door through which we can see cars passing on the street outside. Later a black, stage-wide curtain will descend far upstage, hiding these elements and pro- viding a truly neutral background. Obviously there is little if any attempt to create a scenic atmosphere. All the music and sounds of New Orleans have been cut, and as if to specifically deny that location, light snow falls on the empty stage through much of the final act. Blanche (Jule Bwe) begins the play by entering through this door, in stiletto heels and 92 wearing a short but flamboyant, layered black dress. Although she spends much of the play in black lace undergarments, she also has a variety of highly the- atrical dresses, from loose sarongs to bouffant multi-layered ball gowns (both stage and costumes are the work of Magda Willi). Bwe sets up the min- imal stage, pulling a standing mirror and her rack of clothes to a position downstage left, and placing a chair somewhat right where she sits and drinks, takes a couple of glasses of whisky, which she will consume almost continuously throughout the evening. The chair is located on the right side of a large turntable and it now begins slowly to turn, as it will continue to do throughout almost all of the production's two hours and fifteen minutes (with no intermission). This provides a constant shifting per- spective, and the director often stages scenes so that one character is near the center of the turntable and another near the edge, slowly circling the first, observing them, or interacting with them in some way. The poker table (also used for meals) is also normally placed at the center, so that the audience receives a constantly changing perspective of those seated around it. Perhaps it is the almost continual move- ment of the turntable, or the stark emptiness of the setting, but despite scenes of considerable violence, especially from Stanley, there seems a kind a flat- ness about much of the evening. Lars Eidinger, who plays a contemporary but effective Hamlet in the current repertoire, has a handsome physical pres- ence but does not really convey the crude animal side of Stanley, and his eruptions of rage are power- ful but not fully motivated. From time to time he rolls a wooden bowling ball across the stage to help express his anger, but again this produces more noise than conviction. Still, if Eidinger tends to play primarily on two notes, of bemused frustration and uncontrolled rage, the other leading figures, Blanche, Lea Drager as a waif-like, long-suffering Stella, and Jrg Hartmann as an almost simple- minded Mitch, exhibit an even narrower range, and though they are effective moment to moment, there is a kind of sameness to each of their encounters. The staging thus often dominates the act- ing, as when Mitch demands to see Blanche in the light. He goes to the rear of the stage and rolls out a huge mounted floodlight, whose glare on her pro- 93 Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Benedikt Andrews. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz. vides the only stage illumination for the next sever- al minutes. Never has Blanche been so mercilessly illuminated, but as the scene goes on, and the turntable slowly revolves four or five times, each time blinding the audience as they, like Blanche, become the momentary object of the dazzling light, the emotion of the moment is lost in the theatrical effect. After this, the rape scene comes as a distinct anticlimax. For the final act, the black rear curtain is pulled up, revealing the clutter of stage equipment, Stella upstage to the right with her new child near the dressing table and Blanche, now almost cataton- ic, seated quietly in a modest sweater and jeans near the door she first entered. The turntable is now stilled and the poker game resumes also far upstage, in subdued light. The gentle, softly falling snow provides a final, if geographically questionable accent of calm after the storm aroused by Blanche's disruptive visit. Another, far less conventional Schaubhne offering was Dritte Generation (Third Generation), a collective "work in progress" created by Israeli playwright and director Yael Ronen and a group of ten young Israeli, Palestinian, and German actors and co-sponsored by the Schaubhne and the Habimah Theatre of Israel. This first phase of the project was developed in Israel and Germany in the summer of 2008 and will be followed by a second phase of work in Tel Aviv and Berlin based on the experience of the current presentations. The "third generation" refers to the fact that the grandparents of each of these young actors were involved in the momentous events of the 1940s. Some were Jews killed in the Holocaust, oth- ers were Jews who emigrated to Israel, others were Germans whose exact actions during the Nazi years were understandably often hidden from their grand- children. Yet others were inhabitants of Palestine, who saw their land and sometimes their homes appropriated by the new Jewish settlers. In short the family memories of these actors are closely inter- twined with those memories that make the contem- porary Middle East so difficult and emotional a source of international tensionthe Holocaust in Germany, the establishment of the state of Israel, and the dispossession of the Palestinians that this involved. In a series of narratives, often backed up by group pantomimes, of discussions, and debates, and interactions with the audience, who are treated with understanding by the German actors and with often open hostility by the Jewish ones, the company explores their own connection to this complex his- tory and even more centrally the ongoing areas of tension and conflict between their communities Yael Ronen's Dritte Generation. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz. 94 today. Despite their attempts at reconciliation, the wounds of the past remain unhealed, and the pro- duction (at least in the current version) ends in a violent brawl involving the entire company. There is a certain amateurish quality to a number of sequences, but the dedication of the young company and the seriousness of the questions under discus- sion result in a production that is always interesting and often moving and thought-provoking, as it obvi- ously seeks to be. Obviously, the presentation of this production in Berlin (and in Tel Aviv) provides a special resonance with its audience that would be much less the case in London, Paris, or New York, significant as the geopolitical questions it addresses are internationally. What is missing, of course, as is regrettably so often the case, is the voice and pres- ence of the other third generation, young actors from the West Bank or Gaza, all of the Palestinian actors in the company being residents of Israel, whose situation is fascinating and conflicted, but obviously quite different. In today's political climate neither Israeli nor Palestinian authorities would allow such participation in a project of this sort, but that in itself is an indication of the seriousness and intractability of the situation. My other evening at the Schaubhne was to see the latest contribution to Thomas Ostermeier's series of Ibsen interpretations, John Gabriel Borkman. Ostermeier's earlier Ibsens, Nora (A Doll House) and Hedda Gabler, were both invited to the annual Theatertreffen and were seen by New York audiences at BAM. John Gabriel Borkman has achieved less acclaim, and seemed to me on the whole a distinctly less interesting effort. The tragedy of a failed banker whose career was ruined when he was exposed in a kind of late nineteenth century Ponzi scheme would seem a perfect choice for contemporary allusions. True, Ostermeier includes a few current visual references, perhaps most notably a cell phone, as he has done in his pre- vious Ibsens, but his interpretation in fact seems curiously removed from any specific context. The play was created for the National Theatre of Brittany in Rennes at the end of 2008 and was premiered in Berlin early in 2009. Ostermeier has assembled an outstanding cast, especially in the leading roles. Josef Bierbichler, who plays Borkman, Kirsten Dene, who plays Gunhild, and Angela Winkler, who plays Ella, have been for many years among the best known actors on the German-speaking stage. Perhaps Ostermeier, long a fan of the British theatre, thought to follow the stan- Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkmann, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Photo: Courtesy of Die Schaubhne am Lehniner Platz. 95 dard British mode of assembling well-known actors and not distracting from their work by any directo- rial concept, but if so, the result was a generally respectful but curiously flat reading of the play. Ostermeier's usual designer, Jan Pappelbaum, created a set in the now fashionable German minimalist style, far more stark than the rather cluttered design for Nora or even the elegant- ly stylized glass box of Hedda Gabler. Here we have only two blank white side walls, with a plain door at the back of each, a dimly reflecting back wall, and two very simple clusters of furniture: a sofa center stage with coffee table, lamp, and side chair for the Borkman living room and a table a chair for Borkman's upstairs retreat. These are mounted on a turntable, so that we move from one setting to the other by temporarily raising the back wall and mov- ing the other half of the turntable into position. There is nothing else except for a white fog which covers the entire stage floor at the beginning and end and swirls continuously behind the backdrop throughout the production. The presentation time is also typical of much contemporary German produc- tion, just under two hours without an intermission. This requires a certain amount of cutting of course, but mostly of individual lines here and there. The only entire scene I missed was that involving Foldol (Felix Rmer) after he has been run down by the sleigh, but the entire final act has undergone considerable adjustment. In both Nora and Hedda Gabler Ostermeier's conclusions were among his most radical departure from traditional interpreta- tions, and the same thing is true of his John Gabriel Borkman, although with much less effective results. The cinematic move outdoors and up the mountain has always presented a challenge to those who would stage this play, but I have never seen a direc- tor resolve this problem as Ostermeier has, by never going outside at all, and playing the final scenes in the Borkman living room where the play begins. The mountainside bench where he sits with Ella becomes the center stage sofa where Gunhild sat in the opening act, and his visions out across the valley are taken as entirely internal. The fog which has been swirling behind the back wall flows out across the stage floor, but since we have already seen this effect in the opening scene, we cannot take it as an indication of a shift to the outside. Apparently Ostermeier considered a col- lapse in front of the sofa might be too banal, or even unintentionally comic (there was a lot of laughter, not all of it appropriate, during this production, indeed the young man next to me clearly enthusias- tically embraced Borkman's suggestion to view the whole thing as a comedy). To avoid this, just before Gunhild's entrance, Borkman somewhat inexplica- bly pulled the armchair which had been sitting next to the sofa over to the right side of the stage and, as if exhausted by this effort, collapsed into it, not moving again. This left the sofa free for the two sis- ters, and in the final image of the play, as they sit side by side, Ella slowly and tentatively moves her hand to the side to take the hand of her sister. Thus Borkman is, in contrast to Ibsen's original idea, effectively excluded from the image of their recon- ciliation. Without that image, and indeed without the snowy mountainside, the vision of the factories, and the icy hand of the outside winter night the end- ing seems much diminished and domesticated, and no amount of artificial fog surrounding the charac- ters can hide this. Much of the May 2009 issue of Germany's leading theatre magazine, Theater heute is devoted to the Theatertreffen, but an unusual feature this year is a short report on three productions that the editors felt should have been selected and were not. Perhaps in recognition of such sentiments, the Hebbel Theater, Berlin's leading home of experi- mental theatre, both native and foreign, offered one of these three during the actual run of the festival. This was Jossi Weiler's Munich production of a new play by Elfriede Jelinek, Rechnitz. Theater heute notes that the season contained two much discussed stagings of historical-political material, this work and a contemporary reworking of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. In the opinion of Theater heute's Till Breigleb, the "trivial-demagogic" Marat production was selected as a much less scandalous and disturb- ing choice of the Jelenik piece. In any case, the brief run of Rechnitz in Berlin was sold out, with box office lines longer than I have ever seen at the Hebbel, so the production certainly found a Berlin audience. As a non-German spectator I was less impressed. Even the favorable notice of Briegleb had to admit that the play was not strong on theatri- cal means or traditional character, but derived its power from its formal presentation, its densely packed text, and, of course, its historical-political subject matter. Rechnitz is today a reference known to almost all Germans and the latest grim reminder of the crimes of the Nazi era, which still hang over contemporary Germany (I seem to discover a new monument to the victims of the Holocaust every 96 time I visit the city). The Austrians have never been as willing to confront their crimes of that era as the Germans, and Rechnitz speaks directly to that silence. Its inspiration is the recently revealed (by a British journalist) massacre that took place in Rechnitz Castle, near the Hungarian border on the night of 24 March 1945. There a "Victory Party" was held by leading Gestapo and SS figures, guests of the Count and Countess Batthyany, still an impor- tant Austrian family, at which some 200 Jewish pris- oners, declared unfit for the work camps, were stripped, abused, and executed as part of the evening's entertainment. Jelenik subtitles her play "The Exterminating Angel," in ironic reference to Luis Buel's classic film with its central decadent aristocratic dinner party. There has still today been no official statement from the descendents of the perpetrators of Rechnitz, and a search for the mass grave of the victims also continues, so this is very much an open sore in the body politic. Although the simple but elegant setting (by Anja Rabes) clearly suggests an elegant paneled room in an aristocratic hunting lodge (complete with antlers over the door) there is no attempt to recreate any details of the notorious evening. Indeed it is not at all clear who the five actors/narrators rep- resent. Katja Brkle, Andr Jung, Hans Kremer, Steven Scharf, and Hildegard Schmahl are simply listed in the program as "messengers," and although they seem at the beginning to be welcoming the audience to their residence, it is calculatedly unclear whether they represent figures from the original party, "messengers" in the classic Greek sense, or modern "messengers" bringing us commentary on this largely suppressed event. In any case, although they speak of "our" experience, and "our" party, and "the countess" as if she is a close acquaintance, and although they refer often to the party and even to the killings, they never quite admit to actual participa- tion, focusing more on the situation's abstract horror and on the gray, meaningless, and indeterminate world in which they now circulate. There are occa- sional references to the massacre itself. At one point the characters all take rifles from a closet and bran- dish them about, at another the action stops while repeated gunfire echoes from all corners of the audi- torium. For the rest of the time the characters fill their hollow lives with minor self-indulgences, a bit of desultory love-making (really only a bit of grop- ing and spanking), casual undressing, listening on headphones placed around the room to cheap classi- cal music (such asgrim ironythemes from Der Freischtz played on an accordion with a polka-type rhythm), and eating junk food, picnic chicken and pizza from boxes. The panels of the room can swiv- 97 Elfriede Jelinek's Rechnitz, directed by Jossi Weiler. Photo: Courtesy of Hebbel Theater, Berlin. el open to provide rapid group exits and entrances, but the only actual door is underneath the antlers center. Like the characters, it constantly changes, sometimes an entrance but more often a closet, con- taining various items, first the rifles, later liquors, and later still a stack of fur coats suggesting the pil- lage of the victims and seized upon in an orgy of dressing up by the characters. Wieler, who has pro- duced a number of Jelenik texts, has taken many lib- erties with the cutting and arrangement of material, not to mention the distribution of speeches and the overall visual approach. This is quite acceptable to the author, who makes few if any staging demands on her directors. Clearly the text could be presented in many ways, but Weiler's cool, almost trivialized approach underlines with great effect the notorious "banality of evil," and becomes as well a dynamic of the mechanisms of avoidance and silence. The Hebbel is actually a complex of three nearby but separate theatres. Rechnitz was present- ed in the largest of these, House One. A few evenings later I returned to the nearby House Two, the original home of Peter Stein's famous Schaubhne, to see a new production by one of Germany's most honored and original experimental companies, Rimini Protokoll. The company's repu- tation is built upon its extremely varied use of non- actors presenting material taken from their everyday life. For the most part, previous works have utilized German subjects, but for Radio Muezzin, director Stefan Kaegi took his production crew to Cairo, where in addition to filming general scenes, they found four Muezzins, who traditionally make the call to prayers from the minarets, who were willing to serve as the subjects of Rimini Protokoll's project. The evening begins with the four muezzins standing at the sides of the audience in the darkened theatre and singing their messages, a beautiful and exotic effect. They next came forward to the stage and began to tell their stories. The first, Hussein Bdawy, was blind from birth, a condition at one time preferred among Muezzins, so that they could not peer into houses near the mosque from their ele- vated stations. A second, Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, was trained as an electrician, but after an accident began to study the Koran and turned to this calling. A third, Mansour Abdelsalam Namous, is a former soldier now the caretaker of a tiny mosque, and the fourth is a former athlete and bodybuilder whose voice has received much favorable attention. Their stories are illustrated with photos and films of their homes, their children, and their mosques. Perhaps what attracted Kaegi to these fig- ures is their current state of transition. The Egyptian government has picked thirty muezzin out of the 98 Rimini Protokoll's Radio Muezzin, directed by Stefan Kaegi. Photo: Courtesy of Rimini Protokoll. hundred in Cairo with what are considered the best voices, and in the future their voices will make the call to prayer by radio transmission to the minaret speakers, producing a more standardized experience (hence the title of the production). Only one of the four muezzin here gathered will in fact be allowed to participate in this new program. One can imagine this situation providing a whole range of discussion about tradition and modernity, the personal and the professional, tech- nology versus hand craft and so on, but in fact this aspect of the presentation is considered only very briefly and near the end of the performance. Much more time is spent on the background and daily life of the four muezzin. A central part of this presenta- tion has aroused considerable protest among Berlin audiences. This is the extended sections in which the performers demonstrate for the audience the gestures and actions of traditional prayers and other related activities, such as the ritual washing in preparation for prayer. Though the performers announce that what they are presenting is not actu- ally a religious ritual, but a theatricalized represen- tation of these ceremonies, the sequences had very much the flavor of the ethnographic displays of native ceremonies in nineteenth century exposi- tions, or the entertainments offered today in many tourist hotels in exotic ports of call. This of course is deeply problematic, if not offensive, in a cultural community aware of the tensions of colonial thought. Although the ritual displays were the most obvious troubling sections, not a few of the filmed street scenes showed a similar orientalist slant, and at one point a filmed panorama of the Egyptian landscape also had running across it a series of Arabic sentences, which supertitles informed us were various prohibitions (presumably by the Egyptian government) of subject that could not be filmed. The point could only have been a tacit con- demnation of this "backward" and "repressive" cul- ture by the "more free and liberal" European cre- ative artists. All in all, I found this a well-meaning but often surprisingly nave project by a group that in the past I have often considered highly sophisti- cated in much of their work. Next to another center for avant-garde the- atre in Berlin, the Prater. This adjunct to Berlin's oldest beer-garden has been closed during the past year, like the Deutsches, for extensive renovations. It reopened in April, most fittingly, with a new pro- 99 Der Prater, Berlin. Photo: Courtesy of the Prater. duction by the director most associated with this space, the radical and innovative Ren Pollesch. There has been a clear revival of interest in choric work in the recent German theatre, with several striking examples in the current Theatertreffen, but only Pollesch has made the chorus his subject, in Ein Chor irrt sich gewaltig (A Chorus is Powerfully Mistaken). The immediate reference is to the popular French comedy film of the 1970s by Yves Robert, Un ele- phant a trompe normment, carrying on Pollesch's love of basing his economic/philosophical romps on films and other pop cultural products. Of course the title also challenges the traditional view of the cho- rus as ideal spectator or special narrative voice, upending social and theatrical expectations in typi- cal Pollesch fashion. The text of Ein Chor is also typical of Pollesch, a dense thicket of jokes, pop culture refer- ences and material from current continental political and economic and literary theory such as the work of Dietmar Dath or Boris Groys. What is perhaps most surprising about the evening is how permeated it is by the conventions of French variety and boule- vard entertainment. The surprise begins when the audience enters the theatre. Instead of the surround- ing warren of small rooms so often seen in previous Pollesch productions, designer Bert Neumann has converted the space into a traditional, even clichd proscenium arch theatre interior, right down to a pair of conventional chandeliers hanging over the stage and with a gaudy, flower covered act curtain that looks more like a cheap table-cloth than an ele- gant drape. The characters, who are derived from the sitcom-like figures of the Robert film, are well aware of their French derivation, filling the stage with croissants, lip-synching Piaf-style songs, and, most notably, often stopping the action to correct each other's French pronunciation. As always in Pollesch, the stage fills with physical, human, and linguistic detritus as the often manic characters attempt to find some meaning and some grounds for relationship amid the chaos of late capitalist society. The central figure in the production is the versatile Sophie Ross, an androgynous figure in a nineteenth century black cape, who is based on phi- landering Bouly in the film, who comes home to find his wife has cleaned out the house and left him. Ross is sometimes supported by, sometimes reject- ed by the clich-spouting chorus, but her major 100 Ein Chor irrt sich gewaltig, directed by Ren Pollesch. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater. companions are Jean Chaize, as a foppish French Lord in an elegant frock coat and Brigitte Cuvelier, whose speech consists in large part of fractured French phrases and whose obsession it is to correct the accents of her fellows. From time to time there is a distinct feminist cast to the all-female chorus, and even more frequently the glimmerings of an oppressed proletarian struggling for expression, but this is still far closer to post-dramatic theatre than agit-prop, as Pollesch invariably is. The ninety minute evening passes very quickly and, if not always totally comprehensible, is always surprising and entertaining. For my last free night in Berlin I returned to the Deutsches Theater, planning to see Jrgen Gosch's staging of Schimmelpfennig's Idomeneus, which recently opened there. The production has been warmly praised and has an added poignancy in that it was the last work of this major director. He was suffering from what appears to be terminal can- cer and in fact had to be brought from his hospital bed to attend the opening night. In the event, however, this presentation had to be cancelled due to the illness of one of the actresses, and so at the last moment the theatre sub- stituted Barbara Frey's staging of Euripides' Medea. Since I enjoy Frey's work and had not seen her Medea, this was a quite acceptable substitution. Nor was it free of the air of finality. During the past eight years, under the directorship of first Bernd Wilms and his chief dramaturg Oliver Reese the Deutsches has clearly moved into the leading position among Berlin theatres. Despite this enviable record, Wilms was replaced this year by a new Intendant, Ulrich Khuon. The new leader has immediately empha- sized a new order by announcing the dropping from the repertoire of thirty-nine productions, including works by the directors who have established the recent pre-eminence of the theatre, including Gosch, Dimiter Gotscheff, Michael Thalheimer, Barbara Frey and Nicolas Stemann. Since the Frey Medea is among these disappearing productions, I was very glad to have this opportunity to see it. Bettina Meyer's design and Claus Grasmeder's light are much in keeping with the cur- rent minimalist vogue at this theatre. The stage is closed in a huge white box, like a number of Gosch productions, and within this, mounted on a large podium, is a much smaller box stage, somewhat like the inner stage of Thalheimer's Faust but in this case completely fitted out as a 1950s studio apartment, complete with bed, table, chair, sink, washing machine, cabinets, and TV. Above the sink at the rear is a window with a city skyline at the bottom Euripides' Medea, directed by Barbara Frey. Photo: Courtesy of Deutsches Theater. 101 102 and a sky with constantly changing cloud patterns (video by Bert Zander). Although the furnishings are basically full size, an actor standing at the rear of this little room almost reaches to the ceiling. This is the space of Medea, played by Nina Hoss, and she occupies it right up until the final scene. Only Jason (Michael Neuenschwander) joins her here, while other characters speak to her from the main stage area. During these scenes the entire stage is usually illuminated, Medea's room seeming to float in a sea of white light, while for scenes involving only the box, it is usually surrounded by darkness. Medea's box has no visible entrances. When Jason visits her, there is a brief blackout and he is discovered already within the room. Medea, when she finally leaves, also disappears during a blackout. The effect is very much that of a well fur- nished cell. Only twice do other figures somewhat impinge upon this space. Once the two-woman cho- rus (Christine Schorn the older and Meike Droste the younger) during their dialogue with Medea they stick their heads through hitherto unsuspected slits in the side walls. Later, when Medea speaks to her two children, their heads also appear in such slits. Hoss is an admirable Medea, elegant, occa- sionally with a touch of whimsy, but always intense and driven. She is strongly supported by a cast of familiar members of the Deutsches Theater compa- ny, headed by Neuenschwander, but including the popular character actor Christian Grashof as Creon and the magisterial Horst Lebinsky as Aegeus. Matthias Bunchschuh as the messenger stands almost unmoving downstage, delivering this speech in a quiet tone, often pausing as his emotion over- takes him. This underplayed delivery makes this speech one of the highlights of the evening. Missing the Idomeneus was a disappoint- ment, but there will be other opportunities to see it. Not so this impressive Medea, now disappearing from the repertoire, so I was pleased to be offered this opportunity. In all, I saw during a period of somewhat over two weeks almost as many Berlin productions outside the official Festival as within it, and in terms of range and achievement I have to say that both were equally impressive. 103 JOSHUA ABRAMS is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Roehampton University and Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His publications have appeared in Theatre Journal, TDR, and PAJ, among other places. He is Vice President for ATHE Conference 2011 and is completing a book-length manuscript on notions of Levinasian ethics in relation to performance. 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. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. His most recent book is Theatre is More Beautiful than War (Iowa, 2009). BARRY DANIELS is a retired Professor of Theatre History now living in France. He has written extensively on the French Romantic theatre. His book Le Dcor de theatre lpoque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la Comdie-Franaise, 17991848 was published by the National Library of France in 2003. In 2007 he co- curated the exposition Patriotes en scne! Le Thtre de la Rpublique, 17901799 for the Museum of the French Revolution in Vizille. He co-authored the catalogue which was published by Artlys. He is currently editing the stagehands notebook for the Comdie-Franaise from 1798 to 1825. 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, UC-Berkeley, and UNLV, he is now retired, splitting his time between Paris and New York. He was the editor for the French Review on African Literature and Film for many years. MARIA M. DELGADO is Professor of Theatre & Screen Arts at Queen Mary University of London and co-edi- tor of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her books include Other Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (MUP 2003), Federico Garca Lorca (Routledge 2008), three co-edited vol- umes for Manchester University Press, and two collections of translations for Methuen. She has recently com- pleted a co-edited volume on European directors for Routledge that will be published in 2010. STEVE EARNEST is Associate Professor of Theater at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He has previously published articles and reviews in WES, Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, New Theatre Quarterly, and Opera Journal. A practitioner as well as a writer, he is a member of AEA, SAG, and SSDC. STAN SCHWARTZ is a freelance theatre and film journalist with a particular interest in Scandinavian theatre and film. He lives and works out of New York City and has written for such publications as New York Times, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and Film Comment. In Sweden, he has written for Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, and Teater Tidningen. PHILLIPPA WEHLE is the author of Le Thtre populaire selon Jean Vilar and Drama Contemporary: France and of the upcoming Act French: Contemporary Plays from France. Professor Emeritus of French and Drama Studies at Purchase College, SUNY, she writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance. She is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Contributors martin e. segal theatre center publications Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonias leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive the- atre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into four- teen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Llusa Cunill arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Mir is a mem- ber of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical atten- tion. Josep M. Benet I Jornet: Two Plays Translated by Marion Peter Holt Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty works for the stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a com- pelling tragedy-within-a-play, and Stages, with its monological recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important plays. They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experi- ments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made him a major figure in contemporary European theatre. Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868 Price US$20.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) martin e. segal theatre center publications Theatre Research Resources in New York City Sixth Edition, 2007 Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described including an outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and Other. Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Comedy: A Bibliography Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, students, artists, and general readers interested in the theory and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is an essential guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and publication data for over a thousand books and articles devoted to this most elusive of genres. Price US$10.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus Translated and Edited by David Willinger Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times. Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868 martin e. segal theatre center publications The Heirs of Molire Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the death of Molire to the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean- Franois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nricault Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chausse, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya. Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest something of the range of the Molire inheritance, from comedy of character through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the mid- eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Molire tradition for more con- temporary political ends Pixrcourt: Four Melodramas Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson This volume contains four of Pixrcourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixrcourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." Pixrcourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868 Price US$15.00 each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) For information, visit the website at www.gc.cuny.edu/theatre or contact the theatre department at theatre@gc.cuny.edu The Graduate Center, CUNY offers doctoral education in Theatre and a Certificate Program in Film Studies Recent Seminar Topics: Middle Eastern Theatre English Restoration and 18 C. Drama Sociology of Culture Contemporary German Theatre Kurt Weill and His Collaborators Opera and Theatre: Tangled Relations Performing the Renaissance The Borders of Latino-American Performance Eastern European Theatre Critical Perspectives on the American Musical Theatre New York Theatre before 1900 Transculturating Transatlantic Theatre and Performance The History of Stage Design The Current New York Season Puppets and Performing Objects on Stage Classicism, Root and Branch Melodrama European Avant-Garde Drama Theorizing Post Executive Officer Jean Graham-Jones CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 telephone 212.817.8870 fax 212.817.1538 Affiliated with the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Western European Stages, Slavic and East European Performance. Faculty: William Boddy Jane Bowers Jonathan Buchsbaum Marvin Carlson Morris Dickstein Mira Felner Daniel Gerould David Gerstner Jean Graham-Jones Alison Griffiths Heather Hendershot Frank Hentschker Jonathan Kalb Stuart Liebman Ivone Margulies Paula Massood Judith Milhous Claudia Orenstein Joyce Rheuban James Saslow David Savran Elisabeth Weis Maurya Wickstrom David Willinger James Wilson