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Berlin, Day 6: The Robbers (Schiller / Nunes), Gorki Theater

By On 06/05/2013 · Leave a Comment

Certain theatrical experiences stick with you. I doubt I will ever forget a production of Buechner’s Leonce and Lena directed by Andreas Kriegenburg at the Residenztheater in Munich that I saw in 1999. The stage was a huge steeply raked field of artificial turf; at one point, one character watered the grass, and another figure [...]

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Berlin, Day 5: Enemy of the People (Ibsen / Droese), Gorki Theater

By On 05/05/2013 · Leave a Comment

What an action packed day! A morning discussion with Michael Thalheimer and Constanze Becker about their Medea, an afternoon discussion about the play with Inge Stephan and Hans-Thies Lehmann, and then my second Enemy of the People in three days, at the Maxim Gorki Theatre — the smallest of the six [...]

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Berlin, Day 4: Medea (Euripides / Thalheimer), Theatertreffen

By On 04/05/2013 · Leave a Comment

The stage is completely empty. Completely, utterly empty. All the way to the iron curtain at the back. A huge, black and grey cavern lined with grids, ropes, and other mechanical elements. This is the emptiest, most openly empty stage I’ve seen in my four days here.

Then the worklights fade, and a large, very [...]

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Berlin, Day 2: Postscript

By On 03/05/2013 · 1 Comment

Two further notes apropos yesterday’s show:

- Dialect
Horvath’s play is set in Vienna. People speak, if not quite in dialect, at least with a rich smattering of dialect words and speech forms, diminutives in particular. None of Thalheimer’s actors sounded remotely Viennese (I haven’t looked at their bios to see whether any of [...]

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