Our production of Norway.Today is on in London at Sothwark Playhouse on the 14th and 15th of November as part of Company of Angels’ Theatre Café Festival!
We recommend you book tickets now, because Southwark Playhouse operate with airline style ticketing, which means they are cheaper the earlier you book.
Box office: 020 7928 2811
We hope to see you there!
Øystein and Philip
(UG)gly, the brilliant show that replaced ours at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival
Øystein in email-conversation with Adrian Gillott
After the letter exchange between David Overend and myself arranged by INSTED (see right hand menu), exchanging thoughts and ideas through letters has fascinated me. It’s very stimulating putting your thoughts down in letters, and getting thorough and intelligent responses to it. Your ideas feel like they matter, and that is a very satisfying feeling.
Here is a slightly shortened version of an email conversation between myself and Adrian Gillot of TheSamePerson who stood in for us on short notice when we were hindered from going to the Amsterdam Fringe:
Subject: URGENT from Oystein, can you help us?!
From: Øystein
Sent: 25 August 2008 13:34:26
Hi Adrian,
Philip and I have got into an unfortunate situation… As you know, we were going to perform at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival. But then Philip decided to fall down a flight of stairs and damage his leg, so now we’ve had to cancel. Very disappointing for us, but also for the festival who have now got four nights available in one of their best venues. So… we thought we’d ask you if you and Anna wanted to go with UG(gly) instead?
(…)
All the best,
Øystein
From: Adrian
Sent: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:48:08 +0100
Hey Øystein,
Thanks for thinking about us! It would be very cool if Anna and I could take UG(gly) to Amsterdam.
But how terrible for you guys. I’m so sorry to hear about Philip and his leg. Argh! Why do these things happen at such terrible times?
Thank you!
Best,
Adrian.
From: Øystein
Sent: 29 August 2008 09:50:21
Hear you’re going! Great stuff! Have an amazing festival! 
Best, Øystein and Pip
From: Adrian
Sent: 29 August 2008 10:29:51
Yes, it looks like we’re going…
It’s a bit scary because we haven’t looked at the show since June but it is going to be really exciting. I can’t believe that we are profiting from your misfortune, though; that seems really harsh. I hope that Pip’s leg gets better really soon. And, you know, I am really curious about your show…
Best,
Adrian.
From: Øystein
Sent: 30 August 2008 10:07:01
Well, it was supposed to be about failure. So I reckon this was probably the best way to fulfill that aim… ;-P
Ø.
The two (UG)gly samaritans, here in blue
From: Adrian
Sent: 09 September 2008 20:06:04
Dear Øystein and Pip,
This is just to say thank you so much for recommending us to Anneke
for the Fringe. It is really such a shame that you were not able to go
because it was a beautiful theatre and the people were so wonderful
(you have already met some of them, I think) but your loss was very
much our gain and we are extremely grateful. It was a wonderful few
days and an invaluable opportunity for Anna and I to play the show in
front of audiences of total strangers; and Dutch to boot.
Anneke was very disappointed that you guys were not there – after
Hamlet Machine (which she kept telling us about) she was really
excited to see what you were doing. I think she is expecting to see
you next year…
You must also tell Anna and I when you are performing in this country.
I am really curious about the show we were replacing. In fact, some of
the best people we had in the audience were just people who had been
searching on line and had picked your show as something out of the
ordinary to do with their Sunday evening (they said that they hardly
ever go to the theatre); they made do with ours but yours obviously
has something about it. Oh and there was the actor (whose name I have
forgotten) who picked your show as part of his Saturday evening
‘route’. In some ways it felt as though we were wearing somebody
else’s perfume! Now we want to know what it smells like in the right
place.
All the best,
Adrian (and Anna).
From: Øystein
Sent: 16 September 2008 17:10:01
Dear Adrian and Anna,
Well, thanks for helping us out! It was brilliant for us to be able to recommend a good show rather than just disappearing and leaving the festival in a trick situation… We’re glad you enjoyed playing there, and that you had a good reception!
Hearing about all the people who had randomly discovered our show, or had been eagerly anticipating it is rather weird, sitting here in little Sidcup…
We’ll definitely go to the Amsterdam Fringe next year. And perhaps you will too, if this year’s ad hoc performance was a success?
It doesn’t seem like Now You See It will surface again, at least not for a while. After interrupting and calling off rehearsals and performances this time we feel like the moment has passed for that particular show. But, we’re up to our neck in other plans and ideas instead. You can see the first ten minutes of Now You See It on our YouTube page, if you haven’t done that already. There were a number of further ideas known only to me and Pip (both or one of us) which the world will never know. In combination with what we already had and the what the blurb promised, I’m sure it would have been a very intriguing show. Now, it’s the show that never was. An idea which does have a certain romantic, mystical or even eery quality to it.
We have our next performance in November, and you should come and see it if you can! Its a very different kind of show to Now You See It, its called Norway.Today and is a piece of drama where video is essential to the story, and we use live feed video projection a lot. Its on at Southwark Playhouse as part of the Theatre Café Festival arranged by Company of Angels.
Best wishes,
Øystein and Pip
(PS. Can I use this email-conversation as an entry for our blog? I liked your perfume-analogy and my “show that never was”)
From: Adrian
Sent: 17 September 2008 23:34:43
Dear Øystein,
I’ll just reply to you quickly – otherwise I won’t get to reply for a
week or more.
So:
I watched the Now You See It video. I think it’s a shame that you are
not continuing to work on that because I think there is something very
promising about the place you started from. Maybe you can cannibalize it for new shows.
Please feel free to use the e-mail conversation. I assert no ownership.
Hope to see you in November.
Best, best,
Adrian.
For more info about TheSamePerson have a look at their webpage: http://www.thesameperson.com
(and make sure you watch their funny and weird little videos!)
Apart from all the usual productions of Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm and so forth, this year’s Ibsen Festival in Oslo also features Ibsen performed by little plasticine figures…
The theatre designer Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens travelled to visit kids between 14 and 16 at several Norwegian schools. She boiled down classic Ibsen plots into one sentence (“Girl kills herself although she has everything”, “Mother leaves husband and kids” etc.) and gave them to the teenagers as a narrative starting point. Equipped with a video camera and plasticine the teenagers set about creating, modelling and filming their own stories derived from these premises. Inger didn’t mention the Ibsen plays, so the pupils created without any preconceptions. They modelled their own version of events…
The resulting films are being shown for the duration of the festival in the National Theatre’s foyer, and Inger Astri Kobbevik Stephens screened them at the Open Theatre (Det Apne Teater) as part of a performance lecture entitled Bloody Dramatic Rooms.
Inside little cardboard boxes, lovingly decorated as affluent living rooms with widescreen TVs fashioned out of match boxes, wild fantasies of domestic violence, abuse and addiction take place. It’s revealing that all but three of the fifteen groups (despite complete freedom) decided to stage their dramas in domestic living rooms. The pent up tension of these claustrophobic shoe box homes is in fact quite reminiscent of Ibsen. The way the tension is unleashed though is quite different… There is an abundance of violent humour and graphic detail. The ramshackle plasticine film making is boundless in terms of ambition. In my favourite film for example Nora’s modern-day plasticine husband hacks his way out of the doll’s house with a chain saw. Although most of the scenarios at some point spiral out of control into gratuitous gore, the films are filled with insights into these pupils’ world views and how they perceive “family.” What is starkly obvious is the extent in which TV pervades every aspect of their domestic lives. A TV is featured in every one of the dramatic rooms, as are fathers complaining “you’re in front of the screen” and “shut up, I can’t hear it!” It seems that family life without the TV set has become unthinkable. But it’s not just a physical presence in these films, the vocabulary of TV can be sensed in the making of them. The creators are obviously highly visually literate. They also have an eye for lurid detail and a taste for violent humour. Whilst watching I sometimes think these films are more in reference to movies these kids have seen or series they admire, rather than their own lives in well to do, rural Norway. The “Lady from the sea” film can best be described as Beavis and Butthead meets Ibsen.
So, are these films about Norwegian families, or American families, or how Norwegian teenagers see American families or an assemblage of all the things they fear, idolise or identify with? Whatever the answer (and it’s probably a mixture of all these things) these tiny films seem both harsh and at the same time quite vulnerable. They make for fascinating viewing!
They also seem to suggest that directors confronted with the staging difficulties of say Brand or Peer Gynt should maybe get themselves a handful of play-do : )
Philip Thorne
Our rehearsals of Now You See It; Now You Don’t have been inconveniently, annoyingly and abruptly interrupted by Philip taking the well-wishing of our friends a little too seriously.
Break a leg, they said. And so he did.
Well. It’s probably not quite broken. It’s not removed at the hip. It’s not crushed and jelly-like. It doesn’t even have white bits of bone sticking out. So in that sense, the whole business is disappointingly un-dramatic. But the doctors say Pip’s leg is fractured and that he should rest for a while and not use it. So we have been forced to quit rehearsals and cancel the project.
This means we are not going to Amsterdam, not previewing in Oslo, not visiting the Ukraine, not currently planning another Rome-trip and not going to get the opportunity to take this particular project any further. Which is sad, of course. But life goes on and all that.
Then. When the cloud of disappointment had subsided, the thick layers of irony hit us. Like a slap in the face with a big fish.
Here we embark on a journey trying to make a show about failure. And fail.
We make a show about clowns. And Pip performs the perfect act of slapstick on the staircase outside where we’re rehearsing.
We set about creating a slippery landscape of tricks and fiction and end up physically slipping up.
In fact, we called our show Now You See It; Now You Don’t. And for a long time we could see it looming in the distance. Unclear, slightly out of focus maybe, but full of promise and bright colours and joke shop props and touring plans. Now, we can’t see it anymore. The show is off radar, it has entered the Bermuda triangle of theatre only reappearing like a ghost of memory – like the Flying Dutchman, perhaps, its journey interrupted, but its trajectory forever Amsterdam-bound… (How’s that for a syrupy analogy?)
We were making a show about what we laugh at and why, how we make something un-funny, funny. And it is with all this in mind that we suspect that this whole situation might in fact be a perfectly legitimate laughing matter. It is funny that this whole thing went tits up. Or leg down, as the case may be. We are waiting for the pain to recede – or, Pip is, I’m fit as a fiddle to be frank, waiting for the aftermath of cancellations to quieten down before we make our mind up about this. The laugh-worthy-ness of our current unfortune – does it deserve a five star rating or a meagre two?
But in the end I guess it is to be expected. Not Philip falling down stairs, of course (Well, maybe that too…). What I mean is: When you have the nerve to call your company Imploding Fictions… Perhaps it is only natural that in between the projects where a show successfully implodes the fiction of fake drama, or implodes the audience’s expectations of fiction, or implodes theatre’s fictional frame, or reveals a self-imploded fiction, or implodes the lies of reality and exposes the fiction of truth, now and again a project comes along and simply pops politely, in an imploding fashion, not unlike a balloon bumping unexpectedly into a needle – and folds up. Exactly in the way we imploders expect fictions to behave.
This particular project has – like the aforementioned balloon – popped. Retracted to its own crumpled, wrinkly shape, its true face revealed. It is not a pretty face. It used to be big, red and shiny (if perhaps a little bloated). Now it’s small, raisin-like and a little wet. (Yes, Pip, I’m talking about you again. Oh my god, is that blood? Nurse! Nurse!)
I’m writing from Pip’s bedside at the Norwegian A&E, anticipating a big bill handed over to me with a polite smile by a pretty nurse. (I hate people who smile politely and look distractingly attractive whilst they rip you off.)
- Pip, have you got your E111 with you? Your E111, the European health service… card… thingy… Bugger. Well I’m not paying, you’re the one who fell!?! It’s your fault that it has all stalled, isn’t it? I’m still standing!
But, come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t be quite as smug about the whole thing. After all, I was the one who pushed him.
- Øystein
PS. Thanks to all the people who have believed in this project; INSTED, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian Dance and Theatre Centre, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, International Publishers Forum in Lviv, the Norwegian Church in London, the Acting Department of the Film and TV-academy at the Nordic Institute for Stage and Studio in Oslo and of course our eminent producer Michael H. Sciarrone! We will be back with renewed strength before you know it… (After all, we aren’t broken. Only fractured.)
foto: Sigrid C. Degener/ITs Festival
During Imploding Fictions’ trip to Amsterdam where we performed Hamletmachine as part of the ITs Festival, we also participated in the INSTED @ ITs program. INSTED is an international network for young theatre directors (www.insted.eu) and Pip and I have taken on the responsibility for being INSTED’s London representatives.
The ITs or International Theatreschool Festival (www.itsfestival.nl) is a large festival presenting final work by graduating theatremakers from Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere. As a side program to ITs 08, INSTED invited 20 young international and 20 young Dutch theatremakers, and arranged a week of workshops, talks, networking and parties. I participated in what was called the Music Theatre Workshop (replacing the original opera workshop). This was not a workshop on how to direct musicals as one might think, but rather a series of laboratory sessions of theatre-making, focusing on how music could play an essential part in making theatre, enhancing or adding something new to a moment of theatre and also become central in the telling of a story on stage.
The workshop was consummately and engagingly lead by Thomas Spijkerman and Wilko Sterke, two young musicians and theatremakers (both young gentlemen with an impeccable sense of retro style – looking just as if they were extras in an Austin Powers movie), and we were six young directors participating. Over the course of the four days the workshop went on for, we explored the function music could have in a number of different ways: With pre-recorded music, with live music performed beautifully by Thomas and Wilko, with live music performed not necessarily always as beautifully by the rest of us, with musical- or cabaret-style singing characters, with music naturalistically woven into the scene (a character listening to music in the scene f.ex.), as background music/muzac, Hollywood style emotional underlining, abstracted sound-scenarios and as pure, unadulterated, loud, riotous, riveting, raucous, noise!
Highlight of the week: Øystein during the showing for the rest of the INSTED crowd on the last day, hammering madly on a bass guitar (I can’t play one for shit, but I can make lots of sound with it), being so encaptured – no, entranced – in the industrial, deafening, cacophonic, earpiercing soundblast, he doesn’t realize the scene is over ages ago and everyone is shouting for him to stop…
Hell yeah, give me some LOUDNESS!
(Dear Pinter; this might be the first and only time in history that one of your short playlets have been given the deaf-metal treatment. Though it was good, I’m pretty sure you don’t need worry about it happening again.)
Conclusion: If you ever come across Thomas Spijkerman or Wilko Sterke, don’t shy away. I guarantee there’s some musical fun to be had, some exciting experiments to be made and lots to learn!
Next year: Give me a drumkit. Ooohhh yeah.
foto: Sigrid C. Degener/ITs Festival
Imploding Fictions’ Hamletmachine was performed at the ITs Festival at Theatre Frascati on the 23rd June 08.
http://www.itsfestival.nl/2008_nl/festivalinfo/juryguestaward.php
http://www.itsfestival.nl/2008_nl/festivalinfo/Recensies.php
INSTED @ ITs took place from 23rd – 29th June 08.
http://www.itsfestival.nl/2008_nl/programma/instedatits.php
http://www.insted.eu/instedatits
(That last web address says “Insted at ITs”, not “instead’a tits”. Just to clear that up.)
- Øystein
Just returned from a terrific evening of over the top acting, knockabout theatricality and the best rendition of “to be or not to be” I have ever heard – recited by a four-headed Shakespeare.
Travelling theatre company Footsbarn don’t do subtle. They do in-yer-face, cut the crap theatre. Their brash theatricality veers between irritating and invigorating. It’s like hardcore Panto or Kneeghigh without the cutesy bits.
I first saw Footsbarn as a child near Avignon in France. They were staying on the same campsite and I looked at their colourfully painted caravans with awe and envy. The hand to mouth existence of this travelling group of players pitching up their stage somewhere different each night just seemed like the most adventurous and romantic way of living ever.
Now after an absence of almost two decades they have returned to England and are partying at the Globe. Shakespeare Party is an irreverent “best of” edit of the canon featuring Ophelia in a waterfall, Romeo and Juliet on the highwire, hacked off limbs flying out of a cauldron and some midget getting high on magic mushrooms (no idea from which play the latter is spurned…)
It’s approaching that season when awful productions of A Midsummer-night’s Dream are put on in every bush and grassy path in Britain and picnicking crowds can watch actors camp up iambic pentameter. What sets Footsbarn apart from the usual Shakespeare pageant is the unapologetic deftness of it all, real anarchic verve and madcap flair. An ideology of irreverence lies under everything they do. It’s really, really stupid and really funny. It’s coarse theatre that celebrates itself as such.
The Globe is an amazing venue. I’d always considered it a tourist attraction or ‘museum theatre’. But I’ve rarely felt the power of the audience so strongly as here. The relationship between stage and audience, the standing, milling, shuffling spectators and the performers’ total exposure are deeply fascinating. It’s an ideal location for Shakespeare Party.
During the course of the bard romp enough mess is created to match Forced Entertainment standards, I desperately want to raid the company’s surreal costume store and a Cello is unintentionally smashed. We hope Footsbarn return!
Philip
(Jack. One of our regulars. He played one of the robots in Hamletmachine. Great guy.)
WARNING: This blog entry contains an overload of clichéd verbal imagery, gross exaggeration, naff pop-cultural references, shameless self admiration and personal opinions. (It is, in other words, not that dissimilar to Cherie Blair’s recent biography.)
Looking at our busy schedule the last year, one might think Imploding Fictions’ projects appear like duped rabbits out of a magicians hat (“What’s with the bright light? How did I get here? Why do my ears hurt?”), pearls on a string (Norwegian expression. Don’t ask.), train carriages out of a tunnel, one following the other, or that they fall into place like dominos or double cherries on a slot machine (Keeeerching!!!).
(Sammy, doing his impression of a confused rabbit.)
Although all these analogies might carry some truth (particularly the ‘Keerching’ bit), the actual experience is more like this:
It is like looking at a door.
A large, calm, white door. Impeccably painted, nicely framed and comfortably closed. It is the kind of door that fills you with peace inside, like a door of good karma, a haven of light wood and worry-less tranquility.
Then.
All of a sudden a massive, kick-arse axe comes hacking its way loudly through the all-too-soft wood in a single smashing blow. Splinters fly everywhere and through the jagged hole a new project rears its ugly head and grins shamelessly in our face exclaiming:
“He-e-e-ere’s Johnny!!!”
“Keerching!”
In fact, I don’t believe the experience from the inside of the Imploding Fictions vehicle even remotely resembles the viewpoint from the outside. From the corner of the sofa, with a beer and a bowl of popcorn, the Formula 1 racing car is a feast for the eye, a glistening, gleaming beam of light through the dust of the racing track, with a low, humming drone gently caressing your ears emerging from the speakers of the TV-set. From inside the cockpit on the other hand, the scandi-anglo-germanic co-pilots experience a brain mushing, blood curling G-force, battling neck breaking acceleration (Buckle up, cowboy! Let’s ride!) and the noise is like having a 10-inch nail hammered ruthlessly through your eardrums.
Metaphorically speaking, that is.
Metaphorically speaking, Imploding Fictions is like a Formula 1 car where the pan-european construction team with a combination of luck and utter foolishness built the engine out of the spare parts of a space rocket – but completely forgot to install brakes.
Or, it is like the baby in Lynch’s Erasorhead (the cutest baby ever to hit the silver screen!); a demanding, devouring, desperate creature with an excess of growth hormone, a living thing which has to be fed and tended to every day, like a mean green mother from outer space and it’s bad… But like any living creature, worthy of of love and respect (This is where the blog goes soppy, look out. Get your handkerchiefs lined up), having become something we crave for, enjoy (why else would we be doing it?) and ultimately depend on.
It is not something we can really drop or forget, it is not just an object or a concept or simply a legal entity, it is more than that. Something that can perhaps only be expressed through metaphor:
Imploding Fictions is like waking up in the morning, discovering that you have been chained to a rodeo-bull who can’t tell anger management from nuclear warfare just about to be severely stung on his crown jewels by a bee with the wrong sense of humor.
(Example of bee with the wrong sense of humour.)
It is both our Mr. Hyde and our super hero alter ego.
Our anagram.
That which you read between the lines.
It is our hidden treasure and the life-size map to find it.
Our fun fair mirror room reflection.
Us without the make up on.
A stack of yellow bricks next to a big, blinking neon sign saying:
“Grab your sand and bubble-fluid, guys!
It might mix nicely into mortar!”
You can read more about Imploding Fictions’ various projects on http://www.implodingfictions.com.
- Øystein
The distinct smell of make up, boiled sweets and cheap champagne hangs in the air. We are unpacking our BAC scratch show of bad jokes, bad acting and bad taste and turning it into a full length evening of misjudged razzle dazzle for the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam.
Now you see it, now you don’t is essentially the debris of a clown act, a topsy turvy magic show. The principles of showmanship are deconstructed… hence, build up and punch-line are presented in the wrong order, the magical effect pre-empts its presentation. What should be fast and snazzy and glam is rendered through slow-motion, while the actual ‘trick’ is understated to the point whereby it almost escapes attention…
The idea for the show was spurned through a simple fascination for the processes of a repeated joke: its journey from amusement, to becoming a running gag, to becoming a crushing bore and finally through stubborn persistence finding its way back into a warped kind of humour. Now you see it, now you don’t plays with such perceptual shifts and the slippery proximity of laughter and embarrassment, tragedy and comedy, wit and stupidity. The piece also owes a lot to our admiration for Tommy Cooper, and we’ve been watching far too much Jan Svankmajer latley.
And there will be confetti. Lots of it. There will be so much confetti that you will never want to see the bright frivolous stuff ever again.
Two clowns sit opposite the audience. It is the day after the party. After the show. Possibly after the last ever show. Shards of the old act are performed out of context and gags are riffed. An unaffected, lazy, drunken haze seems to lie over the whole thing, which somehow seems to magnify the oiled routines – their absurdity, their construction and their addictive appeal.
Now you see it; now you don’t is a celebration of failure, a bid to give drinking games the title of art, and an attempt to salvage the world through an overabundance of confetti.
- Philip
Together with INSTED we were invited to the Körber Studio Junge Regie 2008 in Hamburg, Germany’s annual symposium for young directors. We lived in a place just of the Reeperbahn (probably the most decadent street in Europe), but even so nightlife was eclipsed by a full on schedule that seemed devised to test even the toughest theatre junkie.
The regular programme: show for breakfast, four hour afternoon debate about the previous shows, supper (this was invariably soup), first play of the evening followed by an audience discussion, second play of the evening followed by an audience discussion, then a ‘party’ (which was another play, only this time you were allowed to bring in a glass of wine).
So, this was the ‘basic programme’ around which were scheduled a series of special events, shows, talks and debates, including a lecture with postdramatic theatre gurus Hans Thies Lehmann and Heiner Goebbels.
By the end of six days we had seen nineteen shows. You can read the previous sentence again if you like.
Being invited to the Körber Studio Junge Regie in Hamburg is equivalent to being waved onto a roller-coaster escapade through the current trends of contemporary German theatre. It would be an interesting sociological experiment to force Charles Spencer through the experience. My guess is that he’d explode in a fit of indignation.
With neat regularity Spencer accuses people like Katie Mitchell of ’smashing up the classics’, taking ‘outrageous liberties’ and ‘not serving the intentions of the dead playwright’ (actual quotes!!!) On evidence of Körber Studio 2008 faithfully reconstructing classics is certainly not what German theatre is about. It dismantles them, reconfigures them into new constellations, probes them for contemporary relevance or exposes ideological clashes with current thinking. The productions we saw of Woyzek, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler and Elektra were not attempts at reconstructing Büchner, Shakespeare, Ibsen or Hoffmansthal but rethinking them and their themes from a 21st century standpoint. A central figure at the core of German (and most European) theatre is the ‘dramaturge’. When the term crops up it in Britain it is usually in reference to someone who acts as a kind of script supervisor on new writing. But on the continent dramaturges work on classic plays, they research previous drafts, influences etc. and then, together with the director, determine the structure and strategy for a new production (in Britain we’d say adaptation) of it. The constant accompaniment of the dramaturge and the resulting intellectual rigour in theatrical debates was one of the first striking features of our visit to Hamburg.
The other one (really not wanting to be stereotypical, but hey) was that German tea is a fucking disgrace. You get presented with a glass (!) of warm water into which you are expected to dunk a tea bag. And when Oystein asked for tea with milk the guy behind the bar (after an initial period of confusion) held it under the coffee machine and filled it up with frothy milk.
A rather novel aspect of the festival was that it was accompanied by students of criticism (in Germany you study to become a critic) as well as the students of directing, dramaturgy and acting. The critics joined the directors’ internal discussions and debates on the shows we had seen and then read out and discussed their reviews with the artistic teams under discussion present. This meant that the practitioners had an opportunity to give direct feedback to the critics and vice versa. It was a great idea to bring these two stereotypically polarised fronts together and engage in mutual debate.
Christa Müller, a dramaturge at the Thalia showed us around the Thalia Theater which made us green with envy: two rehearsal stages which are exact replicas of the main stage (minus the auditorium) a firmly employed ensemble of actors on a regular salary and a current repertoire of fifty three (!!!) plays!
Our stay in Hamburg was really inspiring and we met some great people – we thank the Thalia Theater, the Körber Stiftung and INSTED for inviting us, and we hope to return to Germany again soon (maybe next time with a production…) Next week we’ll be back in London.
Read more on:
http://www.insted.eu
http://www.thalia-theater.de
http://www.koerber-stiftung.de/foerderung/foerderung_junger_kuenstler/studio_junge_regie/index.html
http://www.implodingfictions.com
or see some more photos from our trip on
http://www.facbook.com/photo.php?pid=481820&l=eee5e&id=603357604
- Philip