Imploding Fictions' Blog

This year’s line-up:

Fantasma                                         René Pollesch
Geisterfahrer                                   Lutz Hübner
Privatleben                                      Ulrike Syha
Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)         Elfriede Jelinek
Hier und Jetzt                                Roland Schimmelpfennig
Die goldenen letzten Jahre          Sibylle Berg
Kritische Masse                              Oliver Bukowski

I’ve just returned from the 34. Mülheimer Theatertage. After the Berliner Theatertreffen it’s the largest theatre festival in the German speaking world and it’s the most prestigious event there is for contemporary German language playwrights. The line-up is often quite eclectic: established writers and newcomers stand side by side.

The jury claims it is after the most exciting, challenging, provocative pieces of work of the year. In order to be considered the play has to have been produced. Inevitably the choice of the plays is influenced by the quality of their production. This can lead to some tension and confusion. This year that was the case with Sebastian Nübling’s production of Oliver Bukowski’s Kritische Masse. Nübling had cut 80 percent of the text, switched the names and gender of most of the characters and come up with a new dramaturgical framework. The piece on display at Mülheim was totally different from the written script, which begged the question whose work was being judged: the writer’s or the director’s. The Jury’s response is that what matters is the theatrical event itself. And within the theatrical event it’s the writer who has provided the spark that sets the theatrical process rolling. In the best case a good production can help a weak script, but it can also work the other way around.
At the end of the festival two prizes are awarded. An audience prize (votes are taken after every performance) and the jury prize of 15.000 Euros. The final jury debate occurs live in front of the audience. In the past the award has gone to writers such as Franz Xaver Kroetz, Gerlinde Reinshagen, Heiner Müller, Botho Strauß, Tankred Dorst and Werner Schwab. Last year’s Mülheim winner was Dea Loher with the impressive The Last Fire.

International Theatre Translators Conference

I was in Mülheim to take part in the Interationale Theaterübersetzer Begegnung, a coming together of theatre translators from around the world to discus the new plays at Mülheim, see them in production, consider their possible translation and discuss the specific translation problems these plays pose. My colleagues were from Japan, Iran, Indonesia, Chile, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, Finland, Letland and France.
It was a thrilling (but incredibly intense) time! We met in the mornings to read and discuss the day’s play, translated an excerpt in the afternoon, saw the production in the evening and then met the writer and director to discuss the piece further. The following day we’d read out each others translations (in the many different languages) and compare the problems and challenges we’d faced. It was amazing how often solutions could be found from a different language! When confronted with a tricky figure of speech or piece of verbal imagery, quite often someone would mention a saying or metaphor in their language which triggered of ideas as to how it could be solved in one’s own target language. We developed quite a dynamic working process between us. It is a requirement of the programme that all translators pursue other activities within the theatre, some were directors others dramaturgs, one was an actress. This way everyone had a lot of knowledge about the theatre scene within their country and we spent two days giving each other presentations about the theatres in our countries of residence, introducing the playwrights, the directors and the overall artistic and financial situations the theatres work under. It was a very inspiring group of people and has left me with contacts and good friends all over the world.

The Plays

Elfriede Jelinek: Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)

Elfriede Jelinek is a regular in Mülheim. She has been invited many times and each new piece is awaited with much anticipation. The gaps between plays can be long, but when she does decide to write she does so at a frenetic pace, finishing a play within a matter of several weeks and not going back to proof-read. Her plays read like a feverish stream of consciousness. She has long dispensed of character and plot, the organising principle of her plays is language and the way it sounds, flows, tastes. The densely associative texts resist being logically deciphered, they work more like musical scores. Once a theme is established the line of enquiry channel hops into a new area through constant wordplay, puns, double meanings or sometimes just through an association in sound.

Jelinek’s latest play Rechnitz (Würgeengel) is perhaps her masterpiece. It is a deeply unsettling account of a little known massacre in the small Austrian town of Rechnitz, home to Baron von Thyssens daughter. In the final days of the second world war and with the Russians only hours away, the baroness decided to throw a party for the Hitler youth and the SS at her hunting castle, to drain the wine reserves and leave nothing for the Russians. Around midnight the baroness handed out hunting rifles and twelve drunken party guests walked to the nearby concentration camp and shot two hundred Jews. They later returned to the castle and continued partying. At dawn they set fire to the castle and fled. Several hours later the Russians arrived. Silence hung over this incident for a long time. The only two witnesses found willing to talk about what had happened were shot on their way to the trial. A documentary crew visited Rechnitz in 1994 and asked older inhabitants about their memories of the fateful night. Some say they knew of nothing, others say they heard the shots and screams, all of the interviewees talk a lot, explaining, justifying, putting into perspective, repeating themselves etc. They talk a lot whilst saying very little. Jelinek saw this documentary and was fascinated by how the interviewees kept the events at a distance, not by remaining silent, but by talking incessantly.

The play takes on the form of a messenger’s report of what occurred at Rechnitz, posing the question: how can an event like this be talked about, narrated, passed on?
It’s a three hour relentless barrage of language. There are numerous echoes of messenger speeches from Greek tragedies, whole sections of Euripidies’ The Bacchae have been lifted and woven into Jelinek’s speech tapestry, the latter play’s big feast offering an eerie association to the wild party on Rechnitz castle. Shards from other pieces of writing reappear too, the cadaverous Jews are evoked through TS Elliot’s Hollow Men (used in a willfully flat automatic internet translation) and its famous apocalyptic last stanza constantly finds its way back into the material in a variety of forms. The folkloric opera Der Freischütz also features heavily throughout, its romantic hunting connotations savagely subverted. These literary and cultural references are mixed with quotes from Rechnitz inhabitants, newspaper articles concerning the event, talk-show transcripts and general media chatter. It amounts to highly associative speech debris, every line containing echoes of something else. It is as though Jelinek (who cannot leave her house and famously relies solely on TV, internet and books for information) has an over-sensitively tuned antenna to all of the cultural and pop cultural events around her and it this baggage flows straight into her writing.

The messengers are not only the wriggling and contradictory eye witnesses and commentators, they also become the culprits, the murderess, the participants. What makes the play truly sickening is how the victims are never given a voice. We are confronted with endless explanations, justifications and the story’s appealing sensationalism in which the core of the tragedy, the pointless death of two hundred people is conveniently buried beneath relentless and often entertaining chatter.

As is typical of Jelinek, the play is written as one long, dense text, without a division into characters or any clues as to its staging. Jelinek’s plays need strong directors who can impose a dramatic shape onto the unwieldy and sprawling texts. Jelinek gives the director total freedom in the staging of her work.

Jelinek’s plays are truly unique. This is the most powerful and disturbing play I have seen in a long time. It was this year’s recipient of the Mülheim award, in my view an entirely deserved honour.

Lutz Hübner: Geisterfahrer

Lutz Hübner is an interesting case in German theatre. He is by far the most successful contemporary playwright working in Germany today. He is the third most performed writer in the German speaking world (after Shakespeare and Goethe). And yet, judging by the country’s influential theatre magazine Theaterheute and the national broadsheet press, you wouldn’t know he existed. His plays are rarely reviewed by the national press and the monthly Theaterheute which publishes a contemporary new play in every issue, has never printed one of his plays or ever given him a mention. Likewise Hübner has never been nominated for any of the major awards and hardly ever been invited to the big festivals. Apparently, last year at Mülheim in one of the public debates the subject was raised why a playwright as prolific as Hübner has never been present at the festival. This year he was invited for the first time and his presence caused a lot of discussion.

Hübner is a rare thing in Germany: a writer of straight, well made plays. Most German writers since the 60′s have been mistrustful of language, character and plot and seek ways of deconstructing language and and twisting theatrical form. Hübner draws psychologically rounded characters and places them into dramatic situations which tell a more or less linear story. The plays are often big hits with the public but theatre critics and dramaturgs tend to be quite critical of his work and equate it to bland television realism. Hence his work is marginalised by the ‘theatre intelligentsia’. It was quite interesting to see how a writer of solid, regular plays (the sort of plays which are the norm here in England) was the cause of such a stir at the festival!

The play with which Hübner was invited was Geisterfahrer (Ghost Drivers), a tale about people on the opposite carriageway of life. It’s a play about what it’s like to start the second part of ones life. It’s about the guilt you inevitably accumulate through life, and how to deal with it. The play starts with the return of Johannes and Miriam, a couple in their late thirties who have just returned to settle in Germany after a decade living in Brazil. It is obvious that Johannes regrets the move. He lands a mediocre teaching job in a local school and tries to come to terms with how foreseeable his life from here onwards is. Johannes and Miriam move into a house-share with four former friends, all middle aged academics. In the course of the play all six characters have to confront how much they’ve lost and how little they’ve won, and each deals with this in their own way. Silke obsessively tidies, busies herself with housework and plays the mother. Her husband Harald, a senior physician, realises that apart from reputation and money he has achieved very little in life. He washes away his feeling of despair through alcohol. Pitt who’s given up on his dreams of becoming a musician long ago and buried his passion, falls in love with Miriam, another hopeless situation. His wife, the psychologist Silke, cares for everyone apart from herself. Johannes and Miriam are at the pivot of the action as they are sucked into their house-mates shattered hopes and ambitions and must ask the question whether this is the fate they reconcile themselves to, or whether they seek change and attempt a new start once more.

I thought Geisterfahrer was a gripping, well crafted play with very engaging characters. The ‘mid-life crisis’ theme never got sucked into the self absorption and narcissism that some plays dealing with this subject slip into. Through all its sense of melancholy it retained a peculiar wit.

René  Pollesch: Fantasma

René  Pollesch’s offering Fantasma couldn’t be more different. Pollesch has become quite a cult figure in Germany. He’s a writer/director who has created his own brand of theatre which has absolutely nothing to do with traditional “plays” and attracts huge, predominantly young audiences. Attending a Pollesch event is more like going to a concert, a happening or a demonstration than going to the theatre. There was a big buzz in the air on the night I went to see Fantasma. The show I saw is hard to describe. It was a huge philosophical trash spectacle dealing with communism’s ability to appropriate the capitalist ethos and the nature of illusion. The aesthetic of the evening owes much to pastiche, it was saturated with filmic references and pop culture, as well as nods to Baudrillard, Lyotard and Deleuze. There is much use of video, pre-recorded and live feed sequences, a lot of the action also unfolds backstage and is only viewable via the screen. But unlike Katie Mitchell’s painstakingly detailed, almost forensic live camera work, Pollesch’s video sequences are a wild and anarchic whirl that celebrate rupture and relativity and the breakdown between fake and real. It’s an exhilarating theatrical experience. The six highly skilled and versatile performers (including the great Martin Wuttke from the Berliner Ensemble) never let you forget they are playing roles and switch between playing styles with great dexterity.
Each show by René Pollesch is only one small part within a larger exploration. Like artists working in the plastic arts he pursues themes which he follows through for several years, each new show is a continuation of the latter. They are all part of one overall project.
In England the only real equivalent to René  Pollesch is possibly the work of Forced Entertainment.  René  Pollesch has established himself as a big name all over continental Europe and beyond. I really hope he will be invited to work in England at some point.

I missed Oliver Bukowski’s Kritische Masse and Sibille Berg’s Die goldenen letzten Jahre, since I had to leave early to start rehearsals for Hamletmachine in Strasbourg.  The other much talked about play in competition was Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Hier und Jetzt which I will briefly mention:

Roland Schimmelpfennig: Hier und Jetzt

Schimmelpfennig is a master of twisting dramatic form. Hier und Jetzt is based on a very clever set up. The guests of a wedding party sit at a long dining table laden with food and wine and start inventing stories about what will happen in the future of the newlyweds Katja and Georg. The stories take on a dark turn when it is conceived that Katja will leave Georg for Martin. As the alcohol flows and the stories take on unexpected turns, time suddenly comes out of joint, it seems as though several years have passed and the wedding guests are now discussing what actually happened to the couple. The boundaries between storytelling and actuality disintegrate and the play’s timeframe becomes fluid slipping swiftly backwards and forwards, examining the story of Katja and Georg from many different angles.

It’s a charming play although sometimes I felt it became slightly too whimsical. I had big problems with Jürgen Gosch’s production however, which dragged the short, tightly written play out over a playing time of almost three hours and crammed it full of visual gags and bits of business which it could have done much better without.

More about Mülheim and this year’s plays and writers under:

http://nachtkritik-stuecke09.de/

An article and a video of the theatre translators conference can be found under:

http://nachtkritik-stuecke09.de/index.php/internationale-gaeste/152

and:

http://nachtkritik-stuecke09.de/index.php/internationale-gaeste/31

Lutz Hübner’s play Respect will be produced by Company of Angels at the Birmingham Rep later this year… Watch this space!!!

Post by Philip Thorne