The Berlin theatre scene in the months of October and November is an embarrassment of riches. Major theatres open several new premieres and offer works from their repertory: radical interpretations of classical works, dramatic adaptations of novels, new plays based …

Christoph Marthaler has made his career devising theatre pieces that amalgamate text, music, and movement to do heavy philosophical lifting with a wicked sense of humor. Through these he has succeeded in creating a unique theatrical language that is at …

Berlin’s 2018 Theatertreffen featured a strong lineup of both classical as well as new theatrical works that commented on world politics, social mores, gender, and the way we deal with the past. This season’s festival, however, struggled with issues of …

The most recent premiere of the Theatre of the Eighth Day from Poznań, Poland, Paragraph 196 (Exercises in Terror) is strongly involved in a specific political context: in 2015, the right-wing party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) won the …

On the tenth day of each month, manifestations and counter-manifestations are organized in Poland commemorating the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, in which Polish President Lech Kaczyński and over 90 other persons accompanying him died. Other counter-manifestations and marches such …

In the Summer of 2017 as a result of coproduction between Berlin, Poznań, and Warsaw, the Gorki Theater in Berlin presented three notable Polish performances: Hymn to Love by Marta Górnicka, Klątwa by Stanisław Wyspiański, directed by Oliver Frljić, and …

The great and open stage:

Church of God or the Devil,

which one will this temple of art become?

— The Scenery, Liberation by Stanisław Wyspiański

An icon of the prewar “Young Poland” movement, Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) — a theatre …

During recent years, theatre in Turkey has been generally prosperous. Spectators can find various trends, theatrical forms, and new dramaturgical and narrative techniques during a season, especially if they attend works by the so-called “independent theatres.” Among the independent theatres, …

Report from Vienna of 2017, the Austrian Minister of Culture made a long-awaited and much approved announcement, the appointment of Martin Kušej as the new director of Austria’s most important venue, the Burgtheater in Vienna. Kušej  has come close to …

I first heard of Motus in 2000 or 2001 when Hanon Reznikov, Judith Malina, and I drove down the Apennine hills from our residency in Rocchetta Ligure (1999 – 2004) to see a new avant-garde group named Motus perform on …

Theatre schools came to the city of Brno for the twenty-eighth time to showcase their work. The slogan or theme for 2018 was “losing ground,” an appropriately, allotted foreground to absurd shows. Or, to simplify it: since reality no longer …

Watching Lluís Homar’s Cyrano in a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play at Barcelona’s Borràs theatre, the ghosts of the actor’s earlier roles tumble out in quick succession. The wispy, thinning grey hair no longer cascades as it did …

Although documentary theatre had not been fully absent from Hungarian stages before 2007, it was only in that year that a definitive trend of this genre started to take shape. It was then that the prestigious Katona József Theatre put …

Having been invited as a participating guest to the Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM) for four days, I was somewhat curious about the festival program on offer in a country that has become something of a pariah in Europe. Because …

Eirik Stubø is a Norwegian theatre director awarded for his Wild Duck production shown in New York in 2006. He is currently working for Sweden’s national theatre, The Royal Dramatic Theatre, as an artistic and managing director. Last year I …

When Rufus Norris replaced the popular Nick Hytner as director of the British National Theatre in 2016, there was a certain amount of apprehension. Although Norris had produced a number of exciting and innovative works, primarily at the Young Vic, …