By Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol

Every July, Barcelona hosts the Grec Festival, or “el Grec,” as it is commonly known. Named after the 1929 Greek amphitheatre in Montjuïc, it has become an important multidisciplinary event in the European summer festival circuit. Covid-19 closed theatres across Europe and wreaked havoc across cultural institutions in many countries.  However, Spain was an exception.After a mandatory initial lockdown, theatres opened doors with limited capacity and fully masked spectators under the “culture is safe” motto. While last year’s Grec Festival went on with limited programming, this year, its 45th year, it was (almost) back to normal, with over 100 productions across different city venues. These performances were attended by almost 107,000 spectators (approximately 70% capacity). Strict Covid-19 protocols were in place throughout the month, but, unfortunately, full runs of five scheduled productions were cancelled, as were many performances of other productions. 

Running parallel to the Grec Festival were two productions that deserve special mention. The first one is the Uruguayan playwright Gabriel Calderón’s clever monologue about an actor about to play Shakespeare’s Richard III, titled Història d’un senglar (o alguna cosa de Ricard) (History of a Boar (or Something about Richard)). Joan Carreras, one of the best stage actors in Spain, and a long-time collaborator of Àlex Rigola during the latter’s time as Director of the Teatre Lliure, offered a mesmerizing tour de force where he cunningly played several characters while also impersonating different people involved in the mounting of the show. This monologue deserves to be translated and performed across the world as soon as possible. The second noteworthy production was mounted by La Calòrica, a small theatre company that has typically performed in fringe venues. However, in July, the group finally had a full commercial success with a sold-out run at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya of De què parlem mentre no parlem de tota aquesta merda (What Are We Really Talking About While We Do Not Talk About All This Shit). This work is a play by Joan Yago and directed by Israel Solà that tackles the global climate crisis from a very local point of view. It addresses this important issue with hilarity, but also brings an unexpected serious heft towards the end. La Calòrica, a company at the top of their game, will finally make their Madrid debut next year with Els ocells, their uproarious version of The Birds by Aristophanes. 

The actual festival opened with a worrying misstep.  The focus of this year’s Grec was African culture, with a particular emphasis on the city’s people of African descent. There were also many performances from different African countries. For example, from Morocco, Mohamed El Khatib presented Finir en Beauté/C’est la vie, and Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza dazzled with  La nuit+Sur le fil. There were productions from many other African countries, including Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast, to reflect the variety of artistic richness from the vast continent. It came as a surprise, then, that the opening production of Carrer Robadors (an adaptation of Mathias Énard’s novel Rue des voleurs), directed by Julio Manrique, chose Guillem Balart, a Caucasian actor, to play the main role of Lakhtar, a young African born in Tanger. This action cast a shadow of hypocrisy over the much-publicized theme of the Festival.  Leaving aside the early bump and the Covid-19 cancellations, the Festival, directed by Frances Casadesús, was truly a success, both in numbers and quality of the local and invited productions. The sheer number of offerings became something akin to a mirage given how devastating the impact of the pandemic had been on the local theatre scene. Theatregoers could choose between Peter Brooks’ latest production of The Tempest and Lauwers & Needcompany’s Billy’s Violence, an adaptation of the ten Shakespeare tragedies that primordially highlights the encroachment of misogyny on our culture. The repetitive, overlong, highly disturbing and graphic staging created an unintended opposite effect by delivering a voyeuristic “épater le bourgeois” kind of evening. Director and playwright Pablo Messiez also teamed up with renowned singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz to offer a beautiful spectacle that merged songs and theatre seamlessly. Set around a wooden box (stunningly designed by Sílvia Delagneau and Max Glaenzel), Pérez Cruz’s soulful music created evocative moments that produced an exquisite evening. 

One of the most anticipated openings of the month was the quickly sold-out return of Dimitris Papaioannou with Transverse Orientation. Although the Greek director’s production might not have reached the resounding artistic success that The Great Tamer achieved, it still provided some indelible images and breath-taking moments that were carried out seamlessly by an indefatigable cast of actors/dancers. 

Acciones sencillas, by Jesús Rubio Gamo. Photo: Jesus Vallinas.

As usual with the Grec programming, dance was center stage, in all its forms, ranging from María Pagés to Les Impuxibles, to name a few. The indomitable Sol Picó triumphed yet again with Malditas plumas (Damned Feathers). She offered a delirious, and at times very touching, take on the world of Spanish genre called revista (a sort of vaudeville) that was very popular in the Barcelona theatre district known as Paral.lel. Jesús Rubio Gamo, one of the leading choreographers of his generation, presented his Acciones sencillas (Simple Actions) to much deserved acclaim. With just five tireless dancers, three cantaoras (flamenco singers) and an empty stage, Rubio Gamo created repetitive, asynchronized sequences by merging naked bodies and voices that then he would completely divide, and break into bare moments to mesmerizing effect. There was an unforgettable pas de deux where one of the singers stood on the stage and followed the dancers with her voice and her clapping and, most importantly, her whole body. After his take on Ravel’s Gran Bolero (2019), Rubio Gamo was recognized as an important choreographer. However, after Acciones sencillas, his work has become unmissable. Finally, in the Escena híbrida (Hybrid Scene) section, Enric Montefusco’s Viaje al centro de un idiota (Trip to the Center of an Idiot) at the Sala Hiroshima delivered one of the most interesting pieces I have seen in a long time. The work mixes music, dance, poetry, art and theatre with exquisite simplicity and Montefusco invites us to think, or better yet, to re-think everything that we know about ourselves, to inquire anew.

As usual, theatre offerings were plentiful. Ana Torrent and Alicia Borrachero offered perfectly nuanced performances in a top-notch production of Las criadas, Paco Bezerra’s shrewd translation of Jean Genet’s Les bonnes (1947), directed by Luis Luque. M’hauríeu de pagar (You Should Pay Me) by Jordi Prat i Coll became a sold-out hit at the small (and very uncomfortable) Sala Àtrium. The play is composed of three monologues that are more compelling and better structured than most modern plays. Hopefully, someone will bring it back to the stage soon, and with the same three actors: Àurea Màrquez, Albert Pérez Bort and Carles Roig. Àlex Rigola brought to Barcelona his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull that had opened at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid in October. Several changes to the cast (including Rigola himself playing the role of Trigorin) gave La gavina an edgier approach that transported Chekhov’s classic into a closer realm, while maintaining the Russian author’s themes.  Rigola adapts the play while combining the actual actors’ experiences; thus, Chantal Aimée, who plays Arkadina, talks about her illustrious career as a theatre actress, having worked with the most important directors on the European scene, while Nina’s Melissa Fernández recalls the first time she was in an acting class with Rigola. It is a different approach, yet it places the original play under a different light that allows Chekhov’s spirit to resonate anew. Josep Maria Miró premiered L’habitació Blanca (The White Room) at the miniscule Sala Flyhard. Meticulously directed by Lautaro Perotti, Miró told the story of an old teacher who revisits three of her students after thirty years. As is usual with Miró, he superbly crafts a text where nothing is what it seems, and a word might turn the characters’ lives upside down—where reality is a fragile construct that we cannot trust, and, as usual, subtle time and space shifts, create a menacing atmosphere. Miró’s plays invariably leave the audience with more questions than answers, and this work was no exception. Francesca Piñón, as the teacher, was a study in quietness that slowly wreaks havoc on her old students, played by Paula Blanco, Albert Prat and Marc Rodríguez. Miró’s importance on the contemporary peninsular theatre scene can no longer be overestimated. Another playwright with the same last name, Pau Miró, adapted Pedro Páramo, the well-known Mexican novel by Juan Rulfo from 1955.  This was a risky proposition that did not quite succeed for many reasons, but mainly because the two great Catalan actors, Vicky Peña and Pablo Derqui did not deliver. They were portraying iconic Mexican characters, but despite their efforts, it felt like they were playing them instead of inhabiting them. The cringe-inducing Mexican accents did not help. 

Las criadas, by Jean Genet, directed by Luis Luque. Photo: Jesús Ugalde.

Finally, there was the much-anticipated Liebestod by Angélica Liddell, one of the most controversial figures on the Spanish theatre scene today. The play combines bullfighting with a special nod to Juan Belmonte, a famous matador immortalized by García Lorca and Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, Liddell says, his regret was not dying in the bullring, but, instead, committing suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. In an interview, she said that “(On stage) I swallow Belmonte, I infuse him in my blood and I dance with his ghost” (Toni Polo Bettonica’s “Angélica Liddell baila con el fantasma de Belmonte” in El país). She considers Belmonte, who consciously risked his life every time he stepped in front of the bull, a kindred spirit, since she herself comes close to death every time she steps on stage. Liddell creates both striking visual tableaux (a scene using Francis Bacon’s work is particularly inspired, as is her use of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde’s leitmotiv), but she also performs extremely disturbing scenes where, for example, she mutilates herself as if wanting to die in front of her audience. The play ended with a long, angry, and, Liddell being Liddell, highly controversial scene. She shouts that she hates the fags and women (her words) who make up most of her audience, that she hates actors and actresses (that is why she employs non-professional actors), that she thinks actresses are whores, and that she hates the me-too and the anti-system movements. There were other provocative declarations, all of which she has repeated during media interviews.  Her views may be controversial, but her intensity and her complete abandonment to her creation is unquestionable.

In all, this 45th edition of the Grec Festival turned out to be a huge success for both the professionals on stage and behind the scenes, but also for the audiences that flocked nightly to experience theatre in all its forms—a seemingly small feat that we can no longer take for granted.

Maria M. Delgado is Professor and Director of Research at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Modern Language Research at the University of London. Her books include “Other” Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (Manchester University Press, 2003, updated Spanish-language edition published by Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2017), Federico García Lorca (Routledge, 2008), and the co-edited Contemporary European Theatre Directors (Routledge, 2010), A History of Theatre in Spain (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and A Companion to Latin American Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). She is currently Co-Investigator of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Staging Difficult Pasts’. The research for this article is part of this project and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number: AH/R006849/1]. In 2018 she was awarded the Fundació Ramon Llull’s prize for the promotion of Catalan culture, in recognition of her performance criticism of Catalan stage works.

Anton Pujol is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He graduated from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and he later earned a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in Spanish Literature. He also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, with a focus in economics and international finance. He has recently published articles in Translation Review, Catalan Review, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea and Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, among others. His translation of Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (National Book Awards 2020 for Poetry) will be published by Raig Verd in 2022. Currently, he serves as dramaturg for the Mabou Mines company opera adaptation of Cunillé’s play Barcelona, mapa d’ombres directed and adapted by Mallory Catlett with a musical score by Mika Karlsson.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Oana Cristea Grigorescu

The present is a floating notion nowadays, subject to postponement, suspension, reconfiguration, under the circumstances of restrictions imposed on theatres by health security measures. The seasons, festivals, premieres of 2021 have been scheduled under the threat of last minute changes. The Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival (3-12 September), organized for 32 editions by the local Youth Theatre (TT), returned after the break in 2020, proposing a theme that focuses on the characteristic of the time: Post-present. The post prefix, which has generated artistic trends in opposition to the original isms, fights the insecurity of the present by contemplating the challenges of the global world. Post-present is imposed as a federating term in the artists’ offer to discuss and performatively reflect the new social, cultural, global realities. 

Celebrated as a place of renewal and revival of aesthetic formulas in the Romanian theatre, the Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival has consistently proposed – since 2017, when stage director Gianina Cărbunariu took over the management of TT – a critical reflection of the issues of Romanian society and the global one in performances involved in the local community, interested in re-evaluating the past, in criticising neo-liberalism and educating young audiences. These constants were present in the selection of the recently concluded edition of the festival, with face-to-face performances in the theatre hall and in open spaces around the city.

Perhaps the most challenging, but also the most perturbed by the pandemic context was the international section of the festival, entitled Something to Declare & to Share. Due to the reintroduced physical borders between countries, the productions in the section were presented as performative readings. In the absence of actors, the playwrights and directors were invited to summarize the missing show, to “declare the immaterial cultural assets” with which they transgress, the borders drawn by the pandemic waves by their presence in Piatra Neamț. 

One Flew Over the Kosovo Theatre, by Jeton Neziraj. Photo: Piatra Neamț.

I watched three such readings that proved most convincing thanks not only to their socio-political themes but also to the illustrated presentation with excerpts from the absent show or audio-video interventions followed by discussions with the audience. 

One Flew Over the Kosovo Theatre, presented by playwright Jeton Neziraj, director and founder of the independent company Qendra Multimedia in Pristina, commented on the concept and impact of the performance that drew a bridge of cultural communication between Kosovo and Serbia after the secession crisis. Preparing for the premiere, public actions imbued with parodic humor and acidic irony sought to undermine the ultranationalist political climate in Kosovo’s young state. Political theatre intervenes in the social breach caused by the separation from Serbia, and Jeton Neziraj’s play uses theatre to prove that regardless of political ideologies, culture remains a lingua franca. Appreciated as the most representative political author in the Balkans today, the playwright is internationally acclaimed and will be awarded with the “EuropeCultureAward 2020/21” prize which he will receive in November.

Heroes of Capitalist Labor, composed by Jindřich Čížek, directed by Michal Hába. Photo: Piatra Neamț.

From the Czech Republic, the documentary-based show produced during the pandemic, Heroes of Capitalist Labor, was summarized by director Michal Hába and composer Jindřich Čížek by reading short scenes illustrated with live music. An international co-production of several theatres including Prague City Theatres, Berliner Volksbühne and TT (as part of the POSTWEST project), the show’s title plays with the name of a popular medal offered to top workers in socialist countries: hero of socialist work. The themes of inequitable working conditions and the capitalist exploitation of the activity of the “essential workers” overlap with the precarious status of self-employed actors, aggravated during the 2020/21 pandemic years. Heroes of Capitalist Labor is a critique of the political class, but also of union disarticulation and the dissolution of the employees’ class consciousness in the capitalist economy. The form of musical entertainment is misleading – it is the social message that is the real center of the show. 

The third reading was entitled “MUSEUM OF THE ROMANIAN HOLOCAUST, a story better left unsaid again.” It was presented by Jakub Skrzywanek, its young Polish director. Actually, he was invited to TT in 2020 to direct The Cremator by the Czech writer Ladislav Fuks, as the final part of the “Violence Triptych.” The production was suspended due to the pandemic, though, so now he did this performative reading in which he associated two different sources: documentary information about the pogrom of the Jews of Moldova and pages from the diary of the Romanian writer with Jewish origins Mihail Sebastian. The pages from the diary included in the reading record the breakup of the friendship between Sebastian and Mircea Eliade due to the anti-Semitic convictions of the latter. 

MUSEUM OF THE ROMANIAN HOLOCAUST, a story better left unsaid again, directed by Jakub Skrzywane. Photo: Piatra Neamț.

Several more Festival entries focused on the pogrom: Radu Jude’s film The Exit of the Trains, the TT production Future in the Past by Clemens Bechtel and the documentary production Gewald in Darabani (“Texte bune în locuri nebune” Company). All of them re-evaluate history from subjective, yet well documented perspectives and search for the causes of anti-Semitism through a documentary recovery of the tragedy of the expulsion and extermination of the Jewish population in Romania throughout history.

In the section of Romanian performances, grouped under the title See you outside, there were two productions inspired by Titanicul, the story of Romanian writer Florin Lăzărescu, a text with a deep metaphysical background fueled by the theme of death. While Titanic at the Municipal Theater “Matei Vişniec” in Suceava (directed by Cosmin Panaite) merely illustrates the narrative vein by the visual and acting exploration of the misery and lack of perspective of rural life, the second show, produced by ”Frilensăr”Bucharest cultural platform (directed by Daniel Chirilă) is truly an asset. The title of the latter – alcohol, light and a little death: a case study – perfectly connects the drama of the characters with the melancholy of extinction. The musical extension of the story maintains a sensitive balance between the rough realism of the text and the gradual immersion into the melancholy of death. The first part of the show musically supports the story through the surprising variety of sounds produced by original instruments, only to convert in the second part into a musical incursion of folklore extraction into Romanian fatalism. The combination of musical and vocal skills and the performing talent of the actors in the production were applauded, recognized and given an award, by the way, by the Teenagers’ Jury.

Other selected shows highlighted burning acute topics of Romanian society, such as illegal deforestation and corruption in Green Felled (“Pro Teatru” Association, Zalău), labour exploitation in Delivery Rider Bucharest (Masca Theatre, Bucharest) and The Field of Struggle (unteatru, Bucharest) or abandoned children and the generational gap in Pattern (TT, Piatra Neamț). 

Two performances of the newest production signed by Gianina Cărbunariu at TT (TO BE CONTINUED. On the Planet Mirror), presented at the beginning and the end of the festival, served as its frame. The production is a bitter socio-political critique in the form of musical entertainment adjusted as a SF story. The audience placed outside, in front of the entrance of the theatre, watches the occupation of the building by aliens who present themselves at the colorful windows of the building. We are offered possible versions of life, led by the governing programs of the city’s occupiers, the aliens. The several legislatures, each lasting not longer than a few minutes, are in effect critical commentaries on our own distractions in our terrestrial civilization. The inventiveness of the costumes and the glamour of the lights (Dorothee Curio scenography), the soundtrack (Alex Halca) and the video design (Andrei Cozlac) create a seductive dystopian universe to everyone’s taste – the audience as well as those who happen to pass by at the time of the performances. 

The Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival invited us to look at the present from the view-point of the future and to become more responsible to the next generations. The post-present thus became the expression of awareness of the social, political, climatic challenges of our time. The selection of the festival reminded us that the theatre has always crossed cultural, ideological, social borders and on the Planet Mirror of the stage, artists have always been the source of visions about the world of tomorrow.

Oana Cristea Grigorescu is a theater critic and radio drama producer for Radio Romania. Holder of a PhD in Music from the Music Academy from Cluj (2011), she is also member of UNITER (The Theatrical Union from Romania) from 1997. Since 2016, she has been dedicated to the production of radio drama at Radio Drama Dpt. of Radio Romania with internationally awarded productions.  

As a theater critic she regularly contributes cultural articles and studies in magazines Scena.ro, Observator Cultural, Capital cultural, and www.liternet.ro  portal, or in the annual bilingual volumes coordinated by Oltiţa Cântec (2015-2021). In 2020 she received the UNITER award for theater criticism. In 2021 she is the artistic director, along with two other theater critics, of Romanian National Theater Festival.  

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

By Chris Rzonca

We all had our temperatures checked. We all filled out forms affirming we were Covid-free. We all wore masks, of course. But when we took our seats, squirming in the dark on the hard chairs, we were alone, yet at the same time together, sharing the space of live theatre again.

And this performance had theatre to spare, starting with the nearly empty stage holding only a few plain chairs, randomly placed, in which actors sat or slumped, separated from each other; little islands awaiting our arrival. A long mirrored wall cut diagonally across the entire left side, reflecting images of the actors and behind them another stage wall, or the back of it, revealing the flats and jacks holding it up. This allowed us to see the stage and behind the scenes at the same time. We were seeing the reflections, the insides, the bones of both the play and the characters.

Most actors were older—in fact, the ages and personalities of the characters were mixed up.  Only Natasha and Masha seemed close to the age designated by Chekhov. Olga was played by an actress much older than the 28 of the original version. Most of the men in this performance seemed even older, although today we might consider them closer to middle-aged. This directorial choice strengthens the idea of the passing of time, nostalgia, and missed opportunities for a modern audience because, quite simply, as Perceval notes in the program, the world has become older as people live longer.

The English language supertitles kept us in touch with some of Chekhov’s words, even if the action didn’t always correspond to the text. That apparent disconnect only strengthened the sense of disorientation that the mirror wall presented us wordlessly. The script also contains fragments from Juliusz Slowacki, Agnieszka Osiecka and a Chekhov poem. According to the program, this performance is based on Three Sisters, but rather than another straight up talking heads version, this 3STRS is a reflection on Chekov’s, somehow making it fuller, yet simultaneously more unresolved, even secretive. Perceval owes something to Tadeusz Kantor in this. He does not interpret the text, but rather restates it mostly in movement, sound, and visual images, including some scenes of the Russian countryside projected on the mirrored wall.

Many of the monologues (or “philosophizing”) of the original text are either absent altogether or are danced or sung, perhaps to show the absurdity and pointlessness of such pseudo profound proclamations so common in Russian (and also) Polish culture. We see inside, but perhaps don’t really learn anything more; nothing much really happens. Not much makes sense.  Perceval has said that theatre teaches us to accept “the sense of nonsense,” and we somehow do accept it.

3STRS, based on the play by Anton Chekhov, adapted and directed by Luk Perceval. Photo: Monika Storlaska.

At one point we see, reflected in the long mirror, Irina and Masha quietly climb the flats (literally climbing the walls) like two slow-moving besequinned stage hands, or perhaps two prisoners attempting their escape. But of course there is no escape.  They are moving, always going, but never leaving. That Godot-like reality is reinforced throughout the performance as the actors move, usually slowly, glacially, at a Wilsonian pace that only serves to further root them in place.

In a surprising reversal of some unwritten rule of theatre, instead of beautiful, young female bodies, it’s the older men who disrobe during the performance. While the lighting (mostly) obscures, we are left wondering why they stripped down and carried their clothes with them while exiting the stage. Perhaps that exposure of older male bodies on stage in the twenty-first century is reason enough, or perhaps this re-enforces the sense of helplessness and vulnerability of these men and perhaps of us all. Vershinin exemplifies this idea. He is played from a wheelchair in this production. While usually seen as an alpha male, a handsome officer (albeit with a needy wife), his offstage “weakness” is here made visible. He may do wheelies with his chair in anger and frustration, but like the sisters, he too is stuck, limited, as we all are, in this pandemic world. 

There are other surprises, such as  occasional blaring bass notes vibrating off the mirrored wall (and our ribcages—the sound literally entered our bodies). The already reflected images on stage thus became further blurred and distorted—like a fun-house mirror. There is some frenetic dancing and shouting that replaces many monologues. The actors writhe on the floor, alone or in a scrum, where love is expressed or rejected.  But there are also long silences, in keeping with Perceval’s belief in the “spiritual path that theatre follows is toward a rejection of all concepts, questions and answers, toward the acceptance of silence” which certainly encourages contemplation of the ambiguities and indeterminacies of this play.  

This is a Three Sisters filleted and displayed, turned inside out, exposing the organs, reflecting the inner workings of the play, just as the flats and the jacks reveal the bones of the stage set. We are both inside and outside, looking sometimes at the actors, sometimes at their reflection, behind the scenes, listening, but also accepting silence. Thanks to the Belgian director Luk Perceval’s mind and the Polish actors of TR Warszawa at work on this great classic text, we see and hear both more and less in the play than we thought possible. Yet we are forced to realize that there can be no final resolution, no complete, startling epiphany, only bits and pieces of insight and that is more than enough.  

In the end, we were reminded once again why we keep returning to live theatre.

Chris Rzonca has written about the Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski (Polish Review, forthcoming) and other performances and theatre-related events in Poland for European Stages. His photographs have appeared in KwartalnikArtystyczany. Currently, he teaches writing as part of the Liberal Studies curriculum at New York University.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

By Dan Venning

At the end of 2019, London’s theatre was preparing for a crisis. The specter of Brexit was looming, and the snap election that had the potential to confirm, further delay, or potentially lead to a cancellation of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union was scheduled for 12 December 2019. This occurred almost precisely at the midpoint of my visit, during which time I saw fourteen shows with a group of my students. Several of these productions dealt, in one way or another, with the United Kingdom’s place in an increasingly globalized society which, through centuries of imperialism, the UK had helped to create. Additionally, many of the shows engaged with crucial questions that have been gaining traction worldwide over the past decade: structural racism and sexism, microaggressions, justice, the #MeToo movement, and the ways marginalized people have struggled to be heard and find representation, and have been silenced. My report assesses these shows not in the order in which I saw them but in three broad categories: innovative engagements with early modern English drama, creative reimaginations of pop culture products, and shows explicitly reckoning with questions of race, imperialism, and marginalization. It is worth noting, however, that although the plays in this third category explicitly focused on this topic, many of the fourteen shows throughout all three of these groupings were deeply intersectional in their focus on inclusivity and cultural engagement, and addressed, either directly or indirectly, the issues that were dominating global politics and cultural discourse at the time.

I. Innovative Engagements with Early Modern English Drama: Teenage Dick (6 December 2020), Richard III (17 December 2019), The Taming of the Shrew (11 December 2019), and The Duchess of Malfi (14 December 2019).

Richard III, by William Shakespeare, directed by Sean Holmes and Ilinca Radulian at the Wanamaker Playhouse in Shakespeare’s Globe. Photo: Marc Brenner.

In a fortuitous coincidence, Shakespeare’s Globe was staging Richard III, with the same ten-actor cast who had performed in their abridged Henry VI production earlier in the season, at the same time as the Donmar Warehouse was opening a new production of Mike Lew’s modern high-school take on Richard III, Teenage Dick, which is written for a cast of six and requires two disabled actors. I reviewed the Public Theater’s 2018 production of Teenage Dick, which was directed by Moritz von Steulpnagel and written for Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy who founded The Apothetae, a theatre company dedicated to producing works that explore “the Disabled Experience.” Michael Longhurst’s production of Teenage Dick at the Donmar Warehouse was the UK Premiere of Lew’s groundbreaking play, and was lightly rewritten to feature Daniel Monks, an Australian actor with hemiplegia. Unfortunately, I attended this production during previews and for that reason, the Donmar requested I not discuss its challenging production of this noteworthy play in my report. However, Sean Holmes and Ilinca Radulian’s production of Richard III at Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor Wanamaker Playhouse, featuring Sophie Russell as Richard, proved just as invigorating and contemporary as Lew’s adaptation.

In the past, I’ve been somewhat unhappy with some of Shakespeare’s Globe’s productions: their focus on “original practices” in spaces designed to replicate the Globe and Blackfriars have felt like museum theatre with a few exciting moments—often viewed from obscured angles in uncomfortable seats. Thankfully, Holmes and Radulian’s Richard III was easily the most vital production I’ve seen at Shakespeare’s Globe, riveting even with one of the assistant directors serving as a script-in-hand understudy for some of the supporting parts. Russell played Richard without any (physical) disability—but Richard was now a woman, marginalized and undervalued by everyone around her. Her glee at tormenting those she killed as she rose (and tried to cling) to power was intensified by designer Grace Smart’s costumes, lighting, and set. Shakespeare’s Globe usually avoids complex sets, but here Smart made great use of a wooden stage covered in a pile of dirt. Richard was present at every single murder, and always wore a pristine white costume, often with absurdist touches: sometimes a pantsuit (but with white combat boots and sunglasses), at other points a white jersey with the name “Richard 03” emblazoned on it, at one moment a sombrero. One of her henchmen, most frequently Ratcliffe, creepily played by John Lightbody, would turn on a florescent lamp—harshly disrupting the Wanamaker’s candle-lit aesthetic—and Richard would brutally murder her victim, her white costume getting covered in stage blood, dirt, and other grime. She would merrily exit, and return moments later after a lightning-fast quick change in another unblemished white costume. The ten-actor cast made for particularly potent ghosting of Richard’s victims during the scene when she was confronted by apparitions of her victims, played by the same actors as her few remaining underlings. Also particularly noteworthy was Steffan Donnelly who, in a parallel to Russell’s gender-conscious Richard, was cross-gender cast as Margaret and appeared at the end as Richmond to offer a moment of respite and regeneration as he planted a tree in the dirt. But the real star remained Russell, who was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, a woman whose rage against the patriarchy we could empathize with, but whose methods and joy in victimizing others placed her firmly among the noteworthy Richards of the last decade who have appeared onstage to critique a growing global tide of authoritarian populism.

The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare, directed by Justin Audibert for the RSC at the Barbican Centre. Photo: Ikin Yum.

Sadly, neither Justin Audibert’s cross-gender production of The Taming of the Shrew for the RSC (at the Barbican), nor Rebecca Frecknall’s staging of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi at the Almeida, proved anywhere near as successful, despite the potential for these productions to engage in invigorating ways with patriarchal oppression of women both in Shakespeare’s time and the present day. In Audibert’s Shrew, the problem—which certainly exists in Shakespeare’s play and requires deft directing to address—was one of tone. Audibert reversed the gender of all the characters, imagining a matriarchal society in which Baptista (Amanda Harris) had two sons, Katherine (Joseph Arkley) and Bianco (James Cooney). Into this world swept the fierce Petruchia (Claire Price), determined to win and humble Katherine. Yet Audibert failed to either successfully address the sexist violence in Shakespeare’s text or to consistently craft comedy. Bianco’s suitors Lucentia (Emily Johnstone), Hortensia (Amelia Donkor), and particularly Gremia (Sophie Stanton), who glided across the stage as if floating, came from a world of topsy-turvy hilarity in which the viciousness of Petruchia’s abuse of Katherine seemed deeply out of place. The reversed gender of the characters did not make Petruchia’s methods of “taming” Katherine—which conform uncannily to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” tortures—any more palatable. Hannah Clark’s Elizabethan costumes and Stephen Brimson Lewis’s simple, two-tiered stage evoking early modern theatres only highlighted that Shakespeare’s play is deeply discordant in our world today, even when we see it staged with female characters in positions of power. 

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, directed by Rebecca Frecknall at the Almeida Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner.

Frecknall’s take on The Duchess of Malfi was almost diametrically the opposite of Audibert’s approach, but no more successful, and certainly a disappointing follow-up to the visceral and feminist Summer and Smoke that I had seen the year previously. Webster’s text is, as written, a terrifying nightmare, with stunning set pieces, including the psychological torture of the imprisoned Duchess when she is given a severed hand, shown “the artificial figures” (bodies appearing to be her husband and children), and confronted by eight dancing madmen. In another stunning set piece in Webster’s text, one of the Duchess’s evil brothers, a Cardinal, dons a soldier’s regalia; after her murder, her other hateful brother is stricken with “lycanthropia,” believing himself a werewolf, digging up bodies, but while “a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside / his on the inside” (5.2.17-18). When the titular character, having undergone horrors and facing death, declares “I am the Duchess of Malfi still” (4.2.152). Her words are an electrifying cri de coeur that articulate proto-feminist resilience in the face of oppression. Yet Frecknall’s production, for some reason, instead of centering on Lydia Wilson as the titular Duchess, seemed to focus on her ill-fated but good-hearted husband Antonio (Khalid Abdalla) and the men—her evil brothers the Cardinal (Michael Marcus) and Ferdinand (Jack Riddiford), and the opportunistic and amoral Bosola (Leo Bill)—who abuse her and other women. Chloe Lamford’s bland, ultramodern set seemed a bit on-the-nose, with a glass box upstage that came to contain the bodies of the women including the Duchess and Ferdinand’s other victims. This glass box seemed almost directly cribbed from Lizzie Clachan’s set for Simon Stone’s riveting (and again, ultramodern) adaptation of Yerma that premiered at the Young Vic in 2016 and came to New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2018. However, unlike that astounding production, Frecknall’s contemporary Duchess of Malfi sapped its play of affective power and failed to deliver any feminist message.

II. Pop Culture Remixed in Contemporary Musicals and an Adaptation of a Young Adult Novel: SIX (8 and 15 December 2019), Girl from the North Country (18 December 2019), Ghost Quartet (2 December 2019), and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (9 December 2019).

Six, by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage at the Arts Theatre in the West End. Photo: Eleanor Howarth.

In contrast, unbridled and joyous feminism in the face of oppression was on prominent display in Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s Six (“Divorced Beheaded Live!”) at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End, directed by Moss and Jamie Armitage. After its runaway success at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, an initial hit run on the West End, and a UK National Tour, Six had been performing in a usually sold-out open run at the Arts Theatre since early 2019. During that time, a North American tour of Six began and productions opened in Australia and on Norwegian Cruise Lines. The Broadway production of Six was set to open on 12 March 2020 and had been playing to sold-out preview audiences; theatres were shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic only hours before the opening. This was the only production I attended twice during my time in London and it was readily apparent why it has become such a global hit: its creators seamlessly blend catchy pop hooks and clever lyrics with an intersectional feminist historiography to reframe Tudor history on Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr rather than on the crazed monarch to whom they had all been married. The show begins as a competition over which of the queens was treated the worst by Henry VIII, but ends, during the number “Six,” with a rejection of female competition as the women honor each other’s experiences and reject a hierarchy of suffering, choosing to celebrate female solidarity. Gabriella Slade’s flashy costumes, Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s athletic choreography (including hand-held microphones as at a pop concert), and the rocking accompaniment of the all-female “Ladies in Waiting” band helped endear the production to legions of teenage girls—many of whom came to the theatre dressed up as their favorite queen, taking selfies in a bedazzled mirror in the lobby. But the show was no less exciting for a male historian and professor of theatre as I reveled in the way Marlow and Moss (who were both twenty-six years old in 2019, far closer in age to my students than to me) blended the aesthetics of intimate avant-garde theatre and stadium pop music to craft their show. The Arts Theatre is a small West End house, with a capacity of only 350, and Six runs 75 frenetic minutes without an interval. During the final encore, “Megasix,” audience members are encouraged to take out their mobile phones and photograph or record—an event common at concerts but usually forbidden in the theatre. The cast, who often rotate through roles, was also superb—albeit rather different each time I saw the production. Swing and Dance Captain Collette Guitart excelled as both Katherine Howard on 8 December and Catherine of Aragon on 15 December. Vicki Manser, in her last performance in the role as Howard, played excitedly to an audience of fans on the 15th. Hannah Stewart was particularly heartrending singing Jane Seymour’s “Heart of Stone” on the 15th; the role had been a bit vocally challenging for Cherelle Jay on the 8th, but Jay shone as an alternate for Anna of Cleves on the 15th. Courtney Bowman was superb as Anne Boleyn on both nights. And on the 8th, Marlow was in the Balcony, jubilantly enjoying his show with everyone else: after the performance he gladly took photos with my students and other audience members.

Dan Venning, Toby Marlow, and Union College students in the lobby of the Arts Theatre after Six. Photo: Isabel Dollar.

Like Six, Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country was slated for a Broadway run that was delayed due to the global coronavirus pandemic. Both were created in 2017, and like Six, Girl from the North Country has had successful runs in numerous theatres: first at London’s Old Vic, then in a limited run on the West End at the Noël Coward Theatre, at the Public Theater in New York, in Toronto, and then on the West End again at the Gielgud, where I saw it on 18 December 2019. Unlike Six, however, Girl from the North Country was able to open on Broadway, one week before the pandemic put everything on pause; Ben Brantley gave it a glowing review in the New York Times, calling it “ravishing and singular.” The show, written and directed by McPherson, is a Bob Dylan jukebox musical, set in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934, during the heart of the depression. Narrated by the ghostly town doctor, the plot—if there is one—concerns the diverse stories of the residents at Nick Laine’s (Donald Sage Mackay) financially underwater boarding house. In most cases, the stories McPherson crafts for these characters are only partial or fragmentary. For example, we only see the end of the relationship between Nick’s son, the alcoholic Gene (Colin Bates) and his girlfriend Kate (Gemma Sutton). Nick’s adopted daughter, Marianne (Gloria Obianyo) is pregnant and she never precisely reveals who the father is. Nor is it exactly clear who is the titular character: perhaps Marianne, or Nick’s wife, Elizabeth (Katie Brayben), who suffers from dementia. Although race is clearly a central concern in this color-conscious production (Nick, Elizabeth, and Gene are all white but Marianne is Black, as is Nick’s lover, the widow Mrs. Neilsen [Rachel John]), it is never clear exactly what McPherson is trying to say about race in America in the early twentieth century, even when the boxer Joe Scott [Shaq Taylor] sings “Hurricane.” Bob Dylan’s songs, which interrupt the action in the vein of Sondheim or Kander and Ebb’s concept musicals, as opposed to springing organically from the plot in the manner of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s book musicals, were the highlight of the show. Simon Hale’s orchestrations and arrangements for a large-cast ensemble musical with violin, mandolin, guitars, and double bass, broadened and deepened the sound of Dylan’s American anthems. But for all its beauty, I ultimately found the show mystifying: wonderfully produced and compelling in most moments, but signifying nothing.

Girl from the North Country, written and directed by Conor McPherson, with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann.

Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet is similarly mystifying, largely because the plot(s) of this musical written for a cast of four (who also play all the instruments) is almost impossible to unpack. But this musical, which was the first show I saw on my 2019 visit to London, was a resounding success. Directed by Bill Buckhurst, it was the first production to appear in the new Boulevard Theatre in the heart of London’s Soho. The intimate 165-seat venue retained some of the historic neon signs for the burlesque club Raymond Revuebar that once inhabited the site, and was set to present an ambitious inaugural season. I had seen Malloy’s song-cycle at the Bushwick Starr around Halloween in 2014, with Malloy performing alongside Brent Arnold and his Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 costars Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell. The show mixes elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” with The Arabian Nights, fairy tales, classic ballads, a murderous rivalry between sisters, and whiskey. The songs are listed in a four-sided “track list” and revel in interwoven, circular storytelling. Ultimately, the characters are all ghosts, haunting the stage for a moment, at once each other’s lovers, sisters, children, best friends, parents. Buckhurst’s production was staged in the round with objects seemingly magically springing from designer Simon Kenney’s set of boxes. Buckhurst clearly seized upon the “Arabian Nights” aspect of Ghost Quartet, recognizing that it is crucial to have actors of color, particularly of middle eastern or South Asian heritage, in this show. Buckhurst cast a far more diverse group of actors than in the original production in New York: the Pakistani-British actor Maimuna Memon was a particular standout. Carly Bawden, whose vocal purity shone in “Starchild” and “Hero,” the Italian actor and musician Niccolò Curradi, and Zubin Varla, who is of Parsi Indian heritage, were also superb. The show was generally the favorite among the students studying with me in London, and a great way to kick off the trip. It will be exciting to see what the Boulevard produces next once theatres reopen.

Ghost Quartet, by Dave Malloy, directed by Bill Buckhurst at the Boulevard Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was adapted by Joel Horwood from a young adult novel by immensely popular author Neil Gaiman and directed by Katy Rudd—with movement by Steven Hoggett—for its premiere in the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre, was a major success with critics. It earned three nominations for the delayed 2020 Olivier awards, including for Best New Play, with Paule Constable winning for her haunting lighting design. Dealing with issues of abuse, trauma, loss, memory, forgetting, and aging, the play begins with a man (Justin Salinger) going home for his father’s funeral and rediscovering lost memories from when he was a Boy (Samuel Blenkin). The Boy and his neighbor, Lettie Hempstock (Marli Siu) went on a quest to save his family (the Boy’s father, now played by Salinger), and perhaps the world itself, from his father’s new companion, Ursula (Pippa Nixon), who was actually an otherworldly mind-controlling monster, and reality-devouring “hunger birds.” Although the story can be read as a modern magical realist fairy tale, it also works when seen metaphorically as the imaginative lens through which the Boy and Lettie see their world. The monsters were effectively crafted through puppetry and Hogget’s signature use of stage movement. However, the show also felt, to some degree, like a recycling of Hoggett’s signature tricks that have been seen in numerous shows like Black Watch, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and, most similarly, Peter and The Starcatcher. Hoggett’s movement design, alongside Samuel Wyer’s puppets, Constable’s lighting, Ian Dickinson’s sound design, Jamie Harrison’s “magic and illusions design,” Gaiman and Horwood’s plot, excellent performances from the whole cast, Jherek Bischoff’s affecting musical compositions, and Rudd’s precise directing, led to a wonderfully effective production. The show compellingly provoked jump scares in one moment and tears at the end. But it felt a bit like a well-worn melodramatic trick, guaranteed to impress audiences without delivering any clear message about the crucial issues at its core.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, adapted by Joel Horwood, directed by Katy Rudd at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan.

III. Race, Imperialism, Marginalization, and Britain’s Reckoning with its Past: Translations (3 December 2019), ‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys (17 December 2019), Three Sisters (19 December 2019), Death of a Salesman (4 December 2019), A Kind of People (10 December 2019), and Fairview (20 December 2019).

The last set of shows I am discussing in this report explicitly engaged, either in their texts or through striking directorial concepts, with crucial issues of our time, most notably race and British imperialism. Three of these shows were at London’s National Theatre: it was clear that, as Brexit loomed, the National sought to engage with the legacy of colonialism and Britain’s place on the world stage. Two of the productions were revivals of plays written only two years apart, which are now both roughly forty years old: Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations and Athol Fugard’s 1982 play ‘Master Harold’ … and the boys. Together, these productions simply yet incisively explored the various failures of British imperialism and the damage such ventures perpetrated in both Ireland and Africa. The third, Inua Ellams’s Three Sisters, was a new play, a close adaptation of Chekhov transposed to the period from 1967-1970, during the Biafran war in Nigeria. 

Translations by Brian Friel, directed by Ian Rickson at the National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre. Photo: Catherine Ashmore.

I reviewed Translations and Master Harold in greater depth in Theatre Journal and thus will write about them only briefly here. Rickson’s production of Translations, starring Ciarán Hinds as the Irish hedge school master Hugh and Fra Fee as his wayward son Owen, was a restaging (with many new cast members, including Fee and Jack Bardoe as the English Lieutenant Yolland) of a production that had opened a year-and-a-half earlier, in 2018, in a sold-out run. Unlike many productions created for the National’s massive Olivier stage, Rickson’s Translations did not make use of the Olivier’s magnificent drum revolve and its potential for rotating stages, or for raising and lowering actors from depths below the stage. Instead, Rae Smith’s single set covered the stage in sod and dirt, with a simple wooden platform, a few chairs and tables, and a staircase into a house stage right indicating Hugh’s hedge school in the rural landscape of the Irish-speaking community of Baile Beag (Ballybeg), County Donegal, in 1833. Actors would enter and exit over an upstage hill, as if having traversed through farmland to reach the school, and the realism of the design was reinforced not only by Smith’s gorgeous period costumes but also through the scent of peaty moss dispersed throughout the massive auditorium. Rickson’s production highlighted the transformative power of language, showing how the renaming of a location on a map, or of Fee’s Owen into “Roland,” as the British soldiers call him, can possess a constitutive power. 

‘Master Harold … and the Boys, by Athol Fugard, directed by Roy Alexander Weise at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre. Photo: Helen Murray.

Roy Alexander Weise’s ninety-minute, intermission-free production of Athol Fugard’s ‘Master Harold’ . . . and the boys in the National’s smaller Lyttelton space managed to seem consistently present, relevant, and expansive in scope, despite Rajha Shakiry’s period costumes and almost claustrophobic café set. One could wonder what a play so frequently read and taught could gain from Weise’s production, which, for the most part, faithfully and precisely staged Fugard’s text, almost without any apparent directorial concept. Yet the captivating performances from Lucian Msamati as Sam, Anson Boon as Hally, and Hammed Animashaun as Willie made this production an astounding theatre-going experience, utterly compelling for every moment of those ninety minutes. Animashaun’s abilities as a dancer were luminous: his not-so-bright, slightly clownish Willie transformed completely as he began dancing. (Animashaun’s skills as a dancer can also be seen on extraordinary display in his performance as Bottom in Nicholas Hytner’s 2019 queer and immersive A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged for the Bridge Theatre and broadcast globally through National Theatre Live screenings.) The final moments of Weise’s production particularly highlighted the continued relevance of Fugard’s play. As the jukebox played and Willie prepared to walk home, Shakiry’s café set slid away, revealing an expansive ballroom hidden there all along. Weise’s production was clearly showing that Sam and Willie’s dream of a beautiful world, a restorative “world without collisions,” can be possible if we make the effort to work together toward it. And following the curtain call (which was quite extended, as the thunderous standing ovation continued for some time when I saw the production on its closing night), the three actors embraced, modeling the sort of reconciliation and mutual understanding the world needs if we are to achieve such a dream.

Three Sisters, by Inua Ellams after Anton Chekhov, directed by Nadia Fall at the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Theatre. Photo: The Other Richard.

Inua Ellams’s Three Sisters also ran in the Lyttelton; for the final week of Fugard’s play, and the first week of Ellams’s, the two ran in the same space in alternating performances. Both plays contain the device of a character insisting that an employee who is essentially a family member address him by a formal name: the echo was unmissable. And Ellams’s play was similarly riveting throughout, although more than twice as long, running over three hours. Dedicated to the people of Biafra, Ellams’s play follows Chekhov’s plot but renames all the characters and places them firmly within the Nigerian context from 1967 to 1970. The role of the oldest sister, Lolo (Sarah Niles) is significantly expanded, as she struggles to implement a progressive and nationalist curriculum at the school where she teaches. The duel between the Tuzenbach and Solyony analogues, Nmeri Ora (Peter Bankolé) and Igwe (Jonathan Ajayi) is presented onstage and transformed into a traditional wrestling match—but the tradition is violated when Igwe shoots his rival and former friend after losing the match. Katrina Lindsay’s evocative period sets and costumes helped director Nadia Fall demonstrate how the specific national and cultural context influences Ellam’s take on the story of three educated sisters who lose their home and dreams. Ellams does not rely only on Chekhov, but also refers to the works of Christopher Okigbo and Chinua Acheba and theories of neocolonialism in order to unforgettably examine the individual suffering endured by colonized peoples even once they have achieved independence.

Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell at the Piccadilly Theatre on the West End. Photo: Brinkhoff Mogenburg.

Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End was certainly not an adaptation or new play, but at times felt like one due to its strong directorial concept and a few stage directions that were changed. Starring Wendell Pierce as Willy and Sharon D. Clarke (who won an Olivier for her performance) as Linda, Elliott and Cromwell’s production was not an all-Black production of Death of a Salesman (an example August Wilson specifically deplores in “The Ground on Which I Stand”), but a color-conscious one, in which the Loman family is Black in mid-twentieth-century America. Scenes took on new resonances when this Willy refused to accept a job from his white friend and neighbor Charley (Trevor Cooper), or had an affair with a white Woman (Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), or when the white Howard (Mathew Seadon-Young) calls an older Black man who works for him “kid.” Seadon-Young also doubled as Stanley, the waiter at the chophouse where Willy’s sons abandon him, and, in a notable departure from Miller’s text, instead of “as Willy turns, Stanley slips the money back into his jacket pocket,” this Stanley pocketed Willy’s forgotten cash, putting it into his own jacket pocket. Anna Fleischle’s set design also revealed the boiler in the house that Willy has contemplated using to commit suicide. Aideen Malone’s lighting and Carolyn Downing’s sound design were particularly effective in highlighting the disturbed fantasy in Willy’s flashback scenes, which were shown using unrealistic blue lighting and accompanied by jarring sounds along the lines of record scratches. Although the show was at times marred by genuinely poor dialect work in which several characters sounded nothing like Americans, let alone Brooklynites, Elliott and Cromwell’s concept, along with Pierce and Clarke’s commanding performances, showed just how much harder it would have been for a Black Willy Loman to achieve his flawed American Dream.

A Kind of People, by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, directed by Michael Buffong at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. Photo: Manuel Harlan.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s new play A Kind of People at the Royal Court, directed by Michael Buffong, examined the intersections of race, class, sex, and immigration in present-day urban England. In the first scene, a dinner party in a cement-walled council flat (affordable housing), we meet all the characters: the mixed-race central couple, the white Nicky (Claire-Louise Cordwell) and Black Gary (Richie Campbell), Gary’s sister Karen (Petra Letang), their friend and Gary’s white colleague Mark (Thomas Coombes), their friends, the more affluent British Pakistani couple Anjum (Manjinder Virk) and Mo (Asif Khan), and Gary and Mark’s white supervisor, Victoria (Amy Morgan). Nicky and Gary’s three children remain unseen throughout the play. As the party in the first scene hits its stride, Victoria gets quite drunk and makes overtly racist comments to Gary; she is ushered out and given a cab. Designer Anna Fleischle’s set, which appeared realistically like heavy concrete-walled low-income housing, weightlessly slid away to reveal Gary’s workplace, where he has to endure constant microaggressions from Victoria and is passed over for promotions. Over the course of the play’s hour and forty-five minutes, the small cuts Gary and Nicky are forced to endure become too much and neither is able to contain their bottled-up rage. At times, it seemed as if Bhatti was cramming every possible degradation into her play, for example when Mark makes a pass at Nicky, letting her know he has always desired her and subtly suggesting that because of their shared race, they may have been a better match than her and Gary. But the fact that these indignities become exhausting to the audience in under two hours is part of the point: we realize what a tightrope Gary and Nicky must walk to survive from day to day, and that it is all too realistic for marginalized people to experience injustices with the relentlessness depicted in A Kind of People. Near the end of the play Nicky explodes in an act of violence towards her children that is nowhere near as lethal or permanent as Medea’s. In Buffong’s production of Bhatti’s play, this climax was thoroughly earned and every bit as devastating as that in Euripides’ classic, since we could see just how realistic it was. Bhatti’s play ends in a moment that is simultaneously heartrending and full of utopian hope, as Cordwell and Campbell portray Nicky and Gary twenty-five years earlier, at the start of their relationship, imagining that all the world can one day be theirs. We know just how hard this will be for them.

Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by Nadia Latif at the Young Vic. Photo: Marc Brenner.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-winning Fairview, which received its UK premiere at the Young Vic under the direction of Nadia Latif, similarly ends with utopian vision, but one brought about by a destruction of the theatrical frame unlike any most audience members have seen before. I saw the original production, directed by Sarah Benson, at Soho Rep in New York, and ensured that this would be the last show my students would see in London: I wanted to leave the group of (mostly white) students profoundly challenged. It is hard to describe the action of Fairview without spoiling this powerful and important new play, but what begins like an uplifting middlebrow sitcom about an upper middle class African American family soon, through repetition and revision, turns into an invitation to the audience to directly confront the nature of representation and racism in the theatre. In Drury’s description, “Act One appears to be a comedic family drama. Act Two watches Act One. Act Two pushes further into Act One and tries to drive it forward to make Act Three.” Drury’s poetic opening stage directions, which include “Lights up on a negro: […] There is a glitch of some kind. […] she looks at herself in a pretend mirror hung on the fourth wall. It’s a very normal thing to have happen in a play” strikingly resonate as the play transforms into an engagement with the deep-seated power dynamics entangled with race in America. Latif’s production at the Young Vic was created for a far wider stage and much larger audience than that at Soho Rep (the Young Vic seats 550 while Soho Rep has only sixty-five seats) and this made the final moments all the more challenging. Donna Banya was particularly effective as Keisha, and her final monologue, during which she dropped her perfect American accent to speak in her native British dialect, demonstrated how the play could resonate as much in London as it did in New York.

Dan Venning has published articles in Asian Theatre Journal, Forum for Modern Language Studies, and Performing Arts Resources, as well as numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals. He is working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building in nineteenth-century Germany. Before entering academia, he was the Associate Dramaturg at the California Shakespeare Theatre.

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European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Dominika Laster

Mieczysław Janowski, great Polish theatre and film actor, and core member of Grotowski’s Theatre of 13 Rows and the Laboratory Theatre, passed away on 25 September 2021 in Wrocław. Janowski was born in Warsaw on 22 March 1935. His entire education, as he would later say, came from the student theatre. He made his theatre debut in Jubileusz [Jubilee] directed by Waldemar Krygier (1928-2006) on 13 June 1958 at Teatr 38 in Kraków. Janowski continued to work with this experimental student theatre until 1963 appearing in such performances as Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Zygmunt Krasiński’s Nie-Boska komedia [Undivine Comedy] and playing the title roles in Arthur Adamov’s Professor Taranne and Juliusz Słowacki’s Samuel Zborowski. In 1961, Janowski performed in Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefather’s Eve and Ludovico Aristo’s Orlando Furioso at the Teatr Rapsodyczny [Rhapsodic Theatre] in Kraków.

Janowski began his collaboration with renowned Polish theatre director and performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) in September of 1964 at the Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole. Ludwik Flaszen, the theatre’s co-founder and literary director, had seen Janowski perform in Kraków and arranged for him to meet Grotowski. Janowski recalls that his first meeting with Grotowski took place in the restaurant of the train station. Grotowski had brought a contract for him to sign that very first meeting. In the Theatre of 13 Rows, Janowski first played Jacob in The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus based on Christopher Marlowe’s drama, replacing Maciej Prus in the role. He later appeared as Laertes in Studium o Hamlecie [Hamlet Study], a performance based on the textual material of William Shakespeare and its adaptation by Polish dramatist Stanisław Wyspiański. Janowski also participated in work on Samuel Zborowski in which he was cast in the role of the Bishop.

Janowski was also a performer in the Laboratory Theatre’s masterwork Akropolis an adaptation of Stanisław Wyspiański’s dramatic poem. The piece premiered in Opole on 10 October 1962 and was subsequently revived in several different versions. Janowski appeared in versions III and IV. The royal castle encircled by a moat and located on Wawel Hill in the center of Kraków serves as the Polish analogue of the Athenian Acropolis in Wyspiański’s Romantic drama. In Grotowski’s production it is transposed to the extermination camp, which represents the graveyard of tradition and the necropolis of European civilization. Akropolis emerged as a co-creation of Grotowski and painter and scenic designer Józef Szajna (1922-2008) who was responsible for the set design, costumes, and props. Szajna, who developed the aesthetic vision for Akropolis, was himself imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Peter Brook famously argued that in the production of Akropolis something of the reality of the camp actually emerges. In his introduction to the 1968 film documentation of the work, Brook contended, “At certain moments in Akropolis, because a nameless horror was not described, was not referred to, was not something that once happened in a place called Auschwitz, it was actually brought into being.” Janowski, who along with his fellow actors, disappeared into the rectangular wooden container – a stand-in for the crematorium – at the end of each performance, was also a survivor of two Nazi camps. Janowski recalled that – given the modest size of the container – he and his colleagues had to slip into it in such a way that the puzzle-pieces of their bodies fit perfectly together in order for the cover to close above them.

Janowski’s perhaps most famous performance was in the Laboratory Theatre’s iconic work The Constant Price based on Julisz Słowacki’s adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s historical drama, where he played alongside Ryszard Cieślak (1937-1990), Rena Mirecka (b. 1934), Maja Komorowska (b. 1937), and Stanisław Ścierski (1939-1983). Janowski appeared in the role of Muley in versions I and II of the piece, and toured internationally with the production. He would later reveal that the emotional score – or what to the audience appeared as a long exchange with the Infante Don Fernando – was an internal conversation with Janowski’s father who was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of thirty-three. Looking back, Janowski recounted certain performance details perceptible only to him and his fellow actors by virtue of proximity. For instance, he remembered that Cieślak’s performance score was so precise that in a particular moment of each performance of The Constant Price, he shed exactly one tear. Not one, not two, Janowski insisted, but one.

In a public conversation convened by Grotowski archivist Agnieszka Wójtowicz that took place in Opole on 4 April 2016, Janowski said “We toured the whole world in Polish, and everyone understood what was going on.” In the context of the same conversation, Janowski contended that Grotowski did not care if the public liked Laboratory Theatre performances or not, what was important is that they remembered them. A charismatic speaker, at times Janowski liked to subvert expectations. In his characteristically playful manner, he compared Grotowski’s theatre to a car accident – a car accident that you will never forget.

Janowski was a gifted raconteur and enjoyed enacting anecdotes from the theatre’s rehearsal process. For instance, he described one occasion when – in typical Laboratory Theatre fashion – all the actors were gathered around attentively observing Grotowski’s work with a single performer. This time it happened to be Janowski. He was given the prompt “the back is crying.” Agile in body, he set his back and shoulders in motion shaking, shivering, trembling, and quivering. At each attempt, Grotowski would announce his verdict “I don’t believe you.” This was one of Grotowski’s most often used criterium for determining whether the actor’s work was effectual. At each pronouncement, Janowski would renew his efforts, but time and again was met with Grotowski’s “I don’t believe you.” After hours of work, in his mounting frustration, Janowski grabbed a chair and ran toward Grotowski shouting expletives. Just as the chair was about to meet the director’s head, Grotowski said: “Now, I believe you.” When describing the rehearsal process, Janowski recalled that Grotowski would often say “Don’t talk, do. Don’t act, be.” No one acted in our theatre, Janowski recounted, we were always ourselves.

Janowski was a core member of the Laboratory Theatre and played in all the main productions during his eight years with the ensemble. With Grotowski’s assistance and support, he received a fellowship from the French government to study in Paris, which he undertook while on leave from the theatre. He officially left the Laboratory Theatre in April 1970 shortly before its dissolution and Grotowski’s exit from the “theatre of productions” period, which signaled the transition to the paratheatrical phase of his research announced publicly by the director at New York University on 13 December 1970.

After his work with Grotowski, Janowski went on to play numerous roles in the Teatr Dramatyczny [Dramatic Theatre] in Wałbrzych and Teatr Współczesny [Contemporary Theatre] in Wrocław. He also worked as an actor in television and film. Janowski’s film career was particularly prodigious, spanning over four decades and well over a hundred films. In addition to his work as an actor, he also served as assistant director on numerous film projects. In 1999, he was decorated by the President of Poland with the Gold Cross of Merit for his entire artistic oeuvre.

Despite his dynamic and extensive acting career after 1970, Janowski felt that his most significant and memorable experiences were with Grotowski and his colleagues at the Laboratory Theatre. In the final decades of his life, he shared those experiences with younger generations of theatre artists and students in the context of workshops, symposia, film screenings, and public talks. He took part in an event pivoting around The Constant Prince at the University of Kent in Canterbury in 2007. In 2009, he was a guest artist at Tracing Grotowski’s Path: Year of Grotowski in New York a six-month-long series of events curated by Richard Schechner, which coincided with UNESCO’s designation of 2009 as the “Year of Grotowski.” The same year, he also participated in the British Grotowski Project conference curated by Paul Allain. He later traveled to Brazil, Australia, and Sweden to take part in artistic exchanges organized by universities and other cultural institutions. In November of 2012, Janowski returned to the United States with fellow Laboratory Theatre actor Andrzej Paluchiewicz to participate in a series of events at Yale University, which included screenings of rare archival documentation of performances directed by Grotowski as well as public talks. Later that month, the two actors also presented at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in New York.

Janowski was a lively and moving speaker who shared his experiences of working in the Laboratory Theatre with enthusiasm, humor, and vigor. I had the honor of serving as his Polish-English interpreter at numerous public events. On these occasions, his passion and volubility were uncontainable leaving no pauses for the translation. Realizing I needed to shift to simultaneous interpretation, I attuned myself even more closely to his rhythm. In this way, I felt carried by his waves of expression overflowing with the desire to share. He was a beloved friend with close, lifelong ties to my family, and will be dearly missed. 

As he would often end his public talks – referring to himself and his Laboratory Theatre colleagues:

Mówiliśmy od serca

We spoke from the heart

Mieczysław Janowski. Photo courtesy of Andrzej Paluchiewicz.

Dominika Laster is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work (2016). In 2009, she served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path: Year of Grotowski in New York.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Marvin Carlson

The National Theatre of São João (TNSJ) in Porto, Portugal, has been, like theatres around the world, closed to the public throughout 2021, but unlike many of its sister theatres, it took advantage of the closing to undertake a series of major renovations, including a complete rebuilding of the stage and the addition of 450 new seats, at a total cost of over 2.5 million Euros. The reopening, on October 22, also marking the theatre’s centenary, was therefore an occasion for multiple celebrations. It was marked by the premiere of a new production of King Lear, as well as a major exhibition of artifacts from the last century of the theatre’s offerings, as well as a conference on the current role of national theatres, with directors from many such theatres meeting to exchange ideas and plans.

The inaugural production of Lear, created by Nuno Cardoso, one of Portugal’s leading directors, was based on a design concept that originated with this unique moment in the theatre’s history. The full expanse of the renovated stage was utilized, but the lower part, extending up to perhaps ten feet above the stage floor, was largely empty, but dotted with objects discarded from the renovated stage and backstage areas—a few chairs, an old refrigerator, some dressing room makeup tables, a number of upright and chest-like storage boxes mounted on wheels, and several wheeled costume racks, complete with old, mostly modern costumes. In the course of the production these units were moved into different configurations around the stage, abstractly suggesting different locations.  Actors not performing stood or sat upstage or art the sides, sometimes watching the onstage action with interest, and sometimes simply relaxed, awaiting their turn. Not all of this was visible for the first act, which was played far downstage, with the act curtain lowered to about four feet above the floor, leaving a shallow forestage which the actors entered by stooping beneath the curtain, using simple scenic elements like the wheeled storage containers which they pushed out below the curtain.

The full stage was not revealed until the second act, when in contrast to the simple elements in the mostly empty lower part of the space, the fly area above was filled with a constructivist network of shining metal piping, criss-crossing the entire space. The effect was visually striking, but the symbolic relationship between the upper and lower parts of the stage was not entirely clear. The minimalist open area below with clearly reused storage elements suggested a somewhat improvised or rehearsed performance (although the detailed essentially modern costumes did not particularly support this) somewhat in the manner of Richard Burton’s 1964 “dress rehearsal” Hamlet. The ultramodern maze of piping above seemed to bear no aesthetic relation to any of this, though I wondered if the combined effect might be referring less to Lear itself than to the occasion, with the lower  stage representing the tradition and memories of the theatre and the upper the just-installed impressive new technology.

Lear, by William Shakespeare, directed by Nuno Cardoso. Photo: National Theatre of São João.

This symbolic ambiguity might well have been resolved had the complete production been presented, but it was not. The rather minimalist program provided announced a running time or 90 minutes, and my first assumption was that the production might be following the approach popular in Germany at the beginning of the century when Ibsen, Chekhov, and even Shakespeare were often cut down by Thalheimer and others to their “essence,” presented without intermission  in versions about this long. In fact I found that the cutting and speed was fairly normal, and only the first two acts were presented at this official opening. The rest is scheduled to be added in early November.

Accustomed to a paucity or complete absence of live performance for much of the past year, I certainly felt half a Lear was better than none, but obviously any comments I make on the production will have to be qualified by the fact that I saw only part, and admittedly the less challenging part—without all the cruel extremities, physical and mental—occurring in the later scenes. I would have been especially interested to see the further development of Lear by the leading Portuguese actor António Durães. In the opening act his bursts of rage, vocally and physically, were overwhelming (in his first burst of anger against Kent (Joao Melo) he brutally crushed him against the proscenium arch and then, when pronouncing his banishment, literally hurled him off the stage into the central aisle of the auditorium. His mounting hysteria and struggles to contain it in the second act were powerfully shown, and it was a great disappointment not to see how they would be developed in the storm scene. The approaching storm was clearly suggested visually and aurally by rumblings and flickering lights among the hitherto neutral tubing above the stage and here too one could only imagine how this effect might have been developed in the full production. 

Lear, by William Shakespeare, directed by Nuno Cardoso. Photo: National Theatre of São João.

Lear’s arbitrary and erratic violence was nicely seconded by four followers, who several times cornered the hapless Oswald (Antonio Parra) and surrounded him, beating and kicking his prone body. Regan (Margarida Carvalho) and Goneril’s (Joana Carvalho) complaints against them seemed unusually well founded. Maria Leite offered an athletic and effectively sardonic female fool, in rather traditional motley, although the costumes were in general rather neutral modern dress. The only particularly contemporary production element (aside from the ceiling tubing) was a hand-held microphone, used by Lear to make official pronouncements and by Edmund for his soliloquies. Edmund’s (Pedro Frias) deviations from normality were emphasized—he moved in an awkward, rather disjointed manner, although without any clear physical deformity, and at one point he popped out from behind a cabinet to seize Oswald for a quick but passionate homosexual embrace. This aspect of Edmund was not indicated at any other point in the section we saw and one could only speculate how it might have been developed in the unpresented acts.

A seemingly much more arbitrary gender choice involved Kent. Preparing to return to the court in disguise, he riffled through one of the onstage costume racks and selected, rather surprisingly, a quite plain and loose fitting dress. With only this to alter his appearance he applied to Lear as a follower, who shows no surprise at this obviously cross-dressed figure.  This gives a whole new dimension to their opening exchange “How now, what are thou?” “A Man, sir.” But neither actor suggests in any way that the exchange refers to Kent’s appearance, and the following clearly male banter is also presented quite conventionally, leaving the audience to wonder if perhaps Lear is already mad, until other characters also accept Kent’s odd appearance without apparent surprise, leaving his choice of disguise a puzzle.

Frank Castorf has had a distinct influence on the modern Portuguese theatre, and this likely explains the production’s use of projected images from a hand-held video camera onstage—a favorite Castorf device. In this case however I did not feel that the extra perspective this offered really added significantly to the performance, especially since the images projected were identifiable, but not particularly clear or visually interesting. In the first act, the images are projected on the lowered curtain behind the performers, which is not a good reflecting surface, and are essentially closeups of Cordelia (Lisa Reis) as she crouches center stage under the weight of Lear’s attacks on her. During the second act the camera is generally carried about by the Fool, but for the most part it is not used to present the Fool’s view of the action, but rather self-image closeups of his own face.  These are rather dimly projected onto the dark face of one of the upright storage cabinets scattered about the stage. Again, their weak definition and lack of clear relevance to the overall dynamics of the scene made them seem to me more of a distraction than addition to the performance.

All such misgivings of course have to be qualified by the fact that I witnessed only half of the production, with all of the most challenging scenes still ahead—Gloucester’s blinding, the storm, Lear’s madness and Poor Tom’s pseudo-madness, and the final reconciliation. Production choices that seemed to me unclear or ineffective may well have become appropriate and even memorable viewed in the context of the whole. To my Covid-deprived theatre soul, however, even half a Lear was distinctly better than none, the powerful interpretation of Durães alone making the evening a memorable one, and my congratulations and warmest thanks to the National Theatre of Porto and to its sister institutions around the world who are restoring the living theatre to us.

Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. 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 a theatrical autobiography, 10,000 Nights, University of Michigan, 2017.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Kathleen Cioffi

On March 3, 2021, Jerzy Limon, the founder and artistic director of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre in Poland, died of Covid-19 at the age of seventy. A man of many talents, Limon—a professor of English, Shakespearean, theatre historian, drama theorist, essayist, translator, and novelist—left a lasting mark on both the scholarly world of theatre specialists and the artistic world of theatre practitioners. He wrote many important scholarly works on Elizabethan theatre history as well as on drama theory. He was also an inspiring teacher, a witty raconteur, a good friend, and, as the editor of Teatr magazine, Jacek Kopciński, said in an interview published after Limon’s death on the e-teatr.pl website, “gentleman w każdym calu” (every inch a gentleman). However, it was through the gradual fulfillment of a dream—first, by starting a foundation, then by establishing an annual Shakespeare festival, and, finally, by building a Shakespeare theatre in Gdańsk—that he not only achieved the fulfillment of that dream but also had an enormous impact on Polish and European culture.

I first met Jurek (the Polish nickname for Jerzy) in the mid-1980s, when my husband and I taught in the English Institute at the University of Gdańsk, where Limon was the deputy director of the Institute. He had already made a name for himself as a theatre historian through his research on the Fencing School, the first public theatre in Poland. While working on his doctorate at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, he had compared the structure of the Fortune Theatre in London, known from Philip Henslowe’s construction contract, and that of the Fencing School, pictured in a 1687 engraving by Dutch artist Peter Willer. Even prior to defending his dissertation, he had published articles in the Polish journal Pamiętnik Teatralny and the British journal Shakespeare Survey on this subject. For the dissertation (defended in 1979), he also meticulously examined all petitions and applications to perform submitted by English actors to city councils and at aristocratic courts in the Gdańsk area. He was thus able to establish the scale of the activity of English touring companies in Gdańsk in the early seventeenth century.

Limon continued to write articles and books in both English and Polish on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage throughout his career. His first monograph, Gentleman of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590–1660 (1985), expands on his dissertation by not only containing his description of the Fencing School but also describing the route followed by English actors on the Continent in the early seventeenth century and their performances for noble patrons. The following year he published Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics, 1623/24 (1986), where he undertakes a textual analysis of five Jacobean plays that he contends were part of an elaborate propaganda campaign intended to promote the views of a particular faction at the court of King James I. In The Masque of Stuart Culture (1990), he analyzes the masque as a genre closely related to court ritual. More recently, he published Szekspir bez cenzury: Erotyczny żart na scenie elżbietańskiej (Shakespeare Uncensored: The Bawdy Joke on the Elizabethan Stage, 2018), a lexicon of Shakespearean jokes that is also a commentary on the history and culture of England at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

By the 1990–91 school year, when my husband and I returned to Poland, Jurek had transitioned from his academic study of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to a seemingly quixotic plan: he wanted to reconstruct the Fencing School on its original site. Inspired by the American actor Sam Wanamaker’s efforts to rebuild the Globe Theatre in London, he initiated a similar project in Gdańsk. His first step was to establish a foundation, Fundacja Theatrum Gedanense, whose primary purpose was to build the theatre. Over the years, this foundation also organized academic conferences, sponsored concerts and other artistic events, implemented an educational program for young people, and raised funds from individuals (including Britain’s Prince Charles, who became the Foundation’s patron); corporations; and local, national, and international governmental organizations. In 1993, it also began a Shakespeare festival, at first called the Gdańsk Shakespeare Days, but renamed in 1997 the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival. The festival has been held annually since then during St. Dominic’s Fair, a traditional early-August festival that has taken place since the Middle Ages in Gdańsk. This is precisely when the English actors would perform in the Fencing School in the early seventeenth century.

The Gdańsk Fencing School, shown on the right, engraving by Peter Willer, 1687.

The foundation and Shakespeare Festival served two functions: they grew support for the reconstruction of the theatre, and they spread knowledge about and familiarity with William Shakespeare and his works in the Gdańsk area. Shakespeare became inextricably associated with Gdańsk. On 12 February 1992, in an article in Gazeta Wyborcza about one of the conferences sponsored by the foundation, the Gdańsk poet Anna Czekanowicz declared, “Jeżeli Szekspir, to jesteśmy w Gdańsku” (If it’s Shakespeare, then we must be in Gdańsk).  This became a recurring slogan as more and more Shakespeare festivals were held and the foundation sponsored other events associated with Shakespeare. Limon traveled all over the world, seeking out interesting Shakespeare productions and inviting them to perform at the Festival. Because of bringing these productions to Gdańsk, he learned what directors needed from venues hosting their productions. As a result of this and also of the experience of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which many directors complained was too limiting to stage plays in, he modified his own ideas about reconstructing the Fencing School.

As early as 1991, Limon consulted with the Pomeranian Voivodeship Heritage Conservator, Marcin Gawlicki, to find out if reconstructing the theatre would be possible. Archaeological excavations were undertaken, first between 1997 and 2000, and then again in 2004. During the first excavation, parts of the Fencing School were discovered, but they were interpreted by the archaeologists as the remains of nineteenth-century outbuildings. However, when Gawlicki compared the drawings the archaeologists made with Willer’s print and also with a drawing found in Swedish archives that documented the city’s layout at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he was able to determine that the wooden structures that the archaeologists had thought were nineteenth-century outbuildings were more likely to have been the remains of the seventeenth-century Fencing School. In 2001, the Theatrum Gedanense foundation obtained rights to the land and commissioned a second excavation. The 2004 excavation, along with dendochronological studies conducted on the wood found at the site, confirmed Gawlicki’s hypothesis. The foundation commissioned him to publish a study that reported on the new archaeological findings and made recommendations about the reconstruction of the theatre.

Gawlicki’s study confirmed the correctness of Limon’s evolving thinking about the undesirability of reconstructing an Elizabethan theatre in Gdańsk in a completely literal way. An international competition soliciting proposals for the reconstruction was announced that same year. The call for proposals specified that the architects had to propose an edifice that would take into account the original dimensions and Fortune Theatre–like structure of the Fencing School, but would also be flexible enough to accommodate productions originally designed for different spaces. Thirty-eight entries were submitted to the competition, and in January 2005, Renato Rizzi, a Venetian architect, was declared the winner. Rizzi’s design from the outside looks nothing like the Fencing School from Peter Willer’s print, but instead, enters into a dialogue with the architecture of the city of the Gdańsk; it is constructed of black brick, echoing the red-brick Gothic churches in the city’s Old Town and the medieval fortifications that surrounded it. Inside, however, the black brick gives way to a light-colored wooden structure, with Elizabethan-style galleries of seats for spectators, a ceiling that can be opened and closed, and the ability to accommodate proscenium, thrust, and in-the-round productions.

In 2008, a new institution, the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, was incorporated, and in 2009, the official groundbreaking for the theatre was held. The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by Donald Tusk, then Prime Minster of Poland; the Minister of Culture; and many local dignitaries. It was preceded by an artistic event devised by filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, an honorary patron of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, called Aktorzy przyjechali (The Actors Are Come Hither) in which eighty actors from all over Poland performed scenes from Shakespeare’s plays on twenty-two outdoor stages along the Long Market, the main street in Gdańsk’s Old Town. The spectators—who numbered around ten thousand—could move from stage to stage to watch the performances of the actors, many of whom were film and television stars. As Limon himself wrote in his 2011 article “The City and the ‘Problem’ of Theatre Reconstructions: ‘Shakespearean’ Theatres in London and Gdańsk” for the Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, “Thus, for one hour the whole city spoke Shakespeare, adding to the narrative that has continued since around 1600, when the first English players came to Gdańsk.”

The 2009 groundbreaking event is just one example of the prodigious feats of organizing and fundraising that Jerzy Limon undertook over the years. Societies of Friends of the Theatrum Gedanese Foundation were started in the United Kingdom and the United States, and fundraising events, including ones that Prince Charles attended in the UK and Barbara Bush attended in the US, were held. A small performance space, the Teatr w Oknie / Two Windows Theatre, was started as a kind of spin-off of the Actors Are Come Hither happening, and continues to be an alternative space for performances during the Shakespeare Festival. In 2010, Limon, along with representatives from the UK, Armenia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Romania, France, Macedonia, and Serbia, founded the European Shakespeare Festivals Network (ESFN), and became its founding chairman. The Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre applied for and received a large grant from the European Union, which enabled it to complete construction. And at last, construction was completed on the magnificent realization of Rizzi’s design, which was also the fulfillment of Limon’s visionary idea to bring Gdańsk’s “golden age”—the Renaissance, when Gdańsk was the largest metropolis in Poland and a multicultural city teaming with tradesmen and traveling artists—back to life. The Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, the first purpose-built theatre to be constructed in Poland in forty years, opened on 19 September 2014.

One would think that with all the organizational activity involved in being the president of the Theatrum Gedanense Foundation, the director of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival, the founding chairman of the ESFN, and the artistic director of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, Jurek would not have had much time left for teaching or writing. In fact, however, until his recent retirement, he taught a full load of courses at the University of Gdańsk, and even established a new department, the Department of Performing Arts, which he ran for three years. He was also an active scholar, and his scholarship evolved over the years from being solely concerned with Shakespearean and Jacobean theatre and drama to being more engaged with questions of the semiotics of theatre. In works such as Między niebem a sceną: Przestrzeń i czas w teatrze (Between Heaven and the Stage: Space and Time in Theatre, 2002), Trzy teatry: scena, telewizja, radio (Three Theatres: The Stage, Television, Radio, 2003), Piąty wymiar teatru (The Fifth Dimension of the Theatre, 2006), and The Chemistry of the Theatre: Performativity of Time (2010), he sought to define the theatrical performance as a communicative act in which fictional characters are created by real actors who create a present time on the stage that is received as a past or future time by an audience inhabiting a different space than the actors. He also sought to distinguish the communicative systems in live theatre from those in theatre presented on television or in radio theatre.

Limon was also active as a translator of dramatic works. Together with his friend, the playwright Władysław Zawistowski, he translated plays by Shakespeare and other Elizabethans from English to Polish, including Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, as well as Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman (which takes place in Gdańsk). He also translated plays by Tom Stoppard, including Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Real Inspector Hound, and The Artist Descending the Stairs, as well as Stoppard’s screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. His translations of Arcadia and The Invention of Love were performed at the Teatr Wybrzeże in Gdańsk.

Jurek also wrote his own literary works, some of which were novels; others might be more properly classified as creative nonfiction. For example, in Wieloryb (The Whale, 1998), which he wrote under a pseudonym, the “author” structured fictional archival documents into a meditation on human memory that was also a response to the hundreds of archival documents Limon had studied and edited as a theatre historian. (In 2018, this work was adapted for the stage by Romuald Wicza-Pokojski and presented by the director Jacek Głomb at the Miniatura Theatre in Gdańsk.) In Młot na poetów albo Kronika ściętych głów (A Hammer for Poets, or The Chronicle of Beheaded Heads, 2014), he wrote about three real seventeenth-century Polish authors of political pamphlets whose books were publicly burned thanks to the machinations of agents of King James I, whom they had criticized. Limon constructed his nonlinear “chronicle” from commentaries, digressions, and quotations that he had found in his research and regarded this work as a kind of deconstruction of the traditional narrative of history.

Jerzy Limon had retired from teaching, and had announced his retirement as artistic director of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre at the time of his last illness. He had been planning to devote himself to his writing now that he would no longer be running the theatre, and we can only mourn those groundbreaking works of criticism and literature that he had not yet created. Nevertheless, he leaves behind several institutions that are firmly established in the cultural and physical landscape of Gdańsk and Europe as a whole. Thanks to him the residents of the Gdańsk area have been able for the last twenty-five years to see Shakespeare productions by the world’s most interesting directors. The Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre was, under his leadership, constantly inventing new ways to engage with its own community and the world at large. He also leaves behind many friends in the artistic and academic communities in Poland and around the world. Even in the mid-1980s, I had the impression that Jurek knew everyone, and by the end of his life, it seemed as if he really did. I join the directors whose plays were performed in the theatre he built, the Shakespeare scholars, his family, and all the people who came into contact with him over the years in mourning a true visionary and great friend.

Kathleen Cioffi is a theatre historian and drama critic who writes frequently about Polish theatre. She lived for four years in Gdańsk, Poland, where she cofounded Maybe Theatre, a group that performs English-language theatre productions in Gdańsk. She is the author of Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954–1989 (1996) and the coeditor, with Magda Romanska, of Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (2020).

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Steve Earnest

The 2021 Theatertreffen was once again presented under difficult circumstances due to the COVID-19 crisis that had plagued the world since Fall 2019.  Productions were presented only via virtual format by the producing companies of the ten selected productions during May 2021. The Berliner Festspielehaus served as the central clearing house for the productions but viewing the productions was restricted by a few of the theatre companies and only brief time periods were given for viewing for reviewers outside of Europe. Several, though not all, of the productions will be covered by this review due to the guidelines established by the Theatertreffen and the individual theatre companies. Given the severe restrictions caused by world conditions, the results of the festival were uniformly outstanding and the staff at the Theatertreffen and the individual companies are to be highly commended.

One common element of the productions included in this review was that most, if not all of the productions, included video, sound and lighting crews co-mingling with the actors in large theatre spaces with no audiences. This approach made for a more cinematic treatment of the 2021 invited productions. However, the absence of audience response and presence in the actual theatres was notable. Many of the productions actually emphasized the bare theatres and film crews – these elements were interwoven into the production concepts. Empty seats without audience members could be utilized as staging areas and camera crews were often incorporated into the action of the works. Another trend of the past several years is the duration of works selected for the festival.  Works lasting seven, eight and even twenty-four hours have been increasing in Germany for well over a decade and the scale of artistry has generally measured up to and warranted these expansive treatments of works presented on the various stages of the German-speaking world.  

Maria Stuart was directed by Anne Lenk and produced by Schauspiel Zurich. The production was staged on a set that consisted of nine smaller stacked stages reminiscent of The Hollywood Squares game show from the 1970’s/80’s in the U.S. With three rows of three stages, the action unfolded stage by stage, with Elizabeth generally occupying the central, slightly larger stage area. Given the nature of the stage design, the actors communicated via direct address to the audience as they were unable, in most cases, to make eye contact with one another. There were several scenes where two actors would occupy a single square but for the most part each character was alone in their stage space. Centrally located, Elizabeth spent the first part of the work masked until the Fotheringay Park scene with Mary when her mask was removed. The overall style of the acting and look of the scenic design was reminiscent of a puppet show – the actors moved and behaved (even spoke) in a unique mannequin-like style. In that sense, the story of all the characters being “mere puppets to Elizabeth’s wishes” was developed. In addition to human puppets, Lenk’s staging and scenic design yielded the idea of jail cells in which Maria, Elizabeth (as well as the other characters) were confined or imprisoned in jail cells. (Note by the editor: Seeing this production later online I could not avoid associating the visual isolation of the characters in their cells with the now widespread phenomenon of zoom performance).

Maria Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller, directed by Anne Lenk. Photo: Arno Declair.

Der Zauberberg was a complicated production. Produced by Deutsches Theater Berlin, the work was based on the novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann, but in fact, the work bore little in common with the novel, as the Sebastian Hartmann adaptation delved more into the difficult scenes that took place in the “Snow” chapter of the novel, set during several WW1 warfare scenes. Eventually arriving at a skiing location in the Swiss Alps, Der Zauberberg presented a world characterized by movement and time that had little to do with place. The ski lodge was the final destination for a number of individuals who had lost control and were nearly freezing to death; their interactions were frantic and tense and embodied the horrors of trench warfare during the dead of winter. Throughout the work, which was heavily based in movement and video imagery, the characters dealt with the issue of “time as a circular issue” and there were continuous strands of text that emphasized those passages, as repeated in the Hartmann adaptation. The actors embodied the difficult travel through the war-torn region, as lengthy circular movement sequences became a movement underscore to the spoken dialogue that was most often delivered by the lead character Castorp, played by Markwart Müller-Elmau. The most notable element of the production was the costumes. Designed by Adriana Brava Peretzki, the oversized body suits were intended to display the grotesqueness of human form. According to Peretzki, “I wanted the characters to move as objects rather than roles – the sick body is represented both internally and externally, no matter what condition it is in. And not hidden under clothing, but as a kind of disguise itself.” Produced on the main stage of the Deutsches Theater, the work made use of the entire auditorium, including the theatre seats and lobby. However, the central focus of the work was on the film crew and its ability to capture the extensive movement scenes from numerous camera angles as the bodies moved through the Alps on the completely white stage space. Multimedia filmic backgrounds of snowy mountains further developed the cinematic sequences.

Maria Schleef’s Name Her, produced by Ballhaus Ost Berlin, Munich Kammerspiele and Kosmos Theater, Vienna, was an incredible highlight of the festival. It featured Anne Tismer, a celebrated German actress who had appeared in numerous previous German films and stage plays, and here performed over forty female characters. Compiled by director/playwright Schleef, the female characters of Name Her were figures who had been neglected by  history, which offered only limited information about the dynamic ideas, innovations and contributions they had provided to humanity. These figures ranged from scientists and professors such as Gudrun Penndorf, Josephine Nivison and Maria Gaetana, to composer Francesca Cacinni, Flora Tristan and many other important “unknown”women throughout history. The “lecture/demonstration” inspired work was presented in an exciting multi-screen environment that allowed Tismer the possibility of being seen on multiple screens simultaneously. In each of the scenes Tismer narrated the story of each character’s life and contributions as well as playing some scenes (utilizing a Brechtian “street scene” format) to develop two person scenes within the monodrama.  All of the scenes were linked by the use of the 1990’s Madonna song “Like a Prayer,” which preceded each segment with Tismer dancing as she moved through the long list of characters. Covering the historical characters in an A-Z format, the work was over seven hours in duration.

Show Me a Good Time, by the Gob Squad. Photo: Dorothea Tuch.

For many years the German/British company Gob Squad has been in the Theatertreffen and 2021 saw a major breakthrough for the company with their selected production of Show Me a Good Time. Co-produced by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) in addition to the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Series (San Diego, USA), the twenty-four hour production was available to be seen on a single date, but there were many YouTube videos and other versions of this work available on the internet. The work centered around the situation caused by the world pandemic and the fact that theatre had basically been shut down worldwide. The situation had basically stopped human contact including face to face contact, touch, the physical occupation of space and the absence of one of the critical elements of theatre: the audience. Central to the work was the many challenges and “new life space” created by the world COVID pandemic. Show Me a Good Time explored what was perhaps one positive development of the world situation – the “home office” that gave rise to an incredible number of possibilities for engagement and activity during quarantine times. The extensive nature of the possibilities and scope of the work cannot be covered in a short report, but it is important to note that Gob Squad sprang from the tradition of Frank Castorf and others from the Volksbühne who, over the past thirty years were responsible for the creation and evolution of a theatrical genre that co-exists in the realm of television talk shows, reality TV shows (such as Big Brother) and especially from 2018 forward, the world of Zoom conferencing. Given the company’s unique approach to theatrical work and staging, Gob Squad was able to transform the theme of “Show me a good time” into a twenty-four hour work, as company members explored their fantasies, and interacted with themselves and outsiders virtually to create a large shared space of discovery.  

Einfach das Ende der Welt, by Jean-Luc Lagarce, directed by Christopher Ruping. Photo: Diane Pfammatter.

Einfach das Ende der Welt (Simply the End of the World) by Schauspielhaus Zurich had also evolved into a cinematic work on the bare stage of the Schauspielhaus as the lifetime of the leading character, a cancer victim, had been reimagined for a final tour through his life in a theatrical setting. Directed by Christopher Ruping and featuring Benjamin Lille, the work was essentially another solo journey through the key years of the leading character’s life and his return back to his hometown with a terminal illness. Eventually made into a feature film by Xavier Dolan, the original script was written by Jean-Luc Lagarce, who passed away from HIV-AIDS in 1990. In that way, the work is mostly autobiographical and follows the character of Louis, who had lived all over the world in various countries and had engaged in numerous activities detailed in the play. Other cast members – such as his family members, friends and some illicit acquaintances in his life – were brought into the story. The camera crew consisted of multiple cameras and assistants who shot all of the scenes in true cinematic form but also revealed the fact that the work was being filmed. It had the characteristics of a docudrama in many ways.  

Graf Öderlund, by Max Frisch, directed by Stephan Bachmann. Photo: Birgit Hupfel.

Co-produced by Theater Basel, Munich Kammerspiele and Residenztheater, the Max Frisch play Graf Öderlund (Count Oderlund) was yet another extremely strong offering by the same company that delivered Woyeck in 2019. The play is a classic Frisch absurdist work set in a typical Frisch fantastical setting. The leading character Dr. Hahn (played by Simon Zagermann) becomes obsessed with a client, a bank clerk who had murdered his victim with an axe and was being tried in a high-profile court case.  Eventually obsessed with the idea of axe murdering, Hahn decides to commit murder with an axe himself. While lacking some of the comedic moments often seen in the work of Frisch, the play was presented in high stylistic fashion with orchestral underscoring and an onstage chorus. Graf Öderlund moved from the trial sequence through Hahn’s gruesome murder and eventually into a dark void, where Hahn encountered numerous spirits, fantastic figures and past acquaintances. The vast scenic design was that of a huge tunnel leading downstage into which the actors traveled and realized the various settings of the play – a forest, a courtroom and some type of cellar or basement. The dreamlike world of Frisch, perhaps best displayed in this play (hailed as one of his personal favorites), evolved into multi-locational “cosmic” locations that defied concrete explanation. These scenes, including the incredible courtroom scene, which included the choral jury pulling rats out of a downstage gutter, dizzying scenes of lunatic forest travel and violent scenes of murderous contemplation that left Hahn in a state of spiritual anagnorisis as he began to question various social structures and societal constructs – including his own elevated position as a member of the intelligentsia. The fantastical nature of Frisch’s work was successfully realized by director Stephan Bachmann and musical director Sven Kaiser who were able to sculpt the script into a powerful music drama.

Automatenbuffet, by Ana Gmeyner, directed by Barbara Frey. Photo: Matthias Horn.

Burgtheater Vienna’s production of Automatenbuffet (Vending Machine Buffet) written by Ana Gmeyner in 1935 and directed and/staged by Barbara Frey was a mixture of expressionist and absurdist material – as the performance style included numerous elements such as choral recitation, choreographed movement and stylized delivery of lines. The story centered around an automated vending machine environment where citizens could come and eat, drink and socialize for a fee that was paid for the items procured. However, the political/economic views of the staff (Adam and his wife Mrs. Adams) accompanied by the hostile external environment, led to the development of a “refugee-like” situation as the visitors to the environment were strictly monitored and controlled by the leaders. Automatenbuffet commented on the rise of automation and new modern devices (such as vending machines) that marked the new direction of post WWI society. At the same time Adam was developing ideas for a new fishery that signaled a contrast to the rise in automation and a return to nature and humanity’s desire to return to a simpler way of life. Frey’s staging was picturesque; the highly symbolic work included visually stunning scenes of Adam rescuing Eve while making planning calculations for his fishing preservatory, eventually bringing her to the vending buffet. The contrast of socialist and capitalist systems was characteristic of this work that was written by the radical Jewish Austrian playwright Gmeyner just before the unprecedented rise of Hitler in Austria and Germany.  

Medea, by Euripides, directed by Leonie Bohm. Photo: Gina Folly.

Presented by Schauspielhaus Zurich, Medea was directed by Leonie Bohm and was staged in a white videotaping room that included a cabaret type piano setting. Like so many of the plays in the 2021 Theatertreffen, Medea bore little resemblance to the original text; Bohm’s Medea was a contemporary woman of today – one who refused to capitulate to the ancient Greek myth. Two performers engaged in this “cabaret journey” – Maja Beckman and Johannes Rieder– embodied the archetypal male/female story that is the basis of Medea. Most of the work came in the form of long speeches given by Beckman to piano accompaniment. The details of the stories included ideas about banishment, being ridiculed by a teacher in school, leaving one’s spouse and eventually, child murder. Instead of considering the actions from an internal, active standpoint, the situation is considered via an external narrative. Commentary replaces action in Bohm’s Medea. The tone of the stories would shift from light comedy to fanatical screaming and crying. Beckman’s incredible vocal range and movement skills made this work a real showpiece for the actress as the musician Rieder spoke only occasionally but played piano and guitar.

In summary, the 2021 Berliner Theatertreffen displayed the extreme resiliency of the German theatre system and its commitment to honor the achievements of major state and private theatre companies, many of which were presented in beautiful historic theatre buildings under difficult contemporary conditions. The creativity involved in the presentation of these events was extraordinary and the companies undoubtedly made outstanding discoveries regarding the production of mixed media events.  It is hoped that future events and holdings of the Theatertreffen will be live, though the legacy of the 2020 and 2021 festivals will naturally have a prolonged effect on the future of the Theatertreffen.   

Steve Earnest received a PhD in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, Florida. Dr. Earnest has published articles, reviews and interviews in Theatre Journal, Western European Stages, Backstage West, Ecumenica, The Journal of Beckett Studies, Theatre Symposium, New Theatre Quarterly, and Theatre Studies, among others. In 1999 he published a book entitled The State Acting Academy of East Berlin and is currently a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University and is working on projects dealing with the theatre system of Iceland.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of one of the most dedicated and appreciated supporters of this journal, Marion Peter Holt. Marion was one of the founding members of the editorial board of Western European Stages in 1989 and remained with us when the journal changed to European Stages in 2013. He contributed in no small part to our continued strong coverage of the contemporary Spanish and Catalan stage through all these years. Of course these contributions were only a small, if typical example of the life-long service Marion performed in bringing knowledge of the contemporary Spanish and Catalan theatre to the English-speaking world. His death has inspired many tributes on both sides of the Atlantic, including the following, which incorporates the observations of a number of leading figures in the dramatic world of Spain and Catalonia. It was assembled for the digital journal Núvol by Jaume Forés Juliana for the issue of 17/08/2021 and is here reproduced with the kind permission of that journal:

We often hear about the excellent international reputation that the Catalan theatre is enjoying, but this reputation would not have been possible without the intervention of good translator ambassadors. One key such figure was the author and translator Marion Peter Holt, who, through his translations, helped to spread knowledge of Catalan and Spanish drama throughout the United States. A Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a member of the Real Academia Española since 1986, he translated into English such major authors as Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Àngels Aymar, Sergi Belbel, Marta Buchaca, Guillem Clua and Lluïsa Cunillé. The news of his death this Sunday in New York, has shaken the Catalan theatre, which mourns the loss of one of its most staunch American champions.

Guillem Clua

Playwright, director and screenwriter. National Prize for Dramatic Literature 2020.

Marion and I had a friendship that went beyond the professional relationship we’ve had over the last few years. He was one of the first people who became interested in my works when I moved to New York in 2006 and helped me in my first steps in that rather hostile city, promoting my few texts in the academic and publishing fields where he had influence despite them not being his translations. I had already heard about him, because he carried out a tireless task of translating and disseminating contemporary Catalan drama (at that time focused on texts by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, with whom he had a great friendship, and Sergi Belbel).

He was always very curious to discover new authors and help them in any way possible. Thus, he immediately offered to translate my works Marburg, The Promised Land and Smiley. Thanks to him I had the opportunity to present them in staged readings in theatres in New York such as the Martin E. Segal Theatre, the Repertorio Español or the New York Theatre Workshop, as well as others across the country.

He always devoted his time and energy which gradually failed him, to young authors. Many of us are indebted to him, as his translations could not only be read and seen in the US; they were also the gateway for translators from other countries to our work. I would say that without Marion, Catalan contemporary drama would not be as well known everywhere as it is now. And beyond that, on a more personal note, I will always remember his generosity, hospitality and wisdom, in a relationship that has lasted for these 15 years.

Sergi Belbel

Director and playwright. Director of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya from 2006 to 2013.

I met Marion through Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, a teacher and friend I miss (with pain, every day since he left us, first from Alzheimer’s and then from the damn pandemic), and therefore, I am grieving both partners. I also associate him (perhaps because I saw him twice in Manhattan and walked with him there) with New York City, where he lived, and this also makes me inevitably think of Mary Ann Newman. She also saw Marion every time he came to Barcelona, ​​a city he adored. The last few times, he had stayed to sleep in the huge flat that Papitu (Benet and Jornet) had in Balmes Street. He translated three of my works into English: Blood, Mobile, and Offside, the first and third published.

Blood premiered in Melbourne, Australia, and the other two were staged in New York. I immediately noticed that his translations were, in addition to being very respectful of the original, very beautiful and “sonorous” (an important aspect, in a theatrical translation), with a refined and cultured English. Marion was a character, what we used to call a “dandy,” a lyricist and a great lover of theatre (I think I also remember the opera). He translated great names of the modern Spanish theatre like Buero Vallejo and López Rubio, then , later, like the other great translator and specialist in Catalan theatre, his friend Shaorn Feldman, he ended up being a passionate and loyal follower and enthusiast of the theatre in the Catalan language.

Marion was an extremely learned, refined man with a great sense of humor. He never raised his voice and always had kind words for everyone. Sometimes he looked like an almost prototypical movie character from Woody Allen, a Manhattan “gentleman,” when he told you what he’d been seeing lately at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, or what Broadway musical you should have to go see, or what Public Theater play you couldn’t miss, or what Soho exhibition was worth visiting.

From the United States, along with the splendid Mary Ann Newman and Sharon Feldman, Marion followed very closely everything that premiered in contemporary Catalan theatre. The phenomenon of our spoken theatre in the Catalan language after the transition, with Josep Maria Benet i Jornet at the helm, and even the youngest authors who emerged in the 21st century, such as Guillem Clua, fascinated him and had him always on the lookout for new voices that were being added to a now lengthy list. Hopefully future crises do not cause it to languish, as this list is now full of strength and talent.

We must be very grateful to this great professor and intellectual from New York who was so passionate about Catalan theatre. Thanks to him, some of the “little” works of our culture and “small” language (I pay homage to Papitu) have been able to be seen and heard in the most powerful language in the world. Thanks, Marion, we’ll always be grateful!

Sharon G. Feldman

Academic, translator, and Professor of Catalan and Spanish Studies at the University of Richmond.

Marion Peter Holt was a man from the South (South Carolina, to be precise) who came to live on New York’s Upper West Side, a bit like Tennessee Williams, another Southerner who became a New Yorker. It seems to me that he never lost a certain special quality of Southern kindness, as well as a certain lovely feeling of surprise at living in the big city.

I met Marion at the beginning of my professional career, when my interest in Catalan theatre was just beginning. In an American academic context, in which dedicating oneself to Catalan studies was often considered an unthinkable proposal, Marion, with his decades of experience and professional weight, reached out to me, offering me his unconditional support. I will always be grateful for his generosity and ability to imagine the future. In 1997 we met at an academic symposium on “Spanish theatre” in the heart of Pennsylvania. I still remember the inaugural cocktail I attended with playwrights Carles Batlle and Josep M. Benet i Jornet, whom I had recently met in Barcelona.

And I also remember the feeling of satisfaction I felt when I whispered to Marion, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” and when I grabbed his arm and carried him to “Papitu.” The mutual appreciation between (also much missed) “Papitu” and Marion became very authentic and deep. They shared many loves: the theatre, New York, cats, Barcelona, ​​the Catalan language… In fact, in Benet’s house, the guest room was renamed “Marion’s room, ” a perhaps ironic or subconscious reference to his play The Child’s Room.

I had the honor of publishing a volume of four theatrical translations with Marion entitled Barcelona Plays (the title, wonderful, was very much his), which includes his beautiful translation of Salamandra, by Benet and Jornet. Shortly afterwards, Marion would prepare another volume entitled Two Plays, with two more works by Benet. And he continued to translate works by Àngels Aymar, Sergi Belbel, Guillem Clua, Lluïsa Cunillé. but he didn’t just translate the texts; he went on to successfully place them in some of the country’s leading regional theatres, from the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia to the San Diego Repertory.

Of his great legacy, I suppose one of the least known works in Catalonia would be his Magical Places: The Story of Spartanburg’s Theaters and Their Entertainments: 1900-1950 (2004), a beautiful book about the theatrical and cinematic life of the first half of the twentieth century in one of the places of his childhood: Spartanburg (South Carolina). It is a jewel that remains as a sample – among many – of his great refined sensitivity, his great intellectual vitality and his great love for the performing arts. 

Dr. Isaias Fanlo

Academic, cultural manager and Professor of modern and contemporary Iberian literature at the University of Cambridge.

Our perception of a city, of a neighborhood, of a street, is usually marked by the emotional imprint left by our personal experiences. For me, the Upper West Side of Nova York will always remain inevitably marked by the impression of Marion Peter Holt: a professional humanist, lover of Spanish and Catalan culture, and above all, a man of the theatre. His work as a translator of pieces by authors such as Sergi Belbel, Lluïsa Cunillé and Guillem Clua will never be sufficiently recognized.

Marion’s apartment, located on 71st Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenue, west of Central Park, is for me one of the intersections of Catalan culture in Manhattan — the other, no doubt, is the flat of another splendid Catalanist, Mary Ann Newman. I remember the first time I went to Marion’s house, almost a decade ago. I arrived after crossing Central Park on a cold March evening, pursued by a family of racoons. I knew Marion’s work as a translator, and I introduced myself as a pilgrim, with respect and admiration. Marion, however, was a generous and warm man, who appreciated visits and soon made you feel at home. I remember that night we went to dinner in the neighborhood, not far away because I already had back problems, and the conversation then lasted a few more hours, in the dining room of his house, with a bottle of wine. Marion was a man of profound wisdom, and to hear him talk about Buero Vallejo or Benet i Jornet and to feel the passion with which he did so was a real pleasure. I can say that there are not many intellectuals and academics capable of combining rigor and tenderness as Marion did, without imposture or hypocrisy.

That March night on the Upper West Side, I told Marion about my plan to resume my academic career, after eight years at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, and do my PhD in the United States. He was one of the first people to encourage me to make the leap, and he promised me that I would have him by my side, and that we would find ways to collaborate. Over the years, already based in Chicago, I returned to Marion and his translations on several occasions, both to conduct my research and when I coordinated a collaboration between the University of Chicago and the TNC. to make a dramatized reading of the work of Lluïsa Cunillé, Barcelona, ​​Map of Shadows. The translation of the play, needless to say, was masterful and by Marion, who generously donated it for the occasion.

The translator Marion has bequeathed us an important body of work, which has made it possible to spread Catalan theatre in the Anglo-Saxon sphere —I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that he is one of the agents responsible for the international boom in Catalan drama a decade ago.  For those of us who knew him, this legacy is accompanied by his bonhomie, a candid smile under his characteristic Hollywood gallant mustache, and a generous, restless look, always sparkling with curiosity. What a fortune to have met you, Marion. Thank you for these years, for your wisdom and support. It’s impossible not to remember you every time we step into the Upper West Side.

Josep Maria Miró

Playwright and stage director. Born Theater Award 2020.

Sometimes we start to love people for how they love our friends. Also for how they love what we love, such as our culture and language. The first time I heard Marion Peter Holt’s name was through “Papitu” [Josep Maria Benet i Jornet], from whom he had translated several works into English. We corresponded and he was interested in my theatre, but it wasn’t until 2017, on my first trip to New York, that I met him personally.

His house was the interior of a typical New York historic flat, full of objects—posters, plates, books—that showed his love for Catalonia and our culture. Spending the afternoon talking about theatre, translation and politics with someone who has almost a century of experience and the knowledge and friendship of names like Buero Vallejo or Benet i Jornet was a gift. I say almost a century and that is a guess because I’ve never known the age of Marion, a braggart, who hid his age, and maintained a certain aura of youthful flirtation. Papitu’s news of Alzheimer’s was a great shock to him. I understood and was deeply moved that, despite his advanced age, he always spoke of an imminent possibility of taking a plane and traveling to Barcelona to reunite with his friend and our city. It is the same sort of tenderness that causes Alvin Straight take the only means of transportation he has, an old, battered John Deere mower, to cross 500 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his brother Lyle, who is ill and whom he has not seen for ten years, in David Lynch’s The Straight Story.

I also have an admiration for translators, a work that is often discreet and silent but crucial to the visibility and internationalization of our theatre. Marion was so generous that, despite expressing a desire to translate for you, he recognized the happiness it caused him to know that your theatre was in good hands, even if they were those of another translator for whom he spared no praise. This past year we’ve written quite a bit. He was grateful for “the letters,” as he called the e-mails, and I was happy to send him new texts. His “letters” were genuine and sent texts were soon returned; problems with the elevator; his panic at the dentist and tooth implant; or his deep contempt for politics and recent attempts of Donald Trump to stay in power. I am saddened by the pain and loneliness of the pandemic. We are too unaware of how the elderly living alone have suffered.

Marion, I will miss you. Have a rest. Hopefully this last trip will take you wherever you want with your lawnmower.

European Stages, vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2021)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Alyssa Hanley, Assistant Managing Editor
Emma Loerick, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. Berliner Theatertreffen Fights to Survive as Live Theatre Adapts to World Conditions by Steve Earnest
2. Cultural Passport for Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival 2021 by Oana Cristea Grigorescu
3. We See the Bones Reflected: Luk Perceval’s 3STRS in Warsaw, 2021 by Chris Rzonca
4. Festival Grec 2021 by Maria Delgado and Anton Pujol
5. Report from London (November – December, 2019) by Dan Venning
6. A National Theatre Reopens by Marvin Carlson
7. In Memoriam: Mieczysław Janowski, 1935 – 2021 by Dominika Laster
8. In Memoriam: Jerzy Limon, 1950–2021 by Kathleen Cioffi
9. In Memoriam: Marion Peter Holt

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2021

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Steve Earnest

The theatre community in Iceland is most active during the cold winter months but Winter 2020 presented many challenges. Iceland’s thriving cultural and theatre scene was heavily affected by the COVID-19 virus as the National School of Theatre, the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, were all closed on February 27, 2020. This unprecedented action halted Iceland’s thriving theatre scene during its high season as theatre in Iceland tends to rise to its height during the “long dark hours of the winter nights.” The closing of the theatres was abrupt but several shows are included in this review. The timing was fortunate and several were able to be seen during February 2020 during my short teaching stint at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts. However, the damage to the theatre system and to Iceland’s thriving Spring tourism scene was devastating according to national reports. Tours to Icelandic cultural site were down a minimum of 50% according the representatives at Reykjavik Excursions, one of Iceland’s largest tour booking companies, with whom I spoke.

There were many changes in Icelandic Theatre since my last trip there in 2009. Artistic directors for both major theatres in Reykjavik had changed and many arts organizations had come and gone. However, Iceland’s strong commitment to arts funding had not changed so many of the major organizations had been able to survive. Those included the Icelandic National Theatre, Reykjavik City Theatre, The National Opera of Iceland, Iceland’s Dance Theatre, the National Theatre in Akureyri and many private theatre companies like Vesturport Theatre that are funded each year by the Icelandic Ministry of Culture. Funding for Icelandic Culture had remained in the one hundred million Euro range for many years and, prior to theatre shutdowns in March 2020 due to the COVID19, the outlook for the upcoming season had been nothing short of brilliant. However, as of May 2020, there was a spectre of doubt placed over the entire world and especially smaller nations like Iceland where mechanisms of defense against world pandemics are extremely limited.

Student fashion design project. Photo: Icelandic Academy of the Arts

Having been returned by the U.S. Department of State from a Fulbright in Nanjing, China in February, I had been able to secure a short-term guest teaching position at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts. The Academy had grown significantly since I last visited there as a guest teacher/researcher in 2009. With a new state of the art facility on the northeastern coast of the Reykjavik harbor, the Academy also boasted a new M.F.A. degree in Performance with a specialization in Devised Performance. The Academy regularly features faculty from across the globe with specialists in the area of physical theatre, devised theatre, musical theatre and other areas. Work at the Academy has also generally blended many fields of study – therefore the study of performance was very often blended with visual arts, costume design and other artistic fields. Images of this work are included. The work at the Academy was progressing at a very high level according to Dean Steinunn Knutsdottir and it was believed that the program had reached a strong new plateau of artistic success. However, funding for the Academy had typically been challenging throughout the early 21st Century, and strong international ties and exchange programs had been a source of financial relief for the school. The Icelandic Academy of the Arts is a critical component of the Icelandic Theatre system as it is the only world institution that teaches Icelandic language theatre. Admission to the Academy has always been difficult – less than 5% of all applicants are accepted but graduate placement in Icelandic theatre companies and film approaches 100% annually. The reason is simple; the Icelandic Academy of the Arts is the only acting school in the world that produces actors who speak Icelandic and are trained specifically to perform the works of the Icelandic stage. The Icelandic Academy includes numerous fields of art including Architecture, Fashion Design, Product Design, Visual Communication as well as programs in Acting, Film Production and many other areas of artistic inquiry. During the 2019 the Academy presented a series of performances including final MFA Thesis performances such as Svithslistadeild, directed by Brynhildur Kardensdottir as well as Icelandic Fashion Design projects such as those by the graduate students displayed in this article.

The Icelandic Ministry of Culture maintains a number of major priorities with regard to the type of works that are presented in the state funded Icelandic houses. Two of the primary objectives are that state theatres will present about 38% of their yearly works from Icelandic playwrights (statistic is from 2011 but still approximately the same in 2020) and that a strong portion of programming would be geared toward programming geared toward work for children and/or work involving children. International works of great importance and timeliness were also on the list so the few productions listed in this essay will easily attest to the goals of the Ministry. As was the case throughout Europe the Icelandic Theatre season was cut short therefore it was not possible to see many productions in March 2020. However, the tight knit nature of the Icelandic theatre community made it possible to learn a great deal about various aspects of the Icelandic Theatre scene; elements were discussed that included new appointments, strong performances of the year, scandals and other noteworthy happenings. Additionally, many new productions were cut short and/or cancelled due to the COVID virus.

The National Theatre of Iceland turned a major corner in late 2019 as it hired the extraordinary Icelandic Theatre producer Magnús Geir Þórðarson, formerly the Artistic Director of the Reykjavik City Theatre for many successful years before moving into a career as a television producer. Magnús Geir, as he is known, is among the most respected theatre figures in Iceland and has proven himself across the nation as an accomplished producer and director. Prior to his appointed to the Reykjavik City Theatre in 2004 he had been Artistic Director at Iceland’s only major theatre company outside of Reykjavik the State Theatre of Akureyri in northern Iceland. The few individuals with whom I was able to speak within the Icelandic Theatre community felt that the hiring of Magnús Geir as director of the National Theatre of Iceland would certainly lead to a virtual renaissance in the Icelandic theatre world. The repertoire at the National Theatre was severely limited by January 2020 but one production was notable.

The Great Dictator referenced the famous film in its performance style and was adapted for the stage and directed by Nikolaj Cederholm, a Danish theatre artist. The Great Dictator (Einræðisherrann) was based wholly on the Charlie Chaplin movie of 1935. Alternating between a black and white and color world, the highly stylized performance made strong references to the movement styles of Chaplin and included an onstage live band of musicians and musical numbers related to the musical and to the world of Chaplin’s life but also included references to other dictators like Hitler, Mussolini and finally (in the adaptor’s view) Trump. The movement and performance style were extremely stylized to include many gestures of Hitler, as well as video projections from both the actual movie but also accompanied by video from Hitler’s speeches as well as other crazy black and white scenes that included clips from the Three Stooges as well as clips from the Marx Brothers. The inclusion of onstage musicians and many rousing works of European nationalism (many German works) established the necessary outline for the political message of the work. The Great Dictator was a brilliant work of physical and visual theatre that framed the world discussion on dictatorship and rule by force.

Reykjavik City Theatre has remained in a position of prominence as far as productions with high popular appeal are concerned. Artistic Director Kristian Eyesteinsdottir has managed the company since 2015 and national funding for the theatre has remained in the 10 million Euro range annually. The house allows outside producing companies, such as Vesturport and the Icelandic Dance Theatre, to use the space for minimal or no cost. There are normally 9 to 12 shows in the repertory at any given time that include new Icelandic plays, devised physical works, dance performances and productions of international plays and musicals. Large scale musicals such as Billy Elliot and Mary Poppins had been produced in the latter years of the first decade of the 21st Century. Recent previous seasons have seen Shakespeare’s Richard III, McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, as well as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. The theatre complex is comprised of 3 theatre spaces – the large theatre (550 seats) the small theatre (350 seats) and the studio theatre (150 seats).

Halldora Geirharthsdottiir as the Mother in Bubbi Morthens and Olafur Egill Egilsson’s Nine Lives, directed by Egilsson with choreography by Lee Proud. Photo: Reykjavik City Theatre.

Nine Lives considered the career of the legendary Icelandic musician Bubbi Morthens, a pop musician from Iceland whose life and music are profiled in the musical. Having suffered from alcohol and drug addiction in addition to sexual abuse as a child, Morthens changed his life in the early 2000s and became an advocate for sobriety and the prevention of addiction and sexual abuse. Following the highly successful documentary about his life in 2004 entitled Blindsker, Morthens and writer/director Olafur Egill Egilsson created Nine Lives utilizing Morthens music as the score and his life as the story. The work was directed by Egilsson and choreographed by Lee Proud. Given the fact that Morthens was still living as of 2020, one of the highlights of the musical was the fact that he actually appeared onstage during the musical and especially near the musical’s end. The rousing medley of his playing and singing the many works included during the musical the work was presented in a quasi “rock concert style” that included a 6-piece rock band upstage and featured highly physical choreography that also included a great deal of gymnastic feats. The 10-year-old Morthens is central to the story as his younger life was central to the story. The settings alternated between his home and school life. Musical numbers also featured the factory in which his mom (played by Halldora Geirharthsdotir) that engaged in the skinning and preparation of fish, a huge industry in Iceland. The musical and dance scenes also featured the incredible technical capabilities of the large stage that include automated scenery, moving lights and the ability to rotate the audience’s actual location in a circular pattern.

Bubbi Morthens and Olafur Egill Egilsson’s Nine Lives, directed by Egilsson with choreography by Lee Proud. Photo: Reykjavik City Theatre.

Utilizing these tremendous capabilities, the musical evolved into numerous spectacular scenes in the second act. Apparently, there was an incident in Morthen’s life that prompted him to work on a Viking movie and there were scenes that detailed that unsuccessful period of time as well as various scenes that took the audience through Morthen’s world of alcoholics anonymous, mental health evaluations and other life issues. The entire work was performed in an entirely Brechtian fashion as characters took care of all the scenic changes while video sequences of Morthens childhood and later life occupied the large projection screens involved in the production. Eventually the work involved into a television show type atmosphere to acknowledge the fact that Morthen’s work was eventually presented on Icelandic television and even into the world of movies.

Maria Reyndal’s Er Eg Mamma Min? Directed by Egill Igibergsson. Reykjavik City Theatre.

Er Eg Mamma Min (Am I My Own Mother?) demonstrated a primary aspect of the theatre’s mission as it presented the work of contemporary Icelandic playwright Maria Reyndal. The work was directed by Egill Igibergsson and was presented in the small stage of RCT. The work alternated between a realistic world that consisted of a mother, father and their daughter and included other ancillary figures such as a grandmother and a few friends. The performance style alternated between realism and direct address to the audience in the style of a television program with a live audience. The characters would shift from their realistic world into a dialogue with the recognized “on set” audience. Many issues were discussed including several ideas about the role of the patriarchy in the family and ideas that would elevate the hierarchy of the mother (Mamma) and grandmother (Ella) above that of the father (Pabbi). The presence of the grandmother created a growing tension throughout the play and began to also involve the minor role of the son (Matthias). As a family drama there were many jokes and physical lazzi that dealt with the behavior of older family members. For example, at one point Paddi moved to Mamma to attempt to kiss her and she moved away at the last moment. The timing and articulation of this moment resonated greatly with the audience on the night that I saw the production. The production was an excellent example of contemporary new Icelandic realistic drama.

Pinocchio, directed by Agusta Skuladottir. Photo: Reykjavik City Theatre.

Pinocchio further demonstrated the theatre’s commitment to performances that are geared toward and also feature younger actors and themes. Directed by Agusta Skuladottir , this version of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story included a cast of actors and musicians who presented this short (45 minute) version of the famous story of Gepetto and his puppet “son” who is created from his marionette shop. Unable to escape his father’s wishes for financial gain, Pinocchio’s deeds lead to the classic nose growth that made for great hilarity in the performance. While adults in the audience may have sneered and ignored the ideas of lying and the growing of the nose, the children in the audience were amazed and genuinely laughed at the incompetence of the justification for Pinocchio’s lies. It was a hilarious display of the theatre’s ability to produce non-human characters; the major characters encountered by Pinocchio included the Fox, a talking cricket, a scheming cat and a blue haired fairy that finally helped Pinocchio reach his personal goal. The incredible costuming and puppetry (Cricket) underscored the theatre’s ability to include multiple theatrical elements into their overall outlay of dramatic work. The youth acting company in conjunction with numerous on-stage musicians made this short production a strong highlight of the theatre season.

Winter theatre in Iceland 2020 was a very limited, yet highly indicative repertoire that accurately reflected the basic outline of the types of work that are produced in Iceland. It is inspiring that the mission of the state theatre companies includes the advancement of new Icelandic plays in every season as well as works by and for young people. Additionally, the theatre community of Iceland has seen fit to engage incredible individuals in key positions that advance the country’s strong artistic community. Considering the overall health of the world theatre community it seemed that the Icelandic Theatre system would move into the summer and fall seasons with a great deal of success.

Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University, having received a PhD in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, Florida. Dr. Earnest has published articles, reviews and interviews in Theatre Journal, Western European Stages, Backstage West, Ecumenica, The Journal of Beckett Studies, Theatre Symposium, New Theatre Quarterly, and Theatre Studies, among others. In 1999 he published a book entitled The State Acting Academy of East Berlin and is currently working on projects dealing with the theatre system of Iceland.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Tony Haouam

2020 would decidedly be a year unlike any other. Long before the first mention of the novel coronavirus, the theme of this year’s Avignon Festival was—almost prophetically—Eros and Thanatos, the gods of desire and of death. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, had other plans: in the end, the Festival was simply canceled. As those who have attended the Festival in Avignon in July know, it is impossible to maintain social distance in the bustling streets of the city’s center, itself held tight by 14^th century ramparts that enclose it. Within both the maze of small medieval streets and across 19^th century avenues, actors distributing fliers for their productions in the “Off Festival” normally mix with crowds of amused onlookers, hurrying off to pack into the Court of Honor in the Papal Palace, a 2,000-seat venue. The virus, then, succeeded in killing the Festival: nonetheless, the desire to survive is so strong—so transforming—that the Festival metamorphosed into “A Week of Art,” a change in name in homage to Jean Vilar and the very first theatre event held in Avignon in September 1947. Maintaining this program is an “act of resistance,” as the Festival director Olivier Py explains, but it is an act that comes at a price: the financial loss is estimated at 130 million euros, and of the 45 performances programmed for the summer, only seven were able to be retained for this autumnal week of art, unique in its genre. From reimagined Noh theatre and experimental flamenco to a rewriting of the Orpheus myth accompanied by Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the performances of the Week of Art affirm a desire to live and to be reborn despite the death that surrounds us—a desire very appropriate for our current moment—and perhaps a reason that music occupies a significant place in most of the performed works, as if to compensate for the ineffectiveness of language to name the crisis that humanity is currently traversing.

It is, thus, a very strange opening ceremony that takes place Friday, October 23: the streets of Avignon are deserted, the sky is overcast, the temperature low, only a few people occupy the restaurant terraces, watched over by concerned owners. It is worth noting that nearly half of the inhabitants of Avignon support themselves through the tourism industry; for them, 2020 is a dark year. And moreover, on the eve of the opening of the Week of Art, President Emmanuel Macron announced a nationwide curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., which forced the Festival organizers to reprogram all of the performances for three hours earlier in the day, in order to allow spectators the time they need to return home after the shows. All of these setbacks, however, only demonstrate the theatre’s capacity to survive despite public health and political constraints. Maurice Jarre’s trumpets sounded, as usual, before each performance, but were accompanied by a message reminding spectators of the public health measures in place: obligatory masks for the duration of the performance and an empty chair between each spectator. Fortunately, these did not prevent the works from transporting spectators both very far—to Spain, Japan, or further still, Africa—and very near—to examine our current preoccupations, in order to better exorcise them.

The play featured in the opening ceremonies, without a doubt the most audacious work of the Festival, is a loose adaptation of the Orpheus myth, entitled The Game of Shadows, directed beautifully by Jean Bellorini in collaboration with Thierry Thieû Niang. Valère Novarina, who rarely accepts to write commissioned work, created the text especially for the Week of Art. The Game of Shadows was originally meant to be presented in the Honor Court, but due to Covid-19, the performance took place at La FabricA. Bellorini,  by constructing a work in which Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) resonates with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, aims to respond to the following question: why does Orpheus, the son of Apollo, who was capable of convincing the guardians of Hell to let him rescue his wife Eurydice from their realm, turn around even though he knows that this means losing her forever? If Orpheus turns around, it is because he takes the risk of living fully, passionately, rather than in a prudent or “sanitized” manner: instead of “under-living,” Orpheus prefers to “over-live,” explains the director. (press conference).

The Game of Shadows, by Valène Novarina, directed by Jean Bellorini. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

For the duration of the 2 hour and 15 minutes, Novarina’s language is deafening, sometimes incomprehensible for being cumulative, verbose, elevated, and full of paronomasia (“I will trace with a compass the invisible limit between being born [naître] and not being (born) [naître/n’être pas],” says Orpheus, played by François Deblock), almost as if it were a foreign language. Some audience members even allowed themselves to check their phones during long sections of dialogue. But this language, thanks to its neologisms and dramatic intensity, transforms the actors into terrestrial creatures situated between the dead and the living, a place where each word is pronounced like a last breath, a final expiration. The nine actors wander about the stage, which gradually transforms into a liminal space, a space between Earth and Hades, where one desperately seeks to speak in order to avoid the workings of death. Words are revealed to be, at the same time, useless and vital, as the conflict is in the language and “death has nothing to say” because “it is worthless.”  The best section of the text remains the very long enumeration of different conceptions of god—according to Gainsbourg, Nietzche, Artaud, Lacan, Darwin, John Lennon, Marie Curie, or still the Qur’an, and so on—recited with impressive energy by actor Marc Plas, who sent the audience into fits of laughter several times.

The staging and costumes by Macha Makeïeff make The Game of Shadows truly splendid. Framed on an empty stage there are, stage right, the nine actors—Eurydice in her wedding gown and Orpheus in a costume drawn on his body, a kind of skeleton—stage left, there are seven musicians and two singers (Ulrich Verdoni et Aliénor Feix), whose stupendous voices punctuate the dialogue with music from Monteverdi’s marvelous opera. The scenography is marked by visions alternately baroque and surrealist. Dilapidated, hollowed out pianos, travel the length of the stage, lit by red ghost lights, from behind which characters appear or disappear, until fiery footlights light the stage and then turn out to illuminate the audience. While Aliénor Feix sings, text is projected onto a red-toned backdrop: “My wish for tomorrow is that it will have happened”—a veritable incantation for the desire to live to transcend a universe haunted by death.

The Game of Shadows, by Valène Novarina, directed by Jean Bellorini. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

Rebirth through the word is also the driving force in Traces. A Speech to African Nations. This mise-en-scène is much more stripped down: the Burkinabe actor and director Étienne Minoungou stands alone, behind a podium, and directly addresses the audience with a playful tone and smiling eyes. Dressed in a black pagne, he is accompanied on his right by the musician Simon Winse, who plays the musical bow or the Peule flute. Minoungou performs, with much humor, a text written by Senegalese author-scholar Felwine Sarr, periodically calling out to spectators, encouraging reactions from the audience. If Novarina’s language is mysterious and hazy, language is above all a question of power and politics in Traces: “I have won the right to Speak. It was denied to me for ages. (…) I must speak to you, you, my fellows, because only the word remains.” For nearly an hour, Minoungou recounts the course of his life after leaving Africa, before returning to bring a message of hope. It is a matter, for the actor, of reconfiguring the imaginary associated with Africa, by retracing another political and philosophical history of the continent—from its pre-colonial period to the fatal migratory crossings of the Mediterranean today. Multiple conceptions of “Africanness” are evoked, and then questioned, one after the other: Négritude, Afro-pessimism, Afropolitanism, decolonization, Pan-Africanism, universalism, Afrofuturism. Blame circulates, as well, falling on either Western colonizers, fratricidal wars among African nations, the corruption that underpins capitalism, or still, predacious multinational corporations. The registers shift constantly during the play: when Winse begins playing the Peule flute with intensity, the actor’s rhythm accelerates—becoming more tragic, notably when evoking the deaths of Africans during the period of the slave trade—only later to  break out into laughter again, asking the spectators, “Are we crazy?”—to which the audience, applauding energetically, responds chorally, “No!”

Traces: A Speech to African Nations, by Felwine Sarr, directed by Étienne Minoungou. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

Throughout his performance at the Lambert Collection, the storyteller addresses his “brothers,” implicitly encouraging the whole of his Avignon audience, the majority of which was white the day I attended, to put themselves in the position of the Africans to whom Minoungou was speaking. It is this ambiguity between the imagined and the real audience that lends Minoungou’s performance such force. Insisting on Africa’s role as the mother of humanity, the actor implicitly invites us, regardless of our racial identities, to identify with our African “brothers.” He, furthermore, underlines the importance of “naming our world anew” by emptying it of dehumanizing terms (like “underdeveloped”), all while maintaining the memory of our slave or migrant brothers, in order to imagine together a universe filled with “traces” of life—that is of laughter, of the desire for freedom, of vibrations. These traces alone can allow our own re-humanization. If the language of the past created violence, then a new language, as well as the transmission of history to our younger generations, will deliver us from it. “We must remember,” explained Minoungou, “to rise up against enslavement.” Despite the sometimes difficult, but true, picture of human history—slavery, genocide, armed conflicts, venality—Minoungou succeeds at cleverly juxtaposing death and hope, sorrow and laughter, thanks to a rich performance, grounded in the body, as well as to a powerful musical prosody that led a large portion of the audience to rise to their feet in applause at the end of his performance.

Traces: A Speech to African Nations, by Felwine Sarr, directed by Étienne Minoungou. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

Another performance earned the most enthusiastic standing ovation of the Week of Art: Melizzo Doble, or “Twin double,” which staged a fantastic and wild duo, the danser Israel Galván and the singer Niño de Elche (the duo which had already collaborated on Fiesta during the 217 Avignon Festival). Programming a flamenco performance for this Week of Art is particularly appropriate: this musical genre and this dance form, born within marginalized communities in Andalusia and highly anti-establishment, are haunted by the literary topoi of death and of loved ones—even the state of desiring someone to the point of agony. In Melizzo Doble, the Adalusian duo reimagines some of the flamenco genres (martinetes, seguiriyas, pregones, bulerías, tangos, farrucas, caña) and turns to traditional flamenco topoi—such as litany, social oppression, imprisonment, unrequited love, and toponymic references to the south of Spain.

Melizzo Dole, by Israel Galván (dancer) and Niño de Elche (singer). Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

In the theatre “Benoît XII,” spectators wait impatiently in front of a nearly empty stage—occupied only by a metallic disk, a felt square, a wooden pedestal, and a chair—until Niño de Elche, dressed entirely in black, sings the first note, plaintive and harrowing, unleashing immediately the zapateado (the striking of the ground) of Galván’s white boots. The dancer, for his part, is dressed in black overalls like that of coal miners. The audience, however, was startled by the lack of supertitling for this performance done entirely in Spanish, but they quickly ended up being captivated by the intensity of de Elche’s singing, his way of playing with traditional flamenco songs’ format by deconstructing them, ad-libbing at times, and by punctuating some singing parts with rumbling sounds and onomatopoeias. Next to him — or rather, around him — Galván follows the rhythm of the song in perfect sync with hypnotizing dance moves and palmas (hand-clapping), hitting all the objects on stage, including his own body and Niño de Elche’s back. With a mischievous smile on his face, Galván ceaselessly looks at the audience, while combining flamenco dance steps with voguing and slapstick body movements. The chemistry between the two artists is staggering, to the point where we don’t know who, between the singer and the dancer, leads the dynamic rhythm of the performance. Together, they pave a new way for experimental flamenco.

For an hour and a half, the two artists perform a series of songs (palos) with surrealist-sounding titles: Fandango cubista, Seguiriyas carbónicas, Sevillanas sentadas… But thirty minutes before the end, the lights shut down completely and both actors go silent. Then, very slowly, two spotlights are switched on: one lights up Niño de Elche’s face while the other illuminates Galván’s boots striking frantically on the metallic disk. He dances on it so hard that it turns into dust, creating on stage a grey smoke, symbolizing the ashes of the loved one for whom Niño de Elche sings a mournful incantation. Galván throws himself on the ground, onto the metallic ashes ; the sound of the gravel accompanies the singer’s cry. In the room, the tension reaches its acme. It is, by far, the most beautiful scene I have witnessed during the Week of Art.

Melizzo Doble, by Israel Galván (dancer) and Niño de Elche (singer). Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

Yet again, after death life is reborn, as though the energy of the two artists had managed to defy agony. Thanks to the fantastic work of lighting director Benito Jiménez, the lights come back up, fully bright and red, illuminating the duo who appear even stronger and goofier, playfully smiling at each other. The “fraternal twins,” as they like to call each other during interviews, seem happier than ever to have found each other again, before chanting La Malena, the last song of the show, concluding their performance with a powerful and heartfelt: “Olé!” According to Galván and de Elche, this performance is like “an apartment shared by two roommates;” to us the audience, it felt like a vigorous love declaration to the universal and transforming power of music and dance. As one French spectator told me at the end of the show: “I don’t speak Spanish, but I feel like I understood everything.”

The Damask Drum is another performance that relies on a tight collaboration between two artists. Actress and dancer Kaori Ito and actor Yoshi Oïda stage Yukio Mishima’s adaptation of “Aya no Tsuzumi,” a 15th century traditional Noh play. Originally, the plot is simple: an old man falls in love with a young woman, who gives him a damask drum and tells him: “If you manage to sound the drum, I will be yours.” But in The Damask Drum, our two actors offer a modern interpretation of this Noh story where amorous feelings are replaced with a more ambiguous form of desire, situated outside the realm of sexuality.

The Damask Drum, adapted by Yukio Mishima, directed by Kaori Ito and Yoshi Oïda. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

The pink damask drum, shaped like an hourglass, is on a small wooden stool at the forefront of the set, next to a shadeless lamp that is turned on. Stage left, there is a desk, a chair, and a mirror that look like an actor’s dressing room. Stage right, we can see a multitude of mainly Japanese traditional instruments — Nô-kan bamboo flutes from Noh and Shinobué theatre, taïko and shimé-daïko drums, a také-marimba bamboo xylophone, as well as a South-American quéna flute. All of these instruments will be played by musician Makoto Yabuki throughout the performance. Oïda suddenly appears on stage, wearing a beige trench-coat and carrying a water bucket, and starts mopping the floor of what seems to be a theatre decor. While mopping, he plaintively recites, almost as though he were in agonizing pain, a verse written by Jean-Claude Carrière for the play: “Suffering, birth, life” [Souffrance, naissance, la vie]. Then, Ito arrives on stage, all dressed in dark pink, with a T-shirt and yoga pants; she puts a beautiful light-pink kimono on the back of her chair while she’s getting ready for a dance performance, framing The Damask Drum as a dance rehearsal replete with meta-theatre elements that shed a modern light upon the 15th century Noh story.

Ito is warming up by executing some dance moves, under the cleaning man’s amused yet envious eyes. Why does he gaze at her so intensely? What is this desire that we can read in his eyes? The dancer looks back at him, bursts into laughter, and then invites him to come join her; he refuses, he is too old, but she insists anyway. The cleaning man accepts and what follows is a very heartwarming choreography scene where the old man, whose physicality is slightly clumsy yet touching, tries to follow the lead of the dancer’s cadenced and flowing dance rhythm. Their shadows are poetically reflected on the back wall of the Chapel of White Penitents, covered for the occasion with a large white silk cloth. This intergenerational dance is so moving — the audience looked smitten and even gasped at times — that it gives the impression that it is still possible to dance, even at the winter of our lives (Yoshi Oïda is 87 years old!) if we still feel the driving force of desire.

While the old man exits the stage, frustrated to not have been able to strike the damask drum, he says to the dancer: “You have been making a fool out of me. You are cruel.” The dancer ignores him, focused on the Rambyoshi — a traditional “madness dance” that Ito learned from a Noh master — that she is about to perform. The choreography, which consists of a lot of grounded body movements, is impressive, as the dancer gracefully moves around the damask drum. Each one of her dance moves perfectly mirrors the music played by Yabuki. We will never know if the damask drum will ever sound one day: but it works as a poetic metaphor for troubled desire, for a promise of something that might never happen but still drives us to fight against the ineluctability of time. “Suffering, you dance, I live” [Souffrance, tu danses, je vis], happily concludes the cleaning man to the dancer — a nice echo to Mellizo Doble but also to the hope that Minoungou expresses towards African youths.

The Damask Drum, adapted by Yukio Mishima, directed by Kaori Ito and Yoshi Oïda. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

During a roundtable after her performance, actress Ito insists that she wanted to shy away from the traditional image of Japan and avoid portraying a caricature of the passive Japanese women. For that, the result is successful, but the overall impression left by this one-hour and fifteen minute long performance is a feeling of incompletion and haziness. Some elements of the play are unclear — for instance, why does the cleaning man reappear wearing a white scrub covered with blood ten minutes before the end? A very eager high-schooler asked actor Oïda about this, but his response remained evasive: “You are the one who does the interpreting, not me!”

On Wednesday October 27th, even though there are still 4 days of plays left, President Macron announces a nationwide lockdown starting the next day at midnight. Then, we find out that the adaptation of Moby Dick, directed by Norwegian puppeteer Yngvild Aspeli, is cancelled because one of the actors has been tested positive for covid-19. The end of the world is approaching, and there is only one performance left to see before another confinement: Endless Andromaque, an adaptation of Racine’s play directed by Gwenaël Morin, with the help of Barbara Juig as his artistic partner. For this play, Morin asked the three young actors from “Ier acte”—a theatre program that gathers actors from minority groups and low-income families—to learn, by heart, the entirety of Andromaque, that is, 1,648 Alexandrines. Each day, the actors switch roles and play a different character: it is a Herculean task, with endless possibilities, that they perform under Juig’s attentive eye, who plays the role of a conductor who strikes a drum between each scene, and sometimes serves as the prompter for the young actors. The story of Andromaque — one of the most performed plays in France — is simple : “Oreste loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromaque, who loves her son Astyanax and her husband Hector who died.” A structure of unrequited and hopeless desire chain that drowns all of the characters far into despair.

Since Endless Andromaque is a wandering performance that aims at inclusivity, its venues change every day, each time in a little village in the outskirts of Avignon. Today, the play is performed at the Sorgues cultural center. Once we enter the room, we are given the entirety of Racine’s play (slightly rewritten and rearranged) on a yellow newsprint. The room is quite small, there are two groups of chairs on each side, and the stage is in the middle, composed with only four chairs and a drum: the theatrical set-up reminds us of an agora. The decoration on the walls is quite sparse: there’s a master painting printed on paper representing a Trojan horse, a map of Ancient Greece drawn with a marker, and the allocation of the play’s roles. The atmosphere in the room is certainly nervous, most of us know that this is probably the last play we are going to see for a while.

Endless Andromaque, by Racine, directed by Gwenaël Morin. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

From the first drum blow, the actors, all wearing jeans and sneakers, recite the Alexandrines so fast that it is impossible to understand everything: the audience members have to frequently read their text-newspapers to follow the plot.  The actors don’t play much with the stage space, even if they sometimes walk around the audience to get on a chair and point to the map of Epirus that is hung on the wall. Admittedly, the acting is impressive regarding the emotional embodiment — a special mention to Emika Maruta, who delivered a breathtaking performance of Andromaque and Oreste. But despite some moments of grace, Endless Andromaque was arguably the least successful play of the Week of Art. Almost a quarter of the audience members left the room before the end of the play, probably perturbed by the actors’ overly expeditive prosody. Director Morin justifies his formal choices by explaining that he wanted to question hegemonic forms of culture, and the role they play, by transforming them endlessly and putting them in contact with the immediacy of the present. “We must accept to not understand Racine” says the director.

In many ways, this Week of Art felt like an intimate event: very few people in France even knew that there was still a theatre event happening in Avignon this year despite the pandemic. The limited number of tickets available made it easy to run into someone that we had come across the day before, while waiting in line to get in. And if we pay attention to the spectators’ ways of speaking, we realize that the audience’s demographic has changed: we barely can hear any Parisian accent or foreign languages. Most of the audience members seem to be retired people from the South of France or students from the city’s neighbouring high schools. Avignon feels like a village now, just like in 1947. Sure, the masks remind us that it’s 2020 and that we live with a pandemic; yet, as everyone hurryingly leaves Avignon, it is now with an even stronger desire to get over the deadly virus in order to be able to finally live again.

Tony Haouam is a joint PhD candidate at NYU’s Institute of French Studies and Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture. His research focuses on the intersection of race, humor, and emotions in contemporary France. His dissertation, “Laughing at Color Blindness: Race, Performance, and Affect in the French Comedy Scene,” examines stand-up comedians’ aesthetic work in order to get at the subtlety of the corporeal, sound, performative, and rhetorical modes through which race and racialization operate and are interpreted in ‘colorblind’ France. He is currently at the École Normale Supérieure d’Ulm as a pensionnaire étranger, conducting ethnographic research on controversial comedians and their public.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Ksenija Radulović

Just before the Covid 19 pandemic, the biggest cultural event of the season (even more – of the entire decade) in Serbia was The Cleaner, a retrospective exhibition by Marina Abramović. The exhibition was held in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade from 12 September 2019 to 20 January 2020. Before that the exhibition was staged in several European countries, with Belgrade being the last stop of the tour. There were several reasons for the enormous interest and debates in the public sphere that this exhibition sparked in Serbia.

First of all, Marina Abramović was born and spent her formative years in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, which was also the capital of former Yugoslavia during the socialist era. She moved from there to the Netherlands (1976), and then to New York (2005), having built an incredible international career in performance art. The Cleaner was her first individual retrospective exhibition in her hometown after she had left it, over 40 years earlier. In the meantime, she had only performed in Belgrade within the framework of collective exhibitions or festivals. Her earlier statements about being sorry that her own country had not accepted her as an artist or that she did not have a place on the Belgrade cultural scene also contributed to the great emotional charge of the exhibition.

Abramović started her brilliant career in Belgrade and the key art pieces in the early phase of her work were connected with a legendary location in the local cultural life of the 1970s – the Students’ Cultural Centre. There, along with a group of young conceptual artists, she performed her works.

Marina Abramovic, The Cleaner, exhibition. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Widewalls.

Belgrade curator Dejan Sretenović says that ‟after she and Ulay went to Amsterdam in 1976, Abramović worked on the international scene, alienating herself from the Yugoslav art scene and disappearing from the radar of local cultural institutions.” He adds that some time later, during the 1990s and the wars in former Yugoslavia, organising an exhibition by Abramović seemed unthinkable. Following this period, there were great political changes in Serbia: the regime of Slobodan Milošević fell in 2000, and democratic forces came into power (the first prime minister in 2000 was Zoran Đinđić from the Democratic Party, assassinated in 2003). There came a parallel shift in cultural policies as well. The new management of the Museum of Contemporary Art tried to organise an individual exhibition by Marina Abramović during the first decade of the 20^th century, but to no success. First, the attempt to make the exhibition a partnership project of several European co-producers, one of which was supposed to be the Belgrade museum, failed. Then the Belgrade Museum tried to organize an exhibition on its own, in its own premises. According to public statements of the members of the team who worked on this project, the exhibition required enormous funding which exceeded the financial capabilities of the Museum and Abramović herself was unprepared to make concessions or decrease the amount of funding necessary to stage the exhibition.

In 2011, the artist received an invitation from the Serbian Ministry of Culture to represent Serbia at the Venice Biennale. According to written sources (texts and books in Serbian dedicated to the person and work of Abramović), she rejected the invitation in the end. Instead she decided to represent Montenegro, one of the former Yugoslav republics in the Biennale that year. Her performance at the Montenegrin pavilion in Venice was part of a project with a wider scope: the Montenegrin government had arranged for her to create a multimedia centre which would bear her name and be led by her in Cetinje (a town in Montenegro), in a former socialist refrigerator factory. In 2010, Abramović was awarded Montenegrin citizenship, and in 2012 she was awarded the most prestigious award given by the state of Montenegro (the 13th of July Award). On this occasion the artist emphasized that her family was originally of Montenegrin descent saying that this award was the most important one in her entire life. (It has to be noted that Serbia and Montenegro are neighbouring countries with close ties, with many Serbian citizens originally coming from Montenegro.) This ambitious project subsequently failed and during the recent opening of her Belgrade retrospective exhibition  Abramović spoke about some of the unpleasant experiences she had during her efforts to open an art centre in Montenegro, stating, among other things, that it was all ‟very complicated.”

Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (1997), from The Cleaner exhibition. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Bojana Janjic.

In 2012 once again great political changes took place in Serbia. The Post-Milošević forces (primarily the Democratic Party) lost the elections and Milošević’s political partners from the 1990s came to power again. The Cleaner exhibition was realized on the basis of a personal invitation and engagement of the current Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić and as a state and art project at once. The negotiations pertaining to hosting Abramović’s exhibition lasted for several months in 2017 and ended in November that year with a visit by the Prime Minister and the then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade to Oslo for the opening of The Cleaner there.

The costs of the exhibition were high for Serbian standards, which was also a topic of discussion in the general public – given the relatively modest funds that Serbia earmarks for culture annually. The figure generally mentioned in public as The Cleaner’s budget was 1.5 million euros. Yet, according to an official statement it was actually 1.3 million and it was partly funded by the state, and partly by sponsors and donations. A VIP pre-opening night event was also organized, attended by some state officials.

The Cleaner was actually the first European retrospective exhibition by Abramović and its title alluded to performance art as a process of cleaning up the past and our consciousness. The exhibition was produced by Moderna Museet of Stockholm, in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humelbæk), and Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn). It was curated by Lena Essling (Moderna Museet), with Tine Colstrup (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) and Susanne Kleine (Bundeskunsthalle). After Sweden (2017), it went to Norway, Denmark, Italy, and Poland.

Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present. Photo: Marie Abromovic.

In Belgrade the exhibition was organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art and its local curator was Dejan Sretenović, who partially adapted some of its parts to the Belgrade context. It has to be noted that The Cleaner came to Belgrade as a ‟finished product,” i.e. there was an initial core group of works in which, to a certain extent, local curators could intervene.  The exhibition took up the entire interior of the Museum of Contemporary Art, on five levels. It covered all phases of Abramović’s work chronologically from the 1960s to present day, containing over 120 works: paintings, drawings, objects, photographs, audio and video pieces, films, scenography, and archives. The works also included some legendary performances, such as Rhythms (1973-7), Balkan Baroque (1997), The Artist Is Present (2010) … Live segments were an important part of the exhibition too – remakes of Abramović’s historic performances (both solo and with Ulay), which were performed by local and foreign “re-performers” during the entire run of the exhibition. In addition to this, Abramović also had a public lecture in the park in front of the Museum, attended by around 5,000 people, speaking about her life and work. At one moment she invited members of the audience to stand up, close their eyes, put their palm on the shoulder of the person next to them – and thus share unconditional love. Many found this reminiscent of a ‟guru,” and she remarked that ‟no performing artist has ever performed for a crowd this size, at least to my knowledge,, and added ‟this is the biggest event in my life.”

As expected, The Cleaner caused enormous interest both in the media and with audiences. With the exception of some (essentially insignificant) opinions, questioning the status of performance art per se, and thus the work of Abramović, this great event confirmed the artist’s exceptional importance. Almost all relevant figures on the Serbian cultural scene pointed to Abramović’s exceptional status in the sphere of performance arts on a global level. In the accompanying material for the exhibition, it was noted, among other things, that she is the only one of the generation of radical performance artists from the 1970s still active today.

The curator of Belgrade’s version of The Cleaner, Sretenović, put an emphasis on a fact that had hitherto gone unmentioned: over the past decades Abramović has done all kinds of performance arts, another thing that makes her unique, constantly pushing the boundaries and outreach of her art. ‟Just look at all the genres or types of performance art that she has tried her hand in so far: body art, duet performance, endurance art, spiritual performance, autobiographical performance, participatory performance art, performance-installation, object mediated performance art, site specific performance art, performance art with animals, re-performance art, community performance art, etc.”

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10. Photo: Kooness.

Curator Slavko Timotijević noted that Marina’s key contribution was introducing/establishing performance art as mainstream, ‟regardless of its controversial perception in the general public.” As for the exhibition itself, he expressed a certain doubt that ‟the use of digital technologies and screens somewhat clouds its essence.”

In turn, the art historian and university professor Branislav Dimitrijević expressed his pleasure that his students would be able to see re-performances of Abramović’s historic performances, pointing out that he had already included the key phases/segments of the artist’s career into his syllabus.

Many art historians and theoreticians put special emphasis on the importance of Abramović’s Belgrade phase for the rest of her career. It was pointed out that her performances, especially those in the 1970s, were authentic and uncompromising. The renowned painter Uroš Đurić had earlier noted that Abramović played an important role in the market sphere – she put performance arts on the art market and was the first performance artist to make significant amounts of money.

Marina Abramovic, The Cleaner, exhibition. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Bojana Janjic.

When the exhibition was first announced, some figures on the cultural scene expressed their regret that Belgrade would get The Cleaner as a ‟finished product” rather than the exhibition be both initiated and created by Belgrade curators, all the more so because they would be the most familiar with Abramović’s early phase. Art theoretician Stevan Vuković saw this as ‟a great defeat for the Serbian scene, the scene where the artist came from,” and also as a ‟self-colonising gesture, where the Belgrade Contemporary Art Museum was put in the position of an institution which merely hosts a travelling blockbuster exhibition whose initial conceptualisation its curators played no part in.” According to him this meant that we are ‟a cultural backwater where you merely market finished products, not a partner in a dialogue from which art projects spring.” Vuković was not alone in his opinion – similar observations were heard from other theoreticians and curators too.

In spite of the general consensus that it was of undeniable importance for Belgrade to have the exhibition, there was also a debate around the special, “state-produced” character of this cultural event. Some voices on the cultural scene were of the opinion that the government used the exhibition for political marketing and for creating its own ‟symbolic capital.” The issues of participation, if not domination, of politicians in the sphere of cultural politics was raised (connected to the Prime Minister’s personal engagement) and of the role of Belgrade Museum as being ‟merely” organisational, with no key initiative or creative aspects.

A special topic of discussion was the current status of Abramović as a contemporary celebrity with a certain accompanying glamour and the latest phase of her work. Branislav Dimitrijević, one of the true connoisseurs of her earlier, legendary performances, has been very critical in recent years, speaking of the entertainment industry aspects of her art and ‟spectacles for the Hollywood jet set,” as choreographer Yvonne Rainer wrote following Abramović’s ‟Museum Canonisation” in New York’s MOMA (The Artist is Present, 2010). Similarly, Dimitrijević wondered how it was that a radical representative of contemporary art started to care so much for state accolades and ceremonial status in general, such those she enjoyed in Montenegro. However, Dimitrijević and Sretenović both hold that, unlike her ‟Montenegrin episode,” Abramović was more careful this time – her personal participation in the Belgrade version of The Cleaner did not cross the boundaries of art. Sretenović believes that a contributing factor was her reputation as an artist of international recognition who can set certain conditions and, at the same time, ‟request state guarantees” for such a large and expensive project. In other words, he is of the opinion that the political marketing of The Cleaner was cut to a reasonable size.

Marina Abramovic, The Cleaner, exhibition. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Bojana Janjic.

‟The ambivalent relationship” between Abramović and Serbia was also a topic of interest. This was partially caused by her expressing regret that she had waited so long to have an individual exhibition in her own hometown and her dissatisfaction in principle with her status in and relationship with the environment she was born in. Especially interesting were also interviews and statements by some of Abramović’s previously close associates from her Belgrade phase. Dunja Blažević was among them, having been the director of Students’ Cultural Centre in the 1970s and the editor of its visual arts programme, as well as the person who ‟found room” for the then young artists. In her interview for Radio Free Europe, when asked if Abramović was commercialising her relationship with Yugoslavia, Blažević answered that ‟nothing that she (Abramović) said is true, that she had to paint flowers to sell her paintings; that she had to leave (Yugoslavia) to be able to work at all. “ It has to be noted though, that Blažević makes a clear distinction between the performances of Abramović that are ”an artistic interpretation of her own life” (‟I have nothing against this,” says Blažević) and the ‟books and interviews where she simply says things that are untrue.” She also said that, on one hand, The Cleaner was ‟a matter of politics,” and, on the other, it was ‟a spectacle.” Ljubomir Živkov, a journalist, was among the sharpest critics: without even entering into the artistic aspects of the exhibition, he gave the title of One-man Boycott to his article and explained why he was not going to see the exhibition. ‟If the artist does not care who invited her and how her host treats her subjects, why should I care about her mere skill or art? I will not be drawn to it, even knowing that New York repeatedly swooned at her art!” wrote Živkov.

Biljana Tomić, an art historian who has been working on affirmation of contemporary art since the 1970s, and was a one-time curator of Students’ Cultural Centre Gallery, was of a different opinion. She pointed out that it was ‟a brilliant exhibition,” and did not see anything “spectacular” in its staging. In addition, she explained the issue of the exhibition budget and state ‟intervention:” ‟Every exhibition costs money. It was thus in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and here we still do not have the system of places like England, France, Germany, Italy, or America, where you can raise the money in a different way to realise certain projects.”

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm, from The Cleaner exhibition. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photo: Widewalls.

Ten days after the closing of The Cleaner, the Museum of Contemporary Art got a new acting director. One year previously, there was a public competition for the vacant position of museum director, with four applicants. The procedure had been practically suspended for a while, only for a fifth candidate to be selected – one who had not originally applied. Viktor Kiš, a ceramics artist and a sculptor, with no previous museum experience, became the new acting director. In one of his first public statements, Kiš said that the initiative for him to become the Museum’s director ‟originally came from Marina Abramović.” This statement was never subsequently either confirmed or denied.

This text is part of the scientific-research activities of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (Belgrade, Serbia), financed according to the agreement with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development.

Ksenija Radulović, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade, teaching History of Theatre and Drama. She was Director of the Museum of Theatre Arts of Serbia and editor-in-chief of the journal Teatron (2001 – 2012). She was also the artistic Director of Sterijino pozorje festival, which is the leading national theatre festival in Serbia (2010-2012). In 2009 she was the curator of Serbia focus programme at the New Drama Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia, and in 2007 she was the selector of Show case – Bitef / Belgrade International Theatre Festival. She writes regularly articles and reviews for Serbian and international journals. Since 2020 she has been Editor-in-chief of Anthology of Essays by FDA (Faculty of Dramatic Arts).

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Marvin Carlson

Frankfurt, though the birthplace of Goethe, and the home of the Theater am Turm, which during the 1960s was among the leading experimental theatres in Germany, does not have much of a reputation in the current German theatre, although, like any German city of any respectable size, it has an active theatre scene and a wide range of well supported venues. Normally I have visited the city only on my way to somewhere else, but I made for the first time a special trip in January of 2020, attracted by an unusual, indeed unique theatrical offering. The city’s main theatre, the Frankfurt Schauspiel, offered in its repertoire Ibsen’s two epic dramas Brand and Peer Gynt. The challenges offered by these monumental works make stagings of either uncommon, and no theatre has ever mounted the two of them at the same time.

The motivation for this unique event was the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and most important such gathering in the world. For many years the fair has selected the literature of a particular country to emphasize, and that chosen for 2019 was Norway. In honor of the occasion, and with the financial aid of the Norwegian government, the Frankfurt State Theatre opened its Peer Gynt on May 23 and Brand on October 12. Since the Frankfurt Schauspiel follows the usual German repertory system, rotating the plays in its active repertoire, a theatre goer visiting the city for several days in late 2019 or early 2020, as I did, could see both productions in close proximity.

The first thing that must be said is that while presenting these two monumental works in repertory offers a very special opportunity both for Ibsen lovers like myself and for the general theatre-going public to experience something of the scope of Ibsen’s dramatic and poetic imagination, it does not use this almost unique opportunity to allow the works to reflect theatrically upon one another. To be honest, I thought this a missed opportunity. Both directors are leaders in the German theatre and both productions were ambitious and even praiseworthy, but the only connection between them had to be the work of the spectator’s imagination. I could not help wondering what the result would have been if a single director, one of these two or any one of a number of other leading directors of the contemporary Germany theatre, had undertaken to direct both shows (a number of such directors have taken on no less ambitious projects, such as both parts of Faust) and in some manner or other put them into conversation.

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Andreas Kriegenberg. Photo: Frankfurt Schauspiel.

However, I must report on what was done, not what I might have wanted, and both productions in fact had much to offer. The first I saw was Peer Gynt, presented by one of my favorite German directors, Andreas Kriegenberg. Kreigenberg often serves as his own designer, and often utilizes ingenious and highly technological means in his productions. He has however also worked with the well known Austrian designer Harald Thor, and as is often the case with Kriegenberg productions, the design, for good or ill, dominates the production. The production opens with the stage presenting a rather sterile but highly realistic hospital room, all in stark white, with a single bed, surrounded by hospital fittings, to the left. At the center rear an opening gives onto featureless white corridor. A figure, whom we later learn in Peer, lies in a hospital gown on the bed with his back to us. Other figures in the room include several nurses and doctors, all in white and going about their business in a rather mechanical manner, and three figures in darker, more conventional clothing, whom we learn are Peer’s mother and father (Katharina Linder and Sebastian Reiß) and Solveig (Sarah Grunert). Through mimed action and a small amount of dialogue (not in Ibsen), a frame situation is established. Peer is a long-term (perhaps permanent) catatonic patient in a combination hospital/asylum, apparently regularly visited by his wife and parents. Solveig in particularly seems well acquainted with the nurses, and chats casually with them over coffee.

Although this basically realistic situation is now and then disturbed, subtly by the rather mechanical movements of the nurses, and more strikingly when one of the presumed doctors goes out of control and is revealed as a patient in medical garb, the opening sequence as a whole clearly establishes the premise of the production—that the entire action of Ibsen’s play is taking place in the mind of the catatonic patient we see on the bed. Having just a few months earlier seen the Jonathan Kent Peer at the National Theatre in London, I was struck both by the similar directoral interpretations of Peer’s advantures, and also by the much greater development of this interpretation (as I would expect) in Germany. In London, Kent’s Peer (James McArdle) is rendered unconscious by running into rather incongruous door in the mountains, and during his subsequent encounters with the trolls, a body double remains lying onstage with his back to the audience while McArdle, apparently dreaming, continues the troll sequence, even eventually returning to shake the unconscious “Peer” in a futile attempt to escape the dream.

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Andreas Kriegenberg. Photo: Frankfurt Schauspiel.

The concept of the unconscious unmoving Peer remaining in his hospital bed while the active Peer (Max Simonischek) pursues the actions of the play is essentially the same in Frankfurt, except that Peer is already in a coma when the production begins, and never emerges from it, while the McArdle awakens after the Boyg scene as performs the rest of the play in apparent consciousness.

The transition from the hospital sequence into Ibsen’s play proper is managed by a technological device typical of Kriegenberg in its physical spectacle. The actors onstage freeze in position and the inert figure of Peer rises and goes into the upstage hall where he pulls down a folding ladder from a hitherto unseen ceiling trap and climbs up. As he climbs, the entire stage slowly sinks out of sights and he emerges into a totally different, a much larger and far less realistic world. Now only dimly lit, faintly suggesting a primeval forest. The center of the stage is a bed of dark material—earth, mud. mulch, perhaps rotting organic matter, through which Peer drawls as he begins the opening lines of the play. Other indistinct figures similar crawl through this space and surround them, are dozens of huge greenish-brown boards, perhaps a foot wide and perhaps 30 feet long, standing on one end and stretching upward at different angles, like the contents of an ill-tended lumberyard. The impression was rather like that of an dense, abstract forest composed only of trunks, or of a grassy lawn with Peer shrunk to insect size. Although the figure of Peer from time to time (as after the Boyg scene) goes back down the ladder and into his hospital bed, the production clearly assumes that on the realistic level he never stirs from the bed and Ibsen’s picaresque adventures are all within his dreaming mind. Thus, unlike most Peers I have seen, Simonischek plays Peer throughout as roughly the same age, a man in full maturity (he is in any case a large and imposing figure), clearly older than the usual Peer of the first acts and younger than that of the homecoming.

In the course of the evening, individual planks were used by the actors to create different playing spaces, but the physical configuration of this dream world remained the same. In many scenes vague figures—trolls, Arabic maidens, and other unidentifiable shapes would move upstage among and behind these boards, observing Peer or going about their own mysterious business. Aside from the planks, scenery was minimal, but from time to time actors would use individual planks to suggest other setting. Usually with the aid of hooks and cables dropped from the ceiling. So Peer and the Troll King’s daughter swung back and forth at opposite ends of a plank supported like a swing by two cables, and the four merchants in Morocco each balanced on his own individual plank swing. Two plank swings supported the head and foot of Aase’s death-bed-sledge and a number of planks were lashed together to create the ship that returns Peer to Norway.

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Andreas Kriegenberg. Photo: Frankfurt Schauspiel.

From time to time, the hospital asylum setting would reemerge from its depths and as the play went on the two worlds bled into each other. The earth and mud that Peer tracked in from above puzzled the interns in the otherwise spotless hospital room, and figures would wander into this room that represented both other patients in this institution and parts of Peer’s alternate universe. The blending became most complete in the middle of the play when the hospital room itself served as the setting for Cairo insane asylum, with Peer as one of the patients.

The production ends, as it began, in the hospital room. The Button Molder (Christoph Pütthoff) and the other characters of Peer’s fantasy universe are left behind on the upper level as the faithful Solveig, by Peer’s hospital bed, helps his large but feeble body into a wheel chair, and slowly rolls him up to the center opening and out of sight through the hospital corridor.

Ibsen’s Brand, directed by Roger Vontobel. Photo: Frankfurt Schauspiel.

The Brand, which I saw three nights later in the same theatre, was a very different experience. Again both the director, Roger Vontobel, and the designer, Olaf Altman, are leading figures in the contemporary German theatre. Although the two, working together and with other artists, have presented a wage range of works, modern and classic, in a wide variety of styles, both have a strong interest in massive minimalistic settings of platforms, stairs and simple geometrical shapes, and clearly the stark contours of Ibsen’s Brand suited well this orientation. Altman’s setting was composed entirely of simple shapes, somewhat reminiscent of Stephane Brauschweig’s monumental/minimalist production of this play in Stuttgart in 2005. Although one had the impression of neutral monumental shapes—a huge seeping curve forming a partial framing arch to the left, a flat neutral area running across the downstage area, a receding platform, slightly titled, leading upward toward the rear of the stage to the right, and an unseen ramp or stairs that allowed actors to come up into the acting area from behind the left side of this large platform. Little else could be seen, and even these elements were shrouded in think moving clouds of smoke throughout the evening, so that characters would often make entrances and exits simply by disappearing into the clouds. The area represented seemed to be the fells, that mysterious setting of one of Ibsen’s most famous poems high above most habitation but with the real mountain peaks still towering above. The consistent use of the area to the left of the tilted platform by characters coming from or going to the town, their heads appearing first as they ascended to the stage, strongly reinforced this image.

Although the drifting clouds and changing lighting (very often characters appear as silhouettes) seems to keep the visual field in constant motion, there is only one major shift in the scenic configuration, making it all the more striking. As Brand ascends into the ace church near the end, the huge tilted platform slowly rises, so that it is only with great difficulty that he is able to climb almost to its top, where he lies with his arms spread out as if crucified. The image is all the more striking in that the surface of the platform, which up until then seemed a flat cold grey is now lighted in such a way as to reveal itself in dazzling metallic gold, with Brand pinned against it like a small insect on display. After this stunning moment, the actual play ending, with Brand sliding down to deliver his final lines on the main stage, seemed anticlimactic, especially in that Ibsen’s famous and much debated final “deus caritas” line is cut and the play end with Brand’s final question, and a crashing sound like a shot, leaving open the possibility that he has been killed by Gerd, or even committed suicide—fascinating possibilities, but surely not what Ibsen originally had in mind.

Ibsen’s Brand, directed by Roger Vontobel. Photo: Frankfurt Schauspiel.

The performance, though it runs for nearly three hours, is still much cut, containing only about a third of the original text. Peer Gynt is cut as well, of course, but less radically—it runs over four hours. The Brand translation is a new one, especially commissioned for this production, from one of Germany’s leading translators, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, who has previous translated A Doll House, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkmann. The Peer Gynt on the other hand, uses the text created by Both Strauss and Peter Stein for Stein’ 1971 two part production of the play in Berlin, widely considered the most important modern production of the play. The Stein translation is in poetry, that of Schmidt-Henkel in prose, and to my mind was far more successful in catching something of the flavor of the original.

Heiko Raulin, in his stiff black, floor length clerical gown (costumes by Ellen Hofmann) did not seem to me ever to reach the fanatic power of Ibsen’s protagonist. He seemed rather to very successfully set off the play’s two major women, the angelic Anges (Jana Schulz) and the demonic Gerd (Katharina Bech), both of whom are given much more prominence in this production than is normally the case. Gerd in particular hovers over the production like a bird of prey, whom her posture, movements and cries seem literally to evoke. Often her voice or her twisted shape can be discerned in the mists, not infrequently seeming to have a direct physical impact on Brand. Less prominent but also profiting from a contrast to the rather monochromatic Brand is Isaak Dentier as the district administrator, down-to-hearth, venial, and surprisingly engaging. The electronic musical score, created and performed by Keith O’Brian underscores and considerably enhances the entire production.

I had two evenings free between these productions at the Schauspiel, and the city offered many possibilities—classic and contemporary work, cabaret, musicals, even magic and circus. Being a devotee of Stephen Sondheim, I could not resist Sweeny Todd, at the English theatre of Frankfurt, continental Europe’s largest English-speaking theatre, located in elegant quarters on the ground floor of a commercial skyscraper, the Galileo building, on the same large square as the Schauspiel.

Sweeney Todd, directed by Derek Anderson. Photo: Martin Kaufhold.

Popular as the play is in the U.S. and England, it is almost unknown in Germany, and the overflow audience was clearly both delighted and shocked by the play’s bloody excesses. Far from minimalizing this aspect of the show, director Derek Anderson emphasized it. Spurts of blood shot out into the audience from the slit throats of Sweeney’s victims, some of the patrons of Mrs. Lovett’s shop carried their meat pies out into the house to offer bites to audience members, and most strikingly, about a dozen audience members were placed in a “Splash zone” on stage wearing protective ponchos, and closely involved in the action physically if not dramatically. Seated together in an alcove on the left of the stage, they were only a few feet from the action. When Mrs. Lovett (Samantha Ivey) is throwing herself into the preparation of her meat pies, they are showed with flour, and later with shaving lotion as Signor Pirelli (Matt Bateman) whips it up preparing for his shaving duel with Todd .

Director Anderson brought this intimate interpretation from a successful award-winning revival at the newly opened Twickenham Theatre in London in 2014. The most praised performer in that production, Sarah Ingram as Mrs. Lovett, was in fact scheduled to revive the role in Frankfurt, but her voice failed on opening night, and she was replaced by her understudy Samantha Ivey, who the evening I saw it provided an excellent companion, physically and vocally to Stephen John Davis, boasting a distinguished career on the London musical stage. Indeed the entire cast came from the London theatre, and created a performance which would have doubtless been well received in the British capital as well.

Stephen John Davies and Samantha Ivey. Sweeney Todd, directed by Derek Anderson. English Theatre Frankfurt. Photo: Martin Kaufhold.

Anderson brought with him to Frankfurt his London set designer, Rachel Stone and costume designer Olivia Ward, who apparently recreated something close to the physical look of the London production. For most of the evening the entire stage serves as the pie shop. Up stage center is an opening which usually contains the door opening into the shop. There is a higher level which appears to be an unfurnished second floor/ Its main visual feature is a large multi-paned window, mostly broken away so that we can see behind it the two-man orchestra, piano and percussion. Although characters from time to time move across this space it never is clearly defined and it notably does NOT serve, as in most productions, of the location of the new barber shop and its infamous chair. The shop is instead located on the right hand side of the main stage, with Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop to the left. Thus, when Sweeney has killed his victims, then do not drop down through a trap as in most productions, but their chair slides backward into an opening door in the wall behind them, and quickly returns empty for the next patron. This worked quite satisfactorily, though given the fact that the stage had a second floor I rather missed the added if admittedly more complex upstairs version. David Pendlebury, another seasoned veteran of the London musical stage, was excellent as the villainous Judge Turpin, ably seconded by Nathan Elwick as Beadle Bamford. Matthew Facchino and Aliza Vakli were engaging young lovers and Tobias was winningly portrayed by a young woman, Lucy Warway, from the Guildford School of Acting. The performance was sold-out and clearly the audience enjoyed what was for most their first Sondheim. The woman seated next to me asked if Sondheim was a known name in the U.S. and was pleased to be informed that he was.

Without a single actual German play to show for my Frankfurt visit, I selected for my fourth evening a particularly fitting one, Faust, the greatest work by Frankfurt’s greatest author. Indeed I prepared for the evening by visiting for the first time the fascinating museum which is now housed in Goethe’s restored childhood home in the inner city.

Goethe’s Faust, directed by Reinhard Hinzpeter.  Photo: Felix Holland.

I found a staging of Goethe’s work being offered by one of Frankfurt’s leading experimental theatres, the Freie Schauspiel Ensemble Frankfurt, founded in 1984, a loose association of theatre professionals in the city who come together in various combinations to realize their projects, somewhat in the manner of Mabou Mines in New York. Their two-person version of Faust was created in 2016 and has been revived from time to time since. The two current artistic directors of the ensemble, Reinhard Hinzpeter and Bettina Kaminski, are at the heart of this project, he as the director and she as one of the two-person cast. The other is Axel Gottschick, very well known in German films, TV and radio drama in addition to his stage work.

The basic casting of the evening was Gottschick as Faust and Kaminski as Mephistopheles, which roles they maintained, establishing from the beginning an engaging contrast—Gottschick thoughtful, probing and deliberate, Kaminski mercurial, sly, and insinuating. Each plays other, smaller roles throughout the evening, almost never departing from their base characters at the same time. One notable exception is one of their most moving sequences, when they play the ancient couple Philemon and Baucis, the innocent victims of Faust’ imperial vision. The two form almost a single body, sharing a rough-hewn cloak and each with a pair of glasses with one lens blacked out. Few other characters are as clearly defined, except of course for the two leading ones, and I was particularly unconvinced by Kaminski’s Gretchen. Clearly too old for the role, she has decided to play her as a kind of caricature of a naïve young peasant, which I felt diminished the character, the situation, and Faust himself.

Axel Gottschick and Bettina Kaminski in Goethe’s Faust, directed by Reinhard Hinzpeter. Photo: Felix Holland.

Visually, the production was almost as minimalist as the casting. The setting was an essentially empty stage (setting by Gerd Friedrich) with a tall stepladder, occasionally used, to one side, and rolls of barbed wire across the back. As Faust’ world closed in at the end, these coils surrounded the acting area, still littered with the paper money from Faust’s earlier experiments with capitalism, creating a strong and effective stage image. A large screen above the stage, occasionally used for projects of abstract landscapes, fire, or the heads of the Emperor and other dignitaries, was less successful and could, I think, have been omitted.

A minimalist Faust is something of a contradiction in terms, but I found the experiment an engaging one on the whole, and enjoyed an extra benefit from seeing it in close conjunction with Peer Gynt. Although this production, like Brand obviously made not attempt to acknowledge the related Ibsen play currently being performed, the Faust echoes in Peer, of which I had long been at least somewhat aware, added an unexpected extra element to this unique spectatorial experience.

Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. 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 a theatrical autobiography, 10,000 Nights, University of Michigan, 2017.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Ivan Medenica

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began and global physical distancing measures were introduced, many have been wondering about the consequences for theatre and the performing arts in general. As an art which is created and exists only through energy—the physical, spiritual and intellectual exchange between performers and the audience (the concept of “autopoietic feedback loop” of Erika Fischer-Lichte)—theatre cannot survive under the conditions that involve physical distancing. Even if we could devise a system to block some seats in theatre auditoriums, or to construct auditoriums in alternative venues, which would have an appropriate distance between the seats, not even the most bizarre imagination could come up with a mise-en-scène that would involve distancing, or actors’ physical play without–physical play… Still, this trepidation is unfounded, since theatre will–if not sooner, then in a year’s time for sure, once the vaccine against the coronavirus has been developed–return to its normal, non-distanced routine of production and distribution. The year 2020, however, might be lost when it comes to theatre after all.

With that in mind, a heroic dimension can be seen in the fact that one of the rare (grand) performances staged this year, at least among the ones I am aware of, bears the title 2020. It is a project by the Croatian director Ivica Buljan, which premiered 25 January 2020, based on the books by an intellectual star of today, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, made in coproduction with the leading theatre and cultural centres from Ljubljana, Slovenian National Theatre Drama, Ljubljana City Theatre, and Cankar Center. This project belongs to those seminal works of art which, not only by their title but by their content as well, point to the history of humankind encapsulated in one truly or imaginary important year: George Orwell’s novel 1984, Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A space Odyssey, Ariane Mnouchkine’s performance 1789. Regardless of whether they represent dystopian futures or pasts that were once utopian, all those works used some other time dimensions in order to re-examine – the present. Just like Harari’s books, Buljan’s performance relies on the presentation of the past (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind) and the projection of the future (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow) to indicate the challenges that we are facing today, to point out at their origin, and the potential—although not necessarily optimistic—outcomes. That this performance is about the present is made evident through an excellent video by Vanja Černjul screened in the background, which consists of scenes from everyday life in various spots on the planet earth.

I did not manage to see the live performance; the lockdown was introduced just as I was about to travel to Ljubljana. Given the fact that we have begun to consider recordings of performances to be theatre, which is an approach that could be deemed problematic both from the point of view of performance studies and common sense, I too can toy with writing a text about a performance that I have seen only in the form of a recording. Since this text is more of a historiographic analysis than a critical review, its being based on a video-recording is not methodologically disputable. What reduces the problem even further is the fact that the recording I saw is of high-quality, comprised of both full shots (which are important for a performance with numerous group scenes and other spectacular sights), and close-up shots, while also registering the audience participation which is very important for the understanding of this particular poetics.

2020, directed by Ivica Buljan. Photo: Mestno Gledališče Ljubljansko (Ljubljana City Theatre).

The aim of this text is to analyse the artistic features of the performance (it belongs to the concepts of devised and immersive theatre), and their correlation with Harari’s texts, in order to support the thesis that the performance 2020 is an open call to us, the audience, to assume, in the spirit of the contemporary (post-dramatic) practices, our responsibility for theatre experience for which we share co-authorship but, at the same time, for the destiny of the world which we have also created. The post-dramatic paradigm implies the “aesthetics of responsibility,” which can also be found in the performance 2020. This is how Hans-Thies Lehmann defines “aesthetics of responsibility”: “Instead of the deceptively comforting duality of here and there, inside and outside, it can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and thus make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception. Such an experience would be not only aesthetic but therein at the same time ethico-political.” (Lehmann 2004: 343)

An actor comes onto the vast empty stage of the Cankar Center and, as a narrator, introduces us to the thematic of the performance. The actor, Jurij Zrnec, is a good impersonator, which makes it clear to the audience that the narrator is not, as the stage logic and the text might suggest, Harari himself, but Slavoj Žižek. What additionally and wittily supports this conclusion is his costume: a T-shirt with an inscription that reads Antigone 2, which is a reference to Žižek’s first and, so far, only play, an adaptation of the Sophocles tragedy. The director Buljan and the dramaturg Petra Pogorevc have made the character of Žižek utter Harari’s leitmotif hypothesis: Homo sapiens might quite possibly be the most genocidal animal and/or human species (the Israeli scholar insists that sapiens is not the only human species in history). This strategy creates a blend between Harari’s thoughts and Žižek’s vocal expression, his typical excited, scattered, panting, unconventional way of speaking.

Although seemingly confusing, this approach is, actually, quite witty. While the quoted statement resonates in Žižek’s own thoughts and represents a director’s hint at local circumstances (the reception of Žižek’s person and work in his homeland, Slovenia), the fusion of these two identities also makes an ironical comment on the global phenomenon of celebrity-thinkers. Among them, namely, the Ljubljana thinker’s biggest competitor is the Jerusalem historian himself. And yet, the irony is not absolute. Zrnec’s acting fuses the irony with warmth for the Slovenian philosopher.

The prologue ends in a disturbing comment by Harari-Žižek, which announces the imminent end of humankind, for which sapiens is to take the blame because of the ecocide they have committed: “We, the small gods on this sad planet made of plastic.” The final outcry by the celebrity-thinker – “what’s this, an Odyssey 2020?” – is a witty introduction to the first part of the performance, which refers to the main thesis of the Harari’s “brief history of humankind,” the book better known by its title Sapiens. Namely, out of the depth of the stage, out of the trap where the smoke is coming from, the rest of the actors come in a throng, resembling in their appearance, movements and behaviour the monkeys from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In addition to the manner of their arrival on the stage, which represents a comical metaphor of humankind entering the stage of civilization from the depths of pre-historic times, the entire look of the actors (the costumes, masks, actions) is comically stylized: it is an ironical illustration of Homo sapiens in its genocidal rampage. Besides the stylization and its concomitant humor, the dominant feature of the prevalent part of the performance, in terms of style and genre, is its spectacular character. It is based on the performance of the songs and dynamic and attractive dance scores, but also on the use of stage machinery, resulting, among other things, in flying scenes. Among those who flew across the stage were Neil Armstrong (for obvious reasons), the hosts of the Tokyo Olympics (an equally obvious projection of a spectacular event which will, unfortunately, remain a projection), etc.

There is an unusual balance between the spectacular character of the performance and its opposite stylistic feature: minimalism. The stage design (Karmen Klučar and Ivica Buljan) is almost absent, and the space is mostly created through repositioning empty cardboard boxes and their metaphorical rearrangement, which is performed by the actors. Well conceptualized costumes by Ana Savić Gecan are stylized by the fabric they are made of (usually the one widely used by humans to destroy the planet: plastic), and by the shape, while sometimes they also demand the actors’ intervention in order to be fully realized onstage. Still, it is not only this minimalistic stage (and to a certain extent the costumes, too) that the actors shape; they also participate in the creation of their spoken text and stage movements.

2020, directed by Ivica Buljan. Photo: Mestno Gledališče Ljubljansko (Ljubljana City Theatre).

This brings us to the main poetics of the performance, which is at the same time its basic concept. The performance 2020 is not a dramatization of Harari’s texts. all of which serve only as a dramaturgical starting point.

As a work of devised theatre, the text was created through a process that combined Harari’s texts, the material previously chosen by the actors, and the text through the rehearsals. The final text was composed through an associative conjoining of all the materials by Pogorevc. To illustrate a text created thus, I will single out one of the scenes I found most impressive, the confession by the young actor Timon Šturbej. He follows Harari’s presentation of discrimination among the sapiens by a story of how, back in his school days, everyone, including him, used to avoid a Romani girl by the name of Gultena at parties. So now, from the greatest theatre stage in Slovenia, he apologizes to her, sincerely and through the tears (both in his and in our eyes). This example serves to demonstrate Buljan’s concept: the performance is not an illustration of Harari’s pondering the destiny of the humankind, but a dialectic confrontation with our, in this case the actors,’ experience of the topic.

Midway through the performance, the actors take a seat at the proscenium edge and engage in a dialogue with the audience. Having listed the annual death numbers in the world and the main causes, the biggest killer being the coronary diseases (the cause of 28 million deaths), seven times more than diabetes-related problems, and 280 times more than wars, the actors start asking the audience about their health. They do not address the audience as the characters they play but as themselves, and in a very personal manner (since it is not about collective phenomena but about personal health). All the points mentioned in the previous sentence are aspects of immersive theatre, the one which projects a more active audience participation. For that reason, this scene can be used as the best support of the thesis that, besides devised theatre, the other paradigm under which we can and should consider the performance 2020 is – immersive theatre.

Let us stay with this scene for a while. Although the questions seem spontaneous, and the actors do pose them in such a way, they are well thought out. The actors ask who in the audience has had a caesarean section, laser eye surgery, and an organ transplant, but also who is on antidepressants and who has had a plastic surgery. The fact that both actors and spectators appear to be answering the questions very truthfully, proves that the immersive quality of the performance, the penetration of artistic intention into the direct spectators’ experience, has been established.

And yet, this scene, cleverly devised in terms of dramaturgy and directing, goes a step further. The selection of questions about health suggests that modern medicine improves the quality of life (c-section, organ transplantation, etc.) but also meets the controversial challenges of modern civilization, such as craving eternal youth and beauty, or infinite happiness. It creates a clever link between the general immersive and post-dramatic features of the performance and the concrete topics raised by Harari, in this case particularly Homo Deus. This scene marks the beginning of the second part of the performance, which refers more to this book, and places its focus onto the current moment in the history of the civilization and the projection of its future, as opposed to Sapiens, which is focused on the past of civilization, and represents the basis of the first part of the performance. Unlike the thematic aspects of the two parts, the performance style remains the same. Therefore, this seemingly light, improvised, and spontaneous scene, methodically and accurately hits the bull’s-eye: Harari’s thesis that the concealed and ethically controversial, though understandable and to a certain extent justified goals of contemporary medicine and sciences–the perfection of human biological characteristics in order to achieve bliss, immortality and godlikeness–are always justified by the demands of conventional medicine: fighting illnesses and saving lives.

The last part of the performance, however, completely differs from the previous two, both in terms of genre and style, as well as the emotional impact it creates. As is the case with the excellent British television series Years and Years, which shares a similar spirit with the performance, it is not easy to determine whether the third part of the performance 2020 takes place today or in the near future, although the costumes, which are now realistic (unlike the stylized ones of the previous part), place it in the present moment.

2020, directed by Ivica Buljan. Photo: Mestno Gledališče Ljubljansko (Ljubljana City Theatre).

On the revolving stage, three TV studios are endlessly rotating, and three parallel interviews are taking place. In a Japanese garden, surrounded by his meditating adherents, Harari, in a slightly ironical form of a new-age guru (played by the excellent Marko Mandić) is giving an interview to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. The effect of strangeness and irony is amplified by the scenes in which everyone takes off their clothes, Harari and Zuckerberg engage in sexual intercourse, but, above anything else, by the appearance of a homeless woman. In her appearance and a total lack of interest in what is happening around her (Jette Ostan Vejrup, whose acting was marked by deep sophistication and distanciation) she creates a critical distance from the pretentious and at moments absurd conversation whose leitmotifs are marked by sentences such as: “one of the most important things is to get to know yourself better,” or “smell your finger–inhale, smell your finger–inhale.” Toying with the boundary between the fictional and the real, that is with her personality (she hosts a TV show in real life, too), which is something she was doing throughout the previous part of the performance, Zvezdana Mlakar interviews the choreographer of this performance, Ahmed Soura from Burkina Faso. His story is based on suffering, challenges and struggle: but he has emerged from all of that as a winner, as a person filled with optimism and zest, the feelings he conveys to the audience. In the third studio, a group of Slovenians, although they could be any other people from the Balkans, or from Europe, or Homo sapiens in general, crammed on a narrow sofa, are having an argument about the nation and politics. Their physical closeness in the small space (in the small worlds) is occasionally contrasted to their ideological conflicts. Just like the homeless woman in the Japanese garden, the everyman in a grey suit, with a confused, absent, and scared face (minimalistic acting by Matej Puc), keeps out of the conversation. Thus creating a distance from always the same, pointless, aggressive, monologic discussions that never reach any conclusion. Still, his position represents not only his detachment and non-belonging, but also the endangered position that often comes from non-belonging to the pack: at the end of the interview he falls victim–he suddenly drops dead.

At one point, all the studios remain empty, but the stage keeps revolving. The scene creates a strong metaphor of a possible civilisational perspective: the stage without actors keeps revolving just like the earth will keep rotating once it gets rid of us, Homo sapiens. This interpretation of the final image should not create the wrong impression. Not even the ending, not even the entire third part of the performance is a rounded, straightforward “stage metaphor;” on the contrary, it is distanced, absurdist, ambiguous. The third part is a randomly assembled kaleidoscope of possibilities that open up to humankind in the present moment of crisis. Those possibilities range from old, barren, (self)destructive nationalistic conflicts of the twentieth century, to the trendy new-age problematizing of reality, to an optimistic streak created through a brave struggle against real life challenges. Which of these—or of some other—we choose, and whether the choice would help us avoid or, actually, initiate the global finale hinted by the empty revolving stage (rotation of the human-free planet), depends solely on us–theatre audiences, the members of a certain society, people on earth. In other words, the empty revolving stage is not a “conclusion,” or a “verdict.” It is an open call to the spectators to come up with an ending: to assume responsibility for the destiny of the stage fiction, just like they must assume in relation to our reality, the one represented through this work of fiction.

Ivan Medenica (PhD) is a professor of the history of world drama and theatre at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. He is an active theatre critic and has received the national award for the best theatre criticism six times. He is a member of the International Association of Theater Critics’ Executive Committee and the Director of its international conferences. Medenica is the artistic director of Bitef (Belgrade International Theater Festival).

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
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European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Daniele Vianello

Claudio Longhi has been appointed Director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Thus opens a third phase for the famous theatre, after months punctuated by exhausting controversies and political clashes between the Municipality and the Ministry on the one hand and the Lombardy Region on the other. At the same time, steps were taken to find a successor of Longhi as the director of the numerous theatres of the ERT Foundation – Emilia Romagna Teatro, which he led for four years, beginning in January 2017.

Claudio Longhi. Photo: Riccardo Frati. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

It will perhaps be useful to begin with some background about the Milanese theatre and its new director.[1] Il Piccolo – Italy’s first permanent theatre (teatro stabile) was founded in 1947 by Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi and his wife Nina Vinchi Grassi and made “Teatro d’Europa” by ministerial decree in 1991.  After Strehler’s death, a second phase began under the direction of Sergio Escobar, who led the Piccolo for 22 years, from October 1998 to July 2020, supported by the director Luca Ronconi as an artistic consultant.  Since December 1st of this year, his direction has passed into the hands of Longhi, who, though he departed from the Piccolo in 2015, had worked there for more than eight years (from 1995 to 2002), collaborating with Strehler on the creation of such memorable productions as Quel pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1996), Lolita (2001), and Infinities (2002).

In Italy’s theatrical microcosm Claudio Longhi, 54, can be considered a young man. His career has been marked a very rapid rise and gaining the profile of a cultured artist, his interests divided between academy and stage. Named Full Professor of “History and Institutions of Directing” (a field of study introduced in the early seventies by the director Luigi Squarzina), he mainly dealt with the history of dramaturgy, directing and the actor.[2] At the same time, Longhi has directed performances for numerous national theatrical institutions, including the Teatro di Roma, the Teatro de Gli Incamminati, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, the Teatro Stabile in Turin, the Teatro Due in Parma, the National Institute of Ancient Drama, ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro. Among his stagings have been Brecht’s Arturo Ui (with an excellent Umberto Orsini as the protagonist), Classe operaia va in paradiso, based on the film by Elio Petri in Paolo di Paolo’s adaptation, La commedia della vanità by Elias Canetti and, lastly, Il peso del mondo nelle cose  by Alejandro Tantanian.

Many international theatre projects have been directed by Longhi since 2008, including the multiple project Il ratto d’Europa. Per un’archeologia dei saperi comunitari (2011-2014, UBU Premio Speciale 2013). His work as a theatrical pedagogue is also important. After teaching History of Theatre at the Scuola del Piccolo Teatro in Milan from 2005 to 2015, in 2015 – for the ERT Foundation – he took over the direction of the Iolanda Gazzerro School of Theatre in Modena “Laboratorio permanente per l’attore”. In this context, his artistic partnership with the actor Lino Guanciale, a constant presence in his most recent shows and in the activities of audience training and theatrical teaching directed by him at schools and universities, is of particular interest.

Longhi’s plans for the Piccolo – a theatre where he is well known and esteemed, thanks to the precious work carried out alongside Luca Ronconi when he was artistic consultant to the director Escobar – is structured around some points in particular, with the primary objective of relaunching and redefining the role of public theatre as a cultural mission. Among the most important ideas proposed, are the wide international vision with the possibility of a great festival, the creation of a stable company on the German model, a particular attention to the formation of the public and to the numerous professional concern that bring to life the theatrical microcosm. The chapter on what is to be learned artistically still remains to be written. By statute, however, the new role of manager will force him to be limited as a director; he can direct only one show per year.

The theatre currently comprises three spaces: the “Teatro Studio Melato” (an experimental space that also houses the school of theatre), the “Teatro Strehler” (the main venue, inaugurated in 1998) and the “Sala Grassi” (the historical space on the Via Rovello).[3] Longhi wishes to clearly define the identity of these various locations in the Piccolo, redesigning and clarifying the geography of the three spaces: at Grassi the mission will be the consolidation of a canon, at the Melato the study of the new, and at the Strehler the presentation of strong European innovations.

Exterior, Sala Grassi. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

The new director has all the qualities and skills necessary to lead the prestigious Milanese institution.   His profile is that of a militant intellectual in the theatre, with a vision of renewing the public scene and a conception of open theatre, made up of a wide variety of interactions with the public, of insights that come out of the world of spectacle and is dedicated to developing, through theatre, the spectator and his knowledge of society more generally.

Certainly he does not face a small task.  As much as he seems to enjoy the favor of the hundred workers of the Piccolo, the challenge is considerable and the road does not seem to be downhill. Behind him Longhi has the spectres of the various guardians of the Italian and international scene that preceded him, in a theatre that in just over seventy years has had only three leaders.  Before him a mission for a courageous captain; to reform the Piccolo after bringing it out of a politically and economically complex situation. Viewed from above, 2021 will include the celebrations for the centenary of Strehler’s birth, while on the other hand this season is must operate on an international level, of interest to the whole world of theatre.

The following pages reflect on a recent conversation with Claudio Longhi on the future of the Piccolo Teatro, on its new direction, and on his experiences, just concluded at ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro.[4]

The Public Function of the Theatre

A central issue, already significant in the so-called “world before,” the world as it was before the pandemic – but which the situation in which we find ourselves has exacerbated and made it all the more topical – is the need to clarify and establish the public function of the theatre. This is a concern directly linked to the history of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and its founding fathers, to the approach that Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi have brought to the theatre, supporting and realizing it from an organizational and artistic point of view.[5]

It was during the second post-war period that the first public theatres were born in this country, called “stable” as opposed to private companies, mostly itinerant. Italian theatre had lagged somewhat behind other countries, especially with regard to modern directing, which had not yet developed in Italy. Fascism had held back the development of the theatrical landscape, preferring to subsidize private companies in order to guide their choices. Starting from this scenario, in the second post-war period the need for a theatre as a “public service” was thus prepared for; the Piccolo, municipally run, was both the first public theatre and the first stable theatre in Italy.

The programmatic intentions of the Piccolo Teatro were declared in the magazine Politecnico, where the desire to create an “art theatre for all” was emphasized. The repertoire should not include texts intended to be pure and simple escapism in order to please the public and thus guarantee a profit, as was the case with private companies. The Piccolo would be “art theatre.” Presenting itself as a theatre with only artistic ambitions, without speculative management, with a precise planning in the choice of shows. It would also be a “theatre for all,”[6] since ticket prices would be kept low and there would be the possibility of subscribing and receiving discounts. It was the opinion of Paolo Grassi, in fact, that the “people” did not stay out of theatres for cultural reasons, but only for economic ones.

Interior, Sala Grassi. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

Today, as then, it has become urgent to return to those programmatic intentions, trying to, in a Brechtian manner, return the sense of utility to theatrical practice. In Italy it is difficult to understand the function of culture and art in the broadest sense, and of theatre in particular. Until we come to define what artistic experiences are for, it will not be possible to clarify the thorny issue of the endemic fragility of theatrical practice in this country.

This is a concern that Grassi and Strehler have strongly raised thanks to their idea of public service of the Piccolo Teatro. This is a very topical problem, and one very close to the new director’s heart.  On this subject he has said: «I think it is important to start from that original idea, to reaffirm the centrality of the theatre within the practices of community building and sociability. I wonder whether theatre is still a public service or whether that category is partly outdated. From this point of view, I have often thought about the fact that perhaps we should talk today not so much about community service but about the value of theatre to the community.»

This distinction is far from a sophisticated abstraction or based upon pure speculation.  It has obvious practical repercussions, since the concept of service is closely linked to the idea of a supply that anticipates a demand.  «I am convinced – continues Longhi – that at the moment there is a strong need for theatre, but there is not as clear and defined a demand for theatre. Or rather, there are questions about theatre, but looking at most people numbers you gain the perception that the theatre corresponds to an intimate need to which one struggles to give a name. I say this with good reason, because – as all the training experiences in schools confirm – when you meet people who do not know the theatre and start showing them concretely what it is, they become attracted to and develop a fondness for practical work with great strength and passion. In this sense, I am talking about a necessity that is not in question. But if it is not in question, it is also difficult to say that theatre is a service, because to be a service it would have to answer a question. Hence the concept of value serves as the founding element of a cultural identity and as a driving force for a dynamic of cultural development. Value can also be of use, but it is not necessarily service.»

Longhi’s statements demand a broader horizon, which concerns the possibility of conceiving theatre as a common good, not belonging to an individual or a government, but to a community. These are reflections on the public function, service, value, the common good of theatre as a field of exploration and investigation that makes it necessary today to disassociate ourselves from the practices of the past, to lay the foundations of tomorrow’s theatre, taking the pandemic experience as the starting point of a dynamic of progress of the scenic experience. «I am convinced – says Longhi – that it is a powerful field of exploration , within which to rethink the role of the theatre starting from Via Rovello, from the reality that first in Italy radically placed at the center the themes emphasized there, laying out the conditions for that theatrical system in which we live today, the offspring of the various reworkings of the ‘Piccolo Teatro’ model that in the forties of the last century was imposed at national level.»

Theatre as a place that is a generator of thought, a space of storytelling and dramaturgy

How, then, can the function of theatre be described today, what is the usefulness of theatrical practice? What is the theatre’s ability to once again take a place in the exercise and development of Community practices, interrogating the dynamics of the functioning of the community?

«Never more than in this moment, I believe it is essential to regain the ability to say ‘we’: this is precisely the political, public and civic function of the theatre» declares the new director of the Piccolo. For Longhi, this function must be directly linked to the ability of the theatre to become a place where thought is generated, understood primarily as reflections on “sociability,” which is a nodal and constitutive aspect of theatrical practice.

There has often been talk of the economic value of culture. One of the legacies that Covid has left us is that of becoming aware of the value of the dimension of work that is connected to cultural practices, just when it became understood that entire segments of the country’s production system were failing in relation to theatrical experiences. «I am convinced’ – insists Longhi – “that the entrepreneurial and economic contribution that culture in the broadest sense and theatre in particular can give to a country Iies not only in the fact that there is work related to the sphere of theatrical practices, but also in the awareness that theatre can generate thought. Thinking is the engine of a country’s growth: it is no coincidence that countries with a high index of cultural consumption are often also those with the highest gross domestic product.»

For Longhi, these aspects fall within that public function which needs to be reflected upon in a theatre like the Piccolo: «Obviously this node of issues branches off in various directions. On the one hand, the element of sociability leads us to reflect on the ability to become a community and a place that can serve as the generator of the theatre community. I am thinking of the beautiful pages that Fabrizio Cruciani dedicated to this theme in his book on the theatrical communities of  the 20th century, which are a starting point of what theatre could be today.[7] I find this reflection on community theatre and the various participatory forms that have been promoted in recent years extremely interesting. They represent a revisiting of those practices of an animating theatre that were undertaken  between the late 1960s and early 1970s, directly linked to the concept of decentralization desired by Paolo Grassi.»

Time has passed since those extraordinary years, time that has introduced changes that must be  confronted. The idea of using participatory forms as a way of rebuilding the relationship with the public and educating the public is central and has been pursued in various ways during Longhi’s theatrical career: «I do not mind, with regard to the particular structure of Milan, reintroducing practices of this kind, which I also find appropriate to a certain model of urban development applied in Milan in recent years , like the idea of the “15 minute city,” the idea of a polycentric and scattered city».  With this in mind, therefore, thinking about the future of the Piccolo, it becomes essential that the theatre comes out of the risk of self-referentiality that sometimes grows within theatrical practices, without, however, renouncing its own specificity: «Theatre must not set itself apart and become something else in itself. In all the participatory practices that I tried to put in place, the problem was to understand what the theatre could give more than other practices of sociability and intervention within the community, starting, however, from its own specificities.»

Cloister, Sala Grassi. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

At the same time, theatre has always had another fundamental function: that of telling stories, as a fascinating attempt to organize the chaos of the experience. Telling a story means finding logical and chronological connections in the flow of happening, and these connections are an attempt to put order into chaos.  Never before have we needed orientation maps to move within the confusion that surrounds us.

The theme of telling stories directly calls into question the question of the return of the centrality of dramaturgy in the theatrical experience. Longhi has always had a strong interest in dramaturgy, the new dramaturgy in particular. The latter can only take “critical” forms, such as revision and reinvention of the mechanisms of organization of the stage fabula experienced in the past. It is an attention that starts from the shared fundamental conviction that even the so-called post-dramatic theatre and the awareness of the “suspended drama” have in themselves a strong dramaturgical drive. As another way of articulating the dramatic form, the dimension of the story is underlying even the most radical experiences of post-drama, it is simply a different way of telling. Longhi states: «Gertrude Stein’s “Landscape Drama” also has a story, as well as the “description” can be a story in itself. The new way of telling stories cannot but take note of the adjustments that, from epic dramaturgy to post-drama, the experience of dramatic form has undergone during the last century and the so-called “Theatre of the Zero Years”. I’ve always been very attracted to this horizon.»

Longhi imagines, therefore, that the Piccolo di Milano can once again become a strong point of reference for the new dramaturgy: «I am very fascinated by the idea that the Piccolo is a place of intense confrontation with national, European and more generally international dramaturgy, with a view to mutual fertilization». Dramaturgy is, moreover, a peculiar and historically constitutive trait of Italian theatre, even if it lives on a series of “wasted inventions” – to quote a famous expression by Claudio Meldolesi – that struggle to settle in canon, with all the ambivalences that the word canon brings with it, as a place of constant vitality, but also as a trap within which one risks being imprisoned.[8]

Europe and internationalization

Longhi’s clear openness to crossing national borders directly raises the issue of internationalization. In the current legal framework, the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa” is part of the UTE (Union des Théâtres de l’Europe). The UTE itself is the daughter of the original impulse that started from the Piccolo and that sees the Milanese theatre and the Odéon in Paris as the leaders. Founded in 1990 by Jack Lang and Giorgio Strehler, who in particular worked for the creation of the Association, it is designed to bring together theatrical productions and European artistic works under the sign of cultural exchanges and the formation of a common cultural identity.

Exterior, Teatro Strehler. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

Historically, therefore, Il Piccolo di Milano has set itself the mission of operating on the internationalization front. This is a point about which we must question ourselves today and which we cannot ignore. Longhi says: «While there is a widespread need to rebuild a supranational community, the pandemic forces us to isolate, to take into account the strong travel restrictions. We must therefore ask what kind of sustainability community practices we will have in the world of tomorrow». The Covid crisis – emphasizes Longhi – marked a profound turning point in the relationship between man and nature. This crisis has highlighted extremely critical elements in the previous life system. The issues of gender jumping, the elimination of bio-diversity, the relationship between these and other issues with the deep crisis that has settled between man and his surroundings are very evident.”  Longhi comments: «We will get over the Covid crisis, but we must treasure this opportunity to change, otherwise next time it will not be called Covid, it will be called something else, but we will be confronting the same problem. We’re on a running train, which is hard to stop, and there’s still a force of inertia in the previous life system that we are struggling to get rid of.»

Since the dramatic reality in which we are living will not change overnight, the theme of the environmental impact that international travel and tours carry with them is an issue that cannot but touch the theatrical universe closely. In reflecting on these topics, the new director thinks of questions that are being asked in this regard by artists such as Katie Mitchell in seeking alternative ways of imagining theatrical exchanges at international level: «Being at the head of a Theatre of Europe today one cannot ignore the question of what it means to create international relations at a time like the one we are experiencing , just as one cannot help but wonder what it means to be a European theatre today. In other words, it also means questioning Europe and the European identity itself.»

Theatre has played a decisive role in creating the identity of European culture: from classical Greek theatre to the experience of Renaissance theatre, to commedia dell’arte, to the Spanish Siglo de Oro theatre, to Elizabethan drama, to the great flowering of bourgeois drama in its various forms, theatrical practices and dramaturgy have played a profound role in the definition of European society and community , drawing boundaries and characterizing elements. Longhi says: «If I sit in the theatre and experience a character named Irina or Hedda Gabler I don’t feel anything separate from myself, distant from me, despite the fact that I am aware that I belong to a different cultural system. This is because there is a kind of European glue. Let’s think about the extraordinary function that commedia performers had in creating a cultural imagery. One of the founding myths of modernity, Don Giovanni, experienced series of “journeys” through Europe that have strongly conditioned our way of understanding. Mythologically, Cadmus founds Thebes while searching for kidnapped Europa. So, there is a kind of kinship between the founding of Thebes and the mythology linked to the Labdacids, which has occupied so much of our theatre along with the idea in particular of a kidnapped Europe […] The oldest dramatic text that has come down to us is The Persians, which with an extraordinary invention of estrangement interrogates European identity seen through the eyes of the East.»

What remains of this immense historical baggage? What does it mean today to be a European theatre? What role can theatres play in contemporary European cultural dialectics? Longhi says: «We live in a moment when, even in light of the pandemic crisis, we belong to a global village where there are areas that have deep characteristics and ancient identities, yet we are all within a single reality that goes from China to New York. But it’s one thing to live in China, another to live in Milan, another to live in New York. Theatre plays a fundamental role in these reflections, and I believe that being a “Theatre of Europe” today means engaging in focusing on questions of this kind.»

Speaking of internationalization, the Festival moment in the new direction of the Piccolo represents for Longhi a fundamental crossroads.  In this case also, a gaze towards the future starts from the past experiences of the Piccolo, which already under the guidance of Escobar and Ronconi had accentuated its international dimension and vocation thanks to a series of events including the “Festival Teatro d’Europa.”

Interior, Teatro Strehler. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

Festivals being famously the strongest moments of dialogue with abroad, the new director plans to create and direct one, as he did with the “FESTIVAL VIE” during the recent years of his direction of ERT: «During a festival, in a short time a series of projects are carried out that facilitate foreign organizations in coming to us to see the Italian reality and make it possible for the Italian public to see what happens outside their country. Festivals are strong two-way crossing points, from the inside out and from the outside inwards. It is clear that the concept of the festival poses cost problems. We will have to hold discussions about this… In years when economies are precarious, like the years we are living now, I cannot say what space there is, but I would like to make one for the Piccolo, just as I would like to give space to dance.»

Inside the great lava flow that goes under the common label of “performance practices,” dance is probably today one of the most lively and interesting transformational faults. This has been demonstrated by the great names of the past such as Pina Bauch, and great names of the present, such as Dimitris Papaioannou, just to give some of the best known examples. Choreographic practices are today giving much food for thought on several fronts, including from the perspectives of the evolution of dramaturgy and directing. For Longhi it would be useful to consider, for example, the transformation, involution or crisis of the figure of the director through comparison with that of the choreographer. From choreography as well could come useful stimuli to comprehend dramaturgical practices. In this regard, he says: «The way our system is built, the world of dance and the world of prose – assuming it makes sense to talk about prose  (from my point of view it makes no sense to use the prose category to catalog a certain area of theatrical operation) constitute an unhealthy separation, while from the contamination you could have very strong stimuli. Even if I am not an expert, I am fascinated by the panorama of contemporary dance and that panorama must be kept in mind, explored, encouraged.»

Training of the public and actors

In Longhi’s reflections on the responsibilities that the future Piccolo Teatro di Milano will have to assume under his direction, the theme of the formation of the public is central, growing from his observation of the crisis in the demand for theatre that has characterized Italian reality for years: «A theatre like the Piccolo must also remain a leader and example with regard to theatrical education at both the national and international level». Rightly, Longhi doesn’t make it so much a problem of box office money flowing into one theatre rather than another. The crisis in demand inevitably leads him to consider the formation of the public. The training is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of theatre in Italy, not so much in relation to the education of artists, but rather with regard to the theatrical literacy of the country. Italy struggles to confront the matter of arts education in the broadest sense and theatrical education in particular. Those who work in the university, for example, know perfectly well that as regards the so-called humanistic sciences (which in themselves are considered at the tail end of the training that makes the work possible) theatrical studies are considered to be “children of a lesser god” compared to the more respected disciplines.

This is an area that should be studied carefully and seriously. The matter of the formation of the public, in fact, points to a broader problem: that of the difficulty of our country in conceiving theatre as an organic part of the cultural system. At best, we always tend to regard theatre as a recreational activity, of greater or lesser quality, while we struggle to recognize theatre the status of a cultural experience in a serious sense.  Longhi rightly says: «I recall that the theatre legislation provides specific support for joint projects between the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) and the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MiBACT). I believe that, today especially, it is very important to link creative processes to a conceptual design that contextualizes them within a broader system of thought and reflection, in which the creative process is only the tip of the iceberg. I like to think that the Piccolo Teatro can become, or go back to being, a crossroads of heterogeneous cultural experiences that are in dialogue with the scene, but that can also be perceived as external to the scene and find from time to time in the scene their limits, their conflicts or their springboard».

The theme of cultural planning, in Longhi’s vision of the future Piccolo, is intimately linked to that of scenic practice in the strictest sense: cultural planning and scenic practices should be in a dialogue creating constant synergy. This vision of theatre as part of a broader cultural dimension will represent a fundamental hub in Longhi’s direction, aimed at interfacing and aligning the activities of the Milanese center with other European theatrical experiments: «As I have often said, Italian theatre has nothing to envy in the theatre across the Alps, it is instead our own theatrical civilization, I believe, that belittles and scorns itself, thus existing in a state of anomaly in comparison with the theatrical cultures of other European countries. A “Theatre of Europe” such as the Piccolo will have to work seriously on this front too.»

Exterior, Teatro Studio Melato. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

In recent months it has become common to talk about Covid as a disease that affects the older sections of the population. With regard to discussions about education, however, we soon realize that this is true only from a strictly medical and physiological point of view. Parallel to this, there is a social illness which has arisen among young people, and it is extremely powerful. The younger generations are a category fiercely affected by this pandemic. When we talk about education and the pandemic, let us think about the situation of schools, universities, conservatories and theatre academies. How much of their educational experience do young people now have to give up? «Distance learning is not bad,” says Longhi. A chapter could be opened here which would need more room for reflection and to which I will therefore return elsewhere. However, to simplify the matter greatly, it is critical to much of the training experience that you “get out of the house” and that you meet with your peers. This is precisely what is missing now, we will see the consequences in 15-20 years, when the people who are being formed today will begin to hold critical positions, places of responsibility in society and in the world of work. Young people today are a group under enormous pressure at the same time that we are on the threshold of a new world, which will have young people as its protagonists. For this reason, even more today, the training of the public and the theatre professionals is at a critical juncture.»

In 1987, Strehler founded the “Scuola per attori” at the Piccolo, which is based in the Teatro Studio, today named after Luca Ronconi. Claudio Longhi has been involved in the training of actors for years. He has therefore no lack of reflection, and brings a clear perspective on the system of complex competences that an actor must possess today. This cannot be summed up simplistically as possessing technical knowledge, limited to theatrical and performing practices. Instead, it is an orientation that keeps expanding and includes more generally a reflection on how the actor approaches society and on what role the actor must play in contemporary society, starting from technical training. It is a discourse that involves not only the actors, but all the professions of the theatre; Longhi, over the years, has always given ample space and recognition to the theatrical function of the “dramaturg” who, as a figure of mediation in cultural dialogue, is directly connected to the very way in which theatrical practices are oriented within society.

Longhi greatly esteems Carmelo Rifici, the current director of the “Scuola per attori” at the Piccolo, and with him he intends to collaborate in a strong synergy: «I believe it is necessary for the “Scuola del Piccolo” to exist in autonomy, within a horizon and as an artistic project that is the one that I will try to focus on and pursue in the coming years. Once I have drawn up its artistic and cultural parameters, it will be my responsibility to ensure the good functioning and effectiveness of the training trajectory of the actors and beyond. It will be important not to forget to constantly question how young people who leave that training  can find a place in the world of theatrical work, with a secure place on the stage, within the horizon of meaning of the artistic and cultural project of the Piccolo di Milano. […] I always like to act in concert and in dialogue with the various institutions of the real situations in which I find myself operating, giving priority to internal concerns, but also in dialogue with external ones. I have often, for example, worked with or admired young people who trained at the “Paolo Grassi” in Milan. I am therefore pleased that we will be able to develop a dialogue with that School, while respecting each other’s specific characteristics.»

As has already been mentioned, in addition to having a career as director and director of National Theatres and Organizations, Claudio Longhi is also a university professor at the historic “DAMS – Discipline delle Arti della Musica e dello Spettacolo” in Bologna. With a view to enhancing the relationship between research, study, theoretical reflection, training and artistic practices, Longhi aims to further expand the activity of the Archive of Milanese theatre: «At the Piccolo I went there for the first time to see one of the many exhibits concerning Strehler’s The Servant of Two Masters. Later the Piccolo was a fundamental part of my artistic professional training. I attended it first as a student. The last part of my apprenticeship with Ronconi was at the Piccolo, in the late 90s, when he was still director of the Turin theatre. I then ended my collaboration with the Master when Luca was appointed Artistic Consultant of the Piccolo. This theatre is therefore for me a place of the heart as well as a professional one. I fully agree about the need to create a strong combination of theory and practice. That is my own history and I’ve been trying to do it all my life. The Piccolo’s archive is not easy to access. I repeat, I also visited it when I did my thesis on Ronconi, to consult the folder there on Furioso. Having now attended Italian theatres for a long time, I think the Piccolo probably remains the theatre that has one of the best organized historical archives compared to other Italian state theatres. I will take care to strengthen it further and investments will certainly have to be made in this direction as well.»

Interior, Teatro Studio Melato. Photo: Masiar Pasquali. Courtesy of the Press Office of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

One last aspect, although not the least, concerns the governance of the theatre. As is well known, the director of a building may delegate artistic or administrative functions to a person he or she trusts. This happens and has often happened in the past, not only at the Piccolo in Milan. But, as already mentioned, Longhi seems to want to take a different path in this regard: «One issue which I have already begun to discuss with the Board of Directors is governance. I wonder, in particular, whether it is still appropriate to support the director with an artistic consultant in the strict sense or whether it makes more sense to envisage a system of artists and residents with the support of a dramaturg colleague who can guide the choices or otherwise act as a stimulus for the choices to be made. […] In any case, there must be an internal confrontation with the structure of the theatre, which has not yet taken place. We are faced with a historical moment in which, also out of a sense of responsibility towards the operators of the production, the commitments made must be kept.  There are already organized projects that due to Covid have not been realized this season and that will have to be scheduled for the next.»  In light of these statements, it therefore seems premature to name one or more artists who may support Longhi in the programming and management of the activities of the famous theatre.

Recent experience at ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro

With the appointment of Longhi to the Piccolo, the Emilia Romagna Teatro loses its leadership, on which it counted for the next few years, and finds itself without a director during this strange 2020-21 season, still threatened by Covid. If, in fact, after the resignation of Sergio Escobar, the crisis in which the Piccolo had fallen during the summer has ended positively, a complex phase is now opening to identify Longhi’s successor at the head of the numerous theatres of Modena, Bologna, Cesena, Castelfranco Emilia and Vignola, spaces in which the various activities of the Foundation are carried out.[9]

It will not be easy, in fact, to find a figure who measures up, a personality with a strong international profile, who knows how to build up the legacy of an innovative and distinguished artistic tradition, capable of coordinating theatrical seasons, international projects and festivals and the multiple training activities carried out in recent years by ERT. Among the most likely names are that of the Cesenate director Romeo Castellucci, founder of societas Raffaello Sanzio, an artist of clear world renown, that of the director Antonio Latella, who has many years of experience in organizing the Venice Biennale, also of national and European renown and with an excellent knowledge of ERT, that of Silvia Bottiroli, a leading figure in the world of theatre, for years head of the Santarcangelo Festival, distinguished in her capacity for coordination and organization.

In the four-year term 2017-2020 during which he was head of the Foundation, Longhi carried out on several fronts a high-profile work, demonstrating that he knows how to interact with the major cultural and institutional establishments, both on the ground and at a national and international level, thus allowing ERT to be recognized in the ministerial ranking as “the first Italian theatrical establishment.” The projects carried out by the participating theatres in recent years have involved and mingled Bolognese and Modena society in a vital and pervasive way and the European projects previously inaugurated have gained new life and momentum.[10] The idea of theatre understood as “agora” and a powerful look at Europe and the world have characterized the theatrical seasons and the international theatre festival “Vie”, which he directed.[11]

Teatro Arena del Sole di Bologna (1904). Photo: ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro. Courtesy of the Press Office of the ERT.

An important and innovative part of the most recent activity of Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione has been theatrical training. The projects, aimed at training young actors “on the ground,” offer them opportunities for further training and professionalization. Since 2015, of particular importance has been the “Iolanda Gazzerro Theatre School, permanent workshop for the actor,” directed by Claudio Longhi, in which specialization courses for actors and dramaturgs are offered.

The attention to training at ERT is also indicated by the intensive programming of Teatro ragazzi. Its production and hospitality activity is rich with proposals for young people and teachers, aimed at developing suitable tools for reading the languages of the theatre: workshops, seminars, internships, conferences have been interspersed with shows, developing new perspectives and more conscious spectatorship. In recent years, tradition and innovation, shows and school have pollenated each other, giving life to an intense relationship with the public, as is appropriate for an idea of culture that builds communities.

According to Longhi, however, it is too early to take stock of his experience as artistic director at the Emilia Romagna Teatro: «We should look at this period from a little distance; I still feel too involved. I therefore cannot yet make an objective judgment. These days at the end of November I am working on the construction of the ERT 2021 budget, so I find it difficult to consider my management a closed experience». Yet, if it is too early to take stock, in the course of this directorship there have been important changes at ERT, which have taken place as the result of a path toward identity and cultural policy that has remained essentially true to itself.

As mentioned, ERT is famously a multifaceted and complex theatrical entity, strongly rooted within the region – or rather, it reflects different regional characteristics, since it organizes the activity of theatres scattered in several cities of Emilia Romagna – but also able to interact with the outside world, at an international level. More than anything else, it is this dual orientation, a kind of trademark, that has made it possible for Longhi’s path to cross in past years with that of the Foundation. At a national level, Emilia Romagna Teatro had probably the orientation best adapted to a certain way of thinking about the theatrical experience. For example, the many participating theatre projects carried out were created not by chance at ERT, but emerged due to the very orientation of that structure. Similarly, at the international level, the Festival Vie has proved to be a cohesive space-time reservoir, thanks to which important cultural and theatrical exchanges have been possible.

Longhi guided ERT at a time of strong growth: «I like to think of the transformation that ERT had in the aftermath of the 2014 reform, the reform involving the establishment of national theatres, as a teenage phase in which, just as happens to adolescents who grow up very quickly, ERT made a rather naive quantitative leap in the development of its production structure. This development started as early as 2015, that is, before I took office as director, and it continued into the years of my management». Such strong and fast growth created both organizational and structural problems. Longhi was able to accommodate these changes, helping the structure define itself at a time when it had taken a leap forward to adapt to the reform itself, which called for more and more production. But he has also encouraged the Foundation to implement a radical “change of skin:” many top ERT figures have retired in the years of his management. A very rapid generational renewal has therefore taken place.  Again, Longhi was able to lead the Foundation so that it did not lose its center of gravity, remaining within its vocation: «I never had the ambition to give tears or to mark deep discontinuities, I simply tried to interpret, according to my sensitivity, a function and the address that ERT had manifested before me. The results achieved are certainly not thanks to me, but to those who have spoken before me. It is they who have created the conditions to achieve their recent goals».

On the other hand, there were many innovations carried out during Longhi’s of ERT. Among these, leading examples were the establishment of the Permanent Company, the Courses in Dramaturgy and the recently realized focus in the field of training due to its internationalization (a sort of roundup of honored authors). Think, for example, of the South American project that marks the current 2020-21 season, with the Courses of Calderon Blanco, those of Lisandro Rodriguez, that are being held right now, or the course of the Brazilian Antonio Araujo (which was supposed to take place this season, but which unfortunately will not materialize due to the Covid emergency). Think, also, of the many dialogues organized with the students of the DAMS from the University of Bologna.

Teatro Storchi di Modena – Emilia Romagna Teatro. Photo: Futura Tittaferrante. Courtesy of the Press Office of the ERT.

Many things have been undertaken, which are stimuli, possibilities, pathways that have been opened thanks to Longhi. Those who take on the direction of ERT after him, can decide to continue going in the same direction, adjust it or abandon it to head somewhere else. Longhi comments on this: «I am not fond of the idea that what I have done must necessarily continue after me. In my direction, I have tried to interpret what seemed to me to be a political mandate, to act as a cultural guardian vis-à-vis the city and regional context. I think it’s important to clarify your goals and look for your own way of staying faithful to those goals. […] I thank the entire ERT team for the priceless and wonderful way in which they have been close to me in recent years, sometimes with great momentum and passion, sometimes with difficulty, even with divergent points of view, but always in a climate of collaboration, constructiveness and adherence to a cultural project that I could hardly have wished to go better. I also thank those who accompanied me institutionally, President Giuliano Barbolini, who was a valuable road companion in very complicated moments, from the important external and internal structural moves, to the complicated current management of emergencies related to the pandemic.»

Claudio Longhi must be thanked for what he has done in recent years at ERT and wished a heartfelt “good luck” for the exciting and difficult challenge that awaits him at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

Daniele Vianello, vice-president EASTAP (European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance), is Professor at the University of Calabria (UniCal), where he teaches Performance History, Drama, and Staging Technique and Theory. He has also taught at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (2002-2008) and at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2015-2016). He is member of the editorial board of European Journal of Theatre and Performance, contributing editor and member of the advisory board of European Stages, Olhares, Biblioteca Teatrale, Rivista di letteratura teatrale, among others. His publications, centered mainly on Renaissance and contemporary theatre, include L’arte del buffone (Bulzoni, 2005) and Commedia dell’Arte in Context (eds. Balme, Vescovo, Vianello, Cambridge University Press, 2018). He worked for several years with the Teatro di Roma (Union des Teatres de l’Europe), where he assisted Italian and foreign stage directors (including such figures as Eimuntas Nekrošius).

[1] Concerning the history of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, reference should be made, in particular, to G. Guazzotti, Teoria e realtà del Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Turin: Einaudi, 1965); L. Cavaglieri (ed.), Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano, (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002); A. Benedetto, Brecht e il Piccolo Teatro: una questione di diritti  (Milan: Mimesis, 2016); S. Locatelli, P. Provenzano (eds.), Mario Apollonio e il Piccolo teatro di Milano. Testi e documenti  (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2017). From a critical point of view, the pages that Claudio Meldolesi dedicates to the development of Grassi and Strehler and to the foundation of the Piccolo Teatro remain essential in many respects: cf. Id., Fondamenti del teatro italiano  (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984).

[2] Among Longhi’s main publications, see the volumes La drammaturgia del Novecento Tra romanzo e montaggio (Pisa: Pacini, 1999), Tra moderno e postmoderno. La drammaturgia del Novecento (Pisa: Pacini, 2001),  L’Orlando furioso” di Ariosto-Sanguineti per Luca Ronconi (Pisa: ETS, 2006).

[3] On January 26, 1947 the Municipal Council announced the establishment of the “Piccolo teatro della città di Milano,” placing its location in the Palazzo Carmagnola in via Rovello n. 2. As is well known, the name “Piccolo” refers to the small size of the theatre.

[4] This interview took place on November 15, 2020. I have been authorized by Claudio Longhi to publish the main parts of it here, using «quotation marks» to indicate his exact words.

[5] On this subject see the recent study by S. Locatelli, Teatro pubblico servizio? Studi sui primordi del Piccolo Teatro e sul sistema teatrale italiano (Milan: Centro delle Arti, 2015).

[6] M. Apollonio, P. Grassi, G. Strehler, V. Tosi, “Lettera programmatica per il Piccolo Teatro della città di Milano”, in Il Politecnico, January-March 1947, n. 35, p. 68. See S. Locatelli, P. Provenzano (eds.), Mario Apollonio and the Piccolo teatro di Milano. Testi e documenti (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2017), pp. 115-28. “Politecnico” was one of the main magazines (first weekly, then monthly) of politics and culture that came out in Italy in the immediate post-war period, founded by the writer Elio Vittorini, and published in Milan for Einaudi from September 1945 (year I, n. 1) to December 1947 (n. 39).

[7] Fabrizio Cruciani, Teatro nel Novecento: registi pedagoghi e comunità teatrali nel XX secolo (Rome: Sansoni, 1985).

[8] C. Meldolesi, Fra Totò e Gadda: invenzioni sprecate del teatro italiano  (Rome: Buzoni, 1987).

[9] Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione was founded in 1977 as a center of theatrical production, with the intention of supporting the prose theatre in the region. Its production venues are the Teatro Storchi and the Teatro delle Passioni in Modena, the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna and the Teatro Bonci in Cesena. By decree of the Emilian Municipality and ATER (Emilia Romagna Theatre Association), ERT became an Autonomous Body in 1991, and then became a Foundation in 2001. In 2015 it was recognized as a National Theatre and, in addition to the prose sector, also dedicates space to dance.

[10] Particularly worth mentioning here is the ”Prospero Project,” a European cultural network inaugurated in 2007 and aimed at developing intercultural dialogue through the mobility of artists or technicians and the exchange and dissemination of cultural productions. The project was conceived with the aim of promoting the circulation of works and artists, supporting a common cultural heritage and at the same time encouraging intercultural dialogue and promoting different cultures, contributing to the development of European citizenship. The project includes the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione (Italy), the Théâtre Nationale de Bretagne (France), the Théâtre de la Place (Belgium), the Centro Cultural de Belém (Portugal), the Tutkivan Teattertyön Keskus (Finland), the Schaubühne (Germany).

[11] Inaugurated in 2005 by the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, the “Vie Festival” takes place in Bologna, Modena, Carpi and Vignola. The event is dedicated to the contemporary scene and its reflection in the theatrical forms and artistic expressions that gravitate around theatre, dance, performance and music, trying to capture its newest manifestations, with the aim of drawing the map of a theatrical territory – international and national – and developing its protagonists.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Kalina Stefanova

You may assume I mean back to the time before the pandemic. No. Back just few months ago – to the first part of September 2020, when the Pilsen International Theatre Festival took place. Not digitally or outdoors, neither in a shortened edition or a mixed digital-meets-real one. It transpired in a fully real, traditional manner, from the 10^th till the 14^th of September – the only large-scale festival in Eastern Europe that dared to undertake such a significant step this summer.

Importantly, the conditions at that moment happened to be on its side too. When I arrived in Pilsen two days before the opening, the city was declared mask-free on its municipality site, since the virus cases were very limited, and all indoor events had already been given a green-light. So what a delight it was indeed to see the faces of the colleagues, shake hands, and get freely together. The next day, though, the cases in Prague rose and, when the Festival started, the masks were back, yet only few other changes followed.

Of course, the Festival was not miraculously spared by the general situation. Several months earlier, 887, the one-man show of Robert Lepage, that was scheduled to open the event and present for the first time to the Czech viewers the work of the Quebecois theatre wizard, was cancelled.  Yet during the Festival itself only two more shows got cancelled and they were immediately replaced. Ironically, one of them was entitled Tonight’s Performance is Cancelled – a production of the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, directed by Jiří Havelka, the Czech master of a documentary-based, yet not verbatim theatre. Frequent entries to the festival’s previous editions, his shows invariably manage to present our reality at once stunningly authentic, yet, from one point on, totally different – as on those drawings where all of a sudden we see something else there; something which makes them eye-opening in regard to our own presence in it. So the cancellation of this very show left a real void. However, Havelka did take part in the Festival, as a guest-speaker at a discussion devoted to the Czech-Slovak Theatre century, so one could at least listen to his first-hand account of the creation of Tonight’s Performance is Cancelled.

With the exception of these few last-minute changes, everything else went as planned and, were it not for the masks, one could easily even forget the pandemic. For in the theatres no seats were removed or left empty. Some of the halls were chamber and one of the shows took place with the audience on stage, i.e., as usually in such cases, the ambiance was really cozy, especially given it was really packed, as were most of the other shows too.

So, although I’ve never let the critic in me oust the ever enchanted by the theatre viewer, this time I relished as never before the mere sitting in the dark and feeling a part of the warm and pulsating body of the audience. After months on the mirage-like digital theatre diet, letting the energy of the live communion with all these people around me and on stage run through all my being was like finding oneself in an oasis. And I have to admit I was on the verge of entirely abandoning my critic’s hat and succumbing to the delight of merely experiencing theatre. I was ready to forgive any of its imperfections.

I didn’t need, though, since, as usual, the program of the Festival was selected with an impeccable taste. And also because one of the main treads that went through it was exactly an outright hats-off to the theatre art.

The Triumph of Love written and directed by Olivier Py. Photo: Avignon Festival.

A marvelous manifestation of this attitude was the French The Triumph of Love, a production of the Avignon Theatre Festival, directed by its head, Olivier Py, who has also written the text (in Alexandrines), based on the Grimm brothers’ Maid Maleen, and composed the music too.

The story in The Triumph of Love is rendered in something like an operetta style to the accompaniment of live music, played by a cast of four actors themselves. The stage is markedly small, with sets painted in an old-fashioned manner and a piano in front of it, underneath the proscenium. The actors shuttle up and down between the stage and the hall, while either relating the story en-face to the audience or enacting it with the implied understanding that we have to use our imagination to build up the rest of the picture. No obvious presence of the ubiquitous technique interferes in this communication. The actors are impressively versatile: some play two instruments and all of them act, dance and do mime acts equally well. All this brings a nostalgic feel, as if we are back in time and a traveling company has visited our town to play for us.

The Triumph of Love written and directed by Olivier Py. Photo: Avignon Festival.

The Triumph of Love exudes child-like pure innocence and disarming naivety, and feels like a refreshing splash of water on one’s face in the morning, transporting us far away from infantility, another ubiquitous trend today, as if it were just a nightmare.

There is one element in the show, though – photographs from war disasters – that, appearing from time to time on stage, reminds us that the nightmares of today are all too real and that it is this deliberately and brilliantly old-fashioned theatre that is more like a dream. Yet this is only an underlying streak and, maybe again because of the pandemic situation and the lucky crack in it that the Festival happened to be, I had a feeling that The Triumph of Love could equally be entitled The Triumph of Theatre.

Don Quixote, directed by Jan Mikulášek. Photo: Pilsen Festival.

The most impressive of the Czech drama productions (the Festival presents a large selection of the traditionally excellent local puppet theatre too) was Don Quixote, directed by one of the most idiosyncratic directors, Jan Mikulášek, at the Goose on a String Theatre in Brno. It has nothing to do with the literary plot of Cervantes, yet has captured the essence of the spirit of his book as an existential take on life and life’s theatre, equally valid for today.

The action takes place in a small TV studio where guests are invited to discuss Don Quixote and other themes. The first discussion is so to speak fuller-scale and the audience is presented with hilariously funny archetypical characters in the face of the guests. The next scenes get shorter and shorter, while the semi-circular stage rotates, changing the array of guests, and, as if in the maddening tempo of TV and of contemporary life on the whole, it becomes something like a merry-go-round where sketches of recognizable and very funny characters dash before us.

Since the audience is on stage too, the feeling is like watching through a gigantic kaleidoscope. Only, instead of beautiful figures, in there is a set of changing distorted mirrors with caricatures of human types and behaviours – epitomes of stupidity, pretentiousness, emptiness, ambition, etc.

At the center of all this is a TV host who in the beginning seems as a part of the whole craze; then all of a sudden he literally stops the swirl and shows a photo of a woman, whom he met when they were young, pleading to her to call him. He does this several times and it is always like a stop-motion, as if putting on hold the rest of the action – and of the whole surrounding world –and opening the door to a parallel universe where things are very different and where purity, longing, and love still reside and make sense. When the woman does eventually call and even shows up in the TV studio, though, she turns out to be already very different from his memory/dream and this parallel universe loses its allure at least for a while.

Don Quixote, directed by Jan Mikulášek. Photo: Pilsen Festival.

Nevertheless, it is this character, played brilliantly by Dušan Hřebíček, that manages to be not just a counterpoint to the rest but sort of a gravity center that invisibly holds everything together, not letting the increasingly centrifugal motion (in figurative terms) – another ubiquitous feature of our time – make his surrounding world break into pieces and fly away. Visually an antidote to the classical image of Don Qixote, more like Sancho Pansa actually, it is this character who brings in the Don Quixotian essence here, the ability to preserve purity in the midst of a degraded humanity that is already taken as a norm. Or maybe each of the other characters too have such stop-motion moments when from two-dimensional caricatures they become human beings with preserved deep down personal gravity center; only this remains invisible to us…

I have seen several productions of Mikulášek, a master of grotesque and refined hyper-stylization, yet here as never before I felt a much more palpable presence of a kernel of humanity deep down in his work – something which made to me this Don Qixote of his equally funny and moving, very moving.

I Am the State, by Vincent Macaigne, directed by Jan Mikulášek. Photo: Prague National Theatre.

Also directed by Mikulášek was the production that opened the Festival: I Am the State of the National Theatre – Drama Section in Prague, which was performed just two days after its premiere. It set the tone on a very topical note: the apocalyptic state of the world.

The very opposite of Don Quixote’s compactness, it spills over the stage from the very start, donning briefly the shape of something like a popular-music concert. Assured by sort of an MC that we are in the right place at the right time, the audience is invited to enjoy themselves, stand up, dance and be happy despite the very difficult times. The “have-fun” mantra valid until just before the pandemic – a mantra which has almost managed to substitute or even displace the “be-good” principle – here resounds ever more absurdly. For the time when the action takes place is in a not-so-far and not-so-impossibly dystopian future, when, as we are informed, 52 countries have disappeared, the natural resources have been exhausted, there is little water left and everyone has lost a close one. So the audience is invited to keep a minute of silence for Italy, Sweden, etc, and, after each such minute, a popular song from the respective country is played by a band in corona-like protective costumes – as a requiem; and also lest we forget the entertainment is what we are here for.

The play – by Vincent Macaigne, a French actor and director – is from then on a mish-mash of references to politics, TV and the entertainment industry, the reality formats, myths, etc. rather loosely interwoven into an absurd fable that can easily finish much earlier than it does. And even the talent of Mikulášek, helped with a great cast, doesn’t seem to be able to put reins to all this and compensate for the feeling of a lost measure. At the same time, the many-ness is so typical a trait of our time, and so much at the core of the problems of our world and of the one the play and the show depict, that the spilling of the show over and over again could be taken as part of its overt political and allegorical nature.

I Am the State reminded me of a show I saw back in 2002, in Egypt, at the Festival of Experimental theatre: The Al-Hamlet Summit, directed by Sulaiman Al-Bassam, which depicted a world so much like ours today, yet back then it seemed too far-fetched. I do hope I’m the State does not turn out to be that prophetic 20 years from now. Or rather, I do hope that it helps at least in its own way that we do not get our world into such a state as the show warns us we could very well do.

The Beggar’s Opera, by Václav Havel, directed by Hana Burešová. Photo: Brno City Theatre.

The Festival’s closing production – The Beggar’s Opera by Václav Havel, directed by Hana Burešová at the Brno City Theatre – was also with political implications. Even more concretely: with “contemporary relevance to our putrid Babišland,” as one of the Czech critics, Vladimir Just, quoted in the Festival’s program, found it.

Yet here this is not on the direct-statements level but is more of a subdued undertone embedded in a playful, overtly this-is-theatre traditional frame. From the deliberately uniform sets that after just few changes fit the different scenes and the casting of one and the same actress in the roles of the two rivals’ wives, again with a slight change in the costume and appearance only, to the deliberate clichés in the acting style and costumes, and the direct reverences to the audience. So this production of The Beggar’s Opera gathers in a very fine way the politically topical with, once again, a celebration-of-the-theatre approach.

The latter came as a fitting continuation of the brief closing ceremony held just before the show and comprising several very short speeches and a long standing ovation for the star of the evening – the Festival’s team. “It was extremely hard to organize the Festival,” said Jan Burian, its director. “There were all sorts of complications. If it were not for the great organizing team, it would not have been possible for the Festival to be pulled off. All the more we need to acknowledge their work.”

The Pilsen Festival has never been a pompous and ostentatiously glitzy event. Quite the opposite: refraining from any fanfares and investing its energy exclusively in assuring high quality and professionalism has been its trademark for the nearly three decades of its existence. Maybe this tradition of not wasting any energy into aside and façade things helped it manage to take place during this so theatre-unfriendly year too.

Of course, the unwavering support of the Pilsen region and municipality has also been an important factor. Pilsen’s mayor of several mandates, Martin Baxa, who throughout the years could often be spotted among the audience of the Festival’s evening and weekend shows, was very kind to dwell on this year’s special edition, in an exchange of correspondence after the event. “The general prosperity and commitment to arts in our city is a very important chapter of the city’s development strategy”, he wrote. “Since 2001, when the Pilsen City Council approved the so-called Basic Document on the Cultural Policy (one of the first cultural strategies in the Czech Republic), Pilsen has been applying a systematic approach to the support of culture in the city, including the subsidy policy. … culture is a significant and irreplaceable part of the citizens’ lives and …lasting and consistent care for culture is one of the basic standards of human society and helps its development. This systemic concept was among the reasons Pilsen was awarded the prestigious European Capital of Culture 2015 title.”

It was exactly back then, when Pilsen opened a new, large theatre, with two stages, thus becoming one of the very few Eastern European cities who have managed to gain such an asset during the last five years. And it is in this theatre where the Festival headquarters have since then been residing and where a lot of its shows get presented, along with four more theatres in the city.

“Because we consider the International Theatre Festival the most significant international cultural event with a long tradition in our city (together with the Skupa’s Pilsen international festival of puppet and alternative theatre), we decided to organize it this year too, in compliance with the current hygiene measures,” wrote Mr. Baxa.

And one more motivation which was of crucial importance for the final decision for the Festival to take place, naturally coming from its head, Jan Burian, who is also head of the Czech National Theatre in Prague: “We have to preserve the energy of the theatre alive,” he said. “We know people can live without many things. People can live even in a prison. Yet, we should not let people live without the energy of the theatre.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a line by William Hazlitt has been hovering in my mind: “Whenever there’s a playhouse, the world will not go on amiss,” he wrote about 200 years ago, in his essay On Actors and Acting.  Have we indeed entirely lost the right path? Where did we do so?

With its 28th edition, unique for 2020, The Pilsen International Theatre Festival courageously tried to prove we have not.

Kalina Stefanova, PhD, is author/editor of 14 books (12 books on theatre, four of which in English, launched in New York, London and Wroclaw; and two fiction ones, published in nine countries, in two editions in China). She has been a Visiting Scholar/Lecturer world-wide. In 2016 she had the privilege to be appointed as Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University as well as a Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She served as IATC’s Vice President for two mandates (2001/2006) and as its Director Symposia for two mandates (2006-2010). Since 2001 she has been regularly serving as an evaluation expert for cultural and educational programs of the European Commission. Currently she is Full Professor of Theatre and Criticism at NATFA, Sofia.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By María Bastianes

Following the critical and commercial success of Simon Stone’s remarkable reworking of Yerma (2016) with Billie Piper in the eponymous lead role, the Young Vic, in Kwame Kwei-Armah’s second year as artist director, returns to the work of Federico García Lorca. Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre) brings on board two heavyweights of the English-speaking stage – Irish playwright Marina Carr and South-African director Yaël Farber – to revive Lorca’s first breakthrough, the only one of his plays to have been translated for the Anglophone stage in his lifetime. The 1935 debut English-language production of Blood Wedding in New York received a lukewarm reception at best, but Lorca is now the best-known Spanish playwright in the UK and US, a posthumous canonisation inextricably linked to his execution by the Francoists at the onset of the Civil War.  

It is easy to see how Lorca became a martyr, but even his most realistic and best-loved plays—Blood Wedding, Yerma or The House of Bernarda Alba—pose some very difficult challenges for the contemporary stage. Dense poetic language and a carefully elaborated tragic structure can easily lapse into the default setting of stage(d) melodrama. Throughout its stage history, Blood Wedding has been understood in relation to his earlier poetic collection Gypsy Ballads (Romancero Gitano) and to the world it describes, despite Lorca rejecting this association. Based on a historical crime that had taken places some years previously in Almeria (where Lorca briefly studied when he was a child), Blood Wedding contains no reference to gypsies.  

The Young Vic production departs from a promising premise: to infuse the Andalusian landscape with the ethos and ambience of rural Ireland often found in Carr’s own plays. The lyricism of the Irish theatrical tradition is a good match for Lorca’s writing-style (as the programme notes, the Granadan poet admired and was probably influenced by John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea when writing Blood Wedding). To employ acidic humour, another hallmark of many Irish authors (Carr included), might also have supplied an antidote against the risk of lapsing into melodrama.

 The adaptation of Blood Wedding returns to recurring concerns in Carr’s oeuvre: vicious cycles of competition between female characters (especially within the family), women entangled in relationships with unequal power relations, in which they are subjugated by unloving partners and an asphyxiating social environment. In the case at hand, the character of the Bride is afforded a newfound prominence. Trapped amongst the blood feuds between two families, she is almost forced to marry the Groom and is animalized by her future mother-in-law (the first time the characters meet, the younger woman complains of the older one examining her body as if she were a heifer at the mart). Victim of the violence of her own father, her groom and even her beloved Leonardo, the real aspiration of Carr’s Bride is to be free.  

The rural Irish atmosphere is replicated on and through Susan Hilferty’s sets designed for an in-the-round thrust stage and comprised of a wooden floor and items of humble furniture and objects (there is also a predominance of wood in the props), that the actors place and remove during the performance, often through choreographed movements. At the rear, a platform that can be moved to redefine the stage helps to demarcate different spaces (it is used most spectacularly as an inclined plane from where the Bride and Leonardo descend to the floor as they elope together after fleeing the Groom and his family in the midst of the Wedding). The mise-en-scene also provides room for more ludic and quasi-oneiric scenes. Hence, for example, the use of a flying device to re–enact Leonardo’s gallop around the stage.   

Carr introduces transitions with the Moon character between scenes, allowing the symbolic and poetic elements to be present from the outset, instead of concentrating them in the third and final Act as in Lorca’s original text. The touching voice of Thalissa Teixeira, cast as the Moon, is a recurring and mesmerizing presence in these interpolations. The majority of her lines originate in Lorca’s play (she sings for instance, the Lullaby of the Big Horse and the epithalamium), although it is also possible to identify other pieces by the author such as a fragment in Spanish from the Sleepwalking Ballad (Romance sonámbulo). Carr condenses in the sole figure of the Weaver Lorca’s more realistic character of the Neighbour and the allegorical figures of the Old Beggar (Death) and the three little girls who, like the three Fates, ask the yarn about what awaits the lovers.

Roger Jean Nsengiyumva and Faaiz Mbelizi. Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, adapted by Marina Carr, directed by Yaël Farber. Photo: Marc Brenner.

Natasha Chiver’s lighting design reinforces this division between two worlds: warm light is employed for the more realistic moments, matching the wooden sets, and cold light is typically reserved for the symbolic and lyrical passages. The production opens with the striking image of the Mother kneeling on the floor, cleaning in half-darkness a spot of something that could perhaps be blood, an image that is revisited with circular symmetry at the denouement as the Mother and the Wife of Leonardo wash away the blood of the dead bodies. Following this silent prelude, the sprightly initial dialogue between the Groom and the Mother provides an ideal showcase for Olwen Fouéré’s gifts as a performer (I found myself unable to take my eyes off this austere and sour matriarch any time she was on stage).  

As the play unfolds, the production was unable to maintain this intensity. Although it picks up on many of the play’s original themes, there is an unfortunate tendency by both Carr and Farber to make explicit what is only subtly intimated by Lorca. As a result, characters and actions alike are simplified and become more Manichean. An increased emphasis on the feud between the warring families provides space for issues not always recognised in earlier productions such as the greed of the Father of the Bride and the “financial problems” of Leonardo  (Paula Ortiz’ 2015 cinematic adaptation, La Novia bypasses completely the fact that the Bride and Leonardo were unable to marry in part at least because of his lack of lands and material possessions). Conversely, however, Carr plays down the importance of the fatal and inescapable passion that links the lovers. What Leonardo is after in this version is not getting the Bride but offending the Groom. As a result, any sexual tension is lost in the mix, no matter how many times the hyper–masculinized Gavin Drea’s Leonardo takes off his shirt during the show. This was a far—and, for this spectator at least—disappointing cry from the electrifying, erotically charged atmosphere that Farber brought to her 2012 production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The sensual dialogue between the Bride and Leonardo after they run away from the Wedding, one of the original play highlights, is rendered in a lacklustre and, quite frankly, dull manner here. An absence of tension in general provides one explanation as to why even the most spectacular moments of the show (e.g. Leonardo’s aforementioned galloping or the rain of green leaves falling from above at the end) failed to connect with auditorium.  

Listening to Aoife Duffin’s Bride constantly evoking the full name of Leonardo Felix as a way of drawing attention to the hates between families, reminiscent of the declamatory style of a Mexican soap opera, did little to alleviate the situation. Neither was I convinced by the new ending of the play, in which the Bride is surrounded and threatened by all of the characters, before being killed by the Mother. An arguably worse fate befalls Lorca’s Bride whose transgressions are not punished by the knife but instead by the icy indifference of her “not to be” mother-in-law. The dramatic fight to death between Gavin Drea (Leonardo) and David Walmsley (Groom) unwittingly provoked laughter amongst some members of the audience. The actors ought not to be held to account: it is a nigh on impossible task to reciprocally kill each other in an ostensibly realistic scene (perhaps that’s the reason why the action occurs off stage in Lorca’s play).  

Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, adapted by Marina Carr, directed by Yaël Farber. Photo: Marc Brenner.

These were, however, relatively minor misgivings in relation to what I would content to be the most unfortunate characteristic of this reworking: the use (and abuse) of a dangerous cliché. The image of the gypsy as an avatar of some mythical Irish essence (more ancient, free and connected with nature) is a minor recurring motif in many of Carr’s plays, usually linked with a specific model of femininity. It is, for example, in place in her play that will be staged as part of the Young Vic’s next season: Portia Coughlan. The objective appears to be to reconceptualise and revendicate the figure of the gypsy as an “other,” but, even with the best intentions, there is the risk of falling into the trap of reifying cliché, of trading in essentialist generalisations. The risk is even bigger if the cliché occupies a central place in the play, as is clearly the case in this production of Blood Wedding. The Bride’s thirst for freedom is inherited from her ancestors, and the character belongs to a lineage of “mischievous,” “unruly” women. Her mother was stoned alive and hung, seemingly for her behaviour with men, whilst her gypsy grandmother, La Manchita, was, we are told, chased before finally committing suicide by riding off a cliff on her horse. Carr’s version, alongside her comments in the programme notes, conflates Moors and gypsies. The dramatist speaks of “the annihilation of identity and the psychic wound of colonisation” in Ireland and the Spanish “reconquest of the land from the moor.” This reflexion on the dynamic of oppressors and oppressed, victims and persecutors includes also a reference to Lorca’s murder. Universalising suffering and oppression runs the danger of underplaying and trivialising the specificities underpinning instances of cultural or political oppression.   

Gypsies and Moors also play a privileged role in the antiquated romantic idea(l) of Spain, as an exotic place of passion and wonder. A similar complaint can be made about the foregrounding of the Catholic devotion of the characters: as a wedding present the Mother gives to the Bride not only the not very chaste silk stockings that appear in Lorca’s play, but also, and paradoxically a pearly rosary blessed by the Black Madonna of Montserrat. The lack of care in the use of Spanish in the production does not help. La Manchita (literally ‘the little stain’), is a ludicrous nickname for a person (is it a veiled homage to the Don Quixote of La Mancha or a reference to the reputation of the character?). Sometimes the Moon sings in Spanish, but instead of the original text what we hear is a translation of the translation in English, and the result of this double displacement doesn’t always sound natural. That is what happens for instance with the fragment of the Sleepwalking Ballad, one of the most popular poems from the Gypsy Ballads, often learnt by heart by school students in Spain. Although non-Spanish speakers will not notice this linguistic slippage, Thalissa Teixeira’s task would have been made much easier if she had been left to sing the original verses, instead of a translation that lacks rhythmic meter and accent.  

Ethical qualms aside, playing with clichés is symptomatic of a production that amounts to far less than the sum of its parts: Carr and Farber’s track record boded well, as did the talent of the actors treading the boards of the Young Vic, but this underwhelming and sometimes insensitive production proved incapable of transforming its considerable potential into a moving and memorable night at the theatre.  

This review is part of “EStages.UK. Spanish Theatre in the UK (1982-2019)”, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curiegrant agreement No 797942.

María Bastianes is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on the documentation and promotion of the presence of Spanish theatre in the UK. She is an expert on 20th century European history of theatre and Spanish classical drama in performance. She is the author of Vida Escénica de “La Celestina” en España (Peter Lang, 2020), a book on the performance and reception of La Celestinain Spain.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

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By Daniele Vianello

The 2020/2021 Season of ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro opened with the world premiere of Il peso del mondo nelle cose (The Weight of the World in Things), a new production by Claudio Longhi with original dramaturgy by Alejandro Tantanian.[1]  Staged at the Storchi theatre in Modena from 29 September to 11 October, the show involves seven actors from the permanent company of ERT – Simone Baroni, Daniele Cavone Felicioni, Michele Dell’Utri, Simone Francia, Diana Manea, Elena Natucci and Massimo Vazzana – with Renata Lackó alternating with Mariel Tahiraj on the violin, and Esmeralda Sella on the piano.

It is an ambitious project conceived by two leading artists on the international theatrical scene. Claudio Longhi is director, theatrical pedagogue and university professor; he was artistic director of ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro from 2017 to 2020, and since December 1st of this year he has been director of the famous Piccolo Teatro di Milano.[2] Alejandro Tantanian, from Argentina, is a playwright, director, singer, teacher and translator; from 2017 to 2020 he directed the TNA / Teatro Nacional Argentino – Teatro Cervantes in Buenos Aires.[3]

Claudio Longhi. Photo: Riccardo Frati. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

Starting from two stories by Alfred Döblin, A Tale of Materialism and Trafficking with the Afterlife, Tantanian and Longhi, artists who share the idea of an open, lively and dynamic theatre, in close dialogue with the present and the community, develop an unprecedented portrait of our time, reconceived from new points of view. Thus, in the light of the dramatic events we are experiencing, they imagine a bright future in which human beings find their relationship with mystery and recognize the immense and inexorable rulership of nature.

Between 1940 and 1945, Döblin, a German of Jewish origin in exile in the United States, experienced with great discomfort the impact of industrialized American civilization, while in Europe the Nazi-fascist fury raged. In those years, with his penetrating sense of humor and with the sharpness of his critical gaze, he created two extraordinary literary inventions. To do this, he utilized popular genres: the fairy tale, the fantastic story, the thriller, giving them a new impulse and untried forms.

In A Tale of Materialism (published in Italy by Ibis)[4] Döblin chooses a strategy of entertainment to explore the breakdown in the balance of the relationships between nature and civilization, between science and life, and to investigate with humor the spectres of chaos which he felt surrounded him. The text tells a kind of strange strike by nature, which discovers that it is made of atoms, because this was the insight of Democritus. This position of radical materiality puts nature in crisis.  It stops working and we witness a kind of epochal upheaval, in which disorder overturns reality. The human species is isolated, overwhelmed, unable to understand or act. At the very moment when the disarray is such as to raise the very possibility that men will wage war, men back down, withdraw. Democritus’ theory and everything strangely returns to an “after” that feels like a “before.” A sudden truce restores order, but it is no longer the same as before; there is a new awareness of the relationship between human beings and reality; things have inexorably changed.

Trafficking with the Afterlife (published in Italy by Adelphi)[5] is an occult thriller, a swirling detective-story full of humor. In a small town in the English provinces, during the Second World War, an inexplicable crime is being investigated, the murder of the brewer van Steen, found with his head smashed. In a sort of parody of a detective drama, the investigation focuses on a series of bizarre spiritual sessions, animated by paradoxical surprises, during which the forces of the afterlife seem to take over. The police end up asking the circle of local spiritualists to create a spiritual session in which to summon the dead man and be told by the deceased himself who killed him. Here too, as in A Tale of Materialism, pandemonium results, because during the spiritual session we witness a revolution and an unforeseen antagonism between the living and the dead. The world of the dead is presented to us in a joking way, as a picturesque community that wants to overthrow the world of the living.  This introduces chaos into the investigation of the death of the brewing protagonist – who does not know that he is dead, and feels only what it is like to have left for a journey and to be simply “elsewhere.”

From the blending of these two texts comes The Weight of the World in Things, a contemporary fairy tale that, as Longhi explains «plays with the conventions of theatre – from cabaret to melodrama – to reflect on the power and function of imagination in the relationship with reality, calling together spectators into a kind of party: an invitation to the permanent celebration of the theatre, a show seeking to return to the belief in the power of fantasy.»

There is quite a bit of middle Europe in the show, starting with Renata Lacko’s violin (alternating with Mariel Tahiraj) and Esmeralda Sella’s piano, which accompany the performance with studied counterpoint, based on interspersed songs with a clear Brechtian flavor. The references to Brecht and the epic theatre go far beyond the cabaret scenes, however. The mimetic narration is continuously shattered by diegetic inserts, captions that comment and create distancing and possibilities for reflection. It is therefore an ambitious dramaturgical and directorial project, which perhaps at times would have required a less puzzling gathering of material and a more uniformly experienced company, but which as a whole is an indisputably successful show.

From the dramaturgical project to the production

The work on dramaturgy, rehearsals and the performance was the subject of a long conversation with Claudio Longhi, of which I report here some of the main elements.[6] The director says: «By choice, I have always avoided drawing clear lines of distinction between my private life and my professional life, between my daily life and the theatre. For me they are a kind of great continuum, one continuously blends into in the other. This show came at a very particular moment in my life because my appointment as director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano took place while I was rehearsing the show». It was beautiful, but sometimes also heartbreaking for Longhi to work with the young actors of the “Iolanda Gazzerro School of Theatre – Permanent Laboratory for the Actor” of ERT, a school he directed from 2015 until  his recent appointment as director of the Piccolo Teatro.

Alejandro Tantanian. Photo: Ernesto Donegana. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

Fundamental to the realization of the show was the meeting with Alejandro Tantanian, with whom the director collaborated for the first time. Despite the forced distance, due to the pandemic and lasting the entire period of rehearsals and production, a kind of intellectual and emotional friendship was created between the two artists: «It is the first time that Alejandro was not present at the opening of his show; he decided to stream in from Buenos Aires.  He could not participate in the rehearsals, because at that time he was in lockdown. I thank him for what he has made available to me with great generosity; playwrights are all too often jealous of every comma of their texts. Instead, he gave me great freedom and we immediately created a strong harmony of interests».

Longhi says he met Tantanian in France in 2017, a few months after taking office as director of Emilia Romagna Teatro. At the time Tantanian was director of the Teatro Nacional Cervantes in Buenos Aires. Between the two was born instinctively a great sympathy, both newly elected directors, both with a driving ability and with the desire to change the organizations that they were called to direct. The Teatro Nacional Cervantes directed by Tantanian is an institutional and conventional theatre, decidedly academic in nature, while he is one of the noble fathers of the new course of Argentine dramaturgy, made up of many little-known names, no less interesting than the best known artists. It was Tantanian who made the dramaturgical world of Argentine “teatristes” rise to national notoriety; it was he who brought a strong shock to a conventional structure like the Teatro Nacional.

The two directors wanted to collaborate, realize projects and exchange productions. Unfortunately for Tantanian, the experience of conducting the Teatro Nacional ended in a stormy manner last December. Longhi says: «We had last seen each other in Buenos Aires in January.  He had just closed his experience of directing at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes, and shortly after we were overwhelmed by the events related to the pandemic. When I found myself thinking about the 2020-21 season, wanting to reflect on the epochal times we are experiencing, it occurred spontaneously to propose to him a project to be realized together, also in light of the interests I have in Argentine theatre, approaching him and asking him to create a text.»

The Weight of the World in Things. Photo: Francesca Cappi. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

Longhi and Tantanian’s was an experiment and a borderline collaboration: the project, to compose a text and starting from that building a production, took off late in relation to the programming and production times. Following the pandemic, playwright and director were hit by emergencies involving what was happening: «These were not simple steps; I presented to him with a basic idea. In the show I would have been delighted to talk about the radical change in the relationship between human beings and nature and the redefinition of natural balances. I was very impressed during the lockdown to notice how the animals, by virtue of the fact that people had retired, were reclaiming spaces that had been stolen from them. It is impressive to imagine that a dusting of matter such as a virus has created such a collapse in the planetary system.»

Longhi recounts how these and other reflections had brought him back to his old reading, Döblin’s A Tale of Materialism, a critique of materialism in the strict sense (a novel that, moreover, appears significantly in the years of the German writer’s conversion). That novel stimulated Longhi to read another text by the same author Trafficking with the Afterlife: «Speaking with Alejandro, I presented myself with the two stories and told him that I would like to start from these, combining them … or start from just one of the two and blend it with another longer story, which would describe the history of the twentieth century. He said ‘I understand you’… In fact, reading those stories, he was seduced by another text concerning spiritism, the diaries of Victor Hugo, dedicated to spiritual sessions after the death of his daughter.»

Tantanian imagined a dramaturgy that intertwined the two starting texts of Döblin provided by Longhi with suggestions from Victor Hugo’s Contemplations. These parallel tracks converged creating a sort of great fantasy festival. Longhi explains: «My production is faithful to the text of Alejandro, who in turn is faithful to Döblin’s novel. I have made only small cuts, mostly of simplification, except for some parts concerning the A Tale of Materialism and the songs, which were the result of a collective writing with the actors. We had, however, a superabundance of material. Therefore, we decided to divide the show into two evenings, building it on an alternation of cabaret scenes and spirit scenes. In the cabaret scenes we also operated based on improvisations and exercises.» Divided into two parts – though essentially indivisible if you want to grasp the sense of its creation – the show finds in the almost serial multiplication of duplicity its own peculiar structure.

The sections of the script concerning the A Tale of Materialism are closely based on Döblin’s original. It is an operation in some ways similar (although of a completely different design) to that carried out in some of the stagings by Luca Ronconi, Longhi’s master. I am thinking in particular of Gadda’s Pasticciaccio, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Gombrowicz’ Pornography; in those productions the novel was literally “staged” by the director in its entirety, attributing to the various characters both the dialogues and the parts narrated in the third person, instead of a conventional adaptation, which would have provided for the transfer of the story to the first person and the present.[7]

The Weight of the World in Things. Photo: Francesca Cappi. CCourtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

Also in the case of Longhi’s show, the choice made for the staging of Döblin’s short stories is not that of an adaptation, or a simple summary. Instead, it is a complex operation of segmentation and distribution of the text, faithful to the original novel, as regards the hidden and diegetic parts, which are divided among the characters (in particular between Augustus and Facciabianca, clown characters of an unusual cabaret). The director says: «Döblin’s story is certainly longer, but not so much, because it is a small pamphlet. In the script, the A Tale of Materialism turns out to be almost literally the text, with some cuts. In the preliminary text that Alejandro provided almost the whole novel was present. I then cut it here and there. In the end, there is a good seventy percent of Döblin’s original text in the show: it’s no small thing.»

As Trafficking with the Afterlife, Döblin’s work is present in its entirety, but it has been largely re-designed and reassembled, in a strange sort of hybridization with the biography of Victor Hugo, creating a typically South American story. The protagonist, in this case, is a disturbed family that turns to a medium to solve a family crisis born from the death of a daughter and another unlikely cataclysm in progress, not clearly identified.

In creating the overall scaffolding of the text Tantanian acted as a pure playwright, while leaving room for the desire and the ability of the director and the actors to invent, intervene and rewrite some parts, especially with regard to A Tale of Materialism and the cabaret scenes of comic characters (Democritus, Augustus and Whiteface). Longhi reveals: «It was Aleandro who reminded me that he was working with an Italian translation of Döblin’s works, moreover with very tight deadlines. He confessed to me that he struggled to create a gap between the language of comic characters and the Italian translation of the German novel, which he felt was literary, but for which he could not find a Spanish counterpart. Speaking about the jokes of the comedians and especially the character of Democritus – a character that was supposed to function as an alienating element of the A Tale of Materialism – he told me: “It is far more appropriate for the actor who will play Democritus to improvise, I can not give you the jokes, much better if I provide subjects. You should work from the improvisations of the actor.” That’s exactly how it went: the dramaturgy is Alejandro’s, but he gave me license to treat it as material for a set-up.»

To counterbalance the supernatural tinges and tension of Döblin’s tales, a series of cabaret-style comedy intervals were “improvised.”  Often, during the show, laughter helps to scroll through the narration of the most serious scenes, built mainly on the Trafficking with the Afterlife. An extraordinary master of ceremonies, Michele Dell’Utri as Democritus, entertains the audience, appearing and disappearing at will between scene and forestage, interrupting the dialogue between Augustus and Facciabianca, who tell the A Tale of Materialism. Almost all of Democritus’ interventions and the answers given to him by Augustus and Facciabianca are the result of improvisations and were put together directly during the rehearsals.  The songs were also reworked: «Alejandro wrote lyrics in Spanish, but he didn’t have any music in mind. Thus the texts have proved to be untranslatable in many respects. The playwright provided a subject for which we had to find the musical counterpart and a linguistic coating, because otherwise the rhyme and structure of the verse could not have been found.» Live music makes a fundamental contribution to the success of this show.

The Weight of the World in Things. Photo: Francesca Cappi. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

Longhi’s direction accentuates the irony and parody of the genres that mark Döblin’s tales, managing several times to create an atmosphere of lightness not present in the beginning texts. The dramaturgy developed by Tantanian, from this point of view, is more ambiguous than its stage realization. In fact, especially in the part that derives from the Trafficking with the Afterlife, the script is literally a real melodrama, so overloaded that it becomes almost ridiculous. Longhi comments: «The directorial solution I could have adopted was twofold, it could have gone in two opposite directions. I could have worked on the materials I received by dramatizing them and taking their contents for real; or I could have created a production in the manner of an Almodovar movie. With the consent of Alejandro, we created a variation on an Almodovar movie. We started from the music: the musical accompaniments of the spiritual sessions were to be “bolero,” alternating with more serious melodies, classical music […]. What I wanted to realize was a kind of great soap opera style event from a South American telenovela, deeply ironic. I wanted to ironize the musical form, in the spirit of Döblin’s writing, whose lyrics are parodies: Trafficking with the Afterlife is a parody of a detective story, A Tale of Materialism is a parody of an epic didactic poem. Even this show could only be conceived as a parody of a genre, partly already embedded in the dramaturgy provided to me by Alejandro. […] His script, however, is a very elusive object, sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t putting in too much, if I wasn’t moving off of the dramaturgical track that had been provided to me, beyond the fact that the comedy tone is more in harmony with my nature than the dramatic one. But I think it was a way of keeping me in line with the text.»

In Longhi’s previous stagings the dramaturgy of space was largely confined to the scenography, to the stage machine as the defining element. In this show, on the other hand, spatiality is realized above all by the presence of the actors themselves: these from time to time inhabit and define the scene with choral actions, the proscenium and the boxes with the clownish interruptions of Democritus, the auditorium with the orchestra and the actions in the audience. Longhi comments: «About the space I have to say that I was electrified by the first notation in Alejandro’s script: it describes a large white and empty space, which in the first initial sequence is illuminated in different ways, as if a day were passing.  It struck me that he did not know that the stage of the Storichi in Modena is white. When I read that first stage direction and thought of it inside the Storchi, I said to myself: there is almost nothing to do here, you just have to live in that space». In addition to the structure of the scene, already white, the possibility in the Storchi theatre to open the window door overlooking the gardens in the back creates a dialectic between inside and outside, between nature and artifice, between reality and fantasy. The Storchi stage is already a semantic space and full of possibilities. It was enough to simply create the two doors and place the table on stage, the elements of which the script provided by Tantanian speaks. Compared to the most recent productions and the best known works I’ve done, it’s definitely a different way of using space. But I had already worked in this direction in lesser-known shows, such as Koltés’ In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields and in the Natural Stories of Sanguineti. In this case, the aesthetic need coincided with the need to work in a Covid regime.»

“Once upon a time there was a world, once there was noise out there…” reads the text. What about today? Today, on that stage, there are few white pieces of furniture, a window (really) open onto the green of the trees, but immediately closed. Seeing the actors with masks on their faces in a theatrical show could have reversed things, with the story of something different from today’s world.  Instead the show shows precisely the reality in which we live, this particular historical moment. The theme of the pandemic is the background; it leaks in everywhere, as much as in the themes underlying the text, as in the many solutions adopted in the staging of the show. The pandemic, as has been said, was the starting point of the dramaturgy, the production and the project more generally, created to reflect on what is happening. Longhi says: «I didn’t want for ERT a 2020-21 season made up of covid document dramas. However, the experience we are undergoing has led us to redefine our concerns, our fears, our expectations. I was interested in returning to and presenting at the theatre a particular feature: the one that makes it a mirror of the reality that surrounds us. Not an ascetic mirror, but a deforming one, as Turner would have said, a mirror that enlarges or shrinks, a “disguise,” as Sanguineti would have said.»

In fact, in the show the pandemic is everywhere and at the same time it is nowhere. There are masks on stage… sanitizing gels, but it’s all deliberately between the lines. Spiritism and materialism in dialogue with each other are at the heart of it. Longhi explains: «In this work there is, at the end of the day, a reflection on the power of mystery and the power of fantasy. I don’t really like the mystery category, but this time I was pleased to engage with the dimension of mystery. I feel like I have a pretty neo-Enlightenment approach, I had a jolt when I found myself confronting these materials. And yet, working, I found it a consonance and a profound challenge. Even the reflection on fantasy, inherent in the text, is a fundamental component of the scientific gaze, because it activates a kind of dialectic in which neo-Enlightenment lucidity cannot but enter into a dialogue with evasion from procedural clarity.»

The Weight of the World in Things. Photo: Francesca Cappi. Courtesy of the ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Press Office.

The Weight of the World in Things seems to make real – in the text and in the staging – the profound meaning of one of the central observations made by the protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the best known of Alfred Döblin’s novels: “Life does not begin with good words or good intentions, you start by knowing and understanding it and with the right companion.” The show turns out to be a close reflection on Döblin’s overall poetics and references to the present that can be grasped in it. The key to reading offered to viewers seems to lie in the words of Marina Cvetaeva, words that give the title to the show and that are posed as an introduction to the text itself: “I have never learned to live: I do not live in the present, I am never there. I feel in harmony with all the people who cannot be a presence in the world. But I can feel its weight: the weight of the world in things, its weight in the mountains, even the weight of time on a budding child that no one feels.” It is no coincidence that, in stressing their importance, these words are repeated in the fifth and seventeenth scenes, reminding us that, if we want to find the world again, we must first recognize the naturalness of the ‘weight’ which is manifested in all things.

I would like to close this short article with the words of Tantanian and Longhi, taken from the notes to the show. These words that summarize the profound meaning of their project and of the dramatic moment that we are all experiencing: «As a result of an improvised sneeze of nature in its lowest manifestations (its height a microscopic virus, rigorously crowned, however – delivered to us, as in the most anguished tales of terror, from a sinister and fluttering lackey in bat livery), for some months our world seems to have come off its hinges. After decades of learned and sharp anatomies of modernity and its myths, the “global risk” has finally – and suddenly – revealed itself here and now […]. In the clamor of this “grandiose drama” in which day after day hot iron marks our flesh, what space is left for useless theatre – if not that of tracing fleeting and hypothetical maps of our Hamletic “bad dreams” in order to try to find a possible (although very precarious and, not already open, but wide open) order in reality, telling stories? […] The Weight of the World in Things is also and above all a theatre feast, a reflection on the power and function of the imagination (mimetic and otherwise) in relating to reality, as it is. On becoming a community. On being suspended, as in the theatre, as in life. Together, once again, summoned here, waiting for all this to finally become something else, reunited, determined, fatal, heated, laggard, fearful, so courageous, so united, so separated, so worried and so thoughtless, sick, healthy, alive, dead, together, once again. Come! All of you are welcome! Once upon a time (perhaps)… ».

Daniele Vianello, vice-president EASTAP (European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance), is Professor at the University of Calabria (UniCal), where he teaches Performance History, Drama, and Staging Technique and Theory. He has also taught at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (2002-2008) and at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2015-2016). He is member of the editorial board of European Journal of Theatre and Performance, contributing editor and member of the advisory board of European Stages, Olhares, Biblioteca Teatrale, Rivista di letteratura teatrale, among others. His publications, centered mainly on Renaissance and contemporary theatre, include L’arte del buffone (Bulzoni, 2005) and Commedia dell’Arte in Context (eds. Balme, Vescovo, Vianello, Cambridge University Press, 2018). He worked for several years with the Teatro di Roma (Union des Teatres de l’Europe), where he assisted Italian and foreign stage directors (including such figures as Eimuntas Nekrošius).

[1] A. Tantanian, Il peso del mondo nelle cose, Luca Sossella Editore, 2020.

[2] Claudio Longhi has directed shows for the major national theatrical institutions. Among his productions we must mention at least Arturo Ui by Brecht (with a very good Umberto Orsini as the protagonist), the Classe operaia va in paradiso, from the film by Elio Petri as adapted by Paolo di Paolo, La commedia della vanità by Elias Canetti , and most recently, The Weight of the World in Things of Alejandro Tantanian. For further information on Longhi’s artistic biography, see my essay entitled ”The third season of the ‘Piccolo’ – Theatre of Europe, under the direction of Claudio Longhi” in this issue of ES.

[3] As a playwright, Alejandro Tantanian has been awarded in Brazil, Uruguay, France, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Germany. His plays are translated into Portuguese, English, French and German. His directing has been presented in numerous international theatre festivals, receiving numerous awards. He was part of the collective of authors “Caraja-ji” (starting a fruitful collaboration with Daniel Veronese, one of the key figures of the theatre of Buenos Aires in the post-dictatorship period) and of “El Periférico de Objetos” – a “paradigmatic” independent group of the Argentine experimental theatre (founded with Rafael Spregelburd and Mónica Duarte). During his three years at the helm of TNA, he radically changed the face of the Cervantes in Buenos Aires, imprinting a new and easily recognizable aesthetic, andgiving space to plays by both established and emerging authors such as Rafael Spregelburd, Mariano Tenconi Blanco, Emilio García Wehbi.

[4] A. Döblin, Fiaba del Materialismo, Ibis, 1994 (original title Märchen vom Materialismus).

[5] A. Döblin, Traffici con l’aldilà, Adelphi, 1997 (original title Reiseverkehr mit dem Jenseits).

[6] I was authorized by Claudio Longhi to publish the interview, carried out on November 15, 2020, by inserting parts of his reflections in «quotation marks.»

[7] See Daniele Vianello, “Gombrowicz’s and Ronconi’s Pornography without Scandal, the Novel Effect: Mimesis and Diegesis in Scene,” in European Stages, IV, 1, 2015, pp. 1-11; Daniele Vianello, “Teatro e romanzo…,” in Biblioteca Teatrale, 113-114, gennaio-giugno 2015, pp. 93-108.

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

www.EuropeanStages.org
europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
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European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center ©2020

europeanstages@gc.cuny.edu

By Eylem Ejder

Theatre is a lively art co-created by a group of people –audience and performers- gathering in a certain place and time. The components of this definition were interrupted in the pandemic. Because of the social distance rules and lockdown, it was almost impossible to make theatre. This led practitioners to find new ways of coming together and standing in solidarity. The most important manifestations the pandemic brought into Turkish theatre can be summarized as follows: digital theatre experiments, creating forms of solidarity through and in theatre and the legal struggles of theatre makers trying to make a living.  In this short essay, I will try to give an overview of the theatre life during the epidemic days in Turkey.   For a more extensive discussion on what Turkish theatre has experienced during pandemic, I wrote an essay in Turkish “Tiyatro, ‘Şimdi’ ve ‘Burada,” in ArtDog, Volume 6. For more discussions and interviews with theatre makers from different regions of Turkey, please see theatre critic Yavuz Pak’s reports which have been periodically published in Tiyatro Dergisi

With the pandemic, theatre in Turkey, as in everywhere began to change its form. Many of the world’s leading companies have shared performance archives online. Festivals have turned into online. Despite the discussions of difficulties on making theatre during a pandemic, the  annual İstanbul International Theatre Festival has been organized this November with seven online performances. A large number of theatre companies have explored the possibilities of making theatre in a virtual environment. Despite  negative reactions to digital theatre (including the recording of performance) and questions about whether digital theatre is really theatre, the possibilities of experiencing “here and now” in the digital environment were experienced with some reasonably successful examples.   Among these one might mention BGST’s production A Case for Each Day (Her Güne Bir Vaka), Onur Karaoğlu’s videolog series on Youtube Read Subtitles Aloud, Duygu Dalyanoğlu’s sound theatre The Voice of K, Şule Ateş’ Quarantine2020 Video Performance Series, and Platform Tiyatro’s Map to Utopia.

The pandemic prompted actors to experiment with new forms of storytelling to come together with audience. However, when economic problems were added to this, the anxiety of producing art turned into a struggle to survive. Life was completely suspended, but taxes, rents, and bills did not stop. Theatres and venues were about to collapse, one by one. With the pandemic, more than two thousand theatre workers were unemployed. Although it is said that the Ministry of Culture will provide support to private theatres that are deprived of government subsidize, theatre makers argue that the support is project-oriented and will not solve the problem in the long run. In addition, many groups on the black list cannot benefit.

Tiyatromuz Yaşasın İnisiyatifi (Lets Make Theatre Live İnitiative). Photo: yeniyasamgazetesi.com.

There is, however, another side of the coin. The economic crisis opened the way for a network of solidarity among the theatre companies. In May, a solidarity campaign, called “100 Poems of Solidarity/Poetry, the Face of Solidarity” initiated by theatre artists to support theatre workers financially. Likewise, from different regions of Turkey, different theatre makers and groups, who perhaps never come together, united under the initiative of “Tiyatromuz Yaşasın” (Let Our Theatre Live). When the petition circulated, more than thirty thousand signatures were collected in the first four days. The signature campaign initiated by the “Tiyatromuz Yaşasın Initiative” helped the theatre actors and their audience to fight back and establish new organizations in their own city. Theatre makers began to work on a “Theatre Law” that would recognize professional legal rights. The Theatre Cooperative, which set out with similar intentions, still continues its activities and struggles for the rights of theatre makers during the pandemic.

How do theatre actors evaluate this process? What kind of theatre awaits us in the new season, where almost all festivals and many performances are organized online? To what extent and how is this process carried out by the actors in the field? What are the suggestions within the theatre for this crisis? These are only few questions which we need to discuss more in near future. Apparently, this situation will lead to significant changes in the way we make theatre. But it may be an opportunity for a dialogue to re-think this art together and to create a new dramaturgy and a new theatre language for this time, even while theatre workers face with the danger of unemployment, loss of income and closure of some theatres.

Eylem Ejder is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre at Ankara University, Turkey. She is a theatre critic, researcher based in Istanbul, the co-editor of the theatre magazine Oyun (Play) and co-founder of Feminist Çaba (Feminist Endeavor), a collaborative criticism and writing group between four women critics. Her PhD studies are being supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) within the National PhD Fellowship Programme. For more information about her works: https://ankara.academia.edu/EylemEjder and for her personal blog https://kritikeylem.wordpress.com/

European Stages, vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2020)

Editorial Board:

Marvin Carlson, Senior Editor, Founder
Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor
Dominika Laster, Co-Editor
Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor

Editorial Staff:

Philip Wiles, Assistant Managing Editor
Esther Neff, Assistant Managing Editor

Advisory Board:

Joshua Abrams
Christopher Balme
Maria Delgado
Allen Kuharsky
Bryce Lease
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Magda Romańska
Laurence Senelick
Daniele Vianello
Phyllis Zatlin

Table of Contents:

1. The 74th Avignon ‘Festival,’ October 23-29: Desire and Death by Tony Haouam
2. Looking Back With Delight: To the 28th Edition of the International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, the Czech Republic by Kalina Stefanova
3. The Third Season of the “Piccolo Teatro di Milano” – Theatre of Europe, Under the New Direction of Claudio Longhi by Daniele Vianello
4. The Weight of the World in Things by Longhi and Tantanian by Daniele Vianello
5. World Without People by Ivan Medenica
6. Dark Times as Long Nights Fade: Theatre in Iceland, Winter 2020 by Steve Earnest
7. An Overview of Theatre During the Pandemic in Turkey by Eylem Ejder
8. Report from Frankfurt by Marvin Carlson
9. Blood Wedding Receives an Irish-Gypsy Makeover at the Young Vic by María Bastianes
10. The Artist is, Finally, Present: Marina Abramović, The Cleaner retrospective exhibition, Belgrade 2019-2020 by Ksenija Radulović

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