As befits the world’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare has had his work translated into over 100 languages, including Klingon. But long before he was the international superstar we know today, he was adored by the Germans with a fervor that led August Wilhelm Schlegel, the poet and critic who masterfully translated his complete works in the early 19th century, to claim him as “ganz unser” — “entirely ours.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, this country’s most revered writer, compared his experience of discovering Shakespeare at age 22 to “a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch.” Roughly a century later, in 1864, the world’s first Shakespeare Society was founded in the city of Weimar. It survived the Cold War divide and is still going strong, with roughly 2,000 members. In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe in London held a season of events to acknowledge Germany’s special relationship with the playwright. (He is performed more frequently here than in his native land, the theater said.)
So far this season, the highest-profile Shakespeare production here has been a new “King Lear” that reopened the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in October, after the theater underwent a major renovation.
Karin Beier, the company’s artistic director since 2013, set the action inside a huge white cube that is tilted toward the audience. Working from a new modern-language translation by Rainer Iwersen, she also streamlined some of the action and whittled down the large cast of players to 10 speaking roles.
Her most radical idea, however, was to invert the genders of the three most unsavory characters, with Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan played by men and Gloucester’s illegitimate son, Edmund, played by a woman, as if to make the point that evil is not binary.
The actors Carlo Ljubek (Goneril), Samuel Weiss (Regan) and Sandra Gerling (Edmund) are all wonderfully invested in their villainy, but the cross-dressing daughters lend the production a campy edge. Especially in the opening scene, when they compete in flattery for Lear’s affection, it’s difficult to understand why Ms. Beier chose this particular register.
Alongside her flamboyantly fawning sisters, Lina Beckmann’s Cordelia is not merely subdued but strangely colorless and stolid. The cast’s only woman apart from Ms. Gerling, she also appears as the Fool, a role that allows her to show more dramatic range, although — mumbling through the role comically wide-eyed, with her squeezebox in tow — she is more dope than jester as she follows the mad king around the mostly bare but dramatically lit stage.
The Lear is Edgar Selge, whom Ms. Beier also directed in a one-man adaptation of the controversial Michel Houellebecq novel “Submission” that has toured Germany and was adapted for television. Mr. Selge, who is not so very far from the king’s age of “fourscore and upward,” moves across the stage with a sort of hulking but sunken grandeur.
Physically, it’s a no-holds-barred performance, featuring ample nudity, a hosing-down and several eggs cracked against the septuagenarian’s skull. Psychologically, however, the portrayal is less convincing, as Mr. Selge doesn’t quite find a way out of the king’s madness after his reunion with Cordelia. To be fair, the blame seems to also lie with Ms. Beier, whose insistence on highlighting the play’s chaos, arbitrary cruelty and nihilism makes for an intense production that often feels scattershot.
Ms. Beier’s most significant addition is an epilogue spoken by Edgar (the limber Jan-Peter Kampwirth, who spends much of the evening naked and coated in white paint), addressed to the children of tomorrow. When “Lear” was performed in the 18th and 19th centuries, a certain degree of moralizing was required to convince audiences of the virtues of such a dark play. But it’s difficult to understand why Ms. Beier felt the need to provide some up-to-date moralizing of her own at the end of three long hours.
About 400 miles away in Munich, an angst-ridden prince dithers and equivocates over the course of five acts. As he mopes around the palace, he burns with murderous rage against the king and is tormented by lust for his mother. Sound familiar? This is the plot of Friedrich Schiller’s youthful play “Don Karlos”: In terms of Shakespeare worship, Schiller rivaled his friend Goethe. Even though he took his subject matter from a 17th-century French historical novel, Schiller turned to “Hamlet” for structure and psychology.
At the Residenztheater, Martin Kusej has staged Schiller’s historical tragedy virtually uncut. Dark as night and running late into it, the minimally furnished, starkly lit production provides its many theatrical jolts thanks to a large and committed cast.
On an empty, rotating stage, the splendor of a 17th-century Spanish court is suggested by a sleek crystal chandelier, while the brutality of the Inquisition is hinted at by a hole in the floor through which characters periodically disappear. Away from courtly protocol and beyond the Inquisition’s reach lie intrigue-filled chambers that Annette Murschetz, the stage designer, represents as a soundproof recording studio outfitted with blue pyramids of acoustic foam.
Despite “Hamlet’s” length and complexity, Shakespeare ensured that the melancholy Dane remained the play’s central figure. Schiller tipped the balance away from his title character in favor of the Marquis von Posa, the Spanish Infante’s boon companion. Franz Pätzold, a brilliant young actor with a strikingly textured voice, is spellbinding as the idealistic Posa, a character who trumpets Schiller’s Enlightenment ideals.
With the intense and smoldering Mr. Pätzold in the role, our attention is never less than riveted. So much so that Mr. Kusej’s production quickly loses steam in the final half-hour, after Posa’s murder. Among the other cast members, the royal couple of Thomas Loibl’s venomous and haunted Philipp II and Lilith Hässle’s nobly suffering Elisabeth von Valois are the best. Nils Strunk is a serviceable Karlos, although his dramatic range here is pretty much limited to desperation and wild anger.
Schiller considered Shakespeare a kindred spirit who wrote more perceptively than almost anyone else about what it meant to be human. Four centuries after the Englishman’s death — and 200 years after Schiller’s — how is he still relevant?
That question is the starting point of “Shakespeare’s Last Play,” a witty and irreverent version of “The Tempest.” Staged at the Berlin Schaubühne by the directors of the Dublin-based theater company Dead Centre, it attempts to make sense of the Bard’s last completed play, a fantastical comedy so far removed from the noble and tragic themes embodied by “Hamlet” and “Lear” that it has vexed scholars for generations.
At the start of this brisk, 100-minute-long evening, the disembodied voice of Shakespeare guides five of the Schaubühne’s actors through the enchanted island (with help from GPS). The directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd have eliminated the play’s three most interesting characters — Prospero, Caliban and Ariel — and concentrate instead on the supporting cast that Shakespeare moves around like pawns on a chessboard.
In the production’s unexpected second half, these minor characters get their revenge on their maker as they exhume Shakespeare’s rotting body from beneath the waters and set about eating him in a splatter-filled, cannibalistic orgy.
“I love Shakespeare,” one actor opines, tearing the flesh off a decomposing arm. “He tastes like chicken.”
König Lear. Directed by Karin Beier. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, through March 9, 2019.
Don Karlos. Directed by Martin Kusej. Munich Residenztheater, through Nov. 21.
Shakespeare’s Last Play. Directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd. Berlin Schaubühne, through Dec. 8.
(Source: NYT)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, this country’s most revered writer, compared his experience of discovering Shakespeare at age 22 to “a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch.” Roughly a century later, in 1864, the world’s first Shakespeare Society was founded in the city of Weimar. It survived the Cold War divide and is still going strong, with roughly 2,000 members. In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe in London held a season of events to acknowledge Germany’s special relationship with the playwright. (He is performed more frequently here than in his native land, the theater said.)
So far this season, the highest-profile Shakespeare production here has been a new “King Lear” that reopened the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in October, after the theater underwent a major renovation.
Karin Beier, the company’s artistic director since 2013, set the action inside a huge white cube that is tilted toward the audience. Working from a new modern-language translation by Rainer Iwersen, she also streamlined some of the action and whittled down the large cast of players to 10 speaking roles.
Her most radical idea, however, was to invert the genders of the three most unsavory characters, with Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan played by men and Gloucester’s illegitimate son, Edmund, played by a woman, as if to make the point that evil is not binary.
The actors Carlo Ljubek (Goneril), Samuel Weiss (Regan) and Sandra Gerling (Edmund) are all wonderfully invested in their villainy, but the cross-dressing daughters lend the production a campy edge. Especially in the opening scene, when they compete in flattery for Lear’s affection, it’s difficult to understand why Ms. Beier chose this particular register.
Alongside her flamboyantly fawning sisters, Lina Beckmann’s Cordelia is not merely subdued but strangely colorless and stolid. The cast’s only woman apart from Ms. Gerling, she also appears as the Fool, a role that allows her to show more dramatic range, although — mumbling through the role comically wide-eyed, with her squeezebox in tow — she is more dope than jester as she follows the mad king around the mostly bare but dramatically lit stage.
 |
| From left, Lina Beckmann, Samuel Weiss and Sandra Gerling as Cordelia, Regan and Edmund in “King Lear” at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg.CreditCreditMatthias Horn |
The Lear is Edgar Selge, whom Ms. Beier also directed in a one-man adaptation of the controversial Michel Houellebecq novel “Submission” that has toured Germany and was adapted for television. Mr. Selge, who is not so very far from the king’s age of “fourscore and upward,” moves across the stage with a sort of hulking but sunken grandeur.
Physically, it’s a no-holds-barred performance, featuring ample nudity, a hosing-down and several eggs cracked against the septuagenarian’s skull. Psychologically, however, the portrayal is less convincing, as Mr. Selge doesn’t quite find a way out of the king’s madness after his reunion with Cordelia. To be fair, the blame seems to also lie with Ms. Beier, whose insistence on highlighting the play’s chaos, arbitrary cruelty and nihilism makes for an intense production that often feels scattershot.
Ms. Beier’s most significant addition is an epilogue spoken by Edgar (the limber Jan-Peter Kampwirth, who spends much of the evening naked and coated in white paint), addressed to the children of tomorrow. When “Lear” was performed in the 18th and 19th centuries, a certain degree of moralizing was required to convince audiences of the virtues of such a dark play. But it’s difficult to understand why Ms. Beier felt the need to provide some up-to-date moralizing of her own at the end of three long hours.
 |
| Nils Strunk as the title character in “Don Carlos” at the Residenztheater in Munich.CreditMatthias Horn |
At the Residenztheater, Martin Kusej has staged Schiller’s historical tragedy virtually uncut. Dark as night and running late into it, the minimally furnished, starkly lit production provides its many theatrical jolts thanks to a large and committed cast.
On an empty, rotating stage, the splendor of a 17th-century Spanish court is suggested by a sleek crystal chandelier, while the brutality of the Inquisition is hinted at by a hole in the floor through which characters periodically disappear. Away from courtly protocol and beyond the Inquisition’s reach lie intrigue-filled chambers that Annette Murschetz, the stage designer, represents as a soundproof recording studio outfitted with blue pyramids of acoustic foam.
Despite “Hamlet’s” length and complexity, Shakespeare ensured that the melancholy Dane remained the play’s central figure. Schiller tipped the balance away from his title character in favor of the Marquis von Posa, the Spanish Infante’s boon companion. Franz Pätzold, a brilliant young actor with a strikingly textured voice, is spellbinding as the idealistic Posa, a character who trumpets Schiller’s Enlightenment ideals.
With the intense and smoldering Mr. Pätzold in the role, our attention is never less than riveted. So much so that Mr. Kusej’s production quickly loses steam in the final half-hour, after Posa’s murder. Among the other cast members, the royal couple of Thomas Loibl’s venomous and haunted Philipp II and Lilith Hässle’s nobly suffering Elisabeth von Valois are the best. Nils Strunk is a serviceable Karlos, although his dramatic range here is pretty much limited to desperation and wild anger.
Schiller considered Shakespeare a kindred spirit who wrote more perceptively than almost anyone else about what it meant to be human. Four centuries after the Englishman’s death — and 200 years after Schiller’s — how is he still relevant?
 |
| “Shakespeare’s Last Play” at the Berlin Schaubühne.CreditGianmarco Bresadola |
At the start of this brisk, 100-minute-long evening, the disembodied voice of Shakespeare guides five of the Schaubühne’s actors through the enchanted island (with help from GPS). The directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd have eliminated the play’s three most interesting characters — Prospero, Caliban and Ariel — and concentrate instead on the supporting cast that Shakespeare moves around like pawns on a chessboard.
In the production’s unexpected second half, these minor characters get their revenge on their maker as they exhume Shakespeare’s rotting body from beneath the waters and set about eating him in a splatter-filled, cannibalistic orgy.
“I love Shakespeare,” one actor opines, tearing the flesh off a decomposing arm. “He tastes like chicken.”
König Lear. Directed by Karin Beier. Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, through March 9, 2019.
Don Karlos. Directed by Martin Kusej. Munich Residenztheater, through Nov. 21.
Shakespeare’s Last Play. Directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd. Berlin Schaubühne, through Dec. 8.
(Source: NYT)
No comments:
Post a Comment