Background

A compendium about the most important new plays and their premieres at the German-speaking theatres in the season 2008/2009.

Today one cannot speak of the new German drama without speaking of German support for dramatists. Still the sweetheart of the theatre a few years ago, the intensive funding of young talents is now the subject of ever more loudly expressed doubts in the German-speaking theatre scene. This year the Vienna Burgtheater cancelled its prestigious dramatist workshop: the plays that were sent in failed to satisfy the requirements. The Berlin Theatre Festival organised a symposium on dramatist funding in the hope of finding a new orientation. Swamped on the one hand by writing workshops and theatre days for authors, scores of prizes and diverse grants, and not taken seriously on the other hand by the theatre as authors and independent artists, the German-speaking dramatist moves somewhere between these extremes. Can one still lead the life of an artist as a dramatist? Can one live from writing dramas? Is there a path between premier madness, addictive curiosity and rapid oblivion?

Meanwhile, young authors continue of course to be merrily premiered. Most recently three hitherto largely unknown dramatists have aroused attention. The most promising perhaps is Claudius Lünstedt (born 1973 and educated at the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre), with his subtle play Krieger im Gelee (i.e., Warrior in Jelly). Three elaborate monologues revolve round a tale of abduction and murder, and above all the question: Who has done what here and why? Anne Habermehl (born 1981 and educated at the Berlin University of the Arts) writes social dramas in which the merciless rules of the game have hold of the characters’ inmost being, perhaps most successfully realised up to now in her play Daddy. And Thomas Freyer (born 1981 and educated at the Berlin University of the Arts) writes harsh and sombrely along the edge of the only seeming opposition between youth and death in his gloomy, forlorn play Und in den Nächten liegen wir stumm (i.e., And at Night We Lie Silently).

Dirk Laucke (born 1982 and educated at the Berlin University of the Arts), known mainly for his alter ford escort dunkelblau (old ford escort dark blue), has succeeded, in his Der kalte Kuss von warmem Bier (i.e., The Cold Kiss of Warm Beer), in writing a not very spectacular but precise study of violence in the German Federal Republic. Ulrike Syha is also a precise writer, but she has confined herself for the time being completely to the private sector: her new play, premiered in Chemnitz, is called Privatleben (Private Life) and tells of the empty, weary and pragmatically conformist relationship of Lutz and Karla. Here even the retreat into private life has lost even a vestige of the utopian dimension.

Upscale German television drama

Off the beaten track of drama funding, the actor Jan Neumann develops his plays during rehearsals. The latest, Königs Moment (i.e., König’s Moment), was premiered in Mannheim and tells of a small comprehensible catastrophe while a big catastrophe remains incomprehensible. König meets with an accident on the autobahn; like a momentary dream, his whole life passes before his eyes while the radio blares the latest news of the financial crisis.

Lutz Hübner writes dramas and scripts for upscale German television: realistic, with roles and plot. For years that made him an outsider in the German theatre; now his Geisterfahrer (i.e., Ghost Drivers), premiered in Hanover, has been invited to Mülheim. The play unmasks the liberal, open-minded posturings of a large middle-class flat share; the characters are precisely drawn and very believable; the tragedy emerges almost all by itself.

The big names have also not been idle. At the Mülheim Theatre Festival, where the most important German drama prize is awarded, Elfriede Jelinek was again the winner. Her play Rechnitz is a voluble harangue, full of groaners (as is the wont of this author), directed against silence, in this case against the suppression of Nazi atrocities. At the very end of the Second World War, nearly 200 Jews were slaughtered for no reason during a celebration in the town of Rechnitz. Jelinek’s characters wriggle themselves into the past, just as they wriggle to get rid of it. They are professional copers with the past, and at the same repressors of it. This drama probably corresponds very exactly to the prevailing state of consciousness.

Outstanding too is Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Hier und jetzt (i.e., Here and Now), which airily brings together several lives at a wedding and lets the characters circle round their happiness and unhappiness in deliberately redundant language. Schimmelpfennig weaves simple sentences and an unfathomable process, light summer air and repressed violence, into a moody panorama whose premier Jürgen Gosch, in his last production in Zurich, stages brilliantly. His plays have long lived from Gosch’s stagings. Schimmelpfennig’s latest play, Der Goldene Drache (i.e., The Golden Dragon), was premiered at the Akademietheater in Vienna, very much in the style of Gosch. The drama links a tragedy of abuse with a tragedy of immigration.

Comedically well cushioned

Schimmelpfennig is probably the most successful German dramatist. The most prolific, on the other had, is probably René Pollesch, who also always stages his plays himself: excursions in modern consciousness, discursively well underpinned, comedically well cushioned. The most advanced of his new plays is Fantasma (i.e., Phantasm), also at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in which Pollesch parallels love and the economy, and how they both go to the dogs. Ping Pong d’amour at the Munich Kammerspiele and Wenn die Schauspieler mal einen freien Abend haben wollen, übernimmt Hedley Lamarr (i.e., If the Actors Just Want A Night Off, Hedley Lamar Steps In), with Harald Schmidt in Stuttgart, are peak performances as comedies, but perhaps not to be taken seriously.

In Der Stein (i.e., The Stone), Marius von Mayenburg succeeds in presenting a panorama of German history from the Nazi period to today, held together by the conceit of a house with changing owners. Händl Klaus, in his musical Furcht und Zittern (i.e., Fear and Trembling), illuminates the ambivalences of the theme of child abuse. With Die goldenen letzten Jahre (i.e., The Golden Last Years), premiered in Bonn, Sibylle Berg has written on the other hand a very wicked and very affectionate sort of musical, interspersed by sardonic songs, about a serious utopia for those of retirement age. Long lost dignity is rediscovered; freed from the pressure of belonging, people can finally become unashamedly who they are.

On the margin of dramatic productions are several, extremely impressive plays: in Mea Culpa, again at the Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief has found an intense, equally emotional and sarcastic way of coming to grips with his lung cancer. And Joachim Meyerhoff’s self-recited autobiography in six parts, Alle Toten fliegen hoch (i.e., All The Dead Fly Up), so impressed the jury of the Theatertreffen that they invited him to Berlin.