Perhaps things cannot turn out any differently if you grow up in Cologne, the capital city of fools, if you have a British mother, and if your first encounter with professional theatre is as an assistant to an English youth theatre putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps Shakespeare’s most versatile play, which puts all the world's laws out of joint. Since then, this playwright has influenced Karin Beier’s work as nobody else, encouraging her again and again to sound out and try out everything that theatre offers by way of playful potential.
Already at Cologne University she put on nine radically modernised Shakespeare productions in English in five years and went on to pursue this cross-border work at the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf. In 1995, she staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an amalgamation of many languages and stylistic elements, using 14 actors from nine countries who cover the entire theatrical spectrum from Commedia dell’arte to Brechtian theatre. Her recent fame as a promising talent for creative theatre where the focus is on great acting does not prevent Beier’s wild, often clown-like stage spectacle failing to do justice to some writers. She staged Werner Schwab’s Eskalation ordinär (Escalation: obscene) at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, making it a circus-like revue with acrobatic and mime, which did not receive unanimous plaudits. Beier is increasingly developing an interest in political issues. Since 2000, she has been addressing her generation’s attitude to life in the “Futur Zwei” project, which she developed herself, and she has sought parallels with 9/11 and the bombardment of Afghanistan in classical works of drama such as Richard III, which she staged in Bochum.
Seeking the spirit of the age without brooding – Beier’s strength is sometimes also her weakness. She can immerse herself in socially-critical plays with curiosity and commitment, and can tease out archaic pleasure even from accomplished and well-honed comedies, as she does in her Munich production of Season’s Greetings and her Cologne production of Der Gott des Gemetzels (The God of the Carnage). But sometimes she loses herself in ideas and an eclectic mixture of styles that displays her artistic references rather than a compelling approach.
Many ideas in her 2007 Cologne production Nibelungen are reminiscent of Andreas Kriegenburg’s Munich production, from the slapstick of a domesticated Barbie-Brunhilda to the posturing of vengeful Kriemhilda as a black spider. Beier mixes trash theatre with highly-charged psychology, and zeitgeist with the history of literary reception. “Peace is our profession” say the posters of the people of Worms, after George W. Bush, while the gramophone plays Wagner’s funeral march upon Siegfried’s death. Without rigour, there is also something actionist and hail-fellow-well-met about Karin Beier's urge to make associations. She transports Peer Gynt to an old peoples’ home, making it a senilely fantasised retrospective view of life, but rather than seeing a shortage of nursing staff, one sees the shortcomings of a director whose scenic means slip out of control among all the slapstick and songs, despite the exciting basic idea. In King Lear, Beier presents herself as an epigone of Jürgen Gosch. With all the intoxication of the primevally powerful and impressive acting performance, she loses sight of why she has staged the drama exclusively with women, something that attracted a great deal of attention.
Karin Beier wants a great deal, if not everything, from the theatre. Tragedy and laughter, drama and commentaries on it, old and contemporary. These levels come together in her successful works, circulating pulsatingly between the head and the heart. In 2008, she presented Grillparzer’s Golden Fleece in Cologne with a quartet of top-class actors as a trilogy of age-old estrangement. It begins with large archaic masks, proceeds to trace civilisation through a sandy gladiatorial arena and ends up in the icy modern era of self-alienation. In her almost silent film adaptation of Die Schmutzigen, die Hässlichen und die Gemeinen (Ugly, Dirty, Bad), she turns her audience into voyeurs for two hours, observing an underclass behind soundproofed windows, heightening our awareness, particularly in playing with our otherwise so superficial view of the precarity of living on Hartz IV benefits. Here, a mobile home is a stage, and the theatre lies between the drama on stage and real-life drama. Karin Beier lives her Shakespeare with new verve every time. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players ….
