The tremendous energy that characterises Castorf’s productions comes from the confrontation of harmony and violence. When he was a young director in the GDR, bureaucratic socialism provided the first opposition for Castorf’s anger. Banished to Anklam in the provinces, he continued to offend against the tolerated canon of hidden criticism of the system that was established in East German theatre until he was allowed to produce in the West. After Unification his revulsion at false common features, and especially of the “all’s well” politics of victorious capitalism, exploded. Nowhere in the art of the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall was the smile of the state power so fiercely confronted with the depressing reality of the system take-over as in Castorf’s theatre.
For example, in 1990 he produced Schiller’s “The Robbers” as a requiem to the GDR that both expressed uproar about the take-over and anger about the “creeping depression” of the East Germans. Ranging from pubescent, naked rebellion and offending the audience right up to montages of Schiller, Hegel and de Sade, the aggressive spectacle already unpacked the whole toolbox of Castorf's discontent. He made violating rules into a principle and developed it into a theatre that is permitted to do everything and ought to do nothing. And he transferred this principle to other social situations when the merger of the GDR into the consumer society faded historically as a subject.
Thanks to his tremendous creative energy and an ensemble of exceptional actors who could fulfil intellectual provocations as shrill satire, Castorf subjected Shakespeare and Hauptmann, Dostoyevsky and Tennessee Williams to radical reworkings. Flying potato salad and inserted theoretical texts, urinating in zinc buckets and the trials of hysterical family life were followed by improvised speeches to the audience or enacted subconscious with plenty of slapstick. Booming music and inserted films, tedious waiting that ends with the landing of a toy helicopter or nude madness with a boa around the actor’s neck – Castorf uses elements like this to assemble his snotty view of the world as theatre. Only the following agenda in the director’s words applied: “To do away with unambiguities, to cut the ground from under the feet of meanings – that’s what I always wanted to do!”
The many failed echoes of his method showed that this devaluing of harmony and meaning only works thanks to Castorf's constructive exceptional spirit. The deconstruction fashions, that were declared the trend of the nineties in his name, only led to a dissolution of the form among many emulators. But with Castorf the permanent, often cynical commenting on what is happening on the stage as part of the production resulted in a genuine challenge to intellect and humour. Even marathon evenings lasting many hours, such as “The Idiot” or “The Demons”, which transferred the Russian melancholy to a charged metropolitan atmosphere in the shabby bungalow aesthetics of his sympathetic set designer Bert Neumann, created an exciting enjoyment of excessive demands.
In recent years, the principle of “effort as purification” has been intensified by Castorf once again doubling the image and narrative levels on the stage with film teams. However, his work seems to have increasingly run out of control, with the range of venues where it is performed growing ever more diverse and the floods of images that flow through it becoming ever less coherent. Productions such as “Cocaine” (2004), which was based on the novel by Pitigrilli and had a stage set designed by the artist Jonathan Meese, or “My Snow Queen” (2005), which was based on the work of Hans Christian Andersen, dissipated their initial impetus in their incoherent deployment of provocative theatrical techniques. By 2006, when Castorf turned to Brecht and obscured “In the Jungle of the Cities” behind a chaotic jumble of contemporary slapstick and political finger-wagging, it had become evident that he was facing an artistic crisis. Maybe the world has moved on and Frank Castorf has run out of ideas. Or maybe the years of repetition have made the way he breaks the rules in his productions an example of exactly the kind of thing Castorf always wanted to struggle against: something harmonious and thoroughly predictable.
