In several months of rehearsals, Perceval – who had by now become manager in Antwerp – once again studied the twelve-hour version of the history plays with German actors with which he had also succeeded in Belgium. This co-production of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Salzburg Festival, invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2000, made him famous overnight. Since then he has been considered one of the great directors of European theatre.
“Battles!” turned the Wars of the Roses into the original picture of the eternal ups and downs of power: bloodily, gloriously, mercilessly. In large-scale tableaux and changing stylistic forms, Perceval presented terrors, horrors and passions, free of all moralising interpretation. Things are as they are: this director is a realist through and through – but one who has never been driven to irony or cynicism by society’s loss of utopia.
He has kept going back to Shakespeare. In “L. King of Pain” (2002) he made King Lear into an Alzheimer’s sufferer in an old people’s home, an old man spouting nonsense who imagines he is Lear. The production met with much criticism (“shrunken theatre”). His “Othello” at the Munich Kammerspiele (2003) also met with a controversial response. Perceval reduced the drama to his existential-emotional core, practically down to the bare bones: an “impossible” pair of lovers, an old man and a young girl, dream in dark nights the dream of the love that this society of careerists and cynics will not allow. At the centre of the production, a black grand piano and a white grand piano are placed upside down, a jazz pianist and singer comments on the plot with ecstatic singing. It is an evening in which Perceval’s reductionist theatrical language gains particular intensity.
Perceval stresses that he does not want to impose his directorial style on the texts as a “trademark”. “I have never been interested in repeating myself. Every play has its own language and form, its own secret.” Indeed, the distance between the image orgies of his “Battles!” and the mysterious intimacy of his Munich Jon Fosse version of “Dream of Autumn” (invited to the 2002 Berliner Theatertreffen) is vast. Nevertheless, clear lines can be seen in his theatrical work. Perceval seeks out the extreme: the screeching and the silence. Bodies and physical expression are dominant. He wants to create primeval situations, elemental nature. In contrast, language fades into the background – something for which he is occasionally criticised. With him, language is often reduced to a mere exclamation, a monotonous litany, banal everyday jargon.
It is not surprising that Perceval has also come across classical plays in his search for the archaic. in “Aars!” (2000) he described Aeschylus’s “Oresteia” as the murderous concentration of a family catastrophe, an explosion of hatred, greed and violence, a tirade between musty kitchens and the coldness of space. In the storm of light and sound of this production, in the vehement images of aggression and regression, hunger for happiness and inconsolable loneliness, the language faded into screeching and noise.
At the Berlin Schaubühne, too, he recently produced classical material, as found in Racine; with his brother Peter he developed a short version of “Andromache” (2003). On an altar-like platform surrounded by a sea of splinters, the actors are exposed like prisoners, they stay in terrible rigidity, without any opportunity to escape or move, the drama freezes to a sculpture. This is extreme minimalism in which even the language petrifies into cold, anthropological diagnosis.
