And why not? Times are changing. The problem is only that many of the stage reflections on the new media do not go beyond the level of description, irony and cliché. And Falk Richter is also active in this area, with his attempts to analytically view the tension between man and the media. As a dramatist and director he repeatedly describes human psychology as a victim of media pretence and colourful promises of globalisation.
After a first production – “Silicone” in 1996 – Richter started to examine the scandalous manipulation of people by information. Firstly, he developed the play “Cult” at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, which deals with enslavement by fashion and pop.
This was followed by “God is a DJ" after the work of the same name by the British pop group Faithless, which he premiered in Mainz in 1999. In it, a media couple spouts mantras about urban life, with its problems of authenticity and personal ranking, then starts to talk about crying men and exploding windows, to end abruptly with personal experiences of child abuse and pornography.
After Richter had produced an impressive theatre performance about the relationship wars of young emotional egoists together with the choreographer Anouk van Dijk in Hamburg’s Kampnagel-Fabrik, his strong political commitments were ideally combined in text and production for the first time in the play “Peace”. The production by the Berliner Schaubühne describes everyday life in a metropolitan flat-share of convenience, in which war photographers and professional advertisers, media people and pop stars come together, as in “MTV The Real World”. The only difference is that here, all of the cynicism of presentation and content can somehow no longer be laughed away and the real human dramas emerge as caricatures. Richter’s drama “Electronic City”, which Matthias Hartmann premiered as a multimedia spectacle in Bochum in 2003 before Richter produced it himself, describes globalisation nomads in a permanent nervous breakdown.
But because Richter learned the craft of actor direction in his training in Hamburg under Jürgen Flimm, who he did not really like, in his own productions he constantly succeeds in transferring the virtual subject psychologically accurately right into human conflict situations. And it also enables him to present completely media-free plays, such as Jon Fosse’s “Nightsongs” or Sarah Kane’s “4.48 Psychosis” densely and impressively as highly conventional human drama. He even succeeded remarkably well with a diversion to the opera with Henze’s “We Come to the River”, which he once again produced as a powerful media political spectacle.
As Richter’s criticism of the media was born from fascination with the media, his approach sometimes has the reformatory zeal of a convert. Then his characters mutate into stereotypes or caricatures, his tone loses distance and the analytical contention turns onto jargon. But when he concentrates more on suffering in the world than on critical polemics, he arrives at impressive portraits of modern people. And in this work he has created some of the most intensive stage experiences of recent years.
