Professions and Education

He was one of the management team of the Frankfurt Theater am Turm before he became dramaturge at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin. Today Bernd Stegemann is Professor for Theater History and Dramaturgy at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts and head dramaturge at the Berlin Schaubühne.

We speak about the performative invention of stage situations in rehearsal. How do you know when that works and when not?

You see it in your own reaction. We all react with immediate empathy as soon as we feel an acting performance is genuine. The technical mark is whether a sentence is concrete or a general text, whether an action is general or concrete – whether, for example, something actually happens when an actor reaches for a glass or whether he only does so as if he were doing so. That’s a difficult distinction, which can only be vaguely described. What happens there isn’t scientific but rather something mental-emotional.

What happens when an actor plays a character who is playing a part within the play, as, for example, when Shakespeare’s Richard III or Worm in Schiller’s Intrigue and Love go about their intrigues?

That’s of course a very special type of character, one who dramatizes himself. Since these characters add a quite exciting dimension to the drama, both the audience and the actors, amusingly enough, very much like this sort of person. In everyday life such people are usually less popular, and we say of them “They’re just playing a part”.

Acting suggestions

You’ve said that plays make more or less good suggestions about how they should be acted. Are there plays that hardly do that?

Yes, there are plays with diffuse or altogether no such suggestions. When a dramaturge reads a play, precisely that is a decisive criterion of quality. But he always reads a play on two levels. On the level of the theatrical situation and with a view to the question what opportunities it gives the actor for acting; and then on the level of the character himself and with a view to how he can be dramatized. Directors frequently feel repelled by plays with clear indications of how they should be acted and their ambition is often to seek another way, as contrary as possible, even when the hints are written as stage directions into the drama.

Can you give an example of a play that makes few staging suggestions?

Goethe’s Faust, for instance, works at the level of drama only once Gretchen appears on the scene. Before that it’s rather rough going. Schiller, on the other hand, was an exceptionally gifted dramaturge, inventor and designer of situations. His dramatic work is written with such energy and imagination that he anticipated all Hollywood’s melodramatic turns. Lady Milford in Intrigue and Love, for example, is straight out of Hollywood: a fallen woman who sleeps her way up and then suddenly says: “That was all wrong; I will give away all my possessions and live in poverty”. What more can you ask for?

Spoilsport

Does the dramaturge sometimes have to play the spoilsport at rehearsals?

He should, and he should play it above all when the performative discovery of acting possibilities has become a law unto itself, when it becomes silly and dumb and is only about having fun on stage. Then someone has to be there who nags and says that isn’t the non plus ultra.

Can that work without spoiling the good mood?

Sometimes it can be very good to spoil the good mood. Acting is, after all, a profession. It’s important that the dramaturge names the concrete points and points to the text or situation where in previous rehearsals the acting made more sense, was more complex and aesthetically richer. It’s also important to assist the actors so that the whole thing goes in a better direction.

A goal of the theater is to produce already during rehearsals something aesthetically autonomous, but also something socially relevant. How can you do both?

That’s the dialectic of theater as an art. The result of the rehearsals shouldn’t be something vain, not some Dadaist or maudlin circling in oneself. Nevertheless, the result should be artistically autonomous and, in its autonomy, be in touch with the social reality. The Western art of the stage has always lived in this paradox – wanting to communicate with the audience, and wanting equally to communicate in such a way that not everybody already knew it all beforehand.

Child’s play

Can it happen that an actor loses himself in acting like a child’s loses himself in play?

Yes and no. A professional actor can step out of his performance whenever he likes; he doesn’t lose himself in his acting, but rather the character loses himself in a situation taken to be real. Psychologically, that’s a moment which is very difficult to understand. Human beings are capable of operating simultaneously at various levels of reality, and the good actor can do that to the highest degree. He knows that he’s on stage, yet his character forgets this at the moment and so the actor too forgets a part of his self. This strange simultaneity is something altogether mysterious and fascinating.