Theatre Scene and Trends

Classics like Lessing, Goethe and Schiller top the hit lists of German-language theatre productions. The performances often relate to subject matter at school and attract young audiences to the stage. But the educational mission of theatres is not wearing thin in its employment of material from the canon. Educational theatre programmes are enabling access to classics that are increasingly undergoing experimentation.












At Schauspiel Hannover, Wendla, Moritz and Melchior, dressed in jeans, seem to have sprung from a classroom of today. Director Nuran David Calis premiered a present-day adaptation of Frank Wedekind's 1906 “Children's Tragedy” Spring Awakening. And in Falk Richter's staging of Schiller's Intrigue and Love at Berlin's Schaubühne, the president's son Ferdinand is nothing if not modern: He bewitches the musician's daughter surrounded by walls of video. The spectators of these performances are hardly older than the actors on stage: 13- to 16-year-old students who perform a significant economic role for the theatres.

Classics as stage hits

Statistics of the Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Theatre Association) for the 2006/2007 season - the most up-to-date data currently available - make it patently clear: The classics, in more or less modern garb, are the bestsellers of the German-speaking stage. Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's classic standard, tops the list of most performed plays: It was staged at 46 different theatres. Second place went to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with 28, followed by Friedrich Schiller's Intrigue and Love with 26 stagings. The previous year showed much the same tendency.

As soon as theatres place certain plays in the repertoire, those that appear in the school curriculum of the particular federal state, they need hardly worry about less-than-capacity crowds. Are the theatres therefore fulfilling a classical educational mission that is continuing to dwindle in other media and perhaps even in the schools?

Education as reflective exercise

Ulrich Khuon, artistic director of Hamburg's Thalia Theater, does not see himself in competition with teachers, a group he highly esteems. Concerning the educational mission, however, the theatre manager, whose house was chosen multiple times as “Theatre of the Year” by the trade journal Theater heute, agrees. At least as long as “education” is not perceived strictly as a canonical work, but rather as a possibility to reflect passionately on society and the world: “Theatre contributes to a better understanding of yourself, and thus also of others.” That theatre lends itself especially well to the treatment of classical or, rather, not immediately accessible material, is due to its inherent ability to enliven, as it were, the reading. For this reason, however, orienting the production style to allow for a presumably easier consumption would be the entirely wrong strategy.

For example, although Nicolas Stemann's Thalia production of Friedrich Schiller's early work The Robbers is thoroughly modern in its casting of the brothers Franz and Karl Moor in the style of a Schiller boy band, the plays interpretation remains nonetheless sophisticated. “Art has the right to hear what we think about it.” He therefore always places great worth in outreach programmes and educational theatre offerings, especially for teenagers.

Theatre educational support programmes

Sure enough, educational theatre - oftentimes as groundwork for a theatre visit - continues to spread: Audience discussions, workshops and local youth theatre groups are the norm from Hamburg to Munich. An initiative like TUSCH (Theatre and Schools), a programme funded by the Berlin Senate in which theatres assume sponsorship for a particular school, is a good example of this trend of honouring the educational mission though practical and personal theatre experience rather than through theory, the typical mode of instruction in Germany. This thesis holds that those who have first-hand experience of a Schiller or Shakespeare production understand the play even better as spectators. At the Maxim Gorki Theatre, teenagers from Kreuzberg's Rütli school stand on stage alongside professional actors in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Schiller in practice at Berlin's Schaubühne

Uta Plate long ago embraced this belief in more practical experience when she began 10 years ago as a theatre instructor at Berlin's Schaubühne. Like Khuon, she sees the theatre's educational mission less in terms of specific content and much more in the enabling of young individuals to come together in a protected space, not subject to the customary usability criteria, in order to engage in discussions while pondering themselves and society. Familiarity with certain classics can be assumed to be as low among university-track students as among those at vocational schools. Thus, Plate conceives her workshops as “introductions” to the theatre visit, awakening interest through assignments related to real life.

With Intrigue and Love the students are asked to write down which external conditions they themselves could nowadays discard, in place of the class distinctions in Schiller, in order to be together with a special boy or girl. In the end, if they have not only understood the classic, but also something more about themselves, the educational mission has been optimally fulfilled.