Theatre Scene and Trends

At present – a glance at the season programs suffices – authors, dramaturges and directors are biding their time with respect to the crisis. And this even though it threatens to do in budgets.

Today we know what was happening parallel as the investment bank Lehmannn Brothers gasped for air in autumn 2008 like a drowning equity swimmer. Several billions of its speculative financial material had gone missing, but as ever it still tried to exude an air of “all will be well”. At this point the crisis was looming only vaguely, but Elfriede Jelinek was already writing her play The Merchant’s Contract (Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns), and the newly forming Hamburg Thalia Theater very swiftly joined the Cologne Theater in including Nicolas Stemann’s production of the text flow about globally flooding financial flows in their program.

Have-nots

This was not so surprising inasmuch as theater people, especially those beginning in the job, are among those who earn so little that they live in a constant financial crisis. Who better then to report from that state of mind which Jelinek evokes with her puns? “No yield, from nothing comes nothing, yet it comes, the big Nothing, where we have-nots sit and gnaw at our fingernails”.

In the eloquent Nobel laureate the theater had found a mouthpiece, and from Freiburg to Saarbrücken, Göttingen to Berlin, stages threw themselves on the Contract. But this was not all. Earlier, other theaters had given themselves over to classic plays that tell of the “have-nots” whom Jelinek considers with scornful garlands of words: the little man who always gambles away his pension, as in Ödön von Horvath’s Kasimir and Karoline, or is also a fired chauffeur and is called Johannes Pinneberg in Hans Fallada’s novel Little Man, What Now?

A full circle

Luc Perceval’s adaptation of Fallada’s novel at the Munich Kammerspiele spans a horizon to the Great Depression of the 1920s, while Dennis Kelly’s new play Love and Money gives the impression of being an echo from the present. At the center stands a man who lends a hand in the suicide of his wife in order to free their marriage from debt. The play has been produced at seven theaters and will appear in the coming season at Oberhausen and Wuppertal.

Things have come full circle. After all, Oberhausen and Wuppertal are precisely the cities in the Ruhr area that have been thinking about shutting their theaters in the wake of the deepening financial crisis. Especially in Wuppertal, the past season was accompanied by protests against the closing plans, and one could suppose that the subject of the “crisis” would be pointedly found in the new season line-up. But even in the preface to the new program, the tone is discreet. It speaks of “financially difficult times”, while in the repertory, apart from the Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money and Rafael Spregelburd’s Stupidity (Dummheit), a play about “greed”, the strained state of the global economy finds no echo.

Wuppertal is not alone in its dignified reserve. Currently theaters are more in search of possibilities of a substantial way of coming to grips with the crisis. Otherwise they are living in accord with the motto emblazoned under a picture of a fishmonger in the Wuppertal season’s program: “Whoever grasps the eel by the tail ends up holding nothing”.

Playing it safe

It is understandable that when dramaturges want to grapple with the “crisis”, they repeatedly come face to face with the fact that plays on the subject are not exactly growing on trees. So theater people behave like the crisis itself: discreet, unobtrusive and taciturn. So, too, the premier announcements for the coming season. Theaters are playing it safe for starts and are otherwise allowing themselves two or three productions with content relevant to the subject.

The Mainz State Theater is the exception when it prefixes its new season with the motto “Crisis as opportunity” and begins with the premier of Laura Fernández’s Counter Summit, a “sarcastic anti-globalization farce” by an Argentine author. The director is Philipp Löhle, whose own play Supernova will be premiered at Mannheim in mid-season. The play describes how a gold rush breaks out in the Black Forest and it is once again greed that tears people apart.

With three plays about the crisis, Mannheim and Mainz are all in vogue. The same applies inter alia to the Dresden State Theater which, following the example of Munich, is staging Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? Later in the season it will present Elfriede Jelinek’s The Merchant’s Contract, a play, which will probably continue to occupy the theater world for some time.