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Ostermeier |
backstage
Foreword
Ostermeier
Work biography
The first time I ever heard of Thomas Ostermeier was when I saw his production of Shopping and Fucking at the Festwochen in Vienna. Excited, I went puffing up to the fifth floor to see him and his troupe, and there he sat, sober and silent, and I wasn’t able to properly express my praise to the man himself. Here I hope to make up for that.
The production was incredibly real, and theatrical in the best sense of the term. This was no flat naturalism, no mere transferral of the real world to the stage. Ostermeier came up with ingenious images and incarnations that arose out of the theatrical imagination and took the brutality in the play, which in fact defies performance, and presented it in a way that was both real and invisible. It was this path, of translating into theatrical language, that captured my imagination and empathy a thousand times more.
I value his humanity, the way he treats the characters in plays, the way he treats me as an observer, the way he treats his actors. They “blossom” under him, they are authentic, because they’re allowed to develop autonomy and their own imaginations. He himself is an excellent listener and observer, respects dissent, he only speaks in rehearsals in response to questions, he gives the actors time to develop, and isn’t easily satisfied. He encourages – in the best sense of the word.
Having done Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure with him, both of which he interpreted and adapted in a way that was extremely clever and conscientious, he became a highly important director for me, one whose way of working has taught me so much. Like Peter Zadek, Ostermeier possesses the ability to present reality on the stage using unusual and highly powerful means. I found his way of working exhilarating, because he doesn’t exert pressure, rather he slowly and patiently works his way forward, observing closely. This freedom and lightness of touch results in true veracity and authenticity, but at the same time a kind of mystery about people that he doesn’t seek to solve or simplify.
Rehearsing with Thomas is really a great adventure. His curiosity and his precision in watching and listening mean that you discover completely new things every day. He is very conscientious in his interaction with all of the “stage workers” and that gives everyone a great sense of shared enterprise.
He has an absolutely musical ear and an absolute sense for theatrical tone and theatrical dishonesty which keeps his productions from becoming conventional. The wonderful thing about his work and the way he works with actors is that he is always fighting for something, not just fighting in the interests of formalism.
Overall I have to say that Thomas has become one of the most important directors for me. And as a person, I like the fact that he has remained unpretentious and incorruptible, he isn’t driven by careerist thinking and, last but not least, that he is an observer of the world.
Gert Voss died after a brief, severe illness just a few days before the German edition of this book went to print. The passages in the following discussion that refer to him remain unchanged.
Mister Ostermeier, where have you just come from?
From Venice, where we were doing a guest performance of An Enemy of the People.
And where will the next trip take you?
To Zagreb, with Death in Venice. Later in the year we’ll be going to South America with An Enemy of the People once again, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. We’ll be doing a guest run in New York with the same play, for a week. In between there is Rome, Hedda Gabler. And I almost forgot – St Petersburg is also on the schedule.
The Schaubühne’s international guest performances
And in the last few months you were in Lausanne and Lyon, in Montreal and Quebec, among other places… It’s truly a crazy schedule that you and your company have taken on, across countries and continents. Every season the Schaubühne is on the road with more than a hundred guest performances. I’m very keen to talk about this right at the outset of our discussion – about the incredible international activities of the Schaubühne, the full extent of which only really became apparent to me when I started preparing for this book. I believe the same goes for others as well. Because ultimately, despite the countless guest appearances, the Schaubühne still offers a full programme in its home port of Berlin day in, day out, often multiple productions in parallel. Is there any other German theatre that comes close to this kind of international workload?
Only dance companies come to mind – Pina Bausch, Forsythe.
Some of your major Ibsen productions, Hedda Gabler and An Enemy of the People, but also Hamlet with Lars Eidinger, tour throughout the world. You yourself always take part in these guest tours whenever possible. With the Schaubühne’s amazing presence and representation it’s hardly surprising that DIE ZEIT described you some years ago as “the face of modern German theatre in the world”. Does that fill you with pride?
Giving a face to the new bourgeoisie
“I don’t deconstruct, I reconstruct”
No, in fact I have difficulties with that kind of label! I’m quite capable of assessing myself. I know that I still haven’t made truly great theatre history – like Marthaler, Castorf or Schlingensief, for example, who have made a significant aesthetic impact. The only aesthetic impact that my work to date may have made is in giving a face to the new bourgeoisie with productions such as A Doll’s House, Hedda and An Enemy of the People. I think people draw a connection between the glittering, design-obsessed surfaces of the new middle class and my theatre work. But there’s also the crazy Hamlet with the upturned crown on his head. The fact that I am so successful abroad is above all due to my narrative style. A lot of what we here consider the last word in modish avant-garde is impossible to communicate abroad as a relevant theatre aesthetic. In America and the UK they call it Eurotrash. I am, if you will, the little brother of the Deconstructionists – when the big brothers have torn everything apart, someone has to collect the pieces and put them together again. And that’s what I do. But always in the hope that the joins between the pieces are visible. In Japanese culture they have an expression for it – Kintsugi. A ceramic object is only truly beautiful after it has been broken and put back together again. Making the joins visible is the goal of the aesthetic. I don’t deconstruct, I reconstruct. And I’m telling stories again. Cultures that are oriented toward narrative, particularly the Anglo-Saxon world, they simply skip the generation of my big brothers, who don’t even get invited – and come directly to me. And that’s how you (laughs) become the face of German theatre all of a sudden.
That makes sense to me – your story-telling realism is comprehensible throughout the world, while some peculiarities of Germanregietheater are met with incomprehension beyond our borders… The whole world is shaped by Anglo-Saxon culture, cinema thrives on Hollywood stories. The North American novel is an important reference point in literature. And thematically, too, a lot of what someone like Castorf works with – post-socialism, the East German experience, and so on – is almost impossible to export. But the role of women, issues around the family, the happiness promised by our bourgeois society – these are issues that are of interest to everyone.
France, a second home
When did your guest performance activities actually start?Very early on, while I was still training at the Ernst Busch acting school, 1995. We went to France with Alexander Blok’s The Unknown Woman. We were invited to perform at the Festival en mai in Dijon – that’s where I established my first major links with France.
You have a particular affinity with France. Does that have anything to do with your family background?
On my mother’s side, my family comes from the Saarland, on the border with Lorraine. My grandparents met in the household of a Jewish doctor in Metz. My grandfather, who spoke the Saarland variety of French, was the chauffeur for the doctor’s family, my grandmother was the femme de ménage – she had to hangout the washing with white gloves, that became a legendary anecdote for us.
So you were familiar with French from an early age?
No, no, I only learnt it a lot later on! I didn’t have the kind of background where you grow up with things like that.
These days you are almost at home in the country. You regularly do guest performances and direct in France. You’re president of the German-French Cultural Council and in September 2013 you attended the ceremony in Oradour to commemorate the SS massacre there, along with presidents Gauck and Hollande. In France they’ve given you all sorts of honours and awards, including the order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres. They’ve offered you directorship of the Odéon theatre in Paris and the Comédie-Française, and leadership of not just the Avignon festival, where you were appointed artiste associé in 2004, but also the Festival d’Automne in Paris. And the French cities and theatres can’t get enough of the Schaubühne. In Paris you could just about set up a subscription.
Yes, year in year out we have at least 20,000 visitors. And it’s no different outside Paris – every theatre, big and small, from Normandy right down to Marseille, they all want us in their programme at least once…
Why do the French love your theatre so much?
I believe for one thing it’s the great respect for narrative, for this realistic story-telling, another reason is their idea or (laughs) illusion of modernity. The French find our theatre to be highly physical, highly radical. I myself often get labels like enfant terrible, provocateur, social engagé… But above all they’re fascinated by our actors.
This enthusiasm for the Schaubühne – doesn’t it also point to a deficiency within French theatre?
It takes an ensemble to create an identity
Yes, absolutely! The biggest and at the same time most banal deficiency – they have far less money than we do in Germany. That means that the whole spectrum of set design, aesthetics, the constant search for new forms and investigating how spaces determine the behaviour of actors – none of that can really develop there, they don’t have the budgets or the workshops for it. The second decisive point is that when you think of people like Peter Stein or Frank Castorf, the major developments in the theatre have always been associated with ensembles and with the fact that those ensembles developed over the course of years and cultivated their own language. It’s only when you maintain a permanent ensemble that you can build up that kind of identity. They don’t have that in France.
Not at all?
Ariane Mnouchkine
Well, at the Comédie-Française they do. And Ariane Mnouchkine does as well, with the Cartoucherie. Which I have to say is the most significant ensemble theatre in Europe, I’m convinced of that. There is no national or city theatre in Germany that functions as perfectly, as an ensemble, as Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil! It functions as a theatrical undertaking – and, still, as a theatre community.
We know that facts and figures are no criteria for art – and yet the audience statistics for the Schaubühne are so impressive that I have to ask you again: how many visitors does the Schaubühne reach overall with its international engagements?
80,000 visitors a year outside Germany
As a rule of thumb, about 80,000 visitors a year. And it’s a part of our theatre work that we take extremely seriously. Certainly a lot more seriously than any other German-language company. And there’s another factor here, which as a critic of neoliberalism I really shouldn’t be saying out loud – we are an extremely lean operation. We orient ourselves toward international troupes like Jan Fabre or Jan Lauwers & Needcompany. It’s something our partners appreciate.
If I understand you correctly, the international tours are not just a change of scenery for your company, but a constitutive part of your theatre work. Are there financial reasons for that?
Indeed. The Schaubühne now has a fixed revenue target of two million euros from guest performances. Otherwise we would never be able to stick to our business plan – we get twelve million from the city, up to two million from revenue at home, and then two million from international revenue. So we have 16 million in total, and 25 per cent of that is our own revenue – no other publicly funded theatre in Germany brings in that much.
But finances are surely not the only reason?
No, of course not. Internationalism is absolutely self-evident for me, I can only think internationally. That was clear when I came on board here. A globalised world – you know, it’s actually a wonderful idea! To me it recalls the dream of international solidarity. But then this idea was trampled on by the Chicago Boys! You can’t just leave globalisation to the economy and to economists.
Culture for the global market?
Aren’t you at all worried that cultural globalisation might lead to nothing more than an international, globally compatible cultural mix? There are already groups today that don’t have a location in any true sense of the word and only exist to service the global market.
It’s a charge I’m familiar with and one I take seriously. But we’re not making a global mush! We play in New York or in Paris and, this amazes a lot of people, we perform in German for a whole week! International festivals are purchasing a Berlin identity from us. An Enemy of the People is the best example. This hipster culture, which comes across as vegan, engaged, enlightened and critical but then, when it comes to the crunch, retreats to the private sphere – this hipster culture is more concentrated in Berlin than anywhere else. It’s an issue that is understood throughout the world, because our ways of life are aligning.
Motivation for the whole company
You’ve mentioned money and you’ve mentioned the programme. I am sure that there is a third factor – all of this travel must be extremely important for the emotional well being of the Schaubühne, the whole ensemble, the individual actors – and also for your own motivation. Because it’s obvious that you are far more successful internationally than at home, in Germany and in Berlin.
Yes, that’s true. When I went to the French Embassy to receive the order that you mentioned earlier, I said in my acceptance speech, and it still applies today – if we hadn’t been successful internationally, I would have finished with the Schaubühne! I would never have been able to put up with all the hostility, especially in the early years. So many people who wanted to piss all over me, so much envy among colleagues and among the critics.
But today the tempest of envy is behind you! You’ve long enjoyed terrific success among Berlin audiences, the company is buzzing, performances are sold out.
And yet there are still many who are rankled by the fact that the company is doing so well financially, and in terms of audience figures. But don’t get me wrong – I’m not at all frustrated here. When we come back from a successful international tour, it’s not like we say, oh God, here we are back in Berlin where it’s all so blah, where is the enthusiasm of Paris, or Sydney, or New York? No, we have a really fantastic, young audience here!
What’s behind the company’s enormous international success?
But success isn’t measured in audience numbers alone, but also in public opinion. It surely can’t be a matter of indifference to you that your Hamlet, which has been celebrated all over the world by audiences and critics alike, and has collected awards, got the cold shoulder from the Theatertreffen in Berlin and had most of the city’s critics griping about it.
You know what, we’ve become used to that over the years – after the premiere comes the cold shower, you know it’s coming, the ensemble knows as well, and so for two days we lay low. Then we all get through it somehow, and we hope it hasn’t had too great an emotional impact – and we look forward to performing for our audiences once again.
German critics and their narrow postdramatic framework
How do you explain the striking difference between public opinion here and elsewhere? In Taormina you received the Europe Theatre Prize, in Venice you even got the Golden Lion for your life’s work – you’re unlikely to get anything like that here. I find it hard to believe that people simply envy your success, critics aren’t that stupid. Is the fact that you get far more recognition as a director abroad than in your own country primarily due to the very specific aesthetic discourse of German-language theatre? To put it bluntly, your approach – making politically engaged, realistic theatre – meets with significant reservation from many German critics with a postdramatic orientation.
Receiving the Golden Lion for his life’s work at the Theatre Biennale in Venice, 2011
“Tacit agreements in the German cultural and critical industry”
Yes, that’s true. There are these tacit, fixed agreements in the German cultural and critical industry that aren’t even discussed any more. My aesthetic is simply not fashionable, anything linear, anything like realistic story-telling is simply labelled “TV realism” and then dismissed – case closed. They would prefer to concentrate on the mainstream of a postdramatic style that has long become derivative than engage at all with my theatrical language, much less consider why it gets far more respect from European and international critics than it does here in Germany.
We will be coming back to this issue. But my view is that German theatre critics tend to lump all realistic stage storytelling together, and reject all of it as backward. In any case the postdramatic dogma has passed its zenith, at least in the arts pages. One more question on the subject of international tours: apart from the fact that your actors get so much acclaim – what other experience do you gain from these guest performances?
“The feel-good soup of the Federal Republic”
Big, beautiful, important experiences! You know, my childhood was to a great extent marked by conflict, and my view of the world definitely has a lot do with that. And that’s why I look for situations with my actors where together we come to understand that the issues we are dealing with on the stage are not just theatrical problems, but real conflicts about responsibility and morality. When we put on An Enemy of the People in Athens during the financial crisis or A Doll’s House in Turkey, when we perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Ramallah and thus in a land where eighty per cent of male youths under 21 have already been in prison, Hamlet’s line “Denmark’s a prison” comes across completely differently than it does on the Ku’damm – because suddenly these are entirely concrete, elemental questions of life that we have long since lost, here in the pacified zones of capitalism, in the feel-good soup of the Federal Republic. That makes an incredible impression, suddenly you understand, and that makes all the criticism that we hear in Berlin relative. Then it doesn’t matter any more, you just shrug your shoulders.
A childhood full of conflict
A childhood marked by conflict – this is a theme I would like to pick up on. You were born in 1968, you come, as they say, from very humble circumstances, you had a difficult youth. You certainly couldn’t say that you were born to the theatre. Could you tell me about it?
I come from a lower middle class background, my mother was a shop assistant, my father a career soldier. He was extremely authoritarian, and he could be really rough with the family, especially when he’d been drinking. In essence his was a subservient mentality, a somewhat Wilhelmine view of the world. And Catholic. When I was 16 I decided I would never talk to my father again, and I stuck to that until I was 26. My mother had an incredibly hard time in the marriage – and that led to me developing a protective instinct and a strong maternal connection. She was a great woman, who tried to take it all upon her herself. The healthy part of my mind (laughs) I owe to her in any case! But even my father had his good side. He was a great entertainer and he would take his accordion along to his friends’ parties and he could play all the old classics until the early hours of the morning, from the twenties to folk songs, and he was usually the centre of attention. And it was with him that I first saw Karl Valentin’s short films. He passed on his love for Valentin’s brand of unfathomable, bloody Bavarian humour.
Thomas with his father, 1970
So you do have some good memories of this time. However, you were confronted with a lot of misfortune early on. That includes your grandfather being run over by a car, your mother later dying the same way.
We haven’t talked about my grandfather yet. He was a miner in Bavaria, a kind of day labourer, his wife was a seamstress who went from farm to farm. They never had a real home of their own. He was in the Russian campaign and came back a broken man.
You’re the middle of three sons?
Growing up amid barracks
Yes. And I grew up in a barracks environment, first in Munsterlager, a terrible barracks town on the Lüneburg Heath. There were constant manoeuvres on the parade ground, constant shooting. And later in Landshut we lived directly in the barracks themselves. Combat – that was the sound of my childhood! I rebelled against all of that early on and at some point I said, I’m leaving, I’m going my own way. I kept running away, staying with friends, and at 16 and 17 I hitch-hiked for long periods throughout Europe. Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey…
Thomas (below left) with his parents and his brothers Martin and Andreas in Munster, Advent 1970
But you still went to grammar school?
You would get a recommendation for grammar school in primary school, and all three of us were very good in school, it came easily to us. A few years can’t hurt, thought my parents, then they will do the secondary school certificate. They didn’t believe that we would actually matriculate. For my mother it was clear – we had to be skilled workers, because they’re always in demand. So not workers, but skilled workers.
Processing a Bavarian childhood
You did your matriculation in Landshut. How much Bavaria is there in you?
Oh, plenty. Because I had a northern German idiom from my first eight years in northern Germany, and to a Bavarian there’s nothing worse, school was really difficult to begin with. I was a complete outsider. But I very quickly taught myself the Bavarian dialect, and I can still speak it today. For a long time we lived in my father’s old village near Landshut. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bavaria? That really provincial, dull, brutal Catholicism, particularly in Lower Bavaria…
And you worked through that later in plays like Fleißer’s The Strong Tribe and Achternbusch’s Susn?
And how! All of my strength comes from this resistance to Bavaria, from anger and hatred. I grew up extremely Catholic, an altar boy. There’s that saying – any good Catholic who was an altar boy will be a communist by his early twenties. The communitarian principle, the whole redemption and saving-the-world thing, has a lot do with my socialisation…
When did your mother and father separate?
My mother, self-sacrificing as she was, held out until her children had left home. Then they separated. I thought it was great that she still had the strength to do it.
I have to ask – how does someone who comes from such a difficult family background, not at all a cultured milieu, get the idea to go into theatre of all things?
Theatre – a kind of life-saver
I was a relentless self-promoter, I always wanted to be the class clown, to be the centre of attention. And I was so cheeky! These days they would probably just say “ADHD” – and fix it with Ritalin. (laughs) Back then I fixed it myself, by looking for any, I mean any forum in which to blather, to get a laugh and to get a response. It was clearly compensation for an unhappy home life. A kind of live-saver, you could say.
What were your first actual steps toward theatre?
I had friends in relevant circles – this neo-existentialist milieu, early eighties, everyone was suddenly running around in black turtle-necks and reading Camus and Sartre. I fell in with a theatre group where they read and performed Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Felix Mitterer’s No Place for Idiots, as well as Mrozek, Anouilh, Tennessee Williams.
I read once that it was in this theatre group that you first got the theatre bug, from a teacher.