The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier

Peter M Boenisch, Thomas Ostermeier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138914469
• eBook ISBN: 9781317428237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Thomas Ostermeier is the most internationally recognised German theatre director of the present. With this book, he presents his directorial method for the first time. The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier provides a toolkit for understanding and enacting the strategies of his advanced contemporary approach to staging dramatic texts. In addition, the book includes:

• Ostermeier's seminal essays, lectures and manifestos translated into English for the first time.
• Over 140 photos from the archive of Arno Declair, who has documented Ostermeier's work at the Schaubühne Berlin for many years, and by others.
• In-depth 'casebook' studies of two of his productions: Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (2012) and Shakespeare's Richard III (2015)
• Contributions from Ostermeier's actors and his closest collaborators to show how his principles are put into practice.

An extraordinary, richly illustrated insight into Ostermeier's working methods, this volume will be of interest to practitioners and scholars of contemporary European theatre alike.

Acknowledgements

Without the opportunities provided by a Small Research Grant awarded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I would not have been able to immerse myself so intensely into Thomas Ostermeier’s work at the Berlin Schaubühne. These periods of research residence at Berlin were further complemented by study leave provided by the University of Kent during Spring 2014. At Kent, I am particularly indebted to the former Dean of Humanities, Professor Karl Leydecker (now at the University of Dundee), for his most generous personal efforts in re-directing my career as I briefly took to the stage at the wrong theatre, disregarding his sagacious Regie-instructions. Above all, though, my thanks are due to Thomas Ostermeier for his unreserved enthusiasm that turned what was once planned as a book about his work into a collaborative effort to articulate and document his methods, craft and technique as well as the intellectual context of his work. Thomas, his actors and colleagues at the Schaubühne, and his students have welcomed me most warmly whenever I intruded on their work in rehearsals, workshops and seminar sessions. As a pure theatre theorist by trade – a ‘theatre scientist’ even, as they say in Germany – these past few years at and around the Schaubühne have been genuinely transformative not only for my own understanding of Regie, but also of the true task of theatre scholarship. At the Schaubühne, I owe particular thanks to Maren Dey, Florian Borchmeyer, Christoph Schletz, Eva Meckbach, Johanna Lühr, Rebecca Berg, Leila Frieling and Carsten Höth for their generous support of this project. To Elisa Leroy, assistant to Thomas Ostermeier, a special thank you for contributing with such great interest, care and curiosity, and with untiring effort and commitment even during your rare holidays! Arno Declair, Florence von Gerkan and Jan Pappelbaum have assisted us by providing images, and Robert Shaughnessy, David Barnett and Clare Finburgh have kindly commented on draft versions, not least helping us out in our at times vague command of the English language. And finally, thanks to Ben Piggott, Kate Edwards and Talia Rodgers at Routledge who have helped us with great patience to bring the seed of an idea to its eventual fruition.

Peter M. Boenisch

London and Berlin, September 2015

This book about my methodological experiences over the last twenty years would never have been possible without the initiative of Peter M. Boenisch. I would never have taken the time, and would not have had the diligence to do this work without him_ he deserves my infinite thanks. Without the collaboration, help and patience of my wonderful personal assistant Elisa Leroy, this book would not have seen the light of day. That is why I would also like to thank her profoundly.

This is a book mostly about directing actors: Without the troupe of actors who have accompanied me all these years at Schaubühne, I would not have had the possibility to conduct my research on acting. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my loyal set designer, Jan Pappelbaum, with whom I’ve been working for twenty years now; the costume designers Nina Wetzel and Florence von Gerkan; the video artist Sébastien Dupouey; the musicians Nils Ostendorf, Malte Beckenbach and Thomas Witte; the dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer, and the Schaubühne’s vice director and my long-term collaborator Tobias Veit. I also thank Jürgen Schitthelm, co-founder and former proprietor of the Schaubühne, as well as Schaubühne’s former vice director and nowadays managing director Friedrich Barner, who trusted me with the artistic direction of the Schaubühne; and last but not least: my closest collaborator of all these years, the wonderful playwright Marius von Mayenburg, who also provided me with beautiful translations of Shakespeare and Ibsen. Without these, I would not have been able to delve into the realms of these two writers as deeply as I have.

Thomas Ostermeier

Berlin, September 2015

Chapter 1
Playing with the R(ealism) effect

An introduction to Thomas Ostermeier's theatre work

Peter M. Boenisch

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690810-1

No other German theatre company, and no other contemporary German theatre artist, is as present around the world today as Thomas Ostermeier (b. 1968) and the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the theatre ensemble he has been leading as Artistic Director since autumn 1999. In addition to servicing the four venues at its Berlin Kurfürstendamm home with a continuous repertoire programme of around 500 performances per season, the company also plays around 100 performances abroad each year. In the course of the 2014/15 theatre season, approximately 68,000 spectators saw Schaubühne works outside Berlin – of course not exclusively, but mostly productions directed by Ostermeier himself. In the twelve months between July 2014 and July 2015, the company travelled to Avignon (where they began and ended the season with performances at the Avignon Festival), Oslo, London, Seoul, Dublin, Moscow (on three occasions with three different productions), Belfast, Cluj Napoca, Amsterdam (with two different productions on two occasions), Lausanne, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, São Paolo, Rennes, Montreal, Wiesbaden, Macau, Recklinghausen, Tianjin and Beijing (with two productions), Naples, Athens, Paris, Lisbon and Venice (with two productions at the Biennale). As a result of this global presence, Thomas Ostermeier’s theatre, above all his own globally celebrated productions of Hedda Gabler (2005), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (2007/14), Hamlet (2008), An Enemy of the People (2012), Little Foxes (2014) and Richard III (2015), has come to represent German theatre to the wider world, far beyond Europe. In 2011, aged 43, Ostermeier became the youngest ever recipient of the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for his lifetime achievement in theatre. It was with good reason, therefore, that the German weekly Zeit Magazin described him as ‘the face of modern German theatre’. ¹

And yet, there could hardly be a director less typical of contemporary German theatre than Ostermeier. In stark contrast to his popularity with audiences abroad and at home (at the Schaubühne, tickets for his productions regularly sell out the day they are released), German theatre critics – after an initial hype around the director’s work at the ‘Baracke’, which he led from 1996 onwards – have rarely been more than lukewarm even about his most celebrated works, such as Hamlet. Since taking over the Schaubühne in late 1999, Ostermeier has only received three nominations for the Berlin Theatertreffen, the annual showcase of the season’s ten best productions as voted by a jury of theatre critics. ² Comparing the Berlin reviews of his recent Richard III (2015) to the production’s critical reception in France (where its Avignon premiere made front page news in the national broadsheet Le Monde and two other newspapers) reveals a baffling discrepancy. In his native country, Ostermeier’s work seems largely to slip through the net of mainstream critical categories, and German theatre scholarship equally has remained largely silent about his oeuvre. ³ Unlike most other theatre artists from the country that has invented ‘directors’ theatre’, his work cannot easily be summed up by a handful of aesthetic principles that recur with each production. At first sight at least, he seems to lack a trademark ‘directorial signature’, and despite giving plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams a distinctly contemporary feel, Ostermeier steers clear of idiosyncratic, authorial interpretation; these are, of course, all the hallmarks of German Regietheater that most professional as well as academic critics consider as gold standard to measure directorial achievement. The Anglo-American perspective that tends to frame his work as that of a directorial auteur likewise misses the crucial tenets and core values of his work, which this introductory chapter seeks to outline.

Ostermeier himself positions his approach to theatre, first and foremost, as outside, after and against postmodern deconstruction and postdramatic performing, German theatre’s prevalent aesthetic paradigms in recent decades. Above all, he rejects the aesthetically self-referential theatricality of contemporary theatre-making (in Germany, in particular, and certainly elsewhere, too). In his analysis, much of it has become stuck in epigonic clichés of deconstruction while having long lost most, if not all of the critical impetus that originally drove the post-modern provocations against modern certainties in the wake of the 1968 year of revolt, as exemplarily articulated by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Ostermeier describes himself as ‘the deconstructionists’ little brother’ who finds himself tidying up after them. ⁴ For him, theatre is, first and foremost, a forum for critical self-reflection – not an aesthetically secluded self-referentiality, though, but the self-critical interrogation of our selves and of the world around us, of our self-assured positions, of all apparently self-evident truths in and of the society that surrounds and conditions us. His own key writings about theatre, from the late 1990s to today, make this central intention very clear (see Chapters 2, 4 and 8 below). He unites these essentially political core values of his theatre work in the notion of ‘realism’ that underpins his work, which he understands as something very different from any theatrical ‘kitchen-sink realism’ or plain naturalism. The original Schaubühne manifesto entitled ‘The Mission’ (Der Auftrag), with which Ostermeier and his then co-director, choreographer Sasha Waltz, launched their joint tenure of the venue in January 2000, succinctly summarised some of these ‘neo-realist’ essentials: ⁵

Theatre can be one of these places where attempts to comprehend the world in a different way intensify into a shared world-view and into an attitude. Theatre can be a place for society to gain consciousness, thus to be re-politicised.

For this aim, we need a contemporary theatre [...]. We need a new realism, because realism counters a ‘false consciousness’, which these days is much more a lack of any consciousness. Realism is not the simple depiction of the world as it looks. It is a view on the world with an attitude that demands change. ⁶

Ostermeier’s idea of realism could not be more distinct from representations of face-value, literal realities which in their recognisability affirm the world as we believe we know it. Against the soap-operatic ‘capitalist realism’ of mainstream media, yet also against much post-dramatic performance work, his materialist realism uses the feel of ‘authenticity’ in order to confront audiences with some deep rooted, perhaps even disavowed conflicts and contradictions at the heart of our present-day society. In a stance that appears almost outmoded today, his theatre thereby holds up the original values of bourgeois citizenship – liberty, equality, solidarity – combining them with a belief in an enlightened humanism, and a Brechtian utopia that a recognition triggered by the de-naturalisation of our standard perception may result in reflection, insight, a critical attitude, and potentially even in an act to make a change; in his Baracke-years, Ostermeier proclaimed, ‘After the victory of communism, theatre will be redundant’. ⁷ It is in these terms, far beyond the surface of aesthetics, intentions, and interpretations, that Thomas Ostermeier’s theatre indeed reveals a surprisingly consistent pathway that leads straight from his early work at the Baracke, where he staged mainly Anglo-American ‘in-yer-face theatre’, right down to his recent productions of dramatic classics and modern plays at the Schaubühne.

The main motor to trigger this recognition and the defamiliarisation of a normative perspective in his work is theatral play. ⁸ Ostermeier’s directorial approach, introduced in detail in Chapter 6, still remains true to some fundamental principles which he already articulated way back in 1998. Above all, his Regie believes without reservation in the actors as ‘original creators’:

[...] the prime function of the director is to describe and communicate with the actor. You discuss a dialogue, you agree on a situation in a play – and then it’s up to the actor. [...] When something happens in rehearsals which I don’t control, when something is liberated in the actors, then I leave the rehearsal room in bliss. I don’t get that from feeling ‘fine, my concept works’. ⁹

Instead of imposing his vision and concepts on a play, which Ostermeier describes as ‘deductive method of directing’ (see Chapter 6), he follows the principle of an ‘inductive’ Regie. In this respect, he adds to his Brechtian political commitment an aesthetic approach in the tradition of Max Reinhardt, based on the conviction that each play demands its specific directorial approach and way of producing it, while also taking further Reinhardt’s sense for captivating, at times spectacular, and certainly popular and accessible theatrality. Ostermeier’s work thereby makes an important contribution to theatre direction as it draws together the two German directing traditions defined by Reinhardt (crudely spoken, the ‘German Stanislavsky’) and Brecht, with an amalgam of Meyerhold’s very concrete psychophysical technique and Artaud’s visionary ‘cruelty’ providing the medium to bring the two together. ¹⁰

'Jumping into people's faces with our bare bottoms': Existential theatre at the Baracke

Thomas Ostermeier’s ‘meteoric rise’ ¹¹ commenced while he was still a directing student at Berlin’s Ernst-Busch-Theatre Academy, the leading theatre training institution of former East Germany, which has managed to remain a central and distinct voice in German theatre training to date, following a distinctly ‘Eastern European’ theatre pedagogy in the traditions of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Brecht. ¹² In 1996, Michael Eberth, the then outgoing head dramaturg at Deutsches Theater (DT), had secured a grant from the patrons’ organisation to turn a disused wooden cabin next to the theatre that had variously served as workshop, canteen and storage space into a small auditorium to stage new, experimental work. Having noted Ostermeier’s student productions, Eberth appointed him to run this venture, aptly named Baracke (literally, ‘the shack’; in German, the word does not carry the English association of military barracks). Eberth, who himself moved on from his DT position at the same time, left Ostermeier a bunch of playscripts and translations whose productions would quickly make the small, improvised and rather dilapidated space famous far beyond Berlin: Fat Men in Skirts by New York playwright Nicky Silver opened the Baracke in December 1996, followed by David Harrower’s Knives in Hens, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, plays by Martin Crimp, Enda Walsh, and not least Sarah Kane. Between autumn 1996 and summer 1999, eight productions premiered at the Baracke, seven of which directed by Ostermeier himself, supported by his dramaturg Jens Hillje (with whom he went to school in his Bavarian hometown of Landshut) and architect-stage designer Jan Pappelbaum, who had turned the wooden hut into a flexible, empty space, while adding portacabins as dressing rooms and box office at the rear (see Chapter 3.1 and Figures 3.2 and 3.3). They had only limited financial and technical support from the DT-main house and were constrained by the availability of the DT ensemble actors to a certain number of performances. Therefore, they ran the Baracke more like a subcultural arts centre, hosting in addition to the performances readings, exhibitions, club nights, political discussions, and concerts, including those of Ostermeier’s own punk-rock band, where he played the bass. Breaking with the elitism and conservatism associated with most theatres, they envisioned a theatre that was open, inviting, and accessible for everyone. Continuing a trend started a few years before by Frank Castorf’s equally alternative and highly successful Volksbühne, the Baracke managed to turn theatre into a ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ destination for a young, fashionable crowd, mainly in their twenties. Eventually, the Baracke team was offered the reins of the prestigious Schaubühne, made famous in the 1970s by Peter Stein. He accepted and decided to start out in a joint venture with choreographer Sasha Waltz and her producer-partner Jochen Sandig that would last until 2005. ¹³ Together they moved from their make-shift quarters in the former East to the impressive Bauhaus-building by architect Erich Mendelsohn at Lehniner Platz in the affluent (Western) district of Charlottenburg in January 2000, precisely coinciding with the new millennium. Ostermeier was thirty-two at the time – the same age as Peter Stein when he took over the original Schaubühne in 1970.

Ostermeier had dedicated the Baracke to ‘material that is relevant’, and to making ‘theatre that interests us’. ¹⁴ The affiliation with the Deutsches Theater allowed him to pursue these aims, working from the very start with actors from one of the country’s finest theatre ensembles, such as Thomas Bading, who is still in the Sch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier
• Acknowledgements
• Index