Contemporary European Playwrights

Maria M. Delgado, Bryce Lease, Dan Rebellato, Maria M. Delgado, Bryce Lease, Dan Rebellato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351620536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

Contemporary European Playwrights presents and discusses a range of key writers that have radically reshaped European theatre by finding new ways to express the changing nature of the continent's society and culture, and whose work is still in dialogue with Europe today.

Traversing borders and languages, this volume offers a fresh approach to analyzing plays in production by some of the most widely-performed European playwrights, assessing how their work has revealed new meanings and theatrical possibilities as they move across the continent, building an unprecedented picture of the contemporary European repertoire. With chapters by leading scholars and contributions by the writers themselves, the chapters bring playwrights together to examine their work as part of a network and genealogy of writing, examining how these plays embody and interrogate the nature of contemporary Europe.

Written for students and scholars of European theatre and playwriting, this book will leave the reader with an understanding of the shifting relationships between the subsidized and commercial, the alternative and the mainstream stage, and political stakes of playmaking in European theatre since 1989.

1 European playwriting and politics, 1945–89

Dan Rebellato

Like its companion volume (Delgado and Rebellato 2020), this book takes as its starting point the opening up of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and focuses largely on playwrights who have developed their European profile in the years after that momentous shift in the continent’s geopolitical structure. However, crucial though that moment was, it did not wipe the dramaturgical slate clean, and all playwrights write in the shadow of the traditions, the institutional arrangements, and the playwrights that preceded them. The aim of this chapter is to outline some of the broad forms and movements of playwriting – the dramaturgical imaginary, one might say – that dominated the years before 1989 and forms a mental and cultural landscape against which more recent playwriting may be placed.

Clearly, it will not be possible to cover all plays and playwrights over five decades and across over 40 countries, so the survey will be necessarily selective and will aim to note divergences as much as commonalities between playwriting traditions. Each country’s theatre history has its own character; for much of the period, as an example, Greece and Spain’s theatres did little to encourage contemporary writers, while the United Kingdom and the Netherlands prized the new play almost above all else; France’s great period of discovering new playwrights was in the 1940s and 1950s, Poland’s was the ’50s and ’60s, while Germany’s was in the ’60s and ’70s; in the UK the playwright is increasingly someone who only writes, while in Italy throughout the period a playwright will typically also be an actor or a director; in northern Europe the distinctions between popular and art theatre are typically fairly sharp, while in southern Europe these forms are more likely to blur. Even these generalisations, of course, must admit of exceptions but nonetheless they illustrate that there is not a single story of postwar European playwriting.

Nonetheless, a few convictions shape this account: first, while the emergence of directors’ theatre in the 1970s is one of the most distinctive and important features of Europe’s theatre in the postwar years, this should not obscure the persistent vitality and diversity of European playwriting in the same period and indeed the way that playwriting has adapted to, even contributed to, some of the director- or company-led revolutions in theatre practice; second, related, the play has been a locus of constant theatrical experimentation since the Second World War, Europe’s playwrights showing an undimmed interest in finding new subjects, structures, forms, and styles in which to capture and interrogate the contemporary world; third, the play, for reasons that we will discuss, has often been at the sharp end of confrontations between the theatre and the state, between artists and governments (of all political stripes). If there is a particular focus to this investigation, it will be to note the ways in which politics and playwriting have engaged in running battles, exemplified in a number of extraordinary flashpoints, the ripples of which have been felt not just in theatre, but in the wider political culture, indeed, at times, right across Europe and beyond.

That said, it is also important to observe the importance with which theatre has been held in postwar Europe. All European countries have some form of state subsidy for the theatre, sometimes very substantial (as in Germany and Sweden), sometimes relatively modest (as in Italy and Ireland). In many countries, the theatre (and the arts more generally) have been prized by governments, sometimes as a fundamental welfare constituent of a good society, sometimes as an emblem of national prestige, sometimes as a tool of social engineering, sometimes as a means of ideological control – and in most countries, all of these things have been true at one time. Notably, after the Second World War, although playhouses were often damaged in the bombings, many countries – for example Germany, Poland, and Hungary – made reopening the theatres a priority. Jean Monnet, one of the architects of the European Union, is often quoted as reflecting, in the 1970s, ‘If we were to start [the European project] all over again, we would start with culture’ (cited in Shore 2001: 170). In fact, it seems that this quotation is apocryphal, yet that perhaps only confirms the widespread belief that the theatre has had a central role to play in the reconstruction of postwar European identity.

It is no exaggeration to say that, after the war, Germany sought to relearn its identity through culture. Theatre had an important role in helping the country in the project of Bewältigung der Vergangenheit (coming to terms with the Nazi past). Seeking non-Nazi German voices was key to helping the country understand what happened between 1933 and 1945 and, to that end, German theatres took in anti-Nazi plays written by German writers in exile like Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Rassen (The Races, 1933), Friedrich Wolf’s Professor Mamlock (1934), and Bertolt Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, 1938). These plays demanded that German audiences faced up to the horrors committed in their name. The more complicated reception of later plays showed clearly how plays could become crucibles for the painful adjustment to a post-Nazi Germany. The Berlin premiere in January 1948 of Sartre’s Les Mouches (The Flies, 1943) caused great controversy. It is a reworking of the Orestes story and embodies Sartre’s existentialist call for continual renewal through action and not letting who you already are limit you; when it premiered in Nazi-occupied Paris, it was widely understood as a call for resistance; in postwar Germany, it was seen by some left commentators as letting the Germans off the hook. One of the biggest hits of the period was Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1946), in which a German airman, General Harras, who is critical of the Nazis despite flying for them, is tasked with finding a saboteur among the engineers. He discovers that the culprit is a friend and realises that he must sacrifice himself to protect his friend and to stop being the ‘Devil’s general’. Despite its success, it faced some criticisms at its German premiere in 1947 from members of the audience who thought it presented a falsely heroic vision of Germans as critical and self-sacrificing and let them off the hook by characterising Hitler as a supernatural force (The Devil) rather than a product of German society.

It was perhaps the suspicion that some parts of Germany wanted to hastily whitewash the War that led to Martin Walser writing Eiche und Angora (The Rabbit Race, 1962), whose three sections take us from 1945 to 1960 and paint a picture of a convenient German amnesia about the recent past.¹ Relatedly, in Italy, Vitaliano Brancati’s play La governante (The Governess, 1952) satirised bourgeois hypocrisy in its portrait of a rigidly moralistic bourgeois family whose façade of Catholic respectability masks their own complicity with fascism and stirrings of lesbianism. The play was prohibited from performance and Brancati wrote a celebrated pamphlet Ritorno alla Censura (Back to Censorship, 1952) criticising the hypocrisies of Italian culture.

A key political development of the period was the forced abandonment of their colonial empires by France, Belgium, and Britain, and this too is reflected upon and interrogated by their writers. In France, this included plays like Martinican writer Aimé Césaire’s Et les Chiens se taisent (And the Dogs Were Silenced, 1956) and the Algerian Kateb Yacine’s Le Cadavre encerclé (The Corpse Encircled), published in 1954 but so controversial during the Algerian War that it could only be performed in France secretly in 1958. Genet would explore these themes too, and one can see the resonance of these early attempts to find a theatrical language for the anti-colonial struggle in a later play like Combat de nègres et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs, 1982) by Bernard-Marie Koltès, who would go on to influence later writers like Sergi Belbel and Mark Ravenhill. In Britain, the colonial legacy is addressed throughout the period by plays like John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) and Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980), a play whose prosecution for supposed indecency was in part a conservative response to its anti-colonial politics. The dramaturgical picture was also informed by the new wave of Black British playwrights who brought the view from the former colonies, most notably the Trinidadian writer Mustapha Matura with plays like As Time Goes By (1971), that debates the contradictory pull of colonial home and colonial centre in Black British identity. Here and elsewhere, new playwriting has been at the heart of Europe’s developing identity in the postwar world.

‘Not working’

A curious thought experiment about postwar European theatre is to wonder what Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) might have looked like rewritten by Bertolt Brecht. The idea of a forced marriage between the giants of metaphysical and materialist theatre seems preposterous on the face of it, and yet it nearly happened. In the six months before his death in August 1956, Brecht annotated his personal copy of Warten auf Godot with a series of suggestions for how to transform the play from a drama of existential ennui to a critique of capitalist society.² The list of characters is annotated ‘Estragon, a proletarian, Wladimir, an intellectual, Lucky, a donkey, or policeman, von Pozzo, a landowner’. The playtext itself sees various lines redistributed between the characters and sometimes rewritten, usually in a more vernacular form, identifying the two main characters as more evidently working class. Beckett’s play opens with Estragon’s line ‘Nothing to be done’ or ‘Rien à faire’ (Beckett 1966: 9; 1986: 11). Brecht amends this to ‘Geht nicht’ (‘Not working’), thus replacing what may feel like a defeated declaration of human passivity into an observation that something requires fixing.

What needed fixing might well have been, in Brecht’s eyes, the capitalist system but it could also be Beckett’s dramaturgy, which many in Europe (not just in the East) thought deeply conservative, and the play was banned in East Germany and East Berlin until the late 1980s (see McGowan 2002: 134–5). On the other hand, while the ideological differences may have been particularly sharp to mid-century observers, at this distance we might appreciate them both as products of late modernism, and indeed Carl Weber (2002) observes some significant overlaps in their visual approach to theatre, while Hans-Thies Lehmann notes their shared fondness for parable, abstraction, and stories of failure (2002: 44–5, 47). It may be that there is a third reference point behind that ‘Not working’ that both men would share. Perhaps, in mid-1950s Europe, what was not working was realism.

What is so enticing about the thought of the Brecht Godot is that it brings together the two great European influences on playwriting of the third quarter of the twentieth century: Brechtian epic theatre and the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. The emergence of these two forms was itself political, the absurd founded not merely in mid-century philosophical existentialism, but the nihilistic violence of the Second World War, while Brecht’s epic theatre was a response to the emergence of capitalist mass culture across the Europe and the ideological debates about how it might be constrained or overthrown. That there are huge differences between them should not be ignored: the absurd’s preference for whimsical fantasy, parodic illogic, surreal imagery, and comic despair contrasts sharply with Brecht’s profoundly social vision, his direct arousal of audience engagement, his rooting of the story and stage imagery in material human practice. Yet, more immediately, the particular flowering of interest in these opposed dramaturgical options may share a root of opposition to the dominance of various realist traditions across Europe.

The real

The importance of naturalism to European theatre cannot be ignored. Although many of its original emphases – the valorisation of scientific method, its preference for the problem play, its tendency to represent bourgeois society – may have become less unquestioned under the repeated assaults of modernism, psychological realism, realist stage design, and the desire to épater le bourgeois continued to be influential, even in theatre forms that were not thoroughgoingly naturalist. Although it is the challenges to realism that have attracted most attention in the postwar theatre, realism has continued to be a powerful force, often at moments of the most direct challenge to prevailing social values. It’s there in the titles of important new theatres and companies like the Realistické divadlo in Prague (1945), Realistiko Theatro in Athens (formed in 1949 under Aimilios Veakis), and Spain’s Grupo de Teatro Realista (formed in 1960 by director José María de Quinto and playwright Alfonso Sastre). The year before, de Quinto had directed a celebrated production of Look Back in Anger by John Osborne in Madrid, a reminder that British playwriting in the 1950s had been renewed by the angry realism of Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and others, whose works quickly made their way into the European repertoire on both sides of the East-West divide. Elsewhere, broadly realist playwrights included Lauro Olmo and José Martín Recuerda in Spain, Paul Koeck and Walter van den Broeck in Belgium, John Boyd and Martin Lynch in Ireland. The documentary theatre movement in 1960s Germany, which included Peter Weiss, Rolf Hochhuth, and Heinar Kipphardt, took a different theatrical form but still placed realistic engagement with society at its heart.

But by far the most important realist movement in postwar Europe – and the one that perhaps did most to discredit realism as a form – was the state-sanctioned socialist realism that dominated Eastern Europe from the late 1940s. The policy was adopted by the USSR at the Soviet Writers Congress in August 1934, and when Eastern Europe fell under Stalin’s control, the policy quickly spread through the region. Between 1948 and 1949, theatres in the Soviet bloc were nationalised and socialist realism became the official style. This meant realism from a socialist perspective, revealing the social and material conditions determining human behaviour, promoting a teleological vision of history culminating in communism, denouncing bourgeois capitalism, offering rationalism rather than mysticism, political economy rather than individual psychology.

Socialist realism was stylistically quite flexible, it being principally a stipulation about content and meaning, rather than theatrical form. It included many comedies, since, as Paul Trensky observes, ‘this genre corresponded to the greatest degree to the official optimism the plays were expected to convey’ (1978: 6). Dobrá píseň (The Good Song, 1952), the first play by Pavel Kohout, one of the towering playwrights of postwar Czechoslovakia,³ was a socialist realist comedy – in verse. There were also satires, agitprop plays, romances, melodramas, plays set in villages and factories, history plays depicting pioneers of socialist progress or the historic contradictions that could only be resolved under communism. Typical of socialist realism at its cruder end was Czech writer Ota Šafránek’s Ráno startují letadla (Morning Take-Off, 1950), later retitled Čest poručíka Bakera (The Honour of Lieutenant Baker, 1951), a fictional account of the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, imagining his postwar life, unemployed and disillusioned with capitalism, improbably longing for the socialist dawn.

The policy of socialist realism insistently demanded the eradication of nationalism and romanticism. These were intertwined principles for many countries of the Soviet bloc; for countries like Poland, that had long struggled for an independent poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. European playwriting and politics, 1945–89
• 2. Elfriede Jelinek and Werner Schwab: Heimat critique and dissections of right-wing populism and xenophobia
• 3. Weronika Szczawińska and Agnieszka Jakimiak: Dramaturg as a figure of transition
• 4. András Visky and Matéi Visniec: Challenging boundaries of cultural specificity
• 5. Lars Norén and Jon Fosse: Nordic grey or theatre innovators?
• 6. Martin Crimp and Simon Stephens: British playwrights as European playwrights
• 7. Marius von Mayenburg and Roland Schimmelpfennig: Dissecting European lives under global capitalism
• 8. Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill: The ‘blood and sperm’ generation
• 9. Vasilii Sigarev and the Presniakov Brothers: Staging the new Russia
• 10. Paweł Demirski and Dorota Masłowska: Painful pasts, transformative presents
• 11. Jordi Galceran and Juan Mayorga: Unravelling the present, narrativising the past
• 12. Ivan Vyrypaev and Natalia Vorozhbyt: Language, memory, and cultural mythology in Russian and Ukrainian new drama
• 13. Enda Walsh and Martin McDonagh: Reimagining Irish theatre
• 14. Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller: The art of success
• 15. Lena Kitsopoulou and Yannis Mavritsakis: Greek theatre at the antipodes of crisis
• 16. Emma Dante and Fausto Paravidino: Families, national identity, and international audiences
• 17. Biljana Srbljanović and Ivana Sajko: Voice in the place of silence
• 18. debbie tucker green and Alice Birch: ‘Angry feminists’ on the European stage
• 19. Peter Handke: Inhabiting the world together
• 20. Jonas Hassen Khemiri: Writing out of the binary
• 21. Marie NDiaye: Eliding capture
• Afterword: The constructed space
• Index