What does the theater do when it’s in crisis? It seeks refuge in a classic like Shakespeare. That can at least be assumed with a look at the coming season.
What else can be said about the theater at the moment does not sound very hopeful at first. After the forced closures, the postponed productions are still backing up. The audience, once locked out, is reluctant to return to the halls. A general “cultural fatigue” has already been suspected as the cause. However, you first have to be able to afford culture.
The profits of the energy companies and the economic war take their toll, saving is declared the first civic duty. For many, it has long been enough for little more than what is necessary. Will you also be sitting in the theater at a frosty 19 degrees room temperature in the future, and also with a mask? That doesn’t sound very encouraging either. In addition, there is still the fear of being supplied with vapid explanations and instructions from the stage, but hardly with any claim to worldly art.
If you skim the schedules of the German theaters, you can see – once again – that current affairs are pushing onto the stage as a performance. What that entails is anyone’s guess, a tiresome discursive mishmash that seldom gets beyond headlines reprocessed with moral hubris. And the drama, the literary form of the theater? May queue at the back. You have to look for promising premieres and you will find them, if at all, on secondary stages.
But one triumphs: Shakespeare. Whether in Berlin or Dresden, in Stuttgart or Munich, in Hamburg or Cologne, the great plays by the Elizabethan dramatist are on the program everywhere. Less “Romeo and Juliet”, but “As You Like It” and “The Tempest”, but also the dark stuff like “Macbeth” and “King Lear”. In Düsseldorf, “Othello” is being shown in a version by the South African artist Lara Foot, which should be followed with interest after the much-discussed “racism scandal” at the house.
Stefan Pucher kicked off the Shakespeare Festival at the Lausitz Festival in Weißwasser. Once one of the largest production sites for glass in the world, the machines have been idle for over ten years and almost two thirds of the population have left the city. The Telux site, an impressive industrial facility with numerous halls and chimneys, has been used by a club since 2015. Youth work, start-ups and cultural events, a touch of post-industrial big city flair blows through Weißwasser.
Through the smartly designed and atmospherically lit industrial ruins, the path leads into the past, not only of Shakespeare, but of the Roman Empire. “Caesar” will be performed that evening, a political drama that need not fear comparison with “House of Cards” or “Homeland”. Caesar, with red makeup because his face was dripping with blood, is a warlord. A very successful one at that. The people worship him, they cheer him when he is offered sole power. Brutus and his co-conspirators are less enthusiastic.
Josef Ostendorf as Brutus is the actual main character of the evening, wrapped in a lavish toga, as known from Asterix and Obelix. He wants to save the republic and he sees that the only way to do it is to get rid of Caesar.
But he is no Macbeth, no Richard III. When he reaches for the last, he wants to do it with the best of reasons. A man with a conscience, with values, with a moral. Shakespeare’s joke is that it doesn’t get any better results in politics – on the contrary. The attempt to avert the state crisis destroys the state. Brutus wants to prevent tyranny and gets civil war. Because he only looks at Caesar as a person, he does not understand the system of Caesarism and is entangled in it himself.
Brutus is a tragic hero: he brings about what he wants to prevent. This is evident at the climax of the play, with the speeches of Brutus and his opponent Antonius, played by Bettina Stucky. They are master examples of political rhetoric, like Barack Obama in Denver or Joschka Fischer in Bielefeld. In any case, no comparison to the speaking machines and total failures of today’s government personnel. With the rousing mass address, the tide turns.
And yet “Caesar” is not so much a play about populism, as one would find more with Jack Cade in “Henry VI.”, but much more a didactic play about a palace revolt, about political morality and its unforeseeable consequences. Values? These are vain words if they have no reality.
In Pucher’s production, the play is heavily cut, the civil war is packed into the prologue, secondary characters are completely omitted, so the play is done in under two hours. The development of the characters and the complexity of the political problem suffer as a result. And yet Pucher does a lot of things right with his “Caesar”, which is also shown at the Hamburg Theater and the National Theater in Luxembourg: a good play with a great ensemble is how theater can be made. And all this under the eyes of veteran star Claus Peymann, who was seen at the premiere in Weißwasser. Shakespeare always pulls.
A Shakespeare boom is nothing new in this country, the first was in the Weimar Classics. Herder praised Shakespeare above all else, Wieland translated it, Goethe brought it to the stage and commented: “Shakespeare and no end”. The only monument to the poet and playwright outside of the British Isles still stands in the Weimar Park on the Ilm.
Shakespeare was understood as a poetic resonance space and his plays as modern puzzles. Shakespeare is not the answer but the question unfolded. If you are curious, pick up your pieces. If you want to know and experience what forces are at work in the world, you will get further.
Shakespeare’s world was one in upheaval that has gone off the rails. Social classes such as the nobility and bourgeoisie fought relentlessly for power, there were numerous conspiracies and theories about them, religious terror met a tyrannical state, there were popular uprisings, and at the same time there was actually a deadly epidemic with the plague, that was the epoch Shakespeare’s. Even the theaters were often closed when there were too many deaths from the plague in a week. This was not inconvenient for the government and the Puritans, who were not well disposed towards the theater anyway. Is there an uncanny closeness between Shakespeare’s world and ours?
But despite all the enthusiasm, one should not overdo it and assume that one’s own presence is already preformed in Shakespeare’s plays. It is not that easy. A Caesar is neither Trump nor Putin, such analogies become crooked when they are supposed to be accurate. A look at the research, by André Müller sen. by Stephen Greenblatt, helps to orient oneself between time-bound and timeless topicality. Shakespeare’s stands for a relentless view of the structure of power, his precise political and psychological powers of observation and, last but not least, his poetic language. All of this may enable us to see our own epoch more clearly, but it cannot relieve us of this task.
The renewed sympathy of the theaters in Shakespeare – after all, it was never completely gone – speaks for two things: on the one hand, for the interest in political processes, not just political opinions and statements. You won’t find that in the great amoralist Shakespeare. On the other hand, for an interest in the art form of theatre, which Shakespeare helped to blossom to unprecedented levels. And that at a historical moment when it was by no means clear where theater and society were headed. Compassionate and, above all, thoughtful viewers were needed. Just like today.
