2009/10 Season

Theatre section

Art and culture are frequently looked upon as something exalted, as being on a higher plane – as if intellectual activity were divorced from reality and untouched by the drudgery and banality of everyday life. However, the fine arts are not just a refuge from the real world, a haven of eternal peace and carefree diversion. They are linked in many different ways with the social conditions and mores of their age, and they reflect and influence the prevailing political and ideological climate.

Reiner Ernst Ohle
Theatre section

This season’s theme – The Arts and Power – is integrated into all five theatre series. The plays and projects investigate the constant interaction between the arts and power, consider their respective function and their limitations, and look at the opportunities and possibilities offered by their co-existence. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Richard III in the Classical THEATRE series are concerned with business and politics. Claus Peymann’s production of Lessing’s Nathan with the Berliner Ensemble stresses the need for tolerance against the background of the holocaust. Frost/Nixon in Modern THEATRE demonstrates the importance of the media in today’s power games. Biljana Srbljanovič’s play Barbelo, Of Dogs And Children is set in a country in central Europe that is traumatized by war and its aftermath. In The Lives of Others, the stage adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning film, an informer becomes a traitor.Fairground is a dramatization of a novel, banned in the former East Germany, about uranium mining and a chapter of industrial history that was suppressed. In Kampfgesellschaft, two executives competing for the position as boss of a medium-sized company end up at each other’s throats.

The emphasis in Contemporary THEATRE and Words and music is on the 20th century – a century dominated by war and its aftermath, flight and expulsion, exile and migration. Two projects illustrate the situation of artists in the National Socialist era. The first is Dear Tilla Durieux, by the Croatian author Slobodan Šnajder, which we are staging in cooperation with the Ernst Busch Academy and the BAT Theater in Berlin as part of our stART project. The Decision, by director and actor Stefan Bruckmeier, is based on the biography of Fritz Lang and deals with the conflicting emotions and inner turmoil of the successful artist at the mercy of an all-powerful state – an issue that is as relevant now as in Lang’s day. Refugees In Limbo by the Schauspiel Essen is a very moving play that shows with poignant clarity how people’s lives can fall apart if they are forced to flee their native country. Actor Christian Kaiser presents the work of the Russian dadaist Daniil Kharms, who, in the 1930s, allowed neither Stalinist tyranny nor hunger to stop him from writing. Kurt Tucholsky was one of the first artists to be expatriated after the National Socialists seized power in 1933.

The plays in our young people’s subscription -16+x focus on violence in its various forms. Youth Without God by the Staatstheater Schwerin depicts a cold, soulless generation capable of committing murder without feeling either shame or guilt. The theme of The Kick is violence among young people in an environment of right-wing extremism. The Good Soldier Schweik in our Potpourri series demonstrates how important wit and humour are to survival in an age of barbarism.

This year’s theatre programme looks at power in all its different manifestations and its impact on social interaction. In this way, the stage can become a medium for self-reflection, self-determination and emancipation. It can stimulate discussion and compel the audience to form an opinion or reconsider their position. Theatre cannot exist in isolation – it thrives on contradiction and change. Time and again it succeeds in reinventing itself, and, not least as a result of this ability, has become a melting-pot of ideas and ideologies from different eras and different parts of the world. The global flow of information and movement of people mean that no cultural region now has only one single identity. Cultural differences start on our own doorstep. All around us there are people who have experienced war and its aftermath, flight and expulsion, exile and migration at first hand and not in the safety of a darkened auditorium..

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