The eagerly awaited selection for the Berlin Theatertreffen is available every year. From a total of 540 German, Austrian and Swiss productions, a seven-member jury selected what they considered to be the ten most “remarkable” productions of the year. They will be presented from May 6th to 22nd in Berlin, at the industry’s most important festival. Due to the pandemic, video recordings and purely digital productions were also taken into account in the selection. And the women’s quota introduced in 2020 still applies: at least 50 percent of the productions must be directed by women. In earlier years, women were hardly represented at the theater meetings because they never got into directing positions in the first place. That is changing dramatically. One woman, however, is leaving: The director of the Theatertreffen, Yvonne Büdenholzer, is giving up the post after this year.
Linear or even classic narrative theater no longer has a chance in Berlin. What is popular is the performative genre mix, the musically and choreographically sophisticated system explosion. Seven of the ten productions invited are premieres. There is also a real classic, Schiller’s “Jungfrau von Orleans” (Nationaltheater Mannheim,) albeit in a feminist adaptation by Joanna Bednarczyk, with which the director Ewelina Marciniak cleverly questions the role stereotype of saints and whores.
Put an end to the clichés of saint and whore: Annemarie Brüntjen in the title role of Schiller’s “Jungfrau von Orleans”, staged by Ewelina Marciniak at the Nationaltheater Mannheim.
(Photo: Natalia Mleczak)
Molière, whose 400th birthday is being celebrated this year, is only the inspiration for a text by Soeren Voima in “Der Tartuffe oder Kapital und Ideologie”, which deals with today’s neoliberalism, with the help of the world bestseller “Kapital und Ideology” by the French economist Thomas Piketty. The political director Volker Loesch, who tirelessly – and often quite strikingly – staged against the excesses of global capitalism, has finally been represented at the Theatertreffen again for 13 years with this production at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden. He deserves it. The novel adaptation “A Man in His Class” based on the book by Christian Baron, directed by Lukas Holzhausen (Schaupiel Hannover), is also political. It’s about classism and what it’s like to grow up poor in this country.
The good old language artist Ernst Jandl experienced an amazing revival, to whom Claudia Bauer dedicated a slapstick-like, opulent evening with masks and music at the Volkstheater Wien: “humanistää! an abolition of divisions”. Very loosely based on Dante Alighieri, the author of the “Divine Comedy”, Theatertreffen darling Christopher Rüping has developed his production “The New Life” (Schauspielhaus Bochum). It is about Dante’s feelings for his beloved Beatrice on behalf of all lovers, with Rüping covering a wide pop-cultural arc to Britney Spears and the recently deceased Meat Loaf.
Lindy Larsson in Yael Ronen’s famous musical “Slippery Slope” at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.
(Photo: Ute Langkafel)
A strong voice in contemporary German drama is the Berlin-based Israeli Sivan Ben Yishai. In her piece “Like Lovers Do (Memoiren der Medusa)”, which was written like a litany and premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele, she deals with the structures of sexualized violence in a radically shameless and harsh way. You have to like Pınar Karabulut’s fun, neon-colored bouncy castle production, which glaringly counteracts the brutality of the text. The jury liked her: “The whole thing remains uncomfortable, albeit in a different way than the text.” Yael Ronen’s production “Slippery Slope” is also garish, queer-colored and self-confident and packs all contemporary debates in musical form, from cancel culture to gender issues. The production is a hit at Berlin’s Gorki Theater.
The key in “All right. Good night.”, released at Berlin’s HAU, is completely different: a piece in which Helgard Haug from the Rimini Protocol group describes the sudden disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines MH370 from the radar in March 2014 with the dementia that started almost at the same time joins her father for a quiet evening about disappearance and loss. Two Hamburg productions complete the selection: from the Thalia Theater comes, no: not “The Black Monk” by Kirill Serebrennikov, but “Doughnuts”, a work by the Japanese director Toshiki Okada about Japanese cosmopolitans in a hotel foyer. And the theater is represented with “Ruhe”, the new production of the performance collective Signa, which exposes the audience to foreign worlds in its immersive productions, here: a kind of cure in a “recreation institute” with forest and nature experience and the danger of to lose in a sect (or even: a very own bubble).