Oliver Frljić’s Frankenstein begins with an autobiographical monologue addressed to Frljić’s mother, whose death in 2023 delayed the play’s premiere and transformed its contents. It is a beautifully written soliloquy that the actor, Marc Benner, handles ably; it is tender without being mawkish, reckoning with an imperfect relationship, a mother who focused less on her son’s theatremaking than he would have liked and a son who was around less than his mother would have wanted.
The world of theatre is indeed full of rites attempting to conjure ghosts.
It deals humorously with the inconvenience of his mother’s death but also with his resentment of the theatre that kept him away from her during her final moments. I hadn’t expected the play to feature this real engagement with real death. But I was glad it did. I found it beautiful and moving. And as I watched, I wondered why I do so enjoy seeing human tragedy play out on stage. Why did I find this part of the performance so fulfilling?
Tragedy, of course, has been long at the centre of Western theatre, its founding genre. The Greeks did it and the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time did it too, providing important communal events for the release of emotion and the foundation of contemporary drama. Within these contexts – as different as they are – what the spectators were mostly seeing performed were, often, stories already known – and stories as stories.
In his great work on tragedy, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin cites approvingly a description of the classic tragic heroes as having “already long been dead before they actually die”. By this he means the hero of a tragedy has to die to fulfil the work’s logic.
But I didn’t go to Frljić’s show to witness personal tragedy. I went for Frankenstein. The tragedy fulfilled no generic expectation. And indeed our experience of tragedy is very different from how tragedies were experienced earlier in history. We no longer believe in some clear universal moral order – who could, when we look around our world and witness the unrepentant bombing of children, the callous stripping of aid from the ill and indigent, the ongoing fomenting of hatred not only with impunity but also, seemingly, increasing popularity?
And, in this city, the dead do haunt our stages. It’s not only Frankenstein. Along with Frljić’s play, the Theatertreffen-invited Unser Deutschlandmärchen begins with the funeral of the protagonist’s mother, revisiting a mother-son relationship after its end.
Falk Richter’s autofictional The Silence at the Schaubühne mourns his father with biting critique. Tony Rizzi’s Shows You (maybe) Missed at Dock 11 remembers his deceased father and brother. And what are the Thomas Brasch performances celebrating his 80th birthday (at Studio Я and the Deutsches Theater) if not an attempt to revive his spirit?
The world of theatre is indeed full of rites attempting to conjure ghosts – something that’s easier for me to understand from the perspective of a writer. That a playwright might want to memorialise someone close to them makes sense. But what is the satisfaction that I’m receiving in the audience from another’s personal tragedy? Am I, to draw on Benjamin again, “warming” my “shivering life with a death” of another – experiencing death via the theatre as a way of reassuring myself about my own aliveness?
The academic AD Nuttall considered some of these questions in his succinct publication Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? He denies the idea that our enjoyment of tragedy betrays a moral sickness, a deep-seated sadism in us – that, in fact, we enjoy watching people suffer.
He suggests instead that what this art offers is not so much a kind of emotional bloodsport (thank god), but rather a way to process our own mortality – “an exercise in understanding in advance the real horrors we may meet and the psychic violence they may cause”. As for the enjoyment, he suggests that any experience of emotion, what he calls “emotional arousal”, thrills us.
Just the other day, I stumbled across an essay by the writer Yiyun Li about the suicides of her two sons. The only time she cried after the suicide of her oldest was during a performance of King Lear. “By the time Lear finished his howling monologue,” she writes, “I was weeping; I went on weeping after we left the theatre, sitting on the edge of a stone planter, in the centre of which a small tree was shedding its last leaves.”
Li’s words remind us that theatre isn’t only about what happens on stage. It is also what we bring to it; it is not someone else’s experience, but also ours. The tragedy of the play becomes something special to each of us – an external irritant from which we each fashion our own idiosyncratic pearl of significance. And, perhaps, that is part of what it offers: the opportunity to enclose death within our own life and lived consciousness, rather than have it be what obliterates them all.
