Pınar Karabulut has made a name for herself reconceiving classic material. Last year’s Il Trittico at the Deutsche Oper made Puccini’s triptych more vibrant; her ironic staging of reworked Greek myth in Sivan Ben Yishai’s Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa) earned her a spot at 2022’s Theatertreffen.
Now, in her last Berlin premiere before she takes up the co-intendancy at Schauspielhaus Zurich, she’s bringing an all-woman cast and an all-white stage design to playwright Katja Brunner’s revision of Shakespeare’s notoriously sexist The Taming of the Shrew, a show playfully dubbed Der Zähmung Widerspenstigkeit – “the rebelliousness of the tame”.
Why did you want to take on Shakespeare right now?
I believe it was two or three years ago that I directed Richard III at Schauspiel Köln. And at the beginning was the idea that I wanted to grapple with Richard III and tell it from a female perspective, including having a woman play Richard III. And we realised that Katja Brunner was, actually, the perfect writer for the project. She is a feminist. She has a great feel for language. She invents new words. She always uses the German language differently – very associatively, melting together two ideas in a word, creating a language that is rich with images.
That was the first contact that Katja Brunner had with rewriting Shakespeare. And then she was interested in grappling with The Taming of the Shrew. When she told me that I was very excited, because only a writer like Katja Brunner can rewrite this sexist stuff. No one else can do this. And it is not really Shakespeare. It is Katja Brunner’s language and her scenes. She takes Shakespeare, his dramaturgy, the subjects of violence against women and classism that exist in Taming and she thinks beyond them.
The original piece serves here only as a kind of blueprint. It is no longer The Taming of the Shrew. Instead it is the “Rebelliousness of the Tame” – because she takes this big step forward and talks about femicide in Germany, about violence in relationships, about the murder of women and about how endangered the female body is under patriarchy. So we can’t really talk about a rewriting anymore, it’s rather like a reconsidered, reconceived modernising of Shakespeare for the present.
If it’s a new piece, why maintain the relationship with Shakespeare?
We’re primed when we go to theatre and we know that we’re seeing Shakespeare, when we know that we’re seeing a classic [to be open to it]. And this Shakespeare is so misogynistic. It’s been on stage for the last several years – always justified as a love story. But if we watch the original, we see a woman who is subjugated, we see a woman who is tortured.
We see a woman to whom violence is done – and it’s framed as a comedy! And that is interesting when we look at what’s going on in Avignon with this trial right now, when we look at how four days ago there was a femicide in Marzahn. We see that it is a daily subject, and how, in the legal system, under this administration, in Germany, femicide isn’t tried as femicide but rather as manslaughter. And that is interesting because it is not even murder in the first degree, it is manslaughter. It’s like, how is that happening?
How do you see the possibility of theatre intervening? Or, rather, how do you see the political role of theatre today?
We live in dark times – and it’s somehow, day by day, getting even worse. But it’s actually absolutely clear for me. Theatre emerged out of a religious, ritualistic and political realm more than 2,000 years ago – and that hasn’t changed in the last 2,000 years.
We are still an absolutely political place and a politicising place. And theatre shouldn’t lose that. The worst that can happen is already beginning to happen in Germany. If we minimise art and culture and stick them in a drawer, or take away financing or reduce space for them, then that also means that the human spirit is no longer free and can also be restricted.
- Deutsches Theater, Schumannstr. 13A, Mitte, Der Zähmung Widerspenstigkeit, Dec 19, 20 (German) & Dec 27, Jan 1, 7, 25 (German with English surtitles), details.
