“Herzlich Willkommen im Abgrund” – “a warm welcome to the abyss” – were the first words that Matthias Pees, the intendant of the Berliner Festspiele, offered the audience on Theatertreffen’s opening night. The annual festival honouring the year’s best shows had already begun in the abyss, with a recorded snippet of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘Vom Abgrund nämlich’. Its first lines set the tone that the festival’s organisers hoped it would follow: “From the abyss, namely / have we begun / and have gone forth like lions / in doubt and irritation.” After describing the opening piece (Katie Mitchell’s brutally reconceived The House of Bernarda Alba), Pees shifted to English: “It’s going to be a pretty dark evening.”
Theatertreffen began amidst dark days. Pees invoked the spectre of the Ukraine war, the ongoing rise of the far right, threats to women’s rights, and, of course, Berlin’s culture cuts. On opening night in May, the change of federal governments approached – Friedrich Merz would be elected chancellor the following Tuesday – and outgoing Culture Minister Claudia Roth, a Green, said goodbye to the crowd, waving and waving as the audience clapped for a real Theatermensch. Roth, a woman who first worked in the theatre, exhibited far different priorities than the conservative newspaper magnate Wolfram Weimer, who has since assumed her role in the CDU-led government.
After describing the opening piece, Pees shifted to English: “It’s going to be a pretty dark evening.”
The first night’s performance was, as Pees predicted, grim. Where Federico Garcia Lorca’s original piece is all about suffocation and restraint – the desires of the five sisters for romance in a house where, out of concern for their safety, romance is strictly prohibido – Mitchell has turned it into a horrific fever dream. The show is full of slow motion and torturous acts, an excellent dollhouse of a set where conversation constantly slides across the stage. And yet, by giving us scenes of sex and mass death, we gain darkness at the expense of atmosphere. There is no question of the artistry, but the piece simply dragged me deeper into despondency.
Perhaps you wouldn’t think it from the title, but ja, nichts ist okay (“yes, nothing is okay”) pulled me back from the brink – though it also aimed to bring me there. The final work that René Pollesch staged before his death features his longtime collaborator Fabian Hinrichs doing everything, performing as all the members of a Wohngemeinschaft, which shatters as the violence of the world beyond intrudes. With just a soupçon of theatrical magic – a rotating stage and the ability to simulate day and night – Hinrichs takes his audience on a complete a journey of human experience, even dramatising with uncanny accuracy a crushing middle-of-the-night loneliness and despair. And then, in a moment, everything changes again; Hinrichs explodes into a sprint (I could watch Hinrichs run for hours) that takes us out of depression and into mania. As I left the theatre with a friend, raving about the language, an older German man asked us with a patronising smile, “You understood the German?” All of us then praised the prose, before we lost him in the crowd slipping out of the Volksbühne.
There was no question of translation after Florentina Holzinger’s spectacular satanic-opera-cum-utopian mass, SANCTA. At drinks after the first festival performance, the people I talked to loved it. A Volksbühne veteran enthused about the esprit de corps among Holzinger’s crew and the piece’s unadulterated spectacular nature. A Holzinger skeptic from a publication in the US admitted that, despite his concerns heading in, he also thought it was wonderful. And, it is indeed – a work full of hope, a work that believes in art as something godly.
Still, if artists are gods, critics remain mortals. And even as a critic, I couldn’t get tickets to see EOL. [End of Life], the virtual-reality theatre piece that only eight people could experience at a time. But that didn’t mean my Theatertreffen was screen-free. Struck down by sickness, I had to turn to the computer to watch the four Starke Stücke pieces from 3sat, which are available digitally for several months. And I was surprised by how well these pieces translated to the home. Of course, it doesn’t have that collective experience of reacting together – not to mention that the music of Unser Deutschlandmärchen doesn’t quite overwhelm in the same way – but I found the pieces to be well-suited to the screen. This is all to say: even if you couldn’t make it to Theatertreffen, the abyss is now streaming.
