THEATER IN BERLIN

Intensity, imagination, and brilliant acting characterized a new German-Turkish play and a version of Hamlet that I attended in Berlin in the last two weeks.

Shermin Langhoff, the General Director of the Maxim Gorki Theater and Turkish by birth, has made her name engaging Turkish actors and presenting significant dramas involving the German-Turkish relationship (The Turkish community in Berlin is very large, encompassing all financial groups, and in my understanding has never had much of a representation in the theater prior to Ms. Langhoff’s work).  She has lived in Germany since she was a child and has successfully led other theaters. Two years ago she was asked to become leader of the Maxim Gorki Theater, one of Berlin’s most important, and last season the Gorki was named Theater of the Year in Berlin.  She has continued to engage some Turkish actors and explore their relationship with Germans. The theater is sold out at most of its performance, which was the case when I attended.

The play, Nurkan Erpulat’s Verruecktes Blut (Crazy Blood), involved five young Turkish men, almost surely supposed to be older adolescents, and two young Turkish women, all of whom were going to school in Germany. Their German drama teacher believed she could make them understand Germany better or maybe become more educated by reading the plays of Friedrich Schiller, an eighteenth-century German playwright.

The five young men begin the play yelling and literally fighting; raucous, loud-mouthed and incredibly profane (this play like all plays at the Gorki Theater was titled in English), they would be a teacher’s nightmare. The women at first are fairly quiet. The men occasionally cool down, but then quickly go back to fighting, cursing and demeaning both their teacher and the two girls. When the teacher discovers that two of them have pistols, she grabs the guns, and in her frustration and rage shoots them in the air several times; then aims them at the men. This terrifies the students who shake all over and are willing to do anything she asks, almost. On her command they begin to read Schiller.  They still intersperse their reading with contempt for the words and for their situation. In the midst of all this—and this happened five times—the group, breaks from the drama, steps forward, lines up, and sings a German Lied. I know it sounds both improbable and maybe crazy, but it was in performance marvelous—a few moments of peace in the midst of a scene of insanity.

The teacher, brilliantly played by Sesede Terziyan, often lost her temper and fired in the air, bringing about quiet and more reading. She confronted each man, and the character both told his story and reacted to the situation, each in a different, involving way. She broke them down, attacking their macho masculinity, embarrassing one man by making him take down his pants. She was strong, occasionally slightly hysterical but always working toward her goal of getting her students to read the Schiller.  After the teacher had worked with each of the men, she turned on the women who in her mind needed to make a statement of independence. She attacked them, berating them for being shy and withdrawn, demanding that they speak up for themselves, finally winning her point.

One could see this as a feminist play; I think it was bigger. It spoke to the contempt many young people have for authority and the classic tradition. The words they read and the comments of the teacher finally had an effect on them, perhaps not a lasting one but at least a first step.

A summary does not even suggest the degree of tension the play generated in the theater, and how involved the audience became in watching it. Each actor had a separate personality—four Turks and a Kurd each had his own problems as did the women—and each finally expressed enough of it for us to understand them. Except for the singing the intensity never let up, and the audience seemed breathlessly involved. I know that I was rapt throughout, sometimes laughing, often very moved. The 80-minute play was performed without intermission and received a wild ovation that only stopped when the actors would no longer come out.

Nurkan Erpulat directed. The flat, empty stage with a few chairs upstage and appropriately sloppy costumes by Magda Willi and lights by Hans Leser created the right ambience. The production had its premiere last fall; this was the first performance of its revival.

The other play took place at the Schaubuehne on the Kurfuerstendamm. If the idea of Hamlet in German (with Shakespearean titles) might sound strange, the result could not have been more fascinating or more involving. A coproduction with the Hellenic Festival in Athens and theFestival d’Avignon in France, it was directed by Thomas Ostermeier, with a set by Jan Papplelbaum, costumes by Nina Wetzel, music by Nils Ostendorf and lighting by Erich Schneider. Sebastien Dupouey supplied the film which was used sparingly and to great effect. The German translation was by Marius von Mayenburg.

Shakespeare’s words were used in the titles, and the actors occasionally spoke them in English. This adaption of Hamlet, played without an intermission, scrambled scenes, occasionally added words that were not present in the original, and made a good many cuts.  The production, however, illustrated how a director can be radical and still remain faithful to the piece. Ostermeier never did what some opera directors do by seeming to find the words that inspired the composer extraneous and creating their own story, taking away the meaning of what is being sung.

This production was unmistakably Hamlet, treated originally, but in the end true to Shakespeare. The direction was riveting, bringing a contemporary feel to the drama; he chose to make his Hamlet not a procrastinator but a man of action whose craziness seemed almost a part of his being and who was only waiting for the moment when he could kill Claudius at his most depraved.

The play opened with Hamlet calmly and thoughtfully reciting the first third of “To be or not to be” (in English) and immediately following we saw the burial of the old king Hamlet. The stage was a field of dirt, with an upstage dining table that could slide downstage when necessary. We not only saw the dirt, but we laughed at what happened after the quote of the soliloquy because the grave digger couldn’t get the casket in the hole he had dug in the dirt and finally fell in it himself, with Claudius and Gertrude watching. He wasn’t called Yorick, but he might have been. The whole scene became hilarious. The comic relief at the very beginning took away the sense that we were going to see anything like a traditional Hamlet and set up the audience for a modern play. Performing the whole play over the grave of the old king was a great idea as was everyone’s actions and dress. Though a story about a royal family, all the players were ordinary people, totally real to the audience.

The rock music, the costumes, the contemporary sense of everyone onstage made the drama very real, and Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet dominated the whole play as did Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier, the two most memorable Hamlets in my experience. His manic madness, his leaping, falling in the dirt, sometimes eating it, even the times he broke the fourth wall and talked to the audience all made sense.

All the other actors measured up. Jenny Koenig’s realization of the two women—a doubling that I don’t remember seeing—was utterly fascinating on so many levels. At the beginning she was dancing a belly dance at the table, clearly hot for Claudius, and was never anything but his foil; as Ophelia she was a terrified teenager, in love and when she became suicidal, extraordinarily touching. Urs Jucker presented a standard Claudius, perhaps a touch more craven than most, with his shirt becoming bloodier and bloodier as the play proceeded, and Robert Beyer, deprived of this homily-filled speech to his son, Laertes, created a character resembling Wagner’s Mime. Franz Hartwig, with movie-star good looks, both played a strong Laertes and with Eidinger created the most believable and scary sword fight in my memory .

The whole play taking place on the dirt where the old Hamlet had been buried had a strange resonance. The ghost appeared twice as Shakespeare demanded, but he seemed always present. Shakespeare’s words ended the play when Eidinger stood alone on the dirt in front of a closed curtain and said, “The rest is silence.”