Okay, I've had my Bockwurst mit Brötchen ( a delicious sausage with a bit of mustard and bread on the side) and my Milchkaffee so I think I'm just about ready to begin my next entry.
I've been settling into Berlin finally, the thrill being still a thrill but also the fact that hey, I'm living here for nearly a month, and in a country you dont't know in a language you don't speak in a flat by yourself, well that's a long time. Thankfully my first worries are gone - my biggest fear, an english speaker stranded in a country full of people who I don't know, lonely days walking by myself, well that didn't happen thank god, in place I've met many interesting people, most of them travelers, and have been able to thankfully share my experiences with these people and vice versa.
Yesterday I returned to the Schaubühne to see Falk Richter's version (which he also translated) of the Seagull. I've been thinking a lot about the grant recently, trying to see what I can make into my proejct, figure out how best to conduct my research. I've been far too intimidated to go and interview people right after shows - and I also feel in a way that I'm not ready for that just yet. I am at a stage where I myself am being introduced to such new and different things it seems the experience itself is rich enough. Just seeing how people work, how the theatres work, how people behave as they wait in line, who the audience members are (lots of young people, old people all sorts really, but lots of young people) what they're wearing what they're reading, what drinks they're having - when you dont have anything else to do all these details become as rich as the show you are about to see in an hour. You also feel self-conscious, as if you take part in these ceremonies in some different way, some other behavior that you have learnt from going to plays in the US for so much time.
I was lucky enough for 8 euros to get a front row center seat. Actually literally almost ON the stage. That was a far cry from my first seat in Hedda, which was the last row in the middle.
Chekhov, the Seagull (dir. Falk Richter)
First the set. Now if there's one things germans know, it is how to choose a design team. Katrin Hoffkan manages to turn Chekhov's innocuous country house backyards into what looks to be a floor and walls made out of ping pong tables. It manages to create both an abstract world to Chekhov that evokes the games between characters as a game. It becomes especially effective when Richter stages the actors far apart, creating the illusion of two players. The choice of having large scenic walls on each side also helps take us from the realism of the situation and puts us squarely in the playing field, so to speak. The stage spills out a bit into a small fouyer in the center (incidentally where I was seated), where two lawnchairs (incidentally the same from berlin alexanderplatz, and incidentally at one point they were always thrown around. I guessed that would happen since they looked quite billig (cheap) I swear from now on whenever I see those innocuous white chairs I will assume that at some point they will be tossed unceremoniously somehwere on stage in a moment of divine tension)
The other aspect of the stage that warrants merit is the white structure that plays at once the role of the backyard stage, Kostya's studio and the inside of the house. The lights were able to really play with both the offgreen ping pong set and the white structure which for every act break would move towards the audience (something apparently the schaubühne loves to do, rotate or move around sets).
Lastly a large white screen lies behind everything, projecting at different times, clouds, the sky, static, water, but nothing too distracting, working as a setpiece rather than (as I sometimes feel in certain Wooster group productions) a costar.
I came up with a little ingenious plan for the play - since Chekhov ranks among my favorite playwrights and his language is so devilishly easy to mangle in overwrought naturalism (thank you stanislavsky) I really wanted to make sure I grasped more of what the characters were saying. Thankfully because of the german lessons I was able to catch key words and phrases and follow along with my english buch, it was a great operation and the 2 hours flew by as I knew exactly what was going on, and loving it.
Now, for the play! First of all, let me say I was worried for thsi Chekhov piece. I don't know why but it seems that people leave such respect for Chekhov that his pieces feel almost like funeral ceremonies. Dread is so conspicuous and so it seems that along with Ibsen you get the really unfair stigma that naturalism is boring, miserable and unncecessarily intellectual.
Thankfully Richter does away with that, offering characters that have quite a bit of what Lecoq would call 'the ridiculous', without compromising their status as human beings. In many ways I would also called this Chekhov 'spelled out', the characters aren't buried under layers of measured pathos, we have the archetypes that Chekhov is sneakily using (or it seems so in such nuanced crap that passes for theatre nowadays) really just splattered onto the ping pong table set, and I for one couldn't be happier. Masha (Jule Böwe) is now a cokehead, miserable looking, young but looks much older. Konstantin (or Kostya as he is called through the entire production) is gallant, handsome and a bit vain, a tortured artist of course, but more than that, a very confused individual. The choice of Trigorin was to cast someone who I first had my doubts about, Andre Jung first comes in as a complete and utter drunk, saying little. But soon, his character turns into the slimy rich faux thinker that Trigorin is. In Jung's depiction you see a patheticism along with a sort of veiled misogyny that comes from someone who will never be better than Turgenev. The doctor, Dorn is also quite well cast in the measured but intense personage of Sylvester Groth - Dorn in my opinion is Chekhov's voice, someone who has compassion for the Symbolists - Chekhov himself was a fan of Maeterlinck and would oft ask the Moscow theatre to put on his producitons instead of the usual traditional fare.
Nina, playted by Yvon Jansen, gave us what I expected - Chekhov's pretty but uninteresting female protagonists that people always seem to fal for.
The standout performance by far has to be Sylvana Krappatsch in the role of Arkadina. Looking like a less exotic Isabella Rosselini with her hair done way up and in tight designer jogging sweatpants, she is the very figure of Chekhov of course projected into our views. Stanislavsky would throw her out of the theatre immediately. Her performance is the very idea of overacting, but the way in which she allows that overacted persona into her character is something quite impressive. She repeats words over and over, delighting over the sound her voice makes, she makes these large expressive faces, as if all the years of acting have blurred the person she is and the person she performs as. She was, to put it more bluntly, emminently watchable, the very essence of what makes a theatircal character.
I must say I enjoyed Richters production more than Ostermeiers Hedda Gabler, there was a sort of unhinged character to the show that left the unexpected in the room. Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler though more polished, gave me the feeling of something staler, perhaps more aesthetically gripping and more nuanced, but in the end, not as fun.
Richter takes the fact that the Seagull is a comedy (Chekhov called it so, and only named one of his major plays a 'drama') and goes all the way, really finding the patheticism in Chekhov's characters and taking it overboard.
If anything Richter anticipates the difficulties of chekhov today, what was pathetic then, isnt enough now - people have become all about their performances, and the misery that the characters evoke is grasped and exaggerated. There is a desire for exagerration that rather than stifle Chekhov allows the ability for compassion to be stretched and forces the audience in a moment to associate with these people on a ping pong stage, even for just a second. Most of the time though, you're just cracking up.
It seems as if Richter, raised in a newer generation, has grown up with just as much 3 stooges as Goethe, just as much rock and roll as Shakespeare. Slapstick abounds. A recurring theme in the play is people getting doused in buckets of water. I'm not kidding this happens about 5 times in the show. Even in Act 4 when the darkest part of the play, perhaps any Chekhov play makes its way, Richter doesnt hesitate to douse Arkadina in water.
The best scene in my opinion, is what Richter did with the beginning of act 2 where Arkadina arrogantly states how much more attractive she is than Masha who is a mess. Though Richter took out the Maupassant quotation, as he has removed most references, for more contemporary ones, tzhe characters read asex manual instead of Maupassant, Geneva turns into Bangkok, it seems that everything that is exotic is reexoticized everything that is subtle is plastered. And so the competition reaches such a point that Arkadina demonstrates her superiority by standing on her head, challenging Masha to do the same. Masha is an absolute failure and continues trying, only pulling of the first step, and looking in a yoga position as Arkadina proceeds to break down. Her facial muscles contort, she stays still then moves fast then still again, slams on the door, makes faces, so many faces, making her face into nearly a mask with her mouth held wide open. It was a marvelous demonstration of acting, at the same time that it shows a mother's madness, and at the same time paralleling a similar breakdown her son has in the beginning of act 1- that moment also notable, where he criticizes his mother, was so technically impressive that it won a round of applause.
My only criticism is the end. Richter eschews the lotto game, which really throws away such a necessary 'boring' aspect to his charactzer's lives, and then proceeds to let Kostya kill himself right after the conversation with Nina. For me, a waste, since it unceremoniously presents the death of the hero in front of us, without any of the irony and tension of the doctor seeing the body and proceeding to lie to the mother. A small criticism for what is I believe, Chekhov done one of the few ways I believe he still can be done.
The play itself is remarkable - he flirts with Symbolism while providing us with parody and completely massacres the old theatre guard, as long as those writers who turn their craft into a job. Konstantins reclamations for a new form may refer to symbolism, but the true craft in Chekhov is all in form. The way that the plays are constructed resist tradition - Chekhov begins with the Seagull, probably his most plot-driven play, but continues onward with plays that become less and less about plot, and more about character and form. Perhaps it also has to do with a change in vision - Trigorin's declamations that he is not a landscape painter that he cant merely live in nature, feel resistant to Chekhov's new landscape, a place in the country where people merely live out their problems without reaching towards the glory of moral settings, or intense action....
of course what to do now with a play that is mostly about symbolism and the need for new forms when about 100 new forms followed, and of course art has become about repeating yourself as much as it has become about creating.
If anything, we can only rescue Chekhov by pushing his patheticism to those mercantile extremes, by making his characters into products - already what they have become in our eyes, and using that patheticism, until we reach the breaking point, between actor/product and actor/human. Richters play was really all about the media - the variety of mediums that we use to distract ourselves and in return give ourselves meaning. The use of performance (Arkadina), the sanctity of art (konstantin), love (trigorin nina masha konstantin), richter turns the engraved medal that nina gives to trigorin into a photo - their relationship is after all, only about images. Her image of his fame, and his image of her youthfullness.
What does the seagull give us? Flying for one, freedom, water - there is however a symbolist element to that concept that may have escaped our generaiton. A seagull will always be seagull and never be a seagull. That is to say, what we call a seagull is already a symbol. Now when we go to the beach we will think of Chekhov, but will we do that vice versa?
Perhaps it is my postmodern mindset but when I see plays from this period, I always see the strangest similarities. A wild duck and a seagull. Both get shot or shot at. Both are symbols of weak female characters. Both inevitably sacrifice themselves - and what are we left with? In Ibsen we are left with a favor to continue our lives, no matter what charades they may be. In Chekhov we are given the stern words of the doctor. The bodies must be hidden, the family must go back to the city, and live must continu,e but not in the country.
Country houses in a city like Berlin or New York, belong only to Chekhov and Ibsen now though - we are awash in a world the Symbolist's couldn't have imagined. A world where stagnation takes the form of hyperreality, and rather than no movement, as Maeterlinck or Craig may have wanted it is the stillness of endless hyperspeed, the silence of noise.
And what about theatre then? Actors must now fight against their representations rather than represent them. The stage is the combat zone. Buckets of water, I must say, sort of also do the trick.
This was a bit more philosophical of an entry, but then again, these are the questions I should really be parsing with - my 'research' if you will.
Tschüss!
- J
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