Recently, an acquaintance who moderates science programs and maybe has a little idea about the subject, talked shop to me that the pandemic would basically start all over again with the new Omicron variant. I couldn’t and didn’t want to believe him. However, at the beginning of the pandemic, I had also dismissed any newspaper articles as “catastrophic eroticism”, which at that time already held the prospect of the dawn of a pandemic age.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote the first theater diary at this point, which inevitably dealt with the cultural lockdown, only to find now that the subject has not changed at all for the theater. We just remain prisoners of a virus. Last week, with bated breath, we once again looked forward to the resolutions of the Prime Minister’s Conference, when the first houses in Saxony, in parts of Bavaria and in Austria had already closed by the beginning of January. The stage association quickly pulled out a press release and demanded a “clear political commitment to culture”, whatever that should actually mean. There was no new total lockdown on the stage after all, but – as many theaters describe it – a completely different, also surprising problem is looming: a missing audience.
The reluctant return of the audience was reported for the first time in the summer, and now there is talk of a decline in the audience, rows of canceled tickets, low occupancy and a ghostly emptying of the halls. Perhaps metropolises and the big theaters are less affected, but when the dramaturge of the Schauspiel Köln, Lea Göbel, publicly calls on Twitter to “seriously think” about what the shrinking audience “will do with the theater in perspective”, the problem is actually arrived in the houses. What if, she asks, “if a large part just doesn’t come back”? At first this is astonishing. During the lockdown, wasn’t the “people’s longing for culture” heard everywhere? And now we should have gotten used to the theater after such a short time? Or weaned? Have we always loved theater very much and yet almost never go there again?
The signs of weaning now make it clear that theater is also just a cultural practice, a social ritual and therefore existentially dependent on being constantly rehearsed and practiced. If this ritual falls away, as it was the case in lockdown, it suddenly turns out to be no longer so necessary. So there seems to be a lot at stake for the theater right now.
Seen in this light, recent debates in the theater bubble seem strange at first: An increasingly disappointed critic: the inner community accuses René Pollesch of starting irresponsibly as artistic director at the Volksbühne in Berlin, who confidently culls back in the theater podcast that he is “defiantly frigid”. The director of the Hamburger Schauspielhaus Karin Beier, on the other hand, wants to forego theater criticism completely and thinks it is “shit on the sleeve of art” anyway. And all of that on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Or the director Karin Henkel, who last week as a member of the three-person jury for the Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring, the renowned drama award, just Lina Beckmann, the leading actress in her own production Richard the Kid & the King was chosen as the award winner.
Individual examples that testify to a stronghold mentality. There is no trace of the “serious thoughts” that are supposed to bring the audience back into their homes.
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