2024-07-01 05:09:00
WAnybody who usually goes to theaters is aware of this: How a lot one wish to unfold into the realms of fantasy and poetry or to immerse himself in nice contrasts with nice works of literature. However the place does it find yourself? Within the barren desert of dry tutorial concepts that solely use phrases as a mannequin for self-knowledge. Zeitgeist builds monuments by daring to rage over the previous. A brand new pattern in theater: classics are being rewritten or rewritten. The phrase is wiser than the author, Heiner Müller as soon as stated. The director is smarter than the writers, stated the theater director. And as we speak? A residing author ought to routinely be smarter than a useless newbie, because the previous may be tackled with a set of specialist instruments from the cultural research discussion board. Did Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Shakespeare & Co. Is it sufficient to empower the devoted? By no means? Then that should change.
Playwright Katja Brunner stated: “The theme doesn’t match the discourse of sexuality in our time, through the presentation of the Deutsches Theater Berlin program. What it means is Shakespeare’s play “The Taming of the Shrew”, which has been debated for hundreds of years as whether or not it’s a male fantasy taken to the purpose of absurdity or a doc of misogyny. For Brunner the textual content is obvious, will probably be titled “Taming of the Shrew”. Your model needs to be about “sisterhood and unity,” which is why solely girls will do it.
Shakespeare is the one one on this system as a solid, and his play is the one one from a big repertoire that may be learn on the primary record on the well-known Deutsches Theater till the tip of the yr. The indicators of the occasions seem to point a political correction of the Canon. Peter Zadek as soon as stated that he didn’t wish to train lecturers in society. Nevertheless, that is precisely what we regularly see in theater as we speak as a fundamental space of accountability. The primary or second is taken into account crucial cultural apply.
Within the earlier reconstruction by Brunner, which was proven on the Cologne Theater, “Richard III appeared because the water-woman “Queen”. Within the “Hilden Saga. “The play of the queen”, Ferdinand Schmalz on the Deutsches Theater replaces the heroes with Hilden: As a substitute of falling out, Brünhild and Kriemhild work collectively to overthrow the rule of males at courtroom, the place it differs from chav Siegfried there There are solely ineffective dudes in shiny garments. All the things is predictable as it’s boring.
Goethe and Schiller additionally get an replace: In Fatma Aydemir’s “Physician Mom Faust” (Theatre Essen), Faust is a professor of gender research who tries to seduce a homosexual refugee who – beware, MeToo – can be a pupil your physician Something that does not match into the zeitgeist we have been writing about, so communicate. With Leonie Böhm on the Münchner Kammerspiele, the “robbers” are a gaggle of girls on a mission of self-discovery, whose members slide bare throughout the stage and mess around with uncovered breasts. Schiller’s “I’ve nice rights to be indignant with nature” turned a feminist slogan. Issues that had been lately added to the repertoire of the Maxim Gorky Theater.
Prolonged discussions may be mixed in any approach. Golda Barton’s celebration title “Sistas!” within the Berliner Volksbühne shouldn’t be solely feminist, but in addition anti-racist. In an previous Berlin condominium, Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” speaks truthfully about blackness and their racism. And as an alternative of going to Moscow, they wish to go to the promised land of the USA, the place identification politics and integration circulation. Fashionable thought, for instance on the subject of gender illustration, has been fed again into the previous. A previous that doesn’t exist on the stage of discourse by which the current is offered appears insufferable. Why does the current wish to change the previous so rapidly? Why not write a brand new play about “sisterhood and solidarity” but in addition write Shakespeare? This revolt towards the canon won’t produce any new classics.
Who does Canon restore work?
What profit did the viewers actually get from the political reformation of the canon? Is self-efficacy actually enhanced by studying from historic artistic endeavors? Quite the opposite: As a result of the politically right villains don’t face one another with ethical abysses and contradictions which might be even worse within the image, the beauty correction of the classics doesn’t have the facility, however doesn’t have the facility, the viewers to intervene in actuality that’s nonetheless controversial as we speak.
In her essay “Depp as a Everlasting Standing,” theater critic Christine Wahl describes the rewriting pattern as “a spectacularly misplaced proposition.” Wahl writes: “The obvious measure of feminist ‘reform’ is much less about elevating the feminine solid and extra about devaluing the male outsider.” Paradoxical consequence: Quite the opposite, even writing a lady who doesn’t love wins. Anybody who needs to see solely their very own face within the image, wherever they give the impression of being, is affected by aesthetic narcissism. The one concern is with self-image; Self-confidence turns into self-effacement, the place kitsch prevails over contradictions.
Who likes this? An viewers that has exalted self-image as an alternative to politics and faith and enjoys a private dedication that’s contradicted by a murderous ideological sauce. This yr’s Mülheim Drama Prize, which is likely one of the most essential prizes for modern drama within the German-speaking nations, exhibits how balanced the rewriting has turn out to be within the theater enterprise. The jury awarded the prize to “Nora or Learn how to Compost the Nice Home” by Sivan Ben Yishai – at the moment exhibiting on the Hannover State Theater and Deutsches Theater. The writer, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1978, turned Ibsen’s “Nora or A Doll’s Home” into a private model of the theater. “A severe allegation,” wrote the judges.
Ben Yishai turns Ibsen’s play about cash, honor and marriage right into a story about illustration, feminism and classism. Nora is the bogeyman of white bourgeois feminism who makes cash from her story. Her husband Torvald is greater than a minor character. The actual supporting characters, the supply man or the sister and the housemaid, are shut down with the MeToo accusations made or are relegated to footnotes. The quick circuit between the criticism of accountability and the use has its enchantment extra within the thought than within the execution. The play is lame: Nora means and the supporting characters are the brand new corruption of this world, which is known rapidly and is way much less humorous than within the movie comedy that helps the character of Sophie Linnenbaum “Passengers” . And fewer free, as a result of on the identical time Ibsen, the nice creator of bourgeois drama, needed to be consigned to the compost heap of historical past with an indignant gesture.
Like all crimes, re-working has its virtues, “play author Peter Hacks wrote nearly 50 years in the past. In his essay “On Revisited Classics,” Hacks tries to develop formulation for rewriting and rewriting. There’s a particular rule for him, who achieved one of many best theater successes within the GDR together with his adaptation of Aristophanes: “Courses are pure. You may solely change them for those who enhance them.” sue is to not enhance.
When an artist places his hand to classical, Hacks stated, it is like a health care provider’s surgical process, which is commonly improper with out a particular information of anatomy. Hacks calls it “the artwork of midwifery” in his “little catechism” and one ought to get the most effective of the article. And set one other rule: “The aim of enhancing is to not criticize the article, however slightly the article”. What you see most as we speak, nonetheless, is precisely that: criticism of the article, hardly ever understood or confirmed.
“Not solely does the brand new editor not see the great thing about your mannequin; you shut your eyes to them,” Hacks stated. “He had a preconceived notion that he was glad to sacrifice every thing. Now you already know the idea of a beautiful artwork, however you write it.” Even Hacks’ idol of youth finds no mercy: “How the ‘Antigone’ endures, the ‘Don Juan’, the ‘Coriolanus’. How lengthy had been they, in order that they’d not be collectively, when Brecht introduced them right down to Brecht. ” And as we speak they nonetheless convey us below Brecht.
Do not criticize, simply enhance, does anybody else do this? Actually, it isn’t solely an accurate political assessment, but in addition a complicated poetic assessment. Roland Schimelpfennig’s “Anthropolis” performs, which Karin Beier made the largest theater occasion in Hamburg this season, are primarily based on historic classics. They’re motivated by language therapy, not by instruction in content material. They don’t pay homage to the hubris of the zeitgeist, however slightly create what one is searching for within the theater: an encounter with the alternative in magnificence. In Mülheim, Schimmelpfennig didn’t win the primary prize of the jury, however he received the viewers prize.
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