"What was that all about?"
Interview |
At the beginning of one of the rehearsals for Il barbiere di Siviglia, you said: “Every day of rehearsal is a consultation with the oracle.” Does this sentence capture the essence of your work as a director?
In a way, yes. Many directors go into rehearsals already knowing exactly what they’re aiming for. Of course, I respect that approach, but I do things differently. My approach—and my goal—is not to have fully understood the play or the work by the time rehearsals begin. I expose the material to situations one wouldn’t normally expect. Perhaps everyone has to stand on their heads first, and then it’s our job to make it plausible why they’re standing on their heads. That means: Through the way I rehearse with my ensemble, we interrogate the text so that it responds to us: through musicality, sound, and rhythm. Not through punctuation and meaning. The interesting thing is that texts are multi-perspective.
There are an infinite number of ways to understand them. And by, so to speak, tormenting and questioning the text, we provoke responses from it. So I constantly interrogate the play during rehearsals through all sorts of strange processes. And it isn’t until the premiere, at the very earliest, that the play—the text, the melody, and the music—tells me what it’s all about.
Does that mean that, by the end of the rehearsals, we hadn't found the meaning of the work, but rather a perspective on it?
In the end, we still have the oracle. And it remains a mystery. We never really get to the bottom of it. But we do gain a perspective that tells us something. Not the usual formulas that tell us what’s political and how we’re supposed to think about things. But rather that we first say: I don’t know anything yet. We have formulas and chains of argumentation that we repeat over and over again. And I want to break that cycle of repetition. It may be that it doesn’t work out, that you think you’re doing something extraordinary, and in the end, the result is the same as it’s always been. But that, too, can be the result when you approach the material without trying to impose anything on it. Tinkering with it, distorting it—and eventually it speaks to us.
Does that apply to music as well?
Yes, music is also a kind of literature. It, too, is meant to be “read,” just like the lyrics to which it is, of course, connected. The key point for me is that we’re always dealing with things that have been recorded. And everything that is recorded is always open to question. Open to question. It is worthy of being questioned. That is exactly how I want to work.
Regarding the specific work during rehearsal: You don’t present a finished concept, but rather embark on a journey of discovery together with the soloists. How would you describe the initial stages of this process?
When we start, I watch the people. For example, during our rehearsals, when the passage we’re working on is first sung at the piano. I listen to them, watch them, see how they move, what they do. The people who bring the work to the stage are the concept. In them, I see certain things—how they act, how they sing. Then I try to respond to what I’ve seen and heard. I might act something out for them, but I base that on what I see in them. I know from my experience as an actor that there are certain things you don’t even notice about yourself. I tell them what I like about what they’re doing, what interests me, what catches my eye. Because what the actors or singers show me is always something I couldn’t have imagined before and that then leads me to the responses to the subject matter, to the material, that I want to provoke.
So it’s about secrets that need to be revealed and about a sense of complicity in dealing with the material.
Exactly. The singers at rehearsal are my partners in crime.
Your theater has always been known for its physically expressive performances and for the musicality of the body. For singers at the opera, however, it’s often unusual to be moving around so much. What has been your experience at the opera: Are you able to convey the musicality of the performance as a unified whole with the singing?
To understand my work, the most important thing to know is that, for me, there is no difference between spoken theater and opera. To me, the term “musical theater” is a pleonasm. I can’t imagine theater without music. I always think in musical terms. That’s why, in my productions, the same applies to an actor as to a singer. On stage, it’s all about singing and dancing. Always.
About our play. So we asked our oracle about Il barbiere di Siviglia and found out a few things that might be interesting. Can you tell us a little about it?
No. The great thing about it is the unpredictability, the unforeseeability. That’s why I don’t want to give anything away. I don’t want to get ahead of the play—that is, what it will have told me by the time of the premiere. Or even beyond that. In Zurich, I staged Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker. At the premiere, I liked what the actors did—it was all good. Then I saw one of the last performances—and the actors completely blew me away. I thought I wasn’t seeing right. And I gained a whole new perspective on the matter. What happens is that during rehearsals, you plant something that can grow in different ways. In opera, of course, this can also happen through cast changes. But you have to realize: A play is a living being—an eternal life. My dream is to create an eternal play with a troupe—one that we rehearse over and over again, perform over and over again. At some point, the actors will grow older. Then someone dies, and a successor takes their place. So that it keeps going, across generations, but always remains a single play that continues to evolve. To do that, however, I’d have to form my own troupe, ideally with actors and singers.
Perhaps repertory theater even runs counter to such an idea. We’re currently rehearsing at a large, long-established institution. At the same time, references to the Commedia dell’arte—the Italian street theater of the 16th and 17th from which characters such as Harlequin emerged. What are the connections?
I have repeatedly referred to this system in my work because I am interested in the approach of the Commedia dell’arte: The actor or actress chooses a character and continues to develop and refine it over time, well into old age. Just like with the Marx Brothers. Harpo Marx walks into the frame, and you know: here comes the number with the harp or the piano. Or Groucho Marx comes striding in with his long strides—you know what it is, but you always want to see it again. Or clowns like Charlie Rivel, who keeps saying “Acrobat, nice” over and over again and builds his whole life around it. Working with singers also feeds this interest: They often bring this repertoire of gestures and vocal expressions with them, and I can work with that. This is where the connection to the Commedia dell’arte lies—in working with a gestural repertoire that is developed, practiced, refined, and performed anew time and again, so that surprises arise from the variation. You don’t have to overuse the reference either; other references are also important to me —the use of exaggeration, as we know it from silent films. Exaggeration, which is really, above all, a celebration of expression.
Gioachino Rossini’s music, with its famous crescendos and, more generally, its masterful use of rhythm as a theatrical effectseems to suit your directing style very well. What is your relationship to this composer?
While preparing for Il barbiere di Siviglia, I really delved deeply into Rossini for the first time and quickly realized that his compositional style captures exactly what is essential to the core of my work. He sings, as it were, straight from the heart. I’d rather not use the word “modern,” because it’s become so overused. My point is that Rossini writes music that makes it clear a new era has dawned. In this regard, one could place Il barbiere in the same vein as Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. This applies to all three of these works—a different way of thinking, a different way of moving. Rossini intensifies the movement to the point of excess, and in that excess, this new, accelerated era is once again heralded. Nietzsche, who philosophizes about how everything becomes completely different; the entirely different virtuosity of Charlie Chaplin or Duke Ellington: All of this is foreshadowed in Rossini.
In a certain sense, your theater seems to operate at the intersection of the two major poles of Italian theatrical traditionand opera, which ultimately also gave rise to Il barbiere di Siviglia: Carlo Gozzi attempted to preserve the Commedia dell’arte as a play of character types in masks, while Carlo Goldoni sought to create a scripted form of theater and abolish the masks in order to achieve a more distinct characterization.
And in Germany, actress Caroline Neuber publicly burned Hanswurst as a symbol of educational theater. You can still see the effects of this among audiences today—when something gets too comical or turns into a “Hanswurst farce,” people get upset. Or they even feel ashamed because they laughed. This physical audacity—which even the Nazis fought against—is exactly what I find interesting. That also means annoying the audience, driving the audience crazy, confusing the audience —but these aren’t aggressive acts; they’re entertaining acts. And they also have an effect on the mind. There’s a passage in Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra“Ever since humans have existed, they have rejoiced too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin.”” I can only agree with that. I don’t want people to leave the theater feeling guilty and thinking they’re stupid. I want people to leave the theater and ask themselves: What was that all about? What just happened here? The plays I’ve written have sometimes been accused of being meaningless. I think that’s where life actually begins.
Perhaps your stage performances could be described more as a production of meaning. You once described this technique using a stage scene: When an actor stands there completely neutral and unassuming, but his counterpart acts as if he’s absolutely terrified of him, then a chain of meanings begins that has nothing to do with what the first actor might be supposed to show or might want to show. The meaning of what he does emerges anew from the reaction of his surroundings; that is to say: If the second performer acts as if there were something eerie about the first, then eventually everyone else will come to see it that way too: the other actors, the audience. For me, that has always meant: Don’t be too sure of your own reality. Actually, that’s socially critical theater.
I’m not dismissing that. But I think that theater that seeks to create a scandal using supposedly provocative means —liters of blood and sex on stage, however clumsy it may be—is simply no longer possible. I believe that what’s provoking—if anything—can only be the form. That you do something that makes people say: “That can’t be true.” I don’t count on it; I’m not working toward causing a scandal. But I notice that people really do get aggressive because of what I do.
What we often see in your work—and what also played a role in your work on Il barbiere —is the classic clown conflict: the difficulty of overcoming an obstacle, the trickiness of the object. Therein lies a tragedy that we recognize from the great comedians you often refer to. You mentioned Charlie Rivel, the Marx Brothers...
... Grock, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy ... Or even those incredible comic silent films from the time of the October Revolution. And Max Linder, the elegant comedian, traces of whom can be found in Chaplin’s work ...
So, just like with these artists, is your comedy also always about that tragic foundation—the height of the fall?
Comedy is always multidimensional; it has many reasons, and the tragedy underlying it is part of that. And I believe that in order to allow oneself to be swept up in the confusion created by comedy and to delve into its depths, it doesn’t require any great intellectual feats. “Feat” is, in fact, a dreadful word in this context. Perhaps it requires a kind of spiritual energy—but that is accessible to everyone. Everyone is capable of having a mental vibration; it’s just that people in the theater are so often led to believe that they’re all stupid. And that they need an intellectual to tell them what a “cliché” is. Yet the theater is exactly the place where people come face to face and show each other that they’re on the same level. I also like to turn the tables sometimes and, together with my ensemble, show the stage as the place where absolutely everyone is completely crazy. I’ve often told my actors: Playing a real fool is a great intellectual achievement. And, by the way, someone who is mentally disabled in our eyes can often say things that no one else can. Those who are supposedly mentally disabled are, after all, the ones kissed by God.
One more question about your sets: You designed the stage sets for all of your productions yourself. They’re almost always abstract spaces that sometimes bring to mind the places we encounter in our dreams. How do you find your stage spaces?
Associative. During a botched production at the Volksbühne, the technical director asked me in the hallway what kind of stage we were actually building. Then I thought about it: a big tube that you can roll around. A swimming pool, filled with water. With a diving board that might break off at any moment. And at the front of the ramp, eleven pianos that don’t really work anymore. During the dress rehearsal, we decided that the swimming pool wouldn’t have water in it, but a trampoline instead. And that’s how it came to be. I simulated some of the stage designs on the computer. For Untitled No. 1, which was performed at the Vienna Festival, a coincidence played into my hands.
I had modeled the sofa myself, but then gave the workshop some dimensions that seemed right to me. When it was finally done, it was huge—way too big. They showed it to me and even tried to calm me down, telling me not to freak out. I saw it and knew: This is it. That’s fantastic. As it turned out, all the performers just happened to fit right next to each other in the shot. Things like that have happened before. Some misjudgments that then led to the result.