Theater – Berlin Theater Meeting: Reaching after the crises

As always, lovers of stage art are looking forward to the wonderful month of May in theatre. Shortly before the end of the season, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele invites you to the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best in the field of spoken theater. The seven-member jury viewed 738 productions in 88 cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Of these, the ten most “remarkable” works, in the eyes of the experts, will be shown as part of the festival.

It was already clear beforehand that “Nothing is OK,” the last production by Volksbühne director René Pollesch, who died unexpectedly last year, would be selected. “Sancta”, the first foray into opera by the hyped scandalous director and choreographer Florentina Holzinger, which the Berliner Volksbühne co-produced with the Stuttgart State Opera and the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin, among others, has already been discussed up and down in the media, so the invitation The theater meeting is anything but surprising. The evening is above all a mixture of kitsch and cannibalism to watch, coupled with a criticism of religion from yesterday.

The Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg has the honor twice – with “Bernarda Alba’s House” by Federico García Lorca and “The Machine or: There is Peace on All Peaks” by Georges Perec. The Berlin Maxim Gorki Theater is represented with “Our Germany Fairy Tale” based on the novel by Dinçer Güçyeter. With “Blood Book” there is also another literary adaptation from – surprise! – Theater Magdeburg there. The Wuppertal Opera House is showing the Pina Bausch reminiscence “Kontakthof – Echoes of ’78”. And with “Double Serpent” at the Wiesbaden State Theater, Ersan Mondtag delivered what was expected of him: an aesthetic horror number. There remains another astonishing invitation: the independent venue brut Vienna is showing the VR spectacle »(EOL). End of Life” about – well – data garbage. From the Residenztheater Munich comes the double evening “The Rifles of Mrs. Carrar/Strangling Lead,” which combines Brecht’s classic with the premiere of a text by Björn SC Deigner. The jury apparently didn’t find anything in Switzerland.

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At the risk of sounding too grandfatherly, you might ask yourself: Where have all the stage classics gone? Lessing, Shakespeare, Chekhov? But of course – they stuck with the selection for last year. Because the theater, as this much becomes clear from the ten invitations, has little interest in its own canon in its search for a way to deal with the crises of the present. Things are dark on the stages at the moment. The clever study of war and mass death based on “Carrar,” which was trained on Brecht but does not stop at him, poses the right questions. And if Pollesch’s enchanting evening at least deals with the dialogue that has become impossible in damaged life in the 21st century, the other productions try to reach for the glaring problems of the present day – and hardly get to grips with them. The theater viewer has to look for the great parable of fascism, the theatrical treatment of the economic crisis, the artistic approach to the climate catastrophe in the program and instead comes across technological innovation, psychological abysses and beautiful illustrations of an abysmal present.

The Berlin Theatertreffen takes place from May 2nd to 18th and, in addition to an accompanying program, presents the ten most remarkable drama productions from Germany, Austria and Switzerland selected by an expert jury.

www.berlinerfestspiele.de/theatertreffen