Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
Comrade Shakespeare’s cheerful comedy “The Taming of the Shrew” is usually called “The Taming of the Shrew” in German, or more recently “The Taming of the Shrew.” But what the director Pınar Karabulut premiered last week at the Deutsches Theater Berlin and what the playwright Katja Brunner, who – in her own words – “destroyed” the old Shakespeare, had put down on paper was called “The Taming of the Unruly”.
What does that mean? A few sleepless nights and a lot of headaches later since I first asked myself this question, I can tell you: There probably isn’t much to it. A subject has simply been conjured up from an object (the content is obviously in a distant place). And they wanted to do something similar in the theater: the objectified women were now allowed to speak for themselves again.
In Shakespeare, two Paduan sisters are to be married together according to their father’s wishes. While Bianca, the younger, is courted by several men, Katharina, the older, proves to be unruly. In order for Bianca to enter marriage, Katharina must first be tamed. And she will.
Here, in short, Comrade Shakespeare is not quite up to speed with the current gender discourse. (Although the gender swap and a framework plot that exposes the event as a dream of a drunk, yes, as a male fantasy, are definitely production offers from the author.) However, the theater knows how to deal with such things, provided that a resourceful direction enables it to do so, supported by a clever dramaturgy.
Genosse Shakespeare
As you like it: Every two weeks, Erik Zielke writes about great tragedies, political smear theater and fools from the past and present. He finds inspiration in his comrade from Stratford-upon-Avon.
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At the German Theater they wanted things to be different. Brunner took Shakespeare apart and created a “horror fairy tale.” With her piece, she not only presents the violent history of patriarchy, but also calls for women to conspire against oppression.
Not only Bianca and Katharina are involved, no, also Dorota L. from Potsdam, who was brutally murdered by her husband a few years ago – like many other women. Brunner’s cause is honorable; However, it does not find a convincing form. She turns out to be someone whose associations have run away. Femicide and domestic violence, surgical virginity restoration and proper nail cutting blur into a whole that they are not. All of this comes across in rather clumsy language.
To put it in a friendly way, one could say: Brunner is one of the epigones of Elfriede Jelinek. To put it less kindly, one would have to say: In Brunner’s case, this epigonality turns into parodic. Pınar Karabulut presents all of this in the usual poppy and boring way.
Comrade Shakespeare doesn’t always make things easy for us. But wanting to have it easy is actually not something that theater people who make their living from drama are entitled to. Shakespeare did not offer us any means of identification in his plays, but rather left us a work from which we can learn something about people. A lot of it is rather unpleasant, but also enlightening.
The fact that Brunner chose Shakespeare as an opponent for her general attack on the patriarchy (to which there is nothing objectionable) is unfortunate in two respects: Firstly, Shakespeare is not the enemy that we are made out to be; on the other hand, in the truest sense of the word, only moral superiority is presented to us in an unartful manner. Shakespeare would have done it the other way around.