German royalties
Sunday, August 17th, 2008Whilst even big names like Tom Stoppard, David Hare or Alan Bennett are only rarely performed over here, Martin Crimp and Simon Stephens earn a big part of their income from German royalties. Stephens in particular gets pushed by the influential monthly magazine „Theater heute“ which prints practically each of his texts and follows this up with visits to productions of them, so that theatres know they get guaranteed publicity and approval for their choice of play.
Many German repertory schedules for next season could have been written during five minutes in the canteen on the back of a pack of cigarettes:
- a Shakespeare
- a Goethe, Schiller or Kleist
- a Chekhov
- an Ibsen, Strindberg or Hauptmann
- a pointless adaptation of a Thomas Mann-novel
- an even more pointless adaptation of a Lars von Trier-film
- a new German play (very cerebral, very postdramatic)
- Yasmina Reza’s „The God of Carnage“
- Simon Stephens’s „Motortown“, „Pornography“ or „Harper Regan“.
Unfortunately the prospects for new British and Irish dramatists other than Stephens sometimes are not exactly enhanced by the behaviour of their agents. Thinking in terms of continuous runs, they don’t seem to understand that for a text to be a success in the German system you need a number of productions in different cities played over longer periods of time. It requires patience for a play to get a first German outing and then to make it into the repertory elsewhere, because seasons are scheduled up to 18 months before an eventual production. German agents increasingly are flabbergasted by the sums their British colleagues demand as a guaranteed payment for the rights for plays which had a reasonable success at, say, the Bush or the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, but whose writers are still totally unknown on the continent.
As the hype surrounding the work of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill et al. in the mid-1990s is long over, this short-sighted strategy leads to the situation that interesting new plays which would have found their way onto German stages ten years ago without a problem now don’t even get translated. That interest in new British writing is picking up again recently was proved by the astonishing fact that Stephens’s „Pornography“, Paul Jenkins’s „Natural Selection“ and Ali Taylor’s „Cotton Wool“ all had their premières in Germany long before a first British production was planned. Even with Martin Crimp’s „The City“ Katie Mitchell was pipped to the post by Thomas Ostermeier and it came out at the Schaubühne in Berlin before the Royal Court followed suit.
Whilst no comparable wave to the in-yer-face dramatists is in sight, still with a bit more logistical help German dramaturgs might realize that somebody like Simon Stephens is a perfectly decent dramatist, but that there are quite a few other playwrights working at least on the same level. This might make the German repertory less predictable and lead to welcome side-earnings for British authors. After all from what would somebody like Edward Bond have paid his bills over many years if not from German and French royalties?
