When does the pub close? Running times in England and Germany
Friday, March 20th, 2009
In England it is common practice for an actor to count the number of laughs he can get when first reading a text. With Laurence Olivier this was the case even when he played King Lear. (A famous German Lear like Bernhard Minetti would seriously have contested the notion that the play contains even a single laugh.) If a line falls flat during a performance you know immediately that your timing was wrong. German theatre practitioners dislike terms like gag, laugh or curtain line. Directors often object to “this kind of technical language” and maintain that their way of working is “an atmospherical one”. And the cast sometimes take refuge in claims like: “If I feel uneasy, I’d rather let the laugh go and stay true to my character instead” – as if the one and the other were incompatible. A diligent search for hidden subtexts leads to impressive results with classical plays or work from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century which in Britain due to the short rehearsal periods often appear more arranged than directed. With a new text this method can become counterproductive when the line “I was looking for a cigarette” may be just a simple statement not becoming more substantial by ominous pauses in the most self-parodic Pinterish manner: “I was … looking … for a – CIGARETTE.”
Taking into further account that German is “broader” as a language than English with its blessedly high number of monosyllables, it’s easy to understand that performances in the German theatre of new British plays last longer than the original premières. After many years of comparing London and German productions, as a rule of thumb I’d say the latter take up approximately half an hour more even with cuts bringing the translated text down to the same amount of words as the original. These cuts are bitterly necessary if you imagine that “Mind the gap” in Berlin becomes “Bitte beachten Sie beim Aussteigen die Lücke zwischen Zug und Bahnsteigkante”.
The slower playing and the unnecessary pauses have a hefty cumulative effect on the running time. At one fell swoop directors oblivious to the fact that intervals shouldn’t take up more than 20 minutes are able to prolong evenings in the theatre even more substantially. This used to be a speciality of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. The world record for a scene change was set by Peter Stein with 90 minutes for O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. That was closely followed by Luc Bondy who for his production of Marivaux’ The Triumph of Love had secured a special permission from the Berlin waterworks that he was allowed to pump dry a whole stage-lake during the interval. In the meanwhile we walked around the building wondering how many hectolitres were still left. It was enough to help the Sahel Belt over a particularly severe period of draught.
If you successfully sat through one of those artificially prolonged evenings in the German theatre, don’t expect to be on the way to the pub as quickly as in London. Whilst in Britain usually there is only one round of applause, over here the actors take a number of shared curtain calls and at least one individual turn. They don’t seem to mind or realise that the audience often applauds out of a palpable sense of relief that the whole damned thing is finally over and to celebrate their own stamina. After all one of the most basic teutonic maxims is “To be German means to do a thing for its own sake.” It’s by Richard Wagner, not for nothing a specialist himself when it came to taking his time.
