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Jürgen Gosch was the most important German director of the decade. He trained as an actor in the former GDR and left the country after his early productions there were met with official hostility. Particularly contentious was Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena” at the Berlin Volksbühne in 1978 which was staged as an artistic and poetic parody of socialism, where the Privy Council consisted of a dozen blind nonagenarians stumbling around with sticks. In contrast to many of his former colleagues who also went to the West, he was never in danger of succumbing to “eastalgia” but stressed what living under a dictatorship had done to the people down to their rude everyday social behaviour years after unification. In the West Gosch’s career had its ups and downs; strangely he could be very good indeed in one city in the same year and outright awful in another. “Good” Gosch cities were Cologne and Bochum, “bad” ones Frankfurt and Hamburg. His worst disaster was his short-time artistic directorship of the prestigious Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz which he left in 1988 already after his first production there, a universally panned “Macbeth”. During the last years of his life he triumphed with Chekhov and plays by the German dramatist Roland Schimmelpfennig, mostly at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Increasingly he pared down his work to the bare essentials, wary of any stage tricks. This resembled Peter Brook but luckily without Brook’s woolly esoteric side. Gosch’s best-ever production appropriately was another “Macbeth”, as if he wanted to say: “I gave you the worst possible version of this play, now you’ll see the complete contrary.”

The German press discussed Gosch’s “Macbeth” at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2005 as part of a general debate about “Schmuddeltheater” (“muck” or “dirty” theatre). The eight male actors apart from Lady Macbeth were all naked, but that wasn’t due to any sensationalist intentions. As a lot of stage blood, other liquids and flour were used during the high summer rehearsals, the actors had sweated so much that they suggested to work in the nude rather than to have their soiled rehearsal clothes cleaned every day. The nudity had been planned only for the scenes with the witches. Retrospectively Gosch said: “The naturalness of the nudity came as a surprise to us. Therefore you do not ask for any reasons. As with a painting by Lucian Freud.“ Especially drastic were the witches scenes, including copious defecation. But after all witches aren’t exactly clean and harmless. Some people also took offence at the long and slowly played violent scenes which gained a horrendous credibility. The director’s motto was: “All our means, down to the minutest ones, have to be legitimised by the text, serving our view of the play.” Any outward theatricality was strictly avoided. The auditorium remained brightly lit. Actors not needed simply sat down in the first row of the stalls. Set changes were arranged by the actors themselves.

Outstanding were two scenes: Lady Macbeth’ sleepwalking was done in the far left corner of the huge Düsseldorf stage. The bulky Devid Striesow minced up and down manically on high heels without any attempt at “transvesticism” and desperately and in vain looked for an exit from Johannes Schütz’s black box set. Sentences like: “The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?” showed frighteningly what happens when somebody goes to bits. And before the battle in the final act Gosch had his actors bring huge branches from the foyer. The cast stood frontally to the audience with them and for five minutes created a picture of a bewitchingly harmonious nature, complete with twittering and chirping. You understood that the field of battle some years later again would be just such a peaceful scenery. The fight between Macbeth and Macduff until both actors were really exhausted themselves did not yet convey any hope for political change. Gosch succeeded in creating a sometimes grotesquely comic Shakespearean world of timeless truth with the simplest of means. Again and again one felt reminded of the already mentioned paintings by Lucian Freud but also of Francis Bacon’s triptychs and of Caravaggio to whom a big exhibition was devoted in Düsseldorf at the time. Gosch himself told the local paper about the aesthetics of his production, characterised by an increasingly besmirched set: “It is also a beautiful picture. It reminds me of a Grecian mosaic, about 3.000 years old, which I saw in a book. The mosaic showed a floor completely covered with rubbish after a huge party. There were remnants of fruit, fishbones and stones. That’s what I envisage when I look at the stage towards the end.” It was his way of showing that “fair is foul, and foul is fair“.

“Macbeth” was one of those rare productions where small reservations on the spectator’s side are swept aside as the overall result is simply awe-inspiring. I watched it with busloads of schoolchildren and had feared for the worst, but already after a few minutes any attempt at sniggering stopped, as the kids realised that Gosch and his actors meant business and delivered the goods during two hours and forty-five minutes without an interval. Unlike many well-known German directors who are far older than Gosch but can’t stop working with ever diminishing results, after a long illness due to cancer Jürgen Gosch died yesterday aged 65 at the height of his creative powers rehearsing “The Bacchae” for the Salzburg Festspiele and the Berliner Ensemble. The German theatre landscape will be much impoverished without his monolithic harshness which grabbed you emotionally at the most unexpected moments in a completely unsentimental way.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 8:41 am, by Michael Raab and is filed under Audio 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.