How about this or should we rather be saying that?
Monday, July 20th, 2009
In the German theatre currently there is an unfortunate tendency for interpolations. One young director is on record maintaining: “I let the actors speak text of their own which is true to the core of the play and often far more beautiful than the author’s words.” Accordingly when she directed Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way at the Thalia Theater Hamburg and in the play a character can’t remember the exact term for a French law and just calls it “la something … or le something” the actor came up with any French words he had ever heard: “L’état c’est moi, voulez-vous couchez – no, that’s something different”, etc., etc. The mentioning of “a feel at an Arab’s arse” provoked a prolonged debate whether in German one should use the dative or the accusative case. Paying homage to the fact that the play is set in a mining region led to an extensive pseudo-pythonesque riff on life in the pit, allegedly including a whole underground football team. The most blatant invention was to make one of the men a chocolate addict who enthused about a 20 kg slab from Switzerland with a picture of a white cow on the wrapping and asked the actor playing Eddie to bring him some KitKat from the canteen. Now, we all know that what after a couple of pints during an evening rehearsal seems hilarious might look less so in the cold light of the next morning. In Hamburg, however, the director must have bought wholesale practically everything offered by her actors. Needless to say that the invented text throughout was far below the level of anything Burke had written.
The director then managed to come up with an even more ludicrous idea: Completely out of the blue Burke’s Eddie alone on stage quoted Danton’s weariness to get dressed from Büchner’s Danton’s Death and later on all the four characters recited the last conversation the condemned Dantonists have in the Conciergerie prison before being taken to their execution. None of the reviewers mentioned the improvisational liberties or the Büchner interpolations, as they apparently have a very high estimation of the Scottish school system.
A second currently fashionable directorial method for interpolating text is having the actors declaim what used to be mercifully relegated to the programme. So increasingly you hear bits of essays by modish French poststructuralists, the inevitable Baudrillard if the production deals with the media or the current guru of many German dramaturgs, the Italian Giorgio Agamben who in Britain deservedly would be a regular contender for Pseuds Corner. These philosophical musings naturally are written in a very ungestural language and accordingly difficult to speak on stage, to put it kindly.
This may be just about alright with classical texts, although I don’t quite see what Chekhov gains by being “enriched” with reports on the state of German unemployment. With new plays it is an absolute nuisance as many of them are only available in manuscript form via theatre publishers and hardly a critic bothers to read the text, not to speak of the audience. Especially some of the older British dramatists are extremely squeamish concerning even small cuts and make a big fuss about reinstating them when they come over for the German première. Their reaction is often more hysterical and vain than artistically sensible. However, I understand every playwright who is convinced that he did better than a couple of actors with their off the cuff inventions. This experience is rarer in Britain, although already in 1967 Daniel Farson sat at a rehearsal for his Marie Lloyd play in the Theatre Royal Stratford East and experienced Joan Littlewood at work. He realistically commented: “Unfortunately the actors, who made up their own words as they went along, wrote even worse dialogue than I did.”
