Germany Confronts Its Past on the British Stage

This season, the Royal Court in London is presenting a series marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall entitled “Off the Wall” starting with Marius von Mayenburg's The Stone, which tackles the legacy of Nazi guilt. The series continues with Mark Ravenhill’s Over There which is the story of identical twins who grow up on opposite sides of the Wall (which to me sounds stolen from Agota Kristof’s Hungarian trilogy of novels The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie). The reading series includes The Final Fire by Dea Loher, Black Beast Sorrow by Anja Hilling, To the South Seas by Gherkin Plane by Christoph Nussbaumeder, The Uncertainty of the Situation by Philipp Loehle and The Pigeons by David Gieselmann. Check out an article about it here or the Royal Court’s website here.

Mark Ravenhill on Directing in Armenia

by Mark Ravenhill, 'The Guardian'

More than a decade ago, the statue of Lenin was removed from Republic Square, the heart of the city of Yerevan. Now the square is dominated by a massive water feature. This eye-catching, if rather kitsch, landmark in the new capitalist Armenia spits out great plumes of water in time with the blasts of popular classical music booming out of concealed speakers. The Armenian people have moved on from their Soviet past. The new cafe society of young couples parading in their Italian clothes is more reminiscent of Milan than Minsk. But there is one legacy of the Soviet past that Yerevan has held on to. The city, with more than 1 million inhabitants, has a tremendous appetite for theatre: there are no fewer than 12 working companies, and an audience that's enthusiastic for all kinds of performance. During the Soviet era, the challenge for Moscow was to balance the introduction of Russian ideas and language with a respect for local culture. Drama was an excellent tool: both Russian and Armenian theatre was supported and promoted by the Soviet state. And the Armenians have preserved this theatrical legacy.

I'm in Yerevan to direct a translation of one of my Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat plays, a 20-minute work called Paradise Lost. I have an impressive Armenian cast. Part of the Soviet legacy is the high standard of actor training. The quality of the acting is astonishing. So, too, is the loyalty countries such as Slovenia, Georgia and Lithuania still show to a Russian idea of theatre: large ensemble companies, actors working together for a lifetime, lengthy rehearsal periods, visionary directors. While all around them everything is being privatised, actors and audiences have held on to a form of theatre that, by the logic of market forces, should have disappeared long ago.

There is a barrier for me to cross: I don't speak any Russian or Armenian, and the cast doesn't have any English. I've been given an interpreter, an enthusiastic - but not exactly fluent - English speaker. And so rehearsals have taken an unusual course. After the briefest of introductions, in which I tried to summarise the play in a single sentence and gave a few key notes for each character, we hit the stage, slowly working through a couple of pages a day. I've found myself standing at the footlights, beating out the tempos for different sections with a book, holding my hand up to indicate the length of pauses, tapping my head to indicate changes of thought or intentions for the characters. I've focused on giving the actors concrete physical moments to play. I've even demonstrated actions - something many British actors would consider an insult to their craft.

The results occasionally look like the kind of coarse acting you can find anywhere in the world. But at other times, this commitment to the physical has produced exciting results that seem more like the theatre I've seen in mainland Europe than the type of work you usually see on British stages.

Some blimpish Brits still insist that theatre from other countries is more physical and visual than ours because they don't have our language, which - so the argument goes - is the richest in the world. I don't buy this. Surely Goethe, Molière and Chekhov couldn't have been inspired to produce the world's greatest plays in impoverished languages? But it is true that British audiences are unusually attuned to the nuances of language: they can smell a hint of irony quicker than theatre-goers anywhere else.

This ear for language is surely the greatest strength, but also the greatest weakness, of the British stage. Perhaps we should think a little less about the words. Here in Armenia, I'm learning to unlock the meaning of a play without understanding a word the actors are saying. It's a fascinating lesson.

Dramatic Disturbance

Mark Ravenhill, UK playwright and chair of the 2008 forum for young European playwrights, recounts his recent experience of nearly getting arrested in a suburban German park. Read a brief excerpt below and the full commentary here.

"I've decided to keep the meetings simple. Each playwright - the majority of them are under 30 - has already had a play produced in their own country. For our sessions, these have been translated into English, which we use as a lingua franca. We discuss not only the plays, but also the wider issues of playwriting, politics and art in each dramatist's country. Although we're all talking in a careful, hesitant manner that we quickly dub "conference English", our 10 days of discussions prove incredibly exciting. It's striking how different the cultural traditions and expectations of each country are."

Theatre for One

Mark Ravenhill discusses the current trend of theatre artists seeking out smaller spaces and audiences, and asks what’s wrong with the mass shared experience? Below is an excerpt from the full blog post.

In our individualistic world, it could be that every cultural form is gradually being transformed into a private experience. Music, once the public marker of religion and carnival, has now largely become something we plug into our ears to keep the world at a distance. Ghetto-blasting cars and groups of teenagers playing music from their mobile phones are seen as noise polluters. It's almost unthinkable that a family would sit down together and listen to the "wireless", as we did in huge numbers for several decades. Now, the most popular use of the radio is to fill the private space of our cars during rush hour - drivetime. The television has made a similar retreat, with individuals watching TV in their own rooms, often on a PC or laptop.

You would think that the theatre, that most public of acts, would resist this transformation into private experience. Yet, increasingly, directors, actors and writers seem to be seeking out smaller and smaller spaces for their work: this week, the Royal Court theatre in London opened a play in an upstairs meeting room, a room which seats only 30 people. The Edinburgh fringe regularly debuts a clutch of shows performed in cars, cupboards and kitchens.