This coauthored contribution investigates the rehearsal methods of German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier, “the most internationally recognized German theatre director of the present” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016, back cover), as he searches to achieve a spontaneous reaction and interaction between his actors on stage. How can such immediate, ‘true’, ‘pure’, not yet ‘censored’ by the brain responses to a stage partner’s action be created? How do actors become the creators of their own art, rather than serving as mere interpreters of the stage director’s instructions? What are their creative sources? And what can be the tools of a stage director willing to lead the actors to such an autonomous creative process? These questions count among the most important ones that Thomas Ostermeier’s work has revolved around across the past two decades. He gradually developed a specific working process that takes as its sources the Brechtian ‘inductive method’, while also containing variations of many elements of Stanislavsky’s system as well as some of Meyerhold’s legacy. Our chapter will depart from a general overview of some basic pillars of his rehearsal process, with a focus on the principles and approaches that put a Brechtian vision of theatre-making in an unusual relation to Stanislavsky’s legacy. The second part will then discuss in greater detail, how Ostermeier applies his rehearsal methods with different artistic teams and working in different genres, drawing in particular on insights into the working processes towards The Seagull at the Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne (2016) and Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder at the Schaubühne Berlin (2012), as well as Ostermeier’s own interviews and writing. A final section will then position Ostermeier’s work more widely within the context of a ‘return to the social’ that characterises contemporary ‘post-conceptual’ theatre, that is theatre after the dominant paradigm of postmodernism (cf. Osborne 2018). In an original way, though, Ostermeier remains skeptical about the privilege afforded to an almost fetishized notion of reality in numerous directorial strategies of the present, which blend the stage world and the reality beyond the theatre, or which use reportage and documentary formats, as for instance in the work of Milo Rau and Yael Ronen, both of whom have previously worked at Ostermeier’s Schaubühne theatre.
I
In search of a theatrical authenticity: Ostermeier’s ‘inductive method’
The origin of the ‘double bind’ of Ostermeier’s method to Stanislavsky and Brecht can be traced back right to the period of his studies at the Berlin Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts between 1992 and 1996, where the training reposed mainly on these two important pillars. This can partly be explained by the history of this institution, formerly the main dramatic school in East Germany. Stanislavsky’s system has been taught there since the 1950s, as it seemed suited for an actors’ training conforming to the ideology of ‘socialist realism’. Meanwhile, Brecht’s epic theatre – or a certain vision of it – was perpetuated at the school as one of the specificities of the East German theatre culture (cf. Goriaux Pelechová 2013 and 2014). Influential for Ostermeier was, in particular, his encounter with Manfred Karge, one of his professors and an important continuator of Brecht’s legacy in Germany (Ostermeier 2016: 110).
Brecht’s notion of the inductive method dates back to an essay from 1939, “The Attitude of the Rehearsal Director (in the Inductive Process)” (in Brecht 2014: 211–212). ‘Induction’ means for him that the rehearsal process and the aesthetic form of the final performance are derived from the dramatic material, rather than projecting a pre-existent aesthetic conception on the dramatic material (which would be ‘deduction’). However, the dramatic text itself only contains a fraction of the rich reality the author has invented in his play; the stage director thus has to induce its concrete expression on stage. In terms of the stage director’s tools in this process, the basic material for Ostermeier comes from a precise analysis of the play, in Stanislavskian terms: the analysis of the dramatic situations, of given circumstances, processes and objectives; these are what Ostermeier calls the “director’s alphabet” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 134). For the principles and concerns that guide the work of induction, Ostermeier draws again from the Stanislavskian toolbox. It is crucial that the director, together with his collaborators, articulates one principal reason for staging precisely this play; this brief definition, no more than one or two sentences, becomes an equivalent to the Stanislavskian super-objective on the level of the entire production. This personal motivation then provides guidelines for the director’s work with the actors. In Ostermeier’s inductive method, the interpretation of the dramatic material in Stanislavskian terms thereby becomes a basis for exploring “human behaviour within a certain historical, political and social context” (ibid.), in the Brechtian logic.
All this is the stage director’s preparation, his personal work, or potentially with some collaborators. But then the director needs to transform the knowledge that he or she has accumulated, critically reflected and shaped, into clear and useful information for the actors to turn it into information that will stimulate their creativity rather than make them fulfil some abstract expectations of the stage director: “Actors cannot play ideas, dramaturgies and concepts”, says Ostermeier, they are not “service provider[s] [...] who produce on command” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 143–144). His objective is “not to direct at all, not to dictate, not to order, prescribe, tell or instruct” (ibid.: 148) but, on the contrary, use the Stanislavskian analysis of the dramatic situation in order to awaken the actors’ creativity and bring them to act authentically. Even though it may seem paradoxical at first sight, Ostermeier further claims that the analysis of the dramatic text in Stanislavskian terms allows for diverting the stage director away from taking the psychological concerns as starting point in his work with the actors. As a matter of fact, “directing actors by means of describing psychological states [‘Give me some anger’ etc.] predetermines what the actors have to do” (ibid.), instead of stimulating their inspiration and encouraging them to participate in the creative process. On the contrary, according to the inductive method, the behaviour, the attitude and the action of the actors on stage should always be determined by the dramatic situation, and not by the psychology or the emotional state of the character.
Ostermeier’s ‘inductive’ method is thus a variation of a profoundly Brechtian approach to theatre making, into which some basic elements of the Stanislavskian teachings are introduced. Let us now turn to some particular techniques, working processes and exercises that Ostermeier uses in rehearsal in order to stimulate the actors’ creativity as well as a certain authenticity in their acting. First of all, bringing the actors to a full concentration on the situation and on the various relations within this situation also means bringing them to a concentration on their partners on stage and on their mutual communication. “The source of the [actor’s] creativity is the other, the one opposite himself” (Ostermeier 2016: 116). This is why Ostermeier introduced Sanford Meisner’s ‘repetition exercise’ as a regular part of the preparation of his actors for the actual work on the material. This exercise is conducted in couples: two actors face and observe each other with attention. One of them pronounces a brief sentence, inspired by the observation of his partner, such as: “You look tired.” His partner then answers simply: “Yes, I look tired.” They repeat this short interchange ten, twenty, thirty times. In the second phase, the actor answers by the negative: “No, I don’t look tired.” This apparently slight variation is in reality an important shift in the dialogue: a conflict appears among the two partners, where each one tries to persuade the other of his own truth. The situation thus becomes dramatic. Again, the short dialogue is repeated continuously. The main goal is to direct the primary attention away from both the semantic content and from the self (what the actor wants to express) and instead to focus on what, and who, is in front of him or her, on the partner’s emotional message and dynamic energy, on their mutual communication and on how all this can be used as inspiration and material for the actor’s own existence on stage. Through this exercise which trains the skill of both being present and of paying very close attention to the partner, the actors’ personal creativity is awakened. “It’s as if both of them were playing one musical instrument in the same time” (ibid.).
Such an exercise, which brings the relation to the other into the core of an actor’s work, brings us back to Brecht: the human being is considered here as a social being, who constitutes himself in relation to the others. In order to gain more authenticity, the actors ideally need to behave within the dramatic situations of the play as if it was real life (this is of course again a basic Stanislavskian claim). The question is: how to make this really happen? How to bring the actors to realising that “for expressing emotions on stage, they frequently rely on some theatrical models and clichés; in real life, we often react very differently from what we have learnt in acting courses” (Ostermeier 2018). To get away from these deeply ingrained acting clichés, Ostermeier seeks to solicit his actors’ personal life experience through his method of storytelling. It is a complex combination of techniques fully applicable before and during the rehearsals. Firstly, this invention again draws on well-known Stanislavskian, Brechtian and Meyerholdian practices and, secondly, is derived from Ostermeier’s experience as a directing student at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. As Ostermeier himself asserts, his director’s alphabet is primarily defined by “basic Stanislavskian ideas of situations and circumstances” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 134). Hence, the task given at the beginning of a storytelling exercise takes the form of a dramatic situation, abstractly drawn from the play; for instance, “‘a situation where you persuade someone to do something forbidden’; […] ‘you prevent someone from making a big mistake’; ‘you have an idea, but everyone turns against you’, and so on” (ibid.: 156).
Any actor can then come up with their own experience of a situation or story from their own lives; the only condition is that it must be a true story. Someone volunteers to share and tell this moment or story, for example, about how he/she was excluded from the group because he/she didn’t think the way the others did, by preparing with a small number of participants needed within a short period of time to perform this situation in front of the group. This is the first step of Ostermeier’s storytelling approach. He notes that “when watching and discussing the scenes, particular attention is afforded to physical actions, tones of voices, ways of behaving and speaking, and equally to spatial proxemics between the actors” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 156). At this step, the participants “identify what is similar to the corresponding situation in the play, and what is different. The next step brings the situation of the story closer to the play itself” (ibid.). The director replaces the randomly chosen performers in the storytelling scene through the actors who will play the characters in the corresponding scene of the play. And these actors should replay the demonstrated storytelling scene as exactly as possible. In step three, more and more elements from the play are introduced, even parts of the dramatic dialogue, while still keeping the pattern of the initial behaviour, actions and gestures. And, finally, in step four, “the actors are asked to repeat the storytelling scene while now using the original dialogue from the playtext. In this way, the real-life story and the scene from the play become merged” (ibid.: 157).
Even though this exercise may appear similar to the standard improvisation scenes, its purpose is very different: this is not a place to be inventive, it is not a place to expose one’s biography either (the storyteller does not always participate personally in the scene and the fact that his experience is performed by others somehow defamiliarizes it); the objective is above all to stimulate authentic behaviour that avoids the clichés of stage acting. In storytelling “the actors are completely in the present moment, in the situation, because they don’t know what is coming next. The dialogues are not determined beforehand, they thus need to keep a maximum of attention, same as in the real life. This is all a stage director can dream of!” (Ostermeier 2016: 115). Of course, this process is reminiscent of Stanislavsky’s ‘emotion memory’ method. As we will elaborate further in the second part of this chapter, at a closer look, though, we must admit that we are again halfway between Stanislavsky and Brecht: The storyteller is asked to present his story, to demonstrate it, and such a position is much closer to the logic of the epic theatre.
Even though, according to the inductive method, concentration should be diverted away from the actor’s self and from the psychology or even biography of the character, every actor still needs to have a very clear and specific understanding of the situation, of their character, her or his relations to the others, emotional state, hierarchical position etc. The ‘family constellations’ exercise, originally developed in psychotherapy, offers a practical and completely non-psychologising tool for Ostermeier to help his actors to directly experience this. Here, the actors constitute in rehearsal a sort of tableau vivant including all the characters of the play. They are asked to position themselves in space accordingly to the position of their character: whom they are close to, whom they prefer to stay away from. Attention is paid not only to where they stand, but also to what attitude they adopt, which direction they look, what gestures they make etc. While rehearsing Richard III, such a family constellation was developed for every previous generation of the “War of the Roses”, thus giving the actors embodied experience of their character, their past and their relations to others. This care for the characters’ past life can of course be compared to the Stanislavskian method of writing out character biographies; however, the physical and truly scenic experience the actors can draw from the ‘family constellations’ exercise seems again closer to the logic of Brecht’s Lehrstücke. Actors are invited to take advantage of this experience during the rehearsals as well as in performance. Ostermeier notes that just like in real life, where without having to think about it, we naturally adopt a physical and spatial attitude corresponding to the situation and to our position within this situation, the actors also can sense physically when their attitude on stage is not authentic, and when their spatial or corporeal relation to another character is wrong.
Both storytelling and the family constellations feed into the principle of the ‘psychophysical chain of actions’, which aims to communicate to the audience something more than what is said in the dialogues. A concrete series of actions developed on stage by the actor can be very eloquent in terms of expressing the psychological life of the character, their emotional state, their relations to the other figures and of interpreting the dramatic situation and the process at stake within it. The psychophysical chain of actions thus means the expression of the psychological life of a character through physical actions. In a classic Stanislavskian task, his students had to “act out the content of a letter their character receives, purely through their physical play” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 170). Such a chain of psychophysical actions concludes, for example, Ostermeier’s staging of Richard III, where it brings about a reinterpretation of the end of the play. Here, Gloucester does not die on the battlefield surrounded by his enemies, but completely abandoned, left alone in his bed, prey to his torturing conscience and haunted by spectres of those he has killed. The sequence follows the actor (Lars Eidinger), as he runs around the entire stage, frantically waving his sword and fighting the invisible shadows, before falling exhaustedly on his bed, hooking his leg into a loop on a rope and being hoisted above the centre of the stage, where he keeps hanging and swaying head upside down as a quarter beef in the slaughterhouse, until the curtain comes down. The entire reinterpretation of the dramatic situation at the end of the play thus gets along without the slightest change of the play’s text, and still remains clearly comprehensible to the audience: “the chain of actions keeps the actor engaged with concrete, playable actions, rather than the intangible expression of emotion that other approaches prioritise” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 171).
This important principle of scenic composition, of expressing the inner emotion of the character through an outer action of the actor, dates back to Stanislavsky’s notion of the ‘sub-text’. But it is also a principle developed by anti-naturalistic theatre makers; in the 1920’s, it became one of the foundational building blocks of Meyerhold’s ‘stylized theatre’, in the form of the biomechanics. Again, these are principles Ostermeier got familiar with already during his studies, when he met Gennady Bogdanov, himself a pupil of Nicolai Kustov, one of Meyerhold’s actors. Ostermeier even later taught a class on psychophysical actions at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, exploring this common point between Stanislavsky and Meyerhold with his students of stage directing. Once again, though, the particular way Ostermeier uses this principle in his direction of actors can also be considered in a Brechtian perspective: at moments, the psychophysical chain of actions indeed becomes a sort of a commentary of the actor on his character, in the logic of the epic theatre.
Of course, Ostermeier’s working method cannot be reduced to these rehearsal exercises, even though they count among its major building blocks. On the one hand, Meisner’s ‘repetition exercise’, the ‘storytelling’ scenes and the ‘family constellations’ help the actors to gain more authenticity in their behaviour and expression on stage, to solicit their personal real-life experience and stimulate their inspiration, so that they become active and creative partners to the stage director. They “prepare the ground so that the director can delegate [his] work to the actors, to their art, to their imagination and their expertise” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 165). On the other hand, this method allows the actors to work non-psychologically, based on the corporeal and material reality of the stage and on the communication and energetic interchange with their partners, without waiving the expression of the psychology and emotional state of their character; that is the objective of the psychophysical chain of actions. Thus, what seems to be the chief aim and purpose of these elements is to avoid fake theatricality. The use of these elements of Stanislavskian legacy in a Brechtian perspective allows Ostermeier to operate a shift from naturalism to realism, in Brecht’s sense. Realism indeed is not understood here as an image, a photograph of the reality, but as the expression of social processes within this reality. As surprising as it may appear at first sight, some elements of the Stanislavskian system can thereby substantiate an epic vision of theatre.
II
The Birth of an ‘Unnameable Something’ from a ‘Genuine Encounter’: Ostermeier’s rehersal methods in practice
A big family consisting of several generations is dining at a long table. They are eating, joking, laughing and sharing the events of the day with each other. The father of the family joyfully announces that in today’s newspaper he has come across an article about his elder son who had been nominated for a critics’ prize. The son, also present at the table, seems to be pleased about being discussed in such a delightful tone but plays false shyness and tries to persuade the father not to draw much attention to his nomination: in fact, he was only nominated but had not won the prize. Notwithstanding, the second son immediately finds that very article on the web, and on his iPhone reads aloud a positive critique about the “pleasure from outstanding and funny play of actor Cédric Eeckhout”. Everybody at the table is cheered, congratulates the elder son who is on the one hand flattered and pleased but on the other a little embarrassed from so much attention. In a joking manner, he suggests changing the topic. Everybody keeps cheering and joking around when suddenly the father asks the youngest son whether he has been at the job centre today. The youngest silently continues to eat when suddenly he points out his father’s ability to change the topic so ‘delicately’. The father tries to justify himself and says that his intention was just to find out how the son’s day was as he spoke with the consultant about the son’s possible employment. But the youngest does not listen to any explanations anymore. “I am the black sheep of the family”, “When I was a child you locked me up when you played hockey”, “I will slave away for up to 18 hours a day for the roof of Mr. Smith” and other accusations of the sort the youngest son cries out when it, finally, comes to the climax and he is being locked up in the separated room to calm down. The evening ends up with the mother and sister sitting around the crying son, stroking his head and calming him down.
The scene described here is neither an episode from a contemporary play nor from a soap opera nor a reality show. It is the first scene from Jérémie Cuvillier’s documentary film about Thomas Ostermeier’s rehearsals for Chekhov’s Seagull at the Théâtre de Vidy Lausanne in 2016. The scene demonstrates a typical storytelling exercise, according to the method outlined above and applied by Ostermeier in a systematic way since his production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People created in 2012. For Ostermeier, being together with the actors in the same rehearsing room within such improvisational storytelling exercises means to have a shared experience and a true meeting which is not ‘censored’ by consciousness. Nobody in the room knows what will happen in the next moment; in such moments, the players are completely overpowered by their unconsciousness. They stay in a liminal state. Ostermeier is confident of the fact that their inner state in such moments is comparable with that of children as only children do not think about how they look from the outside when they play and interact with their partners. And so, the director observes the playing process, notes the actors’ decisions which were more advantageous and after some discussion incorporates these decisions into the production.
The scene from the documentary described above corresponds to step two of the storytelling exercise pattern discussed in the previous section. The key roles in that storytelling episode were played already by those actors who played Treplev, Dorn, Sorin, Zarechnaya and Arkadina in the production. Judging from the content of the described scene, it resembles a scene from Act Ⅰ when high society is watching Treplev’s play on the lake shore which is performed by young actress Nina Zarechnaya. During the performance they loudly discuss the ‘decadence’ unfolding right before their very eyes. As the director and author of this experimental production hears the dismissive comments of his mother, a prominent actress in St. Petersburg, Irina Arkadina, he angrily interrupts the performance. Equally, in this storytelling exercise, we also see traces of a later scene from Act Ⅲ in which the young playwright Treplev argues with his dominant mother, and sarcastically questions the talents of her lover, the successful author Boris Trigorin, who, above all, seduces Nina, the young actress and Treplev’s only love. These connections demonstrate that, as Ostermeier emphasizes himself, he “prepare[s] storytelling tasks” and “use[s] key situations and constellations from the play” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 155). And his actors now “have become familiar with [his] storytelling method [and] try to figure out which scene from the play [they] are actually working on” (ibid.). Judging from this last observation, it must have been more exciting for him as a director used to discovering together with actors those ‘terrains’ of their professional artistic skills they have never known before and, thus, are more likely to demonstrate a truthful play not ‘censored’ by their brain, to work with actors who were not familiar in advance with the main point and structure of the storytelling and, thus, were not trying to guess on which corresponding scene they were working this or that particular day.
In the documentary, we also find an example of the work on the scene of Sorin’s agony in the last act. Now, the actors were asked to develop a memory of the death of a beloved person. The scene was proposed by actor François Loriquet (who played Trigorin in the production), who comes from a profoundly religious French family, where children were not allowed to touch (hug, embrace) their father. The storytelling scene focused on the moment where the father’s body was put in the coffin: his two adult sisters kneeled down to him and embraced his body for the first time in their life. As Ostermeier revealed in a recent lecture, “the scene had an enormous emotional impact on all the actors. According to the cliché of such a situation, the other members of the family should feel empathy with the frustration the two daughters express, they should pity them. However, within this searching for authentic behaviour, we observed their embarrassment of something profoundly shocking to them. You can only find this sort of authenticity when the actors can liberate themselves from the diktat of the stage director” (Ostermeier 2018).
As already noted, Ostermeier’s storytelling method is derived from the Stanislavskian idea of the ‘given circumstances’ and in many traits it is also familiar to ‘emotional memory’. But whereas Stanislavsky required from his actors to be both a performer and a storyteller at once who should use, above all, their private emotional memory when acting out this or that dramatic situation given in a playtext, Ostermeier, however, deliberately distances the storyteller from the process of acting itself and prescribes him/her to observe the way his/her story being performed by other actors you show this scene. The storyteller is both involved and distanced at the same time. This very idea of involving and distancing at the same time corresponds with the Brechtian approach to epic theatre, as opposed to dramatic theatre, which he addresses in ‘The Street Scene’ (Brecht 2014: 176‒184). In fact, “Brecht’s ‘Street Scene’ provides a blueprint for the aims and purposes of the [storytelling] exercise” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 157). The main Brechtian idea is that an eyewitness of a traffic accident does not have to be perfect in demonstrating to the police how the accident took place. The same principle works in Ostermeier’s storytelling exercises: in rehearsals the actors just tell, retell, demonstrate with their tools a key situation given by the director and then transmit the demonstrated physical actions and behaviour onto the corresponding scene from the playtext.
The observations of the storytelling process then may also form the basis of a psychophysical chain of actions, while it also feeds into a further Meyerholdian tenet that Ostermeier’s directing is characterized by: the principle of plasticity. In Ostermeier’s definition, plasticity is “arranging the scenic space so that a multidimensional, dynamic forcefield of dramatic energies emerges. This starts with simply using the full available potential of the stage; above all, using its full depth, and not just the width.” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 171). And it was exactly the full depth of the stage and undoubtedly even more than just the depth – but even a multilayered and multidimensional space created via several video cameras in different places of the stage – that characterized Ostermeier’s production Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder (2012), to which we will now turn as further example.[1]
The rehearsal process for this production was rather short – just three weeks, interrupted by a tour to Australia, while also changing the location from the rehearsal rooms in Berlin to the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes where the production premiered. Furthermore, this work was characterized by a heterogeneous artistic team: several actors and the technical team (set and costume designers, make-up artists, cameramen, computer technicians, sound designer, lighting designer) came from the Schaubühne; a distinguished Bavarian actor, Josef Bierbichler, was engaged for the main role of Gustav von Aschenbach; three professional female dancers (a German, an Italian and a Spanish), another professional (German) actress and two non-professional (German) adolescent actors (two casts for the role of Tadzio) were chosen via casting; a (German) musician and a (Spanish) choreographer were invited too. It was obvious that under such tough temporal, spatial-physical and psychological circumstances, the applying of the storytelling method in its full scale was merely impossible. Also, the production itself did not entirely conform to the standard dramatic form as we find it in Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It seemed more akin to a devised, interdisciplinary performance piece adapted from prompts offered by Mann’s novel and Mahler’s composition. Ostermeier organized the entire production as an “experimental arrangement”, which preserved the form of an unfinished rehearsal process.
In rehearsal, the director still drew on some elements of his storytelling. It was mostly to the two adolescent performers (14 and 15 years old) whom the director gave imagined situations, having them find in detail the ways of their behaviour in such situations. Then, as the storytelling method prescribes it, the young performers had to transmit their physical actions onto the corresponding situation in the play. There was, for example, the so-called ‘Beach scene’ in which Tadzio, the young boy from Mann’s novel whom Aschenbach longs for, returns from the beach, runs through the hotel lounge, sees his three sisters looking for him, and decides to hide himself behind an armchair so he feels like he plays with them hide-and-seek. The moment and the mise en scène of his discovery turns into a play between the three sisters and Tadzio. This scene was long rehearsed in accordance with the idea of the psychophysical chain of actions. At first the boy and the dancers who played his elder sisters had to imagine and show the way they would do these actions. Then every movement and action was carefully considered, and in the end it was decided whether and what exactly should be included into the performance.
There was also the ‘Dinner scene’ in which the whole catholic family is praying before dinner and then eating and discussing the events of the day, while Aschenbach, sitting opposite them, observes their interaction and starts singing the Mahler song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. At this very moment the family starts moving slowly, like a slow-motion film, as if it was Aschenbach’s dream.[2] The director even went on stage himself several times and demonstrated the boys the way they should pray at the table. Or he showed them the way they should look at Aschenbach, as the live camera had to fix the superior glance of the boy and Aschenbach’s confusion in response to this glance. This silent mimic interaction was transmitted on a big screen. Preciseness in demonstrating (or/and – in case of the boys – reproducing) the mimics and the gestures, building up a sequence of psychophysical actions – these are the elements of Ostermeier’s rehearsal process to which his attention is steered all the time.
Overall, as noted, the production preserved the form of an unfinished rehearsal process. This was initially achieved through the opening scene, a moment when all the actors were training their movements or actions, from dancing and laying the table to changing clothes or even playing a game on their mobile phone. Secondly, there was the permanent presence of video cameras, which were fixed in several corners of the room and focused on the faces of Aschenbach and Tadzio as well as on the whole Tadzio’s family during the described ‘Dinner scene’. In addition, two cameramen appeared from time to time on stage and filmed the live actions of the performers. The live images were broadcast onto a big screen fixed above the stage space. Such multidimensional applying of video cameras created an effect of presence in several parallel spaces at once. The space was – in the direct sense of this word – arranged by the artistic and technical team.
A third scene that broke through the dramatic fiction was the ‘Interruption scene’. Here, actor Kai Bartholomäus Schulze was sitting in a separated glass box stage left reading in the microphone excerpts from Mann’s Death in Venice while the main action was taking place on stage. Suddenly, Schulze left his box, interrupted the play, asked to switch on lights in the auditorium and started to read aloud an episode from the novel which had been deleted from the end version of the production but, in his view, nevertheless, should be shared with the audience. Then Felix Römer, another actor from the Schaubühne ensemble who played a servant at the luxury hotel where the events take place, appeared on stage, folded out a newspaper and announced that he had come across a letter which Thomas Mann had written to his brother Heinrich Mann after publishing the novel. “Death in Venice was half-educated and false”, read Römer aloud, the whole artistic team smiled embarrassingly and… went on playing the scene from the moment of interruption. Both the opening and the interrupting scenes emerged accidentally, during rehearsal breaks. Such discoveries often happen in Ostermeier’s rehearsal process. These two moments were regarded as keys that unlocked the dramatic situation, so they remained in the production itself. Even the physical actions and behaviour which had happened spontaneously were transmitted from one rehearsal into another and so fixed in its original form in the outcome. As for the whole composition, the physical actions, spiced with flowing psychological transitions, were stringed like beads and formed a chain of psychophysical actions of the whole production. As Ostermeier writes, that “unnameable something cannot be calculated, designed, or directed solely on your own; it can only result from a genuine encounter” (Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 134). So, the genuine encounter of different communications – the communication with the playtext, with the material it gives (in Ostermeier’s terminology, the Stoff), the communication with the space, with actors’ techniques and spontaneity – gave birth to that ‘something’ which, in case of Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder, was not ‘unnameable’ but got a name of an ‘experimental arrangement’ (‘Versuchsanordnung’) in the subtitle of the production, and preserved the form of a stage rehearsal.
III
Towards a realist truth: Ostermeier’s directing method
as artistic and pedagogic technique
As will have become clear through our discussion up to this point, the major aim of Ostermeier’s directing methodology and pedagogy is not to create a generation of ‘little Ostermeiers’ who would simply copy his aesthetics. Much rather, his approach seeks to inspire, free up, and to help emerging directors to find their own voice, and their own purpose in the theatre, regardless of their individual stylistic preferences. This echoes Ostermeier’s own work, which does not display an easily identifiable signature comparable to the stage aesthetics of directors such as Robert Wilson, Katie Mitchell, or Frank Castorf. Instead, he finds individual solutions for each production, as the contrasting cases of The Seagull and Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder discussed above have suggested. One may even propose that Ostermeier’s key achievement as theatre director is in fact less to be found in his celebrated productions, in his mises en scène and his interpretations of well-known canonical plays, but instead precisely in the development of this method, in its original combination of a Stanislavskian base of ‘truthful’ stage action with a distinctly Brechtian demand for realism, as they are both employed in the service of Ostermeier’s political impetus driven by contemporary concerns of the early twenty-first century.
On a wider horizon, Ostermeier’s approach to theatre directing can also be placed clearly within a postdramatic context. According to the criteria outlined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, his productions indeed open up the closed fictional world of the drama (2006: 31). However, they do so not via directorial intervention in the tradition of postmodern deconstruction from outside the world of the play, but on the contrary, right from its very immanent core. Ostermeier never renounces the value of fictional dramatic play; in fact, in clear contrast to the postmodern, deconstructive paradigm of previous years, his works do take the playtext serious again, avoiding in particular irony. His Regie thus results in a dialectic effect, as it constantly perforates the fictional framework by emphasising both the ontological reality of the theatre production itself and by reflecting present realities outside the theatre (cf. Boenisch 2015). As Boenisch suggested, writing about Ostermeier’s Regie work back in 2008, for him, theatre had always been, above all, a means to scrutinise the ‘structures of feeling’ of the society around him, in accordance with the useful term from Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism:
Ostermeier was never after a ‘modern’ interpretation of a classic but, first and foremost, after an interpretation of the society around him. […] Instead of infusing a given text with present-day material, that contemporary context in fact became the main text, and the scripted characters and narratives essentially served as the context in which to articulate an urgent analysis of contemporary moral and mental situations. (Boenisch 2010: 346–47)
This impetus remains a central driving force behind Ostermeier’s theatre direction to the present day. In fact, the trajectory of Ostermeier’s theatre work over the past two decades displays a parallel development of both his practical working methodology, and a continuing refinement of an original aesthetic form of contemporary realism. A first phase, during the Baracke and early Schaubühne years, was characterised by a ‘realism of representation’ which drew, in particular, on the ‘in-yer-face aesthetics’ of the 1990s. With a genuinely leftist attitude, Ostermeier’s work at the time focussed on the disprivileged, the outcasts and underdogs of society, and tried to give those who lack representation a voice on stage. From there, the director turned towards a second phase of a ‘realism of recognition’, which concentrated, as Ostermeier himself expressed it in 2006, on the ‘the reality of people of this age, of this class, and it’s maybe much more interesting than the realism of the outcast because it is a realism that directly speaks to the people in the audience’ (Ostermeier 2006: 237). Here, the director’s mises en scène recognisably reflected trendy living room settings of the gentrified Berlin Mitte district. The productions explored, how distinct times and spaces may resonate with each other: how the drama of Ibsen’s bourgeois protagonists or equally of Shakespeare’s tragedies may function as an ‘outside eye’ that offers a distancing perspective in order to comprehend and gain insight into the real-life drama taking place in contemporary society.
Perhaps most prominently signified by Hamlet (2008), a further phase of Ostermeier’s work began to gradually take shape, which is characterised by what may be termed ‘reflexive realism’. In this context, the director’s attempts of an ‘urgent analysis’ of contemporary society have become even more prominent, from the signature Hamlet to the 2015 Richard III, from An Enemy of the People in 2012 to Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi from 2016, and finally in his recent stage adaptations of Didier Eribon’s autoethnographic sociological study Returning to Reims (2017) and of Édouard Louis’s novel A History of Violence (2018). These productions were all created in the time of the current, global financial crisis, to which Ostermeier responded by using the theatre stage as an opportunity to stage dramatic essays revolving around this economic and political crisis, about society’s discontents, and its effect on people. To this end, he further elaborated his use, within the singular space of the stage, of configurations of different realities, which in their dialectical collision invited various layers of recognition. Similar to Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the ‘parallax perspective’, the audience’s perception constantly shifts between different points of view – between the level of recognisable reality on the one hand, and the fictional world of the play on the other, yet neither is afforded privilege (cf. Žižek 2006). Ostermeier developed in his most recent productions an ever more intensified play with such a fluid shifting between the worlds of representation (fiction), of theatral presentation (performance)[3], and the present (the time of the theatre event/audience/everyday life). It becomes a reflexive realism precisely because it no longer relies on the representation of living rooms on stage, but instead highlights, in the Brechtian sense, the reality of the shared, communal theatre event – and hence also the spectators’ own involvement; at times, it does so very explicitly, as in the discussion scene with the auditorium in Ostermeier’s Enemy of the People, elsewhere this happens far more implicitly, as in the audience’s affective seduction by the character of Richard III, assisted not least by stage architect Jan Pappelbaum’s Schaubühne-‘Globe’ stage that had been modelled on the intimacy of Elizabethan theatre space.
This continued development of Ostermeier’s postconceptual realism should be directly connected with the articulation of his unique directing methodology, which has found its present form that we have outlined above precisely alongside this most recent, third phase of his ‘reflexive realism’. In fact, the methodological toolkit elaborated in the previous discussion is underpinned by the same principle; it is what makes the Stanislavskian impulses meet coherently with the Brechtian principles at work here. The close and thorough analysis and understanding of the present dramatic situation, its circumstances, and of each character’s processes (Vorgänge) within the dramatic situation as the basis of the various methodological steps and techniques detailed above allows the director, and by extension the audience of his productions, to stage and watch concrete human actions and the behaviour of human beings within a situation. For the director, precisely such an observation of inter-human relations and of particular behaviour in situations, and not a directorial concept or interpretation, reveal – in the sense of Brecht’s Gestus – insights into the wider socio-cultural Sein in a Marxist sense.
Ostermeier accordingly described his original stage realism as ‘sociological’ theatre, which he clearly contrasts to a ‘psychological’ theatre that would depart from an analysis of fictional characters and their psychologies (cf. Goriaux Pelechová 2017):
A realist notion of theatre, which I have described as ‘sociological theatre’, is based on the assumption that the conduct and behaviour of human beings with each other changes in accordance with societal transformations in their environment. For instance, the boredom of Hedda Gabler in the late nineteenth century presents itself very differently, articulates itself differently, takes different forms and shows different relations with her fellow human beings than a Hedda in the early twenty-first century. It expresses itself in a different tone, in different movements, in different manners of physicality. The humble ambition of my approach to making theatre is to identify these differences, to have the ability to observe the reality that surrounds us – the reality of human behaviour, in all its ambiguity and contradictions – and to find forms of expressing it on stage (in Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 22f).
Ostermeier’s ‘inductive’ techniques foster such a recognisable richness and truthfulness of relational human behaviour, and especially of its ‘ambiguities and contradictions’. Storytelling, the family portrait, repetition exercises and other principles mine the situations of the dramatic play by allowing the performers to make rich experiences in rehearsal, as they respond to the impulses of the theatral situation based on their real life, ‘truthful’ responses – responses that reveal the complex, ambiguous behaviour of human beings. These exercises thereby connect, even short-circuit the situations and relations of the playtext with recognisable situations and relations from the actors’ own live-worlds in the early 21st century, which eventually the audience will recognise as shared ‘structure of feeling’. In performance, the actors will then have at their disposal the recollection of these moments they experienced in rehearsal, and hence, they won’t need to ‘act’ if that means executing, repeating and more often than not shouting out memorised lines in a determined way, accompanied by studied gestural actions and proxemic blocking arrangements. Instead, they are able to ‘communicate’ with the text, with their fellow actors on stage, and not least with the audience in the room.
Ostermeier’s directorial method thus employs Regie as a situational practice. It constructs situations and relations in order to shape, demonstrate and make recognisable human behaviour – which, to reiterate, is not seen as the expression of a psychologically defined character, but as produced by the situation, and by the social relations with others. Importantly, this methodical approach does not reduce the dimensions and depth of, for instance, a Shakespearean dramatic situation to any actor’s or the director’s private present ‘drama’; it never becomes about the individual experience or response alone. The reference framework remains always very clear at the level of the circumstances and situations given in the playtext – precisely what Ostermeier signifies with his term of ‘inductive’ Regie. The reality of the performer, and by extension, the realities of the audience, here infuse, rather than overwrite, the playtexts. In effect, the dramatic plays mediate, reflect and make available for the audience’s reflexive understanding the situations, modes and patterns of behaviour we are confronted with in everyday life. Using the stage as a sociological laboratory to observe human behaviour, as if under the magnifying perspective of a microscope, and at the same time defamiliarising the immediate reflection in its refraction through a playtext and its dramatic situations, Ostermeier’s directorial techniques are all about creating what he perceives as a meaningful theatre event:
[T]he fundamental role of theatre in our culture is to talk about us, about our lives, about our problems, about our society. That’s why theatre exists. The characters on stage are our vicarious representatives who act, take action, make decisions on our behalf. At the end of the day, the unique and singular quality of theatre does not reside in virtuoso performances, in slick, attractive aesthetics, nor in spectacular design and special effects. Instead, it results from being able to find something of our own lives in what happens on stage, from being able to recognise ourselves, even if – and I would say, in particular when – we did not know that we were like this, or even capable of that (in Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 139).
Ostermeier’s theatre aims for such reflexive insight, for recognition, understanding and communication. It embraces a dialectical, speculative grasp of the seemingly more conventional dramatic format, while, crucially, intensifying the play with the prominently exposed theatrality of the performance event. Its emphasised theatrality – i.e. the theatral dynamics such as the rhythmic structuring of times and spaces, the materiality of ‘heavy’ bodies and objects, the interweaving of the levels of narration, representation and presentation – opens up, in the very process of the mediation of the playtext and its dramatic fiction, spaces for reflection. This way, Regie becomes far more than the hermeneutic activity of literary interpretation, but instead reveals itself as a reflexive act where the playtexts are no longer objects to be staged. Instead, they become projects that open up spaces for shared public understanding (or, perhaps more modestly: for communication), at the very moment where they meet, in performance, the present of the audience.
Ostermeier’s work thus deploys canonical playtexts as ‘actual’ signifying practice and, even more so, as concrete social practice that enables common and communal reflection, a shared ‘theatral thinking’. His reflexive realism may thus indeed unlock further insight into contemporary social realities, and also psychic realities, which a mere imitation, a spectacular rather than a speculative attempt at replicating reality through mimetic stage-realism alone, would be unable to tap into. His method and his pedagogy thereby realise Ostermeier’s vision of theatre as:
[…] [T]he place where I am able to make experiences that can challenge my way of life, encourages me to think differently, to appreciate things differently, to act differently, to live differently, and to be different – because someone shows me the world in a way, I have never seen it before, and reveals an entirely new world to me (in Boenisch and Ostermeier 2016: 16).
In this sense, the three phases of the development of the director’s reflexive aesthetic and the development of his directorial method outlined in this chapter point towards an attempt of situating theatre within its socio-political and cultural-economic context as practice, and as an institution with its practical and political agency. In fact, it transpires that Ostermeier’s methodological enquiry is as much about understanding society at large as it is about coming to terms with the role and the potential of theatre in this global– and for the European theatre not least post-bourgeois – context of theatre making in the twenty-first century. In the face of the globalised present, the aim of arriving, by the means of theatre, at an ‘interpretation of the world’ may no longer result in finding and providing answers, but rather in finding and suggesting the right questions – or, perhaps, finding and publicly expressing questions about this world we live in, at all.
As our discussion sought to demonstrate, Thomas Ostermeier reveals himself, above all, as that unique theatre maker of the present who, uniquely in the world of contemporary theatre directing, successfully puts into practice and who even manages to combine some of the postulates and theoretical pillars which have often been revised, remade, permanently enhanced and updated even by their inventors – notably, the very different theatrical approaches of Stanislavskian ‘emotional memory’, Meyerholdian ‘psychophysical chain of actions’ and ‘plasticity’ and Brechtian realist ‘engendering of illusion’ in his epic and dialectical theatre. Ostermeier is a rare example of a theatre director who theorizes his own practice himself, considering it as a permanent research laboratory, and, in fact, conducting thereby research in practice himself, with the goal to synthesize and then to put to paper his working methods with the aim of advancing theatre practice as well as engaging ethically and politically with our globalized society in the twenty-first century.
Works cited
Boenisch, Peter. Thomas Ostermeier: Mission Neo(n)realism and a Theatre of Actors in Authors. In Contemporary European Theatre Directors. Eds. Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 339–359.
---. Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
Boenisch, Peter M. and Ostermeier, Thomas. The Art of Communicating: Thomas Ostermeier’s Inductive Method of Regie. In The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 132–179.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Eds. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014.
Cuvillier, Jérémie. Insatiable théâtre / Auf der Bühne wie im echten Leben. La Compagnie des Indes/ARTE TV, 2016. Available on YouTube, uploaded by Bühnenwelt, 27 July 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQlF2H-9lvw. Accessed 20 January 2019.
Goriaux Pelechová, Jitka. Le Théâtre de Thomas Ostermeier. Louvain-la-Neuve: Études Théâtrales 58, 2013.
--- . Divadlo Thomase Ostermeiera, na cestě za novým realismem. Praha: Disk, 2014.
---. The ‘Sociological Theatre’ of Thomas Ostermeier. In Current Issues in Performance Analysis. Brno: JAMU, 2017, p. 127–34.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Osborne, Peter. The Postconceptual Condition. London and New York: Verso, 2018.
Ostermeier, Thomas. Theatre Against Fear: Thomas Ostermeier in Conversation with Àlex Rigola. Contemporary Theatre Review, 16 (2) 2006, p. 235–39.
---. Le Théâtre et la peur. Ed. Jitka Goriaux Pelechová and Georges Banu, trans. J. Goriaux Pelechová. Arles: Actes Sud, 2016.
---. Lecture at the conference “Thomas Ostermeier’s working method”. DAMU Prague, 1st December 2018.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006.
Notes
[1] See Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder, Schaubühne productions (English): https://www.schaubuehne.de/en/productions/death-in-venicekindertotenlieder.html. Accessed 20 January 2019.
[2] See the way this very scene was performed with Italian actors during the Biennale workshop in Venice in 2011, which was the impetus for Ostermeier and his artistic team for the Schaubühne production the following year: Biennale Teatro 2011 – Thomas Ostermeier (7.7). YouTube, uploaded by BiennaleChannel, 24 Jan. 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0AgEcJswi4. Accessed 20 January 2019.
[3] On the notion of ‘theatrality’, as opposed to ‘theatricality’, see Boenisch 2015, Ch. 2.