‘POLITICAL THEATRE’ is only ‘political’ ina particular society in time-space and placeand its resonance as ‘political’ varies accord -ing to socially defined groups of people.Nothing is absolute, universal, or essentialistabout political theatre. The issue of thespecificity of contexts evoked here cannot beexpanded upon adequately for the examplesto follow: the framework of a short papersimply does not allow a full account. How -ever, several details, here and there, willsuggest differences between sociopoliticaland cultural contexts and, as well, betweenthe theatre productions being discussed inimplied relation to them.

A major principle – contextualization – thusunderlies this presentation instead of beingexplicitly pursued by it. My main purpose isother: it is to select promontories on parts ofthe European theatrescape, roughly from2007 to the near end of 2014, which mightserve as signposts for drawing the field as itappears now, however incompletely. It isessential to keep in mind Pierre Bourdieu’sidea that a ‘field’ is perpetually dynamic, so

that change is always incipient in it; andthose who participate in it take position(prise de position) and hold a position within abroad terrain of plural, diverse positionsshaped by the perceptions, attitudes, andaspirations, including political aspirations,that guide their actions.1 The making oftheatre, which is a form of position-taking, isone such value-oriented and value-ladenaction, as is going to see theatre work, orattempting to get a grip on it analyticallyafter the event.

Independent Theatre and Teatr.doc

A further point of importance has to do withthe types of theatre that are made. All, what -ever their creative processes or their artisticaccomplishments may be, are related insome way, positively, negatively, or quasi-indeterminately, to institutions, institutionalpower, symbolic capital, and economic sup -port, which risks bringing control in its wake:are X, Y, and Z theatres financed throughstate, city, and other government organs, or

142 ntq 32:2 (may 2016) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X1600004X

Maria Shevtsova

Political Theatre in Europe: East to West, 2007–2014What political theatre may be in contemporary times and in what sense it is ‘political’ arethe core issues of this article. Maria Shevtsova discusses examples from within arestricted period, 2007 to 2014, but from a wide area that begins in Eastern Europe –Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland – and moves to Germany and France. Her examplesare principally productions by established ensemble theatre companies and her analysis isframed by a brief discussion concerning independent theatres, ‘counter-cultural’ positions,and institutional and institutionalized theatres. This latter group is in focus to indicate howpolitical theatre in the seven years specified has been far from alien to, or sidelined from,national theatres, state theatres, or other prestigious companies in receipt of state subsidy.Two main profiles of recent political theatre emerge from this research, one that acknowledgespolitical history, while the other critiques neoliberal capitalism; there is some unpronouncedoverlap between the two. Productions of Shakespeare feature significantly in the delineatedtheatrescape. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor ofDrama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book(co-authored) is The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

Key terms: Bogomolov, Castorf, Dodin, Fokin, Gremina, Klata, Krymov, Mnouchkine,Müller, Ostermeier, Pollesch, Purcarete, Shakespeare, Vidnyanszky, Volkostrelov.

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through private funds and foundations?What conditions are set for subsidization?Theatres in a negative relation to officialframe works are differentiated by a singularlack of most, if not all, of the benefits to behad from subsidies, whatever the attendantdrawbacks imposed by the conditions. Thisis frequently the case of numerous small-scaletheatres known as ‘experimental’, ‘alterna -tive’, ‘non-establish ment’, ‘non-conformist’,‘underground’, or simply ‘independent’.

All such descriptions have a politicalcolouration, depending on the actual contextin question. The small-scale Maladype inBudapest comes to mind since it defines itselfas an ‘indep endent’ theatre; and this is so notonly be cause Maladype is privately funded

(though with difficulty and insignificantly),but also to indicate its opposition to currentHungarian state politics.

The verbatim Teatr.doc in Moscow is alsoindependent, and its dedication to new play -writing prepared the scene for Praktika,founded in 2005, a few streets away. Teatr.docitself was co-founded in 2002 by playwrightYelena Gremina, author of the canonicalverbatim piece One Hour Eighteen (2010) onthe lawyer Sergey Magnitsky’s trumped-upimprisonment and then death in custody intraumatic circumstances.

Teatr.doc was initially modelled on thedocumentary and neo-naturalist precepts ofthe Royal Court in London, as part of theRussian and British cultural politics of the

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From the Teatr.doc production of Yelena Gremina’s One Hour Eighteen (2010). Photo: Guterman.

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late 1990s. London may have been the triggerand Maladype may be a parallel indepen -dent theatre case, but both Teatr.doc andPraktika operate within parameters that arequite specific to Russia at the turn of thetwenty-first century. These two groupsopenly develop social-issue work, and theyare influential. They also consciously andopenly mediate political opinion, as largelyheld by their demographically varied groupsof spectators.

Additionally, Teatr.doc has extended itsremit, providing a platform for like-minded,young, and innovative directors, notably in2013 for Dmitry Volkostrelov, a formerstudent of Lev Dodin and director of Teatrpost, another independent theatre, whichVolkostrelov founded in St Petersburg in2011. Teatr post’s one-man show The Soldier,

a ten-minute performance with no more thantwo lines of text by Pavel Pryazhko, is astraightforward action, even though it usu -ally baffles spectators in its cryptic brevity. Ayoung soldier on leave from an unspecifiedlocation walks down a corridor, takes off hisstreet clothes and takes a shower, all filmedin situ in real time; and this imagistic syn -thesis leaves gaps for spectators to con nect ordisconnect at will, such freedom allowingthis spectator to glimpse in it a critique ofwar. Its two lines, aphoristically placed at theend of the performance, encourage thatcritique: ‘A soldier came home on leave.When it was time for him to go back to theArmy, he did not return.’2

The gestalt crispness of the performancewith its fable-like epilogue exposes the sol -dier’s dispassionate demeanour and behavi -our. At the same time, it appears to beaddressed to audiences presumed to beequally dispassionate because of their lack ofawareness or denial of war, their physicaland psychological immunity from its horrors,and their incapacity or unwillingness, there -fore, to empathize with its victims. A soldierwho takes a shower in ordinary life and who,moreover, is distanced by a film screen,cannot easily be perceived as a killer. Nor dothe routine actions that he carries out mech -anically suggest a soldier’s capacity to kill,unless this, precisely, is the point. In otherwords, his routine actions could well alludeto the systematic, and systemic, killing gener - ated by the machinery of war.

It helps to know, when viewing The Soldierin this way, that one of Volkostrelov’s mostimportant themes as a director is callousness:a collective lack of empathy or what could becalled ‘social autism’, which he repeatedlyprojects in his productions as if to throw theimage of this autism back to spectators as acritical image of themselves. ‘Social autism’is tied up with, but is not the same as, theearly Marxian concept of ‘reification’ where -by people are treated as things, and theirrelations are merely instrumental.

Lack of patronage or ‘sponsorship’, thego ing term in Russia, generates difficulties –venues of fortune, tiny venues, unpaid rent,unpaid actors, and so forth. It is conse qu -

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The Soldier (2013), a Teatr-post production by DmitryVolkostrelov. Photo: Paulina Koroleva.

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ential for the types of small-scale theatrenoted previously, but affects, as well, the‘community’ or ‘participatory’ theatres andstreet theatres typical of Western rather thanCentral and Eastern Europe. By the sametoken, it is paradoxically at play in marginaland marginalized political theatre – think ofthe ‘counter-cultural’ 1960s – which hasacquired something of a secondary status inthe overall field of the theatre, garnering allof its varied categories.

Institutions, Ensemble, and the ‘Political’

The attributed or perceived lower status ofthis particular ‘fringe’ category of politicaltheatre tends to be the result of position-taking by collaborators who, refusing to beco-opted by society – hence the 1960s notionof ‘selling out’ to society – deliberately seek alower status, since this, too, is a rejection ofthe political status quo. Either way, whetherthe status is imposed or chosen, the opt-outvariant of political theatre is to be distin -guished from the political theatres of Meyer -hold, Brecht, and Piscator, which, engaged inthe very thick of political struggle, alsowielded political clout (although at whatprice!). The three Russian theatres referred to(Teatr.doc, Praktika, and Teatr post) by nomeans emulate these flagship endeavours –on the contrary, they debunk heroic politics –but nor do they bail out from the socialnetwork. They are both outside the networkand in it, without, so far, ‘selling out’ to it.

My final introductory remarks concernmy choice of productions, which are fromthe state-subsidized houses of Europe ratherthan from variants of independent theatre.My selection is not motivated by an un -healthy penchant for institutions, but fromthe necessity of pointing out that institu tion -alized theatres certainly can, and do, gener -ate political theatre in some sense of the term‘political’; indeed, this is the case ofinstitutionalized theatres in the formerlyCommunist Eastern European countries. Inother words, a theatre need not be marginalor counter-institutional, and marginalized orstarved of institutional approval, to produce‘political’ theatre.

The second reason for my selection is tiedup with my lifelong research on the work ofdirectors. That they are primarily, althoughnot exclusively, the directors of establishedtheatres has a great deal to do with the factthat they are the directors of ensemble com -panies. Some are stable and permanent,largely composed of the same actors forthirty years and more, like the Maly DramaTheatre of St Petersburg. Others are renewedensembles of long duration in that theirmembers stay for prolonged periods, gener -ally ten to fifteen years, and then leave, whilethe company and its ‘brand’ name remain.Such are the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris or theVolksbühne in Berlin.

The key point, however, of my sustainedinterest in ensemble companies is that en -semble practice fosters the ongoing develop -ment of actors, directors, and, most importantof all, their co-creation of work; and this, intime-space-place, makes ensembles richlylay ered sites for research into creative pr -cesses, while they indicate, as well, becauseof their duration, the socio-political tensions,shifts, and changes occurring in their soci -eties. State-subsidized permanent ensemblesare the hallmark of Europe’s national theatres(the National Theatre of Britain excepted,since it does not have an ensemble troupe insitu).

My selection indicates how productionsget a grip on, and come to grips with, the greatdifficulties, political and otherwise, of theworld contemporary to them. Equally, theseproductions raise the question not so muchof where political theatre is going as of whatit might be when gathered up from within theseven or so years leading to the present day.Indeed, is it a matter of political theatre or oftheatre that (only) has a political dimension?Is such a distinction viable? These questionssuggest a double difference: the differencebetween material that has an explicitlypolitical content and material from whichpolitical content can be deduced; the seconddifference concerns direct and indirect com -mu n ication, each involving formal and styl -istic devices and how material is presentedand performed. A third possibility regardingwhat constitutes political theatre or (only)

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gives it a political dimension arises fromHeiner Müller’s argument, in a 1987 inter -view, that it is the form of art and not itscontent that makes it political.3 FollowingMüller, it is how you make theatre that showswhether it is political or not.

Further, what kind of ‘political’ is it in anage of the much trumpeted ‘end of ideo lo -gies’, which, together with an overwhelmingglobal economic crisis, appears, in democ -racies, increasingly to disempower and dis -enfranchise citizens, so much so that the verynotion of citizenship is at stake? In the ex-Communist countries of Europe, citizenshipis made more vulnerable still as would-becitizens struggle against repressive reflexesthat die hard and, in addition, struggle with –or against – the conformist consumerism andother demands of the ‘modernization’ pushedby neoliberal capitalism. The entity ‘Europe’,which was formerly known as the ‘EuropeanUnion’, is the progressively strident standardbearer of this ‘modernization’.

Then, what kind of ‘political’ is it in an ageof false-start revolutions, rampant wars andcivil wars, religious, racist, and other funda -m en talist terrorisms, and the terrorist tactics– the adjective may not be too strong – ofdisinformation, media invasion, celebritycul ture and the idolatry of money? The latterinstances of civil-society terrorist-style intim -i d ation have bred a palpable narcissism thaterodes the spirit of collectivity and a pal -pable cynicism as regards politics, politi -cians, and above all, ideals, whether politicalor of any other kind. Virtually unimaginableis the ‘spirit of utopia’, pace Ernst Bloch, inthis scenario.4

Finding an ‘Impulse to Change’

Well, my preamble and text proper havemerged, bringing to memory a public discus -sion between directors at the HungarianNational Theatre on 27 March 2014 forwhom the ambient cynicism, in its impact onaudiences and so on the role of theatre insociety, was of grave concern. Attila Vidny -anszky, managing and artistic director of thistheatre, asserted that ‘today’s cynicism de -vours everything’, disorienting directors in

their work. Valery Fokin, director of themighty, government-backed and showcaseAleksandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg,echoed his sentiment, calling the pervasivecynicism ‘fatal’ in its destruction of ‘internalvalues’ on which the vitality of theatredepends.

As to the suggestion that politics was toblame for this state of affairs, Fokin repliedthat ‘we’ – that is, those who have a stake inthe theatre – were responsible. His answer isconsistent with his sense of personal ethics,and his feeling of personal responsibility forthe work he produces and where it goes. Buthe does not believe that theatre is capable ofbringing about collective change. Nor doeshe believe that it can change individuals.At most it can give them the ‘impulse tochange’.

Fokin’s reasoning overall suggested thathis ‘we’ is a collection of morally motivatedindividuals, while politics is ‘they’; and hisassumption that politics is on the outside,alien, in fact, to artistic endeavour, has beencommon for decades among a good partof the Russian intelligentsia because of, al -though not exclusively because of, the m is -trust gen er ated by the repression of dissentcharac teristic of despotic regimes. However,if ‘politics’ has acquired nothing but negativeconnotations and ‘political theatre’ is bel ievedto be estranged, by definition, from decentpeople in society – ‘theirs’ but not ‘ours’ –then ‘political theatre’ is not a feasible propo -sition for serious artists,

Or is it? It would seem, then, that theground needs to shift from politics to historyand to art for ‘political theatre’ to gain somesort of credibility. When this happens, a pro -duction can have political dimensions with -out being dominated by politics, even whenpolitical motifs permeate it through andthrough; and, by avoiding agit-prop andsimilarly overtly didactic and persuasivemethods, it can go about its artistic construc -tion, retaining the artistic sensibility andabilities necessary for carefully consideredand well-crafted theatre of quality. This kindof quality in the ‘ours’-versus-‘theirs’ percep -tion at issue here is the presumed antithesisof the agitational, propagandistic, and slog -

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an istic features adjudged to be intrinsic to‘political theatre’.

Dodin’s ‘Human’, Krymov’s DerisionThis shift to history and aesthetics is Dodin’sline of attack in his 2007 Life and Fate, devisedwith the Maly Drama Theatre from the 1960novel by Vasily Grossman, unpublished inRussia for political reasons until 1988, duringperestroika. The production, the first to bebased on the book, embraced its explosivethesis that Nazism and Communism weretwo sides of the same coin: they were inter -changeable totalitarian regimes. Even moreexplosive was the Gestapo officer Liss’s con -tention, in dialogue with Jewish Com munistMoskovskoy in a German concen trationcamp, that the Nazis still had much to learnfrom the atrocities perfected by the SovietUnion.

The camp’s prisoners are identified directlyby their striped pyjamas. The camp, by con -trast, is identified metaphorically, thus indir -ectly, by a volleyball net, the production’scentral design element. The latter is used forflashback scenes to the pre-war youth of theprotagonists, or for remembered, imag inedor dream sequences; it is, as well, an index oftemporal change – past, present, and hints ofthe future – as of location, situ ation, event,and narrative. The net thereby permits aswitch of focus, without set changes, to akitchen, bedroom, apartment, office, thebattlefield of Stalingrad (1943) caught in aflash, and the Gulag, the adjudged reverseside of the Nazi camp.

The production is a masterpiece of mon -tage simultaneity in which stories of family,love, and moral transgression – Shtrum, thenuclear scientist at the core of the familynarrative, is tricked into betraying his col -leagues – are in counterpoint with historywrit large. Nowhere, in the composition, isthe volleyball net a more chilling indicatorthan when the musicians of a brass bandstand firmly behind it in a horizontal line,play Schubert, strip, neatly fold their clothes,and walk into the imputed gas chamber ofdim and seemingly steamed-up light at theback wall. Their instruments remain on thefloor behind the net as signs of lives that once

were lives. Dodin’s finely etched scene reflectsthe central interest of his oeuvre in what hecalls the ‘human’ rather than what might becalled, for nuance, the ‘politicized human’ –or, indeed, the ‘politicized inhuman’.

Life and Fate, a landmark production in sofar as coming to terms with traumatic his toryis concerned, possibly helped to clear thepath for Dmitry Krymov, who is some fifteenyears Dodin’s junior. (Dodin turned seventy-one in 2015.) Krymov, a designer and painter,deals with history through satire andburlesque in installation-type pieces. The2009 Opus No. 7, his first substantial pro -duction, is in two juxtaposed parts. The firstis built on powerful visual images, reinforced,at the beginning, by the roar of an invisiblemachine whose wind blows thousands ofbits of newspaper into the space through theholes punched out, just before, in the panelsof a long, white paper wall. It becomes clearsoon enough that the seemingly randomimages that follow refer in some way to theHolocaust, which, by association rather thanthrough logical connection, is imbricated inthe second part of the work.

This second part has, for focus, the in fam -ous persecution of Dmitry Shostakovich, whoin 1936 was accused by a Pravda article(rumoured to have been written by Stalin) ofcomposing not music, but cacophonousnoise, the opera at issue being Lady Macbethof the Mtensk District. A huge puppet of awoman, indubitably Mother Russia, ismanoeuvred through the space amid threefake pianos, which are rolled in and eventu -ally smashed. In one vignette, a midgetpuppet Shostakovich is set down at a key -board. Mother Russia picks him up, claspshim to her bosom and all but squashes himas placards with the names of artists whowere Stalin’s victims go up, and the voice ofShosta kovich is heard, reading his recan -tation.

This reading is deeply disturbing in thatShostakovich’s fear and public humiliationcan be inferred from its dispassionate, almostneutral inflections, as can the brutality of theStalin years. Even so, its immediate, power -ful effect is virtually negated by the over -riding derision that invades the second part,

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which is at odds with the relatively sobertone of the first. Grossman’s universe peersthrough Krymov’s construction, and this ishardly surprising, given the overlap betweentheir selected tranches of history.

Krymov’s aesthetic arrangements sinceOpus No. 7 have dug into derision, promptedless, it would seem, by ‘today’s cynicism’than by something like contempt, or thesettling of scores, where sons oppose theirfathers and, with them, the historic past.Unbridled contempt is fully evident, in myview, in his 2012 Gorki 10, which, like thepreceding work, is in two parts. The first is aslapstick-grotesque skit on Lenin. The secondis a collage of various writings, notablyfeaturing Boris Vasilyev’s The Dawns areQuiet Here, which concerns the Second WorldWar, with visual pastiche references to YuryLyubimov’s iconic 1970 production derivedfrom this novel.

The purpose of Krymov’s ‘citations’ ofpro minent novels and plays, as of those con -nected with Lyubimov, is to slap them downfor their ideological bravura and/or senti -mentalism vis-à-vis Soviet life. The tone ofGorki 10 links the production with the parodicdeconstructions of Chekhov that, in the mean -time, had drawn his attention, and whichpreoccupy him in the 2013 Honoré de Balzac:Notes on Berditchev, inspired by The ThreeSisters. Here the sisters are hybrids of zom -bies and vampires recently arisen from theircoffins.

Bogomolov’s Lobster: Lear. Comedy

All things considered, the most interestingaspect of Krymov’s theatre of derision (myterminology) is how it feeds into a currentcirculating among directors in their earlyforties, exemplified in Russia for the pur -poses of this argument, by KonstantinBogomolov’s 2011 Lear: Comedy. The produc -tion is after Shakespeare, but not entirely,since there are liberally inserted text frag -ments from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ValamShalamov’s Gulag tales and Paul Celan’spoetry.

Bogomolov dismembers tyranny, lust forpower, political corruption, sexual depravity,

and so on down the line of disfigured anddisfiguring behaviour with an unparalleledsavagery as each and all, including Cordelia,reproduce, clone-like, the dictatorial, foul-mouthed Lear. The fact that none has anyconscience or expresses the slightest bit ofsym pathy, empathy, or remorse is a devas -tating picture of that ‘social autism’ referredto earlier, but also of a sociopathic condition,which, the production shows – targeting theKremlin, past and present, from Stalin toPutin – is configured in absolute power. Thefact that a woman plays Lear (the MoscowArt Theatre’s Rosa Khayullina) and, more -over, that the entire cast is cross-gendered isa subterfuge for not naming names, and thisattempt at anonymity is a strategy, amongseveral in the production, for turning it intoan emblematic rather than a particular case.

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Rosa Khayullina in Konstantin Bogomolov’s productionof Lear: Comedy (2011).

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The 1940s appear in Lear: Comedy and thuswar is inevitably embedded in the produc -tion. The barbarism of war is theatricalized,displayed, and derisively undercut, in thesame instance: Gloucester’s eyes are gougedout with a corkscrew; Cordelia suddenlyturns up in pilot leather and goggles, whiledummy plastic lobsters – probably meta ph -ors for machine-guns – hang from her sides;‘Victory Day’ (‘Den pobedy’), the pat ri oticsong of the Second World War, is hoarselyintoned, rather than sung, with animal-likesounds to rock music, testing, with thissneer ing sacrilege, the limits of how far theproduction can go. (War veterans would notbe laughing.)

For Bogomolov, this war is, in his words,the ‘war of our fascism against theirs’.5 Echoesof Grossman resound in his statement,intentionally or not, but there is no doubtfrom Bogomolov’s reference to fascism thathis production involves the idea of ‘our’ andso of a ‘we’ responsible for a political historyfraught with catastrophes.

Bogomolov’s acknowledgement of politicsin history leads back to the earlier point onestrangement noted via Fokin, who, likeDodin – it is now crucial to observe – belongsto a generation of directors who worked in theSoviet era. Such is not the case of Bogomolovand his generation of directors. For Fokin, aswas indicated, politics is essentially otherthan the theatre, a domain separate from thetheatre, which would make political theatrean anomaly. Bogomolov confronts politics,for there is no doubt that Lear: Comedy ispolitical theatre through and through, aidedin being this very phenomenon by its single-mindedness, single track, and coarse grain.The latter characteristics emerge all the moreaggressively when the production is placedside by side with Dodin’s multi-layered,temperately textured Life and Fate.

Furthermore, Lear: Comedy does not havethe opt-out-of-society clause available to‘counter-cultural’ theatre. It intentionallyseeks high-status visibility of the kind encour -aged by secure institutions, especially as itwas born of an association with one of them,the Moscow Art Theatre, no less, where, inthe past three years, Bogomolov has been

enjoying increasing notoriety and critical andpublic success. Clearly, the protection andcachet of established houses is not to besneezed at. His enemies are the traditionalist,Orthodox-conservative and right-wing pub -lics whose pressure on the Moscow ArtTheatre to dismiss him exerts pressure on hisdirectorial integrity.

Purcarete in Craiova

National Theatres are an integral componentof such established houses in Europe as theMoscow Art Theatre (which, it must be noted,has never been described as ‘national’), andthe National Theatre of Craiova in Romania,a provincial institution as distinct from itsmetropolitan homologue in Bucharest, is asignificant example of how ensemble-theatrestrength in a subsidized framework is able toengender and support political theatre infreed-up conditions.

The Craiova theatre is indelibly linkedwith Silviu Purcarete, whose talents it nur -tured from shortly before the fall of NikolaeCeausescu in 1989, continuing through the1990s. It is here that he carved, with a surehand, his outrageously violent, excessiveproductions replete with metaphors, touringthem to international festivals far and wide.

Purcarete’s 1992 Titus Andronicus becamehis and Craiova’s emissary and calling card.Stirred up by the execution of the hated dic -tator, Titus Andronicus let loose in the theatrethe rage festering in a nation against tyranny,looking back on history in order to takestock, as the Russian directors were radicallyto do a whole decade and more later. But,then, Russia had not executed Stalin, and itsdelay in processing trauma through thetheatre was bound up in the delays and com -plications of its newly emerging mechanismsfor democratic freedom. Needless to say,Russia is also a much bigger country thanRomania, and a far more cumbersome socio-economic structure to turn around.

Still, some factors of common experiencemay help to account for the comparablesavagery of Purcarete’s Titus Andronicus andBogomolov’s Lear: Comedy, and the extrava -gant theatrical devices that drive them. Com -

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parison need not be extended too far,however, since Purcarete, without foregoinghis interest in the idea that political violencebegets multiple forms of other violence,developed a theatre idiom less inclined tostraight-out mockery and more to absurdistambivalence. This entailed excavating thegrotesque, both in the sense of gargoyle gro -tesque, with its emphasis on visual impact,and in Meyerhold’s sense of the startlingjuxtaposition of opposites, with its emphasison the double edges of meaning.

Purcarete’s 2008 Measure for Measure is agood example. Commissioned by Craiova,the production is set in a canteen-cum-psychiatric hospital, where the sick and thesupposedly not-sick are mixed and matched.Everything hovers on ambiguity. Isabella isno less salacious in her alleged innocence thanAngelo in his righteousness, while Angelo’scourtiers, whether in dom estic dress ing gownsor business suits, are interrogators and tor -turers. The sinister pres ence of a police stateis right there in the canteen-asylum, and thewhole lot is rubbish, as suggested by thepiles of sawdust and straw on the floor.

Purcarete has his actors pick up broomsand sweep away the sawdust and straw –intimations of a barnyard, and so of thepresence of animals – that was on the floorfrom the very start, but which has movedabout continually, like a living organism,affected by the movement taking place onthe stage. The production closes with thehint that the old cannot be swept out be -cause, like a living organism, it will returnwith the new. What, then, it might be asking,has come of the hope of change promised bythe euphoria of the Romanian revolution?

Purcarete had emigrated to France bet -ween these two productions, keeping hisfamily life in France and his working life inRomania, and so it was that, besides main -taining his close relationship with the Craiovaensemble, he established another with that ofthe National Theatre ‘Radu Stanca’ in Sibiu.His 2007 Faust there was enveloped in histrademark stage opulence: flames of fire;streams of running water; flying devils;rapacious starlet she-devils (not withouttouches of misogyny); Mephistopheles pop -ping out from beneath the floorboards, or

150

From Silviu Purcarete’s production of Measure for Measure, set in a canteen-cum-psychiatric hospital (2008).Photo Florin Chirea.

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appearing on shelves or coming down fromceilings; visitations floating in and out ofview; and more in this rapturous vein.

The power of knowledge and how it en -courages thought, critique, and re-evaluationis at the heart of the production, as in Goethe,and in this proposal resides its politicaldimension. Nevertheless, the production’scelebration of theatricality is its strongestdimension, its political innuendos recedingwith the cumulative sweep of the sensualityof the whole.

Poland and Germany: ‘Soft’ Power

But we are not yet done with history or withTitus Andronicus. The 2012 Titus Andronicus,directed by Jan Klata from Teatr Polski inWroclaw in collaboration with Staats schau -spiel Dresden, revisits the Second WorldWar. The German actors play the Romansand the Polish are the Goths, reversing theenduring stereotypes in both countries as towho is civilized, and who barbaric. Shake -speare, in any case, provides plenty of evi d -ence that war cannot be a site of civil iz ation,any more than can the cycle of revenge onwhich Titus Andronicus turns.

Fragments from Heiner Müller’s AnatomyTitus, Fall of Rome filter into the productionMüller’s perspective on power as a force thatcannibalizes itself as it destroys the colon -ized. This, for Müller, was the RomanEmpire in its colonization of the Goths andAfrica. The parable with Nazi Germany istransparent but, instead of being activatedby the production, it lies dormant in it asbackground information to be recognizedby spectators. The production is bilingual, inGerman and Polish, which in itself suggeststhat it is a dialogue – or clash – between twocultures and/or an intercultural approach.Surtitles are used in the language appro -priate to the audience.

Judging by the production, the intentionof both companies was to revisit the SecondWorld War so as to bury it by ridiculing theGerman–Polish stereotypes that had devel -oped before, from, and after it. The openingscene is businesslike and solemn as men in T-shirts boasting punk-style war illustrationshaul in numerous casks, one by one, thatmight contain the spoils of war but are actu -ally the coffins of Titus’s sons killed in action.

It is a silent prologue for a sequel thattrades on comedy verging on farce. Xeno -

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From Jan Klata’s production of Titus Andronicus for Teatr Polski (2012). Photo: Natalia Kabanow.

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phobic jokes about the incomprehensibilityof the other side’s language and culturalhabits belong neither to Shakespeare nor toMüller but were compiled by the actors andthe director during rehearsals. Their purposewas to foreground the prejudices among andaround them today. In other words, the pro -duction’s emphasis is on the here and now,and its story, borrowed from Shakespearebut filled out by German and Polish collec -tive memories, is the precondition for thatemphasis.

The rest follows, and it is, in turn, excori -ating or lurid, or merely snide or flippant,appropriating Shakespeare’s bloodbath of aplay for the exposure of stereotypes asinstru ments of power. Power is fundamen -tally understood in this production asmanipulation and brainwashing. However,the production alters the play’s parameters,moving away from hard-core politics,includ ing political indoctrination, to whatshould most probably be defined as lifestyleissues.

Take, for instance, the satirical deflation,by means of heavy-metal rock in full blast,of a symbolically charged Polish war song,which was the signature tune of a more or

less nationalistic television series popularseveral decades ago; or the mockery ofChopin’s music, a national icon, beautifullyplayed during the Romans’ ghastly scenes ofrevenge; or the jingle of an advertisement forsoap powder in some lewd scene; or thesexu ally charged Tamora, Queen of the Goths,styled in the images of celebrity-watchmaga zines; or the pornographic, B-movierape of the Roman daughter, Lavinia. AsKlata and the two ensemble companieswork ing with him see it, power today, inGermany and Poland, is not the ‘hard’ powerof governance, but the ‘soft’ power of mediaspin and pop-culture narcosis of capitalism.

Whether Titus Andronicus is a persuasivevision of where the power really lies today ismoot. There is no denying, on the otherhand, its mocking energy, which carries itinto the ‘theatre of derision’ profiled above,and places Klata somewhere in the vicinityof Bogomolov’s Lear: Comedy.

Germany: ‘Capitalism Pays for Criticism’

Furthermore, Klata’s production reverber ateswith Rene Pollesch’s iconoclasm at the Volks -bühne, and perhaps, most tellingly, with his

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Another scene from the Teatr Polski production of Titus Andronicus. Photo: Natalia Kabanow.

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2012 Kill Your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia.Pollesch kills shibboleths: witness his refer -ence to Mother Courage in his reproduction ofBrecht’s wagon, which circles the stage toactor Fabian Hinrich’s virtuoso parody ofshowbiz babble. The wagon is in unvarn -ished plywood to stress ironically that it is apastiche of the prop Brecht used to sucheffect in his production of his own play.Hinrich flays the stage boards with themassive rodeo and circus whip with whichhe also makes circles while the wagon circlesaround the stage. The whole display demon -strates Pollesch’s thesis, which Hinrich’smonologue spells out, on how entertainmentrules in contemporary capitalism.

As is well known, Frank Castorf, directorof the Volksbühne, has for many years madecapitalism the core subject of his produc -tions, wielding his unholy trinity of power,sex, and money in what I have elsewherecalled his ‘post-Dadaist’ fashion.6 Castorfhas only recently turned to Balzac, thatphenomenal critic of capitalism and its bidsfor political power. Castorf’s La Cousine Bette,premiered in 2013, may not yet be his lastword – any more than are his 2014 Bayreuthproductions of Wagner’s Ring cycle – on thesyphilis that is capitalism (Balzac’s meta -phor) in the global economic crisis of thetwenty-first century. Castorf takes up withrelish Balzac’s corrosive image of inheritedfamily disease for the spread of capitalism innineteenth-century France to suit his ownends.

Notwithstanding Castorf’s East Germanorigins, his critique of capitalism is of a piecewith that of Thomas Ostermeier, born andbred in West Germany and director of theSchaubühne in reunified Berlin (1990). Oster -meier makes no bones about the necessity ofappealing to the young, and his theatrelanguage has come to resemble more andmore their bodily languages, dress codes,gestural short cuts, pop-cultural referentsand, yes, also their confusions over how toget a handle on the conflicting social valuesthat constantly make demands on them.Thus his 2012 Enemy of the People is by theyoung, for the young, on the problems ofhow action can be taken with integrity in a

world based on commercial transactions thatspill over into transactional relations betweenhuman beings.

While Ostermeier shakes the dust offIbsen, he also uses the device of a publicdebate, which the actors, stepping outsidetheir performances on stage, initiate fromwithin the audience. The device is a curiousthrowback to a late 1960s and then a 1970stechnique of political theatre, or of makingtheatre politically, returning to Müller’sdistinction. In the process, Ostermeierresumes an argument, which he repeated ina public forum at the Schaubühne in March2013 and reiterated in an interview in LeMonde, 6–7 July 2014, that the neoliberal state– and, after all, neoliberalism is the name ofthe game in the European Union – under -stands that it has to subsidize the theatre forits wellbeing. Capitalism digests the critic -isms made of it, Ostermeier argues, in order‘to develop better’; and the role of theatre isto continue its criticism while being ‘paid’ todo so. Ostermeier’s diagnosis and solutionsound like old-fashioned realpolitik lightlybordering on cynicism.

Nevertheless, and regardless of the self-aware opportunism that also peers throughOstermeier’s bold words, the director drawsattention to a serious issue, namely the con -tra diction of democratic states – a ‘dialectical’contradiction, in Brecht’s terminology – thatcannot but leave open, in the name of demo -cracy, the freedom of others to criticize them.Furthermore, these states, when driven byneoliberalism, have no alternative but toaccept and finance criticisms of neoliberal -ism, alias capitalism, not least when stateneoliberalism, alias state capitalism, is atissue: such is the condition of both neoliberalpolity and neoliberal economics in the worldtoday. Money is to be made by someone forsomeone through the (entrepreneurial) exer -cise of critique.

Mnouchkine’s Corporate Macbeth

There is a difference in optic and character asthe road is crossed to reach Ariane Mnouch -kine and the Théâtre du Soleil, whoseMacbeth was premiered towards the end of

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April 2014. Macbeth is Mnouchkine’s firstShakespeare production in thirty years afterTwelfth Night in 1982, followed by Richard IIand Henry IV, Part One in 1984. She intendedRichard II and Henry IV to be part of a bigger,unrealized cycle of Shakespeare’s historyplays which are, most certainly, political.

Politics has always been integral toMnouchkine’s professional life, as to her lifeas a citizen fighting for social justice. Theabbreviated Shakespeare cycle that shesucceeded in mounting announced, for thefirst time, her commitment to the stylizedand highly corporeal forms of Asian theatreand its performance to accompanying non-stop, live music. Mnouchkine rendered hertranslations, with a few minor cuts, intomodern colloquial French. She also trans -lated Macbeth in a similar register.

The Soleil was established in 1964, soontaking position in the existing field of thetheatre as a theatre of ‘collective creation’.This, in the given sociopolitical context ofMay 1968 and its flow, in spirit, into the1970s, was also a political position, as was –and remains – the Soleil’s very organizationand practice of ensemble theatre.

Richard II was ‘in the manner of’ Kabukirather than a replica of Kabuki, and itsshades-of-an-imaginary-Asian idiom, notalto gether free of Orientalism, marked sev -eral of the productions in a series whosescripts were by Hélène Cixous. The last ofthe Cixous series was the 1999 Drums on theDike, a marvellously magical and sumptuouswork with real-estate imbroglios andfinancial-political corruption for its mainthemes. It was played by actors playing pup -pets playing characters, the simulated pup petsbeing manipulated by black-clad puppet eersplayed by actors, who were by their sidethroughout the performance.

Mnouchkine is clear about her antipathyto psychological theatre and the aesthetics ofnaturalism and realism. ‘Realism is theenemy,’ she has declared on more than oneoccasion;7 and her outright rejection of real -ism entailed her complete embrace of theat -ricality under which she subsumed herimaginary Asian performance modes andtheir accentuated use of movement, masks,

make-up, costumes, headgear – in short, ofeverything that was externalized and thatforegrounded not the character, but the actor,while enhancing the actor’s playing.

When Mnouchkine left Soleil versions ofKabuki, Kathakali, and so forth behind her,after Drums on the Dike, she retained suchfeatures of her theatricality as whitened faceswith ostentatiously heavy make-up whileseeking new principles for it. Such are thedollies on which episodes of the 2003 TheLast Caravanserai (Odysseys) were performed,the dollies having been wheeled in and outby half-visible actors hugging the floor. Suchare the filming techniques, film tricks, silent-film overacting, and over-the-top vignettesof cliffhanger adventure films, all done withhumour, of the 2009 The Shipwrecked of MadHope, the production immediately precedingMacbeth. The Shipwrecked of Mad Hope, inwhich Cixous was involved, entertains theidea of a utopian community, which wasdestroyed from within by the very characterswho had made great efforts to start it up. Theproduction secretes an almost pessimistic, al -beit not defeatist, viewpoint on the enterpriseundertaken with hope, however ‘mad’ itmay have seemed.

Whichever production Mnouchkine offersher audiences, its theatricality guarantees anindirect transmission of social, moral, andpolitical consciousness and a metaphorictransposition of sociopolitical questions ofimportance for the time in which the produc -tion is performed. Questions of the momentconcern immigration, homelessness, exile,the flight of refugees, and the search forasylum (the case of The Last Caravanserai)together with a whole raft of other socio -political and humanitarian dilemmas thatrun through her entire body of work. In herapproach to politics through theatricality,where metaphor is indispensable, Mnouch -kine demonstrates her common ground withEastern European theatricality.

The Perfidy of Power

Then comes Macbeth with its more discreettheatricality than is usual at the Soleil, and itsmore direct treatment of political subjects.

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Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are a glamorouscouple. All the social semiotics of their cloth -ing, from Macbeth’s male casual chic to LadyMacbeth’s fine blouses and tailored suits, aswell as of their home – beautiful marble onthe floor, streamlined couches, coffee table,Macbeth’s designer desk with computers –conjure up modern royals, who, neverthe -less, look like sleek bourgeois, and/or anelite of politicians, bankers. and corporatemen and women. Serge Nikolaï, in the role ofMacbeth, even recalls Nicolas Sarkozy, hav -ing played a wickedly Berlusconi-like figurein the 1994 The Perjured City, text by Cixous.The Macduff household resembles, in itslayout, the Macbeths’ comfortable home.

Lady Macbeth appears to own a high-class florist shop (unless it is an outhouse ofher château) set against a rose-trellised wall,and it is presumably the source of the hun -dreds of pink rose petals with which shestrews the floor to welcome Duncan, victori -ous from war. Duncan arrives in a helicopter,evoked by sound, to a gaggle of eager photo -graphers and journalists grouped tightlytogether, as they will be later for Macbeth’scoronation, although in a greater frenzy. Thecelebrity universe undergirds these images,which are touched up satirically by exag -gerated detail that gives a critical edge to theotherwise smooth pomp and circumstance ofthese scenes.

A similar process through which theevery day is theatricalized occurs for thecloy ingly sentimental vision of moneyedbliss in Lady Macbeth’s trellised pink rosesand how she repots flowers, covered by anapron and wearing gardening gloves, herhands full of soil, when her husband comeshome to be greeted by a kiss. What morecould this happy couple want, when it haseverything? The answer, as we know fromMacbeth’s reference to his ‘vaulting ambi -tion’, is to be king.

Domestic clichés, of which there are many,cross with the clichés of politics familiar fromtelevision, movie screens and Elle and Hello!magazines – take your pick. It is not alwayseasy to tell when clichés denoting national -ities are jokes. The shorts and knee-highsocks associated with English colonialists

appear to be seen comically, whereas thelarge group of Scots in tartan kilts and tam o’shanters in the closing scenes of war, whenBirnam Wood does, indeed, come to Dun -sinane, might well not be. In fact, the Scottishtableau – for it is arranged as a tableau –could decorate a tin of Scottish shortbread.Yet how is it to be seen, given the eventsplayed out?

By contrast, the supernatural elements aredealt with in an unambiguously theatricalway. The witches are strangely padded out,clustered together to look like a mound onthe landscape. This mound suddenly beginsto talk. Macbeth stares into the the trapdoorof the stage at the imaginary sword thatappears before him. Banquo also appearsfrom the trapdoor, but as smoke and light.He is visible only to Macbeth during anelegant, gently ironic formal dinner scene,fleetingly reminiscent, in its superb briefdance, of Pina Bausch’s choreographies. Thedinner scene, a façade for deceit, might wellclinch the production’s view of the perfidy ofpower.

Unique, but Not Isolated

The little space left me for a conclusion isprobably best left open, since the promon -tories dotted on my theatrescape could bejoined from several different directions,depending on the point of departure. Look -ing from the end of my analysis rather thanfrom its beginning, it would seem that theconnections between the points trace path -ways that are not strangers to each other.

The theatre examples have features incommon, while each is quite distinctive, withits unique voice in its specific chronotope;and yet none of them is an isolated case pre -cisely because societies, particularly in theearly twenty-first century, are not hermet ic -ally sealed. They interconnect, as can only bethe case in our global market, and also in -creas ingly politically interdependent, world,irrespective of its push-and-pull antagonisms.When taken together, these examples openup a pattern of tones, which are mostly vari -ations of shades on a colour chart that haveto do with mockery and some kind of

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critical/mistrustful/scathing perspective oncontemporary political forces.

However, none of these tonal variationsappears to offer anything like an alternative,let alone a solution, to a sea of troublesitemized daily by the news networks in alltheir multiplicity. The theatre is as disarmedas are citizens in the face of daily disasters –citizens who are not so much led as generallymisled, in both the directional and the moralsense of the verb. What appears to be strik -ing is the difference of emphasis between thetheatres within the seven-year period demar -c ated here, beginning in 2007, more or less atthe acknowledged ‘start’ of the economiccrisis, which continues into the present as weenter 2016.

In almost all the cases cited, the beginningof the crisis has a history or at least ahinterland of political theatre, or of theatrewith a political dimension, or of theatre madepolitically. Take only the last example pro -vided of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtredu Soleil, whose interface with politics nowgoes back fifty years. And the difference ofemphasis hinges on whether the productionsselected deal primarily with their society’straumatic political history, which appears tobe especially the case of theatre in Russia andRomania, or with capitalism and its atten dantpolitical, economic, and cultural manifes ta -tions, which appears especially pronouncedin Germany. In France, this second trend isreflected in concentrated form at the Théâtredu Soleil.

Of course, the difference between the twoemphases has to do with the longevity ofcapitalism in Western Europe, against whichthe upsurge of neoliberalism during the pastfifteen years and more has been thrown intogreater relief. By contrast, the advent of neo -liberalism in formerly Communist EasternEuropean countries is a recent phenomenonand, to boot, the experience, in each country,of coming to terms with its political historyhas been slow and painful.

Recognition, acknowledgement, and own -er ship of devas t ating political history triggercomplex res ponses, including denial. Bogom -olov’s savagery, for instance, is doubt less afully conscious reaction against the thickly

wrapped layers of self-protection which, inRussia, have led to a faltering or evencomplete lack of historical memory, particu -larly among younger generations. HenceBogomolov’s impulse to ‘restore’ historicalconsciousness, which is shared, in differentways, by Dodin, Volkos trelov, Gremina, andthe playwrights and directors of Teatr.doc asa whole.

Variations between the two points ofreference here identified in the theatre field –political history and capitalism with its neo -liberal face – do exist and, although it has notbeen possible to focus on them, severalexamples have been sighted. So, too, has thenot overly obvious overlap of traumatic his -tory and the critique of neoliberal capitalismin Titus Andronicus as performed by the TeatrPolski in Wroclaw and StaatsschauspielDresden. Even so, for the moment, theprominence of the two points of referencemarked out here appear to be hubs aroundwhich the productions cited may be iden -tified, as may, indeed, others not discussedon this occasion.

Notes and References

This is a version adjusted for publication of my key noteaddress presented at the conference Whither PoliticalTheatre? on 19–20 September 2014 at St John’s College,University of Cambridge. The conference was supportedby the British Academy as a British Academy ResearchEvent.

1. These are consistent preoccupations in PierreBourdieu’s work, but see Part 1 of The Field of CulturalProduction, ed. and trans. Randal Johnson (Oxford:Polity Press, 1993), p. 29–141. See also Maria Shevtsova,‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s Champ and Habitusfor a Sociology of Stage Productions’, in her Sociologyof Theatre and Performance (Verona: Qui Edit, 2009),p. 83–109.

2. My translation.3. Cited in review of Anatomy Titus, Fall of Rome,

Theatre Notes, 29 November 2008. 4. See The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford University Press,

2000).5. Round-table discussion with the director at the

Golden Mask Theatre and National Awards Festival inMoscow, 6 April 2013.

6. See Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, TheCambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2013), p. 105–11, for further details onCastorf and Ostermeier relevant to this discussion. Forsupporting observations on Fokin’s views, see p. 94–6.

7. Entretiens avec Fabienne Pascaud: l’art du présent(Paris: Plon, 2005), p. 58.

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