Hamlet at the Schaubühne

When it comes to the problem of how to stage lines so famous every schoolchild knows them by heart, Thomas Ostermeier’s new production of Hamlet at the Schaubühne Berlin takes the bull by the horns: “To be or not to be” (Sein oder Nicht-sein) are the first words spoken in the play. This is the same cut-to-the-money-shot strategy recently used as an opening gambit in Michael Thalheimer’s staging of Faust I for the Deutsches Theater, and it’s a good way to deal with the “classics angst” that has turned the staging of these key plays in the repertoire into daredevil variations in search of the ultimate trump. Ostermaier’s Hamlet, though, does turn out to be rather trump-filled, particularly during the first hour of the performance, which consists of one tour-de-force set piece after another. Afterward, the tension subsides somewhat, making for an evening that is good rather than great overall, but the six actors involved all turn out magnificent performances (particularly Lars Eidinger in the title role).

Ostermeier’s Hamlet relies heavily on the video-cam technique pioneered in Germany by Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne, but Ostermeier uses the camera quite differently. Whereas Castorf is interested in hidden spaces (the actors often perform in closed boxes on stage, their performance visible only by means of the live video feed projected on large screens onstage), Ostermeier shows us the mechanisms by which people and things are made larger than life. He projects his images onto a curtain made of shiny gold chains while we simultaneously look through it to see the live action on the stage, which is set up with a long banquet table. Judith Rosmair wearing dark glasses as Gertrude looks like what she is: a woman in dark glasses; but the projected black-and-white video feed in which her hugely magnified face is grainily projected turns her into a starlet caught in the cross-hairs of the paparazzi. And so the play’s initial image of Hamlet reciting his famous monologue with his face blown up so large that just his eyes and nose fit on the screen appears a self-reflexive gesture, a comment on the hugeness of the lines themselves, which have become familiar enough to be emptied out of meaning. At climactic moments of the play, the live video feed is intercut with other images, with e.g. the image of a skull flickering in and out of the live footage of Hamlet’s face (perhaps in compensation for the fact that the Yorick scene has been omitted).

The meaning Ostermeier offers us as recompense comes in the form of dirt: the entire stage is covered in a thick layer of earth, and the first real scene of the play is a burial pantomime in which a frantic gravedigger scuffles about at cartoonish speed to get a coffin singlehandedly lowered into its grave (with lots of slapstick pratfalls) as the play’s main protagonists look on in the rain produced by a hose held aloft. The scene lasts a painfully long time and is stunningly expressive. The gravedigger starts shoveling in the dirt before remembering that the first handfuls belong to the mourners—whereupon he hops into the grave to scoop it all out again. When a languishing Gertrude drops the delicate little mourners’ trowel into the grave along with the bit of earth it holds, the gravedigger offers the other mourners a full-sized shovel instead. Characters keep returning to this dirt throughout the performance, though not in the food-fight way that would have likely ensued if it had been Christoph Marthaler doing the directing. Ostermeier’s dirt has a solemnity, a gravity to it. Characters don’t throw it around, they eat it (Hamlet in particular). The first metaphorical use of the dirt comes early on, when Claudius is chiding bereft Hamlet for his ostensibly untoward despondency after his father’s death: Claudius embraces his unresponsive nephew, and the instant he releases him,
Hamlet topples like a felled tree, face-first into the pile of dirt covering his father’s grave. This descent into dirt is what Ostermeier keeps bringing us back to—the reality of death and loss—and compared to this Claudius’s politic speech is just wind blowing by.

The actors in this production spend a lot of time face-down in things, mostly food, and generally when they show their faces afterward, they look like ghouls arisen from the dead. This Denmark is a ghost town. And although Hamlet tells Horatio (and us) quite clearly that he’s planning to feign madness, it’s hard to see this madness as make-believe. Eidinger’s performance is full of Tourette’s-like verbal tics and is utterly unsettling. When he strips down to act out the play The Mousetrap for king and queen—Hamlet and Horatio are the only performers in this staging—we see that the doughiness of his body is due to the fact that he’s wearing a heavily padded undergarment beneath his clothes. After playing the role of the queen wearing only black lace panties and thigh-high stockings, he climbs back into his fat-boy suit, asking one of the other actors to zip him up. One of the strongest scenes in the entire production is the pas de deux between Hamlet and Ophelia when Polonius forces their encounter. The scene shifts back and forth so quickly between tenderness and violence it’s truly frightening, and eventually he half-buries her.

Toward the middle of the play the pace starts to slow down, and I found myself wondering, as I watched Claudius (brilliantly played by Urs Jucker) contemplating aloud the vileness of his own fratricide, whether this entire scene couldn’t have been cut outright
with no great loss of effect. Ostermeier has created an action-packed Hamlet in which psychological processes are so effectively translated into physical ones that the actual recitation of monologues seems almost irrelevant. Cutting out a startlingly large number of scenes is a strategy that worked beautifully for Ostermeier in his staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2006 (a co-production with choreographer Constanza Macras), and he would have done well to trim Shakespeare’s play more rigorously this time as well. Though two and a half hours is not at all long for a performance of Hamlet, given the density and compression of this staging, making it leaner by half an hour would have served the production well.

Faust in Love

Theater director Michael Thalheimer of Berlin’s Deutsches Theater seems to have found his niche over the past decade: he specializes in plays about the degradation, abuse and abandonment of women. It’s a great subject. His brilliant staging of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (2001) depicted the life of this young woman—which is systematically destroyed by a pair of hit men: a powerful prince who has the hots for her, and her father—as a triangular cage. Wedekind’s Lulu in Thalheimer's 2004 production, which came to BAM in 2007, was rife with sexual violence performed before the blank screen of a wall in the middle of the stage (see fellow director David Levine's interview with Thalheimer). And now his Faust, Part I—currently showing as part of the Berliner Festspiele—whittles down Goethe’s complex tale of Faust’s search for knowledge and earthly pleasures to his bid to get into the pants of dour schoolgirl Margarete. Mephistopheles plays the pimp, and by the end of the play little Grete is left a bloody mess, her mouth a big red smear, her eyes all bruise.

Not that the play’s considerable metaphysical freight is left by the wayside. Thalheimer is a great lover of words, and most of the play is packed with Faust-Mephisto dialogues on everything under the sun. Actors under Thalheimer’s direction, regardless of the play in question, tend to develop a palette of verbal mannerisms, you can’t help thinking of them performing their texts much as musicians perform. Tempos change, voices are pitched high or so low they almost disintegrate (in the case of Sven Lehmann’s Mephisto) into pure resonance. And the story does still focus on Faust’s quest to grasp and master the universe of worldly life. In love with Grete, he may be above all in love with the idea of exercising his will by possessing the object of his desires. Grete in this staging stands in for everything Faust hopes to grasp.

The play begins in silence: the house lights suddenly go out, and the stage lights up, showing us Faust in profile (played by Ingo Hülsmann). He stands there immobile for an unnervingly long time, the only sound the faint grating noise produced by the revolving stage behind him whose circular wall of wide black slats as high as the stage itself continues to move inexorably clockwise throughout the first part of the play as Faust is joined by Mephistopheles and their conversations begin. Eventually lights appear backstage, illuminating the space between the vertical slats and soon blinding the audience at every interstice. After an extended period of constant noise and light, it comes as a relief when a gap finally appears in the slats, baring most of the stage and revealing Grete’s tiny metal bed standing alone at the center, beneath a big luminous cross mysteriously created by the alignment of the slats. This brief interlude of respite (during which Grete, played by Regine Zimmermann, speaks of happiness and peace) is the one upbeat moment amidst the dreariness. Soon enough Faust has entered Grete’s life and she sits on her bed (in left-facing profile like Faust before her) reeling off the verses of the famous song “Grete at the Spinning Wheel,” in which she repeats over and over the words “Meine Ruhe ist hin,” (my peace is gone). There’s no spinning wheel on stage; none is needed; all its symbolic weight is already carried by the black revolving barrel of the stage (literally a wheel, spinning) that’s grated on our nerves for the play’s first half, eventually making this viewer woozy.

The repetition theme reaches its climax when Margarete asks Faust whether he believes in God. Unwilling to answer yes or no, he engages in a long beating-about-the-bush speech that is as exasperating to us as it must to poor Grete. By this point Faust’s use of discourse has come to appear the opposite of kindness and truth. Unhappy with his response, she asks him again, and he repeats the monologue verbatim, with different gestures. Is he really repeating all this garbage? She asks again, and he repeats his response—six times in all. Eventually she gives in, having at last heard enough. And the slats of the background shift enough to set the cross askew.

My favorite part of the production is the stunning performance of Mephisto by Sven Lehmann, who turns the devil into a plump lascivious boor who lifts his sweater to scratch his belly and pantomimes the most astonishing little onanistic dances: prodigiously lecherous cavorting. He appears to be the only character in the play who’s having any fun. Even Faust, his desires quenched, is kept busy learning the lesson that fulfilled desire just gives way to other itches that require scratching.
At times the production’s insistence on monotony produces boredom, and for this reason I find the staging finally less successful than, say, that of Emilia Galotti, which proceeds at a well-nigh military clip. This Faust does drag a bit, but it shows us a psychological, Nietzschean Faust that most certainly affirms (in case you had any doubts) the play’s place in the modern canon.

Seeing The Reader

Some bits of Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader are set in Berlin, which is how I'll justify writing about it here. (Achtung: spoiler alert!)

I’m sure you know the story: A fifteen-year old boy named Michael Berg is seduced by a streetcar conductor, Hannah Schmitz, with whom he has a passionate summer affair. One special feature of their relationship is that she has him read books to her every time they meet. Years later (the Holocaust having happened in the meantime offscreen) he witnesses her trial in Nuremberg when he is a law student, and after she is sentenced to prison for her part in the deaths of 300 Jews when she was a guard at Auschwitz, he starts reading books into a tape recorder and sending them to her. During her years in prison she finally learns to read and write. Berg is asked by prison officials to help her when she is to be released, and he reluctantly agrees, but just before her release she kills herself in her cell.

I found the film terribly disappointing, but was interested to see that it disappoints in ways quite different than the bestselling novel by Bernhard Schlink on which it was based.

The main weakness of Schlink’s novel is that his descriptions are consistently so weak (or irrelevant), his characters so little fleshed-out that the book winds up seeming like a few big ideas clunking down the stairs. The storyline itself, though, is fascinating material, so I was very much looking forward to seeing how it would play out on film.

The film, however, is plagued by issues just as serious, though it does manage to correct some of the book’s flaws. The lush imagery of the film and the excellent performances by Kate Winslet (Hannah) and David Kross (Michael as a boy) fill the world with a nicely shot vocabulary of gesture and image that makes us believe in the characters and their lives. There are other improvements as well. Schlink would have us believe, for example, that the first book that Hannah sits down to read once she has painstakingly attained literacy is Elie Wiesel’s Night. I really don’t think so. The film handles her quest for literacy much more plausibly, treating it not as some abstract way to make amends for her crimes (after all, she does seem to feel she was just following orders and had no other choice), but as an attempt to recreate in fantasy the time in her past when she was loved and had her lover read to her: using Michael’s tape as a guide, she spells her way through Chekhov’s “Lady with the Lapdog,” a story he read aloud to her as a boy (and which touchingly reflects their own relationship). The Odyssey is another thematically relevant choice, especially the opening passage referring to the “twists and turns” of the hero’s life that is read several times in the course of the film. (They read Robert Fagles's 1996 translation, which has been pasted into an old-looking cover; never mind that the choice of translation is anachronistic; after all, they're "really" supposed to be reading it in German - in the Johann Heinrich Voss translation, perhaps?)

The movie handily provides some shots of young Hannah avoiding reading: refusing to look at a book Michael hands her, asking him to order lunch for both of them so she doesn’t have to read the menu (though unless I misheard he orders a BLT – what? In Germany? I hope I misheard). These shots then are used in flashback to show us Michael’s thought process when he realizes during her trial that she is not only illiterate but is so ashamed of the fact that she would rather accept a disproportionately long jail sentence than admit it.

And the large number of prison-library books in her cell is used to powerful effect in the film when she stacks them up high atop her table to make a platform she will use to kill herself. It’s as if the knowledge she has gained from reading has now enabled her to make the decision to take her own life, but there is nothing heavy-handed about the use of this image. I was also touched by the careful way she takes off her shoes before she dies – she doesn’t bother to unlace them, but she does place them neatly side-by-side on the floor.

In all these ways, the film outshines the novel on which it was based. But then it fails in quite different ways, primarily because of the script. The sections of the film that show Michael and Hannah in 1939 don’t contain much talking unless you count the reading-aloud. But the parts featuring middle-aged Michael (played by Ralph Fiennes) are all talk, and the dialogue grates and jars with one sententious, heavy-handed line after another. I don’t know what David Hare (who wrote the script) was thinking. Fiennes winds up having to speak the bulk of these lines, and he just can’t pull them off. It can’t be easy to be playing a character who’s supposed to be painfully repressed—as he casually announces to his 20ish daughter over dinner, causing her to burst into sudden tears of relief, pain and understanding [?]—and at the same time be asked to utter all these cockamamie lines. Maybe an actor of Donald Sutherland’s caliber could have made it work, but Fiennes serves up his homilies like he’s getting paid for it.

The script’s weakness is also seen during the law-school sequences, particularly in a seminar when a fellow-student of Michael’s is so outraged by the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg trials that he begins to shout. His rant makes no sense - in a context where it needs to. First he says how ridiculous it is that a handful of low-level officials are being tried with great pomp and circumstance when most of the rest of the German population is guilty as well. Then he says he wants to shoot Hannah and the other guards. Or does he mean shoot all the Germans? In the context of the scene, it seems that he is supposed to be serving as a foil to Michael’s wordless brooding (25-year-old Berg displays indecision worthy of a Hamlet). But his speech remains incoherent, and so the scene remains unilluminating, though at least the law professor is brilliantly played by Bruno Ganz.

Speaking of whom—since he’s a real German, as is David Kross—it’s quite odd that all the actors in the film speak English with German accents (real or simulated) passim except for Fiennes, who just sounds like a Brit. Did someone decide the inconsistency just doesn’t matter? It does.

Perhaps the worst dialogue of all is in the scene when Michael goes to visit an Auschwitz survivor who testified at Hannah’s trial after the war. He brings her a little tin of money—Hannah’s savings, which she asked be given to this woman. The relative paltriness of the bequest (seven thousand marks and change) is set off by the luxuriousness of the woman’s New York apartment. But then the two begin an inane dialogue studded with a few profundities (“Nothing comes out of Auschwitz”) and the scene quickly starts making no sense at all.

The film ends with a gesture that could have worked stunningly if Michael's daughter were anything but a cipher, but we know virtually nothing about her. So it doesn’t quite make sense that when he drags her out to a village cemetery in the rain (a village where he took Hannah on a bicycle outing one happy day) to show her Hannah’s grave, she actually appears delighted that he has brought her all this way to visit the grave of someone she’s never heard of, in the rain no less. And then we hear Berg’s voice beginning to tell his daughter his story as they walk away—and the storytelling is a lovely gesture (and counterpoint to all the stories of other people he’s read aloud all his life), but the film hasn’t created the psychological context to support it, so it winds up just feeling random. What’s more, the dates on the gravestone read 1922-1988, which would make Hannah just 17 years old in 1939 when she and Berg first meet (we see the date inscribed in the copy of The Odyssey he was reading that year in school). So suddenly she’s just two years his senior? Uh, no.

Ach. This material could have made such a good story. What a shame that neither novel nor film turned out better than this.

Cooking Polish food in Berlin

I'm feeling hungry this morning; here's a little excerpt from my novel-in-progress.

Today I found a new piece of the Valentina puzzle, tucked away inside my mother’s copy of The Jewish Cookbook which Ria gave me to take to Berlin with me “so you can cook something that tastes like home.” It’s a recipe for cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat, raisins and rice, written in blue ink in Valentina’s loopy handwriting on a large index card. There are several cross-outs in the ingredients list, as though she were writing from memory and kept changing her mind. I remember Mom making this dish for us when I was little, but didn’t know it was Valentina’s recipe. The index card is creased and stained, you can see where oil spattered across its surface from a bubbling saucepan. Mom would wrap each leaf around its filling and then stick a toothpick into it to hold it together before nestling the little bundle carefully in the pot. Then she would bake the stuffed leaves in the oven in a bath of tomato puree and broth.

“Are you making Polish food?” Oscar asked the moment he got in the door. It was the smell of cabbage. Its sweet, oily, green odor floated through all the rooms of the apartment and slipped under the door to fill the hallway as well. Poland had come to visit, and all the neighbors must have known it.

He liked it though, and finished two plates of the pale little packages, their filling just visible through their translucent cooked skins. Their taste was pure comfort, the tang of the raisins combining beautifully with the faintly bitter sweetness of the cabbage and the earthy warmth of the meat. I felt triumphant. I had recreated a bit of my own childhood right here in our kitchen, and perhaps it was Valentina’s childhood as well. After dinner I sat down with the recipe and practiced writing like Valentina. I found one of Oscar’s old fountain pens with blue ink in it, and rehearsed the sweeping characters, the billowy swoop of the h as if it were leaping up into the sky I was just learning to call Himmel, the m like a row of Galician hillocks. If I could learn to write like her, maybe I would know what it felt like to be her. I turned the radio to a station that played dance tunes for old people and practiced moving the pen to the rhythms of the music.

Was ist ein Literaturhaus?

"House of Literature" has a vaguely Eastern Bloc ring to it, but in fact "literature houses" are an important part of the cultural landscape throughout Germany and particularly Berlin, which wound up with three of them after unification and now has four. So what is a Literaturhaus? Generally it's a staffed building devoted to literature, offering a regular reading series (or a number of them) that is open to the public, and it usually offers other sorts of services as well: many Literaturhäuser host writers-in-residence, some house the editorial offices of literary magazines, some administer literary prizes, and some even have cafés.

Here's a rundown of the Literaturhäuser currently to be found in Berlin:

1. The LCB (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin), is located in the Wannsee district on the shores of the lake of that name, just down the block from the American Academy in Berlin. The LCB is housed in an elegant old lakeside villa with a beautifully tiled "winter garden" terrace from which one can admire the view down the steeply sloping back gardens down to the lake. It was founded in 1963 by the late Walter Höllerer, whose wife, portrait photographer Renate von Mangold, still photographs visiting authors, making for an impressive display in the downstairs rooms. A large auditorium room is the site of several public readings per week (including the occasional one in English), and a number of radio shows on literature are recorded here, usually before an audience. A small bar dispenses wine, beer and juice after readings. The LCB also hosts several workshop series for young authors and for literary translators (translating both into and out of German), and regularly houses a half dozen writers in residence at a time. Its staff publishes the literary magazine Sprache im technischen Zeitalter (language in the age of technology). The LCB is located at Am Sandwerder 5, a short walk from the Wannsee S-bahn station. Don't miss their garden parties!

2. The Literaturhaus Berlin, much loved for its great cafe, is located at Fasanenstrasse 23 in Charlottenburg just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was founded in 1986 and features the most active programming of any of the Berlin literature houses, often offering a different reading every night of the week. The Literaturhaus also houses a gallery space in which it frequently hosts literature-themed exhibitions, some of which are prepared in conjunction with the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Its bookstore Kohlhaas & Company (named after the title character of a great Kleist story) specializes in quality literature, including titles commissioned by the Literaturhaus for publication in its own series.

3. The literaturWERKstatt berlin was founded in 1991 and initially housed in the building that was formerly the site of the Literaturhaus Pankow am Majakowskiring in the Pankow district of East Berlin. Like many East German cultural institutions, the Literaturhaus Pankow was derailed by the loss of its GDR government funding after 1989, but the new literaturWERKstatt soon became an established part of the city's literary scene. The name literaturWERKstatt is full of puns - Werk is a (literary) work, a Werkstatt is a workshop, and a Literaturwerk-Statt is a site (Statt or Stätte) where the/a work of literature is accomplished, with a pinch of irony thrown in, since the preposition "statt" also means "instead of," as in "literature instead of works." Right from the start, this Literaturhaus distinguished itself as a home for hip new cutting-edge work and innovation, a point driven home by its relocation, in 2004, to an über-hip site in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. The Kulturbrauerei (culture brewery) at Knaackstraße 97 really is a former brewery whose grounds have been renovated to house a number of cultural institutions. The literaturWERKstatt offers readings, contests, open mike events, poetry festivals and more. Of all the Literaturhäuser in Berlin, this is the one that best succeeds in creating a party atmosphere around literature to appeal to a younger audience.

4. The Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus is the smallest of the Berlin Literaturhäuser but still offers a varied program. It was established in 1992 in the apartment house at Chausseestrasse 125 in Berlin-Mitte where Bertolt Brecht lived until his death in 1956 (he's buried in the cemetery next door); before 1989, the building had been known as the Brecht-Zentrum Berlin, institutionally supported by the GDR Ministry of Culture. In the early 1990s, the Literaturforum featured a program defined by its relevance to Brecht's work, but it's since branched out to offer a wide range of readings and screenings of contemporary literature and theater. The restaurant in the basement, with additional tables in the garden courtyard during the warmer months of the year, serves up Viennese specialities that are said to be based on the recipes of Brecht's second wife, legendary stage actress Helene Weigel.

Goethe the Redeemer

I happen to be spending the month in Marfa, Texas, a town said to be named after a minor character in The Brothers Karamazov, and in my borrowed house (thank you, Lannan Foundation!) I find a six-volume edition of Goethe’s works published in Berlin in 1949. This hardback edition, printed on cheap paper that is already turning brown and crumbling, is an early product of the newly founded post-war publishing house Aufbau-Verlag, which was eventually to become the largest and most influential publisher of literature in East Germany. The publishing house (whose name translates as “building” as in “rebuilding”) continued to play a prominent role in the German literary scene after 1989, but went bankrupt earlier this year under circumstances whose complexity would require a blog entry of their own to report; it’s now been sold and will resume operations next week.

From its beginnings (and until 1989 at least) Aufbau was associated with a communist and then socialist worldview, having been a product of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural association for the democratic renewal of Germany) established in June 1945 by the Soviet Military Administration. And so, amid the ruins of the bombed-out city of Berlin, the powers that had vanquished Germany now dictated that literary culture should be reborn there as part of the city’s and country’s new identity as a humanistic, democratic society. To this end, the Soviet military provided Aufbau with an operating budget as well as printing supplies, which by this time were difficult to come by.

Some of the first books published by Aufbau were written by authors who been forced to flee Nazi Germany, including Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Oskar Maria Graf, Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers and Wieland Herzfelde. Readers were hungry for the literature of this new era. Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz (The seventh cross) sold over 100,000 copies, and a book by Alexander Abusch about the wrong turn taken by German society sold 130,000.

The Goethe edition, Goethes Werke in Auswahl (selected works), printed in the old Fraktur typeface, edited by Paul Wiegler and with a moving foreword by Abusch, marked the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The Marfa copy bears the gift inscription "To his dear children on Christmas 1949. Their Papa"; did one of these children
eventually emigrate to Texas? Abusch’s foreword argues passionately for why Goethe was the author Germans urgently needed to be reading, because of the constitutive humanism of his work. The German middle class went astray in the middle of the 19th century, Abusch writes, becoming indentured to a capitalism whose logical consequence was imperialism. Goethe’s “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut” (Man should be noble, helpful and good) had given way to Nietzsche’s Herrenmoral (morality of the masters). The intent of the Volks-Goethe (Goethe for the people) collected in these volumes was to infuse the nascent German post-war society with a love not only for one’s neighbor, but also for foreigners and strangers—a love markedly lacking during the reign of National Socialism. It was time for Goethe’s Weltliteratur (world literature - a key concept in his work) to serve as a signpost for a new morality.

Robert Wilson does The Threepenny Opera

When Robert Wilson stages a play, you immediately know it’s him: harsh lighting, garish colors, fairgrounds sensibility. As often as not, his characters wind up looking like sideshow freaks; this approach can fall flat, but sometimes it shows us something about a play we hadn’t before noticed, as was the case with his 2000 staging of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck with the Betty Nansen Theater of Copenhagen, which traveled first to the Berliner Ensemble and then internationally, including a stop at BAM. The production also features a stunning original soundtrack of songs by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Certainly it was obvious all along that Büchner’s play was showing us how society and its villainous forces (in this case, amoral scientific experimentation and a concupiscent, power-drunk military) can push a fragile soul over the edge. But Wilson’s flashy, Broadway-lit production really brought this point home, even more so than Werner Herzog’s film, in which Klaus Kinski’s deranged portrait of the title character emphasized his own personal grappling with demons. One is all about interiority; the other, internalization. Herzog’s Woyzeck is a muttering, murderous nut; in Wilson’s version, it’s our fault he’s that way.

Now Wilson has taken on Bertolt Brecht’s signature musical The Threepenny Opera, and has done so at the very same theater which premiered Brecht’s own production of the play in 1928. Until Christmas 1995, the Berliner Ensemble was known as the artistic home of Heiner Müller, who staged many memorable productions there, including many Brecht plays; since 1999 it has been run by Claus Peymann, formerly of Vienna’s Burgtheater, who operates in a quite different theatrical tradition (his signature playwright is Thomas Bernhard). So when Wilson stages a play at the BE, it marks a temporary return to the theater’s traditional Brechtian-Müllerian mode.

What does Wilson do with Brecht? For one thing, his heavily powdered and painted characters all wind up looking like creatures straight out of Otto Dix, an effect heightened by the fact that the lighting often makes them look two-dimensional—the final scene winds up looking like a diorama of faces cut out of news- papers. (This photo courtesy of Colya Kärcher.) Many also wear costumes that give them distinctive silhouettes (Mrs. Peachum’s heavy hip padding, Polly’s triangular dress), and are performed according to the principles of Brecht’s gestic theater, with exaggerated gestures indicating emotion rather than expressing felt emotion. When Mrs. Peachum is supposed to look astonished, actress Traute Hoess opens her lipsticked mouth into an enormous O and frames it with hands splayed to either side. Christina Drechsler’s Polly, the dopey bride of gangster Macheath, speaks in a mincing little-girl voice punctuated by a silly little “boo!” Mac himself (Stefan Kurt) is oddly androgynous with his lipstick, lacquered hair and the corset beneath his suit jacket—he winds up looking like a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Joel Gray as the Emcee in Cabaret, a fair-enough point of reference (as is Otto Dix) for this late-Weimar play. The only character whose interpretation flat-out confused me is Jürgen Holtz’s Peachum, whom Wilson has dressed up with a stoop and yarmulke as a caricature of the money-grubbing Jewish merchant (like the pawnbroker who sells Woyzeck his knife). Certainly this is a stock comic character that would have gotten a laugh in Brecht’s own time, but in a post-WWII cultural context it jars. Perhaps Wilson means to draw our attention to the way in which socially acceptable stereotypes like these, even among the left, both in Germany and elsewhere, helped pave the way for the ascendance of National Socialism. If so, it’s a valid point, but since the production signals it with only a single costume choice and provides no specific point of view from which this figure is being perceived, it's hard to see exactly what Wilson is looking to achieve here.

In the world of Die Dreigroschenoper, you never get away from “It’s the economy, stupid!” The opening scene in Peachum’s shop is regularly punctuated by the cartoon sound effect of jangling coins which is repeated throughout the play, even in odd contexts, as when the jailor Macheath’s just bribed not to handcuff him drops the rope signifying the cuffs. Money is shown to be the principal motivation for most of the characters in the play, with the notable exception of Polly, who, we're shown, is just a ninny.

In general, Wilson’s version of Brecht’s play is heavy on the ideas and light on emotion; this is certainly in keeping with Brecht’s own stated intentions, though we’ve since learned that his plays appear at their best when pure epic theater is cut with psychological complexity, as in Martin Wuttke’s brilliant portrayal of Arturo Ui under Heiner Müller’s direction. But at moments a bit of character psychology does in fact slip in, particularly in my favorite scene in this production, the moment of Mac’s return to the bordello after escaping from prison, where he sings the Zuhälterballade (Ballad of the Pimp) in a duet with Jenny, the whore who betrayed him to the police, brilliantly played by Angela Winkler. While it’s clear in the context of the play she turned him in for the money, the song offers a psychological explanation (it details his abusive treatment of her under the guise of nostalgia), and Kurt and Winkler bring such depth of feeling to their performance of this powerful pas de deux that the play does start to feel as though it truly is about human beings—which goes a long way toward giving life to a production that exults in its own artifice.