Black is the New Black

How does an artistically ambitious theatre react? Often by looking back. For example, when Anita Vulesica stages Georges Perec’s 1968 radio play “Die Maschine” (The Machine) in Hamburg, there are no smartphones or algorithms cutting up Goethe’s poem “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Wanderer’s Nightsong). Instead, we see the stage filled by a cumbersome structure that probably comes quite close to what the French author thought technology was at the time. In Luise Voigt’s Munich production, Bertolt Brecht’s “Señora Carrar’s Rifles” (first performed in 1937) gives the impression that we are seeing and hearing a film from the period in which the play – that debates war and weapons, courage and capitulation – originated. Such is the perfection of the black and white illusion of stage, lighting and costumes, so authentic does the creaking language of the actors seem. 

For Meryl Tankard, reaching back into history is the entire raison d’être of the work with which she has been invited to Theatertreffen 2025. The cast member of the historic ensemble piece “Kontakthof”, with which choreographer Pina Bausch revolutionised her genre, brings back eight of her 20 former colleagues in the original stage design. Together they “re-enact” the production, which is unforgettable – for fans of Tanztheater Wuppertal, but visibly even more so for the bodies of the company members, despite the fact that they are now 46 years older than they were in the premiere. Television images of their younger alter egos are superimposed on the proceedings like holograms and drag the past into the present. 

Meanwhile the present refuses to be kept out: it sneaks in relentlessly all over the place. For Luise Voigt, at first in the form of digital glitches in the vintage Brecht and then with its loud collapse. “Würgendes Blei” (Choking Lead), a lyrical text by the contemporary author Björn SC Deigner, is a sequel that starts directly where the play ends: Señora Carrar’s rifles turn into machine guns and make their own voices heard. Similarly, Meryl Tankard is not content to merely reproduce the past: subtle distinctions between the documented “Kontakthof” material and the live events on stage reveal where the “echoes of ’78” reach their limits. And while they once confusingly chattered away across each other about hooking up, the nine members of the company now reflect on what it is like as 70-year-olds to live and love in our time.

To put it another way: many of the works that caught the attention of the jury for Theatertreffen 2025 are concerned with legacies. Partly quite literally in terms of property, when Christoph Marthaler’s wealthy closed society at Theater Basel worship the ashes of their ancestors and administer “Doktor Watzenreuthers Vermächtnis” (Dr. Watzenreuther’s Legacy). Or in “Bernarda Alba’s House” when, following the death of her second husband, the matriarch has to consider how she is going to keep her numerous daughters in check.

At a first glance, however, it is astonishing how significant immaterial legacies are in the productions that were discussed and invited: for example the protagonist in the adaptation of Dinçer Güçyeter’s autofictional novel “Unser Deutschlandmärchen” (Our German Fairytale), who, after his Turkish family arrived in Germany, could or would not become the man his mother hoped he would be. His father had certainly never succeeded – and in his spirited adaptation of the material the director Hakan Savaş Mican did not even cast him. As well as this production, invited from Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, two of Mican’s other adaptations of migrant stories also caught the jury’s eye in 2024: “Archiv der Sehnsüchte” (Archive of Longing) after Deniz Utlu (Staatsschauspiel Hannover) and “Vatermal” (Birth Mark) after Necati Öziri (also at the Maxim Gorki Theater). Here is someone working to build a repertoire that has long been neglected in German culture.  

Legacy – in this case in the sense of a family history – is also an issue for Connor, the main character in Sam Max’s drama “Double Serpent”, given its world premiere by Ersan Mondtag at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden in a compelling and claustrophobic setting. As this work is closer to a mystery-thriller than most others in the Theatertreffen, I would recommend knowing as little as possible about it in advance, so will only say this much: here it is the father whose quirks come back in the present to haunt the son, while Kim de l’Horizon’s “Blutbuch” (literally: Blood Book, but also a Purple Beech tree) extends its branches in the direction of the mother and grandmother – or, as the text calls them: Meer und Grossmeer – “sea and great sea.”

“Blutbuch” has been one of the texts of the hour ever since the novel won the German Book Prize in 2022. Jan Friedrich’s Magdeburg adaptation follows the novel’s five-part structure, applies different narrative forms for the individual sections and finds impressive, at times iconic, images for this modern classic, with the fantastic performers quoting and producing variations on the appearance and dress sense of the author and narrator Kim. Leonie Böhm goes one stage further in her version, which was also considered by the jury: here Kim de l’Horizon leaves the plot of “Blutbuch” behind and takes to the stage in person with members of the Schauspielhaus Zürich ensemble to trace the legacy of earth created by the great seas in a “Blutstück” (Blood Play). In the most memorable scene of this strongly interactive production, de l’Horizon asks one of the audience for their support in the event of being attacked by the right or whatever LGBTQI+phobic direction. 

And this is another distinctive feature of the theatre of 2024: the multiple identities on stage continue to increase. Diversity is the theme of and what drives many of the works but often it is also just simply there, while at the same time being severely endangered by regressive developments outside the theatre bubble (these include but do not end with reduced funding). Both “Double Serpent” and “Blutbuch” are by non-binary writers in whose texts it is largely taken for granted that love and sexuality will take place beyond binary, heteronormative boundaries. And in “SANCTA” Saioa Alvarez Ruiz celebrates an epoch-making mass as “the first lesbian pope”. Florentina Holzinger’s opera performance was probably the 2024 production that generated the most headlines outside the arts pages – from Schwerin to Vienna, and from Stuttgart to Berlin. Some accused the production of offending religious sensitivities, nevertheless it extends the ideas of its underlying work, Paul Hindemith’s one-act “Sancta Susanna”, into the present in the most religious terms. And is really good fun.  

Nevertheless, the first impression is not wrong: this year is a gloomy one. Unfair, but true: where there is a small death, a greater one will also lurk. It strikes sporadically on stage, more strongly than perhaps expected in Alice Birch’s pessimistic take on Federico García Lorca’s drama “Bernarda Alba’s House” (which doesn’t exactly radiate joy itself) – given an almost intolerably intense production by Katie Mitchell at the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus. But then it also strikes in real life: “ja nichts ist ok” (yes nothing is ok) by Pollesch/Hinrichs would become the last work of the great author and director René Pollesch. It premiered just about two weeks before his death at Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, sadly and perfectly encapsulating the mood of unease, world-weariness and the end of days that characterised the first half of the year.  The colour black also predominated in works by Sebastian Hartmann in Dresden, by Timofej Kuljabin in Karlsruhe, and by Christopher Rüping and Ulrich Rasche in Bochum, which can all be found on our shortlist.

Much of what was felt here has intensified since René Pollesch’s death. If the end of the world is looming, or at the least end of our own lives, then the question of what we leave behind becomes an urgent priority. Which brings us back to legacy. And to another theme that gets heads scratching and dominates the media, a theme that now seems to have pushed the climate crisis that was omnipresent a few years ago off our stages: Artificial Intelligence. 

Ahh! Err! True, it’s dreadful, but it’s no use: humanity has to deal with this phenomenon, at least art does: it is here to stay. At the Berliner Ensemble, director Kay Voges is taking advantage of it. With the help of a horde of video artists and, yes, artificial intelligences he has moulded Sibylle Berg’s 700-page tome “RCE #RemoteCodeExecution” into an overwhelming flood of images that spectacularly kills off any hope of a better world inside 72 minutes.

There is one drama that gives an impression of what might happen to all the images in the future while exploring new avenues formally, technically and in terms of content. “[EOL]. End of Life – Eine virtuelle Ruinenlandschaft” by the group DARUM (Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche) from Vienna, is concerned with our digital legacy. Faced with the question of what out of the millions upon millions of unused data online is useless and what ought to be saved in a future metaverse, the production we have invited falls back on human intelligence: that of the audience. With the aid of VR-goggles, it travels to virtual chasms that really get to the analogue substance of things. DARUM allows itself to imagine interactions with digitality that go beyond the trivial.

However, another contribution to this year’s Theatertreffen delivers the most truthful comment on Artificial Intelligence: Anita Vulesica’s production “Die Maschine oder: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” dissects at full speed and absolutely hilariously what happens to the delicate language of an artwork like a Goethe poem when it is exposed to the soulless grasp of a computer. An apt satire on ChatGPT avant la lettre and as a result, despite its cheerily ironic vintage feel, an unexpected play for today. Incidentally, “Die Maschine” also delights as a contrasting note to the minor key that prevails overall. Looking ahead: as long as we keep our eyes our polyphonous theatre culture, it can be a joy after all.