More Light

However, there are still some places where the light threatened with extinction is protected and the flame can be fanned a little. Places that generate a community, dispel black-and-white thinking and can establish something to counteract the progressive polarisation of society. One of these places is undoubtedly the theatre which enables its audiences to immerse themselves collectively for a limited period in other lives and to expose themselves to alien or at times disturbingly familiar situations.

The acting on stage can bring us closer to attitudes that might perhaps be distant from our own in real life and thus increase individual audience members’ tolerance for ambiguity. At the same time, it also allows us to engage with conflicting, possibly even shocking positions with some empathy. That does not mean that we will end up adopting them for ourselves, quite the opposite. But the willingness to understand why someone might represent a position of that kind can clarify one’s own views while also increasing our willingness to enter into conversations.  

This essential theatrical attribute is one that many directors have considered in 2025. In previous years, the more overtly political productions in particular have mostly concentrated on activist points of view and thus attempted to win over the public for their ideas and viewpoints. This trend now appears to be weakening. Surprisingly many productions in 2025 have not emphasised their own position. Instead, their creators have cast an unreserved glance at all the political and social divisions and oppositions that characterise our present lives. These productions leave space for conservative as well as progressive points of view. In this way they go searching for the roots of the rifts in our society and counter these with a radical openness to divergent opinions. An openness that they also demand of their audience. There is no work this applies to more than Peer Gynt, the Gesamtkunstwerk divided across six days and lasting a total of 48 hours realised by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller and Trond Reinholdtsen at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin.

Vinge and Müller transformed Ibsen’s “Nordic Faust” in an equally magnificent and unflinching status report on our times. Working with the myths of American pop culture that were created in the period following the Watergate affair and the end of the Vietnam war and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, they trace the political and social trends that manifest themselves both in the re-election of Donald Trump and in the libertarian, anti-democratic ambitions of some tech billionaires. This Peer Gynt which recreates itself anew in every performance holds a mirror up to its audience. What it shows is anything but gratifying. Vinge and Müller deliberately provoke horror, which also led to some fierce discussions in our jury. But even the rejection that their aesthetic sometimes encounters reveals just as much about the state of art and of discourse in our time as the ten works invited to Theatertreffen.

From an aesthetic point of view, the distance between the Berlin Peer Gynt and Pınar Karabulut’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi die Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo at Schauspielhaus Zurich could hardly be greater. Where excess and perfectly orchestrated chaos reign with Vinge and Müller, Karabulut’s work is ruled by an almost classical severity. Together with the stage designer Michela Flück she has reconstructed the interiors of a Sicilian palazzo and within them faithfully re-awoken the world of the novel set in the Risorgimento. Her production carries its audience away to an epoch that is long gone. Here we immerse ourselves so deeply in the life of the prince Don Fabrizio and his family that it becomes practically impossible to witness the lethargy and melancholy of the aristocracy without recognising symptoms of our own situation. Karabulut’s precise analysis of the past becomes a clear-sighted evaluation of the present.

Jette Steckel pursues a very similar strategy in her stage adaptation of Klaus Mann’s Mephisto. At the Münchner Kammerspiele this “novel of a career” becomes a play about the power and more importantly the lack of power of (stage) artists. Thomas Schmauser plays Hendrik Höfgen not only as an unscrupulous careerist who is prepared to turn whichever way the political wind is blowing: he also discovers a conflicted idealist inside him who has made far too many compromises and as a result become a small cog in an inhuman system.

In this return to a theatre that attempts to present people in as many facets as possible, large ensemble works are experiencing a notable renaissance. Alongside Steckel’s Mephisto and Karabulut’s Il Gattopardo, this is evident in two more of the most remarkable productions from last year; Sebastian Hartmann’s interpretation of Carl Zuckmayer’s German fairy tale Der Hauptmann von Köpenick at Staatstheater Cottbus and Jan-Christoph Gockel’s Wallenstein. A slaughter feast in seven courses, the second production to be selected from the Münchner Kammerspiele. These works represent another central aspect of the theatre year 2025, which at many theatres was much influenced by the present wars. Jan-Christoph Gockel and his team engage specifically with Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine by drawing parallels between Schiller’s military leader from the Thirty Years War and Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenary group.

Sebastian Hartmann has chosen a less concrete but equally immediate approach for his free-associating exploration of Zuckmayer’s play. He frees it from all the sentimentality that has surrounded it since the famous film version starring Heinz Rühmann. As a result, this “German fairy tale” can once again be recognised as a subversive indictment of a society that has surrendered to the stranglehold of militarism and its hollow authoritarian mechanisms.

That the personal is political hardly seems to be much more than an excessively laboured commonplace. And yet: several of the works selected for this year’s Theatertreffen demonstrate that in a society that is becoming increasingly fragmented and progressively more polarised this apparently clichéd assessment is regaining importance and even explosive potential. This is most clearly evident in Julian Hetzel’s production premiered as part of the Wiener Festwochen | Free Republic of Vienna, Three Times Left is Right. Josse De Pauw and Kristien De Proost, a couple themselves, explore through performance the complex relationship between a cultural scholar who comes from the 1968 movement and his much younger wife, an author closely associated with the identitarian movement. This investigation produces some fascinating and irritating feedback between the personal and the political that pursues schematic thinking in simple ideological patterns to the point of absurdity.  

How much worldliness can be contained in stories that place private and personal experiences at their centre is revealed in two works by young directors. At Theater Basel the British theatre maker Jaz Woodcock-Stewart has adopted a surprising approach to The Glass Menagerie. This early Tennessee Williams play can appear antiquated and obsolete. This is primarily due to Williams’s depiction of the young Laura Wingfield as a woman who is incapable of taking control of her life. But that point is precisely where Jaz Woodcock-Stewart and the actor Antoinette Ullrich begin. Their Laura deliberately rejects the capitalist rationale of exploitation that has saturated a large portion of our personal relationships for a long time. Her passivity is a form of targeted resistance that makes this aged play seem highly contemporary.

At first sight Lucia Bihler’s pop-influenced directing style, characterised by bold colours and overt stylisation, hardly seems appropriate for Thomas Melle’s autofictional novel Die Welt im Rücken. However, the idiosyncratic and expansive, at times larger-than-life images that Bihler relies on in her adaptation at Schauspiel Stuttgart become a congenial expression for a life in an almost permanent state of emergency. Here the over-sized costumes designed by Victoria Behr that are worn by Paulina Alpen and her six lookalikes become a manifest symbol of the conflicts Melle’s protagonist is constantly drawn into with the normalised society around him.  

Besides Peer Gynt by Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, another work was created last year at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz that refuses to acknowledge any boundaries or norms and challenges the public to encounter our time dominated by crises and scenarios of doom with a new, open perspective. Florentina Holzinger’s A Year without Summer connects the decline of our plant that is being driven by climate change with the decline of the human body that stems from its natural ageing process. Holzinger and her ensemble of younger and older performers tackle this extremely sombre scenario with so much humour and such an overwhelming gesture of solidarity and sisterhood that one leaves the theatre with a reaffirmed belief in the future.  

On one hand this year’s selection is characterised by large ensemble works. On the other, it includes two very different solo works that demonstrate the vast spectrum the art of acting has to offer. Leonie Böhm’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else devised together with the actor Julia Riedler and first premiered at Volkstheater in Vienna and Sebastian Hartmann’s stage version of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Serotonin from Potsdam’s Hans Otto Theater restore one’s faith in the power of art in the most divergent ways imaginable. Julia Riedler, in the role of the young woman who is supposed to sell herself to preserve her family’s honour, succeeds in making the audience her allies. In this way she can kindle the utopian light of a society that can liberate itself from the destructive shackles of the patriarchy.  

Hope of this kind is entirely alien to Michel Houellebecq. His first-person narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste almost epitomises toxic masculinity, despising homosexuals, degrading women by treating them as objects and indulging in a cynical form of racism. He is the kind of person one wishes to have as little to do with as possible. But categorical dissociation like this is what lies at the heart of our ongoing polarisation. Sebastian Hartmann and the actor Guido Lambrecht counteract it in a simply miraculous way with this minimalist solo. Unlike Julia Riedler, Lambrecht does not attempt to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the audience. He simply spreads out Labrouste’s bungled life before them and with his calm tone and penetrating looks establishes an almost intimate contact with all those watching in the auditorium. For a good five hours the public stare into a human abyss and experience a genuine “ecce homo” moment, one that can make the darkening world seem a little brighter again.