Saving the soul of the play

'Directors' theatre' is not a popular term in Ireland, but two German productions at the Dublin Theatre Festival, which starts today, may change that, their directors tell Christine Madden

As you approach the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the first thing you notice, before its classical facade, is the massive, gate-shaped statue standing in front of it.

"Verweile doch," it proclaims, "stay a while" - a far more significant suggestion than it might seem at first glance.

To understand the implication of these two small words, you need to delve into Goethe's Faust, a text Germans all but memorise during their secondary-school years. When Faust makes his pact with the Devil, he sets out the stipulations for their fateful bet. Obsessed by his thirst for knowledge and experience, Faust agrees to hand over his soul to Mephistopheles on one condition: that his soul will not become forfeit until he, Faust, ceases striving and welcomes a single moment of human existence with the words "tarry a while, you are so fair" ("Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!"). The implication for the theatre-going public is: what is the real price of entertainment, of knowledge, of awareness, or the lack thereof?

An evening of theatre thus becomes more than a cultural event - it is a metaphysical act, an affirmation of one's humanity. The statue is the literary equivalent of Eve's apple.

Like Ireland, Germany has a long, strong tradition of theatre, with a considerable line-up of notable playwrights, such as Goethe (whose Faust became something of a flagship for German culture), Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Frank Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht. Yet Germany's theatre culture has continually looked west for motivation and ideas.

"Since Shakespeare, Anglo-Saxon theatre, or Anglo-Saxon literature, has consistently provided significant inspiration for the Continent," asserts Thomas Ostermeier, the artistic director of Berlin's Schaubühne.

Perhaps due to the language barrier, German theatre has not always travelled so well to Britain and Ireland, with important playwrights such as Schiller going largely unrecognised until recently. But during the Dublin Theatre Festival, which starts today, Irish audiences will get the opportunity to become better acquainted with the German theatre tradition, when two directors - Ostermeier and Michael Thalheimer (of Berlin's Deutsches Theater) - and their companies each present a critically celebrated production.

Drama in Germany has developed into what thespians in the English-speaking world often disparagingly refer to as "directors' theatre". Alongside the playwright, the director takes on the pivotal role in the presentation of a play. The director goes beyond strict adherence to the literal text to conjure up a unique, heightened interpretation of its underlying message. With minimal prodding, many English-language playwrights will report lurid experiences with a German director who "ruined" their plays. Yet the directors' theatre tradition in effect amplifies the audience's immediate, sensory experience of a work to reinforce and refresh a play's dramatic impact.

Both Thalheimer's Emilia Galotti, written by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a German author of the Enlightenment, and Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, seek to invent new theatrical languages through which to transmit and magnify the meaning of these classics for contemporary society. Although, for example, Thalheimer's production of Emilia Galotti has substantially cut back on the text, reducing the play to less than 90 minutes, he affirms that, for him, "despite everything, the spoken word on stage has an absolute meaning, even if I'm working with a radically edited text".

Thalheimer's directorial work has appeared at many leading German theatres; last year, he also took on the role of head director of the Deutsches Theater. According to the theatre's chief dramaturg, Oliver Reese, Thalheimer is "one of the few directors in Germany who has his own theatrical 'handwriting', which is widely copied. His work is very condensed - he doesn't use different rooms, nor portray detailed realistic aspects" in his direction. What emerges is a highly distilled, often intoxicating presentation of a piece that uses associative symbolic imagery, reminiscent of Jungian archetypes, to get at the feral power of a text lurking behind the eloquence of its words.

For some, Emilia Galotti might seem a strange choice for such a directorial approach. When the play was written in 1772, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the leading proponent and author of Germany's Enlightenment. His best-known work, Nathan the Wise, advocates reason and tolerance above religious prejudice, one of the major tenets of the Enlightenment, which was ignored in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His earlier piece, Emilia Galotti, described as a "bürgerliches Trauerspiel", or "tragedy of the common man", focuses on a young woman who has turned the head of the local prince shortly before her wedding to a nobleman, arranged by her father. The prince's henchman has her groom killed, and then seduces her.

At first sceptical about this classic's relevance for contemporary audiences, Thalheimer quickly recognised the immediate parallels between the environment of the piece and postmodern society.

"These are hugely stressed characters who can't find any peace," he says. "What we've got here is a gathering of egotists - with the exception of Emilia Galotti - who all vehemently pursue their own agendas without taking the time to reflect, and that has to lead to catastrophe."

To reinforce the tragic inevitability of the piece, Thalheimer enlisted the assistance of his usual team, designer Olaf Altmann and music director Bert Wrede. The minimalistic set - panelled walls leading like a funnel to a "black hole", as Thalheimer describes it, at the back of the stage - features only two props: an unread letter from the prince's dumped aristocratic lover, and the pistol she subsequently brings to take its place. Not only does the set function as a character, he says, but "more than anything else, the actors are also stripped bare in that space".

The music - a waltz from Shigeru Umebayashi's film, In the Mood for Love - underscores the relentless energy of the piece. In the hands of his colleague, Bert Wrede, the waltz plays over and over, like a broken record with an aesthetic and possibly malicious will of its own.

"It's a waltz of life, the rhythm of which is never interrupted, and which we can't escape," says Thalheimer.

Not far away, in the Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier has also had great success in reinterpreting classics. From staging pivotal works by contemporary authors, including Enda Walsh, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and David Greig at the Baracke, a studio theatre associated with the Deutsches Theater, he went on to become one of the artistic directors of the Schaubühne. In 2001, he brought his production of Brecht's Mann ist Mann to the Abbey Theatre, and he returns with Hedda Gabler, which follows his highly acclaimed version of A Doll's House, to which he gave the title Nora, in 2002.

Ostermeier's directorial "handwriting" veers in a different direction from Thalheimer's. To refresh the audience's experience of a classic, he transplants and redefines its plot into a contemporary idiom, often with scurrilous wit.

This works particularly well with a playwright such as Ibsen, whose works are so well-known that a director can count on audience familiarity with the piece, and so play with their comprehension, twist it, joke with it, and thrust it uncomfortably close to the bone.

"Here we've got an author at the turn of the 19th century with his criticism of a bourgeois society," says Ostermeier. "What I find shocking is that the ways of life and the desires and problems at the turn of the 19th century have returned so that we're actually revisiting the manners and ideals we've long since regarded as outdated. To make a painful point, I try to ask: haven't we become so conservative again that we've internalised these forms of bourgeois contentment and are reaching back to them?"

Enter Hedda, recently married to a professor of cultural history who has overstretched his academic's salary to buy a minimalist villa in a posh suburb of present-day Berlin. She disdainfully notes the tattiness of Aunt Julie's tennis visor on their modern couch as she swans around their living room in Juicy Couture-lookalike lounging outfit and stares at the rain dripping down the glass wall. To her dismay, Eilert Løvborg , her jilted boyfriend, has cleaned up his act and written a ground-breaking book on his laptop - too late for her.

The actors play out the contemporary incarnation of Ibsen's tragedy on an open, revolving set designed by Jan Pappelbaum. This sometimes provides a canvas for Sebastien Dupouey's video projections but primarily shows all parts of the set at all times - thanks also to a distorting set of mirrors angled against the ceiling - as well as indicating how very little privacy we have left in our lives. As the set revolves, and Hedda blasts designer vases with her handguns while other characters come and go, the play's sense of inevitable doom, of entrapment, of the foolish and materialistic - and ultimately unsuccessful - ways we invent to escape banality and boredom in our lives is driven home more starkly than ever.

Both productions promise a stimulating evening's theatre, and the directors of both are looking forward to their time in Ireland. Ostermeier, who has presented work in Dublin before, is pleased to be returning to the city.

"I'm keen to see how the piece works there because Ireland is an important theatre country," he says.

Thalheimer, who has been to Dublin twice and has visited Ireland several times, enjoys being in a country that "has such great writers. Every bar has pictures of at least seven Nobel Prize winners hanging on the walls - an unbelievable theatrical tradition in its literature".

The opportunity presented by a guest production, going in either direction, provides "an injection of reality from another culture", as Ostermeier says, a chance to draw new inspiration and move forward. As Goethe knew, it's never good to stand still too long.

Hedda Gabler is at the Abbey Theatre tomorrow and Sat at 7.30pm and on Sun at 2.30pm. Emilia Galotti is at the Gaiety Theatre on Oct 12-14 at 7.30pm. Both are in German with English surtitles