A Sampling of Colognes Smaller Stages

Erik Abbott
Although perhaps not as well known (at
least to Americans) for its theatre as is Berlin or
Munich, like most larger German cities, Cologne
has a rich and vibrant theatrical scene. There are, of
course, the big heavily-subsidized stages, as well as
a plethora of Kabarett spaces, specializing in either
traditional monologue shows (what would in the
States probably be termed solo-performance, but
which in the Rhineland seem perhaps more likely to
be related to Carnival Btenreden), or musical-variety offeringsor bothand a big commercial
house with long-run Broadway-style musicals. And
then there are the many smaller stages that are scattered throughout the city, some of which often present Kabarett pieces, but that also produce a wide
variety of plays. An extended mid-winter stay in
Cologne allowed me to view a couple of offerings at
two of these theatres. (I had planned to see three,
but the production of The Full Monty that was running was cancelled on account of an actors illness
the night I tried to attend.)

Theater am Sachsenring and Theater der

Keller are a few blocks and one Strassenbahn stop
apart in the Sdstadt section of the city. Both have
small, hundred-seat or so houses, and tiny stages.
Both have long-established reputations for presenting challenging work and have developed loyal
audiences.
I was delighted to get a chance to see director Meinhard Zangers production of Gotthold
Ephraim Lessings Minna von Barnhelm (a play Id
not previously seen produced) at the nearly halfcentury old (founded 1955) Theater der Keller.
Lessing has been in vogue throughout Germany this
seasonowing to the 275 th anniversary of his
birthand Zangers production had received a fair
amount of notice, owing in no small part to actress
Anja Carolin Pohl, who played Minnas serving-girl
Franziska, having received the 2003 PUCK Prize,
presented annually by the Theatergemeinde Kln to
the seasons most promising up-and-coming actor.

Herbert Wandschneider and Peter Schwab in Meinhard Zangers production of Minna von Barnhelm at Theater der Keller.
Photo Copyright: Hydra Productions, www.hydraproductions.de

59

An enormously appealing actress, Pohl won the

PUCK not only for her work in Minna, but also for
performances in Between Worlds and Mnemosyme:
Baptism by Fire. In Minna, the elfin Pohl brings a,
well, for lack of a better word, puckish demeanor to
the sidekick/confidant/servant Franziska. She is
very funny in a play that is hardly a laugh riot on the
page, making the most of what could be a thankless
role. Her Franziska is as amused by her mistresss
machinations to win over her beloved, the stoic-tothe-point-of-icy Major von Tellheim (Herbert
Wandschneider), as she herself is ultimately attracted to the Majors former guard, Paul Werner
(Alexander Hanfland). She seems to be a co-conspirator not only with Minna (Antje Mairich), but
with the audience as well. Though Zanger leaves
Lessings text basically intact, save some judicious
nips and tucks (like the redundant and tedious scene
with Minnas uncle), there are a couple of inserted
lines; in case we missed them, Franziska turns
immediately out and, with a knowing smirk, advises: Thats not from Lessing.
Pohl is hardly the only bright spot in this
smartly staged production. Zanger has pulled
together a skilled ensemble that performs extremely
well together. Mairich, a lithe beauty, is splendid as
Minna.
She is fiercely determined, willful,
unapologetically deceptive, yet at once tender and
gracious. Never do we doubt her love for
Tellheimthough we might wonder what she sees
in the big lunknor can we imagine that she wont
somehow get her way. Wandschneider manages to
convey a man who seems almost afraid of his own
emotions. So thoroughly repressed is his Tellheim
that the eventual melting of his frost, though
inevitable,
is
surprising
and
moving.
Wandschneider is masterful at letting only the
slightest glimmer of Tellheins real feelings show
through his practiced faade. The Major is a man
disappointed and wounded--literally and symbolically. He imagines himself crippled, his injured arm
cradled in a sling, but he leaves no doubt that his
real handicap is emotional. As his confidant/underling, Paul, Hanfland is all amusing swagger. He
misses war, apparently thinking it was a grand
adventure, and aches to join the next one battling the
Turks. Still, he is a man of duty, and he insists on
continuing to be of service. Immediately drawn to
Franziska, who, of course, is miles ahead of his
charmingly awkward flirting, he is from their first
exchanged glance greatly outmatched, their ultimate
pairing obvious to everyone but him.

This charming younger generation of suitors and would-be lovers is juxtaposed by the
Landlord (Reinhold Schulat), Tellheims servant
Just (Peter Schwab), and the beggar Riccaut de la
Marlinire (Bernd Reheuser), who appears in a brief
but humorous cameo, which mainly serves to
demonstrate what a good heart Minna possesses.
This trio of elders forms a nice counterpoint to the
emotional/hormonal antics of the younger quartet.
Schulats Landlord is an unctuous schemer, trying to
play every guest in his inn against the other, if it will
inflate his profits. Just is the cantankerous servant,
often unaware of what is really going on, and
Schwab strikes just the right notes in his gruff portrayal, deftly avoiding the overplaying that is an
easy trap in such roles. The plays first dialogue is
the Landlord and Just bantering. This scene is set
up in a beautifully disturbing opening image: the
Landlord is backlit moving cautiously around a
room full of what, at first glance, appear to be sleeping bodies. But only Just wakes up, and we are left
wondering whether this inn has become a morgue;
Lessing set his play at the end of the Seven-Years
War and the tragedy of war is never too far out of
mind in this comedy. Tellheim, after all, would perhaps today be suspected of suffering from PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. Lessing rarely avoids a
lesson of some sort in his plays, and Zanger is effective at keeping the play rooted in the aftermath of
war without ever letting it bog down in finger-wagging or too much earnestness. The inn itself appears
to be in a state of reconstruction, with plastic sheeting tacked up on the walls. Petra Buchholzs design
evokes a sense of a new start, but one that is sputtering. It is as if this placeand by extension, these
peoplehave lived through something horrible, and
getting back on track is going to take some time.
The characters are costumed in modernish dress
(also designed by Buccholz), Tellheim and Paul still
in their military garb, Minna and Franziska stylish
but never ostentatious. Their independent natures
are reflected as surely in their slacks and jacket traveling ensembles as their mens dependence still on
their military identities are in their uniforms.
Tellheim is never even able to unbutton his somber
grey officers trench coat. It is symbolic of his own
subdued, even repressed, feelings.
Zanger wrings as many interesting pictures
out of the tiny space as likely anyone could, and the
production moves along at a brisk pace. The humor
takes a while to get rolling (I think this often seems
to be the case with Lessings comedies) but never is
60

Anja Carolin Pohl as Franziska in Meinhard Zangers production of Minna von Barnhelm at Theater der Keller.
Photo Copyright: Hydra Productions, www.hydraproductions.de

the audience left too confused that this is indeed a

romantic comedy. The plot is pretty thin. Tellheim
is broke, due to his having covered other peoples
debts during the war, and is having no luck being
repaid. He feels he cannot allow himself to be with
Minna now: he has no money, he is crippled, and he
has lost his commission; he is no longer worthy of
such a woman. She regards this all as piffle and sets
about re-convincing him of the depth of their love.
Of course, in the end, he is restored both to his post
and his former wealthwe never really doubt that
he will bethe ring she gave him that he pawned is
returned, etc., but it is the emotional journey
between that is important. Zanger and his cast handle the inevitability of the story with aplomb, never
letting it stumble on itself, and the production is
smart enough to avoid any effort to force the play to
make a statement about war, war-profiteering, or
any number of other things that surely must have
been tempting. Too, we like these characters
enough that we root for them and we are relieved
when the good Major and Minna finally embrace. It
is finally a breezy and thoroughly enjoyable
evening, a pleasant diversion.

Theater am Sachsenring has been led since

1987 by Director Joe Knipp and Hannelore Honnen.
(An inaugural evening of Brecht songs performed
by the trio Zinnober, of which Knipp is a member,
was produced in 1986.) Committed to a theatre of
authors, including such luminaries as Havel,
Dostoyevsky, Schnitzler, Flaubert, Lorca, Shaw,
Heine, andfor the first time this springAlbee,
the theatres repertoire has included numerous new
plays and adaptations. It is also home to Himmel
und d (heaven and earth in the local dialect) a
regular cabaret celebrating Cologne culture and
dialect, and often hosts evenings of music by
Zinnober and other groups like Margo und die
Banditten. Last season, Theater am Sachsenring coproduced, with actor/director Hans Kieseier, a highly successful production of Peter Weiss Die
Ermittlung, which was staged readers theatre style
in a hall at a local courthouse. (The previous years
echt brecht was also staged there.) Another huge hit
for the theatre in 2003 was Knipps direction of a
stage adaptation of the 1998 Thomas Vinterberg
film, Das Fest, which, in addition to critical
acclaim, won the Cologne Theatre Prize for 2003.
61

In 1992, the theatre began long working

associations with two artists, the English playwright
and actor Tony Dunham, himself a co-founder of the
troupe Ship of Fools in the UK, and the German
Kabarettist Thomas Reis. Dunham has authored
several shows that debuted at Theater am
Sachsenring, including echt brecht and Stumm.
Additionally, Dunham has been the central figure of
English-language shows the theatre has periodically
produced, most recently, the music-hall-esque TaRa-Ra-Boom in 2000 and 2001.
Reis has developed and debuted seven
Kabaretts at Theater am Sachsenring, starting with
Als die Mnner noch Schwnze hatten (When Men
Still had Penises). With the exception of 1995s Die
Weihnachtsmnner (The Christmasmen), in which
Reis was paired with Andreas Kunze, these have
been solo shows, and all of them have been directed
by Knipp. Reiss seventh piece for Theater am
Sachsenring, Gibts ein Leben ber Vierzig?
which Honnen told me she thinks represents his best
workopened last fall, and was brought back for a
sold-out New Years Eve gala. Thanks to the graciousness of Knipp and Honnen, I was able to see an
added matinee that afternoon. (In the interest of disclosure, I should state here that I worked as an assistant at the theatre for a few months in 2001, during
time Reiss previous piece, So wahr ich Gott helfe!,
was produced.)
Reiss performances follow a simple staging pattern: he stands alone, in a suit and tie, more
or less center on a bare stage, and addresses the
audience directly. He rarely moves from this spot,
and never very far when he does. The show outwardly resembles stand-upwhich Reis has performed in New York, billing himself as the ugly
Germanbut its complexities and verbal dynamics far exceed any comic one is likely to see.
Indeed, Ive never encountered an exact parallel to
Reiss work; or indeed even to the tradition of which
he is a part. John Leguizamo or the late great
Spalding Gray, perhaps, and maybe a few other solo
performers, but no one I have ever seen engages the
audience with the degree of verbal intricacy that is
integral to Reiss work. German humor is rife with
Wortspiel (wordplay) although such an innocuous-sounding term hardly describes what Reis is

doing. The titles give a hint of what is to be expected: So wahr ich Gott helfe! translates as so truly I
help God, a twist of the oath one takes in court.
Schwnze also means tails, suggesting an evolutionary theme (although the cartoon flying phallus
on the postermake Reis real meaning fairly clear.)
Similarly, Gibts ein Leben ber Vierzig? is, literally, is there a life about forty? rather than after.
Reis spins such verbal webs with dizzying speed,
one piling on another, blending together, splitting
apart and wandering off on new and ever more complicated tangents, before finally coming to rest at
some point near where he started, if not smack on
top of it. The word gymnastics are daunting even
for a native speaker, and they frankly often seem
insurmountable for anyone else. (I ask a lot of questions when I see a Reis show.)
As skilled a writer and wordsmith as he is,
this is still a performance form. Fortunately, Reis
excels in this capacity as well. Tall, with long dark
hair and a face that is somehow simultaneously
deadpan and elastic, Reis also has an arsenal of
character voices and a keen ear for impersonation.
In So wahr ich Gott helfe! Reis treated the audience
to spot-on mimicry of Helmut Kohl (as an inebriated deity), Erich Honneker, and Willi Brandt. Knipp
skillfully mines the dense material, guiding the
presentation to maximum comic effect. The depth
of experience these two have had working together
shows in the sure and steady result. Vierzig is, in
essence, a comic, even frantic, rumination about
middle age. Reiss text takes on the strange vagaries
of aging in the modern world: elderly children and
childish old folks, pierced grandmothers, etc. His
commentary is always sharp and ironic; under the
surface cynicism lies a profound bemusement at the
absurdity of our present, as well as a sort of mocking inevitability about our future. It is smart, challenging theatre, often hilarious, relying on a spectacle of words and voices, delivered by a gifted performer whose presentation is outrageous and subtle,
silly and remarkably wise at the same time. Reis
ultimately seems to be saying that the stages of life
that follow youth perhaps comprise a journey that is
difficult to take, but it is one that may just be worth
the effort. Reiss observations about it most certainly are.

62

New Names, New Plays, New Ways:

Matthias Hartmann and the Bochum Schauspielhaus
Roy Kift
The man is 40, tall, slightly balding,
dressed in an elegant suit, serious yet friendly,
remote but approachable. He might be taken for a
banker or a salesmanhe initially trained as such
were he not currently the most successful German
theatre director in Germany. Matthias Hartmann is
the Intendant of the Bochum Schauspielhaus in the
Ruhrgebiet, a playhouse with a long and proud tradition of top directors from the founder Saladin
Schmidt, through Peter Zadek, Claus Peymann,
Frank-Patrick Steckel, and Leander Haussmann.
And a playhouse that has often claimed to be the
unofficial National Theatre of Germanywith justification.
In 2000 Hartmann took over the helm from
the luckless Leander Haussman, a former East
German director whose adolescent antics had emptied the playhouse of its regular patrons and failed to
win the new younger audiences he had claimed to

be looking for. And now just three seasons on the

playhouse is booming once more with high-class
productions of classics and new plays of all genres.
The mixture might sound conventional but it works
with audiences and critics alike. Since Hartmanns
arrival seasonal audience figures have risen from
108,000 to 237,000 and the theatre figures high in
the list of the critics favorite venues.
Much to Hartmanns credit new plays have
not been automatically dispatched to the smallest
studio venue but are regularly featured on the two
main stages seating 800 and 400 spectators alike.
Appropriately enough he opened his era in Bochum
with his own production of Peter Turrinis play The
Opening, at the same time bringing a new young
star with him to the town. Michael Maertens has an
uncanny knack for comedy that he exploits to the
full with his adoring fans. Hes the somewhat helpless, friendly, son-in-law type whos always stum-

Matthias Hartmanns production of Waiting for Godot at the Bochum Schauspielhaus. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

63

Hartmanns production of The Directors. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

bling into hopeless situations. It was therefore no

surprise that Hartmann cast him as one of the tramps
in Becketts Waiting For Godot, a masterly production in a brilliant setting by Karl Ernst Hermann
(one of Peter Steins stalwarts during his time at the
Schaubhne), whose metaphoric playing area consisted of a long plank balanced tentatively on top of
a large white ball. The image worked particularly
well because the plank-like road see-sawed slowly throughout the evening, not only evoking associations with a circus act but also emphasising a continuous and delicate imbalance that could tip the
players off the world at any moment. Hartmanns
idea of casting a major TV talk-show entertainer,
Harald Schmidt, in the role of Lucky was not only a
major PR coup. It attracted a whole new generation
of TV fans into the theatre to take a look at a play
that was once considered to be at the outer reaches
of the avant-garde. Even better, his production
avoided the deadly German propensity to heaviness
and significance, preferring to play the piece in the
spirit of the author as a macabre musical-hall
endgame. Here Maertens gauche helplessness was
exploited to the full by Ernst Sttzner, an ex-

Schaubhne stalwart, as a scrawny, meditative

philosopher, the scurrilous Fritz Schediwy as Pozzo,
and Schmidt as a seriously scared Lucky. The result
was a successful combination of depth and entertainment rarely seen in the German theatre that put
the theatre firmly back on the national map.
Hartmann has been criticized in some quarters as being all things to all men, but this is no bad
quality in an Intendant in charge of a civic theatre
with a responsibility to cater for all sections of the
public who provide the taxes without which the theatre could not hope to survive. This chameleon-like
quality means that it is difficult to pin him down
with a particular style of directing, unless meticulous professionalism and a certain elegancehe
hates the word but it fits, so why not?can be
called a style. The man is far from being a died-inthe-wool conservative either in his choice of plays
or styles. One of his early attempts (May 2002) to
test out more unconventional playing spaces and
new media insertions took his audiences up to the
fourth floor administrative level of the local civic
savings bankthe ideal venue for a play about
unscrupulous, power-hungry, money grabbing capi64

talist directors of an armaments company.

The Directors, by the French dramatist
Daniel Besse, premiered in Paris where it won a
major award. The play is a bitter comedy of manners exposing the hypocritical back-stabbing and
fawning in the upper echelons of business where
fortunes, like the stock market, can grow and collapse within seconds, and nobody is sure who is
cooking the books, taking bribes, or badmouthing
colleagues to promote their own ends. Sure enough
the play ends with one of the mobbed protagonists
putting a bullet through his head. The plays theme
and treatment reminded me a little of the marvellous
Glengarry Glen Ross but here the characters and
dialogue are smoother and, for that reason, at times
even more brutal. Not content with staging the play
in a non-theatrical venue, Hartmann chose to set the
different scenes in three different rooms. But
instead of moving the audience from room to room
with the action, Hartmann chose to make us stay in
our appointed room and view the outside scenes
as live video transmissions. This served not only to
emphasize the voyeuristic nature of the event, it
simultaneously alienated the action and the characters and emphasized the inflated unreality of the

multinational wheeling and dealing. The play was

an ideal vehicle for Harald Schmidt to star in in his
own right, this time live and magnified on screen as
the vice-President of the company imposing his will
and opinions on wine, women, or business statistics
on a troop of fawning subordinates. A hugely entertaining evening. Nonetheless I left with the nagging
feeling that, in the final analysis, the content of the
play was swamped by the media that purported to
serve it and the hype which surrounded it. Indeed
the author might have been more effectively served
by a conventional staging.
One year later in March 2003 Hartmann
further developed his use of video projections and
multimedia in an adaptation of Christian Krachts
novel 1979, staged in one of the theatres rehearsal
rooms, a bleak white tiled colliers washroom in a
disused coal mine on the edge of town. In the
course of two hours the story takes us from the chic
interior of a rich villa in Teheran via Tibet to an
internment camp in China. The cast of three male
actors change roles continuously, aided and accompanied by six black-clad technicians/cameramen/
computer operators and by a single musician cum
singer who is responsible for sound effects and

Hartmanns produtcion of 1979. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

65

some wonderful atmospheric songs. The story is

pretty straightforward. A rich, bored, coke-snuffing,
alcoholic dandy stops off in Iran shortly before the
fall of the Shah on a world tour with his lover, a
weak-willed interior designer. After the dandy
Maik Solbach as one of the slimiest, most sadistically nauseating characters I have witnessed on or
off stageis found in a pool of blood on a sofa
(what happened is never made clear) and subsequently dies in a filthy public hospital, his friend
flees from the revolutionary upheavals in Teheran to
make atonement for his sins by walking clockwise
round a holy mountain in Tibet. There he is mistaken for an American agent by Chinese soldiers, consigned to a correction camp, tortured into submission and finally dies of maltreatment, starvation and
radiation. So far, so bad. As if to emphasize the
horrific unreality there are no ordinary sets to mark
the change between scenes. Instead Hartmann and
his team bombard us with an unceasing stream of
videos, projections, back projections, frozen projections, distorted projections (at one point the bloodstreamed face of the dying dandy is twisted into a
Francis Bacon-like nightmare, and at another the
architect flees through the revolutionary crowds in
the city streets), and simple but brilliant technical
tricks such as the projection onto a screen of a toy
tank running along the stage floor to give us the
impression of a real tank driving across a desolate
landscape. Actors build mountains from dirt and
sand (similarly magnified and projected) and place
toy concentration camps on piles of dirt. These are
in turn tracked by cameras to give us the impression
we are arriving there after a weeks exhausting journey on a prison inmates train. Even the characters
lack any sense of permanence. For at times the
actors step outside their roles to comment on them
or others. Or one actor reads the text into a microphone whilst the actual character mouths it. At one
point a puppet with inflated limbs and a blank
stuffed head is suspended in the air. The real face of
an actor is then projected onto the blank stuffed
head, which is battered with fists and the butt of a
pistol before having its limbs broken and severed
with sickening cracks as the air is released from the
burst balloons within. All this is accompanied by
the kneeling actor in question howling in contorted
agony beside it before being wiped out completely
to a repetitive monastic chant of It wasnt really so
bad. This is cynicism writ large. For the action as
a whole takes place in a world devoid of any civilized, moral, social, or legal values. Sadism holds

us in its sway in this stomach-wrenching journey

into hell. The undisputed brilliance of Hartmanns
overall conception and staging, in which film,
music, text (no adapter is given), and acting complement and enhance each other to perfection, is
mind-boggling and points the way forward to completely new dimensions of staging, the like of which
I have only seen in modern dance productions.
The loss of identity in the global village is
taken to even greater extremes in Hartmanns third
major multi-media production, Electronic City,
which premiered in the Kammerspiele on 4 October
2003. The 34-year-old author, Falk Richter, says the
following about his play: The main characters no
longer know in what city they happen to be at any
moment. They are businessmen who spend their
lives in airport lounges and international hotel
chains, public spaces which look the same all over
the world. They merge, flexibilize, rationalize, they
have lost all sense of time and space, they speculate
on the stock exchanges, and their heads are filled
with nothing but numbers and codes which have lost
all connection with concrete reality. They cannot
say what the result of their work is for it is a diffuse
numerical noise in the global financial markets, they
can no longer say what makes them happy or unhappy, they maximize their working performance with
good psycho-pharmaceutics and at some time or
other they are wrenched out of the world by a heart
attack Alienation has become a part of everyday
life.
If all this sounds Germ-manic-ally intellectual and utterly incapable of giving birth to anything
remotely theatricaltheres worse to come, so read
onI can only congratulate Falk Richter and his
director Matthias Hartmann for pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat in a magically trance-making multi-media production that goes one step further than even the achievements of 1979. The first
thing we notice as we enter the auditorium is that
half the front row has been claimed by a headphoned computer technician behind a massive board
of electronic buttons and knobs. The three sides of
the stage are dominated by large rectangular strips
of white gauze, behind which are benches peopled
with ten figures in white: five men, five women.
The gauzes are used for still and video projections,
behind and in front of which the actors perform.
The text is practically devoid of dialogue. There are
no self-contained scenes and only two identifiable
characters, Tom and Joy, played alternatively by the
different actors, sometimes in chorus, sometimes
66

Hartmanns production of The Optimists. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

individually. Everything is fragmented and fragmentary even down to the voices, which as in 1979,
are sometimes projected over microphones from the
back to the mouthings of the actors on stage. Tom
is a modern manager, stressed to the limits of his
being as he rushes from one anonymous airport
lounge and hotel room/corridor/lobby to the next,
and juggling statistics, figures, and codes into some
sort of last-minute coherence in time for hasty cell
phone calls and business meetings at all ends of the
globe in a breathless attempt to keep his high-flying
life from crashing into oblivion. There is no time
for any private transactions or leisure of any kind.
Joy lives in a similar fashion. Every few days she
switches her jobfrom call center to warehouse to
the cash check-out (also in an airport lounge)at
the mercy of a globalized liberal economy that
forces her to run faster to stop standing still or
falling back completely. Both characters are on the
edge of collapse. And when Tom finally gets utterly lost in a hotel corridor at the same time as the
computer on Joys cash desk crashes before an
aggressive line of harassed businessmen rushing for
their flights, Richter and Hartmann pull the carpet
from under our feet by revealing them as fictional

characters in a kind of soap opera. A directorial

voice booms down to Tom to repeat the action once
more because something seems to have gone
wrong. Indeed, no one seems to know any more
who or where they are in reality. In such a universe
are we still people or simply puppets in the hand of
unknown forces? Sometimes virtual images of the
actors are projected onto the live figures, sometimes
pieces of body are detached, projected elsewhere
and/or mixed with others. Sometimes we seem to
be in the middle of a television interview.
Sometimes figures are brought together by means of
the computer mixer. We are all, actors and audiencecaught up inextricably in the media net. And
in the midst of this nightmare jungle we witness the
two protagonists calling to each other across the
void: Tom, Tom, call me please. Help. Joy, Joy,
Joy, fuck this shit, where are you, I love you. As the
play nears its end we hear Joy once again through a
projected snowstorm of figures and sound: On the
Tuesday after next Ill be in terminal four next to
gate 65 at Amsterdam airport for seven hours, I
looked, youre getting in on the same evening from
Madrid and flying on to Toronto via Brussels but if
you could switch your flight to go via Amsterdam
67

Hartmanns production of Something Beautiful. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

and take a later connection I could fix my shift to

have a break between 23 hours and 23. 30 exactly
and then we could meet up in the KLM lounge to
talk to each other live at last, Id so much love just
to lay my head on your shoulder for a moment
Some minutes later the play comes to a halt with the
desperate and uncertain assertions: Joy: Well
make it alright. Tom: Yes. Well make it. END.
Before the first performance in Bochum,
Hartmann came forward to ask for our indulgence
should there be any unforeseen technical crashes.
The show ran perfectly. Unfortunately. For my
only reservation about this remarkable evening of
horrific pleasure was that neither Hartmann nor
Richter went far enough. Had they dared to take
their premises to their logical conclusion they would
have been praying for an unforeseen technical
crash. Indeed they would have allowed for and even
programmed one or more crashes into the show and
left both technicians and actors to find their way out
of the chaos and back into some sense of familiarly
rehearsed order. That really would have been something to experience.
The interesting thing about Hartmann is his

eclecticism. Whereas a man like Frank Castdorf is

predictably de-con-structive in his chic anarchic
experiments, its difficult to forecast what Hartmann
is going to turn to next. This season he has directed
the world premiere of a play by Moritz Rink specially commissioned for the Bochum Playhouse.
Moritz Rink is one of the sunny boys in the current
generation of German dramatists and seems to
derive a lot of publicity from the fact that he plays
tennis with the German Chancellor, Gerhard
Schrder. His play, The Optimists, has a nominal
connection with Electronic City in that its subject is
the effects of globalization. But there all similarities
come to an abrupt halt. In formal terms The
Optimists could almost be of Anglo-Saxon origin
because of its conventional use of chronology, dialogue and characterization. The play deals with a
group of middle-class, educated Germans on the
way to a globalization conference in Bombay, who
get stuck in a hotel in the middle of Nepal after their
bus breaks down. The well-intentioned group of
liberals use the delay to work on a conference resolution that will simultaneously pillory modern
Capitalism and call on the politicians of the Third
68

World to organize resistance to global concerns.

The irony behind their fate is that these First World
sympathizers are themselves in danger from a group
of local Maoist terrorists. After their leader, an ethical economist by the name of Matt (whom we
never see), is found dead in his hotel room with a
smashed-in skull, the hotel staff disappear, external
communications are cut, and the group is left waiting and hoping to be rescued once more. The bus
driver goes off to try to repair his bus and disappears, never to return. From then on we are stuck in
a mixture of Agatha Christie and Clive Barker as the
cast gets decimated in mysterious circumstances
scene by scene. The formal skeleton of the play
sounds promising even thrilling. Unfortunately
Rink seems to think that the mechanism alone is
enough to create tension. Worse still the dramatist
seems unable or unwilling to tackle his ostensible
theme. There are a few satirical references to the
1968 Marxism intellectual movementwhich is
anyway outdated and irrelevant herebut otherwise
the play has no moral or philosophical content at all.
As a result it gradually disintegrates into a silly
debating club dotted with a few failed attempts at
relationships and a desperate appeal to the terrorists

scrawled on the hotel windows: We are on your

side. As chaos descends the detritus of civilization
piles up on the stage and the characters solidarity
with each other falls apart until all we are left with
is a collection of lonely individuals solely concerned with their own salvation. There are one or
two nice moments of humor but these are scattered
sparsely amongst the sterile dialogue as the play
falls apart into meandering boredom. The set by
Erich Wonder is brilliant and Hartmanns direction
is clean and competent. The actors, led by Micahel
Maertens as an incompetent would-be filmmaker,
do their best to keep us entertained. But this is a
vain and empty exercise that should have been subjected to a stringent dramaturgical eye before being
allowed anywhere near a rehearsal room. Shortly
after its premiere in Bochum, The Optimists
received a second large production in Freiburg.
Rinks girlfriend is the current Intendant in
Freiburg. Lucky for some
The Optimists has not been the only new
play in Bochum. Another flavor-of-the month
dramatist was also ushered before us with gushing
comparisons to Samuel Beckett and Thomas
Bernhard. I did not see Hartmanns German pre-

Min Chor Wi, Katharina Thalbach, and fabian Krger in Hartmanns production of Koala Lumpur. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

69

miere of the Norwegian John Fosses Winter in the

2001/02 season so am unable to comment.
Nonetheless I was curious to see the playwright was
back again on the program with a play called
Schnes (Something Beautiful). Now one thing you
can be certain of nowadays is that, if a play is called
Something Beautiful, its going to be pretty ugly.
This one tells of a man and his wife in a tired marriage holidaying in a resort where the husband spent
his childhood. Here they meet the mans childhood
friend who lives in a lonely boathouse by the fjord.
The friend has lost all his illusions of being a musician and seems to moon around doing nothing much
in particular. Which is almost how you could
describe the play. Predictably enough the wife is
fascinated by this enigmatic depressive bore who
reluctantly submits to her sexual approaches inside
his hut. Predictably enough again this activity seem
to be also pretty functional. Indeed I felt that, in
terms of ecstasy-seeking, the two might have been
better advised to share a stale hamburger. Those
amongst the audience unlucky enough to read the
pretentious dramaturgical eulogy to the playwright
published as an afterword to the text, will learn that
John Fosse listens to Bach as he writes. This is
made sadly clear in the way he writes dialogue that
ruts itself into pseudo-fugue repetitions in different
variations followed by different fugue variations of
pseudo repetitions and pseudo-fugue variations of
different repetitions. Ibsen might be depressing but
at least he gives us conflict and enlightenment.
Fosse gives us nothing but his own narcissistic
nihilism clothed in self-indulgent formal doodlings.
From the overblown to the complete
unknown. The Bochum Schauspielhaus cannot be
accused of neglecting new writing. And even
though neither of the following two new plays were
directed by Hartmann himself they are worth a mention for the light they shed on a very German
approach to dramaturgy. David Lindemann is in his
mid-twenties and his play Koala Lumpur was joint
winner of a play competition at the Berliner
Stckemarkt in 2003. The play is set on a campingsite in a deserted square somewhere in the middle of
New York six days after the 9/11 attack on the
World Trade Center. Frau Schmidt (played by
Katherina Thalbach), a secretary in a German startup business, and her student assistant Max are
stranded here in a tent beneath the pouring rain.
Ostensibly they are camping out for economic reasons. In reality they are doing so because, as the
author hastens to assure us in the programme, this is

no ordinary tent. The stage, the auditorium, the

theatre, the world is the inside of the tent. The environment, the outside world is in the tent. So where
does Koala Lumpur come in? Observant readers
might already have noticed that the title of the play
is not spelt correctly. The city is in fact called Kuala
Lumpur. Anywhere but in Germany this might have
been taken as a gag, the slip of an ignorant tongue.
But again the author feels the need to explain that
the mispronunciation, like the tent, is highly significant, if not to say HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT.
Quoting from Jacques Lacan, he tells us that this is
the penetration of the letter into the unconscious
(whatever that might mean). Indeed The o which
slips in is supposed to indicate that the term is open,
that something is there, which has settled there and
determines us thereby [sic!]. Not content with this
the author underlines the philosophical depths of his
play by subjecting us to the transcript of an 18-page
interview (published along with the text) in which
he informs simple-minded playgoers like myself
that the play has something to do with visitation,
la Jacques Derrida, and that this is absolutely of
the essence. For Frau Schmidts insistence that
the only significance of 9/11 is that it happens to be
the date of her birthday is indeed a visitation in
this sense andwait for it!this is what gave Mr
Lindemann the original idea for the play. With
this in mind we approach the WORK with the postmodern, structuralist, philosophical/sociological
reverence we have been asked to attribute to it,
accompanied by another article by Baudrillard and
more Derridaall the buzz names are here baby
and culminating in another 19-page (!) essay by the
author entitled Why Does Excrement Appear on
the StageOn the Relationship Between
Performitivity and Semioticity. [sic!] At this point
we might be forgiven for thinking that the author is
getting bogged down in the excrement of his own
particular lump of koala bear visitationsor more
likelythat we are being subjected to a piece of
satire. But no, this is the absolute essence of
German theatre dramaturdigidity.
Now as Jacques Lacan will definitely never
have said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What is the play itself like? If Mr Lindemann
will allow me a more classical quotation I have to
say that it is very much a case of Montes parturientur, nascitur ridiculus mus (Ovid). For Mr
Lindemanns philosophical mountains have given
birth to a very ridiculous mouse indeed. For the
playif I may call it something so banalis noth70

ing more than a desperate potpourri of derivative

scenes in an absurdist manner cobbled together in
such an arbitrary manner as to make us wonder if
the author has an authentic thought in his head. At
one point the lights go out on stage and Frau
Schmidt screams that she has gone blind. At another a microphone dangles down from the flies and we
are promptly informed that this is The Ear of the
Western World. There follows a slapstick scene
sorry, Samuel Beckett-like visitation where Frau
Schmidt tries to catch the microphone with a long
butterfly net and hurls it to the ground where it is
savagely destroyed by Max. Further constipated
scenes torture us with details of Frau Schmidts
bowel problemsinevitable, I suppose, given the
authors excremental essay on the problems of shitting in and on the modern stageshow Max masturbating into his sleeping bag, and reveal his secret
wish to be recognized as an author. No comment.
As proof of this our budding author subjects Frau
Schmidt and the rest of the audience to a longdrawn out reading from a piece of pornographic
hotel buggery. The play meanders on to an
inevitable end with the arrival of knife wielding
maniac who insists the two protagonists answer him

in full sentences only. Please dont ask me why,

there is probably a post-modern sociological explanation hanging out there somewhere. Following
this two absurd Japanese tourists arrive on the
scene, misunderstand what they have been told and
report Max and Frau Schmidt as suspected terrorists
to the American secret service. On which they are
thankfully blown into oblivion by an air-raid attack
on their tent that drowns them in milk powder and
rice. I can only report that on the first night I was
not the only person in the audience who was left
speechless. For if this play is indeed the very best
new play around the future for German playwriting
is looking extremely bright indeed. It can only get
better.
Anal fixation is a very German trait as witness their palette of favourite insults. But its clearly spreading to neighbouring countries. Another
and much betternew play in the Bochum repertoire, written by a Belgian writer, Jeroen
Olyslaegers, is entitled Deep in the Hole and the Pig
is Also Snuffling Around. Sorry about the title. The
hole in question should now be obvious. The play
is not. Its a two-hander dealing with an oppressively archaic father-son relationship. The father is

Andr Meyer, Fabian Krger, Felix Vrtler, Franz Xavier Zach, Otto
Sander, and Jele Brckner in Hartmanns production of The Captain of Kpenick. Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

71

a filthy, rundown, ugly, ignorant, sadistic, parvenu

drug baron who has made his money out of cocaine,
night clubs, and gangland terrorism, an empire to
which his son appears to be the sole inheritor. The
play is set in a dirty room where the two are waiting
to be picked up by one of the fathers henchmen in
order towhat? Like the two German plays I have
already outlined, nothing is explained here. But by
contrast Olyslaegers succeeds in giving us a palpable feeling of context and reality as the father subjects his son to an unrelenting barrage of verbal and
physical abuse until the son breaks and puts a knife
through his progenitor. The dialogue is opaque and
indirect but full of tension. There are no pseudophilosophical meanderings here, simply the cut and
thrust of love twisted into loathing, mutual mistrust
and disgust. We feel like flies on the wall listening
in to a world of rotten relationships of which we can
only catch a partial glimpse. It is very difficult to
say how good the play really is. But in the hands of
an extremely talented new director named Martin
Hfermann, who manages to imbue the references
with a dark, specific reality, the nauseatingly wonderful Fritz Schediwy, for whom the role of the
father seems to be tailor-made, and the troddendown Oliver Masucci, this turns out to be a very
exhilarating evening of theatre. All praise to
Bochum for digging this dramatist out of Belgian
obscurity. With a decent title and a good translation
its the sort of thing that could make it to an offBroadway attic.
A civic theatre wouldnt be a civic theatre
without its fair share of the classics. And Matthias
Hartmann wouldnt be Matthias Hartmann without
showing us how to direct them in a high-class manner. Judging from the rapturous audience reaction at
the premiere in January this year his latest production of Carl Zuckmeyers social comedy, The
Captain of Kpenick looks likely to be the boxoffice hit of the season. The plot deals with the classic case of the underdog who turns the table on society with a simple trick. We are in Kaiser Wilhelms
Berlin at the turn of the century. The 64-year-old
worker Wilhelm Voigt has just been released from
prison and despite his efforts cannot find anyone in
Berlin to give him a job, since he lacks two essential qualifications. He has not served in the army
a fact that is intrinsic proof of his lack of characterand he does not possess a residence permit.
The second drawback is a bureaucratic catch-22 situation, for Voigt cannot get a job without a residence permit and the only way to get a residence

permit is to provide written proof of a job. In desperation he breaks into the Potsdam police station to
try to steal himself a permit, is caught and sentenced
to another ten years imprisonment in the local penitentiary where he is subjected to extreme military
discipline in an attempt to make him suitable for
society once again. Voigt has learnt his lesson the
hard way and now turns it to his own advantage by
buying himself a military uniform at a second hand
shop, which he promptly dons in the public lavatories of the nearest railway station. On emerging into
the station he wallows in the servile respect of the
two railway employees for his uniformed military
appearance, orders himself a battalion of guards,
occupies the Kpenick town hall (Kpenick is a
suburb of Berlin), has the mayor arrested, and confiscates the parish finances. Unluckily for him,
however, Kpenick has no bureaucratic department
where he can get his cherished identity documents.
In disappointment Voigt dismisses the soldiers back
to their barracks. Soon the word gets around of the
trick that has been played. And when Voigt turns up
at another police station to apply for a pass he is
tricked into admitting his crime in return for the
promised document. When asked by the police how
he managed to do it he answers that theres nothing
to it, all you need is the right uniform. From the
start Zuckmeyers message is clear. The best way to
make your way in a militarized society is to possess
a uniform. For a uniform contains intrinsic power
and status. But there is also a second theme running
through the play civilian joblessness and lack of
status. Voigt, as played here by the wonderful
Schaubhne veteran Otto Sander, is a melancholic,
down-to-earth, working man, who has been excessively punished for an error in his youth and is now
hopelessly lost in a world of inflexible civil servants, social snobs and men and women on the
make. The most impressive moment in the show is
its quietest: the point at which Voigt hits the low
point of his desperation and Otto Sander the high
point of his acting art. Looking back on his life,
Voigt/Sander mutters quietly to himselfwithout
the slightest hint of theatricalitythat he has been
nothing but a carpet for others to wipe their feet on.
And resolves to do something about it before he
dies. Hartmanns production is at its strongest here.
For he emphasizes Voigts natural qualities by counterpointing them with satirically exaggerated portraits of the society with whom Voigt comes into
contact. Its a comic world in both senses of the
word. A restless world full of exaggeratedly irra72

tional rules and rituals. As always with Hartmann

the production is visually strong, from the costumes
and make-up, the over-large suits, overpointed
shoes and overlong shaggy hair (costumes Su
Bhler, Grit Gro, Victoria Behr), right down to the
extraordinary musical-type set dominated by the pillars of the Brandenburger Gate beneath which spins
a revolving stage (set: Bernhard Kleber) on which
Voigt continually tries to get a foothold as the various echelons of society come and go around him.
Theres a cast of 23, accompanied by a band of three
uniformed soldiers sitting in the shadows of a pub
room and providing all the necessary sound effects
live. The actors have a ball, the audience has a ball,
I had a ball. It was only afterwards that I wondered
if Hartmannwhod clearly also had a ball directing the playhas somehow lost sight of its darker

side. At the moment Germany as a wholeand the

Ruhrgebiet in particular in which Bochum is situatedis going through a period of large unemployment and still continues to labor under extraordinary
inflexible and inhuman economic and bureaucratic
formalities. Given the subject matter, Hartmann
inevitably touches on the two themes. But what
could have been hard and bitter at times is swept
into oblivion by the sheer unchallenging entertainment of the show. For all its undeniable virtues this
is theatre for the privileged, safely isolated from the
hard realities of the world outside the stage door.
There can be no more popular and successful civic
theatre in Germany at the moment than the Bochum
Schauspielhaus under Matthias Hartmann. The nagging question is: could it be something more?

Matthias Hartmann
1963: Osnabrck, NW Germany. After he left school he trained as a salesman.
1986-8: Assistant director at the Berlin Schiller Theater
1989: His first independent production Tagtrumer (The Woolgatherer) William Mastrosimone in Kiel
1989: Play Strindberg . (Drrenmatt) Mainz
1990: Nazim schiebt ab. (Jacob Arjouni). World premiere: Mainz.
1990: Class Enemy ( Nigel Williams) Mainz.
1991: Time and the Room (Botho Strauss) Wiesbaden.
1990-3: Chief director in Hannover. The Game of Love and Chance (Marivaux), Minna von Barnhelm
and Emilia Galotti (both Lessing), Lulu (Wedekind), Viel Lrm in Giozza (Goldoni), Leonce und Lena
(Bchner), Volksvernichtung oder mein Leber ist sinnlos (Werner Schwab). Emilia Galotti invited to the
Berlin Theatertreffen in 1992.
1993-9: Chief director at the State Theatre of Bavaria in Munich. Productions include The Taming of the
Shrew (1993), Miss Julie (1995) Richard III (1996), Kabale und Liebe (1996) and Hamlet (1998)
During this period he also directs in at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg (incl. Das Kthchen
von Heilbronn, Peer Gynt) and the Burgtheater, Vienna ( incl. Die Ruber, The Misanthrope, Kasimir und
Karoline.
1999: His production of Botho Strauss Der Kuss des Vergessens in Zurich is invited to the Berlin
Theatertreffen and voted Production of the Year.
2000-5: Intendant in Bochum. Productions in 2000/01 include the premiere of Peter Turrinis The
Opening. Botho StraussDer Narr und seine Frau Heute Abend in PANCOMEDIA, and Woody Allens A
Midsummernights Sex Comedy.
2001-2: Waiting for Godot, German premiere of Jon Fosses Winter and Daniel Besses The Directors.
2002-3: German premiere of Neil Labutes one-act plays Merge, Road Trip and Land of the Dead and
Christian Krachts 1979
2003-4: incl. Falk Richters Electronic City, Moritz Rinks Die Optimisten, Pam Gems Piaf ( with Maria
Happel), Zuckmeyers Captain of Kpenick.
2003: His first opera production, Smetanas The Bartered Bride in Zurich.
2005-: Designated Intendant at the Schauspielhaus Zurich.

73

The Bochum Repertoire 2003-04

Play:

Author:

1979
Arsenic and Old Lace
The Shape of Things
Merge/Road Trip/Land of the Dead
Bash
The Captain of Kpenick
The Parasite
The Optimists
The First Ladies
Faith, Love, Hope
Hedda Gabler
Liebelei
Minna von Barnhelm
The Cid
The Caretaker
Something Beautiful
The Opening
The Physicists
Elective Affinities
Electronic City
Harold and Maude
Koala Lumpur
Mendythe Wusical
Piaf
Look, the Sun is Going Down
Blood Wedding
The Seagull
I, Feurbach
Henry IV
You Dont Play With Love
Lulu
Woyzeck (Planned)

Christian Kracht
Joseph Kesselring
Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute
Neil LaBute
Carl Zuckmayer
Friedrich Schiller
Moritz Rinke
Werner Schwab
don von Horvath
Henrik Ibsen
Arthur Schnitzler
Gotthold Epraim Lessing
Pierre Corneille
Harold Pinter
Jon Fosse
Peter Turrini
Friedrich Drrenmatt
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Falk Richter
Colin Higgins
David Lindemann
Helge Schneider and Andrea Schumaci
Pam Gems
Sybille Berg
Federica Garcia Lorca
Anton Chekhov
Tankred Dorst
William Shakespeare
Alfred de Musset
Frank Wedekind
Georg Bchner (to be directed by Neil LaBute)

74

Alternative Subversion: Cologne Carnival and the Stunksitzung

Erik Abbott
In Cologne, on 11 November each year, at
eleven minutes past eleven in the morning11:11
on 11/11the Carnival season, or Session, as it is
called, opens. (The centrality of the number eleven
refers to one of Colognes patron saints, St. Ursula,
and her martyrdom with eleven thousand virgins.)
Over the course of the next few weeks, this winter
celebration dominates the culture and thought of
Rhineland life. The public partying begins in
earnest at eleven minutes past eleven in the morning
the Thursday before Ash Wednesday
Weibersfastnacht (Womens Carnival)when the
women of the city storm City Hall three times
(three being the other key symbolic numberreferencing the Three Kings, whose reliquary is contained within the altar in Colognes Gothic
Cathedral) until the keys to the city are surrendered. The social order is thus overturned for
these few days before the deprivations and sacrifice

of Lent. Communal rituals of Carnival have been in

place here in some form for centuries, although
modern Carnival and its specific traditions date to
the reforms that began in 1823. The Sitzungen
variety shows that grew out of Festkomitee meetingsremain as an integral and part of the annual
celebration.
An essential and enormously popular element of the alternative Carnival movement, the
Stunksitzung celebrated its twentieth anniversary
this year and released a book tracing its history,
often tongue-in-cheek (one page contains diagrams
charting which members of the ensemble have supposedly slept with which others) to mark the triumph. George Isherwood and Hans Kieseier
returned to share the directorial tasks, with Angelika
Pohlert and Thomas Kller each staging a sketch.
The 2003 production [see WES 15:1] featured a
number of technological upgrades (video chiefly

The Schleimprolog sketch. Photo Copyright: A. & W. Bartscher/dea-NewsInfo.net

75

among them) and this year Manfred Raths lighting

design (hung and run by JoJo Tillmann) continued
the trend, utilizing numerous projections and special
effects, including the gorgeous onstage animation in
the Max und Moritz sketch. Helga Schmelz
always inventive and lively settings and costumes
were framed in a new main set as well. The previous castle-like edifice was maintained more-or-less
in shape, but was re-configured out of exposed
industrial girders, with wires and conductors protruding here and there. Isherwood described the
new look as Soviet, and certainly the theatrically
deliberate austerity could evoke the Eastern Bloc,
but it mostly echoed the history of the E-Werk, the
former power plant turned nightclub/performance
space that has been the Stunksitzungs home since
1991. The set seemed an extension of the E-Werks
industrial steel structural frame, as if it had always
been there. Biggi Wanninger, returning in her role
as the Sitzung President, commented on the new
look in her first monologue, noting that she really
liked the stairs that opened onto the stagein the
past she could only ascend to the second level where
she presides with the Elferrat (Council of
Elevenin a traditional Sitzung, the Festkomitee)
via a narrower, darker, backstage staircase. The
new onstage stairs, that rolled out of view when not
needed, were used primarily in the Prologue, somewhat inexplicably (at least to me) titled the
Schleimprolog, which means exactly what it
sounds like. This Prologue, however, was hysterically funny, a send-up of the Ensembles gratitude to
their loyal audience of the last twenty years. (Many
of the players have been on board since the beginning, and most at least a decade.) Bedecked in
white tuxedos and gowns, they sang a syrupy
Thank you song to the tune of Feelings, even
spelling out Danke with their bodies as they thanked
us for our prayers, noting that we gave them
strength and money. Trumpeters Axel Deland and
Hatti Rau appeared on the stairs, clad in lam as if
from heavena la Beauty School Dropout in
Greaseto play a heavenly duet. The over-the-top
solemnity and sentimentality recalled for me one of
my favorite Stunksitzung numbers from the 2001
production, a mini Swan Lake performed on those
little aluminum scooters that were ubiquitous at the
time.
Carnival in the Rhineland is not perhaps as
fraught with realpolitik as it once was (early
Cologne Carnival songwriter and playwright Franz
Raveaux was in the first German Parliament in 1848

at Pauls Church in Frankfurt and, like several major

Carnival figures of the era, later had to flee the
authorities when the revolution was crushed), but
any Sitzung will still be expected to comment on the
political situation of the day, and the Stunksitzung
ostensibly a transgression of official Carnival,
although exactly how alternative the alternative
Carnival movement is today can certainly be
debatedis no exception. German Chancellor
Gerhard Schrder came under fire repeatedly; his
Red-Green (Social Democrats and the Green
Party) governing coalition has dropped dramatically
in the polls in the wake of the reforms he has pushed
through in an attempt to revive Germanys flagging
economy. The most pointed criticism came within
what was also one of the most beautiful numbers of
the evening, the aforementioned Max und Moritz
sketch. Drawn from the works of Wilhelm Busch, a
nineteenth-century author who wrote rhyming
moralistic tales, illustrated with his own drawings.
Long a staple of German childhood, Busch is largely unknown in English, and I would be hard-pressed
to come up with an easy parallel. Dr. Seuss is the
obvious comparison, but Seuss particular brilliance
is more whimsical, aimed primarily at younger
readers, and generally reflects a far less grim worldview. Buschs lessons often portray, albeit in a
mocking tone, great cruelty and violent punishments and consequences. His dark vision is cloaked
in a delightful sing-song verse that somewhat disarms the underlying bleakness, but it is still a long
way from Sam I am.
Probably Buschs most famous tale, Max
und Moritz, was imported almost wholesale, in
terms of the individual episodes of the story, by the
Stunkers, but with the title characters renamed
Gerd and Joschka, as in [Gerhard] Schrder and
Fischer. In Buschs story, Max and Moritz are two
wicked boys who prey upon their elders: stealing,
filling a bed with biting bugs, sawing the supports of
a footbridge so that the next passerby falls in the
stream, etc. Here, the two naughty children are
political leaders, wreaking havoc on the people, cruelly laughing at the pain their antics cause. The
sketch, staged by Kller, was an eloquent blending
of the two-dimensional with the three-, played out in
front of and on an all-white backdrop. The actors
(Gnter Ggi Ottemeier as Fischer and Ozan
Akhan as Schrder) assumed Buschian postures and
became part of projected line drawings matching the
author/illustrators style. As Anne Rixmann read a
text that precisely mimicked Buschs verses, the
76

drawings were animated to illustrate the story,

which kept the shape and most of the characters of
the original, but with sharply drawn satirical differences. The Widow (newcomer Beate Bohr), having
been ripped off by the scoundrels, hanged herself,
her neck elongating in a darker echo of a stretched
gooses neck in Busch. The tailor Bck (Christian
Rzepka), we are given to understand, drowns when
he falls in the stream. (The Stunksitzung text kept
the reference to the tailors ethnicity as from the
East; in the original, the boys actions are pretty
clearly racistan idea subtly repeated here, but
with the Chancellor and Foreign Minister implicated. Given the racial politics of modern Germany
indeed, of modern Europethis infused the piece
with yet a deeper layer of resonance.) The bugs that
are put in Uncle Fritzs (Bruno Schmitz) bed shock
him so thoroughly that he dies. Finally, the people
rise up and stuff Gerd and Joschka into a sack along
with other controversial politiciansAngela
Merkel, Guido Westerwelle, Edmund Stoiber
extending this revolt across the political spectrum.
The dead characters declare in triumph to the audience that now Anarchy rules the entire country!
provoking an immediate roar of approval. Until this
moment, the normally rambunctious spectators had
remained uncharacteristically quiet (audience rowdiness being part and parcel of any Sitzung, and
especially the Stunksitzung), perhaps having been
taken awayas I wasby the graceful marriage of
live action and animation and the extremely clever
verse. Anarchy is perhaps too easy a cry to raise
during Carnival, when the notion of subversion is
trotted out for fun and celebration, though clearly no
genuine revolution harkens just ahead, but, in addition to the marvelous stagecraft employed, it was an
intriguing reminder of the political agency this communal party once commanded.
The Stunksitzung occupies an interesting
place within the Carnival industry of Cologne.
There are other alternative SitzungenPink,
Punk Pantheon in Bonn, the Rosa (pink; i.e., gay)
Sitzung, etc.but none have achieved the commercial success of the Stunksitzung, which is seen by
approximately 40,000 people every year, although
both Pink, Punk and Rosa typically play to sold-out
houses as well. A cursory look through the anniversary book, also titled simply Stunksitzung, indicates
that the production has grown bigger and slicker
with age, calling into question its position as the
leading, or at least the most visible, piece of the
alternative movement. Still, more than one

Cologner assured me, the official Cologne

Carnival bureaucracy regards the Stunksitzung with
contempt, even if, in the spirit of traditional
Carnival, so many Stunkfans come to the performance clad in costumes, a practice, I was told,
that would have resulted in scorn and ridicule just a
few years ago.
Of course, the Stunksitzung gets its digs in
at traditional Carnival and Cologne powers-that-be.
Mayor Fritz Schramma (Didi Jnemann) was again
spoofed as Super Schramma, Schramma was
lambasted in 2001 as a publicity hog whose motto
was Photo, photo, photo! This year, it was his
relentless promotion of Cologne that was mocked,
as he is leading the charge to have Cologne designated the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2010. (He
previously touted the city as a proposed Olympics
site.) Super Schramma assembled a group of
artists, noting how proud the city was of them and
how especially proud he personally was of the
many starving artists. The artists painted, sang,
danced, and even recited interpretive poetry (based
on the stop announcements of the number six streetcar; Doro Egelhaaf as the poet perfectly captured
the dull intonation of Colognes public transportation recorded voice announcements.) In the Rose
Monday Train sketch (a bad translation of
Rosenmonntagszug), Jupp (Jnemann again) and
Peter (Schmitz) played broadcast commentators of
one of the huge parades that occur on the Monday of
Carnival, with the idea that it was being underwritten with American money. They provided fumbled
translations of Carnival terms (Fasteleer, an local
older word for Carnival became a more literal
almost empty) and noted the changes the new
sponsorship had mandated: for example, a
Dreigestirn consisting of Prince, Madonna, and a
talking Coca-Cola can, rather than the traditional
Prince, Virgin, and Farmer. This Americanization
was represented further by a remote news anchor
(Doris Dietzold) reporting, under fire, on the
American invasion of Colognes rival Rhineland
city, Dsseldorf, where a statue of Heinrich Heine
was pulled down and replaced by a bust of the late
Cologne Kabarettist Peter Millowitsch (whose theatre is a mainstay of local culture). A nod to outsiders difficulties in understanding Carnival was
made in Auslndersitzung (Foreigners
Sitzung), and the traditional rewriting of Carnival
songs was cleverly handled in Mottolied. In this
sketch, which brought the German love of Wortspiel
to staggering heights, an air conditioning repair
77

Tom Simon, Christian Rzepka, and Bruno Schmitz in the Palstiner Talk sketch. Photo Copyright: A. & W. Bartscher/dea-NewsInfo.net

technician (Tom Simon), a Hildegard von Bingen

scholar-hobbyist (Rixmann), a Willi Ostermann
enthusiast (JnemannOstermann wrote many of
the most popular Carnival songs around 1900), and
a school director each took a page from, respectively, a repair manual, a Hildegard cookbook, an
Ostermann songbook, and an eleventh-grade curriculum guide, tore them in pieces, shuffled them
together, and sang the phrases they each drew to the
accompaniment of traditional melodies. Obviously,
the learning curve for comprehending this piece was
quite high, but for the audience, well-versed as they
were in the material, enjoyed the linguistic dexterity immensely.
My favorite Carnival piece was
Quickchange, which, according to Kieseier, was
this years sweet number. (I owe an enormous
debt of gratitude to Kieseier, Isherwood, Production
Stage Manager Sabine Ennulath and the entire
ensemble for their gracious hospitality; I once again
was granted access to rehearsals, backstage areas,
and was even given a copy of the script for reference while preparing this article.)
In

Quickchange, a lonely barman (Ottemeier) is

alone in his pub on Tuesday night, the last night of
Carnival. In stagger a merrily-inebriated woman
(Bohr) and her sad friend (Dietzold), who is
depressed that she has not found a man during
Carnival. Not to worry, her tipsy friend assures her,
there is still time. The barman is immediately smitten upon seeing the sad woman, but she does not
notice him. The two women launch into a discussion of the types of men that are considered good
catches, according to an article in Express (a tabloid
newspaper), based on the costumes men choose for
Carnival. As the two women discuss the advantages
and drawbacks of pirates, Indians (a translation
for Native American has not yet made its way into
German), clowns, Napoleons, sheiks, cowboys,
monks, and apes, the barman assumes and discards
each costume in rapidunbelievably rapid, in some
casessuccession. Alas, his Herculean efforts to
win the distraught womans heart, or even her
slightest attention, are to no avail. Finally, the two
women exit, but the sad one leaves behind her cape,
which the barman lovingly holds, mournfully imag78

ining the love that might have been. She, of course,

re-enters, their eyes meet, there is the requisite
moment of recognition (with appropriate sound
effects), the music swells and he bursts into song
or, rather, the soundtrack does; he lip-syncs, in
grand style, to (I think) the Bob Seger version of
Weve Got Tonight. She joins in, her mouse costume falling away to reveal a storybook Princess
gown, and his clothes are stripped off to reveal a
matching Princes costume. They meet center stage,
swept away in romantic fantasy. But this is the
Stunksitzung, of course, and lest we become too suffused in all this gooeyness, the stage crew comes in
and begins breaking down the stage, handing props
to our love-struck couple and, ultimately, picking
them up and carting them away as the stage props
they have themselves become. It was a perfect coda
to a sketch that had managed to be both very funny
and very touching. Carnival is legendary for its
romantic liaisons, but, the Stunkers insist on
reminding us, romance based on fantasy is but fantasy. By all means, have your fun, but dont take
this too seriouslytomorrow, the party will be
over; the illusions will have vanished back into the
greyness of winter.
Pohlerts number, McClean, in the words
of Isherwood, broke through the good-taste barrier. Shattered might be a more accurate characterization. The sketch spoofed the chain of pay toilets that are in many of the bigger train stations in
Germany. Paul (Akhan) simply wants to use the
facilities, but the attendant (Rixmann) wont let him
until he reveals which, ahem, action he needs to perform, and chooses a style of toilet stall (We have
Louis XVI, fin-de-sicle, and Bauhaus), music
(We have pop, jazz, and reggae), and/or stimulating sounds (dripping faucet, mountain
brook, or Niagara Falls). Meanwhile, the chorus
gleefully sings, Theres no business like Klo business, Klo being slang for toilet, and, at one
point, a satisfied customer (Jnemann) emerges
from a stall followed by the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra (Stunksitzung band Kbes Underground,
here in black tie) and tells the attendant that the
music suggestion was a super tip. Eventually,
Paul can wait no longer, and wets himself. A finale
is performed and Akhan announces a 20-minute
pee-pee pause, adding, Ive already gone. The
sheer relish with which this sketch was presented
allowed to audience to transcend completely its subject matter, lifting potty humor to delightful new
heights.

George W. Bush made two appearances, in

the Palstiner Talk sketch, in which Ariel Sharon
(Simon) and Yassir Arafat (Schmitz) appear on
Brits Talk, a take-off on a popular afternoon television talk show, hosted by Brit (Rixmann), under
the theme of Conflict in the Neighborhood. Bush
(Rzepka) appears, ostensibly to help, but of course
is comically useless. He re-appears in a later sketch,
(this time played by Jnemann, reprising his Bush
impersonation of last year) as a guest host on The
Muppet Show, which has been accidentally double-booked so that he must share the duty with
Saddam Hussein (Akhan). Kermit (Ottemeier)
opens the number, asking out loud Why did we
invite that asshole? but not clarifying which one he
means. Miss Piggy (Bohr), has been carrying on an
internet romance with Saddam, Bush sings
Guantanamo Bay to the tune of Guantanamera,
backed up by prison-stripe-clad Muppets, and,
eventually, Saddam and Bush are lured into a rocket ship, which blasts off, prompting Statler and
Waldorf (Rzepka and Schmitzor Schmitz and
Rzepka; I dont know which one was which in any
language) to declare Pigs in space! I thought this
sketch was hilarious, but the audience, although
receptive, was perhaps a trifle less enthusiastic.
Isherwood, himself an ex-pat American of many
years, told me that although The Muppet Show
has long been known in Germany, it is not as much
a cultural icon as it is here. It was interesting to see
the cultural divideso apparent in this extraordinarily regional theatrical adventurebe transversed
(and maybe transgressed?) in the opposite direction.
The music, always a big part of the
evening, was again terrific. Lead Singer Ecki
Pieper and Kbes Underground have a richly
deserved loyal following and they performed several numbers, including a Russianized version of one
of their signature covers, Just a Gigolo, this time
called Gigolowski. Many of the actors are also
fine musical performers in their own right. Akhan
always performs a solo number, which always
brings down the house, and this year was no exception. This years piece was preceded by a very
funny monologue in which he portrayed a Turkish
man who wanted to rent the E-Werk for his wedding. He proceeded to detail the many cultural differences one might encounter in the Mlheim district of Cologne (where the E-Werk is located),
which is largely Turkish. He brought stage crew
members Daniel Leidecker and Marcel Dietzold
onstage to take measurements while he educated us
79

on Turkish traditions. Wanninger performed another tribute to the late Kabarettist Trude Herr, and
Bohr led a troupe of elderly rappers. Perhaps the
funniest musical moment was Akkordeon, in
which Wanninger, Simon, Rixmann, Schmitz, and
Kbes members Winni Rau and Georg Kunz performed a short medley of tributes to the muchmaligned accordion. (Kunz and Rau are both quite
skilled on the accordion as well as their other instrument, keyboards and guitar, respectively.)
Wanninger started things off with Lord, Wont You
Buy Me an Akkordeon, followed by a group rendition of Smoke on the Hohner.
The Stunksitzung is a fascinating cultural
phenomenon, a public eventor, more accurately,
an event within an eventor, perhaps most accurately, a deliberate overturning of an event within an

event; an assumed transgression of tradition that has

become its own tradition. For whether it is still the
raw in-your-face attack on (what some would define
as) stuffy and ossified cultural practice, or its own
overly commercialized behemoth, it has made an
indelible imprint on the consciousness of the citys
favorite party. It is also unquestionably entertaining, a first-rate theatrical performance within a satirical tradition that is much broader and deeper than
anything Ive experienced in the U.S. If one can
surmount the daunting linguistic and cultural challenges the work presents, the rewards are immense.
The Stunksitzung website is
www.stunksitzung.de
Kbes Undergrounds website is
www.koebesunderground.de

The Muppet Show sketch. Photo Copyright:: A. & W. Bartscher/dea-NewsInfo.net

80

81

The Audience and Civic-Religious Celebration in Tuscany

Jenna Soleo
Each year on June 24 the city of Florence,
Italy, celebrates the feast day of its patron saint,
John the Baptist, by staging the Calcio Fiorentino, a
game that mixes soccer with street fighting. Thirty
miles to the south, the city of Siena honors their
holy protectress, the Blessed Virgin Mary, twice
each summer with the Palio, a bareback horse race.
While the inclusion of such festive games on holy
days might seem to the uninitiated to be sacrilege,
such spectacles have been an intrinsic part of civic
religion for centuries. From Milan to Sicily, Italian
cities and towns demonstrate their allegiance to city
and Savior by parading relics and performing acts of
communal devotion. Since the nineteenth century,
however, certain traditions have also been attractions for tourists. In the picturesque hill towns of
Tuscany, with their distinctly medieval urban landscape crenellated palazzi make the perfect backdrop
for performances of the past. Most period performances are twentieth century revivals of traditions
that were popular throughout Europe in the early
modern era, but a few traditions can claim a welldocumented and even continuous history. No matter the pedigree, however, these modern spectacles

have become major industries for their civic producers and interesting examples of ritualistic and
site-specific theatre. In this article I will focus on
the separate celebrations produced by the cities of
Florence and Siena, which I attended in the summer
of 2003.
In Florence, the celebration of the feast of
Saint John the Baptist begin early at the Piazza della
Singoria, the citys historic civic center, where lay
participants of the festivities gather and progress to
the Piazza del Duomo, the ecclesiastic square,
which houses the cathedral and the Baptistery of
San Giovanni. The procession is solemn in attitude,
but from the spectators distance it is a rainbow of
colorful flags and costumes. The red and white flag
of Florence and blue flag of the citys Societ di San
Giovanni Battista lead the parade followed by
drummers and trumpeters in blue and yellow with
red plumes in their hats. Next comes the alfieri, or
flag wavers, each carrying his own smaller
Florentine flag, followed by a fifteenth-century
militia, their red and white costumes complete with
leather chest plates, silver pointed helmets and
imposing staffs. A variety of others in period dress,

Florentine alfieri performing the sbandierata .

Photo: courtesy Jenna Soleo

82

including a small group of women in velvet gowns

and pearls, complete the costumed group, followed
by representatives of civic groups in contemporary
business attire. Spectators trail behind and by the
time the procession reaches the Baptistery there is a
larger crowd of onlookers, held back by police on
horseback.
As the civic representatives enter the piazza the doors of the Duomo, just steps away, open to
reveal ecclesiastical representatives who make their
way from the larger house of worship to the
Baptistery, their passageway lined by flag bearers
and musicians. This procession is led by the ecclesiastical flag, white with a red band, and is followed
by a procession of clergy in a hierarchy underlined
by color. First come the deacons in black and white,
holding large candles, followed by nuns in blacks
and browns, and then priests in purple vestments.
Finally the bishop in white with his distinct hat and
rook passes the crowd and disappears into the
Baptistery. The lay representatives follow and the
door to the Baptistery close on the solemn services,
to which spectators are not invited.
Outside, however, the fun begins with musicians
and alfieri in period costumes performing a traditional sbandierata or flag presentation. In highly
choreographed formations they wow the audience
with a series of fioretti or waves, high throws,
jumps, and passes, accompanied by drums and
trumpets. This traditional display of skill and
strength is so typical of northern Italian festivals
that it was used as a story point in the 2004 film
Under the Tuscan Sun, but no matter how many
times one witnesses such performances the grace of
the flying flags and the skill of the alfieri never fails
to impress. After only about fifteen minutes of this
entertainment the alfieri return to their processional
positions. The door of the Baptistery opens and the
procession makes its way into the piazza maintaining the hierarchy of clergy and laity, with the clergy
moving back into the sacred space of the Duomo
while the laity process out onto the main thoroughfare, the via Calziauoli, on their way back to the
Piazza della Signoria. Later in the day this same
group leads the opening ceremonies of the Calcio
Fiorentino, staged in the piazza of Santa Croce.
Most visitors to Florence know the Church of Santa
Croce, one of the largest churches in the city, for the
monuments kept within its walls, including funeral
tributes to Dante Aligheri, Michelangelo, Galileo
Galilei, and Machiavelli, as well as tabernacles created by Donatello. Those wishing to see these
pieces on June 24 would be disappointed, however,

as the piazza leading to the church is filled with

earth and transformed into a field for the Calcio
Fiorentino (additional Calcio Fiorentino may be
staged as many as three times in June, but the tradition is always a part of the feast of San Giovanni).
Literally translated, Calcio Fiorentino means
Florentine soccer, often called calcio in costume
or Calcio Storico for the fifteenth-century-inspired
pantaloons the players wear as uniforms, but this
sweet nomenclature does little to prepare the novice
spectator for the violent nature of the game. Its general form may be soccer, but its attraction comes
from the fact that there are no holds barred, literally. Players can use any means necessary to take
down their opponent, even ripping off clothes.
More often, however, hair pulling, punching and
tackling are preferred methods of stopping the
enemy offense. This style of defense locks most
players into disabling positions with members of the
opposing squad, ultimately resembling dance-athon contestants in the eleventh hour. The ball,
meanwhile, is handled by a few celebrities of the
field, who have little trouble scoring in the enormous goals that take up most of each end of the
field. That is if they can make there way across the
huge expanse that forms the playing area for the
Calcio Fiorentino without being attacked by members of the enemy squad. Players take a beating in
each match and the champions are often bloody by
the end of the day. After all, the event is not merely one game, but a series of match-ups between four
teams representing each of the citys four quarters
(the Whites of Santo Spirito, the Greens of San
Giovanni, the Reds of Santa Maria Novella, and the
Blues of Santa Croce).
Still, the violence perpetrated on the way to the goal
is only one element of the event. Preceded by the
parade of costumed musicians, alfieri, and civic representatives who began their day in the solemn ceremony at the Piazza del Duomo, the Calcio
Fiorentino is part of the feast of San Giovanni. As
such it is more than merely a sporting event; it is a
performance of Florentine pride and legendary history. Travelogues and tour operators tout the games
origins, dating back to the Roman times, and its historic popularity in the early modern era. Legend
reports that Florentines refused to give up their tradition even in times of extreme strife. On February
17, 1580, for example, a game of calcio was played
in the midst of Charles Vs siege on the city. (The
most colorful versions of this tale report that cannonballs ended up on the field but the passionate
83

Calcio Fiorentino.
Photo: courtesy Jenna Soleo

calcio players would not quit their game.)

Documents including Jacques Callots 1617 sketch
of a uniformed player in the piazza of Santa Croce
attest to the popularity of the game during the
Renaissance, but the violence that traditionally
accompanied the sport compelled authorities to stop
matches in the eighteenth century. Revived in 1930,
today the Calcio Fiorentino is a popular event,
broadcast nationally. Spectators, however, thrill at
witnessing the live event and fill bleachers stretching across the entire faade of Santa Croce and all
four sides of the piazza. Tickets start at ten euros,
and they are sold out weeks in advance. This festive
tradition brings a distinctly secular aspect to the ritual celebration of Saint Johns day, a holy day in the
Church calendar, which also serves as a day for
Florence to celebrate its history.
While the Florentine San Giovanni celebration is interesting for its dual religious and secular aspects, there is an odd disjunction between the
devotional elements of the morning and the distinct
creative anachronism of the Calcio Fiorentino.
Although the tradition may have a legitimate history, the modern game seems to be more invested in
thrilling tourists than celebrating the city. In fact,
many Florentines I spoke to admitted that they did
not have any interest in the days events. The same
cannot be said, however, for their neighbors, the
Sienese, whose festive ritual, the Palio, has been

produced despite plague, excommunication, or foreign occupation for hundreds of years. Since the
eighteenth century the tradition has been instituted
as a twice-annual event, but its history is documented to the thirteenth century. Like the Florentine San
Giovanni festival, the Sienese Palio displays period
costumes and performances by alfieri and musicians. It also begins with processions by civic and
religious leaders and ends with a sporting event. Yet
despite such similarities the Florentine and Sienese
traditions are markedly different.
Sienas Palio has become famous both for
its novelty and its oddity. Called an inheritance
from the Middle Ages and the strangest horse race
on earth in publications varying from National
Geographic to Sports Illustrated, the Palio is a
bareback horse race run on a crooked and sloped
track around a medieval piazza. Since the nineteenth century it has attracted tourists from all over
the world. Despite its reputation as a curious performance, the Palio holds deep meaning as a sacred
and civic ritual to Sienese, to which first time spectators are often oblivious. But what is it that these
novice spectators take from their first Palio? If they
are well informed they will get there early, perhaps
even the night before the race and partake in the festive banquets hosted by each contrada, or district of
the city, represented in the race. These banquets,
which take place on the street or the steps of the
84

contrada church, are lush and worth the thirty euro

admission price. However, outsiders may have
trouble following the many speeches that fill the
evening. Luckily these posturings are offset with
equally abundant wine. In between the solemn
oaths and prayers regarding victory the evening is
also filled with chants, songs, and the waving of
flags, both by participants at their tables and by
alfieri in costume. And such celebrating will continue well into the night.
The next morning, in a stark contrast, is
often quiet and tourists wander the empty streets
wondering where the Sienese are. Some spectators
will have paid exorbitant sums for good seats in
palazzo windows or bleachers to watch the race
(most are reserved for Sienese), but many choose to
stand in the middle of the piazza. Invariably these
tourists will get to the city center hours before the
race, hoping to get a good spot only to be flabbergasted when, minutes before the festivities start,
hordes of young Sienese push their way into the
square. The center of the piazza is the vantage point
of choice for hundreds of Sienese as well as tourists.
After hours of waiting under the hot Tuscan sun the
piazza suddenly fills to the breaking point, with
spectators jammed together within the center and
every window, balcony, and even rooftop with a
view of the piazza peopled in anticipation of the
event. Drums and trumpets far in the distance signal the start of the pageantry. Mounted police in

formal uniforms and plumed helmets enter the piazza and gallop proudly around the track, the last circuit with swords drawn, thrilling the crowd. Next
come musicians, boys with laurel chains and candles, and finally the alfieri, dozens of them representing each contrada of the city (even those now
defunct). Finally the wagon carrying the blessed
Palio makes its round displaying the days prize a
painted representation of the Madonna and city
commissioned just for the event for all to see.
This spectacle of music, flags, and costumes continues for several hours and tourists in the center of the
piazza may strain only to catch glimpses of it over
the heads of those around them. Finally, after all the
pomp and ceremony, the horses enter and the race
seems ready to begin.
It would be unwise, however, to expect the
Sienese to rush their ritual. Nine horses must take
their position behind the starting rope to the satisfaction of race officials before the tenth is permitted
to gallop into place to start the race. Several false
starts are typical, which may delay the actual start
for an hour or more, often to the collective befuddlement of first time spectators. But just when it
seems that the race will never start they are off again
and this time its good! Spectators in the piazza turn
as one to follow the horses around the track. They
will go only three laps, but each is intense. One corner of the piazza has such a sharp turn that large
mattresses are placed against the wall to soften the

A Palio banquet in Siena. Photo: courtesy Jenna Soleo

85

inevitable blows. Yet, some fantini, or jockeys, will

still come crashing off their horses. (Not to worry:
a scorso, or riderless horse, can win the race.) And
in the time it takes to consider the fate of our fallen
fantinono more than a minute and a halfthe
race is over. First time witnesses no doubt will be
confused. Its impossible to tell which horse has
won. Better to look for which section of the spectators has made their way to the Palio; the winners
take possession of their prize right away. And in the
case of the Palio the winner is the contrada, not the
professional fantino hired to race the Palio. The
fantino will be honored as a hero, however, and
hoisted to the shoulders of jubilant contradaioli, or
members of the contrada, along with their capitano
or captain.
With the end of the race the piazza will
clear immediately the winners to celebrate and the
losers to plan next year. Whats left are the tourists,
confused and often disappointed that all that fanfare
amounted only to a 90-second race, wondering if it
all was just an excuse to dress up and perform a version of some distant past. However, what tourists
may see as example of performed medievalism, no
different from the Calcio Fiorentino or the dozens
of other period pageants around Tuscan, is to the
Sienese a way of life. The subject of numerous
sociological and anthropological studies, the

Sienese Palio is a uniquely authentic folk ritual. Its

history and continued importance prevents it from
being reduced to a mere recreation while its conjoined sacred and secular aspects makes it impossible to separate its religious significance from its
civic function.
Named for the banner (pallium in Latin)
awarded to the winner, the Sienese Palio has a long
and complex history. In essence, it is a competition
between the citys seventeen contrade, of which ten
race in each Palio. Although as we shall see, the
Palio is more than the mere three laps around the
piazza the history of Sienas tradition starts with the
history of such races. Siena was not alone in presenting palii in the Middle Ages when such sporting
events were popularly held throughout the northern
peninsula. However Sienas tradition soon became
unique due to several aspects that are still important
elements of the modern event. First, unlike palii
which were traditionally held beyond city walls
(and therefore out of the jurisdiction of civil authorities) and along a straight course, Siena ran palii alla
tonda or in the round as early as 1583. This wasnt just any round course however; it was the shellshaped circuit around the Campo, Sienas central
civic piazza, which has been the home of the Palio
since 1656. Thus from a very early date the running
of horses was sponsored by the civil authorities in

The long-awaited race during Sienas Palio.

Photo: courtesy Jenna Soleo

86

the heart of the city.

Despite such civic sponsorship the race
cannot be reduced to a purely secular event. The
second factor that separates Sienas Palio from
other similar traditions is its distinctly religious
focus. The Palio is run in honor of the Virgin Mary
on her two important feasts: Sienas local holiday of
the Madonna della Provenzano on July 2, and the
feast of the Assumption on August 16. Thus for
Sienese participating in the Palio is an act of religious devotion. Not only is the palio or banner
which each contrade hopes to win blessed and held
on the high altar of the Duomo, but contradaioli
begin each Palio day in their local church where a
mass is said in honor of the race. This is also the
time when their horse and fantino are blessed.
Furthermore if the contrade should win they will
return to their church to begin their celebration. Of
course this celebration will continue in the streets
well into the night and for days afterwards, when
contradaioli parade their winning palio throughout
the city and banquet in the streets.
Most tourists dont see this part of the
Palio: the banqueting, the days of trail races and
strategizing that consume the Sienese consciousness. Nor do most non-Sienese pay attention to the
sacred elements of the tradition. But to overlook
these events is to miss the heart of the tradition.
According to scholars the tradition of the Palio is
neither a revival or a survival, but a constantly
evolving event, and one that dominates Sienese life.
Although the race itself takes a mere minute and a
half to run, the rest of the year is devoted to its
organization. Moreover ancillary rituals take place
throughout the year, making the Palio not a single
ritual, but a series of events that mark Sienese life.
The race may not be the essence of the Palio, but the
Palio is the essence of Siena. Some might say the
Palio begins for the Sienese at their birthor at
least at baptism. Baptism in Siena not only marks
ones identity as a member of the Church but a separate baptism marks their identity as members of
their contrada. At baptism contradaioli receive
their silk scarf, which they will wear at each Palio
and at all related events Moreover, at baptism they
claim all the attributes of their contrada: their allies,
their enemies, their wins and losses at Palio, and

their responsibility to achieve victory at the next

possible race. This victory will come not only with
strategizing and luck, but also by the grace of the
Virgin, the city protectress and the focus of their
Palio. It is this passion for the Palio and communal
identity formed through the Palio that makes
Sienas ritual performance difference from the period performances and recreations of its neighbors.
Sienas willingness to incorporate novice spectators
into the festivities of their ritual is also noteworthy,
however. Although tourists have often misrepresented the tradition, the presence of outsiders is part
of the history of the Palio. Since the thirteenth century the tradition has, in part, been performed as a
show of the citys strength and industry connected
to the ritual functioned in the citys economy.
Today hotel prices triple in Siena during Palio time
and the purchase of Palio-related merchandise is an
essential component of any tourists visit to the city.
Civic-religious celebrations are, in part,
performances of a citys history, real or legendary.
Florence and Siena are not alone in producing such
events. In nearby Arezzo, for example, an event
called the Giostra del saracino (The Joust of the
Saracens) begins with the town crier, dressed in
vaguely Renaissance attire, reading the challenge to
Buratto, King of the Indies, after which a joust is
performed for crowds of local and tourist spectators.
Brochures written in four languages explain that
there is no doubt that the joust originated in the
Crusades and in the raids of the Saracens, which
reached as far as Arezzo. Despite such manipulations of history the theatrical aspects of the production delight and amuse crowds who are often come
to such cities to feel transported back in time by
being surrounded by historic architecture or by
slowing the pace of their days to match the rhythms
of life in a Tuscan hill-town. Yet these performances straddle a line between creative anachronism and
authentic ritual precisely because their productions
have become essential components of life for such
cities. Even ancient performances were tourist
attractions. Without understanding the implications
of their participation tourists, on the one hand may
become players in the performance of civic rituals.
On the other hand, their delight in witnessing such
rituals has essentially funded such traditions.

87

Index to Western European Stages, Volume 15

Aarhus, theatre in.............................................15:2,29
Aaron, Nicholas ..........................................15:3,19,75
Adamov, Arthur
Barricades ....................................................15:1,42
Adrien, Philippe ................................15:1,64 ;15:3,78
Aeschylus
The Libation-Bearers....................................15:1,29
Oresteia ...................................................15:3,34-38
Prometheus Bound........................................15:1,18
Ahr, Henrik ......................................................15:3,31
Aime, Chantal ...........................................15:1,98-99
Aizcorbe, Nestor ..............................................15:2,14
Ajdarpasic, Rifail .............................................15:3,18
Akhan, Ozan ...........................................15:1,103,106
Akhe Group, Russia
Sun Loco .........................................................15:2,8
White Cabin.................................................15:2,7-8
Alameda, Mariano..............................15:2,22;15:3,60
Albery, Tim ......................................................15:3,13
Albrecht, Marc .................................................15:3,45
Alden, David...............................................15:3,41-42
Alfons, Gerd.....................................................15:3,62
Alvaro, Anne ....................................................15:2,34
Amestoy Egiguren, Ignacio........................15:3,89-94
Betizu, the Red Bull.................................15:3,89-90
Cain and Abel in Potsdamer Platz ...............15:3,92
Chocolate for Breakfast...........................15:3,89,92
Doa Elvira .............................................15:3,90,94
Durango, A Dream .............................15:3,90-91,93
Ederra.................................................15:3,89,92-94
From Jerusalem to Jericho...........................15:3,93
Lock the Door Tight.................................15:3,89,92
Rondo for Two Women and Two Men...........15:3,92
They Shall Not Pass, Pasionaria! ...........15:3,89,91
Violets for a Bourbon ....................15:3,89,91-92,94
Where Are You Going ...................................15:3,92
Amiens, theatre in............................................15:1,42
Amis de Monsieur, Les ...............................15:3,10-12
Anagnostaki, Loula
To You Who Are Listening....................15:3,99-102
Andersen, Sejer................................................15:1,62
Anderson, Marianne.........................................15:3,13
Andreyev, Leonid
Thought.........................................................15:1,56
Angot, Christine ...............................................15:1,19
Anschtz, Ulrich ..............................................15:2,48
Angerer, Kathrin.........................................15:2,40-42
Animalario ....................................................15:2,6-7
Anton, George .......................................15:3,18-19,75
Arlaud, Philippe...............................................15:3,45

Arias, Alfredo...................................................15:1,64
Armada, Alfonso
El alma de los objetos ....................................15:2,5
Los nios no pueden hacer nada ....................15:2,5
Armstrong, Richard .........................................15:3,18
Arnst, Hendrik ................................................15:3 :22
Arribe, David ..............................................15:1,86-87
Anglade, Sandrine ............................................15:1,12
Asmus, Walter.............................................15:2,49-50
Astillero, El, Spain
Rotas ............................................................15:2,16
Arteria Company, France .................................15:3,10
Athne, Paris ..................................15:1,17-18,29-30
Auster, Paul
Laurel et Hardy vont au paradis ..................15:1,64
Austria, theatre in .......................................15:3,55-64
Aveline, Claire .................................................15:1,18
Avignon Festival...........................................15:3,4-16
Avignon, theatre in...........................................15:1,41
Ayckbourn, Alan
Damsels in Distress
(Flatspin, Gameplan, Roleplay)...........15:1,73-74
Sugar Daddies .........................................15:3,73-74
Badiou, Alain ...................................................15:1,43
Baeyens, Andr ................................................15:1,30
Baibussynova, Ulzhan .....................................15:1,18
Baillieux, Brigitte .............................................15:3,15
Bailly, Christophe
El Pelele ..................................................15:3,82-83
Bajard, Rjane ..................................................15:3,78
Bantzer, Christoph ...........................................15:3,33
Barba, Eugenio.................................................15:3,95
Barea, Ramn...................................................15:2,11
Baron, Gal ......................................................15:2,32
Bartabas
Loungta, les chevaux de vent..........................15:3,5
Bartlett, Neil ...............................................15:1,71-72
Baudinat, Michel..............................................15:2,33
Baumbauer, Frank............................................15:3,85
Bausch, Pina
Caf Mller...................................................15:3,50
Rite of Spring................................................15:3,50
Bayreuth, theatre in ....................................15:3,42-48
Beauquesne, Yves ............................................15:1,64
Bechtler, Hildegard ..........................................15:3,13
Bechtolf, Sven-Eric..........................................15:3,27
Beckett, Samuel
Waiting for Godot...................................15:2,49-50
Beethoven, Ludwig von
Fidelio..........................................................15:3,61
88

Beglau, Babiana...............................................15:3,25
Beheshti, Shaghayegh......................................15:3,83
Beheydt, Philippe
Sentinelle.......................................................15:3,11
Bellay, Jacques............................................15:1,63-65
Belloc, Claire ...................................................15:3,78
Bellugi-Vannucci, Duccio................................15:3,83
Benavente, Jacinto .............................................15:2,5
Bendixon, Thomas ...........................................15:2,28
Benedetto, Andr .............................................15:1,41
Bnichou, Maurice .....................................15:3,61-18
Benoin, Daniel............................................15:1,62-63
Benson, Laura
George, A Cats Life .....................................15:3,15
Berge, Franois ................................................15:1,42
Berg, Sylvia....................................................15:3,80
Berlin, theatre in......................................15:2,1,39-48
Bernhard, Thomas
Uber allen Gipfen ist Ruh ...........................15:1,19
Bernstein, Henry
Elvire ...........................................................15:1,7-8
Bernstein, Leonard
West Side Story ........................................15:3,61-64
Berrondo, Jon..................................................15:1,86
Bertin, Louise...................................................15:1,40
Bertram, Uwe...................................................15:1,57
Besson, Pierre ..................................................15:2,45
Best, Even ........................................................15:1,75
Best, Matthew ..................................................15:3,13
Bethune, theatre in......................................15:2,35-38
Bezace, Didier ............................................15:1,20-28
Bezuyen, Arnold ..............................................15:3,47
Bhuchar, Sudha and Kristine Landon-Smith
Strictly Dandia ........................................15:3,19-20
Bianchi, Renato................................................15:3,80
Bianco, Daniel .................................................15:2,14
Bickel, Moidele ................................................15:2,32
Bieito, Calixto ...............15:1,91-100;15:3,8-19,73-75
Bischofsberger, Thomas ...................................15:2,45
Bjerre, Karen Margrethe ..................................15:2,28
Blanc, Dominique ............................................15:2,32
Blanchon, Valrie.............................................15:1,13
Blane, Sue ........................................................15:3,46
Blethyn, Brenda..........................................15:1,67-68
Boettger, Ludwig ........................................15:3,29,59
Bolton, Ivor.................................................15:3,41,59
Bonaff, Jacques ................................................15:3,9
Bonnet, Manuel..................................................15:1,8
Borodina, Olga.................................................15:3,60
Botha, Johan.....................................................15:3,60
Botoft, Rasmus.................................................15:2,26
Bouchard, Nicholas..........................................15:1,32

Bouffes du Nord, Paris ...............................15:1,17,29

Bourbault, Jean-Claude....................................15:1,49
Boursier, Franois ............................................15:1,40
Boyer, Myriam .................................................15:1,64
Brahem, Claudine ............................................15:3,81
Brault, Christophe............................................15:1,13
Braun, Lioba ....................................................15:3,48
Braunschweig, Stphane...................15:1,18,55-60,64
Bravard, Sbastien ...........................................15:1,34
Brecht, Bertolt
The Exception and the Rule ....................15:1,19-20
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich........15:1,20-28
Galileo.....................................................15:1,32-34
The Mother ..................................................15:1,42
Threepenny Opera ...................15:1,97-100;15:3,49
The Wedding............................................15:1,20-28
Breth, Andrea..............................................15:3,26-27
Brennan, Liam .................................................15:3,69
Brianon, Nicolas.............................................15:1,16
Britton, Chris and Tom...............................15:1,80-84
Brombacher, Peter.......................................15:3,29,38
Brook, Peter .....................................................15:1,29
Brown, Trisha .............................................15:3,74-75
Brunel, Richard...........................................15:3,77-78
Bruzat, Marcel .................................................15:3,15
Bchner, Georg
Dantons Death...................................15:3,27,85-86
Leonce und Lena.........................................15:1,5-6
Woyzeck ..............................15:1,5,56,67;15:3,59,85
Buero Vallejo, Antonio ....................................15:3,93
Bulgakov, Mikail
The Master and Margarita......................15:3,21-24
Bunchschuh, Matthias......................................15:3,35
Burchuladze, Paata...........................................15:3,41
Buschor, Ernst..................................................15:3,36
Butel, Stephen..................................................15:1,32
Butzke, Martin .................................................15:3,86
Byrne, Elizabeth...............................................15:3,13
Cabal, Frmin ................................................15:2,8,10
Cabalerro, Ernesto ...........................................15:2,21
Cabeia, Aniesse ................................................15:3,25
Cacoclown
El tuli ..............................................................15:2,8
Cacollo, Juana....................................................15:1,9
Cadiot, Olivier
Retour definitive et durable..........................15:1,19
Calderon.............................................................15:2,5
Calle, Miguel ngel .....................................15:2,9-10
Calvario, Philippe ............................................15:1,16
Camacho, Miguel........................................15:2,11-12
Cam, Roser .....................................................15:1,98
Camus, Paul .....................................................15:3,15
89

Cano, Juan Felipe.............................................15:2,10

Cnovas, Elena ...........................................15:2,23-24
With Rubn Cobos and Juan Carlos Talavera
La balada de la ccel de Circe ........15:2,21,23-24
Cantarella, Robert ............................................15:3,81
Canut, Carles.............................................15:1,98,100
Carnage Productions, France
Les GIGN ......................................................15:2,37
Carroll, Tim......................................................15:3,69
Casamayor, Lola ..............................................15:2,22
Cassel, Jean-Pierre ........................................15:1,8,63
Castorf, Frank................15:2,39-42;15:3,21-26,53-54
Catsermans, Denise..........................................15:1,58
Caubre, Philippe .......................................15:1,49-54
Aragon ..........................................................15:1,49
Ariane ou lge dor................................15:1,49-50
Le bout de la nuit..........................................15:1,50
Le Champ de betteraves ...............................15:1,50
Le Chemin de la mort...................................15:1,50
Claudine........................................................15:1,46
Les Enfants du Soleil ....................................15:1,50
La Fte de lamour.......................................15:1,50
Jours de Colre .............................................15:1,50
68 selon Ferdinand..................................15:1,43,49
Le Roman dun acteur.............................15:1,49-54
Le Thtre selon Ferdinand .........................15:1,49
Le Triomphe de la jalousie ...........................15:1,50
Le Vent du gouffre.........................................15:1,50
Le voyage en Italie .......................................15:1,50
Cavalcade Co., France .....................................15:3,11
Clarie, Clmentine.......................................15:1,4,6
Cline, Louis-Ferdinand
Le voyage au bout de la nuit...................15:1,65-66
Cellier, Anne Marie
Vincent ou lme bleue .................................15:3,15
Cendron, Daniel...............................................15:1,12
Chaillat, Gal ...................................................15:1,14
Chameleons Group, England
The Doors of Serenity..................................15:1,79
Chamorro, Maika .............................................15:2,12
Charriras, Paul................................................15:1,63
Chavarri, Jaime................................................15:2,11
Chekhov, Anton
Platonov ..........................................................15:3,5
Three Sisters.........................................15:3,9-11,29
The Sea Gull....................................15:1,17;15:2,43
Uncle Vanya ..................................................15:1,67
Chreau, Patrice............15:1,29;15:2,32;15:3,6,50-51
Chevalier, Martine ...........................................15:2,34
Christensen, Daniel..........................................15:1,57
Chollet, Christine .............................................15:1,16
Christie, Agatha

Ten Little Indians............................................15:2,5

Christie, Natalie ...............................................15:1,94
Christo ..............................................................15:3,53
Churchill, Caryl
A Number.................................................15:1,73-74
Cixous, Hlne
Le Dernier Caravansrail .....15:1,44 ;15:3,5,83-84
Et soudain des nuits dveil..........................15:1,44
La Ville perjure .............................................15:1,43
Claire, Anne .....................................................15:1,31
Claudel, Paul
Le Soulier de Satin..........................15:1,56;15:3,53
Clausen, Andrea ...............................................15:3,27
Clement, Patricia..............................................15:3,13
Clolus, Emmanuel............................................15:1,13
Codhant, Sonia .................................................15:3,13
Coleman-Wright, Peter ....................................15:3,62
Collet, Yves.................................................15:3,82-83
Cologne, theatre in .................................15:1,101-106
Comdie-Franaise, Paris ......................15:1,16,19,29
Compaia Jos Estruch-Resad, Spain..............15:1,89
Conners, Kevin ................................................15:3,40
Consigny, Anne ..................................................15:1,8
Constable, Paulo.................................15:1,63;15:3,60
Copenhagen, theatre in...............................15:2,25-29
Correa, Christophe...........................................15:3,15
Corsetti, Giorgio Barberio..................15:1,56;15:3,78
Corneille, Pierre
Le Menteur....................................................15:1,16
Cornet, Nathalie .....................................15:1,30-31,57
Cornu, Jean-Pierre ......................................15:3,30,38
Costigan, George..............................................15:3,18
Courseaux, Henri .............................................15:1,16
Craig, Daniel...............................................15:1,72-73
Crippa, Maddalena ...........................................15:3,49
Croft, Dwayne ..................................................15:3,60
Cruz, Luis Miguel
Habla pueblo, habla.....................................15:2,16
Hay que pagar..............................................15:2,17
Curtis, Fionn ....................................................15:2,50
Cuvelier, Brigitte ........................................15:2,40-42
Daisme, Johan..................................................15:1,15
Damgrd, Helle...........................................15:2,27-28
Damraul, Diana ................................................15:3,59
Danby, Graeme ................................................15:1,94
Daro, Rubn....................................................15:2,12
Dashwood, Valrie ...........................................15:1,19
Daszak, John ....................................................15:1,94
Dauch, Stephane ..............................................15:1,37
Davies, Rebecca de Pont................................`15:1,94
Davis, Sir Andrew............................................15:3,46
Davis, Sebastian...............................................15:3,10
90

Daymond, Karl.................................................15:3,18
Debray, Rgis...................................................15:1,48
Debrun, Sylvie ............................................15:1,20,22
Delabesse, Daniel........................................15:1,20,22
Delcuvellerie, Jacques .....................................15:1,46
Demarcy-Mota, Emmanuel..............................15:3,82
Denmark, theatre in ....................................15:2,25-30
De Roo, Sara ....................................................15:1,19
Descamps, Patrick............................................15:1,30
De Schijver, Damiaan......................................15:1,19
Dtournoyment, France
Karton Parade.........................................15:2,37-38
Diaz, Miguel Ango
Chano Pozo, un Cubain New York.........15:1,9-10
Didym, Michel .................................................15:1,19
Dietzold, Doris ...............................................15:1,104
Dillane, Stephen...............................................15:1,75
Dimitriades, Kimon .........................................15:1,34
Diquro, Luc-Antoine......................................15:3,78
Dorn, Dieter .....................................................15:3,61
DOrta, Marcello
Jesperons que je men sortira .....................15:3,11
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Dmonen.......................................................15:3,20
Erniedrigte und Beleidigte ...........................15:3,20
Douglas, Matthew.......................................15:3,19,75
Doyle, Roddy
The Woman Who Walked into Doors ......15:3,52-53
Du Boys, Aurlie .............................................15:1,33
Duesing, Dale...................................................15:3,42
Duez, Sophie ....................................................15:1,63
Dujardin, Guillaume ........................................15:3,14
Dumont, Rene ........................................15:3,35,38,86
Duncan, Martin ................................................15:3,40
Duquesne, Philippe ..........................................15:1,19
Duras, Marguerite
Savannah Bay ..............................................15:1,19
Durieux, Guillaume .........................................15:1,14
Durif, Eugne...................................................15:1,64
Edinburgh Festival......................................15:3,17-20
Egelhof, Doro..........................................15:1,104,106
Eggert, Maren ..................................................15:3,31
Ehnes, Barbara .................................................15:3,29
Eilers, Wilhelm ................................................15:3,85
Elliott, Alasdair ................................................15:3,13
England, theatre in...................15:1,67-84;15:3,66-72
Ensler, Eve
The Vagina Monologues...............15:1,29,67;15:2,5
Erbs, Lis .........................................................15:1,18
Espaa, Angela .................................................15:1,90
Estbanez, Cesreo...........................................15:2,11
Etchells, Tim ....................................................15:3,74

Euripides
The Children of Hercules .............................15:1,18
Evans, Wynne ..................................................15:1,94
Everding, August .............................................15:3,39
Ex Machina, Canada...................................15:1,71-72
Eyre, Richard ...................................................15:1,70
Faber, Pascal.......................................15:1,37;15:3,10
Fabre, Jan
Je suis Sang ....................................................15:3,5
Parrots and Guinea Pigs.........................15:1,58-60
Faivre dArcier, Bernard.................................15:3,5-8
Fallot, Evelyne
La Boutique au coin de la rue.....................15:1,8-9
Farce du cuvier, Le ..........................................15:1,29
Faucher, Sophie ..........................................15:1,71-72
Favory, Michel.................................................15:1,12
Favorita Teatro
La sirena gorda...............................................15:2,8
Fedoseyev, Vladimir ........................................15:3,62
Fellag................................................................15:1,43
Fret, Dominique .............................................15:1,42
Fernandez, Jose Ramn
Dos...............................................................15:2,16
Una historia de fantasmas............................15:2,17
Fvrier, Gilles...................................................15:1,64
Feydeau, Georges
Le Dindon .....................................................15:1,29
Feu la mere de Madame...............................15:1,25
Lonine est en avance...................................15:1,25
On purge bb ..............................................15:1,25
Fiennes, Ralph .................................................15:1,78
Fisbach, Frdrick............................................15:1,13
Fischer, Adam ..................................................15:3,48
Fischer, Anya ...................................................15:2,47
Fletcher, Diane.................................................15:3,19
Flimm, Jrgen .....................15:3,46-47;15:3,46,54-55
Fomenko, Piotr..............................15:1,56;15:2,33-34
Forced Entertainment, England .......................15:3,74
Forkbeard Fantasy ......................................15:1,80-84
Frankenstein ............................................15:1,80-84
Foucher, Michle .............................................15:3,83
Fox, Laurence .............................................15:1,67-68
France, theatre in .....................15:1,4-66;15:2,31-38;
15:3,77-84
Franon, Alain........................................15:1,10-11,64
Frankfurt, theatre in .........................................15:1,56
Frapier, Franois ..............................................15:3,14
Frayn, Michael
Benefactors..............................................15:1,68-69
Frazer, Rupert..............................................15:3,19,75
Frias, Israel.......................................................15:1,87
Friedrich, Eberhard ..........................................15:3,45
91

Friedrich, Georg ...............................................15:3,41

Friel, Brian .......................................................15:1,67
Dancing at Lughnasa .....................................15:2,5
Frizell, Bill .......................................................15:3,53
Fromager, Alain ...............................................15:2,32
Fujimara, Mihoko ............................................15:3,48
Fulgoni, Sara ....................................................15:1,94
Furianetto, Ferrucio .........................................15:3,60
Galibert, Alexandra..........................................15:1,40
Galindo, Josep..................................................15:1,99
Galina, Rosa.....................................................15:3,25
Gallotta, Claude
Trois Generations ...........................................15:3,7
Gambill, Robert ...............................................15:3,42
Gambon, Michael .......................................15:1,72-73
Gardien, Isabelle ..............................................15:3,80
Garrido, Antonio ..............................................15:1,87
Garrido, Ral Hernndez
Calibn .........................................................15:2,16
La persistencia de la imagen........................15:2,17
Si un da me olvidaras.............................15:2,17-19
Gas, Mario .....................................................15:1,100
Gasc, Yves........................................................15:1,12
Gate Theatre, Dublin ..................................15:2,49-50
Gatti, Armand .............................................15:1,46-47
La Passion en violet, jaune et rouge ............15:1,47
Gavora, Vicent .................................................15:2,17
Genet, Jean
Les Paravents ...............................................15:1,13
Genet, Mathieu.................................................15:2,34
George, Andrew...............................................15:3,60
Gergiev, Valery.................................................15:3,60
Germany, theatre in ....15:2,1,39-48,101-106;15:3,2154,57-58,85-87
Gestin, Framoise ............................................15:3,83
Gibaut, Thierry ............................................15:1,20,22
Gillard, Franoise...............................15:1,16;15:3,80
Giorgetti, Florence..............................15:1,17;15:3,82
Giroudon, Grard .............................................15:2,34
Glaves, Richard................................................15:3,69
Globe Theatre, London...............................15:3,65-70
Gobert, Jean-Franois ......................................15:2,31
Goethe, Wolfgang
Iphigenia in Tauris ........................................15:2,43
Goldfeim, Frdric de.................................15:1,63-64
Gololobov, Vadim ..............................................15:2,7
Gmez, Fernando Fernn
Las bicicletas son para el verano ......15:2,10,13-14
Gonon, Christian..............................................15:1,12
Gonzlez, Nando ..............................................15:2,22
Gorki Theater, Berlin ..................................15:2,43-48
Gorne-Achdjian, Catherine................................15:1,8

Gottlieb, Sarah............................................15:2,29-30
Gounod, Charles
Faust .............................................................15:3,61
Grbl, Ditte ....................................................15:2,28
Gravire, Flix....................................15:1,10;15:3,82
Grec Festival, Barcelona..................................15:1,99
Greece, theatre in......................................15:3,99-102
Gregory, Pascal ................................................15:2,32
Grillparzer, Franz
Libussa..........................................................15:3,57
Gros, Nicole .....................................................15:1,37
Groupov, Belgium
Rwanda 94...............................................15:1,45-46
Gurin, Eric......................................................15:1,32
Guillot, Donatien ........................................15:1,20,22
Guth, Claus.................................................15:3,43-44
Haberlant, Fritzi ..........................................15:3,33-34
Hacker, Norman...............................................15:3,33
Hadjaje, Jacques ...............................................15:3,78
Hagen, Reinhard ..............................................15:3,46
Hall, Sir Peter...................................................15:1,68
Hall, Rebecca ...................................................15:1,68
Hamilton, Paul .................................................15:3,71
Hampton, Christopher
The Talking Cure ..........................................15:1,78
Hancisse, Thierry ..........................15:1,15;15:3,78-80
Hancock, Leonard............................................15:1,96
Handel, Georg Friedrich
Rinaldo ....................................................15:3,41-42
Hannover, theatre in ...................................15:3,57-58
Hansen, Bohr
Festen ......................................................15:1,62-63
Harding, Daniel................................................15:3,40
Harewood, David .............................................15:3,72
Hartelius, Malin ...............................................15:3,40
Hands, Marina ..................................................15:2,32
Hamburg, theatre in ....................................15:3,31-33
Harris, Amanda ................................................15:3,67
Hass, Katja.......................................................15:3,31
Hawlata, Franz.................................................15:3,39
Heigel, Catherine .............................................15:1,19
Heim, Michel
Nero the Roman Empress .............................15:3,10
The Night of the Queens ...............................15:3,10
Henshall, Douglas ............................................15:1,76
Henze, Hans Werner
Die Bassariden .............................................15:3,61
LUpupa...................................................15:3,60-61
Heras, Guillermo...........................................15:2,5,19
Herheim, Stefan ..........................................15:3,55,59
Herlitzius, Evelyn ............................................15:3,48
Hernndez, Emilio ...........................................15:1,87
92

Hess, Walter .....................................................15:3,34

Hesse, Volker ...................................................15:2,43
Hewlett, Marion...............................................15:1,57
Heyme, Gnter.................................................15:3,49
Higgins, Claire .................................................15:1,70
Hinrichs, Fabian .........................................15:2,40-42
Hirata, Oriza
News from Level S ........................................15:1,56
Hppner, Benjamin ..........................................15:3,58
Hoffmeyer, Stif ................................................15:2,26
Hoist, Allen...................................................15:1,9-10
Holberg, Ludwig
Den Stundeslse .....................................15:2,27-28
Hollop, Markus................................................15:3,13
Honor, Philippe
LEuphorie perptuelle.................................15:3,16
Hoppe, Bettina .................................................15:2,46
Hopps, Stuart....................................................15:1,96
Horovitz, Israel ................................................15:1,64
Horvath, Odon von
Kasimir und Karoline ..................................15:2,27
Hosemann, Marc ..............................................15:3,25
Hossein, Robert
CEtait Bonaparte.........................................15:1,29
Howard, Michael .............................................15:3,48
Hbchen, Henry.......................15:2,40-42;15:3,22-23
Huetos, Pablo .....................................................15:2,7
Hugo, Victor
Angelo, Tyran de Padoue ..........................15:3,9-10
Les Burgraves ...............................................15:1,40
Claude...........................................................15:3,14
Le Derner Jour dun Condamn ..................15:1,39
La Esmeralda................................................15:1,40
Les Gueux .................................15:1,39-40;15 :3,14
Hernani.........................................................15:1,40
Lucrce Borgia .............................................15:1,40
Marion de Lorme..........................................15:1,40
Marie Tudor .......................................15:1,35,37-38
Ruy Blas..............................................15:1,29,35,40
Torquemanda ......................................15:1,35-36,39
Huguet, Jrme ................................................15:3,78
Humbert, Nicolas .............................................15:3,44
Hungary, theatre in .....................................15:1,64-65
Hunger-Buehler, Robert ...................................15:3,30
Hunter, Kathryn..........................................15:3,67-68
Huntrods, Alexandra.....................................15:2,9-10
Ibsen, Henrik
A Doll House........15:1,29;15:3,27-28,31-33,49-50
Ghosts........................15:1,29,56-58;15:2,43,47-48
Hedda Gabler..........................................15:1,30-32
Little Eyolf ....................................................15:1,56
Peer Gynt.................................................15:3,57-58

Iconomou, Panajotis .........................................15:1,94

Ingalls, James F................................................15:3,64
Innes-Hopkins, Robert.....................................15:3,62
Ireland, theatre in........................................15:2,49-50
Isaev, Maksim ....................................................15:2,7
Isherwood, George.........................................15:1,102
Italy, theatre in............................................15:3,95-98
Jacob, Irne ......................................................15:1,17
Jaeggi, Ueli ......................................................15:3,38
Jandorf, Henrik ................................................15:2,26
Jarre, Stphanie ..................................................15:1,8
Jancek, Leos
Das Schlaue Fchslein............................15:3,61-62
Jay, Claude .......................................................15:1,17
Jeanneteau, Daniel..............................15:1,20;15:2,32
Jeener, Jean-Luc .........................................15:1,35-40
Jelinek, Elfriede
Macht Nichts................................................15:3,58
Rasteplads....................................................15:2,27
Jennett, Dan .....................................................15:1,29
Jensch, Julia................................................15:3,85-86
Jeu dAdam ......................................................15:1,29
Jiminez, Alexandra .......................................15:2,9-10
Joensen, Kristian Holm....................................15:2,28
Jolie Mme, France .........................................15:1,42
Jonas, Sir Peter.................................................15:3,39
Jones, Leah Marian ..........................................15:3,13
Jonigk, Thomas ................................................15:3,51
Jordan, Peter.....................................................15:3,33
Jordanov, Nedjalkov
LArraire Elseneur ........................................15:3,11
Juana de la Cruz, Sor
Los empeos de una casa.............................15:1,87
Jnemann, Didi.......................................15:1,104-105
Jung, Andre .................................................15:3,38,59
Kaiser, Georg ...................................................15:3,61
Kaiser, Joachim...........................................15:3,42-43
Kammer, Frederike.....................................15:1,56-57
Kammer, Salome..............................................15:3,42
Kane, Sarah
Purified..............................................15:1,56;15:3,5
Kang, Philip .....................................................15:3,47
Kaplan, Jrme ................................................15:1,12
Karl, Natalie.....................................................15:3,41
Karmmerloher, Katharina ................................15:3,39
Karpinsky, Olga ...............................................15:1,13
Kastler, Heide...................................................15:3,58
Kater, Fritz
Fight City, Vinet............................................15:3,33
We Are Camera.............................................15:3,33
Zeit zu Lieben Zeit zu Sterben ......................15:3,33
Keen, Will...................................................15:1,75-76
93

Keenlyside, Simon ...........................................15:3,74

Keith, Gillian ...................................................15:3,13
Kemer, Hans.....................................................15:3,38
Kempster, David ..............................................15:1,94
Kenda, Roland .................................................15:3,27
Kerbat, Patrice ...................................................15:1,7
Kergrist, Jean ..............................................15:1,41-42
Kessler, Anne ...................................................15:2,34
Kiarostami, Abbas ......................................15:3,95-98
Kienberger, Juerg .............................................15:3,38
Kieseier, Hans................................................15:1,102
Kimmig, Stephan ........................................15:3,31-33
Kirchner, Jrme ..............................................15:1,17
Kirschschlager, Angelika .................................15:3,60
Klauner, Burghart...........................................15:2,48
Kleist, Heinrich von
Die Familie Schroffenstein ...........................15:1,56
Penthesilia ....................................................15:1,56
Klinke, Martina.......................................15:1,105-106
Klinke, Volker................................................15:1,104
Klobucar, Margareta ........................................15:3,62
Koch, Roland ...................................................15:3,27
Kller, Thomas...............................................15:1,103
Kokkos, Yannis ...........................................15:1,13-14
Kosselek, Julien ...............................................15:1,40
Krmer, Martin.................................................15:3,42
Krappatsch, Sylvana ...................................15:3,25,59
Krejca, Otomar.................................................15:1,49
Kresnik, Johann ..........................................15:3,55,58
Kriegenburg, Andreas.................................15:3,34-38
Krger, Ruth Marie..........................................15:1,57
Krger, Fabian.......................................15:2,43-45,48
Krumbiegel, Ulrike.....................................15:3,35-36
Kubin, Anna.....................................................15:2,48
Kunz, Georg ...................................................15:1,104
Kunzendorg, Nina............................................15:3,35
Kupfer, Harry...................................................15:3,43
Kurth, Peter......................................................15:3,33
Kusej, Martin..............................................15:3,55-56
Kyd, Gerald......................................................15:3,69
Kyhle, Jan ........................................................15:3,13
Kyle, Barry.........................................15:3,66;15:3,63
Labarthe, Samuel ...............................................15:1,8
Labonne, Philippe ............................................15:3,15
Laborey, Eric....................................................15:1,35
Labrusse, Eudes
Le Collier de Perles du Gouverneur............15:3,11
LaBute, Neil
The Measure of Things.................................15:2,43
Lacascade, Eric ..................................................15:3,5
Lacosta, Balbino ..............................................15:1,87
Lagarde, Ludovic .............................................15:1,19

Lambert, Benot
Pour ou contgre un monde meilleur............15:1,42
Lampkin, Agnes ...............................................15:3,28
Landau, Bernhard.............................................15:3,38
Lane, Mathieu ..................................................15:3,15
Langer, Mette Mai ......................................15:2,29-30
Langhoff, Matthias .........................................15:1,5-6
Laporte, Jean-Pierre .........................................15:1,64
Lasalle, Jacques ..........................................15:1,15-16
La Traverse, France .........................................15:1,86
Laurent, Jacques ...............................................15:1,64
Lavaudant, Georges.........................15:1,6,64;15:3,83
Laville, Pierre .................................................15:1,6-7
Lazaridis, Stefanos...........................................15:3,46
Lebacq, Laetitia ...............................................15:1,13
Lecca, Marie Jeanne ........................................15:3,64
Legras, Daniel..................................................15:3,14
Le Livre, Manuel ...........................................15:1,34
Lepage, Robert
Kahlo.......................................................15:1,71-72
Le Maillon, Strasbourg ....................................15:1,58
Lemaire, Vincent..............................................15:1,30
Lemtre, Jean-Jacques .....................................15:3,84
Lennartz, Monika ..................................15:2,44-45,47
Lenz Refrazioni, Italy
Biancaneve......................................................15:2,8
Leprince, Pierre-Yves.......................................15:1,16
Leroy, Denis.....................................................15:3,10
Lessing, Gotthold
Emilia Galotti..........................................15:3,26-27
Ley, Pablo ...................................................15:1,97,99
Leysen, Johan...................................................15:1,17
Liddell, Anglica
Trptico de la afliccin................................15:2,5-6
Lima, Andrs......................................................15:2,6
Lindenberg, Udo ..............................................15:3,49
Lindsay, Arto....................................................15:2,47
Lippert, Matthias..............................................15:3,45
Litton, Andrew.................................................15:1,94
Lloyd, Phyllida ...........................................15:3,67-68
Loew, Hans .................................................15:3,31,33
Loher, Dea
Bluebeard ......................................................15:1,56
Lombart, Maxime ............................................15:1,49
London, theatre in....................15:1,67-84;15:3,65-72
Lope de Vega .....................................................15:2,5
El alcade de Zalamea..................................15:2,20
Peribaez.............................15:1,85-86 ;15:3,71-72
El perro del hortelano.............................15:1,86-97
Lorang, Carol ...................................................15:3,13
Lorite, Paca .................................................15:2,15,17
Loser, Christoph ...............................................15:3,37
94

Lovett, Conor...................................................15:2,50
Lucas, Sonia de.............................................15:2,9-10
Luce, Claire Booth
The Women....................................................15:2,43
Lucena, Carlos .................................................15:2,11
Lucini, Fabrice.......................................15:1,17,64-66
Luhrmann, Baz.................................................15:1,96
Luxembourg, theatre in ....................................15:3,13
Macaulay, Jacqueline ..................................15:2,46,48
Madrid, theatre in .........................................15:2,4-24
Mrki, Jun ........................................................15:3,42
Maestre, Aurlie ...............................................15:1,17
Magee, Waltraud ..............................................15:3,42
Magnan, Philippe ...............................................15:1,8
Magnin, Jean-Daniel
Opra Savon............................................15:1,12-13
Malla, Gerardo .................................................15:2,14
Mallison, Oliver...............................................15:3,24
Manzanares, Lola...............................................15:2,8
Tres Mujeres en Busca....................................15:2,9
Marceau, Marcel ..............................................15:1,29
Marie, Mathieu.................................................15:2,31
Marinese, Valrie .............................................15:3,78
Marlowe, Christopher
Dido, Queen of Carthage .............................15:3,65
Edward II.............................................15:3,65,68-60
Marshall, Wayne ..............................................15:3,63
Marthaler, Christoph ...................................15:3,28,38
Groundings ...................................................15:3,38
Murx den Europaer! .....................................15:3,38
Mathieu, Ccile................................................15:1,64
Martinelli, Jean-Louis......................................15:2,32
Martinez, Iride .................................................15:3,59
Martinez and Fabrega
The Bull Circus .............................................15:2,36
Martone, Mario ................................................15:3,95
Marzolff, Serge ................................................15:3,83
Mason, Anne ....................................................15:3,13
Mathieu, Ccile ...............................................15:1,63
Mathieu, Claude ...............................................15:3,80
Matschke, Matthias ..........................................15:3,38
Maugham, Somerset
The Constant Wife....................................15:1,68-69
May, Jodhi........................................................15:1,78
Mayor, Laurence ..............................................15:1,13
Mayorga, Juan
Le hombre de oro..........................................15:2,16
La mala imagen............................................15:2,17
and Juan Cavestany
Alejandro y Ana..............................................15:2,7
McCallin, Tanya...............................................15:3,60
McDonagh, Martin

The Lieutenant of Inishmore.........................15:1,71

McEnery, John .................................................15:3,69
McGinity, Terry ................................................15:3,69
McGovern, Barry........................................15:2,49-50
McGreevy, Geraldine .......................................15:1,94
McMaster, Brian ..............................................15:3,17
McTeer, Janet ...................................................15:3,67
McVicar, David................................................15:3,60
Meier, Waltraud...........................................15:3,42,60
Merbeth, Ricarda .............................................15:3,46
Merki, Stefan...............................................15:3,35,85
Mermet, Daniel ................................................15:1,42
Mesguich, Daniel .....................15:1,16,29;15:2,31-32
Mesguich, Sarah...............................................15:2,31
Mesguich, William...........................................15:2,31
Messiaen
Joan of Arc....................................................15:3,53
Metalovoice Company, France
Fragiles.........................................................15:2,37
Middleton, Thomas and John Rowley
The Changeling.............................................15:1,29
Milhaud, Sylvie................................................15:2,32
Milin, Gildas
Anthropozoo..................................................15:1,56
Miller, Arthur
Death of a Salesman. ......................................15:2,5
Minetti, Bernhard .......................................15:3,53-54
Mira, Magi .....................................................15:1,87
Mitchell, Iain....................................................15:1,75
Mitrovista, Redjep ...........................................15:1,19
Mnouchkine, Ariane ............15:1,43-45,50;15:3,4,6-7
Moguchy, Andre..............................................15:1,64
Molire
Amphitryon.............................................15:1,13-14.
LAvare..........................................................15:1,64
Dom Juan..............................15:1,15-16,29;15:3,78
Le Malade imaginaire .............................15:1,29,64
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac ....................15:3,78-79
Molino, Giuseppe .............................................15:1,13
Montalvo, Maria ..............................................15:3,63
Montand, Yves ...................................................15:1,5
Montel, Laurent ...............................................15:1,12
Monty Pythons Flying Circus.........................15:1,29
Moore, Simon
Misery .....................................................15:1,62,64
Mooshammer, Helmut .....................................15:3,31
Moral, Ignacio del
P. y los escorpiones. .....................................15:2,10
Pide Una Aclaracin...................................15:2,8-9
Moreau, Jean-Baptiste .....................................15:3,80
Mormiro, Francesco.........................................15:1,30
Morrilo, Gemma ..............................................15:1,90
95

Morrison, Jackie...............................................15:3,72
Mortier, Gerard ......................................15:3,49,51,53
Mozart, Wolfgang
Abduction from the Seraglio .........15:3,40-41,55,59
The Magic Flute ...........................................15:1,56
Mller, Heiner..................................................15:3,55
Der Auftrug ...................................................15:3,24
Mukagasana, Y.................................................15:1,46
Munich, theatre in...............15:1,56;15:3,34-42,85-87
Munoz, Yolanda ...............................................15:2,10
Murphy, Johnny..........................................15:2,49-50
Murray, Rupert.................................................15:2,50
Musset, Alfred de
Lorenzaccio..................................................15:1,49
Muzek, Tomistav..............................................15:3,45
Murschetz, Annette ..........................................15:3,26
N.A.J.E., France...............................................15:1,42
Nacache, Marjorie............................................15:3,13
Nadas, Peter
Mnage .........................................................15:3,13
Nagano, Kent ...................................................15:3,60
Naharin, Ohad..................................................15:3,50
Nardone, Michael.............................................15:3,72
Natrella, Laurent ..............................................15:1,12
Naumann, Kurt.................................................15:3,23
Navarro, Javier.................................................15:2,14
Navas, Vanessa Martinez ...................................15:2,7
Ndongo, Vicenta ..............................................15:1,87
Nedelkovitche, Thomas ...................................15:1,34
Neisel, Carlos.................................................15:1,106
Nemeth, Judit ...................................................15:3,46
Nest, Tilo ....................................................15:2,46-47
Netherlands, theatre in the..........................15:3,75-76
Neuenschwander, Michael ..........................15:3,34,86
Neuhaeuser, Karin............................................15:3,38
Neumann, Bert .................................................15:3,24
Nice, theatre in ...........................................15:1,61-66
Nichet, Jacques ................................................15:1,64
Nicola, Serge ...................................................15:3,83
Niefind, Dagmar ..............................................15:3,27
Nilon, Paul .......................................................15:1,94
Noir, David.......................................................15:3,13
Norris, Rufus....................................................15:3,71
Nothomb, Amerlie
Sabotage amoureux ......................................15:3,15
Novarina, Valre ..............................................15:1,19
Novovic, Anna............................................15:2,27-28
Nsse, Barbara .................................................15:2,48
Nufer, Lorenz ...................................................15:3,14
Nez, Goizalde...............................................15:1,88
Nunn, Trevor...............................................15:1,74-78
Odin Teatret .....................................................15:3,95

Ofarim, Esther..................................................15:3,49
Ofczarek, Nicholas...........................................15:3,27
Olesen, Kirsten.................................................15:2,26
Ollivier, Alain .............................................15:1,19-20
Olmos, Luis ................................................15:2,12-14
ONeill, Eugene
Dynamo ...................................................15:3,81-82
Mourning Becomes Electra .....................15:3,24-26
Orain, Cedric....................................................15:1,40
Orth, Elisabeth .................................................15:3,27
Ostendorf, Josef ...............................................15:3,38
Ostermeier, Thomas....................................15:3,27-28
Ostrovsky, Alexandre
The Forest.....................................................15:2,33
Guilty Innocents ............................................15:2,34
Sheep and Wolves .........................................15:2,43
Otero, Ana........................................................15:2,22
Palencia, Isabel Oyarzbal de ..........................15:2,15
Paloma, Merc ............................................15:1,94,96
Pappelbaum, Jan ..............................................15:3,28
Pargeter, Alison ................................................15:3,73
Parigot, Guy.....................................................15:1,17
Paris, theatre in ......15:1,4-40;15:2,:31-34;15:3,77-84
Pasqual, Lluis ...................................................15:2,11
Patte, Jean-Marie
La Comdie de Macbeth ..............................15:1,34
Pavis, Patrice....................................................15:2,15
Pedrero, Paloma..........................................15:2,21-23
La isla amarilla ............................................15:2,23
La llamada de Lauren ..................................15:2,21
Mal Bajio ......................................................15:2,23
Noches de amor efimero ..........................15:2,21-22
Peduzzi, Richard ..............................................15:2,32
Pealver, Diana ................................................15:2,22
Penchenat, Jean-Claude ...................................15:1,64
Penzel, Werner .................................................15:3,44
Perceval, Luc ...................................................15:3,86
Pernel, Florence .................................................15:1,8
Peschel, Milan..................................................15:3,34
Petit, Herv ......................................................15:1,86
Petras, Armin ...................................................15:3,33
Petronijevic, Sacha...........................................15:1,37
Person, Philippe.......................................15:3,9-10,16
Pfitzner, Ursula ................................................15:3,60
Phillips, Mary...................................................15:3,13
Pickup, Rachel .................................................15:3,19
Pierre, Herv ....................................................15:1,10
Pilod, Julie .......................................................15:1,10
Pilz, Gottfried...................................................15:3,59
Pimenta, Helena ..........................................15:2,11-14
Pindado, Alfonso................................................15:2,8
Pinon, Dominique ............................................15:1,14
96

Pirandello, Luigi
The Mountain Giants....................................15:3,57
Six Characters in Search of an Author...15:3,81-82
Pitaki, Reni.......................................................15:3,99
Piton, Marie .....................................................15:1,16
Platel, Alain........................................................15:3,5
Wolf ..........................................................15:3,51-52
Plato
The Symposium.............................................15:2,43
Plaza, Jos Carlos ............................................15:2,14
Plaza, Mary ......................................................15:1,94
Plemme, Jean Marie
Tango Tanguage ......................................15:3,12-13
Plette, Marie .....................................................15:3,13
Podalyds, Denis ..................................15:1,5;15:2,34
Pohlert, Angelika ...........................................15:1,103
Poncela, Enrique ................................................15:2,5
Pons, Santi .......................................................15:1,98
Portrenaux, Laurent .........................................15:1,19
Portugal, theatre in...........................................15:3,50
Pouly, Jrme...................................................15:1,15
Poutney, David ...................................15:1,96;15:3,61
Pregler, Wolfgang .......................................15:3,36,86
Prvert
La Crosse en lair.........................................15:1,42
Priew, Uta.........................................................15:3,45
Priol, Anne .......................................................15:3,10
Proust, Marcel
Remembrance of Things Past.......................15:3,14
Pszoniak, Wotjek................................................15:1,8
Puche, Gumersindo............................................15:2,6
Puchner, Stefan ...........................................15:3,28-29
Pudding Thtre, France
Hollywood Tif ...............................................15:2,36
Puigserver, Fabi..............................................15:2,11
Pujol, Jaime........................................................15:2,8
Luz Verde ......................................................15:2,10
Pulido, Carlos .................................................15:2,8-9
Py, Olivier........................................................15:1,56
Requiem pour Srebrenica.......................15:1,44-45
Quester, Hugues ...............................................15:3,82
Racine
Andromaque ..................................................15:2,32
Britannicus....................................................15:3,10
Esther ......................................................15:3,79-80
Phaedra ......................15:1,29;15:2,32 ; 15:3,50-51
Raffaelli, Bruno................................................15:3,78
Rfols, Mingo ...........................................15:1,98,100
Rau, Winni .....................................................15:1,105
Raven, Kurt......................................................15:2,26
Ravenhill, Mark ...............................................15:1,95
Razoumovskaa, Ludmilla

Chre Elna Serguivna ........................15:1,20-28

Reagon, Bernice Johnson.................................15:3,52
Recklinghausen Festival ..................................15:3,49
Rjon, Chlo ....................................................15:1,17
Reichardt, Verena .............................................15:3,33
Remiendo Teatro
Como si fuera esta noche ...............................15:2,8
Rempe, Julia.....................................................15:3,42
Rsillot, Benoit ................................................15:1,13
Reza, Yasima
Art ...................................................................15:2,5
Ribes, Jean-Michel...........................................15:1,64
Richter, Sonja...................................................15:2,26
Rimondi, Ruggero............................................15:3,60
Rinn, Inka .........................................................15:3,13
Rixmann, Anne.......................................15:1,104-105
Ro theatre, Rotterdam ......................................15:3,53
Robin, Michel ..................................................15:2,34
Rode, Lone .................................................15:2,29-30
Rodero, Jos Mara ..........................................15:2,11
Rodrguez, Carlos.......................................15:2,15-20
Romain, Jules
Knock ............................................15:1,12-18,64-66
Rome, theatre in .........................................15:3,95-98
Ronconi, Luca..................................................15:3,57
Ronder, Tanya ..................................................15:3,71
Rongione, Fabrizio
A Genoux ......................................................15:3,15
Rose, Jrgen......................................15:3,39-40,59,61
Rosetto, Cecilia ................................................15:1,99
Rothmann, Ralf................................................15:3,53
Roussel, Nathalie
Pourquoi jai jet ma grandmre................15:3,15
Rucco, Lilia......................................................15:3,10
Rudolph, Sebantian..........................................15:3,38
Ruf, Eric...........................................................15:2,32
Ruggiero, ngel.................................................15:2,8
Ruhrtriennale ..............................................15:3,49-54
Ruiz, Boris ................................................15:1,98,100
Ruiz, Chema.....................................................15:1,90
Russia, theatre in ............................................15:2,7-8
Rutter, Claire ....................................................15:1,94
Ruzicka, Peter ..................................................15:3,56
Ryhnen, Jaako ................................................15:3,45
Rylance, Mark........................................15:3,65,69-70
Rzelka, Christian ....................................15:1,104-105
Sabounghi, Rudy..............................................15:1,15
Sacca, Roberto .................................................15:3,41
Sachs, Alain ....................................................15:1,6-7
StterLassen, Sren.......................................15:2,26
Salem, Franois Abou......................................15:3,55
Salzberg Festival.........................................15:3,56-61
97

Samie, Cline ..............................................15:1,15,19

Samuel, Udo.....................................................15:1,56
Sanchis, Clara ..................................................15:1,87
Sanders, Graham ..............................................15:3,13
Sanders, Rachel................................................15:3,66
Sansa, Carme ............................................15:1,98,100
Santos, Alonso de
Carta de Amor a Mary ...................................15:2,9
Sanz, Elisa........................................................15:2,12
Sardou, Victorien
Madame Sans-Gne..................................15:1,4,6-7
Savary, Jrme....................................15:1,9-10,29,50
Sawallisch, Wolfgang.......................................15:3,39
Schad, Stephan.................................................15:3,33
Schijver, Damiaan............................................15:1,19
Scarborough, theatre in....................................15:3,73
Schenk, Otto.....................................................15:3,39
Schiaretti, Christian
Ahmed philosophe.........................................15:1,43
Les Citrouilles...............................................15:1,43
LEcharpe rouge ...........................................15:1,43
Schiller, Friedrich
Kabale und Liebe ...................................15:2,25-27
Schilling, Arp
Schimmelpfennig, Roland ...............................15:3,42
Before/After .............................................15:3,82-83
Schmelz, Helga ..............................................15:1,105
Schmidt, Christian ...........................................15:3,44
Schmidt, Wolfgang...........................................15:3,48
Schmidt-Henkel, Hinrich .................................15:3,27
Schmitz, Bruno .......................................15:1,103-106
Schneider-Hofstetter, Barbara..........................15:3,46
Schneider-Siemssen, Gnther..........................15:3,39
Schnitzler, Arthur
Liebelei .........................................................15:3,30
La Ronde.......................................................15:1,67
Schrder, Simone .............................................15:3,48
Schubert, Franz
Winterreise ....................................................15:3,74
Schtz, Bernhard ....................15:2,40-42;15:3,23-24
Schuster, Lisa ..............................................15:1,20,22
Schwientek, Siggi ............................................15:3,25
Scob, Edith.......................................................15:1,14
16 nez noir, France
The Innocents ..........................................15:3,13-14
Seiffert, Peter ...................................................15:3,46
Sellars, Peter ....................................................15:1,18
Semtchenko, Pavel.............................................15:2,7
Seneca
Thyestes ........................................................15:3,10
Serrato, Jean Louis...........................................15:1,37
Seweryn, Andrzej.............................................15:1,15

Shaffer, Anthony
Murderer .........................................................15:2,5
Shakespeare, William
Antony and Cleopatra...................................15:2,31
Cymbeline .....................................................15:1,17
Hamlet ...................15:1,29;15:3,17-19,55-56,74-75
King Lear ......................................................15:3,49
A Midsummer Nights Dream15:1,13-14,64;15:2,11
Othello ..........................................................15:3,86
Richard II ...........................................15:3,65,68-70
Richard III.....................................15:3,29-30,65-87
Romeo and Juliet .......................15:1,50;15:2,43-45
The Taming of the Shrew .........................15:3,65-67
Twelfth Night.................................................15:1,29
Shaw, George Bernard
Mrs. Warrens Profession ........................15:1,67-68
Sheffield, theatre in..........................................15:3,74
Shenk, Norman...........................................15:2,43-46
Shicoff, Neil.....................................................15:3,60
Shiff, Buki ........................................................15:3,41
Shrapnel, Lex ...................................................15:3,19
Sidhom, Peter...................................................15:3,13
Silhol, Caroline ..................................................15:1,8
Silla Amarilla
Siete por Siete ............................................15:2,8,10
Simon, Michael...........................................15:2,45-47
Simons, Johan ..................................................15:3,53
Simonsen, Birgitte............................................15:2,28
Sinisterra, Sanchis
El otro ...........................................................15:2,10
Sir Henry..........................................................15:3,24
Sireuil, Philippe ...............................................15:1,30
Sivadier, Jean-Franois ....................................15:1,32
Slater, Daniel....................................................15:3,62
Smith, Robert Dean .........................................15:3,48
Sobel, Bernard .................................................15:2,34
Soelistyo, Jalyena .............................................15:1,18
Solaguren, Cecilia............................................15:1,88
Sols y Revadeneyra, Antonio de
El amo al uso ................................................15:1,89
Solzhenitsyn
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich......15:3,75-76
Somers, Catherine............................................15:1,30
Sotomayor, Armando Galindo ...........................15:1,9
Spain, theatre in ....15:1,85-100;15:2,4-24;15:3,89-94
Sphyras, Stephanie...........................................15:3,13
Sprenger, Nathalie............................................15:1,40
Stabell, Carsten ................................................15:3,13
Stanford, Alan.............................................15:2,49-50
Station House Opera, England
Roadmetal Sweetbread .................................15:1,79
Mares Nest...................................................15:1,79
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Steentoft, Elsebeth ...........................................15:2,26

Steffing, Frank............................................15:2,45-47
Stein, Gertrude
Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights .............15:2,43,45-47
Stein, Peter ..................................................15:3,49,57
Steinberg, Paul .................................................15:3,41
Stepantchenko, Tatania ....................................15:3,10
Stocker, Laurent...............................................15:2,34
Stokholm, Maria.........................................15:2,29-30
Stoppard, Tom
The Coast of Utopia................................15:1,74-78
Stoyanova, Krassimira .....................................15:3,60
Strasbourg, theatre in.............................15:1,18,55-60
Stratz, Claude...................................................15:1,64
Strauss, Johann
Die Fledermaus .......................................15:1,95-96
Strindberg, August
A Ghost Sonata .............................................15:2,32
Studer, Cheryl ..................................................15:3,39
Studio Theatre de Stains, France .....................15:3,13
Suars, Andr ...................................................15:1,49
Svejnoha, Tanja..............................................15:1,104
Talavera, Carlos ...............................................15:2,22
Tanase, Virgil ...................................................15:3,14
Tanguy, Franois ..............................................15:1,45
Tarn, Georges ...................................................15:1,17
Tartarin, Catherine ...........................................15:1,14
Tasndi, Istvn
Hazm Hazm ..............................................15:1,65
Tat, Benoit Nguyen..........................................15:3,13
Tvora, Salvador..............................................15:3,91
Taziye.........................................................15:3,95-98
Teatro de la Fondo, Spain
Sanhedrin 54...................................................15:2,7
Teatro India, Rome.....................................15:3,95-98
Teatro Tringulo.................................................15:2,8
Teatro Yses, Spain......................................15:2,23-34
Ten Haaf, Jochum ............................................15:1,70
Tg STAN, Belgium..........................................15:1,19
Thalbach, Katherina ...................................15:2,43-45
Thalheimer, Michael ...................................15:3,30,59
Th la Rue, France
Le Cabinet Public & Cie.........................15:2,36-37
Thtre des Amadiers, Paris .......................15:1,13-14
Thtre de la Colline, Paris ..............15:1,10-14,34,56
Thtre de la Commune, Aubervilliers ......15:1,20-28
Thtre de Complicit, London.......................15:1,56
Thtre Grard Philipe, Saint-Denis................15:1,20
Thtre des Halles, France..........................15:3,11,15
Thtre du Centaure, Luxembourg ..................15:3,13
Thtre Hbertot ..............................................15:1,16
Themba, Can

Le Costume ...................................................15:1,29
Thielmann, Christian .......................................15:3,46
Thieme, Thomas ..............................................15:3,86
Thoreau, Pascal ................................................15:3,16
Tilley, Paul .......................................................15:3,19
Tilling, Carmilla ...............................................15:3,39
Tillmann, Jojo ................................................15:1,105
Timar, Alain
O vous, Frres humaines ..............................15:3,15
Tirole, Christian ...............................................15:1,32
Titus, Alan........................................................15:3,47
Toffolutti, Ezio.................................................15:2,43
Tomaschewsky, Joachim..................................15:3,22
Tom, Jos........................................................15:2,11
Tomlinson, John...............................................15:3,45
Toren, Roni ......................................................15:3,41
Torres, Eva .......................................................15:1,90
Tosi, Florence...................................................15:3,10
Tourneur, Cyril
The Revengers Tragedy..........................15:3,77-78
Tracanelli, Leonida ..........................................15:3,80
Trauttmansdorff, Victoria.................................15:3,33
Trekel, Roman..................................................15:3,46
Triska, Jan ........................................................15:1,19
Trotti, Gerardo .................................................15:2,22
Trottier, Patrice ................................................15:1,14
Tse, Elaine........................................................15:1,19
Tsypin, George.................................................15:3,63
Turgenev
A Month in the Country...........................15:3,75-76
Tydn, Jesper....................................................15:3,63
Ufried, Ariane Isabel........................................15:3,19
Ultz...................................................................15:3,40
Ua, Susana de.................................................15:2,11
Urmana, Violeta ...............................................15:3,48
Tumina, Jana ......................................................15:2,7
Valentine, Graham F. .......................................15:3,58
Valle-Incln, Ramn del
Luces de Bohemia....................................15:2,11-13
Van den Driessche, Frdric...........................15:1,6-7
Vanderheyden, Nadia .......................................15:1,32
Van Kampen, Claire.........................................15:3,66
Vargicov, Lubica ............................................15:3,60
Vasquez, Yolanda .............................................15:3,67
Vassiliev, Anatoli..............................................15:1,14
Vaude, Nicolas .................................................15:1,16
Vayssire, Marie...............................................15:2,32
Vazey, Sylvain ..................................................15:1,40
Vella, Vronique ..............................................15:1,12
Verdi, Giuseppe
A Masked Ball .........................................15:1,91-95
Vernet, Claire ...................................................15:1,12
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Verdi, Maria .....................................................15:1,17

Viala, Florence .................................................15:1,15
Viebrock, Anna ...........................................15:3,38,58
Vielle, Laurence ...............................................15:3,15
Vienna, theatre in .............................................15:3,26
Vidal, Lluis.......................................................15:1,97
Vigner, Eric ......................................................15:1,19
Vinaver, Michel
Les Voisins...............................................15:1,10-11
Viola, Bill.........................................................15:3,53
Vitar, Mirabel...................................................15:1,90
Vitez, Antoine ..................................................15:1,43
Vogel, Josche ..................................................15:1,103
Voss, Manfred ..................................................15:3,42
Voyatzis, Letteris ..............................................15:3,99
Vuillermoz, Michel...............................15:1,7:15:2,34
Wade, Fiona .....................................................15:3,19
Wagner, Richard
Der fliegende Hollnder ....................15:3,42-45,61
Ring ...............................................15:3,17-18,46-48
Tannhuser....................................................15:3,41
Wagner, Wolfgang............................................15:3,45
Walburg, Lars-Ole............................................15:3,85
Walker, Timothy .........................................15:3,68-69
Walsh, Enda
Disco Pigs.....................................................15:1,64
Wanniger, Biggi .............................................15:1,102
Warlikowski, Krzystof .....................................15:1,64
The Dybbuk .....................................................15:3,5
Warmuth, Heike ...............................................15:2,45
Warner, Keith ...................................................15:3,46
Watanabe, Kazuko......................................15:2,47-48
Webber, Andrew Lloyd
Bombay Dreams............................................15:1,67
Phantom of the Opera ....................................15:2,5
Weber, Jacques .................................................15:1,62
Weber, Serge ....................................................15:3,58
Wedekind, Frank ..............................................15:3,49
Wegner, John....................................................15:3,46
Wehle, Barbara .................................................15:1,18
Weill, Kurt

The Protagonist ............................................15:3,61

Royal Palace.................................................15:3,61
Weisse, Nikola .................................................15:3,29
Welker, Hartmut...............................................15:3,48
Werner, Olivier.................................................15:3,78
Wessely, Paula..................................................15:3,58
Wherlock,Richard ............................................15:3,64
Whitehouse, Richard........................................15:1,94
Widman, Jrg ...................................................15:3,42
Williams, Tennessee
A Streetcar Named Desire .......................15:2,39-42
Winslade, Glenn ...............................................15:3,46
Wilson, Robert
The Temptation of St. Antony........................15:3,52
Wittenbrink, Franz
Les Adieux.....................................................15:3,49
Wokalek, Johanna ............................................15:3,27
Wolf, Sibylle ....................................................15:3,63
Wolfram, Andreas ............................................15:3,63
Wonder, Erich ..................................................15:3,48
Wopmann, Alfred.............................................15:3,61
Wright, Nicholas
Vincent in Brixton ....................................15:1,69-70
Wuttke, Martin.................................................15:3,22
Yage, Javier, Yolanda Pallnm Jos Fernndez
Las manos .......................................................15:2,5
Yordanoff, Vladimir.........................................15:1,12
Youn, Kwangchul.............................................15:3,46
Young Vic, London.....................................15:3,71-72
Zaborov, Boris..................................................15:1,15
Zadek, Peter .....................................................15:3,86
Zaepffel, Alan ..................................................15:3,80
Zaimoglu, Feridun ...........................................15:3,86
Zamora, Ana ...............................................15:1,89-90
Zehetgruber, Martin ....................................15:3,55,58
Zilbermann, Jean-Jacques ..................................15:1,8
Znyk, Daniel ....................................................15:2,34
Zoldak, Andrezj ..........................................15:3,75-76
Zorilla, Jos........................................................15:2,5
Zuber, Xavier ...................................................15:1,99
Zurich, theatre in ...................................15:3,28-29,38

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101

Martin Horn, Otto Sander, and Andr Meyer in Matthias Hartmanns production of The Captain of Kpenick at Bochum Schauspielhaus.
[See article page 63.] Photo Copyright: Arno Declair

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Contributors
JOSHUA ABRAMS is a doctoral candidate in the theatre program at the City University of New York Graduate
Center, where he is completing his dissertation, entitled Staging Alterity: The Ethics of Performing
Difference(s). He teaches in the Department of Critical Studies at the New School University and is the
ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group Conference Planner and ATHE PSFG Pre-Conference Co-Planner.
ERIK ABBOTT is a student in the Ph. D. in Theatre Program at the City University of New York Graduate
Center and the Managing Editor for Western European Stages.
KEVIN BYRNE is a graduate student in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He will
be presenting a paper on African American minstrel performers and their audiences as part of a debut panel at
this summers ATHE conference. This is his first article for Western European Stages.
MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate
Center, is the author of many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and dramatic literature.
He is the 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the 1999 recipient of the
American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award. His book, The Haunted Stage: The
Theatre as Memory Machine, which came out from University of Michigan Press in 2001, received the
Callaway Prize.
BARRY DANIELS is a retired professor of Theatre History. He has written extensively on the French
Romantic Theatre. His book, Le Dcor de thtre l'poque romantique: catalogue raisonn des dcors de la
Comdie-Franause, 1799-1848, was recently published by the Bibliothque nationale de France. He is currently working on a study of the Thtre de la Rpublique, 1791-1799.
MARIA M. DELGADO is Reader in Drama & Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London. She is coeditor of the Routledge journal Contemporary Theatre Review. Her most recent publication, Other Spanish
Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage, was published by Manchester
University Press in 2003.
ALLAN GRAUBARD is a poet, playwright and critic. His last theatre work, For Alejandra, made its New
York and Washington, DC premieres, summer 2002, and its European premiere at the Karanetena Performance
Festival, Dubrovnik, summer 2002, with a more recent performance at the Sibiu International Theater Festival,
Sibiu, Romania, summer 2003. He has written for the journal Slavic & Eastern European Performance, and
appears frequently in literary and cultural journals internationally.
ROY KIFT is a British playwright living in Germany. His latest play, Camp Comedy, on the fate of the German
artist and film director, Kurt Gerron, in the Nazi concentration camp at Theresianstadthe sang the Mackie
Messer Moritt in the premier of Brechts Threepenny Opera and appeared opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue
Angelpremiered at the State University of New York-Geneseo in the Spring of 2003.
BRUCE KIRLE is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he directs the
B.F.A. Musical Theatre Program and teaches graduate theatre history and theory. His book, Unfinished (Show)
Business, a sociological counter-history of the American musical, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois
University Press. Other research interests include nineteenth-century French theatre.

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JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK currently teaches in the theatre department at Rutgers University, Newark.
She received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2003. Her current book project is entitled Cyborg
Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Contemporary Performance. She is the Focus Group
Representative for the ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group and Co-Organizer of the ATHE PSFG PreConference. Her essay, Shifting Strengths: The Cyborg Theatre of Cathy Weis, is forthcoming in the
University of Michigan Press volume Bodies in Commotion, edited by Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl.
JENNA SOLEO is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre Program at the City University of New York Graduate
Center. She is currently working on her dissertation on the political function of Sienese civic spectacle during
the Republican era of the later Middle Ages.
PHYLLIS ZATLIN is a professor of Spanish and coordinator of translator training at Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey. She served as Associate Editor of Estreno from 1992-2001 and is currently editor of
the translation series ESTRENO Plays. Her translations that have been published and/or staged include plays
by J. L. Alonso de Santos, Jean-Paul Daumas, Eduardo Manet, Paloma Pedrero and Jaime Salom. Her most
recent book is The Novels and Plays of Eduardo Manet: An Adventure in Multiculturalism.

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Morir cuerdo y vivir loco [See article page 43.]

Photo Copyright: Chicho

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