Christine Madden, just back from a festival in Germany that showcased talent from Ireland, describes what each side learned
The stage was stunning for this particular theatre event. The charming streets and buildings of Heidelberg, close to the Rhine in the Neckar Valley, glowed in the consummate lighting, courtesy of the warm central European sunshine. What marvellous production values.
One of Germany's many theatre festivals, the Heidelberger Stückemarkt serves as a forum for new writing talent, featuring a guest country each year. This adds extra flavour, bringing a contingent of theatre professionals from a different cultural milieu to enhance, compare and contrast with productions from across Germany. This year it invited Ireland to join its celebration of theatre, and we were only too happy to oblige.
Last weekend we packed our clothes and props, including numerous loaves of brown bread for the festival's closing reception, and flew over. I went as a member of Rough Magic, which was presenting its play Take Me Away, by Gerald Murphy, on the final evening of the festival. Other representatives of Irish theatre included the independent director Rachel West, a Dubliner who spent four years working at the Schaubühne, in Berlin, among other German theatres; Enid Reid Whyte and Diego Fasciati of the Arts Council; Caroline Williams of the Theatre Shop; Karen McCully of the Abbey Theatre; and Fintan O'Toole, the Irish Times theatre critic.
The Stückemarkt features cutting-edge productions from Heidelberg and other German cities, as well as a variety of rehearsed readings in the form of authors' evenings. Both offered the chance to ask questions of director, author and possibly cast in public discussions after the performances. The final weekend of this 10-day festival programme then shifted to dovetail German and Irish theatre, offering audiences two full productions of Irish plays, three rehearsed readings with accompanying public discussions and an introductory seminar presented by members of the Irish theatre posse.
With her knowledge of both languages and experience of Irish and German theatre, West chaired the discussion, helping to bridge gaps between language barriers. Talking about the state of Irish theatre, O'Toole quipped that, like the Reduced Shakespeare Company's effort to compress all of Shakespeare's plays in to an hour and a half, he was embarking on an even more risky and ambitious venture in attempting to cover 100 years of Irish theatre in 15 minutes.
Yet he kept his audience - which attended the two-hour seminar with rapt attention on a sunny, warm afternoon - riveted with his description of the theatre scene in Ireland, its revolutions, upheavals and shining moments during the 20th century.
Bells tolled in the late afternoon as the other panel members - Lynne Parker and Loughlin Deegan of Rough Magic and the playwrights Ursula Rani Sarma and Gerald Murphy - brought their experiences of Irish theatre to the forum. Their speeches were ably rendered in to German by two translators, although their services were often unneeded, as many in the audience had enough English to understand.
Some of the audience seemed as concerned about our Irishness as we were. One put forward the conundrum of whether and to what extent the Irish language influenced our English. Another questioned how Irish Martin McDonagh is: an Irish writer living in the UK whose play Pillowman, produced by the Deutsches Theater, in Berlin, takes place in Eastern Europe.
O'Toole discussed the fabric of Irish English, in which the former weaves its way through the latter, and the Irish diaspora, a widely dispersed group, the voice of which, he believes, will become louder and more prevalent in the next few years.
The Deutsches Theater production of Pillowman followed the discussion. Directed by Tina Lanik - tipped by Germany's Theater Heute magazine as a leader of the next generation of theatre - the production of this uncomfortably witty, disturbing play noir was breathtaking. It was the first - and by no means the last - example that weekend of how fascinating and enlightening it can be to watch one's culture through the lens of another's artistic vision.
In response to a question in an interview with the German press the previous evening, West had attempted to clarify the differences between Irish and German theatre, inasmuch as they can be identified and quantified. The Irish, she explained, were excellent storytellers, and this carried in to their concept of theatre-making. The Germans, on the other hand, based their theatre on a concept, so used this as their starting point.
The version of Pillowman presented at Heidelberg gave credence to this distinction. The complex, convoluted story spun by McDonagh evolved - in the hands of Lanik, her set and lighting designer and her highly skilled cast - in to something resembling performance art with a recognisable story and plot development.
Far from being presented naturalistically, everything in the play converged on the idea of a world gone wonky, from the ingenious set - an Irish drawing room, complete with typical doors and wall mouldings, tilted 90 degrees to the left - to the cartoonlike yet sinister presence of the actors. In its sharp absurdity the production felt like Flann O'Brien on cocaine. The acting, too, as Parker said, displayed a precision unknown in Ireland.
We had the opportunity to confirm this impression the next day, during the rehearsed readings of three Irish plays: Scenes From The Big Picture, by Owen McCafferty, Midden, by Morna Regan, and Blue, by Ursula Rani Sarma.
Hearing Irish plays in German was like watching yourself on closed-circuit television: you could recognise it, but it seemed different, removed. (Watching her play in a foreign language, Regan joked that it was like attending theatre on drugs.)
Irish writers' talent for clever dialogue and humour came across strongly, as did the realisation of the universality of human experience.
The mercurial ability to switch from levity to gravity in an instant, the humour implicit even at the darkest moments, impressed the German audiences, heightened by the fact that the expression was new to them, embedded in unfamiliar words and ideas. "In Germany we don't do comedy," said the lead actor in Pillowman, Frank Seppeler, by way of explaining how refreshing it was to get their hands on a witty script. (You'd never know it, though, by their comedic proficiency.)
It wasn't easy to tear ourselves from the festival tent, with its excellent (and inexpensive) beer, wine and food, prepared by a food artist and historian, but the final performance drew us back out.
When Rough Magic presented Take Me Away, Murphy's play, it was the Germans' turn to admire Irish dramatic technique. "We can't act like that," a dramaturge confided afterwards. The Irish actors' "relaxed and casual" stage manner impressed the German dramatists, whose technique is more controlled. Apart from the hilarity this provoked among us in private - "Sure, we work hard at being casual and relaxed" - our mutual fascination indicated how unfamiliar technique can seem fresh and inspiring.
The awards presented at the end of the festival drove home the interest in Irish theatre. Morna Regan received the Stückemarkt's European Authors' Prizefor Midden, which came with €5,000 and the likelihood of a German production of her play in the near future. The Heidelberg Audience's Prize, decided by popular vote on the readings of nine German and Irish plays, went to Rani Sarma. The artistic director of the Theater Heidelberg, Günther Beelitz, then announced that it will produce Blue next year.
The interest and enthusiasm of audiences and dramatists alike made apparent not only their appreciation of what was for them the fresh influence of Irish theatre but also our own interest in and enthusiasm for importing new techniques, visual concepts and production values to Ireland.
A highly acclaimed production earlier in the week, We Are Camera/Jasonmaterial, was the third part in an acclaimed trilogy of plays by Fritz Kater (the alter ego of Armin Petra, artistic director of Thalia Theater, in Hamburg, which produced the play). Given a sense of intensity and depth by its unusual script construction, which flouted all rules of linear time, the production rendered an absurdist, often lyrical text into a stunning visual showcase involving playful, creative use of props and video projection.
Both We Are Camera and Pillowman demonstrated exceptional visionary skill in creating theatre - proof also of what can be achieved with the money and time to prepare work properly for the stage. Pillowman in particular was a revelation: to see an Irish play presented in such a finely crafted version indicates what we, too, can and should be doing to further the development of theatre.
Reluctantly, we packed our clothes and props, minus the brown bread, to return home. But we stashed unseen, unchecked luggage in our heads and hearts - new impulses and inspiration for our own theatre.
Christine Madden, a regular contributor to The Irish Times, is literary manager of Rough Magic Theatre Company
