Bodies That Matter
By Gitta Honegger
Ulrike Maria Stuart
By Elfriede Jelinek
Thalia Theater
Hamburg, Germany
The Nobel-laureate physicist Max Planck
once remarked that for a new idea to succeed the old generation
of scientists and their students need to die. For the following
generation the new will then be an obvious fact. This somewhat
gloomy prospect seems to apply to theatrical innovations as well.
Directors and designers trained in the former West Germany have
not yet gotten over the influence of Robert Wilson in their pristinely
lit, meticulously contoured, slow-motion Gesamtkunstwerke,
expanding already lengthy classics by hours of mega-minimalist
mise-en-scènes.
By contrast, a younger generation of directors
was influenced by the East Berliner Frank Castorf (born 1951),
the provocative artistic director of the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg
Platz, whose over-the-top stagings of Dostoyevsky, Frank Norris
and Tennessee Williams, among others, defined the post-dialectical
merger of Communist and global Capitalist greed, angst and desire
in the reunited Germany.
Not surprisingly, Wilson's signature slow-motion
aesthetic (which drained his staging of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck
at the Berliner Ensemble of all socio-political pathos) was recently
parodied at the Volksbühne by Christoph Schlingensief, the German
playwright, director and filmmaker. Schlingensief's play Rosebud,
which he wrote and directed in 2001 in the wake of 9/11, was a
savage send-up of terrorist plots by and against fame-starved
journalists, dysfunctional media executives, and their abused
and abusive children in a world that can perceive itself only
in terms of staged performances. Among other outrageous appropriations
from stage and screen, construction workers (a ubiquitous sight
in post-Wall Berlin) in primary-colored hard hats and costumes
criss-crossed the stage sideways, Wilson-style, their glacial
speed also suggesting the tempo of workers protected by government-controlled
wages and benefits. Born in 1960, Schlingensief is arguably the
naughtiest and most cheerfully tasteless among the stars of the
so-called "post-dramatic theater." His in-your-face infantile
theatrics belie the seriousness of his attacks on cultural pretense
and contemporary politics.
One of Elfriede Jelinek's favorite directors,
Schlingensief staged the scandalous 2003 premiere of her play
Bambiland at the Vienna Burgtheater. This characteristically
dense text was Jelinek's response to the war in Iraq, particularly
to Abu Ghraib and its connection to her vision of Austria as an
ongoing pornographic spectacle involving its historical undead.
Schlingensief's staging included his response to the material,
which he broke up with improvised scenes and interviews with different
guests every night, alternating with porn sequences on a giant
screen. Turning the venerable Burgtheater into a gilded porno
house harked back to the spirit of Jelinek's earlier play Burgtheater
(never done at the Burgtheater) in which she exposed Austria's
most revered actress, Paula Wessely, as an ardent supporter of
Hitler. Wessely had starred in the Nazi propaganda film Die
Heimkehr (The Homecoming).
It was Castorf's aggressive 1994 staging
of Jelinek's Raststätte (Rest Area) at the Hamburg
Schauspielhaus that became a defining model for dealing with this
Nobel laureate's resistant texts. That was the first time a director
had used the production circumstance as an open confrontation
with the author, who was introduced as a monstrous sex doll, with
braids, signature hair-roll, and all. Jelinek-wigs began to appear
like fetishes in subsequent productions of her plays. Whenever
directors got lost in Jelinek's syntax -- or her jungle of quotes
appropriated from literature, pulp fiction, the media, advertising
and politics -- they would stage their frustrations in their productions.
The late Einar Schleef (1944-2001) famously appeared in his production
of Sportstück as the author's stand-in, named Elfi-Elektra,
and screamed in desperation: "Frau Jelinek, I don't understand
you."
Interestingly, male star directors produced
the most acclaimed productions of her plays, enacting a strange
sort of mating ritual that might be called a "mind fuck" in the
language of Jelinek's generation. Over a decade ago, Jelinek abandoned
dialogue in favor of what she called Sprachflächen --
language planes -- a term that has become a cliché in academic
criticism of her work. The term, however, accurately describes
the surface the directors furiously confront. Whenever they find
themselves running up against a wall, they smash their way through
it, with Jelinek's permission, with the force of a wrecker's ball
(a term that would suit her delight in the tackiest sort of punning).
In her stage directions for In den Alpen (In the
Alps) she advises prospective directors: "As everyone knows
by now, I couldn't care less about how you're going to do that."
"Feel free to fuck around with me," she encouraged Nicolas Stemann,
who directed three of her plays, including the Hamburg premiere
of her most recent, Ulrike Maria Stuart.
In
a sense, her directors enact upon her text-as-body what she stages
in her writing. Her scenarios are littered with dismembered body
parts that suggest the cannibalism of commercially produced desire.
Austrian natives gnaw on the severed limbs of skiers, mountain
climbers and refugees who perished in the Alps -- a special temptation
for directors with a knack for Grand Guignol. Stemann, in his
2005 Burgtheater production of Jelinek's Babel, inserted
a text by an actual contemporary cannibal, Issei Sagawa, who meticulously
described luring, killing, preparing, ingesting and storing the
body parts of a young German woman he met in Paris in 1981. The
text was read by a beautiful, soft-voiced Asian actress. (Released
from a Japanese mental institution after 15 months, Issei Sagawa
became a cult figure, who now maintains his own Web site and has
been featured in a French gourmet magazine, among other publications.)
The German popular press routinely reacts
to Jelinek with personal attacks of astonishing viciousness. As
if to protect her body in her texts from these media assaults,
she recently declared that, starting with Ulrike Maria Stuart,
her work will no longer be made available in print. Instead, she
would only post the texts on her Web site. An early version of
Ulrike Maria Stuart popped up there for a just a few
days several months before the Hamburg premiere.
Perhaps this policy will be temporary.
In any case, it has turned out to be unexpectedly fortunate. One
of Ulrike Meinhof's twin daughters, Bettina Röhl, a journalist,
threatened Jelinek with a lawsuit for distortion of her mother's
relationship with her children and for violation of the family's
right to privacy. The daughter had attended an open rehearsal
of Stemann's Hamburg production and then offered to help with
rewrites and directing. Her offer was declined. Since the play
had not been published, there were no concrete grounds for legal
action. Nevertheless, some changes were made. Jelinek's publisher,
Rowohlt Verlag, sends out the script to theaters with a proviso
that they are prohibited from distributing it outside the production
cast and crew. The implication is that each production must be
considered the current text, and that only the producing theaters
can be held legally responsible for its contents.
According to the German magazine Der
Spiegel, Röhl was satisfied with the changes Stemann made
-- changes, one assumes, to personal references and quotes. I
attended both a public rehearsal and the opening night performance
and thought that, though the lost lines were relatively unimportant,
the production had lost a bit of its aggressive edge.
The unavailability of the printed text
adds an intriguing dimension to the experience of the theatrical
event: remembering details of the performance parallels the remembering
of the historical event through layers of mediatized narratives.
Unlike the actual past, one can return to the theater to watch
another performance. However, due to the uniqueness of each theatrical
evening, it will not be the same. Ultimately, the work remains
as elusive and subject to multiple perceptions as events that
happened in the past. In any case, Jelinek's new strategy gives
directors even more freedom than they had had. From now on they
are the authorized co-producers of the performance text.
Jelinek's exemplary, self-negating move
fulfills the claims of a "post-dramatic theater" that no longer
privileges the text. This move will require critics to radically
rethink their analytical tools and, so far, the German press,
used to directorial excess and authority, has happily ignored
the challenge. They have continued to apply their standard repertoire
of adjectives and witticisms to both her works and her directors'
stock of "post-dramatic" devices.
Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart
examines the legacy of West Germany's Left through the dynamics
of women in power. Friedrich Schiller's fictional encounter between
Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I is refracted in the relationship between
Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the driving forces of the activist-turned-terrorist
Baader-Meinhof group. With Andreas Baader they were the founding
members of the Revolutionary Army Fraction or RAF. What began
as a protest against their parents' generation's unwillingness
to deal with their Nazi past and a rebellion against the war in
Vietnam and the excesses of capitalism escalated into a series
of deadly terrorist attacks.
The drawn out, controversial trial of key
members of the group in Stuttgart in the late seventies marked
the climax of the most violent phase of West Germany's post-war
history. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her prison cell. A year
later Gudrun Ensslin found the same death in the same cell, while
Andreas Baader and two other members were discovered shot to death
in their cells. (It was never clearly established that their deaths
were suicides.) Earlier, another imprisoned member, Holger Meins,
died from a hunger strike.
As usual, Jelinek is not interested in
dramatizing the stories of individuals. Though Ulrike, Gudrun
and the "Queen" are featured speakers, their language reflects
their construction as composite ready-mades. A dizzying kaleidoscope
of splintered references merges in Jelinek's grammar to suggest
a trail of thought leading from the Elizabethans to German Idealism
to Communism to Nazism to the sixties to global capitalism, outsourcing,
the Middle East, Antigone and contemporary petty-middle-class
consumer culture -- which, it turns out, is at the root of the
group's demise. The quotes include Schiller, Shakespeare, Büchner
and Marx, as well as the writings of Meinhof and other RAF members.
These last become material for a bitterly satiric take on failed
revolutions, the self-delusions of rebels (including perhaps Jelinek's
own), and the commodification of revolution in the post-ideological
age.
The
voices of "Princes in the Tower" representing Meinhof's children
(the primary cause for the "real" daughter's concerns), a "Chorus
of Old Men" and an "Angel from America" trying to hang himself
with his AIDS ribbon (a homage to Tony Kushner) connect different
periods and cultures. Jelinek owns the DVD of Angels in America
and watched it many times with great enthusiasm. It inspired her
to insert several appearances by an "Angel from America" in her
text. His role is the most puzzling. His initial warning that
terrorism invariably leads to a reactionary backlash, his wrathful
and increasingly anxious ruminations over traditions, miscalculations
and self-destructive strategies of the Left suggest an outsider's
perspective. (Jelinek ardently admires Kushner's own struggle
with and for the democratic ideals of the American constitution.)
Given the concrete political and existential struggle Kushner's
Angel represents, Jelinek appears to question both the romanticizing
of past revolutions and the indulgences of so-called "post-dramatic"
performance practices (which have been partly spawned by her texts)
-- although, curiously, there are no allusions to contemporary
terrorism and American politics, as in her previous play Bambiland.
Then again, the Angel occasionally adopts the self-absorbed language
of Andreas Baader. At other times, from his new vantage point
close to the Lord, he seems to have refined his political views
and sharpened his sense of irony regarding God and the world.
Her brand of comedy is based on the disconnection between human
efforts to make sense and categorical denials of that just when
it is about to happen.
Jelinek's response to the Nobel Prize is
a case in point. Her agoraphobia and other acute anxieties made
it impossible for her to attend the award ceremony. Her radical
withdrawal from the public after receiving the Prize is reflected
in Meinhof's increasing isolation from her group. Meinhof had
been a journalist and her political pamphlets, reflective texts
and partly critical notes on the history of the RAF were rejected
by Ensslin and her lover, Andreas Baader, who had also been Meinhof's
lover. The contradiction between the women's radically anti-bourgeois
revolutionary project and their old-fashioned rivalry for a man
recalls the role of Leicester in Schiller's fictional encounter
between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I.
Nicolas Stemann, a seasoned Jelinek veteran
-- his previous productions of Das Werk (The Plant)
and Babel, both at the Vienna Burgtheater, were highly
acclaimed -- made full use of the author's invitation to "fuck
around with her." As he once stated with a spoiled son's patronizing
self-assurance, staging Jelinek's texts first requires airing
out the old lady's head.
Born in 1968 in the politicized milieu
of Meinhof's generation, Stemann was raised by a radical feminist
mother who made his eleven-year-old sister read radical feminist
literature. His mother's powerful presence might have made him
immune to nostalgia for the revolutionary spirit of the sixties,
but it did not completely wean him from directorial fathers. Many
of his images can be traced to signature devices of some of his
older colleagues -- most prominently Castorf's introduction of
the author herself onstage (reduced by Stemann to the metonymic
wig), Christoph Marthaler's inclusion of a performing pianist,
and Einar Schleef's insertion of himself into the mise-en-scène
(which Castorf and Schlingensief have done too). Though Stemann
categorically denies such appropriations, his choices are consistent
with Jelinek's processing of existing texts. She has repeatedly
declared that anger is the driving force of all her writing, and
Stemann notes that because of his biography he first perceived
her as the enemy -- an aging, if not anachronistic feminist. Once
he decided to stage Ulrike Maria Stuart, his resistance
to the material was his starting position. Thus, the play may
be about the relationship between mother and child, but Röhl was
mistaken in assuming it was about Meinhof and herself; in Stemann's
version, it is more about the director's unresolved issues with
his mother(s).
Stemann cut down the cyber-samizdat version
of the text to approximately a third of its original length, rearranging
it around key phrases woven throughout the text. Spoken by different
figures and repeated in pop songs, these phrases add up to a mnemonic
scaffolding of sorts that supports the visual and verbal overflow.
Some of these key lines are: "Killing solves
many things," "I am chairman of the board of the exploited," "All
you do is stage yourself as victim," or "One more dead is better
than one less." The mantra-like statement, "I don't know what
has to happen in order for something to happen," serves as a kind
of leitmotif. As an ironic echo from recent history, Stemann added
a well known quote from a famous 1997 speech by then German president
Roman Herzog: "A jolt must galvanize Germany." In this so-called
"jolt-speech" (Ruckrede) -- nine years after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, towards the end of Chancellor Kohl's 16-year
conservative regime when the country faced staggering unemployment
-- Herzog exhorted his reunited yet disillusioned fellow-citizens
to stop complaining and meet the challenges of the global market.
Excerpts from the speech are performed by the company with foam
coming out of their mouths: Germany's obsolete Left and new Americanized
Right meet in their disgust over the populace's resigned dependence
on the state.
Meinhof's repeated statement "I've been
dead for thirty years already" -- another directorial addition
-- highlights the pathetic obsolescence of her project. Some of
Jelinek's lines suggesting the younger generation's jealousy of
their parents' concrete enemies are turned into schmaltzy lyrics:
Oh, if only we could have experienced
the repressive ideological machineries; however, that sort of
offensive position was available only to you. We didn't have
that option. Otherwise we too could have chosen to go underground.
Stemann, who is part of that younger generation,
likes to emphasize that he is not interested at all in the Baader-Meinhof
agenda. The irretrievable loss of meaning -- his generation's
defining experience -- makes it impossible to approach the group's
misapplied idealism with any seriousness. Rather, he wanted to
explore aspects of its members' iconic features in the context
of contemporary pop culture.
The
production opens with three men in drag, women's wigs and scripts
in their hands, trying out different line-readings before the
heavy velvet theater curtain: a vaudevillian warm-up routine.
That curtain opens to reveal yet another identical red velvet
curtain, which peels off to reveal a movie screen, which gives
way to a revolving nightclub stage. Curtains behind curtains and
stages within stages highlight the theatricality behind Jelinek's
professed anti-theatrical stance, while circumscribing a space
that's sealed off from the "real world." Jelinek, a TV junkie,
emphasizes that she does not draw from "real life" but rather
from the mediatized reality she is confined to on account of her
phobias. She does not travel except between her two homes, one
in Vienna, inherited from her mother, the other in Munich, shared
with her husband. She rarely goes out. Except for close friends
and collaborators, she does not receive visitors. The performance
space thus aptly evokes her prison-house of language. Within this
setting Stemann dismantles Jelinek's complex montage into a revue
of loosely connected sketches.
The men's clowning climaxes in a ketchup-bloodied,
syrup-smeared scenario inspired by Paul McCarthy, the Utah-born
video/installation artist and Jelinek's declared favorite. (In
2005 she saw a major retrospective of his work in Munich.) Stripped
naked, their penises covered in pig's masks, the stooges distribute
water balloons and protective plastic sheets among the spectators,
inviting them to aim at signs representing former chancellor Schröder
flanked by well known business and media tycoons. Back onstage,
the actors spray each other with fake blood, chocolate shit and
miracle whip. Sliding, slipping and rolling in the mess, they
finally collapse, singing "Pigs or human"-- allegedly Holger Meins's
last words before dying from his hunger strike. Ensslin's comment
as she steps over the bodies, "I only see dead bodies the moment
I close my eyes," is greeted with laughter by the audience. The
reaction seems to validate Stemann's claim that it is no longer
possible to shock or provoke people. With the revolution fashionably
reduced to the acting out of infantile impulses, audiences happily
participate.
In
this production, Gudrun Ensslin emerges as a media-savvy pop icon
whose petty vanity causes the demise of the group. In contrast,
Meinhof's obsessive reflections lead to her hanging herself. It
was Ensslin's trying on of a sweater in an upscale Hamburg boutique
that got the police on her track. With the director's method of
looping several key phrases and weaving them throughout the performance,
the sweater incident frames her petty (bourgeois) vanity, which
not only defines her flawed revolutionary leadership but also,
by way of Jelinek's multi-referential syntax, deflates all revolutionary
stances -- including that of the author, who has repeatedly flaunted
her obsession with designer clothes in interviews and photo shoots.
Ulrike Meinhof first appears onscreen --
larger than life, long dark hair, sunglasses projecting a fashionable,
darkly rebellious mystique purportedly for a film titled The
Downfall Part II (alluding to the Oscar-nominated 2004 film
about Adolf Hitler, starring Bruno Ganz). Parts of Meinhof's and
Ensslin's speeches and writings are performed as pop songs. The
text of Schiller's pivotal scene between Mary and Elizabeth is
projected on a screen and read by one of the stooges, while Meinhof
and Ensslin, dressed in Elizabethan costumes and playing recorders,
perform the soundtrack, as it were, of the confrontation of the
queens.
The Oedipal thrust of Stemann's project
has its coyly outrageous moments. A skit he added, titled "Vagina
Dialogues," features "Elfie" (Jelinek) and "Marlene" (Jelinek's
former protégée and friend, the Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz),
their heads sticking out of silky, fur-lined vaginas. Their wistful
chat about the predicament of intelligent women shunned by men
is based on a 1997 joint interview with them, originally published
in the pioneering feminist magazine Emma. The real Streeruwitz,
not as good humored as Jelinek, found her stage appearance as
a giant vagina demeaning and filed a complaint, requesting that
the scene be cut. A judge ruled that as a satire it was protected
by artistic freedom.
As usual, power and desire are closely
connected in Jelinek's scenario. The two young women, Meinhof
and Ensslin, compete as intensely for control over the group as
for Andreas Baader, who appears as a graying angel in a fashionable
black leather jacket and huge white wings, spouting invectives
against the women and ranting about the misapplication of Marxist
principles. The old rebel angel's contemporaries are two old women
with walkers -- ghostly queens, the undead of the past embodying
the younger women's unfulfilled future selves. Played by two distinguished
actresses of Jelinek's generation, Elisabeth Schwarz (Maria) and
Katharina Matz (Elizabeth), they also suggest aspects of the aging
author.
Throughout
the performance, both the script and a disheveled woman's wig
are passed around and tossed about like fetishized body parts.
Finally Stemann himself appears wearing a wig with Jelinek's trademark
pigtails. Seated with his back to the audience in his directorial
work clothes, facing a large portrait of the author as literary
diva, he reads Ulrike's lines in Jelinek's melodious, characteristically
Viennese lilt, albeit deliberately distorted by his Northern German
pronunciation. Jelinek's and Meinhof's voices merge in his performance
-- a dirge-like riff on the acknowledgment of failure and the
desire to sleep towards death.
We set nothing in motion, I fear. I am
just a shadow, not much light left to tear up the towel and
lean the bed against the wall, but I manage, what else is left
for me to do. I am ending it now, I am preparing it all, just
for me; I have ended, I don't need a trial, and certainly not
by this group, which isn't mine . . .
Sleep well, my dear I tell myself, for
no one else is there to say so, no, not in a long time, no one
says that sort of thing to me, would have been nice, maybe,
but now I have to tell myself: sleep well, yes, sleep, sleep
even in this uncomfortable position, even in this noose, which
I may even tie myself . . . there, I go to sleep now, sleep,
sleep, I am going to sleep, so I won't have to speak anymore.
Simple as that . . . just want to sleep, sleep, sleep in the
air, in the noose, it will be beautiful . . .
What seems at first a touching, meditative
moment that captures the melancholy underlying Jelinek's rage,
is undermined by the tableau of the man in control of the text
embodying the female author, crowned by her sacrificial scalp
as trophy, in a pose of humble worship underneath her iconic photograph.
Underscored by droning techno music, with the ensemble gradually
gathering around the musicians, some actors still naked, their
bodies smeared with ketchup and syrup, others crowned with little
cotton halos, the action suggests a mock ritual led by the director/shaman.
With post-climactic calm, he embodies the author after her (body
of) text has been cut to pieces, reassembled, and taken apart
again, it's pages ultimately crumpled, torn and scattered from
above. His recital of the speech, written by a woman as the voice
of another woman, amounts to an act of cannibalism: the ingestion
and regurgitation of the body of the text.
Fittingly enough, at the opening night
curtain call Jelinek, who didn't attend, was represented by her
wig, impaled on a foot-high pole at the center of the line of
bowing actors -- an ambivalent gesture of homage to, as well as
triumph over, the author, who is reduced to a sophomoric Freudian
joke. At subsequent curtain calls, Stemann held the wig in his
hand, leaving no doubt whose show it was.
Not that Jelinek is an involuntary victim.
Through her self-deprecating stage directions she coyly flashes
her presence to her (mostly male) directors, only to withdraw
again behind impenetrable layers of language. In that sense, Stemann's
use of layers of theatrical curtains is an astute response to
her flirtatious disappearing acts. It's up to her directors to
tease narrative threads with recognizable speakers out of the
dense linguistic fabric.
The unrestricted surrender of her texts
to her trusted directors raises several conflicting issues: is
it an act of great generosity or the surrender of agency? Is the
aging author once again on the vanguard towards a new definition
of performance as text? Does her resolve to post her future writings
exclusively on her Web site challenge the commodification of authors
by their publishers? According to Jelinek, her non-interference
is not entirely a philosophical, political choice, but an existential
necessity. Her life-long fear of crowds (in conjunction with the
neurotic need of approval fostered by her relentlessly demanding
mother) intensified after the Nobel Prize.
The next production of Ulrike Maria
Stuart, staged by Jossi Wieler, another seasoned Jelinek
director, is scheduled to open March 28, 2007, at Munich's renowned
Kammerspiele, and should offer significant points of comparison.
Wieler's penetrating vision of Jelinek's world has been, in the
past, antithetical to Stemann's deconstructions. Internationally
renowned, Wieler is older than Stemann, born 1951 in Switzerland
and educated in Israel. His award-winning production of Jelinek's
Wolken.Heim at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus in 1993, followed
by Er nicht als er (He not as he -- about the
Swiss poet Robert Walser) at the 1998 Salzburg Festival introduced
a radically minimalist approach to these texts. Shaped by different
generational experiences, the two productions of Ulrike Maria
Stuart will no doubt speak to each other across the phantom
walls that divide historical memory.
Epilogue
About one month after attending the opening
of Ulrike Maria Stuart, I revisited Gerhard Richter's
cycle of paintings "October 18, 1977" at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. The title refers to the day the bodies of
Ensslin and Baader were found at the Stammheim prison. Richter,
born in 1932, left his native East Germany at age 29, shortly
before the Berlin Wall went up. His reworking of iconic media
images of the group leaders' demise provides interesting points
of comparison with Jelinek's approach.
Based on newspaper photographs, Richter's
paintings are deliberately opaque, individual features and contours
diffused in layers of gray: the profile of the dead Ulrike Meinhof,
her neck marked by the rope of towels with which she hanged herself;
paintings of Ensslin posing for a line-up and finally hanging
in her cell, of Baader's library and record player which he kept
in his cell, of Baader shot dead on the floor, of the infamous
arrest of the almost naked Holger Meins.
While Richter dissolves the realistic details
in grayish pigment, Jelinek wraps them in a patchwork of linguistic
ready-mades. Both interrogate memory, historic narratives and
representation. Both also try to counteract in their works the
commodification of catastrophe turned into art, even as their
own art is being commodified.
It struck me that this gallery would be
the perfect environment for a staged reading of Jelinek's difficult
play in New York City.
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