A Playwright's Worries
By Theresia Walser
Translated from German by Claudia
Wilsch Case
German dramatist Theresia Walser first
attracted national attention at the turn of the millennium with
such plays as King Kong's Töchter (King Kong's Daughters)
and So wild ist es in unseren Wäldern schon lange nicht mehr
(Our Forests Haven't Been This Wild in Forever). Although
they often take on serious subjects, such as elder abuse in nursing
homes and nihilism among Germany's youth, Walser's works share
a playfully poetic approach to language and a comically irreverent
tone. In recent years, her success as a writer has been overshadowed
by her conflicts with German directors who are eager to shape
both classics and new plays by radically reinterpreting them in
production.
In response to botched premieres of
two of her plays in 2004, Die
Kriegsberichtserstatterin (The War Correspondent)
and Wandernutten (Wandering Whores), Walser
wrote an essay for the Frankfurter Rundschau explaining
her struggles with directors who are more interested in creating
bold stage pictures than engaging with the rhythm of her language
or honoring the comedic qualities of her work. A year later, at
the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Walser gave the following
talk entitled "A Playwright's Worries," in which she expanded
the ideas introduced in her essay, explaining how Germany's current
Regietheater, or director's theater, aesthetic has affected
productions of new plays. As a result of these public statements,
Walser has become a prominent figure in the German national debate
about Regietheater versus Werktreue, or faithfulness
to the text.
--Claudia Wilsch Case
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Often when I am working on a new play, my characters suddenly
start acting more erratically than I had planned. They upset my
designs; they thwart my intentions and ideas. This moment is a
struggle, but always a fortunate one, because it signals the adventure
of a play that is yet to be written. Once it is finished, the
process starts again: I have created something that can only reveal
itself in practice. Until it is staged, a play remains unformed;
the same is true of the playwright. Sometimes I even think that
each performance is actually an attack on the playwright, and
that I have no other choice but to answer with another play.
When I give a play to a director, I tremble
as I think of what is to come. On the one hand, it is a relief
to know that from that point on, someone else's imagination will
propel the play, discovering things that I did not even know were
there. On the other, I am anxious that a director might suddenly
discover too much, might burden the characters with other people's
social tragedies, or impose deep meaning on an otherwise lighthearted
play.
Novels are protected by the covers of a
book, but plays are offered no such security. It has been said
that each reader stages his own version of a novel. However, we
don't mean that a reader clips different passages from the book
and pastes the end at the beginning, or that he cuts characters
or entire subplots that he thinks will only distract him from
what is essential, or that he suddenly inserts a topical newspaper
article in the middle. A reader also doesn't cover the margins
of a book with the titles of musical numbers that he feels an
urgent need to listen to while reading. And even if such a reader
existed, he wouldn't think to pester other readers with his private
enjoyment.
A director is first and foremost a reader,
the most influential reader a playwright has. All plays need a
director who is sensitive to language, especially plays that don't
rely on a solidly constructed plot but instead use language to
convey the action, plays where the characters are defined by the
music of their language, plays where form and content cannot be
separated, and plays where language itself determines the content.
I don't mean that plays should be celebrated obediently, or that
directors should drown them in the kinds of musical sauces that
have become popular recently, all the while believing they are
taking the language particularly seriously. Both of these extremes
signal an unwillingness by directors to confront language as an
event onstage.
The kind of radical treatment or deconstruction
of a play devised years ago by directors like Frank Castorf in
response to a static and self-referential theater aesthetic, today,
when imposed by Castorf's imitators, seems merely to be the application
of a fashionable principle. All that is left of the rebellion
is its attitude, an attitude that no longer presupposes a director's
engagement with the text. The self-satisfied audience whom theater
artists have long been eager to shock hardly exists anymore. No
one would be outraged, for example, at a production of Hamlet
that was reduced to four characters and enriched with excerpts
from Sartre. Without anyone to offend, such a gesture of protest
is pointless, and therefore seems all the more grotesque.
The Regietheater, or directors'
theater, that has emerged in recent years, is nothing less than
a movement by directors to enthrone themselves as auteurs.
Texts, to them, are merely material, stitched together from films,
novels, and a play's original script. The resulting theatrical
events, although brimming with zeitgeist, appear strangely
harmless; the array of videos, music and current political news
cannot disguise the fact that the essence of drama -- conflicts
between characters -- is missing.
It has seemed to me for some time now that
directors have imposed an unspoken rivalry on their relationships
with authors--as though the point of a performance is who will
win the evening. It is as though the director feared nothing more
than to disappear behind the author's play. When a director feels
he has to layer his own images over my text, I suspect he is trying
to subject our relationship to a democratic principle, to win
a battle that need never be fought. There is no question, of course,
that the wonder of the moment belongs to the director! Without
the magic of transformation, a play would never come to life--I
often feel that interpretive choices that seem to contradict my
plays are inspiring and, in the end, essential.
Some time ago I added the following clause
to the contract for an upcoming premiere of one of my plays: "Music
may only be added in consultation with the author." This wasn't
meant as a threat; I had had a previous unpleasant experience
regarding music and wanted to draw attention to the play as an
independent score. The clause caused an outrage at the theater
in question, as though I had crossed a line that was not mine
to cross, as though I wanted to shake the very foundations of
theater. It wasn't merely that no author had ever demanded something
so impudent. I was admonished that the clause represented an attempt
to intervene in the artistic freedom of directors!
I didn't hesitate to remove the offending
language. I didn't suffer or even feel that I was giving in. I
secretly thought that the clause, having been forcibly excised,
was even more dangerous in its absence. At the same time, I couldn't
get the phrase out of my head. I had not heard the demand for
artistic freedom in this manner in a long time, certainly not
in connection with my plays.
I almost felt empowered by the phrase,
by its demand for attention. And the longer I listened to this
defiant phrase, the more clearly I saw in it a secret longing.
For a moment I recalled my struggles with my characters. Amidst
all the worries an author has about a play, I wondered how my
characters would treat the director. I wondered whether they wouldn't
rebel against him just as they had once rebelled against me, and
whether they might not subject him to even worse annoyances than
those they gave their creator.
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