UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival has already brought us the likes of the acclaimed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre this season. Now, the festival gets set to shift into high gear again when Berlin’s celebrated avant-garde theater group, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz (or Volksbühne, for short), helmed by famed renegade director Frank Castorf, takes the stage for a three-day stint at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, running Dec. 17-19. Castorf’s stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Insulted and Injured” is a near five-hour theatrical tour de force of Wagnerian proportions, surreally set in what seems like the sleazy late 60s or early 70s, and augmented by a kinky reality TV type format (conceived well before the U.S. “Big Brother” craze), employing live cameras and video screens masquerading as billboards. The production is all high-concept, but as international critics have pointed out, also hugely entertaining (the production is making its U.S. premier, but has toured extensively outside of Germany, and has even played in Canada). Carl Hegemann is Volksbühne’s resident dramaturge, and an expert on the work of both Dostoevsky and Castorf. Hegemann, speaking from Germany, was on hand to provide some insight into the creative concepts behind what promises to be a complex and stunning theatrical experience for U.S. audiences at the Freud.
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dB Magazine: Firstly, this production is performed entirely in German. How do you think the American audience will react or respond to a play in a language they are largely unfamiliar with? How many times has the production played outside of Germany to a non-German speaking audience, and if so, what was the response? Also, is the production being adapted in any way for this US performance? What do you think are the challenges or barriers for Volksbühne in making this US run a success?
Carl Hegemann: The play will be performed in German, but there will be subtitles. This enables everybody to understand the whole text, even those who don’t know any German. We use this subtitling technique in all our performances abroad, projecting the text in the specific languages of the country. The show itself is exactly the same as in Berlin. The themes and subjects of the play – the life struggle in a big city, the economic and erotic self-exploitation of each individual, the contrast of rich and poor – (should be) understandable for everyone, everywhere. Unusual and surprising might be the non-theatrical way of acting and the aesthetics of the video-projections used in the performance – many of the scenes take place inside the building on stage and can be observed only by the means of video surveillance. Furthermore, we follow Dostoevsky’s text chronologically, but in an associative way. Therefore the performance does not always match the linear structure of the narrative, which we are familiar with from typical theater or film productions.
dB: There are many famous German writers, like Goethe, for example. Why has Castorf consistently chosen to work with, and to adapt, Dostoevsky? What is Castorf’s particular connection or affinity to Dostoevsky and his works? Is there a particular connection, if any, between Dostoevsky and German culture? And between Dostoevsky and German theater?
CH: Castorf has already directed many plays by Schiller, Goethe and other German playwrights, for instance, Hauptmann, Zuckmayer, Müller, and Lessing. In the last five years, he has worked on three performances based on the American texts of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and five based on the Russian prose of Dostoevsky and Bulgakow. The juxtaposition of these texts illustrates that they have more in common than they have differences. Dostoevsky’s “weltanschauung” (meaning, his “philosophy of life”), and his despair, results from his very specific analysis of German idealism. Conversely, the German analysis of Dostoevsky’s work, for example Friedrich Nietzsche’s, formed the basis for existentialism – for which Williams and O’Neill can be cited as American representatives. From the cultural-historical point of view, Dostoevsky is probably the most important Russian author. In Germany he is just as well known as Schiller or Goethe. No other author has been influenced as thoroughly by German literature and philosophy, and no other author has influenced – for more than a hundred years – German, French and at least indirectly, American literature, as Dostoevsky. He is probably to be considered as (an) important representative of world literature rather simply confining his influence to one specific society. Dostoevsky is not an exotic author for a German audience – no less than the American playwrights for whom Castorf holds such affection. Dostoevsky is considered the inventor of existentialism, and (he) claims to (have been influenced) mostly by the Bible, Goethe, Schiller and the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Nietzsche referred to (the happenstance of) Dostoevsky’s influence on his life as one of “pure luck.”
dB: What were the technical difficulties in adapting a Russian novel into a German stage play? In the first place, why adapt a novel into a play, since this was not the intent of Dostoevsky (to write a play)? What are Castorf’s major objectives in adapting novels, in general, for the stage?
CH: There are several very good translations of Dostoevsky’s texts into German. We used the Russian original only in moments of extreme doubt. Since the novel is based, among others, on Schiller’s play “Kabbale und Liebe,” it is very suitable for a staged version. Some literary scholars claim that (Dostoevsky’s) newspaper-novel “Erniedrigte und Beleidigte” (“The Insulted and Injured”) is a hidden theatre play, or that its form, including all the direct speech, corresponds more to drama than to a novel. Furthermore, in all their complexity and relevance to real life, novels – according to Castorf himself – have formed the most intense challenge for him in the last few years. Plays, with their clear structure, are basically more unrealistic. Reality itself is definitely obscure, and functions more like a novel.
dB: Besides Dostoevsky, what are Castorf’s influences, and what was his inspiration for this production? The production has a Hollywood late 60s feel, as well as avant-garde, mixed-media elements – what influenced these elements, and what tone or message is he trying to convey?
CH: Castorf has to be seen in (a) direct aesthetic and political line (descending from) the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller. Castorf is, as he himself puts it, a wayward student of Brecht. He developed his own style in the GDR (the former eastern German Democratic Republic), against the will of the authorities, and in opposition to the instrumental culture machine. He has been banished into exile to the provinces, and his productions have been repeatedly forbidden. Now, in the West he is free to do whatever he wants. But it (hasn’t, however, made) him any happier – in the free West, he has to fight constantly with triviality and indifference towards the production of art. The Volksbühne has followed the tradition of modern theatre from as early as 1925 – when Erwin Piscator (a teacher of O’Neill, and co-founder of the New School for Social Research in New York) started his Multi-media performances here (in Germany). The juxtaposition of theater and live-camera, used by Castorf long before TV formats like “Big Brother,” has its origin in the massive break with theatrical conventions materialized in the stage sets of Bert Neumann (long-time Volksbühne collaborator, and renowned avant-garde theater set designer).
dB: Speaking of Bert Neumann, please explain to an audience who has never seen such a thing before, how the deployment of a “datcha,” or container, works in terms of the staging of this play. Is this something common to all of Castorf’s productions? Conceptually, what is its function or significance?
CH: In conventional theater, the stage set is meant to show the audience as much of the action on stage as possible. In German we use the word “schauspiel” for theatre, originating from “schau,” meaning “to look, observe,” and “spiel,” meaning “game, action, play.” Since the first Dostoevsky performance in our theater, however, Bert Neumann has built closed buildings on stage – a “container-architecture,” one-level standard bungalows with small windows, through which the audience is barely able to peer inside. The “Demons” (another of Dostoevsky’s novels adapted to stage and film by Castorf) performance took place in a small wooden holiday home container, or “datcha,” placed in the Russian taiga. The audience could follow parts of (the performance) only by listening, almost like a radio play. In “The Insulted and Injured,” the house is cast into stone – consisting of few containers – and placed in a city. The losers and winners live there wall to wall under one roof. The view into the house is just as restricted as in “Demons.” But on the roof there is a big screen, like a billboard, projecting the captured images of everything taking place inside the building, which is filmed by live-cameras. As a side effect, we have the possibility to put theater and film, video footage and real humans, next to each other and compare them directly.
Interview conducted by Alex Wen, dB Magazine reporter.