Exposing the classics: Michael Thalheimer's Regie beyond the text1

I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) who have facilitated the research for this article through their Small Grant in the Performing Arts-scheme. I would also like to thank Henrike Thomsen at Deutsches Theater, Katrin Ribbe and Ingo Hülsmann for their support of my research.

Abstract

Within half a decade, the trained actor Michael Thalheimer (b. 1965, Frankfurt, Main) has become a celebrated (and controversial) shooting star of German theatre, rising from an insider's tip directing in the regions to be appointed Artistic Co-Director of Deutsches Theater Berlin in 2005. His productions of classics, such as Lessing's Emilia Galotti (in repertoire since 2001), have also been shown abroad and won numerous national and international theatre prizes. This essay argues that Thalheimer reappropriates the heritage of the dramatic canon, positioning his work both against an earlier generation of Regietheater (personified by Peter Stein in the 1970s) and equally against the playful deconstruction of classics that had prevailed in the 1990s. The directorial approach and strategies behind his unique and immediately identifiable trademark of almost static, yet highly explosive stylization will then be exemplified by analysing in some detail his productions of Emilia Galotti and the two parts of Goethe's Faust. Thalheimer maintains that being truthful to the play, and the playwright, for him has nothing to do with minutely representing the written text. Instead, he looks for the essence of each play in the anger, rage, and outcry it contains. I will describe his approach of unearthing the emotional and energetic score of a play as ‘ex-position’ of the text (rather than its interpretation, or representation), which displaces verbal semantics by an experiential economy constituted through spaces, rhythms, and bodies, which eventually spills over the stage and fully integrates the spectators in its effect.

Notes

I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) who have facilitated the research for this article through their Small Grant in the Performing Arts-scheme. I would also like to thank Henrike Thomsen at Deutsches Theater, Katrin Ribbe and Ingo Hülsmann for their support of my research.

Thalheimer in the post-show discussion after the performance of Faust 1, Deutsches Theater, 11 February 2006. All translations from the German are mine, except where otherwise stated.

Thalheimer, quoted in Hans-Dieter Schütt, ‘Unter Eis? Unter der Haut: Einer der radikalsten Regisseure des deutschen Theaters – Michael Thalheimer’, Neues Deutschland, 29/30 May 2004, p. 19.

I am well aware that an essay on ‘Michael Thalheimer's Regie’ utilizes the same marketing strategy, yet I hope to cast, en route, some doubts on the notion of ‘directors' theatre’.

Thalheimer, quoted in Schütt, ‘Unter Eis?’, p. 19.

Quoting Thalheimer, a published interview with the director is titled ‘Without the past, we are incapable of living here and now’, Olivier Ortolani, ‘Sans passé, nous sommes incapables de vivre l'ici et maintenant: Entretien avec Michael Thalheimer’, Outre Scène (May 2005), ‘Dialogues avec les classiques’, 17 – 28.

See Thalheimer, quoted in Ortolani, ‘Sans passé’, p. 25. Translated from the French by the author, as are the passages cited below.

Ibid.

‘Interview with Michael Thalheimer, Director, Emilia Galotti; Questions by Marvin Carlson’ – Transcript, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Archive, folder ‘Emilia Galotti’, no page numbers. The interview was conducted for the programme brochure of the New York performances of the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2005.

Ingo Hülsmann, unpublished interview with the author, 17 May 2006.

It was planned from the outset to stage both parts with the same artistic team and performers, over two seasons. Faust 1 premiered on 16 October 2004, Faust 2 on 7 October 2005, both at the Deutsches Theater.

This effectively replicated an effect suggested at the end of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, see Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, trans. by J. and T. Stern with W. H. Auden (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 96.

All quotations from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. by Walter Arndt (New York/London: Norton, 2001).

See Michael Jaeger, Fausts Kolonie: Goethes kritische Phänomenologie der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003).

Thalheimer, quoted in Ruth Bender, ‘Wo den Menschen die Sprache ausgeht: Der Musiker Bert Wrede und der Regisseur Michael Thalheimer: Von der kreativen Kraft der Herausforderung’, Die Deutsche Bühne (September 2004), 52 – 53 (p. 53).

Formally, there are some striking parallels between this movie and Thalheimer's production, yet the director insists that he only saw the film after the premiere, and had only accidentally come across the music as it was playing in the background in a bar.

Ibid.

Interestingly, Ingo Hülsmann, as key performer in both Emilia Galotti and Faust, stressed how his own work in the early days of his career with Ruth Berghaus, the former Brecht-collaborator who came from an Ausdruckstanz-background to theatre, was influential on his approach. He pointed towards her legacy (and thus, indirectly, once more towards Brecht's) as a reference point for discussing Thalheimer's work, rather than Robert Wilson whom I had suggested (Hülsmann, Interview).

Thalheimer, quoted in Carmen Eller, ‘“Ich jongliere nicht mit dem Zuschauer”: Wie Michael Thalheimer mit seiner Emilia Galotti Moskau erobert’, Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung, 30 April 2006, http://www.mdz-moskau.eu/index.php?date=1146413234&gid=6 [accessed 23 November 2006].

See Ibid.

Thalheimer, quoted in Ortolani, ‘Sans passé’, p. 17.

Schütt, ‘Unter Eis’, p. 19.

See Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image – Music – Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), pp. 155 – 65.