‘Draining the English Channel’: The European Revolution in Three Kingdoms and Three Keynotes (by Simon Stephens, David Lan, and Edward Bond)

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. From a speech titled Britain and Europe, given by David Cameron at London’s Bloomberg HQ, see ‘David Cameron’s EU speech’, Guardian, 23 January 2013 <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jan/23/david-cameron-eu-speech-referendum> [accessed 18 June 2014] (paras 17–18).

2. Examples of British practitioners and journalists who cite German theatre as influential and inspirational have proliferated in recent years. For a representative sample, see Simon Stephens’s article ‘Deutsch Courage: Why German Theatre Dares – and Wins’, Guardian, 9 May 2012 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2012/may/09/german-theatre-dares-three-kingdoms>; Andrew Haydon’s interview with Katie Mitchell on German theatre culture, ‘Katie Mitchell: Waves and Traces’, Exeunt, 9 December 2013 <http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/waves-and-traces/>; Mark Espiner, ‘What Could British Theatre Learn from Berlin?’, Guardian, 3 March 2009 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/mar/03/british-theatre-berlin> [all accessed 17 March 2015].

3. David Lan, ‘A Leap in the Dark’, 17 May 2012 <http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/pro/50j/Bildergalerie/BG_1/Speech_David_Lan.pdf> [accessed 18 June 2014].

4. @StephensSimon, Twitter, 24 October 2013 <https://twitter.com/StephensSimon/status/393414776921276416> [accessed 15 July 2015].

5. Simon Stephens, ‘Skydiving Blindfolded’, 8 May 2011 <http://www.theatertreffen-blog.de/tt11/artikel-zu/stueckemarkt/skydiving-blindfolded/> [accessed 18 June 2014].

6. Lan, ‘A Leap’.

7. Stephens, ‘Skydiving’.

8. Lan, ‘A Leap’.

9. Ibid.

10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Part One, German–English edition, trans. by Peter Salm (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 102–03.

11. Lan, ‘A Leap’.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Stephens, ‘Skydiving’.

15. The production premiered in the Theatre Upstairs on 18 May 2001 (dir. by Simon Usher).

16. Stephens, ‘Skydiving’.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. See Simon Stephens’s interview with Jacqueline Bolton in the ‘Preface’ to Three Kingdoms (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), pp. i–xiii (p. ii).

21. See Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) pp. 155–64.

22. Stephens, ‘Skydiving’.

23. See David Barnett, ‘“I’ve been told […] that the play is far too German”: The Interplay of Institution and Dramaturgy in Shaping British Reactions to German Theatre’, in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence, ed. by Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marvin (Rochester: Camden House, 2010) pp. 150–66.

24. Dan Rebellato, ‘Three Kingdoms’, danrebellato.co.uk, 12 May 2012 <http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/spilledink/2013/3/12/three-kingdoms> [accessed 10 June 2014].

25. This is not such a new idea. St Francis de Sales, in his Lettres d’Amitié Spirituelle (1640) attributed the expression ‘l’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs’ (‘hell is full of good intentions and wishes’) to the Cistercian abbot Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).

26. Andrew Haydon, ‘Three Kingdoms – Lyric Hammersmith’, Postcards from the Gods, 10 May 2012 <http://postcardsgods.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/three-kingdoms-lyric-hammersmith.html> [accessed 10 June 2014].

27. See Maddy Costa’s reflections on Three Kingdoms and misogyny: ‘Fanning the Bonfire’, Deliq, 18 May 2012 <http://www.statesofdeliquescence.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/fanning-bonfire.html> [accessed 12 June 2014].

28. Edward Bond, The Third Crisis: The State of Future Drama, 7 June 2012 <http://www.edwardbond.org/Comment/bochumtalk.docx> [accessed 12 June 2014], p. 2, emphasis added.

29. Ibid., p. 5.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Lan, ‘A Leap’.

33. Bond, The Third Crisis, p. 6.

34. Ibid.

35. See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).

36. Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles, ‘Introduction’, in Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, ed. by Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013), pp. 1–30 (p. 11).

37. Thomas Ostermeier, in discussion during a roundtable event on ‘European Theatre’ at the Goethe-Institut, London, 23 January 2013. Transcribed by the author.

38. See the transcript of Max Easterman’s interview with Thomas Ostermeier for the Goethe-Institut <www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/pro/doppelgaenger/Ostermeier_Transkript.pdf> [accessed 20 June 2014], p. 3.

39. See Benjamin Fowler, ‘Hamlet Performed at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (review)’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 31.4 (2013), 737–45.

40. Magnus Florin and Hannes Meidal, ‘Thomas Ostermeier besökte Stockholm’, YouTube, 22 February 2012 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2RyE2yWprw> [URL no longer active].

41. I am grateful to Dan Rebellato for this insight.

42. See David Barnett, ‘Offending the Playwright: Directors’ Theatre and the “Werktreue” Debate’, in German Text Crimes: Writers Accused from the 1950s to the 2000, ed. by Tom Cheesman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 75–97.

43. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. by Harriet de Onís (London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 103.

44. Ibid.

45. A mission statement published by the new artistic leadership of the Schaubühne in 2000, contained the following statement: ‘Die Verbindung eines Theaters zur Welt ist der Autor’ (‘A theatre’s connection to the world is the author’). Sasha Waltz, Thomas Ostermeier, Jochen Sandig, and Jens Hillje, ‘Der Auftrag’, Schaubuehne <http://www.schaubuehne.de/uploads/Der-Auftrag.pdf> [accessed 20 July 2014].