‘This Is Why I’m Really Excited by British Theatre in the Next Five Years’: David Barnett in Conversation with Simon Stephens

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Notes

1. Premiere 15 March, 2014 Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, dir. by Sebastian Nübling. The play echoes the structure of Georges Bizet’s Carmen (in the relative presences of the four main characters on stage – some more present earlier, some later in the play) while having little connection to its plot. Instead the play follows five discrete individuals who remain locked in their own worlds. The fifth character, who is not taken from Bizet, is The Singer, a figure almost without a biography, who is famous for playing the role of Carmen around the world. The critical response to the premiere in Germany was mostly negative, and this was largely due to the production problems Stephens outlines in this interview. Its British premiere on 10 April 2015 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Michael Longhurst, was popular with UK critics for its imaginative, non-literal interpretation.

2. Premiere 15 June 2007, at the Schauspielhaus, Hanover, directed by Sebastian Nübling. The play is made up of a series of monologues and duologues, each separate from each other, but centred around the week of the London bombings of 7 July 2005. Nübling’s production was set against the backdrop of Breugel’s The Tower of Babel and presented the scenes as fragments, seeking connection, but never achieving it. The production was well received and invited the following year to the Theatertreffen in Berlin, the annual showcase of the ten most interesting productions on the German-speaking stage in any given season.

3. The Secret Theatre project at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith is discussed in more detail in Jacqueline Bolton’s essay in this Special Issue. The project ran from 2013 to 2015 while the theatre was being redeveloped and featured a permanent ensemble of actors who were involved in seven productions, ranging from the classics (Woyzeck and A Streetcar Named Desire) to new writing by Mark Ravenhill and Caroline Bird, and a piece devised by the company itself. The aim was to implement a structure that mirrored the European repertory system, and was the brainchild of director Sean Holmes and Simon Stephens. Holmes had previously collaborated with Stephens, most notably on the British premiere of Pornography, 28 July 2008, at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

4. The German ensemble system, visible in almost all the publicly funded theatres, employs actors on an almost permanent basis, regardless of whether they perform in many or few productions in any given season. The strength of such an arrangement is that actors can work together, take experiences from previous productions and use them in future work. The drawbacks can be seen in the example Stephens provides, above, but also in the risk of a stagnation engendered by working with the same people over a prolonged period.

5. German theatre underwent something of a transformation around the student protests of 1968. A general rejection of a more conservative theatre, associated with an older generation of directors, gave way in West Germany to the phenomenon now known as Regietheater, roughly ‘director’s theatre’, in which the classics, for the most part, were reimagined and radicalized in performance.

6. This tri-lingual play, written for English, German, and Estonian-speaking actors, premiered in three locations: Teater NO99, Tallinn on 17 September 2011; the Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich on 15 October 2011; and the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith on 3 May 2012. The production was directed by Sebastian Nübling and received remarkably mixed reviews that either took issue with or celebrated his directorial interventions. It is discussed in essays by Catherine Love, Benjamin Fowler, and Marilena Zaroulia in this Special Issue.

7. Ivo van Hove is a Belgian theatre director, although he is best known for his work with the Dutch Toneelgroep Amsterdam. He started his career in the early 1980s, but he has risen to prominence on the European stage since the turn of the century. Unlike some of the more radical exemplars of a postdramatic theatre, van Hove manages to combine an experimental drive with an interest in presenting narrative. For example, his Roman Tragedies (premiere 17 June 2007 in Holland) staged Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra in a single five-and-a-half-hour production. The audience was free to come and go in a show without formal intervals, which compressed and consequently intensified the three tragedies. Stephens’s play Song from Far Away was directed by van Hove in September 2015 at the Young Vic, London.

8. This adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film of the same name is a three-hour theatre piece, premiered on 1 February 2005 in Amsterdam. It was invited to the Barbican for a short, sold-out run from 14–17 November 2013.

9. Taken from Daft Punk’s song ‘Touch’.

10. Rupert Goold took over from Michael Attenborough as Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre, London in September 2013. His changes to the repertoire and style of the theatre’s productions account for Stephens’s contention that he ‘sacked’ one type of audience with a view to attracting another.

11. This is Stephens’s adaption of the best-selling novel of the same name by Mark Haddon. It opened at the subsidized National Theatre on 2 August 2012 before transferring to the Apollo Theatre in London’s ‘theatreland’, the West End, on 1 March 2013. It won four Olivier Awards that year and has since transferred to another West End theatre. It opened on Broadway on 5 October 2014 and won four Tony Awards in 2015.

12. The Funfair is Stephens’s adaptation of Ödön von Horváth’s Kasimir und Karoline (1929). The original takes place during Munich’s Oktoberfest and explores the early effects of the Wall Street Crash on the lives of the poor and dispossessed through the two title figures.

13. Despite opinion polls that repeatedly pointed to another hung parliament, the Conservative Party won on 7 May 2015 with a slender majority of 12 seats. The UK Independence Party, a party to the right of the Conservatives, attracted 3.88 million votes, although, by dint of the ‘first past the post’ system, only gained one Member of Parliament.

14. Stephens fashioned both plays for the London stage, after literal translations. The Cherry Orchard was staged by Katie Mitchell at the Young Vic, London (premiere 10 October 2014); A Doll’s House was staged by Carrie Cracknell at the same theatre (premiere 29 June 2012).

15. Heisenberg is a play that was commissioned by and staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club, an Off-Broadway venue. It was directed by Mark Brokaw, opened on 3 June 2015 and was a New York Times ‘critics pick’.