Report from Basel

Basel, Switzerland, is surely not widely thought of as a major European theatre center, but each time I have visited it I have been impressed by the variety and quality of the work presented there, which regularly includes productions, even premieres, by some of the best known European directors.  This was certainly the case when I visited the first week in May of 2024, where I saw four productions remarkable in their range and artistic achievement.  The municipal Theater Basel is Switzerland’s largest venue offering theatre, opera and ballet and follows the standard European practice of rotating repertory, so I was able to see all of these productions in this single massive structure, although in different internal spaces.  The theatre’s cultural centrality is reinforced by a large and complex fountain in front of its monumental main entrance, the work of Basel’s favorite native artist, the ingenious and whimsical Jean Tinguley.

In the 2020/21 season the administration of Theatre Basel underwent a major restructuring.  Benedikt von Peter, who had been in change of all three branches of the theatre, became manager only of the opera, while the ballet continued under the direction of Richard Wherlock, formerly von Peter’s subordinate.  Most radical was the change in the drama sector, where a team of four were announced as of equal authority by the theatre, although the same report noted that “the central artistic signature” of the group would be that of Antú Romero Nunes, formerly the in-house director at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, one of Germany’s leading houses.  There in 2018 his production of The Odyssey was invited to Germany’s most prestigious festival, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and in his third season in Basel, Nunes was invited again, for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, clearly establishing him among the leading contemporary German directors.

Although I had not seen either of these two productions, awareness of them made me very eager to see Nunes’ new production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera my first evening in Basel.  I was certainly not disappointed.  It was one of the most original interpretations of this often revived piece I have seen, and surprisingly not because of its departures from Brecht but, on the contrary, by pushing Brechtian challenges to conventional theatre far beyond what most “Brechtian” stagings attempt. The tone of the production was set at the very beginning, when the audience was confronted with a totally empty dark space, not a touch of theatrical illusion visible.  Into this space strolled a familiar, slightly stooped figure, wearing blue worker’s uniform with matching peaked hat and smoking a cigar.  Even before he began to speak in a distinctive Augsburg accent, the audience applauded him as Bertolt Brecht, who acknowledged the identification and warned that the empty stage was an indication that the audience were going to have to put their imaginations to work and those unwilling to accept this “epic” approach might as well go home.  In fact “Brecht” pulled out a rack with a few costumes on it to represent Peachum’s shop, and informed us of the invisible elements we must imagine.  Indeed the only regularly appearing scenic element were a group of long neon lights, sometimes bright sometimes barely seen, which hovered above the actor to suggest ceilings or, upright, surrounded them to suggest various enclosures.

Throughout the production written stage descriptions were regularly recited instead of being shown, and other stage directions indicating movements or reading of lines were similarly articulated.  His general introduction over, “Brecht” announced: “Enter Peachum” and with a quick change of coat, became Peachum, one of a number of roles he would assume throughout the evening.

This virtuosic actor, the remarkable Jörg Pohl, came with director Nunes from Hamburg and is now one of the four members of the directing board.  If the production has a star, it is surely Pohl, but this term is really not applicable, since the company is a flexible ensemble all dressed in identical blue worker’s cap and jackets, occasionally covered with rough coats or removed to reveal body length white underwear.  They switch roles freely, and anyone, male or female, may become Brecht, any other character, or an authorial voice. The plot outlines remain largely unchanged, but spoken material and songs are altered and moved about freely and side comments on the play or its presentation are frequent.  In his opening speech, for example, as Peachum is explaining the tricks needed to get the public to part with its money, he compares his trade to that of the theatre, specifically reminding the audience of the expense of the seats they are occupying (Tickets in Theatre Basel run from $45 to $135, not shocking by Broadway standards but well above the average in Germany, where at a major theatre like the Deutsches Theater in Berlin seats run from $5 to $52).

Although most of the words are Brecht’s, the cast feels free to experiment with readings—sometimes pausing, commenting on the line or the character, or repeating a scene to stress a particular point.  From time to time a particular theatrical choice is explained, as when one actor suddenly remarks: “At this moment, before the main character is established, we add a retardant moment to increase the tension.”  And often, quite unexpectedly, one of the cast will temporarily “become” Brecht, by producing the iconic jacket, cigar and slightly stooped posture, in order to make his own observations on the passing show.

Music is provided by an eight piece live band led by trumpeter Anita Wälti, and although they beautifully captured the Kurt Weill tone, they, unlike the actors, were visually de-emphasized, mostly appearing at the back of the stage in semi-darkness and clouds of fog.  Moreover the same sort of liberties were taken with the Weill score as with the Brecht text.  The two most famous songs in the show—Mack’s Ballad and Jenny’s Pirate Song, were present, but far from their usual place and in much reduced versions, and similar changes were made in the music throughout. Again the effect was to keep the audience, especially those familiar with the opera, continually finding their comfortable expectations thwarted and challenged.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the remarkable closing sequence. Mackie Messer, played by Basel actor Sven Schelker, sings his powerful final Ballad, in which he asks for general forgiveness.  Anyone with reasonable knowledge of the play knows the shape of the following famous conclusion.  Mackie ascends the scaffold and the waiting noose, but at the last possible moment Peachem stops the play to explain that although hanging Macheath would be the Christian thing to do, out of consideration for the audience’s feelings another ending will be substituted.  Then comes the spectacular finale, the most famous deus ex machina in the modern theatre.  A victorious messenger arrives on horseback to deliver a letter from the Queen pardoning Macheath and heaping honors upon him.  Mackie and others exult in song, but Peachum and others in a closing chorus remind us that in real time, unlike in opera, happy endings are not common, and advise a more cautionary view of the world.

In the Nunes production, the curtain abruptly and surprisingly closes immediately after Mackie’s forgiveness ballad, and the house lights go up.  The astonished audience assumes that Nunes has taken the radical step of eliminating the calculatedly ridiculous happy ending and leaving Mack to his just fate.  Hearty applause begins, but is immediately stopped by Peachum appearing from behind the curtains to announce that most of the company feel that the audience may feel cheated by being deprived of the famous traditional ending and so it will be offered for those who wish to remain.

Indeed, the curtains part to reveal the usual almost empty stage except for the neon lights faintly gleaming above, and the blue clad actors lined up to present the closing sequence.  When they come to the announcement of the victorious messenger, the neon lights blaze brightly and the orchestra sounds out in triumph, but no messenger appears, only a pathetic stuffed loose-limbed doll horse, about three feet long, triumphantly waved by a cast member at the end of the line.

Once again, Peachum, at the other end, angrily interrupts, saying that this awkward nod to tradition was worse that nothing at all, and that if they were going to present the messenger scene at all it must be impressively done. Again the curtain closes and immediately reopens with lights and music blazing forth and a spectacular live white horse with richly festooned rider and cortege moving onstage to do the final scene.  One more surprise awaited, however, when the curtain closed again on the play’s traditional ending, it opened for curtain calls, always elaborate in the German-speaking theatre.  The entire cast had remove the blue worker’s aprons and caps they had worn for most of the evening, and appeared for the first time in a dazzling array of individualized costumes, copies in fact of the costumes of the first production of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928.  After an evening of visual minimalism, this stunning tableau, in addition to its final reference to the operations of theatre itself, proved in fact as dazzling, and perhaps even more memorable, than the Queen’s messenger himself.

Threepenny Opera.  Photo © Inco Hoehn

The following evening I returned to the theatre to see what turned out to be the most powerful production of my visit to Basel, a staging of Mozart’s Requiem by one of Europe’s most imaginative directors, Romeo Castelucci.  The production opened to standing ovations in the festivals of Aix-en-Province in 2019 and Adelaide in 2020.  Basel was scheduled to follow, but Covid intervened, and the much anticipated production did not reach Basel until 2024, though its silencing and resurrection added another powerful symbolic level to this already densely layered experience.

Castellucci and his musical director, Raphäel Pichon, have created a radically innovating interpretation of one of the most family works in the Western musical canon.  Perhaps taking his cue from the fact that Mozart left the work incomplete and it was finished by his student Süssmeyer, Pichon has woven together a collection of other related  musical pieces, including Gregorian chants, other religious music by Mozart, and Masonic hymns.  The resulting text is projected as supertitles in Latin, German and English.  These translations often provide little explanation of the specific images on stage, however, which depart far more radically from the tonality of the original than do the arrangements of Pichon.

In his production notes, Castellucci calls the work particularly suited for contemporary times, tormented by the idea of extinction both of us as individuals, of our species, and perhaps of our planet itself.  This idea is most clearly and powerfully seen in one of the production’s most memorable features.  Throughout the evening names are projected on the rear wall of the stage, changing every few seconds. For a considerable time these were unfamiliar Latin names, like Dunleosteos Belgicus or Panxiosteur ocullus, but at last a series of more familiar names appeared—Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannisaurus—and we realized we were seeing a chronicle of extinctions.  Nor was this confined to plants and animals—as man appeared, his departed creations were added to the list, extinct languages, disappeared cities and monuments, lost writings and works of art.  As the evening went on so the list inexorably drew closer to the present--Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima—and at last evoked a future in which even the present theatre and its audience must inevitably join the ever extending list.  It formed a deeply moving and disturbing visual grounding for the production.

Requiem Romeo Castellucci.  Photo © Luciano Romano

In front of this constantly changing roll, however, Castellucci developed a highly complex performance structure that in part reinforced and in part worked in counterpoint to the pain and suffering suggested by the music and projections.  Running parallel to themes of mourning, anxiety and death, Castellucci also celebrated the continual counter-process of rebirth and renewal.  His production begins with a sequence closely fitting the musical theme.  In a black void, an elderly woman places a rose in a base, climbs into an isolated simple bed, and dies.  Castellucchi however takes this end as a beginning, when, in the course of the evening, we will follow this woman backward, into middle age, youth, childhood and infancy, and as the litany of extinction rolls inexorably in the background, the stage is filled with the glories of her (and all human) life.  The black background is torn away and replaced with a large white curtain. A stunning sequence follows, beginning with the chorus point brightly colored paints over the youthful incarnation of the woman who opened the show.  She is then lifted by ropes up to serve as the central element in the white background, as the chorus surrounds her suspended figure with bright splashes of paint of all colors.

The chorus itself remains onstage except for the opening and closing scenes, beginning in regular dress, then changing to a series of traditional folk costumes, and at the end, naked except for loosely wrapped shrouds.   Through the major central part of the production they clearly represent the ongoing life force of the countryside, moving ,primarily in circle dances from many traditions, including an inevitable maypole. Trees and flowers burst up among them.

Inevitably, however, the dances end. The trees and flowers disappear and the chorus obliterates the bright colors behind them by splashing black paint across them.  A pile of soil pours onto the stage and as the lights fade to a low level, is spread out to cover the white stage floor by the actors, who have removed their festive clothes and now are either nude or loosely wrapped in shrouds.  When at last they rest quietly in an indistinct pile of soil, bodies, and shrouds, the back of the stage slowly begins to rise and this mixture of material slowly slides forward to create a mound of refuse downstage.

The old woman whose death opened the evening appears with her three younger avatars, gently place a young baby on the mound and leave.  Offstage a boy treble sings Mozart’s In Paradisum, “May the angels lead you into paradise.”  Silence follows, broken only by the baby’s contended gurgles as the curtain slowly lowers on this final image of hope and rebirth in the very face of death.

For my third evening I returned to the Theater Basel, but to a different performance space there, the medium-sized Schauspielhaus (450 seats as opposed to 860 in the main house and 320 in the small experimental stage).  The production was Maxim Gorki’s Summerfolk, a familiar work on the German stage, but rarely seen in the United States.  The play has a very Chekhovian feel and is generally regarded to have been inspired by Chekhov.  Chekhov in fact died in 1904, the same year Summerfolk appeared.  Chekov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, with a tonality and characters especially close to those Chekov used.

Summerfolk has been often considered a kind of sequel to The Cherry Orchard, though the Chekhovian echoes must have come from earlier plays. While the Chekhov play focuses upon the departure (literally and symbolically) of the old social order represented by the Renevskaya family, that of Gorki takes place a few years later, when the materialistic and pragmatic generation represented in The Cherry Orchard by Lopahin have come to power.  Each summer they gather at the summer house of one of their number, presumably to relax and enjoy this vacation from the pressures of the business world, but actually to pass the time in empty discussion, tedious quarreling and flirting, and lamenting the pointlessness and joylessness of their empty lives.  In the background, the audience, knows, the impending revolution will sweep all this away.

This production has a special relevance in the career of director Stephan Pucher.  After launching his career with a series of pop and disco-oriented works, much influenced by the Gob Squad, he achieved his first major success with a radical reworking of a classic text, which has been his major type of work since.  This first triumph was his reworking of The Cherry Orchard in 1999, created in Theater Basel.  Since then he has premiered only two other productions in this theatre, Uncle Vanya in 2005 and Faust I in 2012.  Summerfolk, just 25 years after his first major success with the closely related Cherry Orchard at this same theatre, thus seems a kind of homecoming.  In addition to a particular fondness for Chekhov (Pucher’s first invitation to the prestigious Berlin Theatertreffn was with his 2001 The Seagull, created in Zurich), Pucher has from the beginning been one of the German directors especially interested in experimenting with the combining of live action with video and digital technology.

The unconventional ending of Pucher’s 1999 Cherry Orchard clearly indicates this and eerily anticipates the technological world of his current Summerfolk.   In Chekov’s original, the dying Firs sits alone within the locked confines of the abandoned Renevskaya home.  In the Pucher staging, two large doors opened upstage to reveal an electronic wasteland.  The verdant cherry orchard dissolved into a frozen ice-glue tundra inhabited by the ghostly images of the departed family, still carrying on their empty and directionless activity.

The opening scene of Summerfolk might almost be seen as a parodic variation on this unsettling conclusion.  We see a healthy middle-aged couple (Annika Meier and Jan Bluthardt) relaxing in front of a beautiful mountain landscape—but immediately recognize it as a bit too beautiful, and indeed the landscape is a video projection with the glowing colors of a TV travel advertisement, and even the three-dimensional scenic elements surrounding the couple suggest advertising stage properties.  The theatricalized summer wear they display has elements of both the early twentieth century and current fashion, since Puchner has moved the play from pre-revolutionary Russia to the modern world of international capitalism.

Summerfolk. Photo © LuziaHunziker

The basic situation remains unchanged, a group of nouveaux riches, disappointed by the lack of fulfillment in their current lifestyles, withdraw to a country retreat, where they find not relief but an even keener awareness of the emptiness and lack of direction in their lives.   Pucher’s contemporary summerfolk assume that the emptiness they feel in their everyday live is caused by their growing reliance upon non-human technology—cell phones, video games, the internet, and ultimately AI. The retreat to which they withdraw promises to provide relief from these forces specifically bans cellphones and internet access, to provide the direct experience of nature.  The difficulty of finding such a retreat is suggested by Pucher locating it in Davos, one of Switzerland’s most popular (and crowded) Alpine resort areas, and equally significantly, the regular meeting place of the World Economic Forum.

The impossibility of escaping contemporary technology is a central theme of both text and staging.  Almost every character has a hidden presumably banned cellphone hidden somewhere about the set, and the resort itself attempts to reinforce its ban on technological devices by technological means, including hidden cameras and even more intrusive video projections about current information of presumed interest which are created by rather robotic announcers in a small isolated area to the side of the stage, and appear on the central screen. The operations of this system, and its frequently malfunctioning, are the continuing preoccupation of the arrogant but inept local engineer, very amusingly portrayed by Ueli Jaeggi, constantly  complaining to the audience of the stupidity and pointlessness of his tasks.

The other major character Pucher adds to his band of Swiss escapists is Rick Roaming  (Julian Anatol Schneider), a half-demented American visitor to the resort who is already much more seriously affected by the current digital world than his Swiss companions.  Neither he nor they are entirely sure whether he is an actual computer addict or his avatar which exists both in and out of the game.  In any case, Rick is convinced that he is threatened with death by his digital foes, and frantically is attempting to construct a coil gun to defend himself.  Eventually is appears that he (or his avatar) is indeed killed, but since the visual background of the stage  shifts continually between the idyllic landscapes of Alpine vistas, in which the actors from time to time appear, official but garbled video announcements from the resort staff, apparent video interventions from the resort engineering center airing the grievances of the engineer, and digitalized segments of Rick’s ongoing Star War type battles with his mechanized adversaries, it becomes increasingly unclear to both audience and characters whether the world in which they are operating is real or digital.  Perhaps not only Rick but all of them are in fact AI figures.  Desperately they seek a way to discover which is the truth and decide that the question “What do you desire?” is reportedly one that computer intelligence cannot answer but living humans can.

In fact none of the characters are able to provide a satisfactory response to this test, and so we are they are left to wonder whether they are all in fact empty forms of AI or whether they have essentially become such by their immersion in the new technological world.  Clearly, as most reviewers were quick to admit, this concern is far from Gorki, despite the well-known socialist sympathies of translator and adaptor Dietmar Dath, but German directors like Pucher have long turned classic texts in radical new directions to make, as this production clearly does, surprising new insights into our most pressing cultural concerns.

For my final evening in Basel I returned to the major house for a new production by one of my favorite modern directors, Herbert Fritsch, who has defied the traditional view of a lack of humor in the German dramatic tradition by establishing himself as the leading director of farce in Europe today.   I first encountered Fritsch’s dazzling and over the top visual and physical theatre in 2011 when he was first invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen, with a stunning  and hilarious version of Ibsen’s Doll House played in the grotesquely exaggerated style of a gothic horror film.  Since then I have followed his work whenever possible, as he continued to put his own particular spin on classical authors like Dürrenmatt and Molière and, to my mind, even more successfully in his own works (like the well-known Murmel, Murmel, with an eighty minute text composed only of those words—the German for “murmer, murmer”).  Although internationally his work in theatre is most frequently compared with the great French farce writers of the late twentieth century, so far Fritsch has only staged two of their works, both by Eugene Labiche, The Affair in the Rue de Lourcine in 2010 and the current Italian Straw Hat in Basel.  Seeing Fritsch’s interpretation of this masterpiece of modern farce was one of the major reasons for my choosing Basel for this European excursion.

Perhaps my expectations were too high, because although I certainly found the evening entertaining, and occasionally hilarious, I did not consider it as a whole among the director’s best works.   All the elements of successful farce were there—the constant frenetic movement, including of course the continual slamming of doors, the elaborate physical routines based on the manipulation of physical objects like hats, glasses, flowers, and walking sticks, the repeated handstands, pratfalls, and inadvertent collisions and near collisions.  Music is almost always an important part of a Fritsch production, and that promised to be the case here, with the play advertised as an Opera, co-produced by the Komische Oper of Berlin, and with lyrics and a score by a cultural icon with an even larger following than that of Fritsch, the rock-pop star Herbert Grönemeyer. The plot, however and even the songs, often tended to disappear in the activity, but that did not seem to me a  great loss.  Grönemeyer’s lyrics were rather banal (though not much less so than the originals) and as for the plot, it is largely an excuse for all the confusions and rushing about in search of the rather ridiculous object which gives the play its name (here changed from the French original [and traditional English and German translations] An Italian Straw Hat, to the admittedly somewhat more active and comic [at least in German] Pferd frisst Hut [Horse Eats Hat]).

Pferd Frisst Hut. Photo © Thomas Aurin

Fritsch’s company are virtuosic actors, acrobats and musicians, and although the latter skills were less used here than in some pieces, the stage provided essentially a machine for the display of their physical abilities and endurance. Designer Oscar Meteo Grunert has created essentially a colorful open box with side walls consisting mostly of doors (actually five on each side) and at the back center, a semi-circular bright yellow platform with five steps leading up to a revolving door.  All the doors and the spaces between provide locations for every sort of physical activity, with actors constantly running into doors and walls, running up and sliding down stairs, and performing complicated routines around the revolving elements.  The familiar saying that the manipulation of doors is the heart of French farce was never more imaginatively developed than here.

The Basel chorus, which plays the confused wedding party running about in search of the elusive hat, moves well and sings nicely but they lack the virtuosic skills that Fritsch likes to encourage and which are stunningly displayed in the leading actors, especially the harassed protagonist Fadinard (Christopher Nell).  In all, despite the ingenuity of Fritsch and his company, the three hour production , entertaining as it often is, is also rather exhausting.

 The Threepenny Opera. Photo © Ingo Hoehn