Exberliner Issue 171 May 2018

WHAT’S ON — Stage
PALMYRA
by bertandnasi
Preview
I love you, you’re perfect, now change
Two stage adaptations struggle
to improve on their sources
Adapting films and books for the
stage is a bit like marrying someone
you see as a fixer-upper: you
love them so much, you just want to
prove how much better they’d be if they
were a little different. Not a great foundation
for a marriage, and maybe not for a
stage production, either. Films pose more
problems than books: Our familiarity with
successful movies makes it hard for stage
actors to make characters their own. And
then the nagging question: why adapt in
the first place?
Two works struggling to answer that
question right now are Kinder des Paradieses,
the Berliner Ensemble’s adaptation of
Marcel Carné’s 1945 French film classic,
and the Deutsches Theater Kammerspiele’s
staging of Medea. Stimmen, a novel
by Christa Wolf. Les Enfants du Paradis,
filmed in occupied France as World War
II came to a close, has undeniable appeal
to theatre folk: most of its characters
are stage performers, as its plot revolves
around three men – Baptiste, a mime;
Frédérick, an actor; and Pierre-François, a
crime boss – in love with Garance, whose
main activity seems to be dealing with her
suitors. The allure of the film’s milieu is
heightened by the story of its making –
produced under Nazi surveillance with a
gay director, a Jewish set designer and film
composer, and a lead actress romantically
involved with a German Luftwaffe officer.
Director Ola Mafaalani tries to stage both
stories, presenting long stretches of the
film broken up by scenes that detail the
off-screen drama of Arletty, the actress
whose love affair landed her in jail for collaboration.
But there’s too much material
here to treat it all equally: Mafaalani ends
up shortchanging Arletty’s story to recapitulate
most of the film, which doesn’t
benefit from recapitulation.
Director Tilmann Köhler has a slightly
easier task at the DT Kammerspiele.
Christa Wolf’s novel, based on the story
best known to us through Euripides’
play, is itself structured as a series of
first-person narratives presenting the
perspectives of different characters – a
series of monologues, in other words. In
that sense, the book was almost begging
to be staged, and the text undoubtedly
deserves high rank in the tradition of
reinterpreted Greek tragedies: Medea, as
Wolf reimagines her, was no perpetrator
of infanticide but was set up to appear as
such by a xenophobic Corinthian political
elite that panicked when Medea started
prying too deeply into its secrets. The
production benefits from Karoly Risz’s
beautifully simple set design of a shallow
pool of water taking up almost the entire
stage and casting shadows of ripples
against the back wall; the puppetry used
to represent the children is even more
affecting. Beyond Maren Eggert’s poised
Medea, however, the acting is surprisingly
uneven: Edgar Eckert’s Jason huffs and
puffs but doesn’t blow anything down,
and Helmut Mooshammer as one of
Creon’s soothsayers needs to find a facial
expression beyond raising an eyebrow
and bulging his eyes. But at least one can
see why the novel belongs on stage – as an
important addition to a dialogue with
our inherited Medeas. — DM
Kinder des Paradieses HH
May 20, 19:30 (with English surtitles)
Berliner Ensemble | Medea.Stimmen
HHH May 4, 11, 26, 20:00 (with
English surtitles) Deutsches Theater
MOUTHPIECE
by
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Collective
(Canada)
etb
International Performing Arts Center
Two German premieres of the
very best of the 2017 Edinburgh
Fringe Festival at ETB | IPAC
May | June, 2018
ETBERLIN.DE
Arno Declair
MAY 2018