Thomas Ostermeier
Artistic Director of Berlin Schaubühne Theatre and Director of Hamlet
The Schaubühne is the most prestigious theatre in Germany. When you took it over you determined not to concern yourself with the people who had always attended it, but to do what you felt was prescient and necessary. The result is that the Schaubühne now has one of the youngest audiences of any major European theatre, and shows sell-out at an enviable frequency. Do you think forcing change is what ultimately worked for you?
It wasn’t my intention at all. I think it happened because when we started as an artistic team we were all in our late 20s, our 30s, and not interested in what the younger generation wanted to see. We were just doing theatre for ourselves and luckily there were a lot of people from our generation who shared this point of view and taste. I don’t think if you put up a strategy to attract younger audiences that it will work out. I do believe that as long as you stick to what you have to do yourself, what you want to tell and how you want to tell it, you have a bigger chance of attracting a young audiences. I think younger generations are clever enough to understand when someone isn’t trying to say anything. But this is a question for marketing, I’m not interested in this.
You’ve long been hailed as the enfant terrible of theatre. Since the mid-1990s you’ve been synonymous with the sort of kitchen-sink, Sarah Kane-inspired, angry, grunge school of theatre. It was a movement that was time and place specific – does it have the same relevance and power to shock now, as it did then?
I think the anger now is even greater as the triumph of neo-liberalism becomes more widespread. We all experienced 2008 and we’re now back to business and nothing’s changed. We’ve left Occupy behind, we’ve had the Indignados in Spain, the occupied theatres in Italy, and nothing changed. I think it’s a good time for theatre, because we’re a medium that still has a certain amount of autonomy and independence, we’re still kind of independent from commercial success. Which means it’s one of the few places in society where you can tell your story and make your point without trying to sell something and that’s what you need today. I’m saying it’s a good time for theatre because we’re living in very hard times and we now have conflict within our societies but also within our own cultural landscape – the North American way. All these conflicts are getting worse and harder. And theatre is about the act of conflict – it’s about how to form a perspective on a world that is full of different stand-points and spheres of interest.
Relating to that, would you agree that there is an uncompromising hopelessness in most of your work?
I don’t mind if you perceive my theatre as bleak. If you look at a play like Hamlet for example, or most of the other tragedies of Shakespeare, there isn’t any hope. How can there be hope if this guy, Hamlet, is responsible for so many dead bodies on the stage – everyone is dead. This hopelessness I share with the greatest writer of all time, who lived 400 years ago. This is not specific to my way of looking at the world. It is more due to the fact that if you give an audience a happy ending, they leave with the feeling that there is no need to change the world, they will be satisfied and happy – what need is there to change the world then? Theatre is not there to give any answers – it’s not a religion or a political party. I don’t have any answers or resolutions to the very urgent questions of our times. But I have a lot of questions and I think they should be asked in a severe manner. The answers should be given by any member of the audience and I think that because of the state of the world today, we should be drawing radical conclusions.
Have you returned to the classics (in this case Hamlet) to ask these questions of them and to perhaps inspire these radical conclusions you speak of?
To draw radical conclusions of Hamlet is difficult – if you want that is my mission. For example, Hamlet himself draws radical conclusions. His most radical one is that he decides to not take revenge – it was the usual pattern of the time and of the dramatic form. And this is what Hamlet refuses to do. This is the big step in the evolution of theatre heroes – that the hero of the revenge tragedy refuses to take revenge. He is hesitating. And he’s hesitating because he’s clever, he’s an intellectual. He’s hesitating because he’s kind of paralysed by the complexity of the world around him. So the radical conclusions of “act or not to act”, “be or not to be”, the solutions of these are leading into a tragedy. It’s ambivalent. Maybe at a certain point it is too late to act, and then if you do finally act there’s a chance you’d create an even bigger disaster.
What was the vision for Hamlet’s world in Jan Papplebaum’s design?
The whole set is covered with earth, so it’s like a big open grave. We also have a curtain that hangs as part of the set that represents another theme in the production – the question of truth and the appearance of things – because it’s the world as a theatre curtain, you never know the difference between the appearance of things and their reality that lies behind the surface.
Why are there only 6 people playing all the characters on stage?
I wanted all the actors involved in the storytelling of the play to be on stage and part of the process all the time, otherwise there is a feeling of a lack of energy or a lack of involvement. Secondly, it’s because of something in the play – Hamlet doesn’t know who to trust anymore, he can’t distinguish who his friends are anymore, he mistakes his mother, and having the actors play multiple characters drives that dilemma home.
Hamlet runs from 25th to 27th September at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Tickets cost €15 to €40.
Words: Roisin Agnew
