Autumn Approaches
✮✮✮ Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk Deutsches Theater | Berlin directed by Daniela Löffner At first glance, this Deutsches Theater production misreads Maxim Gorki’s Summerfolk. The play is deep and sprawling: a great Russian novel that spills onto an expansive stage, an endless summer garden party filled with sorrow and longing. But, whilst Daniela Löffner’s rigid aesthetic is initially testing, it is that same aesthetic that elevates her production later on, drawing out the taste o
The American Struggle
✮✮✮ Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire Berliner Ensemble | Berlin directed by Michael Thalheimer When working on classic plays, Michael Thalheimer has a reputation for steadfastly cutting and condensing text, yet he never alters or adds to what he’s been given. We see the effectiveness of this method in this canny production of A Streetcar Named Desire. With a play that is so of its time, one would expect to hear references or turns of phrase that jar, but this is p
Now We'll Hear From the Opposition
✮✮✮ 1/2 Oliver Frljić's Gorki - Alternative für Deutschland? Maxim Gorki Theater | Berlin directed by Oliver Frljić There is a trend in Oliver Frljić’s work of confronting the audience with the hypocrisy of their bourgeois, theatre-going lives. In Our Violence, Your Violence, which premiered at the Croatian National Theatre in 2016, for example, he criticises the audience for continuing with normal, inane activities while millions are dying in the Middle East and continue to
