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
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
The Last Days of Caterpillar
✮✮✮ 1/2 Falk Richter's Verräter - Die letzten Tage Maxim Gorki Theater | Berlin directed by Falk Richter Falk Richter’s Verräter - Die letzten Tage (Traitors - The Last Days) is an attempt to grasp and examine the recent and radical turns in today’s political climate. The title alone elicits the questions that provide a framework for understanding the entire production. If there are traitors in the world around us, who are they and whom have they betrayed? If these are indeed
