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Deja Bucin and Krista Birkner. Photo: Lucie Jansch |
“Shakespeare is full of time. He is not ‘timeless,’ but ‘full of time.’ It seems ridiculous when people try to update Shakespeare. It is simply not possible.” Robert Wilson’s view of the author is reflected in the free-spiritedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which he and composer Rufus Wainwright created in 2009 for the renowned Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigle in 1949, in then East Berlin. This music-theater work features more than two dozen of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, each unfolding in its own aural and visual setting. If all the world is a stage, Wilson’s stage includes much of our world—telephone, bicycle, car, video screen, gas pump, and floating bed. Birdsong is in the air. A child’s voice.
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Traute Hoess, Anke Engelsmann, Krista Birkner. Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks |
In Shakespeare’s Sonnets the Elizabethan convention of men playing women’s parts is given a charming queering, as now women play men’s parts. Since many of the sonnets treat the theme of love—discovered, lost, unrequited, delusional—the role reversals deepen the universality of human emotion. How did this influence the songs? Wainwright says, “It was easy. I basically felt as though I was following in a very well-established and long-running tradition that Willy himself obviously reveled in several times, of course, mainly as a writer. Perhaps in other ways? I wouldn’t put it past him.” Sonnet 20, a dreamy ballad sung by a man dressed as a woman, enacts the ambiguities expected in the fluidity of gender roles. “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted/Hast thou the master-mistress of my passion.” The lovers’ meeting ends in a suicide while Shakespeare looks on from a window.
Shakespeare is a woman in the production, in a role originated by Inge Keller, one of the great actresses of German theater. “She has a brilliant way of reading the sonnets that is formal, non-interpretive, rooted in deep emotion,” Wilson observes. BAM audiences who saw his 2011 Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera will recall other company actors: Jürgen Holtz, now playing Queen Elizabeth (I and II), admired by Wilson for his “fantastic comic, ironic sense of timing,” and Angela Winkler, here in the role of the Fool. Though Wilson speaks fondly of the actors trained in the theatrical tradition of the former East Germany, he praises the younger ones as well. “They have a different training. They are all quite amazing in that they could approach this work, and my direction, thinking about it abstractly.” He adds, “As Heiner Müller often told me, my work is very close to Brecht. It is formal. There is a kind of alienation.”
Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie Award-winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is the author of Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, and has edited numerous anthologies of plays and essays.
http://call.hollyherndon.com/
ReplyDeleteDear BAM,
ReplyDeletePLEASE post on your website and/or e-mail to subscribers a full list of the sonnet numbers for this production. Audience members should be able to read them (in English, Deutsch, or both) in advance of the show. .
Hi there, we just posted them all here: http://www.bam.org/theater/2014/shakespeares-sonnets-sonnets
DeleteHave I misunderstood, or is all spoken in German?
ReplyDelete