Ostermeier by Gerhard Jörder

Author:Gerhard Jörder
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Theater der Zeit
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Blasted by Sarah Kane, Schaubühne 2005, Katharina Schüttler and Ulrich Mühe

What did they find so dusty about it?

The family conflict, the theme of emancipation, none of it, they said, was topical any more… I didn’t find that at all, otherwise I would never have chosen that play. Of course casting the actor Anne Tismer had a part in it – many of my decisions in favour of certain plays are directly associated with the potential offered by the ensemble.

Showdown in the Doll’s House, 2002

You staged A Doll’s House as a real thriller, with uncanny effects and horror projections, with strong optical and acoustic signals, with quotes, characters and stereotypes from pop, comics, film and soaps. And with a final provocation. How did the idea of reinterpreting the end of the play as a showdown come about?

First of all it was an intellectual punch line. In this work I played with numerous different media images of women that were in vogue then, bringing together power, sex, violence and weapons. And then we worked Lara Croft into the text, Nora’s disguise at the masked ball she attends with her husband Helmer, and a gun from a carnival costume hire – which is actually a borrowing from Hedda Gabler, in A Doll’s House there is no gun. And we wondered, what would happen if this woman didn’t just use the gun playfully, as she might in a video or computer game, but really turned it on Helmer and shot her way out of the doll’s house? There were feminists who said, after 120 years it’s about time that she unloaded a bullet rather than just slamming a door – that’s what I felt, too. Others were critical – typically masculine, that’s not the slightest bit feminist! In any case, wherever we performed it in the world, the effect of this shot, this radical shot was the thing that unleashed discussion straight away.

Hedda as a universal marriage drama, 2005

Your Hedda Gabler, with Katharina Schüttler in the title role, is told in a much less spectacular, quieter, calmer way, a kind of universal marriage drama, an almost banal suicide.

For me it was much easier to tell A Doll’s House the way I did. A Doll’s House is based on the Montage of Attractions principle, from the things I had appropriated from Meyerhold and Eisenstein. With Hedda, however, I didn’t want to overload the audience with effects. I wanted the audience to be interested in the core of the story, in the characters – that was the harder route. That’s also why I’m much prouder of Hedda than A Doll’s House.

Both productions were hugely successful. You were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen with both, and both of them toured half the world. Can you give me some statistics on that?

I can look up the figures… (searches) A Doll’s House we have performed a total of 280 times. In Berlin alone there have been 230 performances with a total of 115,000 visitors. Then there were 50 international performances, with 50,000 visitors.

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