Along came a spider: Kurdwin Ayub's White Widow

On an Austrian filmmaker making their theatrical debut at Berlin's Volksbühne.

This week I’m back in Berlin, where I arrived just in time for the German elections. I actually spent the day of the elections watching a five-hour Robert Lepage show (more on which next week), which led to the tensest interval ever as the entire audience got out their phones to check the exit poll.

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White Widow at the Volksbühne © Apollonia T. Bitzan

The year is 2666. Europe is an Islamic State presided over by the insatiable queen Aliah, who beds a different man every night and then kills them afterwards. She has saved the world from the new right and now rules supreme, striding around in a flowing teal robe, a beaded bikini, lethal heels and little else, her body an object of worship and terror.

White Widow, the debut theatre production by Kurdwin Ayub, is a messy and energetic comedy fantasia which marries button-pushing fun with an underlying frustration about how stories about Muslim women are told and the pressure placed on artists not to cross certain lines.

Ayub is an Iraqi-born Austrian filmmaker known for the films, Sun and Moon, the later of which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival and stars Florentina Holzinger - the Austrian choreographer who is currently one of the biggest names in the German-speaking theatre scene and who recently got appointed to the artistic advisory team at the Volksbühne – as a martial artists who is receives a job to train three wealthy sisters in Jordan. I haven’t seen her film work but from what I read – here’s a review of Moon - it feels tonally quite distinct from this exuberant and occasionally blunt and bloody satire.

A co-production with the Vienna Festwochen, the show opens with an extended dance sequence featuring a troupe of performers in slinky black catsuits and hijabs, as well as a few dancers in harem pants. There’s a hookah in the foreground and a variety of carpets strewn about the place. This cocktail of 1001 Nights cliches and sensibility-skewering imagery sets the tone for a production which is clearly out to poke some holes in the Western lens.

The queen, played by Berlin rapper addeN, first emerges from a giant metal spider which descends from above like a cross between a glitter ball and the Apollo lunar module. This is pretty fucking cool but also creates an interesting juxtaposition with the rest of Nina von Mechow’s set which consists of a few intentionally flimsy-looking wooden flats in the shape of onion-domed buildings. (As a Brit, this set made me think of panto, a British theatre tradition with a long history of deploying orientalist tropes and sometimes outright racism, as discussed here and here).

White Widow at the Volksbühne © Apollonia T. Bitzan

While Aliah has no compunction about torturing her conquests – we see chained men being dragged around the stage - Aliah's daughter, Cezaria (Samirah Breuer), is appalled by the tide of sex and slaughter. She’s not OK with all the carnage, and longs for peace, but Aliah writes this off as characteristic of her generation’s general softness, something akin with their obsession with pronouns. (I did not say the satire was subtle).

At some point, an old white man (Georg Friedrich) sneaks into the queen’s quarters and volunteers to spend a night with her, having first had eyeliner applied and been liberally spritzed with Tom Ford’s Extreme Noir. Like Scheherazade, he’s here to tell the queen a story. The story he tells is of the woman known as the ‘white widow,’ the wife of one of the four terrorists responsible for the 2005 London bombings who remains one of the most wanted women in the world, her name associated with subsequent terror attacks. Born Samantha Lewthwaite in Northern Ireland, she became an object of fascination by some sections of the British media, a radicalised white woman proving more troubling (and exciting) to them than any number of young men.

This is a very busy production. There are dance sequences - including a sudden explosion of Cotton Eye Joe - and comic digressions. Screens at the side of the stage occasionally display Tiktoks - including “the most halal cat you have ever seen” –along with Aliah and Cezaria’s Insta reels, filmed with the aid of a ring-light. Aliah converses with the giant spider, which she refers to as a safe space (and to whom she feeds her conquests). The dancers are sometimes dressed as armed female bodyguards, at other times they don cat masks with niqabs. Some of this is very funny but it’s also incredibly scattergun.

The production finds its focus in its later stages, as the line blurs between the ‘future’ and a recognisable present. We hear some of the condescending things that film producers say to female directors from minority backgrounds, about how a German audience (as if that was a homogenous thing) is likely to receive their work, or how she shouldn’t deviate from the progressive narrative by, say, suggesting that the wearing of a hijab is anything other than empowering and she definitely shouldn’t say anything about the subjugation of women that could be interpreted as perpetuating negative ideas about Islam, thus giving fuel to the right.

There’s a palpable frustration underlying the production, about what views are deemed permissible, what topics deemed sensitive, and presumably how all this plays into, say, the muted outcry about the systemic silencing of women in Afghanistan. There’s a long, hilarious and I’m guessing at least semi-improvised (given how it deviated from the English subtitles), sequence in which Benny Claessens, as a Berlin art guy, loudly expounds on his allyship, which he chiefly demonstrated by buying a bag with a picture on it of “that girl in her underwear” in Iran. Again and again, women are told how their stories should be told.

White Widow at the Volksbühne © Apollonia T. Bitzan

Cezaria is eventually manipulated into overthrowing her mother and taking the crown herself. Shit suddenly gets Shakespearean. Breuer has the difficult task of having to emotionally ground the production and she manages it. In a production where the volume is often dialled up to 11, she creates a calm centre. As she is instructed how to dress in a more relatable and acceptable way (by wearing a polo shirt), how to moderate her speech, how to present herself, she seems to get smaller.

While I'll take messy energy over sterility in theatre every time, there's a looseness to the performance that doesn't always work in its favour. Part of the problem is the space. The Volksbühne is unforgivingly huge, and Ayub addresses this by filling it with a lot of movement and shouting and general cacophony, but the lack of precision means that the production sometimes loses momentum in a way that is kind of surprising for a show featuring an enormous, talking disco spider.

Some moments, like the scene in which Cezaria is trying to place her mother’s severed head (spoiler) on a spike and discovers it’s actually quite difficult thing to do (physically, never mind emotionally) so ends up having to jam the head between her legs, strike a brilliant balance between the appalling and the absurd, but other moments just seem clumsy - early in the production, Aliah’s beaded headdress seems to be engaged in a jangling battle with her microphone, which obscures some of the dialogue. Even a potentially potent scene, like the one towards the end where the dancers writhe around to Britney’s Slave 4 U with blood smeared on their faces, gets swallowed up by the cave of a space.

I know it sounds epically petty to pick holes in a piece that is in part about the experience of having constraints placed on your art, but I did sometimes find myself wishing it was more theatrically rigorous, if only because these things serve to dilute the production’s tired-of-this-shit energy. In terms of approach, it sometimes reminded me of the work of Jeton and Blerta Neziraj, particularly The Return of Karl May, a typically irreverent piece which rips into Western stereotypes of the “wild, savage” east, particularly German attitudes towards Albanians as encapsulated by the popular 19^th century author Karl May. (Here’s a piece I wrote about the show for Nachtkritik).

What emerges is an artist weary of being boxed, and a culture that still does not know what to do with stories of transgressive and aggressive women – at one point someone asks what good does it do to tell a story of a blood-thirsty woman? Why complicate things? Maybe best not to tell that story at all.

The show is brash, crass, angry, and often very funny. It isn’t always theatrically coherent and it is tonally all-over-the-shop, but it displays a willingness to take swings at the right and the left and everyone in between, and while, in the show, the old white dudes regain control and the women end up being brutally erased and permanently silenced, Ayub’s voice comes through clearly.

This week in European theatre

A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days

Malá inventura Festival – Prague’s festival of new theatre, dance and circus features a programme of highlights of the Czech scene of the past year – including the intriguing-sounding Wandervogel by Jan Mocek - as well as an industry showcase. Taking place at venues around the city, it opened on 20^th and runs until 28^th February.

Saint Joan of the Stockyards – Czech director Dušan David Pařízek helms Brecht’s infrequently staged retelling of the Joan of Arc story set in the Chicago stockyards of the 1930s. It stars Kathleen Morgeneyer and Stefanie Reinsperger and premieres at the Berliner Ensemble on 27th February.

Mephisto - Jette Steckel, whose production of Die Vaterlosen, was selected for last year’s Theatertreffen, returns to Munchen Kammerspiele with her production of Klaus Mann's controversial 1936 novel about a German actor who ingratiates himself with the Nazis in order to bolster his career. It premieres in Munich on 28 February.

The Aesthetics of Resistance - Director Sylvain Creuzevault returns to Paris’ Odéon with his 2023 piece based on Peter Weiss' novel about internal German resistance to Nazism. It opens in Paris on 1st March and plays until 16th March.

Ever Given - Rimini Protokoll’s most recent show, a new piece by Heldgard Haug inspired by the ship that ran aground on an embankment of the Suez Canal blocking global trade routes, returns to the Volkstheater in Vienna from 1^st-3^rd March.

Thank you for reading. If you have any recommendations, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com