Blood, sweat and tears: my 2023 European theatre highlights
Blood, sweat and tears: my 2023 European theatre highlights
A look back at some of the shows I found most memorable over the last 12 months.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
Since I started this newsletter in September, I’ve published 16 editions, amassed a little under 400 subscribers and written about work from Germany, Belgium, France, Slovenia, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Finland, Portugal, Kosovo, and Serbia (as well as the occasional show in the UK).
This past week I participated in a podcast for Kosovo2.0 with the legendary director Haris Pašović, a man who kept Sarajevo’s MESS festival going even when the city was under siege and produced Susan Sontag's historic production of Waiting for Godot.
I also wanted to share an article I wrote for the BBC Culture earlier in the year to mark 30 years since the first broadcast of game-changing US cop show Homicide: Life on the Street. I interviewed TV legend Tom Fontana as well as some of the cast and they all spoke with awe and warmth about Andre Braugher who passed away this week.
For this last edition of 2023, I have compiled a short list of the shows that stirred, moved or surprised me in some way. Not all of these are new shows, but they’re all shows I saw this year and, for one reason or another, they have proved the most memorable.
If you enjoy reading this newsletter, then please consider sharing it. If you really enjoy it and want to become a paid supporter, that’s cool too. It really makes a difference and will allow me to expand my coverage. As is the way these days, I also have a Ko-fi account.
Antigone in the Amazon – Milo Rau/NTGent and MTS
“Theatre is not a product. It is a production process. Research, castings, rehearsals and related debates must be publicly accessible.” This is the second point on Milo Rau’s NTGent manifesto and it is evident in his production of Antigone in the Amazon, the completion of a project which Rau began work on before the pandemic. Working in collaboration with a group of Brazilian activists from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Landless Workers’ Movement), Rau staged a re-enactment of a massacre that took place in 1996. The group of activists blocked a section of the Trans-Amazonian Highway – the road that cuts through the Amazon forest – and recreated the moment when Brazilian police opened fire on farmers who had occupied a stretch of the highway. Each year, on the anniversary, people set up an education camp where they make speeches, before blocking the highway for several hours. Rau filmed this, understandably emotional, re-enactment, and wove the footage together with a live stage performance of Antigone. Here’s my interview with Rau and the indigenous actor and activist Kay Sara about the show for The Stage. (Sara eventually e decided against starring in the European tour of the show). When I saw the finished show in at Wiener Festwochen, where Rau takes over as artistic director next year, I found that the live elements couldn’t match the power of the documentary footage, but the way Rau seemed so determined to learn from MTS’ activist practice was really striking. As document, as process, as a political act, and as a gesture of solidarity, it’s one of the shows I’ve thought about most often since.
One Song – Miet Warlop
This fusion of gig theatre and athletic workout was, hands down, the sweatiest show I saw this year. Premiering at the 2022 Avignon festival and touring extensively ever since, Belgian theatre maker Miet Warlop’s One Song – part of NT Gent’s Histoire(s) du Théâtre series– is a call-back to one of her earliest shows, which was made in memory of her brother. When she received the NTGent commission years later, she revisited the piece and the theme.
The hour-long show sees a single song repeated again and again by a group of actor-musicians while they perch on top of balance beams, run on treadmills or perform other physically demanding feats. The tempo of the song grows and ebbs over the course of the show, but the performers never quit. They keep going and going and going. Gradually their initial vigour begins to fade, and the exertion begins to show on their faces. Their sports kit becomes damp with sweat and their breathing becomes ragged. The show is at once a perfect performative metaphor for life and loss, and an exhilarating theatrical experience. I saw the show in Paris, but UK audiences were able to see it in Leeds, as part of the Transform international festival, and at Battersea Arts Centre. I wrote about the challenges involved in bringing a piece like this to the UK for The Stage earlier this year and wrote about Warlop’s work in more detail in an earlier edition of Café Europa.
The Confessions – Alexander Zeldin
Alexander Zeldin made a name for himself with his Inequalities Trilogy - Beyond Caring, Love and Faith, Hope and Charity - a trio of pieces that document societal inequality in a variety of institutional settings, from factoryworkers on zero hours contracts to residents of a temporary accommodation facility and a care home. His latest show took quite a different tack. The Confessions, which was inspired by conversations that Zeldin had with his mother during lockdown, charts one woman’s life from rural Australia of the 1950s to the present. Featuring a captivating performance from Australian actor Eryn Jean Norvill as well as superb support from Australian stage and TV stalwart Pamela Rabe, it’s essentially the story of one woman’s emancipation, set against the backdrop of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s.
Taking its time, the show charts Alice’s growth in confidence, it conveys the resilience and wisdom acquired over the course of a life. I found this evocation of one woman’s strength and sacrifice, regrets and desires moving to witness, especially given the personal nature of the piece. I interviewed Zeldin about the piece earlier in the year and reviewed the premiere for The Stage, though I gather the show evolved since that first performance.
Solo – Mladinsko Theatre and Maska Ljubljana
I first saw Slovenian director Nina Rajić Kranjac’s four-hour show loosely exploring what it means to be a successful, young, female theatre director in the Slovenian theatre system back in 2022. A collaborative solo show co-created by Nina Rajić Kranjac (a successful, young female theatre director) and Nataša Keser, Benjamin Krnetić and Marko Mandić, it’s a thrillingly elastic production in which the four performers spend a lot of time flinging beer in each other’s faces, skidding around on the floor or rollerblading while naked. Various liquids get spilled. The show is literally slippery. Just when the whole exercise is starting to feel more than a tad indulgent, a bit much, it explodes out of the building into the patch of land outside the New Post Office space at Ljubljana’s Mladinsko theatre and evolves into a completely different show, in which the audience is invited to sit around a long table and partake of beer and burek. I saw the show again this year, in part to see if it could still generate the same energy.
Like a lot of Rajić Kranjac’s work – including her recent six-hour production of Angels in America for the same theatre – large sections of Solo are intended to be performed outdoors. However, when I saw it again earlier this year, having been dry all day, it started to bucket down at almost the exact the point the outdoor portion of the show was meant to begin. Not just a little rain but a downpour. How, I wondered, would deal with it? Perhaps they’d have to cancel? No, as it turns out. Instead, they dragged everyone back inside, rearranged the chairs and erected the table inside the theatre. We then got to watch as they adapted each scene on the hoof, squeezing the show into the space, energetically improvising – one scene which required a bathtub prob was performed in a plastic container – as the audience passed around cans of beer and lit up cigarettes (I mean we were supposed to be outside). It was theatre at its most live and fleet-footed, a show being reshaped in front of our eyes. Here’s my review for SEEstage.
Triptych: The Missing Door, The Lost Room and The Hidden Floor
Puddles of blood. Untrustworthy furniture. Mysterious disappearances. A general air of the uncanny. The latest work by Peeping Tom was right up my street. Conceived and directed by Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, this trio of linked pieces in which certain motifs and images are repeated, was atmospheric from the off before morphing into something altogether more apocalyptic in the third hallucinatory third section, set on a sinking ship. The stage was flooded with water as the performers tumbled around the set, soaking and near-naked, bodies twisting into strange shapes, flames raging in the background. Here’s my review for The Stage.
Dark Noon – FIX+FOXY
One of the stand-out show of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival was a 2019 show by Danish company FIX&FOXY (whose work includes an immersive experience inspired by Twin Peaks and a show inspired by Rocky in which a pig carcass is pummelled on stage). A journey through American history told through the lens of western movies, performed by a company of South African actors in white-face make-up, it was presented not at the Edinburgh International Festival as you might expect but as part of the Pleasance’s programme at the EICC.
Co-directed by Tue Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu, (who also choreographed the show), Dark Noon takes the form of a potted history of America, the birth of a tainted nation. Broken down into chapters, it shows us growth and progress, but also slavery, violence, genocide, a land built on the blood of others. Over the course of the 100-minute show we watched as a small American town was gradually erected on stage. First a house, then a church and a shop, eventually even a bank. The audience was invited to populate this town, to take a pew and maybe purchase a refreshing Coca-Cola (for a price, because capitalism). It’s not a comfortable watch, nor is it intended to be, but it was one of the best things I saw on the fringe, and I remain impressed that the Pleasance took a punt on it. I wrote about it in more detail in my first ever Café Europa post.
Post-Childhood/Post-Escape – Belarus Free Theatre
In late 2021, after years of making work underground in its home country, the members of Belarus Free Theatre made the difficult decision to leave Belarus. Co-founders Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin had already been living in exile in London since 2011, but the crackdown on protest that followed the 2020 election made it untenable for the remaining members to remain. Many of them went to Ukraine only to be displaced for a second time by the Russian invasion in 2022 and the brutal war that followed. Having worked in challenging circumstances throughout their career, the company, having been settled in Poland, swiftly set up the Free Artist programme for young people from Belarus and Ukraine, who were also now based there.
The programme was initially intended to give these teenage refugees access to culture and a means to express themselves, but under the supervision of Svetlana Sugako, the company’s managing director, they were given the means to make a piece of performance on a theme of their choice. While the resulting show touched on their experience as refugees, it encompassed all their anxieties, concerns, and frustrations regarding their relationship with their parents.
Their parents did not see the piece until the first performance and were moved and surprised by what they saw. Belarus Free Theatre then repeated the process with their parents, giving them the means to devise their own response piece (which ended up being as much about their kids as their own parents). The two pieces were performed as a double bill at the Museum of Free Belarus, a cultural space in Warsaw, in February. I had the privilege of being there and it was, as you might expect, a very emotional experience. Were these the most polished or ambitious shows I saw this year? No. But they were two of the most moving. By the end the kids were crying, the grown-ups were crying and there was much hugging. For everyone involved, it felt transformative and cathartic. I wrote about the process of creating the shows for The Stage here.
Honourable mentions (Edinburgh edition)
Alongside Dark Noon, my favourite shows from this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe were Liv Ello and Frankie Thompson’s Body Show, Mark Thomas’ sweaty, megawatt performance in England and Son, the off-the-charts charisma of Nathan Queeley-Dennis in Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz and Lucy McCormick’s irregular use of axle grinders and hummus in Lucy and Friends (has anybody introduced Lucy McCormick to Florentina Holzinger?)
Honourable mentions (London edition)
Daniel Rigby gave one of the best physical comedy performances I’ve seen in ages in Tom Basden’s adaptation of Accidental Death of Anarchist. That it was in the service of a show that was laced with fury at police over-reach and abuse of power which smuggled an activist energy into the West End was even better. Similarly I find it heartening that Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, one of the more formally ambitious plays I have seen this year, one that touched upon truth, censorship, and the role of the artist in an oppressive regime, is also West End bound.
Dishonourable mention
Let’s just say I was not a fan of the Frank Castorf’s six hour Divine Comedy.
Upcoming theatre highlights (online edition)
Usually, I would provide a small round-up of festivals, premieres and other exciting upcoming events here, but with the holidays almost upon us this here’s a few livestream and online shows to look out for in the coming weeks.
Dream Agency - Directed by Forest Fringe co-directors Andy Field and Deborah Pearson, Forest Fringe’s debut film features a number of artists and theatre makers from the Forest Fringe family, including Vera Chok, Little Bulb’s Clare Beresford, Ira Brand, Action Hero and (of course) Christopher Brett Bailey. Having premiered in 2022, it’s now available to watch on streaming service, AllFilm.
Spirited Away - The John Caird-directed Japanese-language stage adaptation of the 2001 Studio Ghibli film premiered at Tokyo's Imperial Theatre in 2022. London audiences can see it next year when it open at the Coliseum but before that it will be available to stream on HBO Max from 24th December.
Kings of War – There’s a chance to watch Ivo van Hove’s mash-up of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III (including a brilliant turn by Hans Kesting as Richard III) via livestream from Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th January 2024.
Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed to and shared this newsletter since I started writing it. I hope you’ve enjoyed it thus far. If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com. Merry Christmas and happy new year!