Angels and demons: my 2024 European theatre highlights

On some of my favourite theatre moments from the last 12 months.

When I started Café Europa last year, it was with the intention of writing about all the exciting work I was seeing in Europe, and maybe bringing artists to each other’s attention in the process. Since then I’ve acquired close to 1350 subscribers, some of whom are kind enough to pay to support my writing - thank you! - but it also feels like I’ve spent quite a lot of time writing about funding cuts, infringements of artistic freedom, politically motivated lay-offs and the different ways in which artists have come under attack.

With that in mind, I’d like to wrap up the year on a positive note, with an idiosyncratic and very personal look back at the most fuck-yeah moments I’ve seen on stage these past 12 months, the moments that reminded me why I love theatre and why I do this.

Once again thank you to everyone who’s supported my writing this year, I really appreciate. If you’d like to join them than you can currently do so for £4 a month of £40 a year. It helps me to keep the site largely paywall-free though there will be occasional bonus posts.

If you’re interested in supporting other independent theatre journalism, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the recently relaunched Exeunt magazine - I have a guest post there this week on performers getting sweaty - Fergus Morgan’s indispensable UK theatre Substack The Crush Bar and Tracey Sinclair’s guide to everything going on in the North East of England.

Angels in America. Photo: Ivian Kan Mujezinovic

Angels in America - Mladinsko Theatre

Audiences in Slovenia this year had the unusual opportunity to see two versions of Tony Kushner’s seminal text, one produced by the Mini Theatre in Ljubljana, the other by the Mladinsko Theatre. The latter was directed by one of Slovenia’s most shit-hot young directors, Nina Rajić Kranjac, and consisted of an exhilarating six-hour fusion of both parts of Kushner’s text with several key scenes taking place outside.

I first saw it on a chilly spring evening, with the love scene between married Mormon Joe Pitt and Louis Ironson taking place outdoors, the actors disrobing and embracing before going at it on the cold, cold ground. The audience were supplied with hot potatoes and vodka for this scene (so many shows could be improved by the addition of hot potatoes and vodka). The apocalyptic ending also took place outside, though on the night I saw it, the actors had to contend with noise-bleed from a country music-themed party from a nearby building, with strains of Dolly Parton and Cotton Eye Joe spilling out of the windows. Somehow it didn’t derail the production, it actually kind of enhanced it.

The second time I saw the show (yes, I saw it twice) was in June and I was looking forward to seeing it in more hospitable weather conditions. OK, sure, it had rained a little during the day, but what’s a little rain? As we emerged from the theatre for the final scene, however, it wasn’t just raining a little, there was a full-on downpour going on. How on earth were they going to handle this? I couldn’t see how they could possibly go ahead. The initial idea was for the audience to sit on benches in the small park in front of the theatre, but if we had done that we would have been drenched. Instead, the audience was steered towards the front of the building where we huddled under the balcony as rain sheeted down in front of us and the actors performed the last scenes of the play in an appropriately biblical downpour.

With many shows, having to pivot in this way, having to change everything at the last minute and perform in a motherfucking deluge, would have simply not been possible, but Nina Rajić Kranjac’s work has an elasticity and an improvisational energy that allowed them not just to accommodate the rain, but to make it work in their favour. At first, they performed with umbrellas, but first Adrian Pezdirc, who played Prior Walter, flung his away and then most others followed suit, skidding around on the wet ground and throwing their arms heavenward like Andry Dufresne emerging from the shit-pipe in The Shawshank Redemption, their costumes sticking to their skin, Pezdirc’s tinfoil Statue of Liberty crown beginning to wilt. OK, sure, maybe some dialogue got lost along the way, but the whole thing weirdly chimed with Kushner’s text as Prior affirms his intention to live, in defiance of the elements, roaring into the storm.

Hamlet - Teatro La Plaza

Hamlet - Teatro La Plaza

Teatro La Plaza’s Hamlet may have been the most democratic take on Shakespeare’s play I’ve ever seen. It was also a total blast. Performed by a cast of actors all of whom have Down’s syndrome, this Peruvian production, which I saw at the Edinburgh International Festival, saw all eight actors wearing the crown at some point in the performance, interspersing scenes from the play with their own reflections on what it’s like to navigate life as someone with Down’s syndrome. They shared their desires, their dreams and hopes, as well as their frustrations, in a way that was often remarkably candid. They talked about what it was like to fancy someone when the world doesn’t credit you as being capable of romantic feelings, never mind see you as a sexual being. They talked about what it was to crave independence when people all too often treat you as a child. They talked about the anxiety they felt about performing Shakespeare – and then Skyped Ian McKellen for acting advice.

The whole thing is a kind of a hymn to theatre as well, to its power to connect with people. The actors discuss their personal relationship with the text, and what it means to play the title role, and in doing so, they don’t just take ownership of the play, they become part of a continuum, part of a string of Hamlets stretching back across the centuries. Directed by Chela De Ferrari, the whole things ends with a dance; not just a little jig, but a full-on party, with the cast all but dragging the audience up on stage to join in. The production was at once a satisfying unpacking of the themes of Hamlet, reframing the text in endless fascinating ways, and an insistence on visibility, a gloriously communal, celebratory - and often hilarious - piece of theatre that was as inclusive as it gets.

1981 - Novi Sad Theatre

This four-and-a-half hour show by Tomi Janežič is part of much bigger project, a vast ‘dodecadology’ which will eventually consist of 12 parts each focusing on a particular year between 1972 and 1983 all of which will be performed in Nova Gorica in Slovenia next year as part of the European Capital of Culture activities. Each of the pieces takes the form of a kind of collage of memories and stories tied to the year in question. The section I saw was staged in Serbia by the ensemble of the Hungarian theatre in Novi Sad.

Janežič, who is also a qualified psychodrama psychotherapist, works closely with actors to create performances that draw deeply on the actors’ own memories and experiences to make work of rare intimacy and intensity. Here this manifests in a form of acting-as-portraiture. A scene in which Aron Balaž and Boris Isaković, two of the country's best actors, play two old men kvetching about the news and amiably bickering with each other was performed with such comic precision and attention to detail. Every sigh, every shrug, every expletive, was delivered in such a lived-in way, making for one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in Serbia, hell, anywhere, this year.

Later on, Jasna Đuričić - star of Quo Vadis, Aida? and another of the best performers in the region - plays an old woman in a nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair and mumbling to herself as she tends to an even more elderly friend. This somehow transcends good character acting to be something more, something deeper, an act of inhabitation. Even the way she fiddles insistently with a tissue is deeply evocative, instantly conjuring long-dead relatives with a simple gesture. Performed in a small studio space with the house lights up throughout, and little more than some ill-fitting wigs as props, the whole production had an experiential quality – I appreciated the fact we were provided with interval coffee (though obviously not as much as I appreciated the interval vodka) - while also providing us with a fascinating opportunity to watch great actors not just acting, but transforming before our eyes.

As time goes by: Tomi Janežič's 1981

Hecuba, Nor Hecuba at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus

Hecuba, Not Hecuba - Comédie-Française

Tiago Rodrigues’ Hecuba, Not Hecuba, an incredibly elegant and carefully crafted piece of theatre made with the Comédie-Française, features a radiant performance by Elsa Lepoivre as a mother fighting for justice for her autistic son after he was mistreated in a care facility.

It’s a piece of typical compassion from Rodrigues dealing with the unsexy topic of failings in the social care system, a strong show on many levels, but seeing it in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, while sitting on 2500-year-old stones was something else entirely. It was my first time visiting the place and it was a really amazing experience, the sky like blue velvet above, bats flapping overhead, the weight of history palpable. Sitting there with my limbs liberally spritzed with mosquito repellent as the heat of the day dissipated was one of the most memorable theatre experiences I’ve had in this or any year. I’ve rarely been so aware of time and my place in it. The show was good, great in places - Lepoivre is an actor of immense grace - and the sound of Otis Redding’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ playing under a star-fretted sky is something I’ll remember for a long time, but it was the location that really elevated this for me, the experience of watching this show in that place, that lifted it to another level.

A little tenderness: Tiago Rodrigues' Hecuba, Not Hecuba

Demons (Berlin), Maxim Gorki Theatre. Photo: Dominic Huber

Demons (Berlin) - Maxim Gorki Theatre

Directors Sebastian Nübling and Boris Nikitin’s Demons (Berlin) is an experiment in live film-making that saw a group of black-suited actors from Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre spill out of the theatre and spend the next three hours roaming around the streets and ranting in a disconcerting way at hoardings, shop windows and passers-by as the audience watched the results on a screen inside the theatre.

Sometimes the results were supremely cinematic. There’s an incredible sequence when the actors descend into the eerily clean Museumsinsel u-Bahn station and enact what very much resembles the live-action version of the corridor fight scene from Inception, the camera pivoting as the actors propel themselves around pillars and along the floor. This moment is so brilliantly choreographed and shot (take a bow, Robin Nidecker and Jelïn Nichele) that I remember emitting a little yelp of delight.

More often though we’re watching people trudge through the city streets (though they do briefly ride the u-Bahn, disquieting their fellow passengers in the process). The piece as a whole was deeply Ballardian in tone, defamiliarizing the city’s zones of transience. It made me think of Berlin as an organism, the theatre pumping contaminants out into the urban circulatory system. While occasionally audacious, it was also a little bit attention-testing in places and my concentration was definitely waning as we neared the end. But then, then, as the actors – now dressed as creepy clowns – roamed around the darkened streets, the audience became aware of the faint sound of music. The actors turned a corner and were confronted with a brass band, their faces illuminated by head-torches, playing in the night. The band and actors then joined together to return to the theatre. Sitting in the auditorium, listening to the sound of trumpets get closer and closer was breath-on-the-back-of-your-neck stuff, just brilliant.

At the start of the show, it had been established that there was a fifteen second time lag between what we were watching and what was actually taking place. When the actors re-entered the auditorium – which was sort of like Doctor Strange’s astral-self reuniting with his physical form, only with added brass music – this time lag was exploited brilliantly in a glorious fusion of the triumphant and uncanny.

Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left of Us

Sh!t Theatre – Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit - are the British theatre company I am most likely to enthuse about when slightly drunk (in fact, I did this just recently in Berlin). They make superficially chaotic but actually deeply crafted shows that are frequently fuelled by political anger. The previous year both Biscuit and Mothersole had lost loved ones as well as their main creative collaborator. How do you go on after this? How do you continue to create?

They ended up getting heavily into folk music, visiting folk clubs and meeting the people who frequented them. They’re both great singers and music has always featured prominently in their work, and Or What’s Left of Us saw them performing folk ballads, songs which often are ribboned with death. These songs, about the harvest, the passing seasons and the possibility of renewal, took on new painful resonance. Eschewing their usual video montage approach for something more stripped-back, most of the show took the form of a sharing of songs interspersed with deadpan commentary on what it’s like to be broken by grief; the last 10 minutes, however, were as raw and candid and personal as it gets, and somehow managed to be about their specific experience of loss as well as capturing the brutal rug-pull of losing anyone suddenly. It was utterly winding, part purge, part memorial.

This was the best thing I saw at the Edinburgh fringe by a very long way. After the show, the Sh!ts usually invite audiences for a sing-around in a nearby pub. This wasn’t happening on the day I saw it. Some cunts* (*the National Theatre of Scotland) had double-booked the pub, so I ended up having a little cry in the street instead, but I went back to sing with them a few days later and was very glad I did. Sometimes we need to sing together.

Honourable mentions

Australian writer and actor Virginia Gay’s Cyrano - reviewed here in The Stage - was another Edinburgh highlight. Playful, witty and unashamedly horny, it condensed Rostand’s text to 90 minutes and rewrote the ending – some critics were a bit sniffy about this, and what they diagnosed as an excess of sentiment – but honestly, it’s fine sometimes to have a great, big queer happy ending, they’ll be another downer Cyrano along soon enough.

I realise there’s a lot of Slovenia in this list, but I was also smitten with Sex Education II, Slovenian director Tjaša Črnigoj’s nearly six-hour-long site-responsive exploration of female sexual pleasure and often under-discussed topics, including the sexual desires of disabled women and women who find liberation in BSDM communities. I particularly appreciated the way they included the rarely talked about but remarkably widespread issue of women who experience pain during intercourse and the way their pain is commonly downplayed or dismissed by the medical profession. All this, plus a musical interlude played on vaginal dilators.

In a similar vein, I enjoyed the way Croatian dramaturg Jasna Žmak disrupted her own nuanced, candid and funny solo performance This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, to hold up a piece of card featuring a drawing of the internal structure of the clitoris because she felt it was essential we learn about this right away.

I also loved the moment when I was asked to dance by one of the cast of Theater HORA’s immersive, inclusive Lord of the Rings, an example of how you make theatre truly accessible (as someone who knows spectacularly little about Tolkien I can attest that I felt very welcome) and that’s even before I discovered they’d built an onstage pub into their mini Shire-set.

This year I had the privilege of being on the international jury of two major festivals - BITEF in Belgrade and the Maribor Theatre Festival in Slovenia – which was a real honour, if slightly daunting, but honestly one of the best things about 2024 has been writing this newsletter. It’s brought me into the orbit of so many excellent people and sparked some fascinating conversations. It’s been a shitty, scary year in many ways and these encounters, and the related sense of community, have been pretty heartening.

In that spirit, I want to express my solidarity with the students protesting in Serbia as they ready themselves for a chilly winter and encourage you to read up in why they’re protesting– here’s a short explainer on Radio Free Europe – young drama students are among those driving these protests, and I’m impressed by their determination as they’re repeatedly belittled and dismissed by those in authority. They are a source of hope.

This is the last Café Europa of the year. I’ll be back in your inboxes in January. Thank you for reading and have a happy new year!