Hello to Berlin: Rikki Henry, the British director making waves in German theatre
On a director from the UK about to make his debut at the Schaubühne
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week The Stage published my piece on censorship in theatre, and the different forms it can take, inspired by recent conversations and controversies over freedom of expression in the arts. I spoke to theatre makers and critics from Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Serbia, Hong Kong and Belarus about the situation in their respective countries.
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Rikki Henry is one of a handful of British directors who have carved out a successful career on the German-speaking theatre scene. Katie Mitchell is probably the best known in this respect, but there is also Lily Sykes, currently resident director at Staatsschauspiel Dresden (who I interviewed earlier this year for The Stage). Having directed in theatres across Austria and Germany, Henry is about to make his Schaubühne debut with the German language premiere of David Ireland’s 2018 comedy Ulster American, which premieres on 11th April.
Ireland’s play is a provocative cocktail. An Oscar-winning American actor, an English director and a Northern Irish playwright are about to begin rehearsals for a new play which could be career making or career-salvaging for all of them, but it rapidly transpires that it has not really registered with the actor that the writer is a British protestant, and the play she has written is fiercely pro-Unionist. Ireland’s work is almost gleeful in the way it pushes buttons. This is true of a lot of his work. His earlier play Cyprus Avenue was about a man who becomes obsessed with the fact his baby looks like Gerry Adams. Ulster American is similarly engineered to provoke. It has a lot of fun with both the American and English lack of understanding of Northern Ireland, while also exploring the intersection of misogyny and hypocrisy, the text laced with jokes that probe the limits of taste and offence. This challenging aspect seems to make it all the more appealing to actors and directors. (A recent London revival starring Woody Harrelson, Andy Serkis and Louisa Harland resulted in some of the highest ticket prices ever for a play in a non-West End theatre).
Henry was looking to do something topical for the Schaubühne, something with a bit more bite than the average ‘well-made’ play. Ulster American fit the bill. He and his dramaturg Elisa Leroy have the luxury of time – a eight-week rehearsal process - to work with the cast and with the text. “We’ve read the play to death. It just keeps giving. We keep finding new things in it all the time,” he says. That’s one of the main advantages of working in the German system, he says. You have time. Time to build trust between him and the cast and vice versa. Time to really discuss a play, to explore it from all angles, and not have to pin everything down in a few days.
How does he think German audiences will respond to the play? One area where he thinks audiences might struggle, “is understanding the Northern Irish situation as it relates to where we are,” but to some extent that’s true of UK audiences too. While in Germany, people are broadly familiar with the Troubles, he’s aware thar might be less true of the finer details and specifics. “We are trying to make the translation as clean as possible,” he says. They’ve also made some small textual tweaks, swapping a reference to Wolverhampton to Dortmund, for example.
Ireland’s play contains a memorable scene in which one of the characters puts forward a thought experiment. Is it ever morally acceptable to rape someone? It is an intentionally very uncomfortable scene (I remember finding it too glib in the original Traverse Theatre production). Henry is very mindful of the sensitivity of this topic. Even the word ‘rape’ has weight, whether it’s spoken in German or English. “We've been saying it so much, we were desensitised to the word,” he says, but they’re aware of that and aware of how charged the scene is. It's important that the audience remember it is a thought experiment, he says, that the character who says this not trying to make a joke of it, even though the conversation is – or at least can be – played for laughs. “We're trying to maintain a careful balance,” he says.
Growing up in south London, Henry initially wanted to be an actor and attended the Brit School for the Performing Arts, but increasingly he was drawn to directing and in 2008, Henry joined the Young Vic’s Introduction to Directing course, during David Lan’s tenure as artistic director of the London theatre. Under Lan, the Young Vic was at that point, says Henry, very much a directors’ theatre and Lan became a mentor to him.
Learning from Peter Brook
In 2011, Henry went on a placement at Bouffes du Nord Theatre, Peter Brook’s theatre in Paris, where he assisted on his production of The Suit by Can Themba. Brook and his co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, asked Henry if he would consider performing in the show as well. “The idea was to get me to really flex my muscles and not be so rigid and conservative about whether I was a director or an actor.” (The Guardian ran a piece on his journey from assistant director to cast member when the production played the Young Vic in 2012).
The Suit – which the Guardian described as “an exquisite miniature” - went on a world tour for the next three years, returning to Paris, but also going to Spain, Italy, China and Japan – 16 countries in all. When Brook wasn’t able to accompany the production, it was up to Henry to “man the ship.” While this was something of a steep learning curve, Brook and Estienne were, he says, really generous with him, and he benefited greatly from the experience. “It was life changing.” he says. “Peter really taught me a lot about actors and how to work with ensembles in different languages.”
In 2015 Henry was the recipient of a BBC Performing Arts Fellowship and won the Genesis Future Directors Award, which resulted in him directing Strindberg’s Creditors at the Young, which he reframed as a story of a gay relationship.
When Lan launched a cultural exchange programme between the Young Vic and the Residenztheater in Munich, Henry jumped at the chance to apply. He’d been blown away by Sebastian Nübling’s Three Kingdoms at the Lyric Hammersmith in London – the making of which I wrote about at length here - and he was eager to see more of what the German theatre scene had to offer. (He’s since become friends with Nübling. “When I meet up with Sebastian, it’s a real honour to tell him how much that show opened everyone's eyes,” he says).
“The theatre that we watched in that week in Munich just really got a hold of me,” says Henry. He later received a scholarship which allowed him to return to Munich’s Residenz Theater, where the then-artistic director Martin Kusej invited him to direct a new adaptation of Antigone for the theatre. His production of Antigone Lives*, by playwright Susanne Fournier – tantalisingly described as “a rave-performance combining techno, despair, and family politics in a 200 bpm exploration of the carcass of democracy and notions of revolution.” – premiered as part of the Welt/Bühne festival in 2018.
The following year he staged Hamlet at the Landestheater Niederösterreich in Saint Polten, a small city in northeast Austria. The critics described its thriller-like qualities, with its popcorn and pulsing music, its flashes of flame and sudden bursts of violence. There was also a degree of fascination with the idea of a Brit directing Shakespeare in Austria. The performance won the Nestroy Award for Best Federal State Performance in 2020. You can watch the trailer here.
In the ring - directing Othello in Austria
In 2021, while the world was still in the grip of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter was still a major part of the cultural conversation, he directed Othello – a play which is staged in Austria relatively rarely, a reflection on the diversity, or lack thereof, in Austrian theatre - at the same theatre.
“With its new Othello, the Landestheater is jump-starting a conversation about racism in Austrian society and the need for diversity on the country’s stages,” wrote the New York Times in this article about the production). Henry’s pacy 100-minute production placed the play in a boxing club, focusing on the intensity and isolation of the sport. When we spoke about the production back in 2022, Henry said, “my presence in Austria as a person of colour, is unique. I can tell the story in a certain way, and they were ready for that idea of me talking about this and about race relations in Austria and Germany, where basically there's still a long way to go.” Austria, he says, when we spoke for this interview, is very different to Germany, especially when it comes to “me as a brown person walking around that place.”
Last year Henry directed Uncle Vanya at Schauspiel Dortmund. He relocated the play to an office setting, complete with water coolers, those oversize exercise balls and Windows 95 sound effects (here’s the trailer). The concept stems from a workshop production of the play he worked on with director Joe Hill-Gibbins at the Young Vic back in 2009. He recalls saying to Joe, “if you don’t use this idea, I will.” Relocating Vanya to a modern-ish office environment enabled them “to talk about work, and its personal costs.” They watched a lot of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom The Office in preparation and, again, had the benefit of time to work through the text together, to unpick things, to really interrogate it. The critics thought it was very British, laughs Henry, “but I don’t know about that.” (Nachtkritik wrote approvingly in its review of the production’s mix of British humour and Russian soul).
Coming from the UK, Henry’s had to get to grips not just with the German repertory system, but with different cultural practices and expectations. “It's been a slow burn of learning those cultural standards,” he says. How does working in German-speaking scene differ from the UK? In Germany, he gets to work closely with dramaturgs in a way that’s still relatively rare in the UK. A lot of the conversations he has with them tend to revolve around a production’s ‘situation’, the underlying metaphors that sit within the concept of the production. “It’s about the visual or physical ideas that transport us in our minds.”
The German word for director – regie - derives from king and in some places that still holds true, he says. “Some people only want to listen to me,” he laughs. In some ways that’s great because if you want something to happen, it will happen, but there’s also a pressure to feel like you have to sign off on every little thing. It's a very different world to the UK in this respect,” he says. Some of the technicians in these big institutions have been in the job for 30 years, he adds. “I'm coming to their home,” he says, so he makes a point of finding them and introducing himself at the beginning of the process - “you don’t want them looking at you going: who is this guy? It’s good to have them on side.”
His German has reached a good level now and he’s enjoying immersing himself in the Berlin scene, familiarising himself with the styles of the different cultural institutions. “People are just open here,” he says. “They’re just free. You meet all the different voices.”
A former film student, Henry also has an interest in motion graphics and 3D programming. He thinks a lot about how this could be integrated in his theatre. “There are all these technologies that are emerging,” he says. But it’s rare to see a show where this technology is really a fundamental part of it – Simon McBurney’s The Encounter was something of an exception, but he expects that will change. “Overtime, I think it'll begin to make inroads,” he says.
During our earlier conversation, Henry discussed his decision to make a career in Germany, and what he would say to anyone else contemplating a similar decision. “Don’t wait for permission. Don’t wait for affirmation that you may never get. To come to Germany, I didn't have anyone behind me saying this is the right path. It doesn't work like that. You just have to go.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other exciting upcoming events over the next seven days.
Lapis Lazuli – Director, choreographer and performer Euripides Laskaridis’ work sits at the intersection between theatre, dance, and visual arts. His major new piece, exploring the theme of terror, opens at Onassis Stegi in Athens on 4th April.
Slovenia Counts - Speaking of Sebastian Nübling, he joins forces with musician and DJ Jackie Poloni for a new devised show that interrogates Slovenia, the condition of being Slovenian and the possibility for societal change. It has its premiere at the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana on 6th April.
The End of the World in Three Acts – Selma Spahic directs this trio of plays - Under the Skirt by Kristina Kegljen, Activist by Katja Gorečan and The World Deserves the End of the World by Tijana Grumić- exploring the theme of violence against women during the pandemic. It premieres at Belgrade Drama Theatre on 6th April.
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