Night-walkers: Sebastian Nübling and Boris Nikitin unleash their Demons
On a haunted three-hour experiment in live cinema in Berlin.
Welcome to everyone who has arrived here via Lauren Halvorsen’s (excellent and highly recommended) Nothing for the Group. Here you can expect to find a mix of reviews, interviews and European festival coverage (with occasional dispatches from the UK). So far this year I’ve covered work in Denmark, Poland, Germany, Portugal, Bulgaria, The Netherlands, Austria, Ukraine, Slovenia and Latvia. This week I was back in Berlin for a fascinating experiment in live cinema co-directed by Boris Nikitin and Sebastian Nübling (who UK readers may remember as the director of the exhilatingly divisive Three Kingdoms).
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In the West End currently, it feels almost obligatory to have a sequence in which the actors leave the confines of the building for the surrounding streets. Jamie Lloyd did it in Sunset Boulevard, with actor Tom Francis entering the theatre from the Strand. (Here he is recreating it at the Olivier Awards). Lloyd did something similar in his Broadway production of A Doll’s House in which Jessica Chastain’s Nora exits her marriage and steps out into the streets of New York. In Ivo van Hove’s recently closed Opening Night, Sheridan Smith’s Myrtle crawls drunkenly from a Soho backstreet into the theatre via the stage door. Boris Nikitin and Sebastian Nübling’s audacious experiment in live cinema takes this concept much, much further, with five actors roaming the streets of Berlin for three hours as night falls, shadowed by a two-man camera team.
A projection screen fills the Maxim Gorki Theatre stage. Actor Kinan Hmeidan informs the audience that everything we see over the next three hours will be live - though there will be a 15-second delay. He then proceeds to count to 15 by way of demonstration before exiting the auditorium and joining his four fellow performers, all costumed the same way, in black suits and baseball caps, for a disorienting tour of the theatre’s backstage spaces. The actors race up the stairs, disappear around corners and dive in and out of the toilets - each performer appears to have their own looping circuit through the building - as the camera attempts to keep up with them. After a while of this, the stairwells and corridors start to take on a MS Escher quality. This goes on for at least ten minutes until they finally spill out of the theatre onto the street into a black-and-white Berlin. We remain in the theatre, watching the screen.
The actors – Hmeidabm Tim Freudensprung, Linda Vaher, Flavia Lefèvre and Meret Mundwiler (a mix of Gorki ensemble members and guest performers) - walk in silence through streets that are near-empty, eerily so, in a 28 Days Later way, encountering only an occasional passing car or stray cyclist. They walk and walk and walk until Hmeidan turns his head to look at the camera and starts talking. He tells us how he used to walk through the city when he felt unable to travel by other means. It’s the first of several seemingly personal accounts that we hear over the course of the show, a bleak tapestry of sickness, stillbirth, hospitalisation, mental distress and assisted dying, interspersed by the names and physical descriptions of missing people, those swallowed up by the city, the vanished and the lost.
As they talk, they walk. As one performer dips out of view, another takes their place. They are anti-flâneurs, walking not for pleasure, not to soak up the charms of the city, quite the opposite. They lurch round the city like David Thewlis’ paranoic Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked. The insistent beat of Matthias Meppelink’s music adds to this sense of insistence, as gradually, colour bleeds onto the screen, a smear of yellow here, a pop of red there.
Going underground
It can’t be overstated how dazzling this all is on a technical level. The degree of co-ordination and choreography required to pull this project off is immense. (All the plaudits to Robin Nidecker and Jelin Nichele, the Swiss camera crew). Sometime the camera flatly tracks the actors, sometimes it tilts and pivots, altering out perspective. This is most notable during a real jaw-on-the-floor sequence in the Museumsinsel u-bahn station. This relatively new station is one of Berlin’s most distinctive, lined with grey marble pillars inset with neon lights under a striking blue ceiling. The camera angles itself so that the actors, who are lying on the station floor, suddenly appear to be standing on these pillars. They proceed to tumble and clamber around the space, part Agent Smith, part Spiderman. It’s like a live-action Inception – and it’s really fucking awesome.
There are other cinematic nods throughout – Godard, Wenders, Romero, Reservoir Dogs. At one point the actors all don matching masks, adding to the sense of the uncanny, with echoes of Aphex Twin’s nightmare-fuel video for Come to Daddy.
The camera regularly tracks across skyscapes of cranes, billboards and hoardings, the stuff of a city in flux. The effect is often defamiliarizing. Office block windows take on an abstract quality as the camera pans across them. It’s deeply Ballardian. One review I read complained that the show only focussed on the touristy bits of the city, but I think that’s missing the point. The show focusses on these spaces precisely because they are spaces of absence and transit, sites of redevelopment, culturally flattened out and weirdly liminal despite their centrality.
At one point the actors all turn their heads heavenward only for it to be revealed that they’re looking at signage for Sky. It’s a very funny moment in a piece that could have benefited from a few more humorous beats, something to punctuate the grim trudge.
Watching how other people interact with the actors also generates humour. Mostly they ignore them – we are well practised at unseeing in cities – but occasionally there are double-takes of surprise and curiosity. When the black-suited quintet board a subway train, one young female passenger only gradually realises that she’s surrounded by identically dressed people. When she does, she gives them the side-eye before wisely concluding that, whatever the fuck was going on here, she wanted no part of it and decisively moving away.
Back out on the street the actors yell and bellow, like those people you’d potentially gravitate away from if you encountered them in person, the street prophets and preachers, the down and out and loud (or, you know, guerrilla theatre artists). Meret Mundwiler dons a red nose, drops her trousers and delivers a tirade, backlit by a shop-window, ranting in her pants. (A security guard is part of the unseen entourage, to ensure the safety of the actors and prevent the city from biting back).
Suddenly they break into a sprint, before jumping into the Gorki minivan and being spirited across the city. The camera stays with them inside the van, as they change costumes, gulp down water and hoover up sandwiches in a way that is surely not beneficial to digestion. The van spits them out at Potsdamer Platz, in clown suits and tutus. (Unnerving costumes care of Ursula Leuenberger).
These dark beings roam around under the tent-like canopy of this steel and glass space, this former no man’s zone between east and west. They stare in bemusement at hoardings with their banal slogans and vague promises of a brighter, shinier future. They arrange themselves into a five-pointed star on the ground, which fleetingly made me think of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 5, the piece in which she set fire to a wooden star and subsequently passed out from lack of oxygen. Out in Berlin, the star draws a only a few mildly curious onlookers.
Night has fallen and it’s dark now. The clowns are bathed in the sallow glow of streetlamps. They plunge into an underground carpark and dash back up the ramp, as if pursued by something menacing below. In one truly inspired moment, the camera upends itself and they end up swaying from the ceiling of the porticos of Leipziger Strasse like the twisted siblings of Pennywise (in his Skarsgard form). It is brilliantly creepy.
A sense of inertia sets in. This is all bullshit, they say repeatedly, as if undergoing a collective comedown. They dangle from street-signs and throw away their red noses in disdain. This is all bullshit.
The city and the city
This is the second iteration of a project that first took place in Basel in 2022. The roots of the project go further back, to Noise, Nübling’s 2015 very cool-sounding piece for Junges Theater Basel and the Wiener Festwochen. Various follow-ups were considered, including a six-hour version of what would eventually evolve into Demons, presented by the Basel Theatre two years ago, with what seems to have been more of an onus on the youth of the performers.
Berlin is obviously a very different urban space to Basel, but the format still works. In fact there’s clear potential for this to be the start of a franchise/blueprint model of making work, for Demons to be unleashed in other cities. I could definitely see this working in London. (For maximum Ballardian effect, the Barbican would be perfect, though the South Bank would also be a good fit).
In Nubling’s last show Slovenia Counts, co-directed with Jackie Poloni, they kept the cast in constant motion, their bodies rocking rhythmically to a pulsing beat. There were literal puddles of sweat on the floor at the end. Here, aside from 10 minutes in the minivan, the actors are on the go the whole time, covering a fair few kilometres over the course of the evening. At times, it’s also something of an endurance event for the audience. A big deal is made over the fact you can leave and re-enter the auditorium when and if you need to, (which I firmly believe should be policy in every theatre – no theatre cane be genuinely inclusive if it places restrictions on when people can pee) and bring drinks inside (par for the course in the UK, more of novelty in Germany). It’s still three unbroken hours of performance and for every dazzling subway sequence there are long sections of pavement pounding and ranting in Alexanderplatz.
Partly because of the way the show is described on the Gorki’s own website, I was expecting a more overtly psychogeographic experience, rather than this more grimly spectral exercise, but once I recalibrated my expectations, I found it compelling. The woman sitting next to me, however, seemed actively pained by the experience, checking her phone at intervals before exiting at the two-hour mark. It’s true that watching this on a screen does something to the contract between audience and performer. The show reels you in at times but, at other times, holds you at arm’s length.
And then the sound of brass band can be heard, faint at first. You assume the sound is non-diegetic, until they come into view, an actual brass band, walking through the streets of Berlin. A group of retirees with French horns and tubas, faces illuminated by head torches, who join this pack of by-now ragged actors in a strange parade back to the theatre. After a pretty bleak three hours, suddenly there is light in the dark, cross-generational unity, human connection.
The moment when we hear the first parp of a trumpet inside the auditorium is electric, signalling the imminent resyncing of screen and stage. When the actors finally return to auditorium, along with the visibly knackered cameramen, the reaction is rapturous. The actors take their bows, and then, 15 seconds later, their digital selves take their bows too.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Mnemonic – Twenty-five years after its first staging, Complicité’s acclaimed production returns to the National Theatre in London. Simon McBurney directs what critic Lyn Gardner described as a “gigantic, chaotic theatrical map charting human experience.” It opened on yesterday and runs until 10th August.
Festival de Almada – The Portuguese festival marks its 40th edition with an international programme of work taking place in venues in Almada and Lisbon and featuring an appearance by director Oliver Py’s drag alter ego Miss Knife and Hanane Hajj Ali’s solo show Jogging and. The festival runs from 4th-18th July.
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