Pleasure is essential: Glossy Pain, the international feminist collective rewriting the canon
On a very free adaptation of Woyzeck and why the whole German theatre system needs a rethink.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week, I’m in The Stage writing about English language theatres in Europe and beyond. I spoke to the English Theatre Frankfurt, Vienna’s English Theatre, Gothenburg Studio Theatre, the Bridge Theatre in Brussels and Tokyo’s Sheepdog Theatre, about the opportunities they provide to actors and audiences - and, inevitably, the impact that Brexit has had on them. I also interviewed Lily Sykes, the London-born director, who’s currently in-house director at Staatsschauspiel Dresden, on how she forged a career in Germany. We’re staying in Germany for this week’s edition, looking at a feminist collective who have been making waves on the free scene.
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Two women are discussing the moment a man spat on one of them on the metro. The man had made a lewd suggestion and when she responded in disgust, he spat a mouthful of food at her. The female friend responds with sympathy and recognition, but their male neighbour is a little incredulous. The incident seems a bit extreme to him, a bit far-fetched.
This depressingly relatable exchange takes place within a reworking of one of the most influential and most performed plays in the German canon, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, by Glossy Pain, an international, feminist collective from Berlin. Often cited as the first truly modern play (here’s Michael Billington doing just that), Woyzeck is a story in which a combination of factors - deprivation and desperation, paranoia and poverty - cause the protagonist to spiral out of control and murder his girlfriend, Marie. It’s a play about one man’s downfall, but also a play with femicide at its centre. Famously unfinished, whichever way you arrange the fragmented text, it will always, inevitably lead to Marie’s death.
In Glossy Pain’s production, this inevitability looms large. Our understanding of how this story will go is part of the fabric of the piece. By the end of the play a woman will die at the hands of a man, a still all-too-common occurrence. In 2020 in Germany, 139 women were killed by their partners of former partners.
Glossy Pain was founded in 2021 by director Katharina Stoll together with actress and director Isabelle Redfern and dramaturg Angelika Schmidt. They make work on the German free scene, so outside the state theatre system, and favour a non-hierarchical way of working. Their most recent piece Die Maskeraden des D. Oregan took its inspiration from Erdoğan a graphic novel by Can Dündar and Anwar, which explores the early life of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who in his youth made theatre. Stoll directed the show which had a text by Yade Yasemin Önder and opened at the Volksbühne in December.
Glossy Pain’s very free update of Woyzeck, which I saw last year at Dresden’s Fast Forward festival, is set in a modern urban apartment. Marie (Amanda Babaei Vieira) lives with her guitar-playing, British flatmate Margaret (Riah Knight). Woyzeck (Joshua Zilinske) is their neighbour, the kind of guy who occasionally swings by with freshly-baked bread in an effort to attract Marie’s attention.
The production places the friendship between Marie and Margaret at the heart of the play. In Buchner’s text, Margaret is a minor character, the neighbour with whom Marie admires the Drum-Major, but here they are besties and the play takes time exploring the intimacy of the friendship. Over pitchers of margarita, they talk about the men they fancy and debate which one of them is going to take the wine bottles to be recycled. They are well versed in feminist texts and talk openly and comfortably about abortion. Their dialogue has an organic, free-flowing quality flows, constantly hopping between English and German in a way intended to reflect the reality of the way people communicate in a big city like Berlin (and, presumably, within the collective). Listening to Marie and Margaret is a little like eavesdropping.
Then Woyzeck comes into their lives bearing bread and he and Marie start seeing each other. For a while he becomes part of their friendship dynamic. They hang out on the sofa together watching stuff on their laptops and prepare brunch together. Wicke Naujoks’ box set is realistic urban space complete with a poorly stocked fridge, a guitar (which Knight uses to sing the production’s musical numbers) and a single, sad plant which they struggle to keep alive. A frame around the set acts as a screen for projections, images of sunflowers and horses, as well as shots of the kitchen table from above or intimate close-ups of Marie and Woyzeck in bed together.
Marie is clearly super-hot for him, but, at the same time, isn’t interested in a monogamous relationship; she remains open to encounters with other people. She loves him but still has “room in her heart.” As confident and comfortable as Marie is in her desires, in her sexual self, the very fact that she is woman makes her vulnerable. The understanding of this adds a degree of uneasiness to the production as it ticks towards the inevitable, to the moment when Woyzeck snaps. We see him looming in the door behind her, no longer a benign presence. We see him follow her into the bedroom, the space of their shared intimacy. We do not see the moment of his snapping; we do not see Margaret discover her friend’s body. Stoll purposefully steers away from showing us these things. She instead gives the play’s last speech to Marie, connecting her death - her “good murder” - with other such deaths.
Compared to Margaret and Marie, Woyzeck himself remains something of a psychologically remote figure. I also remember finding the relative lack of exploration of the socio-economic factors an issue when I watched it, but Woyzeck is a set text in German schools. It’s always being revived. There was a production opening in Dresden the month after I was there (coincidently directed by Sykes). There is no shortage of media devoted to men who commit violence, to the Woyzecks of this world, far less to the emotional toll on women of living in a world where such acts happen, nor to the richness and bliss, the comfort and solace, of female friendship.
An interview with Katharina Stoll
Katharina Stoll initially wanted to name the theatre collective as if it were a spa. This sounds “a bit basic,” she laughs, but she was inspired to by a visit to the theatre in Epidaurus. “What I love so much about the ancient Greek way of doing theatre is that they saw it as a place of healing,” she explains. “They went to the theatre and afterwards they went to the sauna together, they drank wine together. I love combining the arts with pleasure.” The spa idea didn’t make it off the drawing board – they chose Glossy Pain because the juxtaposition reflected the kind of work they hoped to make – but the sentiment remains. Pleasure and sensuality and joy are not antithetical to theatre-making, quite the opposite.
The company was founded during the Covid pandemic, when Stoll ,and others she knew, had more time to focus on what they wanted to make and how they wanted to make it. Their first show BANG!, opened in June, 2021 at TD Berlin, a devised piece written collectively in three languages with the tag-line: “Let's unfuck the patriarchy out of our bodies!”
Operating outside the state theatre system, on the German equivalent of the fringe, they needed to get to grips with the German funding system. “It took me a year to understand how it works!” she says. With their next project they were very keen to stage an existing play. They chose Anne Lepper’s Seymour, a play “about children being sent to diet camp, to become more lovable” - which premiered in June 2022 at TD Berlin. They followed this with Golda Barton’s Sistas!, which relocates Chekhov’s Three Sisters to a military base in 1990s Berlin and weaves race into the narrative. (There’s an interesting review of this on Nachtkritik). Woyzeck premiered in February 2023 at Theater an der Ruhr, Mülheim; this was followed by Spring Awakening, a Wedekind rewrite for Staatstheater Karlsruhe. Lie to Me, another collectively written piece about religion and desire, performed by Knight, premiered at Monologue Festival last November.
With their latest show, Die Maskeraden des D. Oregan, Stoll was delighted to discover that, as a young man in the 1970s, Erdogan had directed a play. The relationship between dictators and art is a source of fascination to her, she says. How did he go from that to someone who has caused so much damage to the arts in Turkey? In 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while mayor of Istanbul, he was sentenced to 10 months in jail for reciting a poem. “Erdogan was in jail once for quoting a poem. And now he puts poets in jail.” Initially they wanted to write the show collectively too, but eventually turned to playwright Yade Yasemin Önder because “she has such a unique use of language.”
How does Glossy Pain operate as a collective? “Because we work in different constellations, with different people, there is no one fixed method,” she explains. In the case of Die Maskeraden,“we are 15 artists around a table from different fields, but we all participate in the process of making. We try to value everybody as an artist, and to include all the different colours they bring to the process.”
This validation of everybody is important because it goes against the patriarchal hierarchical system prevalent in theatre. How else does the collective’s feminism manifest in practice? Pleasure is essential, Stoll says. “It's really important to us that everybody has fun.” Even when they’re dealing with serious topics, she adds, “it's important for us that everybody enjoys the work and takes pleasure in doing it.” In this they take inspiration from Audre Lorde. Her quote “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world,” has become a guiding principle.
In the interview with Sykes, she said that it is an interesting time in German theatre, that things are starting to change. Stoll agrees, at least to a point.” We have a lot of discourse,” she says, especially about onstage representation. But, backstage, “we haven't changed the system yet.”
Working in German theatre is a comparatively privileged position to be in, she says, especially compared to other countries, even though incomes on the free scene, where she works, remains relatively low. “There's so much potential in the system, but it's so full of shit. There’s still a lot of racism and sexism, still many more men in positions of power than women.” There is progress, she says. “Theatres are starting to do anti-racism workshops and there are more women in senior roles, but the pace of change remains slow and sometimes happens in a tokenistic way. Adding women and people of colour to the existing system is a good first step but in the end you have to completely rethink the whole thing and develop a new system.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other exciting upcoming events over the next seven days.
Elektra Unbound – NTGent presents the world premiere of Luanda Casella’s new production, a modern, feminist re-examination of the Oresteia, which also marks the official start of the theatre’s Greek season which will be focused on the Greek tragedies, and conclude with a city-wide ALL GREEKS festival. The show opens on 18th January.
Wolf Among Wolves – Following previous adaptations of Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? at Munich Kammerspiele and Every Man Dies Alone, director Luk Perceval presents the author’s sprawling saga of life in Germany in the 1920s for the Thalia Theatre, premiering on 18th January.
Nosferatu – Australian director Adena Jacobs, whose 2018 ENO production of Salome memorably featured a massive decapitated pink pony, returns to Vienna’s Burgtheater following her 2021 production of Die Troerinnen (Trojan Women) for a reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic. It premieres on 19th January.
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