"Text is not holy:" Revisiting Three Kingdoms

On an ambitious German, Estonian and British co-production that divided critics, inspired directors and nearly broke its UK cast members.

As mentioned last week, Exeunt, the theatre magazine I co-founded back in 2011, has emerged from hibernation and is now on Substack.

On bringing back Exeunt

They’ll be publishing two newsletters, a week and if you like smart, insightful and playful theatre writing, you should definitely check it out. And if you’ve found this newsletter through Exeunt, welcome! On Café Europa I write about European theatre in all its forms, and publish weekly newsletters which include reviews - like this one on an epic six-hour Slovenian Angels in America and this one, on Jeff James’ very free adaptation of The Winter’s Tale for the Dailes Theatre in Riga - and interviews - including this one with Carolina Bianchi on one of the most talked-about shows of recent years, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, and this one with Milo Rau on how he’s reinvigorating the Wiener Festwochen - plus other stuff, like this look at the current state theatre criticism in Europe.

Since my subscriber count has almost doubled since I originally published it, I thought it might be a good time to re-share this deep dive on the making of Three Kingdoms, arguably one of the most influential and divisive productions to be staged in the UK in recent years.

To mark Exeunt’s return, anyone wanting to become a paid subscriber of Café Europa can do so for the reduced rate of £4 per month or £40 a year. For this, you get occasional subscriber bonus posts and the warm glow of helping me keep the majority of the content free to read.

Three Kingdoms, Lyric Hammersmith

Three countries. Three languages. Three approaches to performance. Premiering in 2012, Three Kingdoms, an international co-production between Estonia’s Theatre NO99, Munich Kammerspiele and London's Lyric Hammersmith remains a unique theatrical undertaking. It brought together three distinct acting traditions, divided audiences and critics, and arguably inspired a generation of UK directors. It was also, according to one of its stars, Ferdy Roberts, very nearly “a fucking disaster.”

Three Kingdoms was based on a text by Simon Stephens and directed by German director Sebastian Nübling, who’d worked with Stephens on several occasions previously, perhaps most notably on Pornography for Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg. The play is a noir-style thriller in which two cops, investigating the discovery of the severed head of a Russian girl in the Thames, go on to uncover a Europe-wide trafficking ring. The plot becomes increasingly twisty as things go on. The staging was full of striking images. A woman bursting out of a suitcase.  The set being pummelled by a group of Estonians in boxing gloves. What one critic referred to as, “strap-ons galore.” And, perhaps most memorably, actors stalking around the stage in animal heads.

Stephens was then an associate at the Lyric Hammersmith. Sean Holmes, the artistic director of the Lyric, knew Nübling’s work having seen Pornography in Hamburg, as well as his production of Punk Rock in Basel; Stephens, meanwhile, had met with Estonian company NO99 while in Tallinn; gradually, the project started to come together. Initially it was intended to be a co-production with Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg but when this fell through, Munich Kammerspiele, with whom Nübling had an existing connection, were brought onboard. When it comes to co-productions, says Holmes, “it is always best when the artistic needs of the show make the co-production happen.”

“Simon and I wanted to do another production together,” says Nübling. The idea to develop and perform it in three countries developed over time. “It took quite a while,” he says. “The idea of how to produce it and the writing of it went side by side.” (There’s more detail of this process in this piece on Exeunt)

“It was shaping up to be really bloody expensive for a British subsidised theatre,” says Holmes. Fortunately, 2012 was the year of the London Olympics, and a period of internationalism in the arts that had been unmatched since. there were lots of international projects being created. David Lan was still at the Young Vic. It was the year of the Globe to Globe Shakespeare festival. Three Kingdoms would be staged as part of the World Stages Festival. There was money around for this kind of work. “We got the extra money we needed to make it happen from a fund, about 60 or 70 grand.” This made all the difference. “That allowed us to make the show happen.”

Even with the funding, it was a logistical challenge. “It had a creative team from all three countries, actors from all three countries. We rehearsed in all three countries and performed in all three countries over the best part of eight or nine months.” It was, he says, one of the most logistically difficult co-productions he was ever involved in at the Lyric, but it was also “the most rewarding and collegiate because everyone really wanted to make it work.”  It was, he says, “a massive learning experience for all of us, but probably most of all for us at the Lyric.”

In terms of scale and resources they knew it wouldn’t be possible to stage a German-style production at the Lyric. “It’s a beautiful theatre, but it’s not the Barbican.” They could never match that, nor did they try to. Ene-Liis Semper’s set was brilliant, he says “but it was essentially a big wooden room.” The idea was to create a work of fusion. “It was combination of Simon's narrative clarity and psychological reality which those British actors held at its heart, with the fireworks of the German and Estonian actors around them. All of this stuff would smash into each other in loads of interesting ways.”

“I wanted to stick to the script. They thought that was crazy.”

It’s fair to say the experience of working with Nübling was something of a shock to the system for British actor Nicolas Tennant. On the first day of rehearsals, he remembers Nübling, who’d recently watched an X-Men movie, instructing his co-star Rupert Simonian, to imagine he was capable of blasting light out of his hands. “That was our first morning,” he reflects. From them on it was clear to him that this experience would be very different to anything he’d been part of before.

The rehearsal process involved a huge amount of improvisation, says Tennant, and it went beyond the kind of improvisation process to which he was accustomed. Nübling would literally tear pages out of the play, he says.

When the actor who was due to play the main cop Ignatius dropped out midway through rehearsals, Tennant was asked to step into the role. Up until then he had been playing Ignatius’ partner Charlie. Tennant asked if this meant they were going to have to start over, but Nübling said there was no need, he could just use what he’d worked on so far as Charlie. When Tennant argued they were different characters, Nübling said he “didn’t give a fuck about that.”

Tennant remained worried about his character and about what this change would mean for the story, though he often felt as if “I was the only one in the room worried about this.” As an actor, he says, “I was trying desperately to hang on to the narrative.” The Estonians were improvising in a way “I found incredibly discomforting, because I wanted to stick to the script. They thought that was crazy.”

Nübling also found some aspects of the production surprising. “Usually, when I work in German houses, it’s not just for one production, but for several,” he says. “You find the people who would like to work with me and the other way around. This system, where there are thousands of freelancers, was something new to me.”

He confirms he was far less interested in story and character than he was in “the space between the lines and between the scenes.” He wanted to discover “what kind of imaginary world we can find there. It's less something I have in mind already. It's more of an open process.”

“What does a character mean?” he asks. “To me it’s the person standing on stage, using certain sides or parts of themselves that perhaps they would not use in private life,” he says. “I‘m far more interested in images than lines. This sometimes means I don’t really listen to what they are saying on stage. I just look at what’s happening.” He acknowledges that this was “probably very different to what these three British actors, Ferdy, Rupert, and Nicolas, were used to.” They also came to the project as individuals whereas the Estonians were a collective and the Germans had worked together as an ensemble. “So, three very different approaches to theatre from all three parties.”

Eventually Tennant and Nübling had a talk about his concerns, which was helpful, though he continued to find the process quite challenging and couldn’t shake the feeling that the attitude towards the English actors “was that we were being incredibly literal and naïve.”

However, looking back he appreciates Nübling’s method and how it pushed him as an actor. “A lot of English rehearsals are geared towards making things easier,” he says. “If there’s chair on stage and it’s too big for the scene, usually we’d have a discussion with the stage manager about the chair, about finding a smaller chair or finding some other way to make things easier. But Sebastian will go: let’s make the chair bigger. Let's put three chairs there.”  This creates a physical problem for you as an actor, Tennant says. “The way you negotiate these three chairs will then inform how you play the scene.”

Mirtel Pohla was part of the Estonian company. She’d been part of NO99 for around five years at this point, so she knew her colleagues well. When you’ve been working with actors for some time “you know how to create a truly trusting and playful atmosphere, where you are allowed to make mistakes and not to have all the answers immediately,” she says. In this sense, they probably had an advantage over the UK actors. “Maybe the Estonian and German acting style was more physical and metaphorical compared to the British, with their more minimalistic psychological style, at the beginning,” she says, but by the end, “I think it all was very well interweaved in the final Lynchian result.”

Three Kingdoms, Lyric Hammersmith. Photo: Tristram Kenton

“We’ll know we're in the hands of a madman.”

Ferdy Roberts was at a festival in Spain when he got a phone call from Holmes. “He said: I've got a favour to ask him. One of my actors has decided Three Kingdoms isn’t for him and I need you to go to Munich to take over. Tomorrow.” Filter, the company of which he is co-artistic director, makes devised work, so he was familiar with a more collaborative creative process. “I’m sure that’s why Sean asked me.”

There was one problem: Charlie was supposed to speak German, which Roberts did not, but Holmes waved that away and assured him they’d figure something out. Roberts arrived in chilly Munich with the warm weather clothes he’d packed for Spain, where he was met by a deeply relieved Tennant. As Tennant filled him in on what had been going on, Estonian actor Rasmus Kaljujärv strolled into the greenroom wearing a leather thong, “picked up a baseball bat, and said, If this makes it into the final show, we’ll know we're in the hands of a madman.”

When they went through to the rehearsal room, Roberts was confronted with the sight of Rasmus “simulating anal sex with a baseball bat. Somebody else simulating or oral sex with an actor, but over a table. That was my introduction to the show.”

“They were improvising the porn scene, spreading chocolate sauce over each other, for four days,” says Tennant. “But the Estonians were so cool with one another, they were so trusting.” That scene, concedes Nubling, “was maybe a bit of a shocking moment for the three British actors.”

While being a director involves giving directions, Nubling says, “I see myself as a collaborator, not as the main character in the room.” In rehearsal rooms, he says, “I try to establish an atmosphere of working together on eye-to-eye level.”. He does, he admits, have a tendency to leave decision-making until quite late in the process, which can make some people ask him “when the fuck will we ever have a decision?” Eventually, I have to make them, but I leave this as late as I can.” (“This is,” he concedes, “perhaps an avoidance strategy on my part. I am self-critical about this.”)

“People presume he's some kind of tyrant in a rehearsal room,” says Tennant, but he's not. “He just sits and watches. He even watches you on your lunch breaks in case you do something interesting. His great skill as a director is knowing what to pick and what to throw away.”

Later rehearsals in Estonia were, however, quite isolating for the UK actors, says Roberts. The Estonians were on their home turf and the Germans were a close-knit group. Both groups had pre-established ways of working. “It did feel like we were on our own.” Rehearsals were, he says, quite chaotic. “Sebastian would be tearing Simon's play apart.” Roberts, to some extent, found this exciting. “I found it quite challenging in a really good way. It forces you to be creative, and to not just come in and be told where to stand, what to say and when to sit down.”

The animal heads that became the defining image of the show just happened to be in the rehearsal room. “The Estonians lads put them on, and Sebastian was like, that's brilliant. Let's keep that. Let's explore that.” The “predator-like energy” they brought to the show came from them, he says. “It was almost accidental,” he says.

At the same time, Roberts acknowledges the process was difficult and alienating. “Looking back on it now, it was really hard. There were times we felt we'd been hung out to dry by the Lyric. Nobody came to support us. There were times when I felt this was an absolute shitshow. But I think the difficulties lent themselves to the work that we ended up making.”

The Germans were more sanguine. Steven Scharf, who had worked with Nübling  before reassured Roberts that things were going well “because usually by this time in a process with Sebastian, somebody's thrown something at him, or punched him.”

“I really admired Sebastian’s ability to create a playground,” says Pohla, “a space where you knew you were allowed to try absolutely everything that came to your mind and at the same time, he created a frame that held everything and everybody together.” Working with him was “not a straight path but a journey,” she says. “We had all the freedom and playfulness like children in the kindergarten when we were rehearsing and improvising, even when dealing with such a serious topic as human trafficking.”

One night close to the opening, Nübling noticed Simonian flop down on the stage in despondence. He asked him what the matter was, and he replied, “I wish Simon was here to explain my character to me!” This encapsulates the differences in approach, says Nübling.

Roberts remembers a similar incident. “There was a moment in rehearsal when Nick was on his knees, just crying: Why, Sebastian? Why? And, I'll never forget it, Sebastian replied: Why? Because Stanislavski is asking you why!” And he was right, says, Roberts, “he was fucking right! That’s when I clicked with him.”

Even so, Roberts and Tennant remained apprehensive right up until the premiere in Estonia. Even after the first performance they’ weren’t wholly convinced. Roberts remembers waiting for Tennant to clean up afterwards. “Nick had been spat on and had stuff thrown over him. He'd gone the full 12 rounds,” says Roberts. They went to meet Holmes in the bar, expecting the worst, but instead Holmes came up to them and said: “mate, it's really good.”

Three Kingdoms, Lyric Hammersmith.

“Text is one tool among many”

Alongside the Kammmerspiele’s Julia Lochte, NO99’s Eero Epner worked as dramaturg on the production, a role which, he points out, means different things in different countries. “In NO99, "text" was not holy. The production wasn't there in order to illustrate the text but rather it was more about how to find performative moments, create atmospheres, images etc.”

Text, he says, “is one tool among others, not more or less important than an actor's body or the lighting.” Therefore, the dramaturg does not simply discuss the text, but all elements of the production. In the case of 3K, the biggest challenge was the fact that one of the British actors left the production in the middle of the rehearsals, meaning that they had to restructure big parts of the text. “With Simon Stephens, we somehow managed to do that.”    

He found Nübling easy to work with as a director. “He’s seeking impulses from the actors’ improvisations and physical energy, so we share a kind of common ground.” Nübling is also very sensitive towards text, he says, “more than I am. He understands political undertones and tries to implement political manifestations into his productions.” Epner also admires is “his willingness to seek and find new tools. He doesn't have a toolbox of things he uses over and over again, rather he experiments. That's a risky business, because you can fail, but there is no point of doing art if you are not willing to take risks.”

While the combination of three different acting styles inevitably was a challenge, Three Kingdoms was a show about Europe, so a mismatch of styles wasn’t a drawback, rather it enhanced the piece. It was in many ways fitting, he says, that “in the middle of a very expressionistic scene with Estonian actors doing all sorts of shit there was a lost Englishman.”

There were, he acknowledges, some complications because you do need to have “some common vocabulary and common ground in order to discuss things, in order to trust the process.” While the English actors had superb skills when it came to bringing out different layers from the text, on the other side there were the Estonians, who were “using their bodies, improvising speechless scenes, using more abstract performative approaches.” The Germans, he says, were in the middle of those two as they have experiences with both approaches.”

Epner was aware that the UK actors were finding things tough. “They are really good at storytelling,” he says, but they are “not paying so much attention to the more physical or abstract values of the performance.” This is not just a result of different theatre traditions, but also systems. “In Estonia we had state funding and that means that we were and are freer to take all sorts of risks.” In the UK, “everybody is a freelancer and of course this means that in order to earn a living you cannot do things that the audience maybe doesn't accept so willingly.”

As difficult as he found the experience, Tennant took a lot away from the project. It informed the way he thought about theatre. In Nübling’s work, he says, “there's no such thing as a fourth wall. It's all about the audience. It’s live in a very real sense. It is about the audience and how they’re feeling.” Understanding this has changed the way he feels about his work. “The audience don't care about how you feel, but they are interested in what you're going to do. That was one of the main lessons I learned.” Though he “fought against the process the whole way, it taught me a lot. It changed me as an actor.”

He has since come to really admire the way Nübling’s approach. “The bravado of it was quite staggering. A lot of the reviews have talked about him as a visionary, but I’m sure he’d be the first to say that it’s really all about the actors.”

For Roberts, Nübling “was trying to find a voice within the show, and more by accident by design he got there. By the end, everybody in that room felt like they owned it.” The challenging aspects of the production were, for him, part of its appeal. “I'd always much prefer to be in something that makes people have a conversation afterwards, rather than in something where people go: Well, that was nice.”

 “I’m proud of that show,” says Holmes. “I was only a small part in making it happen, but it's personal influence on me, and its influence more generally, is interesting. There is definitely an audience that don't feel fed by what British theatre is doing,” he says. “And this show was feeding them.” Sometimes when watching the London run, he recalls, the audience would respond with “a kind of a roar of yes.”

According to Epner, the Estonian response was rather lukewarm. “Estonia is not very used to foreign directors and actors. We like our own little superstars.” The German response, he says, “was by far the most interesting one and it had most success there,” before adding that “of course the British critics largely hated it, calling it European rubbish.”

Critics vs bloggers

He’s not wholly wrong. Michael Billington gave it two stars in the Guardian and called it a “grossly self-advertising production, in which everything is overstated and overheated.” Tom Lamont, writing in the Observer, said it was “challenging, but too long, too indulgent.” Sarah Hemming, writing in the Financial Times, was more open and generous, though she also shared Billington’s view that “the show’s defect is excess.” “Normally, I love inventive Continental directing,” wrote Aleks Sierz for the Arts Desk, “but this is not so much inventive as invasive.” (Here’s a little round-up of the reviews). By way of contrast, here’s a review in German portal Nachtkritik.

However, other responses were more enthusiastic. Bloggers, including Andrew Haydon and Matt Trueman, went wild for it. Daniel B. Yates spoke of moments “more subtle, more queered and to my mind more extraordinary than the finale of Jerusalem.” Maddy Costa distils this spread of responses in this piece for the Guardian. She points out that “the message subliminally being communicated by the newspaper critics who resist the unorthodoxy of Three Kingdoms is that unfettered experimentation is not welcome here in the UK.” She also lasers in on the representation of women in Three Kingdoms, saying that “it looks dangerously like a play that uses women to tell a story set among men who use women to make themselves rich.”

For Pohla, the way the women were portrayed in the show is the way they are “oftentimes treated and perceived in in real life. In 2022, in Europe 63 % of registered victims of human trafficking were female, she explains. “Not to mention domestic abuse and the violence woman experience throughout the world. Depicting woman this way was part of the story to raise the question about the brutality of humankind. There is no point showing any kind of violence on stage through rose-tinted glasses. Sometimes it is better to show it in the raw.” Everything that happened on the stage, she adds, “happened in a very safe, comfortable environment with people we could trust.”

Looking back Tennant feels the “misogyny was problematic.” While it was a play ostensibly about the sex trade, they didn’t research it or speak to anyone with experience of that world. “We didn’t really discuss it,” he says. In the UK, the show “became more about what is possible with live performance.”

“Obviously this discourse about how to reproduce violence against bodies on stage was there before,” says Nübling. It’s been an ongoing conversation for decades. However, given the context there are some decisions “that you might not do anymore.” A key part of the issue was the gender imbalance in both the production and the play. “I would probably cross cast much more now,” he says.

Critic and academic Catherine Love distils some of the discussions around the representation of women in the show that were happening at the time. At Exeunt, the online theatre magazine I co-founded and of which I was then the editor, this conversation resulted in a multi-authored dialogue piece about the show’s representation of violence and misogyny, the first of many such pieces we would run over the years. (Nübling remembers reading this at the time. “This was a way of talking about theatre we didn’t have before. It was less about opinion and much more about having a discourse.”) More than any other production at the time, it highlighted the different critical approaches of newspaper critics and bloggers (though it’s worth remembering that for all the things it did well the blogging scene back then was also very male-dominated).

“I tried to get everyone I knew to go see it”

It also had an impact on many of the young directors at the time. “Simon and Sean really love the punk analogy,” says Tennant. “Only a handful of people saw it, but they all formed their own bands afterwards.” It feels like there’s a degree of truth in this. Tom David Hughes, resident associate director on the West End production of Cabaret, says he was obsessed with the show. “I saw it 3 or 4 times, and tried to get everyone I knew to go see it.” For him, the show hit at the right time: “I was in my late 20s and doing my first job in theatre and susceptible to work that indicated an alternative path.”

He even directed the play himself a few years later at East 15 theatre school. “We had to cut enormous amounts of text because it’s like a novel. But that ensemble made it seem like nothing. They handled oceans of text with wit, alertness and great control of rhythm.”

A couple years later, he got to observe Nübling at work in Munich; “I saw that what appeared to be magic was the product of hard work and an absence of shame. He pushed actors until they lost their temper, and then would just keep on going.” 

For Rikki Henry, who will direct the German premiere of David Ireland’s Ulster America later this year at the Schaubühne in Berlin, it was also formative. “The production was a landmark in my experience,” he says. It was a source of “great admiration among my peers, representing a perfect fusion of the fascinating work coming from Europe and our own evolving theatre landscape.” He had just come back to the UK after touring with Peter Brook and remembers finding “the intersection of styles and ideas was particularly impactful, resonating deeply with my own artistic sensibilities and place in the world.” Years later, he and Nübling would become friends. “Our conversations often circled back to its influence on me and part of what inspired my journey to Germany to work. It's a production that not only set a high bar for international collaboration but also profoundly affected my personal and professional trajectory.”

“It would be culturally very hard to make a piece of work like Three Kingdoms in the UK now,” says Tennant. It would be a very difficult model to recreate, concurs Holmes.  “A structure was created to make the show happen. A fundamental problem of much of British theatre, and the struggle we have to make work of this kind of reach, is that the structures can't allow it. It comes down to economics, which becomes a spiral. There’s less money so we become more cautious and the possibility of even having these conversations subside.” Our discussion takes a bleak turn. “The old idea of a subsidised theatre making its own work is pretty much gone. You can’t do it anymore. We have these buildings, but it’s hard to make them work, let alone collaborate with two European companies.”

“It’s important to remember that Three Kingdoms was as British as it was German and as it was Estonian,” stresses Holmes. That fusion was central to the show. “It was about cultures clashing,” Tennant concurs. “We were allowed to inhabit our own culture and I think that's what made it work, I think that’s what made it so interesting.”

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