The fellowship of the ring: Riesenhaft in Mittelerde™, an inclusive, immersive experience
On an exuberant, accessible take on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week I was in Berlin, having travelled there from Warsaw by train (my ticket, by the way, cost 40 Euros and the train ran on time, details I include mainly to pain my UK readers), for this year’s Theatertreffen, which rounds up the best of the year’s German language theatre. Here’s my review in The Stage. I saw three shows from the programme, also squeezed in a gig at the Volksbühne, and now firmly believe more theatre bars should serve giant pretzels. The highlight of my trip was an accessible, interactive staging of Tolkien’s fantasy epic, more on which below.
Here comes the predictable plea for support - if you find this newsletter interesting or valuable, please consider sharing it or, if you or your organisation are able, becoming a paid supporter. I recognise times are tight, so I also have a Ko-fi account, if you want to support my writing this way. I am aiming to keep as much of this newsletter free to read as possible, though there will be occasional bonus editions for paid subscribers (with the next one coming up soon).
A confession: I have never read The Lord of the Rings. I never picked up a copy of The Hobbit as a kid. I don’t know what a ringwraith is and I am not completely sure I could tell Aragorn apart from Boromir. I have only a fleeting familiarity with the films. All of which is to say that I am probably not the target audience for an immersive staging based on Tolkien’s saga and yet I enjoyed every minute of it.
Billed as an “accessible installation” this production is the work of Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA, a Swiss company which creates work with artists with learning disabilities, and Das Helmi Puppentheater.
Founded in 1993 by the director Michael Elber, Theater HORA have gone onto become one of the best-known independent theatre groups in Switzerland. Ensemble members are salaried. There are currently 18 permanent full-time members. They have a training department. They have a manifesto. They even have a band. This article provides a brief but interesting insight into their methods. There are clearly parallels with the Australian company Back to Back Theatre, members of which I interviewed here, even if some of their working methods differ.
A lot of the company’s work is pop culture-inspired, like their 2014 production of Mars Attacks!, another co-production with Das Helmi. Over the years, they have made work with several high profile international artists including Jerome Bel, collaborating on a project called Disabled Theatre, a dance-based piece which toured widely and received an interesting mix of reviews (like this one and this one). They also collaborated with Milo Rau on The 120 Days of Sodom, inspired by the scandalous Pasolini movie, a project which was deemed controversial, with some critics raising questions about exploitation. This review offers a pretty balanced assessment of that production, (which, incidentally, is different from Rau’s new version of 120 Days of Sodom which premiered earlier this year).
In 2020, Yanna Rüger and Stephan Stock were appointed joint artistic directors of the company. Recently Theatre HORA collaborated with Rimini Protokoll’s Helgard Haug on Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. However, one of their biggest recent successes was this embracive, celebratory take on Tolkien which premiered last April and proved such a hit in Zurich that they had to increase audience capacity.
While there have been attempts to stage Lord of the Rings before, most notably a 2007 musical co-created by Matilda director Matthew Warchus, trying to cram a whopping 1250 pages of text into a single show is quite an undertaking, but not only do they succeed in bringing this sprawling epic, with its cast of hobbits, elves, orcs and dwarves to life, they do so with tremendous energy in a show which fuses puppetry, video, mist, music and a huge amount of warmth.
One of 10 productions selected by the jury for this year’s Theatrertreffen, the festival of German language theatre in Berlin, it was performed in the large hall of Berliner Festpiele, the interior bedecked with greenery. While there are two banks of seating on either side of the space, those who are able are encouraged to walk around and explore this mini-Middle Earth. A band plays on a raised platform. There are armchairs if you need a sit-down. There's a bar built into the set in which you can acquire a mug of ale (I acquired one).
Collaboration and care
At the start everyone announces who they are and who they will play (many Shakespeare productions would be improved by adopting this approach). Several of the performers share their passion for Lord of the Rings, while one said they did not much care for fantasy; according to the programme, Nikolai Gralak, who plays Gandalf, is the resident Lord of the Rings expert. In the best sense the production sometimes felt like a fusion of cosplay and theatre, a show that is on one level about The Lord of the Rings as an object of fandom – an object of love - as it is a straightforward adaptation and is all the more enjoyable, and accessible, for that.
It is a production of near constant motion, with the performers dashing around wielding puppets on sticks. Seemingly sculpted from packing foam these had a distinctly handmade aesthetic which suited the show. Squishy and squashy, lumpy and bumpy, hairy and horned, these very tactile puppets were the work of brothers Florian and Felix Loycke, Das Helmi’s puppet-makers.
Pre-recorded video footage shows the actors going on their quest to vanquish evil (evil residing somewhere near Zürich), but there’s also plenty of in-the-room action with platforms being moved around the space topped by weapon-wielding performers. (The weapons, like the puppets, are made of foam). Actors strode around in long robes, sparkly hoods and flowing wigs, some with sharp teeth drawn on their faces. Bubbles were blown. Puppets swooped through the air, as camera operators captured all the action which then played on the screens around the space so that everyone was ensured a good view. And there was dancing. Lots of dancing. I had the pleasure of dancing with Gianni Blumer (who, in addition to being a strong comic performer, was an excellent dancing partner). Later one of the performers tried to get a mosh pit going, though he couldn’t gather quite enough people to crowd-surf.
Based on an idea by the Theater HORA ensemble and Stock, the show was co-directed by Stock, Zurich Schauspielhaus artistic director Nicolas Stemann, Florian Loycke and the singer Der Cora Frost, all of whom perform in the show. The company was made up of members of the HORA, Schauspielhaus Zurich and Helmi ensembles and this spirit of collaboration ran through the whole show. According to the programme, the rehearsal process had a workshop-like quality. The songs were written collaboratively by the performers along with two musicians, Thomas Küstner and Sebastian Vogel, plus Stemann (who plays piano in the show). Similarly, the text combines material drawn from Tolkien, scenes written by the four directors and those created by the performers. The costumes were also created with the performers’ input and even included some Lord of the Rings merchandise.
The only aspect that wasn’t explicitly collaborative was Katrin Nottrodt’s design, with its half-indoors, half-outdoors Shire vibe, the space containing various hobbity nooks, armchairs and rugs, as well as dangling vines and foam mushrooms.
Access and inclusion
While quite technically complex, with various moving components and integrated video, it oftentimes felt like the show was raising a playful finger at the idea of Tolkien being a mountain you can only hope to scale with a multi-million-dollar budget. As an immersive experience it was also, I felt, the antithesis of a Punchdrunk show, which while luxuriantly designed can also be overwhelming and alienating to those not good at reading cues. Participating in a Punchdrunk show can be stressful, with a pressure to be in the right place at the right time or risk missing out. Here, access felt as if it had been thought about at every level of the performance. On the night I attended, there were wheelchair-using and neurodivergent audience members. There were kids. There were family groups. The production didn’t use the term ‘relaxed,’ but it felt like it adhered to a lot of those ideas. It was possible to sit on the floor if you felt like it and participate as much or as little as you wished.
A running joke throughout the show has one of the performers, Helmi’s Brian Morrow, standing in for Tolkien. He’s there, he tells us, to keep the estate sweet, to make sure they don’t veer too much from the source material and lose the performance rights. There were also nods to the fact that not everything in the book has aged well and that the Orcs are more than a bit problematic. This wasn’t an uncritical love-in. Affection for the material did not stop them pointing out its flaws or making jokes about Orc Awareness.
The reviews that I’ve read of this performance have highlighted the joy and exuberance of the show, the humour and warmth that permeates it. The questions surrounding ‘authenticity,’ exploitation and how much acting these professional actors are doing did not crop up in the same way they did in some of the reviews of Rau’s show, which I suspect is telling. (One review I read of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, pointed out that performers with cognitive disabilities on stage in Salzburg is still pretty much unheard of, so despite being around since the 1990s, the company still have ground to break).
What came through again and again when watching the show was the idea of community. Just as Tolkien’s cast of characters is made up of hobbits, elves, and wizards, here too we were witnessing people banding together and bridging their differences. Everyone’s needs were accommodated, everyone’s skills were celebrated, everyone was given their moment. There were little gestures of care evident everywhere. Towards the end, Bulmer – who had, by this point, become the emotional heart of the show - was carried aloft by his castmates. It was a lovely symbolic moment in a show where it felt like everyone was uplifting each other.
Of course, we also got a big battle scene. This is Lord of the Rings! So there were battles and moments of high drama and pathos, plus an unexpected but not unwelcome blast of Kiss’ I Was Made for Loving You. If I sometimes lost the thread of the story, I never stopped having fun. Humour and heart were the dominant notes in a show that looked after its audience, no matter how patchy their knowledge of Tolkien, and in its closing moments invited them to participate in some group choreography led by the cast. There were still people dancing as I headed out into the night.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Dortmund Goes Black - Theater Dortmund presents a three—day festival of art from a Black, African and Afrodiasporic perspective, with a focus on visibility. The festival, which includes debates, exhibitions, music and performance, runs from 16th -18th May.
Wiener Festwochen - In Milo Rau’s inaugural year as attendant at the Vienna festival, he will proclaim the Free Republic of Vienna. Following an opening featuring Pussy Riot, the festival will unfold over five-and-a-half weeks from 17th May to 23rd June and feature work by Florentina Holzinger, Łukasz Twarkowski, Rau himself and Bert and Nasi’s German doppelgangers.
TESZT - The Timisoara Euroregional Theater Meeting has taken place annually since 2008 at the Csiky Gergely State Hungarian Theater in Timisoara. This year the international programme, which runs from 19th-26th May includes work by Mario Banushi - profiled here - and a production of Pericles directed by the UK’s Philip Parr.
Thank you for reading! You can contact me about anything newsletter-related on natasha.tripney@gmail.com