Theater under your skin

During my most recent stay in Berlin I was lucky to get to see the premiere of the play Yellow Wallpaper (directed by Katie Mitchell, UK) at a local theater “Schaubuehne” (which means “stage” in German).

This theater has a rich history. It was founded in the western part of the city in the midst of the Cold War in 1962 – a year after the erection of the Berlin Wall. In 1981 “Schaubuehne” moved to its current building on Kurfuerstendamm Street.

“Schaubuehne” had a happy life because, in fact, it was the largest drama theater in the Western Berlin, which, as an informal capital of the Federal Germany, served as a kind of “showcase of capitalism.” Famous German directors and star actors, including Peter Stein, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson, Andrea Brett, and Bruno Ganz worked here.

After Thomas Ostermayer became the director of the “Schaubuehne” recognition of the theater went far beyond Germany. The world’s best directors were invited to work there (read a review on Eugene Onegin staged in this theater in The Day’s issue No. 32 from May 29, 2012). Still, even for such seasoned theater, as well as for its audience, Yellow Wallpaper became a challenge.

Katie Mitchell, 49-year-old director, is considered one of the most talented European directors not without a reason. Her style was formed under the influence of such classics of experimental theater as Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski, and Pina Bausch. Her professional interests include the Stanislavsky system and neurobiology. For her merits she was awarded the rank of an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (2009) and the European Prize “New Theater Reality” (2011).

As it often happens with truly bright talent, the work of Mitchell always causes heated debate. Press describe her as “a director that polarizes the audience like no one else.” Her plays, according to critics, “are special due to the intensity of emotions, realistic acting, and creation of a very unique world,” at the same time Mitchell has been accused of “deliberate disregard of classic texts.” According to the artistic director of the Royal National Theater, very often the critical reviews are gender related and rather sexist.

Mitchell made her productions on different stages all over the world, including The Oresteia by Aeschylus, The Phoenician Women, The Trojan Women and Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, The Seagull, Ivanov, and Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, A Dream Play by August Strindberg, The Maids by Jean Genet, operas Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Mozart, Jephtha by George Handel, The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten. After the premiere of Waves based on the novel by Virginia Woolf in 2007, Mitchell started using video projection more in her work.

Yellow Wallpaper is a story told by an American writer, sociologist, feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 when the author was experiencing severe postpartum depression. This novel is a confession of a woman who is trying to recover after a nervous crisis. A man locks, practically imprisons, his wife Anna on the second floor for her good, forbidding her not only to go outside, but also to leave the room and even to write, that’s why she keeps a diary secretly. At first everything goes well but then the patient becomes irritated with the yellow wallpaper in the room. Gradually she begins to see another woman behind the rough illogical patterns – she is trying to crawl out of there but can’t get free. The entire story is the new “Notes of a Madman,” perfectly written and extremely compelling description of the destruction of person’s mind.

The story became very popular and became one of artistic manifestos of the Western feminism with a wide range of interpretations: from positioning the main character as a victim of male chauvinism to interpreting her as a rebel against androcentric (focused on the interests of men) civilization. There are audio versions, three film adaptations, and numerous stage adaptations of the novel.

The way the stage is organized in Mitchell’s Yellow Wallpaper is quite unusual: to the left in the front of the stage there is a ton-studio behind a glass wall, then there is a part of decoration (Anna’s room) where the action unfolds, right in the center there is a transparent box where the actress Ursina Lardi reads Anna’s diary, after that there is empty space that serves as home of the woman behind the wallpaper. The video editing system stands in the hall behind the audience. Filming crew works on the stage. They film the actors, the video is edited and then displayed in live mode on a large screen above the stage.

Director reinforced the motif of mental disorder and turned Yellow Wallpaper into a story of self-destructive madness, triggered by childbirth. A new life turns into a disgust for life. However, madness leads to an exit. A beautiful young woman from behind the wallpaper (Louise Wolfram) is not simply Anna’s alter ego, but also an angel savior with a hair dryer in hand standing by a bath filled with water. Death becomes a way to get rid of the dictate of the family and society: after freeing the imaginary woman, Anna finally becomes free herself, quitting the acting in a play imposed on her.

All actors do their best working with Mitchell. She is known for her long rehearsals, that’s how she gets actors to work to the fullest. This is German expressionist school of acting, which is characterized by contrast sharpening of actors’ psychophysics: this is the way both Judith Engel, who plays Anna, and Ursina Lardi, who only reads the text, but does it with a stunning impressionable effect, work on stage.

We see a performance as a film with close ups, unexpected fades, superimposed sound. The filming crew is always on the move, along with the actors who play without hardly any dialogue, we also see the assistant who bustles in the tone studio using the necessary tools, we see and hear Lardi, who reads an insane, both by content and complexity, monologue with phenomenal sense of rhythm and mood. The mechanism of creating a play presented in such open manner is a clear sign of the conditional, antipsychological theater of presentation – completely opposite to the abovementioned system of Stanislavsky, so honored by Mitchell. However, there is no contradiction in that.

Director uses the most advanced equipment for one purpose – to bring an actor as close to the audience as possible. In a paradoxical way Mitchell creates not simply a psychological, but a super psychological drama, where actors are on the verge of bursting and approach the audience in uncomfortable proximity. This is the theater of the third millennium. Theater that gets under your skin.