Standing on the Acropolis, a site valued not only for reasons of historical antiquity but also geographically, it is nowhere to be seen: the woods of Athens, the setting for Shakespeare's tangled-love play "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Only houses and concrete, as far as the eye can see: a stony sea sparkling in the sun. The hills of Athens rise like islands, bone-dry humps, in whose sparse vegetation of pines and shrubs the elves would have had a hard time. If these hills were once surrounded by luxuriant woods and meadows, where pookas like Puck once got up to their tricks – even wolves are reputed to have lived on the Lykavittos – there is no trace of them today. Oberon and Titania reign here no more.











"A Midsummer Night's Dream." All photos © Haris Bilios, courtesy Athens & Epidaurus Festival

And even in the theatre, their ancestral home, the magic woods have been thoroughly deforested. In the play "freely interpreted" by the Berlin Schaubühne theatre that is premiering on the stage of Athens – in an empty factory in an industrial district near Piraeus – the comedy has been uprooted from its context and replanted inside of a number of interchangeable party people, where, in the most brutal sense of the word, it pushes out shoots.

Schaubühne director Thomas Ostermeier produced the piece together with the young choreographer Constanza Macras (with the cooperation of dramaturge Marius von Mayenburg) as a co-production with the Athens & Epidaurus Festival 2006: a sexed-up, grotesquely over the top, babylonically confused party which is physically propelled ever more brutally and animalistically into ecstasy, and in which Shakespeare plays at best the role of sperm donor. The Berlin premiere is on September 2. Until then, they they will do some fine-tuning on the timing.



It is already big bad fun, nothing for philologists, a monsterball, literally a monkey circus, nightmarish, wild and macabre. Ostermeier, who has left his critical neorealism far behind for this production, is looking, together with Macras, for the animal in you, the G-point of the piece, not Shakespeare's world of poetry and images. These are pretty much abandoned along the way, as are the identities of most of the characters. The roles and sexes are thrown back and forth between the eleven actors and dancers. Pure loss of control. Even the programme refuses to provide a who's who. The hormones race. A venting of drives.

Jan Pappelbaum constructed a clubbing room fit for partying on the stage, a sort of 70s retro veranda lounge with a balustrade, side staircase and endless swinging doors for the machinery. Two couches stand at the ready for cocooning. The audience enters the hall via the stage, and is greeted by the actors with kisses and punch. The atmosphere is fantastic, sexually charged. A three-piece combo plays party music. Swinging Schaubühne. Berlin theatre hasn't been in this good a mood for a long time.



What starts as an easygoing fete, with striptease, Russian disco, and talking penis, turns into a St. Vitus dance, shamelessly anarchistic like Walpurgis Night on the Blocksberg. A shoe slapping witch, drooling actors in animal masks, flying bodies that quiver and twitch, tearing and picking at one another. Ostermeier and Macras find striking images for lust and frustration. The actors throw themselves into this expressive body theatre as if liberated, never limping along behind the professional dancers who babble away in their native tongues. Bettina Hoppe, new to the ensemble, can look as energetic as a prize boxer in the final round, and she lashes out with the same gritty determinism as Hermia and Titania. Lars Eidinger is a odd-ball satyr in ever-changing manifestations, Robert Beyer is a slippery torero of a Puck who also plays Maya the Bee.

The music for the hormonal gymnastics – Handel, hard rock and electro-pop – was arranged by New York jazz bassist Chris Dahlgren, who plays together with Maurice de Martin and Alex Nowitz. Nowitz gives an absolutely first-rate performance as singer and hermaphrodite, getting involved in the goings-on on stage with his fantastic counter-tenor voice and spot-on Shakespearean English.





In the days when choreographer Sasha Waltz was still part of the team of artistic directors at the Schaubühne, people waited in vain for a production there mixing acting and dance. "You need a certain amount of personal empathy to do something like that," says Ostermeier. Ostermeier and Waltz: not a love story, and even less of a love story at the end, when bickering over the future of the theatre became increasingly frequent. Ostermeier resented that the theatre's budget was cut when Waltz left, making it known that her "deal with the city's cultural politicians" worsened an already dire financial situation. In the end several projects had to be cancelled or postponed. Even the "Midsummer Night's Dream" project with Constanza Macras would have come to nothing if Yorgos Loukos, the new director of the Athens festival, had not come in as co-producer. They met in Avignon.

Loukos, a Greek who has lived in France for the last 20 years, heads the Ballet de L'Opera in Lyon and directs the Festival de danse in Cannes. His experience as a director and his international contacts did much to spruce up the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, opening it up to new aesthetic input. And he's got a fat budget of eight million euros at his disposal, provided by the Ministry of Tourism, which is more than willing to finance the cultural attraction. The Wiener Philharmoniker are here, and so are Philip Glass, Solomon Burke, Liza Minelli and Diana Krall. The Wooster Group is here too, as are La Fura dels Baus and the Comedie de Caen. Ariene Mnouchkine is also putting in an appearance with her "Odyssey" adaptation "Le Dernier Caravanserail." Sasha Waltz is showing "Körper", Pina Bausch will present "Cafe Müller," and there are 18 new productions from Greece.



Whereas the festival used to drag on over five months, it is now concentrated in June and July. Loukos found the programme too old-fashioned, and the theatre section "extremely Greek-heavy." The new director wants to break with the festival's glamorous star character – which goes back to the glory days of Maria Callas and Dimitri Mitropoulos – to draw a younger and more mixed public. He lowered ticket prices and introduced seven alternative venues. Before that the performances were almost invariably held in the Herodion Theatre, the Roman Odeon of Herodes Atticus at the foot of the Acropolis. Anyone who has sat through a performance of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus" in the declamatory entrance-exit staging of Michael Cacoyannis – director of the film "Alexis Sorbas" - may enjoy sitting in the amphitheatre under the night sky, but they will quickly notice how this stage seduces people into creating bombastic spoken-opera with dowdy gestures. It's hard to be contemporary in a place like this.





"Coriolanus"

Aeschylus' tragedy "The Persians" in the strict chorus-theatre staging by Theodoros Terzopoulos is being shown in Epidaurus, the festival's second location. This performance is of another calibre altogether, just as the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, built in the 3rd century B.C. for an audience of 14,000, beats the Herodion hands down. It lies on the hillside spread out like a gigantic fan, with a fabulous view over the countryside.

Audiences who see a Greek tragedy like "The Persians" here breathe in the spirit of antiquity and get a feel for the very origins of theatre, a grandiose spectacle in itself. Less spectacular is Terzopoulos' staging. The male chorus in black down on the orchestra surface engages in such a non-stop, monotonous, whining lamentation that they end up sounding like a bunch of sissies.











"The Persians"

Terzopoulos was born in 1947 in the north of Greece. With his Attis Theatre he developed a strictly codified, rhythmic body language that has won him international acclaim. A book on him has just appeared in German, published by Theater der Zeit ("Reise mit Dionysos" (Travelling with Dionysus), edited by Frank Raddatz). But his "Persians" is a long and mournful complaint in two languages on the topic of war. Terzopolous directs the Greek and Turkish actors like a choreographic sect, deploying the 14 men like a medium for the experience of pain, desperation and fear. Bodies convulsed through language. That too: a midsummer night's nightmare.

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The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on July 6, 2006.

Christine Dössel is a journalist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: lp, jab.