Tag: Hegel

Essay on political theatre – Part 4

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In Part 3 of the ‘Essay on political theatre’, the development of the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ from Herodotus to Lyotard was outlined. Now this development will be followed up to the theatre of the present day.1

f) Derrida

Lyotard’s parallelisation of representation in politics and representation in theatre is taken up by Jacques Derrida in a lecture from 1997 on the occasion of a theatre performance “Karl Marx, Théâtre inédit” in Nanterre. For him, the concept of representation is the intersection of politics and theatre. Derrida speaks of a disease of representation or an evil (“mal de répresentation”) that has infected both areas. His criticism of political representation is less sharp than Lyotard’s; he does not want to attack representative democracy as such, but only to remind the political representatives of their function. To do this, he demands of the theatre:

‘We must change the stage, change the time, change the order of time’ 2.

Without making a clear distinction between politics and the political, he calls for ‘allowing politics or the political to enter the structure of the theatre.’ 3 This can be achieved, ‘by interweaving several heterogeneous times in a single time that is divided and out of joint; by interweaving several orders of speech, modes of speaking that are simultaneously real, that is, realistic, and fictional, that is, lyrical and poetic.’ 4 Like Rancière, he also demands that theatre has the function of giving a voice to the unrepresented.

‘The art of disruption, of contratiempo (off-beat), is also an art of the political, an art of the theatrical, the art of giving the floor at the most inconvenient of times to those who, in the current course of events, have no right to raise their voice.”5

g) What used to be called political theatre

Jacques Derrida shares with Lyotard the rejection of

“what used to be called political theatre, which conveyed a message, sometimes a revolutionary content, without changing the form, time and space of the theatrical event”.6

This reproach against the old political theatre has been running through the discussion about politics in theatre since the 1990s, without the reproach being substantiated by examples. In the French context, one might assume that Sartre’s plays are meant, since they work with the traditional means of theatre: fictional plot and characters, empathy, arcs of suspense, concentrated narration with a condensed fictional time structure, clear separation of stage and auditorium (fourth wall).

Brecht is also considered part of the outdated, old political theatre. Lyotard rejects Brecht in his radical criticism of all symbolism in theatre and Rancière sees in Brecht, as in Artaud, one of the ‘theatre reformers’ who started from the false idea that ‘the theatre is a place of community in itself.’7 Both Brecht and Artaud set themselves the task of

‘to teach their audience the means to stop being spectators and to become actors in a collective practice.”8

Rancière, on the other hand, believes that ‘in a theatre […] there are only individuals who go their own way through the forest of things, actions and signs that they face.’ Only the equality of minds, only the same ability to play an unpredictable game of associations and dissociations, connects individuals.

‘Being a spectator is not the passive state that we have to transform into activity.”9.

Jens Roselt has used the phenomenological method to work out exactly what being a spectator in the theatre is like. It is a temporary, even selective community that in no way suspends the associative activity of the individual spectators. The spectator is actually not passive, he or she acts ‘in individual difference together’10. Although each spectator makes his or her own way through the forest of theatrical signs, the fact that all the others are also in this forest also characterises the theatrical situation of the audience. Commonality and difference – both are part of being an audience member.

An example:

In Karin Beier’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s drama “Iokaste”11, the question of how the occidental culture of the political has developed from a ritual to a political culture is discussed on stage.12 The fact that a production like Karin Beier’s “Iokaste” deals with issues on stage that evoke associations in many minds to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is just one example of the combination of individual freedom and temporary collectivity in the theatre: the fact that about 1000 people are staring in the same direction while at the same time being free to concentrate on whatever detail, that such a temporary collective subject arises, which reacts to the same thing in its own individually different mixture of emotions, considerations and judgements.

Brecht was already aware of this. As is well known, Brecht wanted to teach the ‘art of watching’ ‘an art that must first be learned, trained, then constantly practised in the theatre’13. He was also aware of the inconsistency of audience reactions in political theatre:

‘When plays with political effects are performed, the ambivalence of our audience […] can be clearly seen.’

He explicitly rejects the attempt to strive for ‘a uniformly reacting audience’; only Aristotelian drama, based on empathy, could attempt this. He even saw the possibility of theatre motivating action outside of the theatre more in the Aristotelian than in his epic theatre.14 However, he was not a ‘teacher without teaching’, as Rancière wishes teachers to be.

h) After Brecht

For post-Brecht German productions of political theatre, the accusation that they want to teach the audience to no longer be an audience is hardly true. In the 1960s, the predominant form of theatre was documentary theatre, but it only ever addressed political issues after the fact: Kipphardt’s ‘In the Case of J. Oppenheimer’ (In der Sache J. Oppenheimer, 1964) and ‘Brother Eichmann’ (Bruder Eichmann, 1982), Peter Weiss’s ‘Inquiry’ (Die Ermittlung, 1965) and ‘Vietnam Discourse’ (Vietnam-Diskurs, 1968) or Heiner Müller’s ‘Germania – Death in Berlin’ (Germania Tod in Berlin, 1971) and ‘The Commission’ (Der Auftrag, 1979) took up past political events to shed light on contemporary debates. With the exception of Rolf Hochhuth’s ‘The Deputy’ (Der Stellvertreter, 1963), none of these plays was formally naive in the sense of Schillerian or Ibsenian dramaturgy. The clarity of the ‘message’ conveyed by the old political theatre according to Derrida varied, however: very clear in Peter Weiss’ “Vietnam Discourse”15 and in the original version of Kipphardt’s ‘Bruder Eichmann’, very unclear in Heiner Müller’s ‘Der Auftrag’. The authors and directors of the 60s and 70s were also aware of the mode of operation of their medium. Or as Rancière puts it: the unavoidable split between intention and effect.16 Even then, Peter Stein thought that

‘the actual effect of art on politics is zero.’ 17

These banal insights were already known at the time. Only Peter Stein and Wolfgang Schwiedrzik’s Munich production of the ‘Vietnam Discourse’ in 1968, with an integrated collection of money for the Vietcong (FNL), tried (unsuccessfully) to rebel against this basal structure of reception, but it also only expected a mobilising effect only in the audience that was already in agreement.18

i) Hans-Thies Lehman and the post-dramatic theatre

The most influential definition of what political theatre is for German theatre in the 21st century can be found in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s essay “Wie politisch ist das postdramatische Theater?”(How political is post-dramatic theatre?) from 2001. [Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Wie politisch ist das postdramatische Theater?”, in: H-Th.L., Das Politische Schreiben. Essays zu Theatertexten. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002 {= Recherchen 12}; first published in: Theater der Zeit, October 2001]. As a lecturer at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen and as a professor at the University of Frankfurt/M, Hans-Thies Lehmann has had a decisive influence on the generation of directors and dramaturgs after 2000. His essay, like his magnum opus, ‘Das postdramatische Theater’19, is a profound analysis of contemporary theatre and, at the same time, an aesthetic programme, i.e. not just theatre theory, but a science that is to be applied. From today’s perspective, however, one must formulate some reservations about his definition of political theatre.

Lehmann first reformulates the title question of his essay to ‘How is theatre, for example post-dramatic theatre, political?’ His premise is therefore: theatre is political in a way that is particular to it. So there is no question of whether theatre is political or what kind of theatre is political. He later writes that theatre is structurally political, that the political is ‘inscribed’ in it. In doing so, he explicitly refrains from a more precise definition of the term ‘political’.20 In any case, the term ‘of the political’, which Lehmann always uses here, is not distinguished from ‘politics’.

As a theatre theorist, Lehmann does not want to give ‘instructions (programmes)’. But time and again, evaluations of theatre practice creep into his formulations. For example, when he warns against taking up political content in theatre because then there is a danger that it will ‘too obediently parrot’ what public discourse dictates. He is concerned with defending post-dramatic theatre (Fabre, Wilson, Pollesch, Lauwers) against the accusation that it lacks the political.

The political in theatre

Lehmann’s definition of the political in theatre is based on three formulas, the first of which has three sub-theses.

1. a) The political can only appear in theatre indirectly, in modo obliquo.

b) The political comes to bear in theatre when and only when it cannot be translated or retranslated into the logic, syntax and conceptuality of political discourse.

c) The political in theatre is to be thought of as an interruption of the political.

2. Political theatre is to be understood as a practice of exception. Only a theatre that shakes its own rules, that interrupts theatre as a show, enters into a genuine relationship with the political.

3. Political theatre takes the form of the shock of habit/disappointment of desire to find dramatised simulacra of political realities on stage. At the same time, this is a shock to the moralisation associated with the personalisation in politics and thus the avoidance of the moralistic trap.

Lehmann’s thesis that the political in theatre is the interruption of the political obviously draws on Walter Benjamin’s use of the term ‘interruption’ in his characterisation of Brecht’s epic theatre. Benjamin sees the ‘interruption of sequences’ in Brecht as an essential means of alienation and thus for the spectator to discover in amazement the conditions in which he lives. 21 Lehmann expands this concept of interruption, however, from the interruption of processes to the ‘interruption of the regulatory’ in general and in politics. The interruption thus becomes an intended effect rather than an aesthetic device. The ‘solidified façade of legal relationships’ in which we live is to be broken open so that the agonistic, the conflict as the essence of politics, becomes clear again.22 It also becomes clear to what extent Lehmann in 2001 assumed a society based on superficial consensus in which conflicts are hidden. Meanwhile, in 2025, Western societies in Europe and America are on the road to increasing polarisation. The façade of consensus is crumbling, even legal relationships are becoming fluid because the opponents of the pluralistic-democratic system (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Meloni, Kickl, Ben-Gvir) are attacking the legal institutions first. For Lehmann, however, these agonal forces of politics have no place and are not persons. Therefore, they ‘offer no content that would be political, no form to representation’. This is the old insight that Brecht had already formulated as:

‘Actual reality has slipped into the functional’.23

But if theatre wants to present these formless forces of the political (or of politics?), it cannot just present function graphs, it needs the detour via people, actors, performers or presenters. Lehmann seems to shy away from this detour and points to the possibility of retreating away from politics and towards one’s own rules, towards interrupting the ‘listening and viewing order’. The paradoxical formulation that the political aspect of theatre consists in keeping free of everything political is very much in line with Jacques Rancière’s:

‘Art that makes politics by abolishing itself as art is thus opposed by an art that is political on condition that it keeps itself pure of any political influence.”24

Rancière’s critique of art that abolishes itself for the sake of politics applies more to the actions of the ‘Centre for Political Beauty’ (Zentrum für politische Schönheit, ZfS) and similar artivist projects than to current attempts at political theatre. The political (and politics) also appear in the theatre directly, in modo recto. The political in the theatre can be translated into the terminology of politics. The political in theatre is not an interruption of the political, but (also, not always) an interference in politics.

Political tendency and artistic tendency

Walter Benjamin’s definition of the relationship between political tendency and literary tendency seems to provide a template for determining the relationship between theatre and the political:

‘The tendency of a piece of writing can only be politically correct if it is also correct in literary terms. This means that the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency, […] this literary tendency can consist of a step forward or backward in literary technique.”25

Lehmann seems to want to reverse Benjamin’s formula: for him, progress in theatrical technique (‘overcoming the visual and auditory arrangement in favour of an exploration of the situational aspect’) is the condition for political theatre. For Benjamin, it was still clear which political tendency he meant. His lecture on the author as producer was delivered in 1934 in Paris at the ‘Institute for the Study of Fascism’. For Lehmann, on the other hand, there is no specific political tendency that political theatre should pursue, but only a ‘genuine reference to the political’, which, however, should consist precisely in a break with political content.

The auxiliary institute of theatre

‘Theatre cannot be an auxiliary institution of political education.’ 26

On the other hand, it is certain that theatre is being used as such in the present day: it is often the case that theatre intervenes in the realm of politics, and thus in the realm of power and strategy. The temporal dimension plays a role here. Theatre often takes up global topics of medium-term relevance and relates them to contemporary issues27 or locally in retrospect.28 The most internationally well-known play of this kind, which deals with political processes in retrospect, is ‘Enron’ by Lucy Prebble about the fraud of the American energy company.29 Or, more recently, Volker Lösch and Marlene Engelhorn’s show ‘Geld ist Klasse’ (Money is Class). Elfriede Jelinek’s almost daily text productions for the theatre, e.g. ‘Am Königsweg’ (On the Royal Road) 2017 on Donald Trump’s first election, most recently ‘Endsieg’ (Final Victory) on his re-election, and their staging by Falk Richter, are examples of how quickly the theatre can react and that a theatre that takes up current political content does not have to resort to the structures of traditional narrative-Aristotelian theatre.30

Investigative Theatre

Theatre not only addresses the conditions of the constitution of the polity, the political, but also, to an increasing extent, politics itself. Theatre critics can criticise such projects aesthetically, one can question their political effectiveness, but theatre theory would have to take note of the fact that such a thing exists and explain the condition of its possibility: the analogy of theatre and politics.31 Jean Peters of the journalists’ collective Correctiv explains the function of this investigative theatre with the decline of newspapers:

‘Theatre is one of many answers: here you can tell a story in peace and at the end we know: there are witnesses to the shared experience…. Theatre has the calmness of development and of picking up on things, of contextualisation and of meta-levels.’ ’It’s about creating a space in which society can develop. We want to awaken the desire to shape society. … That is my vision – and theatre can do that.”32

‘A space in which society can develop’ is a definition of the political, and this is the basis for a theatre project about a conference of far-right politicians who discussed the re-migration of emigrants: “Geheimplan gegen Deutschland” (Berliner Ensemble, Volkstheater Vienna 202 4).33 Here, then, the ‘political’, the conditions for the constitution of society, and ‘politics’, the decisions about society that are concentrated in the state and organised institutionally, are to be connected; the one is not without the other in the theatre, not separated as in Lehmann. Here, the political comes into play precisely because it can be translated into public discourse, which is called politics. At most, one could apply Derrida’s proviso clause: provided that the theatre “does not simply turn into a meeting place and continues to follow its theatrical destiny.”34 This journalistic theatre of revelations should certainly not be propagated as the future of theatre, but we should at least take note of its potential.

The moralistic trap

Lehman warns of the ‘moralistic trap’ that theatre could fall into by taking on political content, through the theatricalisation and personalisation of the political. This warning is in line with Rancière’s warning against the ‘ethical confusion’ that equates politics and art.35 For Rancière, art and politics are two areas that are in a permanent state of tension, but do not merge into one another. The possibility of political theatre does not mean a weakening of the autonomy of art36, although, as Janis El-Bira puts it, in the theatre “the post-autonomous has long since been rattling at the auditorium doors.”37  Art remains a separate area with its own valuations, rules and procedures, like politics and morality, even if one system can be judged by the standards of the other.

The ‘moralistic trap’ does not snap shut as soon as the theatre takes up political content because the political, like art, is an autonomous realm. Since the ‘Machiavellian moment’, politics has established itself as a separate realm alongside morality.38 But the autonomous realms of politics, art and morality are in a mutual state of tension.
For a pure ethics of reason, as advocated by Kant, there is no conflict between morality and politics, because politics must always be guided by morality, to which only what is possible is binding.39 But for actual morality, for the moral concepts in people’s minds, for what Hegel calls ‘morality’40, these conflicts between morality, politics and art arise constantly.

From today’s perspective, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s definition of the political in theatre, especially in post-dramatic theatre, seems to be a retreat from the ‘disgusting corruption of political discourse’41 to a ‘politics of perception’42, the effect of which remains questionable and the re-connection to the realm of the political is deliberately negated.

To be continued.

  1. This essay generally refers to German theatre and theory. Therefore, most references and quotations are originally in German. Quotations have been translated by myself, even if there are official English editions as in the case of well-known authors like Brecht, or Rancière. Titels are given in the original language (usually German), sometimes translated into English in addition, if it seems helpful. ↵
  2. Jacques Derrida, “Marx, das ist wer”. in: Zäsuren, November 2000, No. 1 Ökonomien der Differenz, ed. by Hans-Joachim Lenger, Jörg Sasse, Georg Christoph Tholen, pp. 58-70. Here p. 64. Transcript of a lecture in connection with the staging of the play ‘Karl Marx, théâtre inédit’, March 1997 Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, Director: Jean-Pierre Vincent ↵
  3. ibid. p.65 ↵
  4. ibid. p.64 ↵
  5. p.69 ↵
  6. Derrida, ibid. p.64 ↵
  7. Rancière, “Der emanzipierte Zuschauer”, in: J.R., Der emanzipierte Zuschauer. Wien: Passagen, 2nd ed. 2015 (first  Paris 2008), p.26f ↵
  8. Rancière, ibid. p. 18 ↵
  9. Rancière, ibid. p. 27f ↵
  10. Roselt pp. 330-333, see also Essay on Political Theatre Part 2 on this website ↵
  11. Roland Schimmelpfennig ‘Iokaste’, directed by Karin Beier, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg ↵
  12. cf. Ernst Vollrath, Was ist das Politische? Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, pp. 23-27 ↵
  13. Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Vol.22.1, Schriften 2, Part 1. ‘Politische Theorie der Verfremdung’ (1936/37), p.125 ↵
  14. Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Vol.22.2, Schriften 2, Part 2,   p. 663 ↵
  15. “The ideal for an artist would, of course, be to describe the situation in which we live so vividly that people, when they read about it or experience it on stage, say on the way home: ”We have to change that. It can’t go on like this. We won’t put up with it any longer. As long as I haven’t managed that, I haven’t done my job as an artist.‘ Peter Weiss in conversation with A. Alvarez, in: Karlheinz Braun (ed.), Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ `Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 5th edition 1975, p.99 Two years later, however, he also said: ‘Theatre itself cannot change society. That is impossible. The best effect I can hope for is that a play provides an opportunity for further reflection.’ Interview with Peter Weiss, in: Der Spiegel 12/1968 ↵
  16. ‘No art form can avoid the aesthetic split that separates effects from intentions.’ Rancière, ‘Die Paradoxa der politischen Kunst’, op. cit., p. 99 ↵
  17. Hans Bertram Bock, “Ohne Duselei. Gespräch mit Peter Stein, Wolfgang Schwiedrzik und Wolfgang Neuss”. Abendzeitung (Munich) 24 June 1968, quoted in: Dorothea Kraus, Theater Proteste. Zur Politisierung von Straße und Bühne in den 1960er Jahren. Frankfurt: Campus, 2007 p.145 ↵
  18. Dorothea Kraus also provides a detailed account of the controversies surrounding the performances of ‘Vietnam Discourse’ in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin in 1968, op. cit. pp.142-153. ↵
  19. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Das postdramatische Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren, 1999 ↵
  20. ‘The political should not be vaporised in the rarefied air of more precise distinctions’, ibid., p. 14. ↵
  21. ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’ in: Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent. Aufsätze zur Literatur. Stuttgart: Reclam 2012, p. 222, also ibid. “Der Autor als Produzent”, p. 245 ↵
  22. Here Lehmann also refers to Carl Schmitt. ↵
  23. Bertolt Brecht, ’Der Dreigroschenprozeß. Ein soziologisches Experiment“, in:  Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 21, Schiften 1, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1992, p. 469. Also quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Eine kurze Geschichte der Photographie’ in: W.B., Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 2. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1966, p.243 ↵
  24. Jacques Rancière, “Die Ästhetik als Politik” in: J.R., Das Unbehagen in der Ästhetik. Vienna: Passagen 3rd ed. 2016, p.47 (first published in French in Paris 2004) ↵
  25. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” ibid. pp.229, 231 ↵
  26. Lehmann, ibid., p.13 ↵
  27. Climate crisis: “Rethinking our world” (Unsere Welt neu denken) Schauspiel Bonn 2021, war in Ukraine: “The revolution starves its children” (Die Revolution lässt ihre Kinder verhungern’,   Schauspiel Köln 2022) ↵
  28. Bankruptcy during the construction of the World Congress Centre: Schauspiel Bonn 2017 ‘Bonnopoly’, Archive collapse: Schauspiel Köln 2010 “The Work/On the Bus/A Fall” ‘Das Werk/Im Bus/Ein Sturz’ ↵
  29. Nuremberg 2010 ↵
  30. Likewise Marcus Lobbe’s staging of Mike Daisey’s monologue ‘The Trump Card’ at Theater Dortmund 2017 ↵
  31. More examples: Calle Fuhr, ‘Aufstieg und Fall des Herrn René Benko’ (The rise and fall of Mr. René Benko, Volkstheater Vienna 2024) ↵
  32. Calle Fuhr and Jean Peters, ‘Zum Verstehen verfühen’, interview with Nachtkritik editors Elena Philipp and Esther Slevogt 6.8.204. ↵
  33. This action by the journalists’ collective Correctiv, which created a political fact with minimal aesthetic preparation, is likely to be a borderline case in the relationship between theatre and politics, however. ↵
  34. Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx, das ist wer’. in: Zäsuren, November 2 000, No. 1 Ökonomien der Differenz, ed. Hans-Joachim Lenger, Jörg Sasse, Georg Christoph Tholen, pp. 58-70 ↵
  35. Rancière, Ist Kunst widerständig? Berlin: Merve, 2004, p.34 ↵
  36. Cf. Volker Ullrich, Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2022. Especially Part I “Was hat die Idee autonomer Kunst geschwächt?” Ullrich is mainly concerned with the visual arts. ↵
  37. Janis El-Bira, Das ‘Art-Toy’ als Lebensbegleiter. Review of Volker Ulrich, Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Nachtkritik.de ↵
  38. “It is only with Machiavelli that politics achieves a distinctive identity and autonomy.” The Machiavellian moment is the ontological moment “of the experience of contingency and groundlessness of the social.” Thus, politics cannot be based on morality. Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, pp.28 and 49, cf. Luhmann ↵
  39. ‘ultra posse nemo obligatur’, ‘true politics cannot take a step without first paying homage to morality.’ Immanuel Kant, ‘Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf’ in: I.K. Werkausgabe Bd.XI, hg. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,1968, S. 229 B71, S. 243 B97 ↵
  40. cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke Bd. 7. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp 1970. §142, S.292. In Hegel’s appendix to §144, there is a nice poem:
    „Heilig, was die Geister bindet, wär es auch nur leicht wie die Binse den Kranz. Heiligstes, was innig gedacht ewig die Geister einig macht.“ (“Sacred is the bond that unites minds, though it be but light, as the slender rush makes the wreath. Most sacred what as individual thought, eternally unites the minds.”) Here, as often in his Aesthetics, Hegel refers to the exemplary conflict in Sophocles’ “Antigone” between the state (politics) and morality (custom) pp. 293f. ↵
  41. Lehmann, loc. cit., p. 18 ↵
  42. ibid. p. 19. If every change in our perception were political, sunglasses and earplugs would be political. ↵

Essay on political theatre – part 2

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two ways of beginning a sentence: I. ‘Theatre is political because…’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if…’. In the first part of this essay, the first beginning was completed and examined and the second beginning was examined in so far as its continuation is considered to be a descriptive statement.. But it is also often the beginning of a normative statement.  This second part of the essay is about the normative understanding of such conditions (‘if’) for designating theatre as political.

Often, this ‘if…’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ‘ought to’ is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ‘ought to be’ justified?

II. ‘Theatre is political if…’

b) normative

aa) Hegelian

“But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as such, and, since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and shape appear fused into one.”1

For Hegel, art has two sides: the abstract, i.e. thinking or idea, and the concrete, the form or ‘shape’. The criterion for evaluating art is then the ‘unity’ of these two sides in a work of art. Hegel also uses the term ‘inwardness’ (“Innigkeit”) for this correspondence between idea and shape to emphasise that this unity should not be an external juxtaposition, but an inner ‘unity’  that is the result of artistic work. The production of art should be a weaving together of idea and shape.

If the idea of theatre (or its concept or structure) is something political, then the ‘loftiness and excellence ’ (“Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit”) of theatrical  art depends on how far this idea is incorporated into the concrete form. This is roughly what a Hegelian conception of political theatre would look like, which at the same time offers a yardstick for evaluating concrete, individual theatre products. Of course, Hegel’s concept of theatre is not that of a political theatre and, of course, today’s representatives of the primacy of politics in theatre do not argue with Hegel. But the idea that artistic practice must bring to bear what is inherent in the concept or structure of theatre characterises the thinking of many theatre-makers. This often has a kind of super-Hegelian twist, in that this reduction of theatre to its basic structure is exhibited in a self-reflective way.

The idea that theatre is inherently political is rarely explicitly represented in theatre theory, but it forms the background for many statements by theatre-makers when they talk about political theatre. Necati Öziri2, for example, begins his talk about political theatre at the Römerberggespräche in Frankfurt/M. 2017):

‘I would have argued that there is no such thing as apolitical theatre, only theatre that is more or less explicitly political. I would have explained that theatre, by virtue of its form, is one of the most political of the arts.”3

Öziri cites this view that theatre is always somehow political only to distance himself from it. He then defines political theatre in terms of content or at least according to certain political goals: political theatre should be post-migrant, always question the downside of a narrative, have the task of protecting pluralism, demonstrating identities. Öziri says about the arguments for the fundamentally political character of theatre, ‘there is something to that’. But since he is looking for a justification for his own work in the theatre, he justifies political theatre (similar to Piscator) with the current political situation.

Milo Rau 4 takes a similar approach in his speech at the conference of the International Theatre Institute in Antwerp in 2024:

‘Theatre doesn’t ‘have to’ be political, it’s political anyway. Theatre has to be surreal, crazy, hallucinatory, unbearably contradictory. … Which is why the political theatre that I mean shows a clear edge precisely by going between all fronts and asking fundamental questions about our coexistence, our beliefs, and how we represent the world.’5

The fundamentally political character of theatre is assumed in order to then formulate the demands for a specific type of political theatre. The thesis that theatre is political per se serves here as an argumentative springboard for the transition from being to ought. Because theatre is political, it ought to be political in a certain way. In the mouths of theatre-makers who make political theatre, such arguments are attempts to justify their own artistic practice. And on the assumption that theatre is always political, they can then formulate certain political goals for the theatre that arise from the respective political situation.

bb) Moral (Jacques Rancière)

Jacques Rancière is probably the most influential philosopher for the theory and practice of theatre (especially in Germany), and at first glance he does not appear to be one of the theorists who make moral demands on political theatre. He firmly separates the realm of art from that of politics and calls the union of art and politics, the assertion that art is always political, ‘ethical confusion’. 6 But he distinguishes between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘police’ (la police).7 ‘Police’ is the organisation of power in a state, while ‘politics’ means the inclusion of the non-represented. For Rancière, then, politics is a normative term that contains an emancipatory concept of participation. 8

For Rancière, politics is not a subsystem of society or an attitude with which one can view the whole of society, but a process that ought to take place. That is why Oliver Marchart accuses him of an ethicalisation of politics and calls his conception of politics ‘emancipatory apriorism’.9 The tension between art and politics, which Rancière calls for us to maintain, is the tension between art and an ethical, normative concept of politics. Political art, that is, art in the unresolved field of tension between art and politics, is for Rancière an art in the field of tension between art and an ethical concept of politics.

Despite his distinction between the realms of politics and art, Rancière sees a close connection between politics and art. This arises not from artists setting political goals, but because art, like politics (in Rancière’s emancipatory understanding), is an experience of dissensus, of rupture.

‘If aesthetic experience concerns politics, it is because it is also defined as an experience of dissensus, in contrast to the mimetic or ethical adaptation of art products to social purposes.”10

For Rancière, art is therefore not political because it has political content or because it pursues political goals, but because it creates new forms of structuring sensual experience.11

‘The effect of a museum, a book or a theatre lies much more in the divisions of space and time and in the modes of sensual presentation that they establish than in the content of this or that work.”12

Rancière also opposes ‘critical art’ (e.g. Brecht) because the social conditions for its effectiveness are lacking in the present.13 He describes the present (the beginning of the 21st century) as an age of ‘consensus’. The ‘obviousness of the struggle against global capitalist domination’ has disappeared. His rejection of art that sees itself as political through its political content also arises from the experience of the ineffectiveness of such art forms:

‘One does not go from watching a play to understanding the world and from intellectual understanding to deciding to act.”14

His rejection of the previous ‘critical art’ is therefore both the result of his analysis of the way art works and an expression of resignation in the face of the political conditions of his present. Rancière rescues the political character of art, despite his rejection of an art that defines itself through political content, by assigning a political function to its structure.

‘Cinema, photography, video, installation and all performances of the body, the voice and sounds contribute to reshaping the framework of our perceptions and the dynamics of our affects. In doing so, they open up possible transitions to new forms of political subjectivisation…. A critical art is an art that knows that its political effect is achieved through aesthetic distance.”15

But this rescue is only possible through his normative concept of politics. An art that enables new forms of police subjectivisation would be a mockery of his concept. Ultimately, then, for Rancière, political theatre is only possible if it subordinates itself to this emancipatory conception of politics. And this is a moral or ethical concept of politics. Politics is good and police is evil, and art is good when it is political.

One example of the impact of Rancière’s theory is the German women’s artists’ collective Werkgruppe 2 (Julia Roesler, Insa Rudolph, Silke Merzhäuser), which produces theatre productions and films. They describe their work:

‘In artistic projects – especially in theatre and film works – Werkgruppe2 attempts to describe social reality from the perspective of people who belong to social minorities, the invisible, the excluded.’16

This corresponds exactly to Rancière’s demand on politics:

‘To deny a category, for example workers or women, the quality of political subjects, it has traditionally been sufficient to determine that they belong to a ‘domestic’ space, a space separate from public life, from which only whimpers or cries as expressions of suffering, hunger or anger can penetrate to the outside world, but not a speech that announces a common aisthesis. The politics of these categories has always consisted in redefining these spaces, in revealing the location of a community, even if it is only a simple dispute, in revealing and hearing each other as speaking beings that contribute to a common aisthesis.’17

For Rancière, politics is precisely this process by which the unrepresented gain visibility and a hearing. On its website, Werkgruppe2 cites Jacques Rancière’s statement as a motto for its work:

‘The real must be fictionalised before it can be thought.’18

This corresponds to their approach of first conducting interviews with members of groups that are not very present in public, and then editing, condensing and arranging these interview transcripts in a dramaturgical way, and then using these texts and professional actors to create a theatre production in which the real (the statements of the interviewees) becomes fiction (the theatre performance with actors).

This method originated in Great Britain and is called ‘verbatim theatre’ there.19 This method, which is indebted to Rancière’s political aesthetics, reached an ironic climax in their most recent production: ‘Hier spricht die Polizei’ (This is the police speaking). In this production, police officers, as a minority group neglected in public, have their say. It was produced with the help of the police union and co-produced by the Ruhrfestspiele, which is sponsored by the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), and the Staatstheater Hannover, and shown in Recklinghausen in 2024. Here, the executive body of the state, the police, was represented in the theatre as a group of ‘those without shares’.20 Rancière’s opposition between politics and the police was ironically suspended here.

Rancière, too, does not provide a descriptive concept of political art and thus also of political theatre.

  1. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on fine art. vol. 1. Transl. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19 75 p. 72. „Indem nun aber die Kunst die Aufgabe hat, die Idee für die unmittelbare Anschauung in sinnlicher Gestalt und nicht in Form des Denkens und der reinen Geistigkeit überhaupt darzustellen und dieses Darstellen seinen Wert und Würdigkeit in dem Entsprechen und der Einheit beider Seiten der Idee und ihrer Gestalt hat, so wird die Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit der Kunst in der ihrem Begriff gemäßen Realität von dem Grade der Innigkeit und Einigkeit abhängen, zu welcher Idee und Gestalt ineinandergearbeitet erscheinen.“ G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Bd. 13 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (=Theorie Werkausgabe), S. 103 ↵
  2. Necati Öziri  (*1988) is a German author of theatre plays and novels, and has been working as dramaturg at Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin ↵
  3. Necati Öziri, Römerberggespräche 2017  Here, and in the following quotations (with the exception of Hegel) all translations from German to English are by G.P. ↵
  4. Milo Rau (*1977) is a Swiss director and author. At present he is artistic director of NT Gent, Belgium and of Wiener Festwochen, Austria. ↵
  5. Milo Rau, speech at the International Theatre Institute conference, Antwerp 2024 ↵
  6. ‘The becoming-political of art thus becomes the ethical confusion in which art and politics mutually efface each other in the name of their union.’ Jacques Rancière, Ist Kunst widerständig?. Berlin: Merve, 2008 p.34 (in French: ‘Si l’art résiste à quelque chose?’ Lecture 2004) ↵
  7. ‘La politique s’oppose spécifiquement à la police.’ Jacques Rancière, Onze thèses sur la politique. Thesis 8. In English: “Politics is specifically opposed to the police.” Thesis 7, Ten Theses on Politics. London: open university press, 2009 p. 24 ↵
  8. “The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.” Rancière, Ten Theses, p. 32 ‘ „L’essence de la politique est de perturber cet arrangement en le supplémentant d’une part des sans-part identifiée au tout même de la communauté. Le litige politique est celui qui fait exister la politique en la séparant de la police qui constamment la fait disparaître…. La politique est d’abord une intervention sur le visible et l’énonçable.“ Rancière, Onze thèses ↵
  9. Marchart on Rancière: ‘Politics is the politics of equality, therefore emancipatory – or it is not politics.’ Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 183 ↵
  10. Rancière, Der emanzipierte Zuschauer. “Die Paradoxa der politischen Kunst”, p. 74. ’Art and politics are related to each other as forms of dissensus, as operations of reshaping the common experience of the sensible. There is an aesthetics of politics in the sense that acts of political subjectivisation redefine what is visible, what can be said, and which subjects are capable of this. There is a politics of aesthetics in the sense that new forms of circulating words, exhibiting the visible and generating affects define new abilities that break with the old configuration of the possible.” p.78 ↵
  11. ‘the effect of forms of structuring sensual experience in the field of politics’ p. 78 French: ‘l’effet, dans le champ politique, des formes de structuration de l’expérience sensible’. ↵
  12. p. 78 ↵
  13.  It is certainly unfair and at most permissible in a footnote to point out that both Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière attempt in their theories to preserve the legacy of their political past in the years around May 1968 in Paris, also in view of the lack of success of their political actions. Badiou was one of the leading minds of the dogmatic-Maoist UCF-ML, Rancière was in the circle of the spontaneous-Maoist ‘Gauche Prolétarienne’. Both taught at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) from the 1970s onwards. Unlike Badiou, Rancière did not make loyalty to Maoism in 1968 the criterion of truth, but his understanding of ‘politics’ as an emancipatory process in contrast to ‘police’ as the power structure of the state is also the conceptually differentiated elaboration of his convictions of 1968. ↵
  14. p. 82 ↵
  15. p. 99 ↵
  16. https://www.werkgruppe2.de/ueber-uns/ ↵
  17. Rancière, Zehn Thesen zur Politik. Berlin: diaphanes, 2008, p. 35 ↵
  18. p.38. Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics. The distribution of the sensible. (G. Rockhill transl.) Continuum, 2000/2006b ↵
  19. The video by the National Theatre London, Introduction to verbatim theatre, provides an introduction to the methods and history of verbatim theatre. ↵
  20. Ranciere, Zehn Thesen, p.32 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 2 Drama

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Neither Hegel nor Heidegger nor Adorno apply the concept of truth to theatre. They are concerned with art in general, and in Hegel’s case with drama in particular. The side of theatre that is not identical with the word, the visualisation of text in a theatre performance or the non-linguistic side of theatre, are not essential for its truth content. The work of art is the work of words.

Theatre text and theatre performance

Hegel completely devalues the non-linguistic side of theatre 1 and if a theatre performance succeeds, it is only because the theatre poet has created the right conditions for it in the text.2.
For Heidegger, even all art is ultimately poetry.3 As for Hegel, language has a superior role in art4. If Heidegger mentions theatre once in passing, then in a pejorative sense as a machine of experience, as a medium of showmanship5.
Adorno, on the other hand, describes himself as “half a theatre child.”6. But by “theatre” he always means either drama or opera. His “Notes on Literature” contain the influential essays on dramas by Goethe, Beckett, Brecht, Horvath, etc. In the lovingly ironic essay “Natural History of the Theatre”, which is more a collection of aperçus about the audience and the various premises of a theatre building, it is also only about the opera audience and opera houses.7 He thinks nothing of opera directors who try to save operas “through the mise en scene” or try to “modernise it somehow” 8. Thus, one can expect little enlightenment from Adorno on the relationship of theatre (not drama and not opera) to truth.

One of the few theatre practitioners who dealt with the concept of truth was the director Adolf Dresen 9. He emphasises that the truth of art is a new truth, thus, similar to Heidegger, Adorno and Badiou, he sees truth as something developing, emerging, not as something fixed that art must achieve10. For him, the truth of art is always a “new truth”, and – entirely in the Heideggerian idiom – a truth that reveals itself11. But he too only explains his understanding of the truth of “art” in general, not of the particular role of truth in theatre.

The truth of the theatre text

If one now tentatively agrees to understand truth on the theatre only as the truth of drama, i.e. the theatre text, – what can be said about it using the example of Jon Fosse’s drama “Dream in Autumn” addressed by Ivan Nagel?12

Let’s take the first sentence of Jon Fosse’s text:

“MAN: No is it you”13

No criterion of truth can be applied to this sentence: it is the beginning of a dialogue (between a man and a woman), it is spoken in a specific situation (reunion at the cemetery), it is fictional (part of a text that constructs its own reality), it is an interrogative sentence. Let’s try another sentence:

“MOTHER: Nothing stays / everything moves / like clouds / A life is a cloudy sky /before it gets dark.”14

This looks like a propositional sentence, but how are we to judge that it is true? It contains a metaphor and judges something as general as “a life”. Metaphors cannot be true. Nor is the truth of a theatre text to be sought at this level. There are only a few such life-like sentences in Fosse’s work. He also immediately devalues them with sentences like:

“MAN: We’re just talking /Actually all nonsense /What we say /Just talk/ Yes”15.

Fosse himself also sees the truth of his texts not in the individual sentences but, quite Hegelian, in the whole:

“Didn’t someone say here: Truth is always concrete? … I am concerned with the whole of a text, and the world in the text speaks of the whole and is therefore present in every part, in every detail of the text.”16

The truth of a drama, or its participation in truth, cannot therefore lie in individual propositions, but only in the drama as a whole. The drama as a whole speaks a non-discursive language (although it also consists of many discursive sentences). So what this truth is that the drama expresses or conveys cannot be discursively formulated. But nevertheless it is supposed to exist, this trans-subjective something, the truth of the work of art. For Adorno, then, critique would have to work out this truth, although it cannot be squeezed out of the drama as a statement (see Adorno’s remark about “Hamlet”17).

The example of “Dream in Autumn”

So what would be true about “Dream in Autumn”? The experience of time, for example, how past and present mix in consciousness. In Fosse’s play, the time levels mix imperceptibly, forwards and backwards. Of course, in real life we can distinguish past and present, but in our consciousness current perceptions, memories and plans for the future do mix. Only these expanded temporal dimensions give meaning and significance to our perceptions in the here and now. Would that be the truth of this play? If so, – it has been worked out, it is the result of the reflections of an individual recipient. It is trans-subjective at most as an imposition on others to agree with this truth (cf. Kant’s judgement of taste) 18. Of course, “Dream in Autumn” has a part in the “untruthfulness of the age”: the characters are not happy, their communication is unconsciously instrumental, the image of women that the three female characters portray is pitiful, even if at the end they march into the future as a surviving, seemingly reconciled trio.

What is crucial, however, is that what is called “truth” in Heideggersch-Adornitic diction emerges from a communicative act between artwork and recipient. Viewed soberly, this “truth” is different in every head – and thus loses the justification of a supra-individual validity. If everyone has their own truth, there is no point in ascribing truth to these different thoughts of different individuals. 19 That these many thoughts are stimulated by a single object, the work of art, or in theatre by a common experience, is the essence of art. Art is communication, not truth, that is the insight of hermeneutics20. Gadamer does take up the question of the truth of art, but then resolves it in the back and forth of the playful conversation between the work of art and the art recipient. The claim of “lifting {so-called} reality to its truth” through art 21 becomes in the end only the “truth of play” 22. This overstretches the concept of truth beyond its possible meanings.

If there were one or more “truths” in “Dream in Autumn”, they must surely have been noticed by someone. In the reviews of the world premiere at the Schaubühne Berlin and in those of the production of the Münchner Kammerspiele invited to the Theatertreffen, the word “truth” is not to be found, not even the adjective “true”. The judgements of the play, the theatre text as distinguished from its performance, are cautiously positive in the premiere, but negative in the Munich production. The relationship between the evaluation of the theatre text and the production is reversed. Günther Grack in the Tagesspiegel only notes at the premiere that Fosse’s play abstains from “any message pointing beyond it” 23. Eva Corino criticises “flight into false simplicity” 24, Barbara Villiger-Heilig complains on the occasion of the Munich performance that the text “cannot hide its weak points where it becomes philosophical” 25. Marietta Piekenbrock immediately hands out “the sour pickle for the weakest play of the season” 26. The production of the world premiere is benevolently depreciated (“schade” Dirk Pilz 27, “remarkably successful in extracting a maximum of atmospheric appeal and psychological tension from the diffuse web”, Günther Grack28), the Munich production unambiguously praised: “wonderful” (Dirk Pilz), “wonderful” (Rüdiger Schaper29), “great” (Simone Meier 30).
If you look for truth-apt sentences in these reviews that go beyond the description of what happens on stage and the reproduction of the audience’s feelings, the most you will find are sentences like the one by Dirk Pilz:

“To live is to prepare for death, to love is to practice saying goodbye.” 31

Or Christopher Schmidt’s:

“Two things, death and love, take you off your feet.” 32

However, as in many theatre reviews, these sentences deliberately remain in limbo between the reproduction of views attributed to the theatre text or production and general statements by the critic. They are part of the game. Such statements do not claim general validity, they are subjective attempts to mediate between the theatre text or the experienced performance and the spectator, are tentative generalisations that are aware of their unalterable subjectivity. 33.

Interim result 2

The application of the concept of “truth” to a theatre text is thus only possible if truth is something absolute, the idea, the whole, being or the like. Truth as propositional truth is not applicable to texts of theatre literature. Empirically, the use of the term “truth” as an evaluative concept of art reception seems to have died out sometime in the 1970s. Only the philosophical fossil Alain Badiou still uses it.

 

See also Truth in Theatre Part 3 Acting. Part 4 on Representation will (hopefully) follow soon.

  1. see my contribution “Hegel and the Theatre” https://theatermarginalien.com/en/2019/08/17/hegel-and-the-theatre/ ↵
  2. see my contribution “With Hegel in the Theatre” https://theatermarginalien.com/en/2021/05/10/with-hegel-in-the-theatre/ ↵
  3. “All art, as letting happen the arrival of the truth of being as such, is in essence poetry.” „Alle Kunst ist als Geschehenlassen der Ankunft der Wahrheit des Seienden als eines solchen im Wesen Dichtung.“ Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Mit der „Einführung“ von Hans-Georg Gadamer und der ersten Fassung des Textes (1935) Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 2012, p.59 ↵
  4. “Nevertheless, the linguistic work, poetry in the narrower sense, has a distinguished position in the whole of the arts.” “Gleichwohl hat das Sprachwerk, die Dichtung im engeren Sinne eine ausgezeichnete Stellung im Ganzen der Künste.“ Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, op. cit. p.61 ↵
  5. “Everything to be represented should only act as foreground and surface, aiming at the impression, the effect, the wish to impress and stir up: ‘theatre’.” „Alles Darzustellende soll nur wirken als Vordergrund und Vorderfläche, abzielend auf den Eindruck, den Effekt, das Wirken- und Aufwühlenwollen: ‚Theater‘.“ Martin Heidegger, „Nietzsche I“ in: Gesamtausgabe Bd. 6,1. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1996, S.85. Quoted by Marten Weise, „Heideggers Schweigen vom Theater“, in: Leon Gabriel, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Hg.) Das Denken der Bühne. Szenen zwischen Theater und Philosophie. Bielfeld: Transkript, 2019. Weise fictionalises a vision of theatre  that Heidegger should have written but did not ↵
  6. “After all, I consider myself half a theatre child.” “Ich betrachte mich ja selber als ein halbes Theaterkind.“ Theodor W. Adorno, „Theater, Oper, Bürgertum“ in: Egon Vietta (Hg.), Theater. Darmstädter Gespräch 1955. Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1955, p.139 ↵
  7. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I-III. Gesammelte Werke Vol. 16, pp.309-320. The individual texts first appeared in the “Blättern des Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt” 1931-33. ↵
  8. Adorno, Darmstädter Gespräch 1955, op. cit. p.139 ↵
  9. Adolf Dresen (1935-2001) was a theatre director first in the GDR at the Deutsche Theater, then at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in Frankfurt am Main and later an opera director at various European theatres ↵
  10. “The truth of art is {…} the new truth, it depends on the real discovery of truth. When truth is discovered, it is in contradiction with the previous image of the world, with the previous truth, the old truth. The truth of art takes truth seriously as a historical category.” „Die Wahrheit der Kunst ist {…} die neue Wahrheit, es kommt ihr an auf die wirkliche Entdeckung der Wahrheit. Wenn die Wahrheit entdeckt wird, ist sie im Widerspruch mit dem bisherigen Bild der Welt, mit der bisherigen Wahrheit, der alten Wahrheit. Die Wahrheit der Kunst macht Ernst mit der Wahrheit als einer historischen Kategorie.“ Adolf Dresen, „Wahrheitsagen“, in: Siegfrieds Vergessen. Kultur zwischen Konsens und Konflikt. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1992 {auch in Sinn und Form 1992}, p.212 ↵
  11. “It is this crust of self-evidence that art breaks through. {…} Truth is a performance. It is the reality behind reality, the other reality not of the existing, the recognised, the established, but of the astonishing, the astounding, even the miraculous. {…} The truth of art is the new truth, but it is also the new truth. It is neither a flat imitation nor pure aestheticism, but cognition. It is neither the existing truth nor the ignored truth, but the truth that has been unknown until now, the truth that is revealing itself.” „Es ist diese Kruste der Selbstverständlichkeit, die die Kunst durchbricht. {…} Die Wahrheit ist eine Leistung. Sie ist die Wirklichkeit hinter der Wirklichkeit, die andere Wirklichkeit nicht des Bestehenden, Anerkannten, Festgestellten, sondern des Erstaunlichen, Verblüffenden, ja des Wunderbaren. {…} Die Wahrheit der Kunst ist die neue Wahrheit, aber sie ist eben auch die neue Wahrheit. Sie ist weder der platte Abklatsch noch der pure Ästhetizismus, sondern Erkennen. Sie ist weder die bestehende noch die ignorierte, sondern die bis eben unbekannte, die sich offenbarende Wahrheit.“ Adolf Dresen op. cit., p.222f. ↵
  12. An excellent, methodologically very conscious and detailed work on Jon Fosse’s “Dream in Autumn” is the thesis by Marion Titsch, Das Ungesagte im Gesagten. Dramaturgische Untersuchungen zu Jon Fosses Theatertexten Draum om hausten und Svevn sowie deren Inszenierungen von Luk Perceval und Michael Thalheimer. Diplomarbeit Universität Wien 2009. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11585761.pdf ↵
  13. „MANN: Nein bist du das“ Jon Fosse, Traum im Herbst und andere Stücke. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001 p. 91 ↵
  14. “MUTTER: Nichts bleibt / alles zieht / wie Wolken / Ein Leben ist ein Wolkenhimmel /bevor es dunkel wird“ p.135 ↵
  15. „MANN: Wir reden ja nur / Eigentlich alles Unsinn /was wir sagen /Nur Gerede/ Ja“ p.115 ↵
  16. „Sagte nicht jemand hier: Die Wahrheit ist immer konkret? … Es geht mir um das Ganze eines Textes, und die Welt im Text spricht vom Ganzen und ist daher in jedem Teil, in jedem Detail des Textes präsent.“ Programme booklet for “Traum im Herbst” Münchner Kammerspiele. Premiere 29 November 2001. The someone Fosse is referring to is probably Hegel, although the quote was subsequently attributed to Lenin and Brecht. “The true, the spirit, is concrete {…} Only the concrete is the real, which bears the differences.” „Das Wahre, der Geist, ist konkret {…} Nur das Konkrete ist das Wirkliche, welches die Unterschiede trägt.“ Hegel, WA vol. 18 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie , p.45 u. 53 ↵
  17. “Keine Aussage wäre aus *Hamlet* herauszupressen; dessen Wahrheitsgehalt ist darum nicht geringer.“ Ästhetische Theorie, p. 193 ↵
  18. That was roughly the meaning of my awkward answer to Ivan Nagel, that I consider truth to be something objective, whereas the critical appraisal of a play depends on the justification of a subjective judgement ↵
  19. „If it’s open to the individual spectator to derive certain implications into one universal proposition or another, then we are no longer talking about a straightforward instance of learning from true propositions (implicitly) expressed in the play; instead we are talking about a kind of interaction between spectator and performance, in which the spectator develops or reflects upon her own view in relation to the play.“ Tom Stern, Philosophy and Theatre. An introduction. London: Routledge, 2014, p.54 ↵
  20. “For the dialectic of question and answer which we have exhibited makes the relation of understanding appear as an interrelation of the kind of a conversation. It is true that the text does not speak to us in the same way as a you. We, the understanders, must first make it talk to us. But it has been shown that such an understanding making it speak is not an arbitrary use of its own origin, but is itself related as a question to the answer expected in the text. {…} This is the truth of effect-historical consciousness.” „Denn die Dialektik von Frage und Antwort, die wir aufwiesen, lässt das Verhältnis des Verstehens als ein Wechselverhältnis von der Art eines Gesprächs erscheinen. Zwar redet der Text nicht so zu uns wie ein Du. Wir, die Verstehenden, müssen ihn von uns aus erst zum Reden bringen. Aber es hatte sich gezeigt, dass solche verstehendes Zum-Reden-Bringen kein beliebiger Einsatz aus eigenem Ursprung ist, sondern selber wieder als Frage auf die im Text gewärtigte Antwort bezogen ist. {…} Das ist die Wahrheit des wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewusstseins.“ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960,, p.359 ↵
  21. “Aufhebung der {sogenannten} Wirklichkeit zu ihrer Wahrheit“ Gadamer op. cit., p. 108 ↵
  22. Gadamer op. cit., p. 465 ↵
  23. „jeder über es hinausweisenden Botschaft“ https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/traum-im-herbst-liebe-auf-dem-totenacker/264256.html ↵
  24. „Flucht in die falsche Einfachheit“ in: “Fjord Idyll. Das Phänomen Jon Fosse” Berliner Zeitung 18.12.2001 ↵
  25. „da wo er philosophisch wird, seine Schwachstellen nicht verbergen“ in: “Leben vor dem Tod. München mit Traum im Herbst” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 1.12.2001 ↵
  26. “die saure Gurke für die schwächste Spielvorlage der Saison“ Marietta Piekenbrock, “Heilige Hedda! In München eilt Luk Perceval durch den ‘Traum im Herbst'” Frankfurter Rundschau 1.12.2001 ↵
  27. “Verfall, Verlust und Niedergang. Elegisch: Wulf Twiehaus versetzt an der Schaubühne mit Jan Fosse’s Trauerspiel ‘Traum im Herbst’ sein Publikum in einen anhaltenden Zitterzustand”, die tageszeitung 1. 2.2001 https://taz.de/Verfall-Verlust-und-Niedergang/!1145941/ ↵
  28. „bemerkenswert gelungen, aus dem diffusen Gespinst ein Maximum an atmosphärischen  ein Maximum an atmosphärischen Reizen und psychologischen Spannungen herauszuholen“ Der Tagesspiegel 17.10.2201 ↵
  29. “Das Wunder einer Stunde. Luk Perceval illuminiert Jon Fosses ‘Traum im Herbst’ an den  Münchner Kammerspielen” Der Tagesspiegel 1.12.2001 cf. Wolfgang Behrend’s wonderful Nachtkritik column “Wunderbar wegkürzen!” https://nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19662:kolumne-als-ich-noch-ein-kritiker-war-wolfgang-behrens-ueberlegt-welche-formulierungen-er-fuer-die-theaterkritik-auf-den-index-setzen-wuerde&catid=1503&Itemid=100389 ↵
  30. “Mehr November war selten auf einer Bühne. Trauerarbeit in den Münchner Kammerspielen: ‘Traum im Herbst’ von Jon Fosse, inszeniert von Luk Perceval”, Tages-Anzeiger 1.12.2002 ↵
  31. „Leben heißt Vorbereitung auf den Tod, Lieben Einübung in den Abschied.“die Tageszeitung 1.2.2001 ↵
  32. „Zwei Dinge, Tod und Liebe, holen einen von den Beinen.“ Christopher Schmidt, “Ist ein Cutter, der heißt Tod. Lachender Moribund: luk Perceval inszeniert Jon Fosses ‘Traum im Herbst’ an den  Münchner Kammerspielen”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1.12.2001 ↵
  33. After twenty years, it is touching to read  these sentences about death by the two great theatre critics Dirk Pilz ✝︎2018 and Christopher Schmidt ✝︎2017 who died so too soon, one vacillates between shuddering and indignation at death or at life. ↵